British Kinematography (1952)

Vol. 20, No. 1 THE LATEST DEVELOPMENTS IN ANIMATED FILM John Halas Till-, advances that have been made in the animated film in recent years are twofold : aesthetic and te< hni< al. :n the outsit, the tendency has always been for animated cartoon to incline towards d kind of burlesque musi< hall stylisation. cartoons have been based on the . < ration of physical forces, on the " hit him and chase him " style. As a result of this approach, audiences have now come to accept " gagging " automatically, as an inseparable part oi the cartoon medium. The Aesthetic Advance In recent years, however, we have been witnessing an entirely new development and that is the employment, in ever-increasing e, of graphic art in animated pictures. Since the early days of sound film animation has been moving towards naturalism. The objective, particularly in American cartoons, was to make the movement as lifelike as possible. Inventions such as Multiplane cameras and complex rostrum devices were nearly all designed to obtain the illusion of depth and naturalism, in imitation of the produced by live action cameras. Nowadays, however, naturalism is out. In European studios and in some American studios the latest tendency is to ignore depth and make full use of the representative quality of cartoon by showing foreground, ground and characters all on the same flat screen. So cartoon is becoming stylised to a degrei which pulls it away from the conventions of newsp ; nil strips and which leaves us with characters which are true cartoon caricatures. These characters are animated . in two dimensions and make no attem] nceal the fact that they are actual drawings. ttiey n rapture for us some of the .harm of the very early < artoons drawn by Emil Kohl before cartoon production be' industrialised. When we consider the style of these newcartoons we shall find that they are profoundly influenced by modern design. Modern poster technique, for example, is reflected in the fiat surface colour and modern architectural forms have influenced the shapes of objects as well as their colours. This sweeping change of style, which has developed since the end of the war, has also had its effect on our approach to cartoon stories, which are now based far more on visual wit and visual symbolism than upon those twists of behaviour which had pride of place in the naturalistic type of story. The limitations of the cartoon film as a film which is drawn are now accepted and cartoon stories no longer run entirely on " cat and mouse " lines. Fairy tales about cute little kittens are no longer the only approach to animation. As an example, the most popular cartoon character in America is a little boy called Gerald, painted in flat surface colours, drawn on the same simple lines that you may see in a cartoon in Punch or the New Yorker. As a character he cannot talk — he can only produce radio sound effects. The films in which he appears have the sophisticated charm and wit of our best humorous magazines. This is a type of film where, for the first time, cartoon can give us intellectual satisfaction. At the same time, we discover that animation need not always be cute — it may even be artistic and intelligent and still be popular. Aesthetic satisfaction apart, the new style has the added advantage of simplicity in execution. This in turn has economic advantages over the realistic approach which are of considerable benefit in these difficult English and European film markets. Technical Advances Turning now to the technical advances Halas & Ratc-hflor Cartoon Films Ltd.