"What is Animation?"

Who's asking: Not Coming to a Theater Near You in another one of their collectively written extravaganzas: "[W]hat seems to have begun as an amusing scientific parlor trick, a simple optical illusion, now amounts to a vast range of technical possibilities, visual aesthetics, genres and subgenres in cel, stop-motion, and digital animation. This means that while we often use it to refer to a genre, the term 'animation' encompasses an unimaginably large spectrum of films that may have substantively little in common. The limitless variety in animation is in this way both its greatest strength and its Achilles heel."

In "Magic Kingdoms," Rumsey Taylor and Leo Goldsmith write that while there are "many immediate discrepancies between both men, fostered largely by the geographical and temporal distance between them..., a thematic similarity persists between the work of Walt Disney and Hayao Miyazaki..., and this similarity is the more remarkable phenomenon that emerges in a comparison between them."

Jiri Trnka has also been compared with Disney, notes Adam Balz in an introduction to reviews of the puppet films, but when critics saw the first feature, "they saw Trnka as someone who could succeed in combating Disney's monopoly over animation."

Jenny Jediny considers another Czech filmmaker: "There is no doubt that Prague is regarded as a hub of animation in the European film world, primarily due to the genius of Jan Svankmajer." But the "issue of availability has kept a number of Svankmajer's colleagues out of sight for some time, both his influences and protégés. Jirí Barta is one such study."

Teddy Blanks looks over to neighboring Poland to consider the work of one of my own favorite filmmakers in any genre, Zbig Rybczynski: "Seeing just one of his music videos out of context might lead you to underestimate them: many are hilariously dated, and their bright, throwaway look blends seamlessly with the bulk of VH1 Classic's other offerings. But watch a few in a row (with some digging, most of them can be found online), and you begin to realize that his videos constitute a body of imaginative, technologically brilliant work as worthy of canonization as his short films."

Also: "In Praise of Pixar."

"As an animated feature, Fantastic Planet's significance is in how this European film asserts a more artisanal style in opposition to the smoother felicities of the American one," writes Ian Johnston. "Yet even more important to the film is the way its director, René Laloux, is operating here as a kind of enabler of another artist's vision, that of the artist and writer Roland Topor."

"[I]t is chaos that inspires [Don] Hertzfeldt's ingenuity as an animator," writes Rumsey Taylor, who also interviews the filmmaker. "His films are irreverent and anxiously humorous - watching one, one is often prompted to laugh because the visuals conjure no other particular response. It is a nervous, uncertain laughter."

"Sylvain Chomet's turned to filmmaking after completing several award-winning graphic novels, and his The Triplets of Belleville is in many ways a bande dessinée produced on celluloid," writes Jenny Jediny.

Back to puppets and a wide-ranging survey from Leo Goldsmith: "Setting aside the fact that nearly all stop-motion puppet cinema incorporates some amount of live-action footage, there is nonetheless a single, fundamental difference between stop-motion puppet films and live-action ones: Illusion."

Ten years and counting... Tom Huddleston: "There are moments of true horror in South Park, images and viewpoints so extreme you can almost hear the complain and creak of boundaries being stretched. But there's also clear-headed insight and inarguable intelligence, a bull-headed determination to resist censorship, and a quality of writing unparalleled in American comedy."

"Dismissed by purists because it involves tracing over live-action film images rather than hand-drawing from scratch, rotoscoping is nevertheless of great historical significance within the field of animation," argues Beth Gilligan who considers "Lucid Dreaming in the Films of Richard Linklater."

Posted by dwhudson at June 26, 2007 10:00 AM