NARRATIVE - "ANIMATION IS A UNIQUELY VISUAL MEDIUM"

This session was our final dedicated lecture looking at our Narratology project, and looked at how animation works with it's visuals, and how the medium can bring forward stories that can't be presented any other way.

"People keep saying 'the animation genre'. It's not a genre!" ~ Brad Bird, director of The Incredibles, Ratatouille and The Iron Giant.

Like the above quote suggests, animation in itself isn't a genre like a sci-fi or a horror. Animation is a medium.

A medium is the means or method of conveying information. In the arts, there are many different mediums: painting, photography, fashion, film-making... and animation. Animation is mostly considered a genre by the general audience as films made for young children and nothing more. However, animation has been used to get across more than just those types of films. We've seen hard hitting social commentary, risque shorts, and even entire movies & TV series with an adult only orientation.

(South Park has been running since 1997, using animation to show a variety of vulgar, controversial actions and commentaries - credit: Comedy Central)

Animation encompasses a wide range of styles and stories, the latter of which may not even be able to be told without animation. The medium can be intrinsic (vital) to the narrative.

This is where a comparison of Content and Substance comes in. The two can be respectively paired with Story and Discourse, and represent two factors of the story:

• Story / Content - what's told
• Discourse / Substance - how it's told

The substance of an animated film can be just about anything. Through this, we can use animation to tell unique stories that other mediums can't.

"Implicit in the study of the animated form is how 'meaning' is generated by the unique vocabulary available to the animator, which is not the province of the live-action film-maker" ~ Paul Wells

An example of a somewhat exclusive technique to animation is metamorphasis. Cartoons from the mid-1920s to later 1930s used the Rubberhose style, which involved metamorphasis for more comedic effect.

(Snow-White by the Fleischer Brothers and starring Betty Boop incorporates metamorphasis during certain sequences, including the Queen's head turning into a frying pan with two eggs. The short also uses rotoscoping during the Saint James Infirmary Blues sequence ~ credit: Fleischer Brothers)

Another technique animation uses is fabrication. In this context, fabrication means to take existing materials - be it natural or artificial - and reinterpret them within an animated film.

(Bottle by Kirsten Lepore uses fabrication with the items the sand and snow people send to each other - credit: Kirsten Lepore)

(Wladyslaw Starewicz's The Cameraman's Revenge took dead insects from a previous project of theirs, and repurposed them to be animated puppets; audiences were amazed, and considered Starewicz to be more like a magician than a film-maker - credit: Wladyslaw Starewicz)

Animation, as briefly mentioned before, can be used to show more daring subjects & imagery with the facade of a cartoon. Many people associate cartoons and animation with their childhood; moreso, innocence. So seeing horrific actions played out through a cartoon would make it seem a lot better than it actually is.

(Tex Avery's The Cat That Hated People continually shows abuse towards the titular cat; horrific if shown in live action, but played for laughs in animation - credit: Metro Goldwyn Mayer)

The Cat That Hated People also follows the carnivalesque rule animation can incorporate. It essentially means that normal rules are disabled, reversed or altered. It's usually applied to emphasise humour, satire or grotesquery.

One very important element to animation is it's visual storytelling.

"If it's a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what's going on." ~ Alfred Hitchcock, director of Psycho, amongst others

The film-making rule of "show, don't tell" is also applicable to animation. You should plant hints and clues to things, or just straight up show them instead of having things be disclosed through just dialogue.

Roland Barthes stated there were 5 Narrative Codes, two of which we discussed; first there's the Hermenautic Code. This code is when you build mystery & suspense, posing questions that only the narrative can answer. For example:

• "What happens after death?" is NOT a Hermeneutic question
• "After her death, Jane found her day-to-day activities become much more interesting" IS a Hermeneutic question; only the narrative following and/or preceding it can answer this for us.

Linked to this is also Casual Connection and Ellipsis.

Casual Connection is when two random words or images are put side by side. By default, our brain will try and guess what the correlation is through some kind of mini narrative. For  example, showing the words BANANA and VOMIT next to each other. When asked in the lecture what the link would be, the unanimous answer was "it's a bad banana". 

Ellipsis is related in that it's the deliberate omission of what the correlation is, leaving the audience to figure it out themselves with context clues and/or later surrounding actions.

"Explanation kills drama" ~ John Yorke

A smaller, somewhat similar code is the Cultural Code. It involves the audience filling in the gaps that the ellipses creates with their own experiences. 

We also looked at the Kuleshov Effect. The effect is simple; you take three shots; one of a person looking at something, one of what they're looking at, and finally one of their reaction. When you replace the middle clip with something else, the final reaction shot can take on a whole new meaning.

(Alfred Hitchcock explaining the Kuleshov Effect - credit: CBC)

Older texts that use these techniques may be more difficult to read into, given that you may need proper historical context.

Finally, we looked at Narrative Statements.

In a narrative, there are two types of statements it can bring up:

• Process Statement - something that is done or happens
• Stasis Statement - something that simply is or just exists

We finished off by watching an animation that takes the "show, don't tell" rule to it's extreme, by telling a 22 minute story with nearly no dialogue.

(The Old Lady And The Pigeons only has dialogue in it's opening and closing minutes; the main storyline features no dialogue whatsoever - credit: Sylvain Chomet)

And that was the final lecture on Narratology! At this point, we should have a film in mind, or at least have whittled it down to 2 choices. I'm sticking with Who Framed Roger Rabbit? for my film; it fits into my chosen question format too well. From here, I need to settle on a plan of action for the essay, and do deeper research.