Japanese Animation and New Media
Lecture Two: Chapter Two: Animation Stand
The multiplane animation stand, with its limited camera movement and layers of celluloid would seem to make animetism (movement over or across depth) easier to achieve than cinematism (movement into depth). Yet because the animation stand allows you to regulate effects of depth, it also makes it possible to realize cinematism.
Achieving a sense of movement into depth in animation was the dream of Walt Disney. It is a dream of cinematism in that Disney wanted animation to do all things that cinema could do and more, and movement into depth was the great obstacle and challenge.
Disney is credited with the invention of the multiplanar camera system, which basically refines the multiplane animation stand to allow animators to have more control over the distances between layers of the image, in conjunction with lighting between layers and a camera that could focus through layers.
In the history of Japanese animation, Ari-chan or “Little Ant” (Seo Mitsuyo, 1941) is said to be the first film to use the multiplanar camera system.
This film introduces a new sense of depth into the animated image in a couple way. First, the blurring of the foreground layer not only creates an effect of deep focus but also calls attention to the presence of the camera, which furthers the sense of a viewing position amenable to Cartesianism. Second, the ability to bring one than one layer into focus at the same time meant that there could be animated movement in different layers of the image. Having movement in more than one layer increases the sense of depth. Finally, when the viewing position moves, we don’t perceive the gaps between layers. This is commonly called compositing. With the advent of the multiplanar camera system, the gaps between layers of the multiplanar would be considered ‘artifacts’ of animation, to be eliminated or minimized as much as possible.
Ari-chan, like first Disney animations to use the multiplanar camera system, such as The Old Mill (1937) and Snow White (1937), don’t attain the sort of cinematism that we saw previously in Spriggan and Steamboy. But this innovation laid the ground for achieving the dream of cinematism within animation.
