Japanese Animation and New Media
Lecture Four: Chapter Six: Full Animation
To summarize, we’ve seen that, in the animated moving image (the animetic image), there is always a tension between cinematism and animetism, which won’t go away. Such a tension can also appear in cinema, especially when animation is introduced into live action footage. This tension can be negotiated in various ways. Character animation is an important site of negotiation.
In the ideal of full animation, character animation is highlighted, literally ‘foregrounded.’ Full character animation thus distracts our attention away from the movement of layers of the image. While it does not ‘close’ compositing, because it is often used to make us less aware of the movement of layers within the image, it tends to make the movement of layers feel unnatural. We don’t expect a fully animated character to inhabit a world of flat sliding planes. In the prior example from Hakujaden, when fully animated rotoscoped human slides into the bushes, the layers of the image are palpable in a manner at odds with the ideal of full animation. Why aren’t the bushes fully animated? Why are they weightless and depthless?
For these reasons, full character animation conjures forth expectations for scalar proportions and movement into depth, which conventions in animation have both followed and encouraged. Thus the ideal of full character animation works with a tendency toward cinematism. When we have characters animated as fully as actors in cinema, we tend to expect that these sorts of characters inhabit a solid, stable world in which they can act upon things and achieve certain goals. In other words, the ‘target effect’ of cinematism becomes associated with goal-orientated action. Thus full character animation and closed compositing are brought together to construct a world of cinematism.
These techniques of character animation and closed compositing don’t have to go together. They tend to go together by conventions that have developed over time. Conventions of cinematism frequently came to animation from cinema, and the fact that cinema was historically taken more seriously as than animation meant the animation was often in the position of imitating, parroting, or parodying cinema. Or, animation techniques were put in the service of enhancing effects of cinematism, in the form of special effects layered into the cinematic world.
At the same time, however, the animation stand, with its layers of celluloid, introduces a countervailing tendency — animetism. And, no mattter how ‘full’ the character animation, it cannot eliminate this tendency. Consequently, character animation becomes a site of negotiation between cinematism and animetism. Negotiating the relation between character animation and background becomes especially important. It is a matter of negotiating the relation between character and world.
