ANIMATION
The Trouble with Ducks . . . Animation offers the purest form of cinematic expression: its potential is limited only by the creative boundaries of the human mind itself — and perhaps to some extent, technological exper tise. Animation is an existential cinematic medium, eschewing what the semiologists call the pro-filmic event. It is ultimately pure cinema. The animator’s pen becomes a magic wand: all laws of relativity dissolve and traditional artistic perspectives no longer have relevance. The following sequence from Chuck Jones’ Duck Amuck (Warner Brothers 1953) not only demonstrates the mechanics of filmic expression itself, but also opens up the possibilities inherent in the animated form.
©
1975 Warner Brothers Inc.
Duck Amuck1 (Dialogue and stage directions.) All dialogue spoken by Daffy Duck unless otherwise noted. Florid eighteenth-century swash fanfares. Stand back, Musketeers! They shall sample my blade! Touche! Unh! Unh! Unh! Unh! Pan with Daffy swordplaying in period costume, past period castle background, past progressively less detailed sketch-lines o f the background, to a completely blank space. Musketeers? . . . Hmmmm? . . . En garde . . .? My blade ? Hey, psst, whoever’s in charge here? The scenery? Where’s the scenery? Brush enters frame, paints in farmyard. Stand back, Musketeers. They shall sample my . . .? Blade . . .? Hmmm? Okay, have it your way. Daffy leaves frame left, returns with appropriate overalls, hoe, and farmer's hat. Sings: Daffy Duck he had a farm, ee aye ee aye o . . . Background changes while panning with Daffy, to Eskimo snowscape. . . . And on this farm he had an igloo, ee. . . aye . . . ee . . . aye . . . ooh (revelation). Would it be too much to ask if we could make up our minds, hmmmm? Leaves frame, comes back on skis, wearing muffs and winter outfit. Sings: Dashing through the snow, ya-ha-ha-ha-ha, through the fields we go, laughing all the way . . . eee . . . eee. Background has changed to flowery Hawaiian jungle: Daffy exits, re-enters frame with lei, ukulele and wraparound. Sings: Farewell to thee, farewell to thee, the wind will carry back our sad refrai-hai-hai-hai-hai-hai-hain. One last embrace, before we . . . mmmm . . . hmmmm. On pan with Daffy, background has been downgraded again to sketchiness, and then to white. Buster, it may come as a complete surprise to you to find that this is an animated cartoon, and that in animated cartoons they have scenery; and in all the years I Daffy is erased. All right, wise guy. Where am I?
’140 — Cinema Papers, July-August
N mmmm
From Dinosaurs to Dynasties In 1887 Thomas Edison began experimenting with the idea of motion pictures and by 1889, elaborating on the more primitive concept of the zoetrope, he had built his first kinetoscope, a kind of peep-show viewer which held about fifty feet of film. Meanwhile in France, the Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis, were already projecting mov ing im ag es o n to a sc re e n w ith th e ir cinematographe. In 1906, the year J. and N. Tait produced the first Australian film, The True Story of the Kelly Gang, the first animated film was attempted in America. A commercial artist, J. S tuart Blackton, had come up with a little divertissement entitled Humorous Phases of Funny Faces; line drawings which didn’t move so much as give the appearance of creating themselves. The first animator to experiment with timing and characterization was Winsor Zenis McCay, a virtuoso draughtsman whose Gertie the Trained Dinosaur (1914) was the first really popular animated film. Winsor and Gertie aid the vaudeville circuit together with an act which in those days was hard to beat. Winsor would stand on the stage giving commands, and Gertie, up on the screen, would appear to comply. Her piece de resistance was to give the appearance of catching an apple which her ‘master’ would pretend to throw to her. McCay’s success prompted other producers to start experimenting with animation. By 1913 serialized animated films had begun to appear. One of them. Colonel Heeza Liar by T. R. Bray explored the possibilities of animated images even further by adding grey tones to the line drawings. Up to that point everything, including the static background, had to be drawn anew for each frame, until the infelicitously named Bari Nurd came up with the idea of painting characters on separate pieces of celluloid, which have subse quently come to be known as ‘cels’. By 1917 the International Feature Syndicate was releasing animated versions of favorite new spaper cartoon strips like The Katzenjammer Kids, Krazy Kat and many others. In the same year Max Fleischer introduced the Out of the Inkwell series, a combination of animation and live action. By the time Walt Disney had made the first full-color talkie cartoon Flowers and Trees in 1932 the future of the animated film in the cinematic arts was assured.
have mass appeal, engaging to both children and adults. It was a gamble, but it paid off. The hermetic, magical, deodorised world of homogenised fantasy explored in Snow White crystallised into what was to become the Disney style of animation — described by art historian and critic Erwin Panofsky as: “A chemically pure distillation of cinematic possibilities.” The style is unmistakable, and is sustained by his studio to this day. Although Disney himself was not a particularly gifted animator or filmmaker, his genius lay in his ability to organise other people’s talents to syn thesise and realise his own artistic vision. There are, for example, five directors listed on the credits for Dumbo and six for Bambi. Disney was obviously conscious of the propaganda possibilities of the animated film. In Snow White, for example, there is a lengthy whistling musical sequence given, basically, to the importance of washing your hands before you eat. In a recent interview Donald Duck reminisced: “ We were helping to prepare people for, in effect, Dachau.”2
Disney’s moral manipulation — and it’s there alright — is not only well sugarcoated, but in tricately iced. And therein lies the essence of all that which is Disney: presentation and enter tainment. After the box-office failure of what was, ironically, his most inventive and experimental film, Fantasia, Disney began to adopt a more mercantile attitude towards film production. By the mid-forties he had begun to lose critical respect: the naive magic of his earlier work had become heavily diluted with financial con sideration. The fairytale charm became a com modity, and Disney packaged it with mastery. Donald Duck commented: “Above all he represented a biting parody of the bourgeois entrepreneur in the competitive stage of capitalism.”3
Waif Disney: Entrepreneur 7 of the World to the World While visiting Hollywood in 1930, Soviet direc tor Sergei Eisenstein was asked what in American cinema he admired most. He replied: “Chaplin, Von Stroheim and Walt Disney.” In the face of the then popular opinion that feature-length animated cartoons could never compete with live action, Walt Disney spent three years half-calculating and half-dreaming his first animated feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) into realisation. The entire project was cleverly masterminded to ensure that it would
©
1975 Warner Brothers Inc.
Although here Duck is talking about his wealthy Uncle Scrooge, he could easily be referr ing to his erstwhile long-time employer and friend. Walt Disney was the supreme packager: Disneyland itself is the perfect illustration. Hollywood, taken in the overall view of film history, was the point at which the cultural