Animation cinema

Animation cinema

Animated cinema is a variety of films that produce the illusion of movement using the image-by-image technique: we animate hand-drawn images, objects, cut papers, puppets, plastic figurines, raw materials, minutely moved or modified with each shot.

1 - ANIMATION MOVIES MUETS

The animated film preceded the first film. Optical systems were first used, such as Horner's Zootrope (1834) and Reynaud's Praxinoscope (1877), the latter having developed the first projections by transparency in 1889. Several years after the making of the first cinematographic films, the first stop-motion animation was developed by Edwin S. Porter for Edison. In 1905, he directed How Jones Lost His Roll and The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog, in which subtitles were formed by cut-out letters, which moved randomly on the screen until they were align in the right order to compose the desired message. This technique necessitated the adaptation of the camera used for cinematographic films in order to control the freeze frame, in the same way as the rigging experimented at the same time in the Edison, Gaumont and Méliès studios. The first real animated films are due to the Spanish Segundo of Chomon (El Hotel Electrico, 1905) and to the American James Stuart Blackton, caricaturist hired by Edison: Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (graphic animation, 1906). That same year, Blackton produced another film, A Midwinter Night's Dream, for which he had designed miniatures: this was the first example of a puppet film. Blackton developed these animations in The Haunted Hotel (1907) by making plasticine objects that gradually changed between each image. In France, Emile Cohl produced the first series of cartoons, inaugurated by Fantasmagorie (1908), with linear and stylized graphics. The success of his Fantoche ensured him a regular production which he pursued in the United States in 1912-1914. Winsor McCay, one of the pioneers of the comic book, also embarked on the adventure and made the first cartoons with an elaborate graphic reproducing with fluidity the natural movements: Winsor McCay Draws Little Nemo (1911), Gertie the Dinausor (1914) ). Until the 1930s, no one managed to match the quality of McCay's animations.

The basic mechanisms used in the hand-made animations to avoid having to redraw the fixed backgrounds of each image were developed in 1914. These techniques required drawing the figures to be animated on separate Celluloid sheets and superimposed on a fixed background. The technique was patented by John Bray and Earl Hurd in 1914. It was essential to ensure the positioning of each successive drawing and this was possible only by perforating the drawing that was attached with pins on the animation table positioned under the camera, according to an idea patented by Raoul Barré. All these men were the main animators of the time: Bray Studios made the first American series of cartoons in 1913 with Colonel Heeza Liar in Africa; Earl Hurd directed the Bobby Bumps series, which featured the best-built stories to date; Barré produced an animated version of the famous Mutt and Jeff comic strip. The drawing was relatively crude, in black and white, and the movements were bumped. In the 1920s, animation techniques began to improve. Characters like the famous Felix Chat, hosted by Otto Messmer in Pat Sullivan's studio, were still a bit rigid, but Max and Dave Fleischer introduced a new dimension of supernatural fantasy and complexity into the Out of the Inkwell series. . The Fleischer also invented the Rotoscope, a mechanism intended to transcribe by projection a real action previously filmed. Famous for their series Koko the Clown, Betty Boop and Popeye, they also developed techniques through which cartoon characters met real-life actors.

The idea of ​​mixing the cartoon and live characters was taken over by Walt Disney after he moved to Hollywood in 1923. He directed the Alice in Cartoonland series, which showed a little girl moving into a cartoon world . The work of the team led by Walt Disney (for storytelling) and Ub Iwerks (as lead facilitator) improved rapidly and by 1928 they had a huge success with the first Mickey Mouse. After adding the sound to the cartoon in 1928 (Steamboat Willie), Disney Studios became the main creators of this genre, both artistically and commercially. In Europe, production remained more traditional with, in France, Emile Cohl and Benjamin Rabier and Polish Ladislas Starevitch. In the USSR, the animation studios created in 1922 were resolutely specialized in didactic cinema. In Germany, the animators gave in the experimental and in the abstraction with Viking Eggeling, Hans and Oskar Fischinger, Walter Ruttman and Hans Richter. In Germany, Lotte Reiniger directed the first animated feature, The Adventures of Prince Ahmed (Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed, 1923-1926), using the technique of Chinese shadows ("Silhouettenfilm").

