Japanese Animation and New Media
Lecture Four: Chapter Six: Full Animation
Often character animation is thought to be the art of animation. Leaping and frolicking characters are truly delightful to watch; they catch our attention. And they seem to embody the very idea of ‘bringing the inanimate to life,” which for many people is the essence of animation.
But I have taken a very different approach, insisting that we need to give priority to compositing, to the relation between layers of the moving image. There are three reasons for giving priority to compositing over character animation.
First, there are pragmatic empirical reasons. Character animation usually happens in only one layer, sometimes in two layers or more, within the animation stand. Character animation is not all that is happening in terms of movement. As some of the examples from Miyazaki’s animations demonstrate, you can set the world of the image in motion by sliding foreground and background layers—sometimes three or four layers are in motion. In other words, character animation is folded into the animation stand, exerting its effects within the multiplanar moving image.
Second, there are aesthetic reasons. When character animation is taken as the art of animation, full animation becomes the ideal for animation. There is thus a bias against limited animation, in which movement is less a matter of character animation and more a matter of sliding layers and movement of the viewing position (camera or simulated camera). I’ll talk more about limited animation in chapter 15. For now keep in mind that full animation refers to the number of drawings used per second. Traditionally, the projection rate for cinema was 24 frames per second. To produce an animated character with as much movement as an actor in cinema, you would need to have 24 drawings per second, with incremental changes across the drawings. As it turns, character animation looks quite good with 18 drawings per second, which was the Disney standard. But that is still a lot of drawings.
Third, there are pragmatic historical reasons. If we take character animation as the art of animation, we don’t get a good sense of the impact of animation today. In stand-alone digital animation (also called 3D or CGI animation) and in digital animation used in cinema (such as SFX), compositing becomes a central technical problematic: how to layer different kinds of movement into the moving image?
For these three reasons, I will continue to give priority to compositing over character animation. Let me begin with a couple examples to clarify these points.
You probably noticed the emphasis on character animation in the Ghibli documentary on the animation of Otsuka Yasuo. Since Otsuka Yasuo is best known as a character animator, this emphasis is understandable. Yet a bias toward character animation as the art of animation also crept in — and with it, a bias toward full animation as the ideal of animation.
Otsuka Yasuo got his training in character animation at Tôei Studios, which formed an animation division (Tôei Dôga) in the late 1950s with the goal of producing feature-length animated films to rival those of Disney Studios, to export throughout the world. As such, their initial ideal for animation was full animation. And so, in their animated film Hakujaden (Legend of the White Serpent, 1958), acclaimed as the first feature-length colour animation produced in Asia, they used rotoscoping to do the animation for the human characters.
Rotoscoping is a technique where you film the actors with a movie camera. And then you copy their movements frame by frame with drawings. You might think of rotoscoping as a precursor to motion capture. If you take the time to draw every frame, you will end up with 24 drawings per second. It is very expensive and labour intensive. People working on Hakujaden later said that it was like making two films!
The following clip from Hakujaden begins with the two human character singing a song. Their movements were done with rotoscoping. Then the animal characters do a little song and dance. The animal characters could not, of course, be rotoscoped, but the ideal for their movements is still full animation. The ideal is to make them look at as fluidly cinematic as possible, which means getting as close to 24 drawings per second as possible.
Note how these two varieties of full animation (rotoscoped humans and ‘fully animated’ animals) call attention to character animation. With highly animated characters, we don’t tend to feel the interval between layers or the movement of layers. It isn’t really closed compositing, because there is no attempt to organize perception and movement around a vanishing point or target. But it calls attention away from play of layers.
Nonetheless there is a problematic of compositing here. To impart an “Orientalist” flavour to this story drawn from Chinese folklore (that is, Journey to the West, called Saiyûki in Japanese), the Tôei animators drew Chinese-style backgrounds to put behind the characters. Because of the emphasis on character animation, these backgrounds are largely static. And the viewing position tends to follow the character. It is really difficult to do full character animation and have sliding layers and movement of the viewing position at the same time. And in this example, when there is a combination of movement and depth (as when the young woman goes into shrubs), you perceive the layers of the image.
The animation stand in conjunction with the multiplane camera system is designed to ‘solve’ of combining full character animation with movement into depth. But it is tough to do both at once, and there remains a tension between the two ways of doing movement, a tension between two tendencies for movement. This is what we’ve called, in prior examples, a tension between cinematism and animetism.
