Japanese Animation and New Media
Lecture Four: Chapter Six: Full Animation
This tension between movement into depth and character animation continues into various kinds of contemporary digital animation. A clip from a fairly recent film, Waking Life (dir. Richard Linklater, 2001), provides a prime example.
Waking Life was done with digital rotoscoping. Teams of animators used computer software to paint lines and colour upon live-action footage shot with a digital camera. With digital footage, you don’t really have frames, and so animation is no longer a question of photograms (images or drawings) per second. Instead, animators have to decide how long to hold a certain line in place and how often to change the contours of lines to give a sense of movement. As a consequence, you no longer have a fixed background upon which fully animated character move, and the background will tend to move as much as the characters. Everything seems to be in motion, and some viewers find the effect dizzying.
Note how movement here tends to settle on and highlight a sense of the layers of the image. The result is a multiplanar image in motion, that is, a multiplanar animetic image. The movement of different layers of the image begins to take precedence over that of character animation. In fact, it is hard to separate out the actions of the characters from the world, and even the elements of characters appear to move independently.
Linklater and his teams of animators were apparently content with this sort of “open compositing.” And it suits the material in question, which poses questions about the nature of reality and the world.
But, in other animated productions, there is a great deal of effort to ‘close’ the movement of layers of image, to make the world feel solid and navigable, as a place in which the action of characters can be directed toward objective goals, to tangible ends. A similar problematic arises in 3D animation, the sort that you watch with 3D glasses. If you’ve seen any of these films recently, you’ll probably have noticed how the effects of depth tend to separate the image into layers. The compositing becomes quite ‘open.’ But if you want to create a sense of moving into this world, moving into depth, you have to ‘close’ the compositing and eliminate the sensation of layers as much as possible. In animated films, viewers tend to accept some degree of open compositing, maybe because they are prepared to see animation as a fantasy world. But in live action cinema, open compositing is usually considered undesirable. Part of the technical achievement of Avatar (dir. James Cameron, 2009) was to bring live action footage and digital animation together while creating a sense of movement into depth into the film world. The different layers of the film were ‘perfectly composited’ to sustained the ideal of fully animated characters and creatures in conjunction with movement into depth.
