Japanese Animation and New Media
Lecture Four: Chapter Six: Full Animation
To return to Tôei animation and the legacy of Otsuka Yasuo’s character animation, we saw in Hakujaden how rotoscoping and full character animation were the ideal for animation. And in the Ghibli documentary on Otsuka, the emphasis was on classic techniques of full animation:
key animation (establishing key points of the motion),
in-between animation (drawing the intermediate movements), and
clean-up (erasing sketch lines and carefully inking bold contours).
Yet you may also have noticed that Otsuka’s character animation, particularly in the examples taken from television animation, wasn’t really full animation. There are economic, technical, and aesthetic reasons for this. In the context of cel animation, full animation is expensive and labour intensive. Also, animators need to play with new techniques to differentiate their work in the market. Moreover, as times and techniques change, there are new and creative ways of doing character animation. Animators constantly try new ways of negotiating the relation between character and world.
One technical problem that continually crops up in the relation between character animation and animated world comes of the sense of ‘weightlessness’ of the characters. Characters feel weightless for a couple of reasons. First, as you erase the sketch lines and ink bold contours, the characters lose their sense of mass. Second, because of the gap between character layer and background layer, the character may not feel anchored in the world. Third, when characters are highly animated, the viewing position tends to become associated with their movements. This association can make the gap between the character layer and the background more palpable.
The same problem doesn’t arise as much in live action cinema. Conventions for filming tend to assure a sense that the actors have mass and move into accordance with physical laws such as gravity. In animation, if you don’t take care to impart a feeling that characters are grounded in their world, they feel weightless and unanchored. In fact, in Waking Life, you can see how making cinema into animation can make the characters in the film sometimes appear to be free floating and sometimes to be indistinguishable from their world.
Otsuka Yasuo presents his character animation as an art of movement in accordance with the ideal of full animation. That ideal adheres in his characters more in the form of imparting a strong sense of the energy, physical weight, and ‘groundedness’ of a character than in the form of using the Disney standard for full animation (18 drawings per second).