2 - ANIMATION AT THE TIME OF SPEECH

In the 1930s, the trend was to fill the image with more and more autonomous movements for both characters and sets, until the whole image came to life. This was the case for the cartoon Disney The Old Mill and especially the feature Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs (Snow White and Seven Dwarfs, 1937), the first color sound animation movie in the history of cinema, inspired by a tale of the Grimm brothers. Not only were these films new in the way of rendering the movement, but they also diversified the points of view in each scene, as in classical cinema. This technique refined by Disney studios from 1935 to 1945 was never surpassed. Classics such as Fantasia (1940) and Pinocchio (1940) bear witness to this. In the years that followed, Disney had to cope with the rising cost of labor and therefore had to reduce the complexity of the work. But his commercial success continued. The other Hollywood animation studios followed Disney's footsteps, and each Major wanted to distribute his own animated short films. Among the most original directors was Tex Avery, successively employed by Warner and MGM, whose films remain the most delirious in the history of cinema.

In the late 1940s, a more modern graphic approach was developed in a new cartoon studio: the UPA, created by John Hubley, Stephen Bosustow and other Disney defective directors. No comparable production has developed in the rest of the world, except perhaps in some socialist countries where the cost criterion of these expensive techniques does not constitute a barrier to artistic expression - as a result of which works of high quality were produced in Czechoslovakia in particular. In Western Europe, small animation studios had limited resources and devoted themselves in part to advertising (in France: Jean Image, Paul Grimault, Arcady). With the steady increase in the cost of labor, the Disney method became too expensive and most studios gradually returned to "limited animation," as in the early days of the cartoon, where only one character moved and where the movements were jerky. To compensate for this decline in visual interest, more space was given to the soundtrack, dialogue, music and sound effects. The use of photocopying simplified the production process by eliminating tracing, which reduced production costs and gave a new face to films such as One Hundred and One Dalmatians (101 Dalmatians, 1961). In the 1980s and 1990s, the decline in the quality of animation was halted thanks to directors such as Don Bluth, who directed An American Tail (Fiével and the New World, 1986) and Disney Studios, who tried to return to the quality of the 1940s.

Since the 1930s and 1940s, animation techniques have become more and more diverse, from drawing engraved directly on the film (Len Lye, Norman McLaren) to the current processes using computers, electronics and the computer-generated image, such as John Lasseter's Toy Story (1995), produced by Walt Disney Studios, the first full-length computer-animated feature film whose public and critical success naturally inspired its creators to produce a sequel , Toy Story 2 (1999). Many talents flourished in Europe, particularly in the socialist countries where permanent production structures had been set up, notably in Zagreb, in the former Yugoslavia, in Czechoslovakia (Jiri Trnka and his animated puppets, Bretislav Pojar , Karel Zeman, who was able to mix actors, drawings and animated models), in Poland and, of course, in the USSR. Some snipers and non-conformists have achieved some fame, such as the Soviet Yuri Norstein and the Poles Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk.

As early as 1939 in the United States, the cartoon was part of television programs that encouraged mainly the most industrial and stereotypical techniques, represented especially by the Japanese production. A number of independent workshops have nevertheless developed: in Canada at the National Film Board (led by Norman McLaren), in the United States where some independent filmmakers have developed avant-garde graphics (Robert Breer , John Whitney, Jane Aaron) or new comic books (Ralph Bakshi) while others innovated in traditional methods (Will Winton). Similarly in Europe, apart from the currents represented by the Frenchman Paul Grimault, the Italian Bruno Bozzetto or the British John Halas and Joy Batchelor, original creators have produced new works in relative isolation: the French Jean-François Laguionie and René Laloux, the Belgian Raoul Servais, the Czech Jan Svankmajer, the Polish Piotr Kamler, the Hungarian established in France Peter Földes.