backgrounds

In the earliest days of figurative animation, a background or setting which was internal to the cartoon ‘world’ was often not provided at all – many early cartoons focus only on the human subject and bring to direct attention the artist’s creation of the ‘character.’ In Emile Cohl’s 1908 film Fantasmagorie, regarded by many to be the earliest fully animated cartoon, we begin to see the intrusion of spatiality into what starts off as a simple demonstration of animation’s potential for simulating movement, similar to the vein of ‘lightning sketch’ films which were popular in the era. In Fantasmagorie, a simple figure is drawn by the artist’s visible hand, before floating down through emptiness to land on a chair within a rudimentary gesture towards a room. White lines materialise and spread out, forming the rough outline of a theatre stage, and the curtain rises to reveal a glimpse of a movie screen. As the film-within-a-film begins to play, each line of architectural structure surrounding the ‘screen’ is continuously drifting and jittering. Fantasmagorie was constructed from around 700 separate drawings on paper, which were then sequenced and photographed to create two minutes of footage. The stage, and therefore the room and the building in which the action takes place, is redrawn with the same materials, at the same rate, and on the same sheets of paper as the animated ‘toons.’ As such, the drawn world does not ‘house’ these characters; the world and those within it are extensions of each other, with no physical boundary to separate their materiality.

Later developments in cel animation processes, on the other hand, rely almost entirely on the separation of background and foreground: composed of different materials, on different surfaces, with different rates of change, and, crucially, each using a different visual logic and style. As Kristin Thompson writes, the “difference in the amount of work involved in the background and foreground tends to promote a split between the types of depth cues used in the separate layers.” Backgrounds consisting of singular paintings could include a much higher level of detail and, particularly in the case of large Hollywood studios such as Warner Brothers and Disney, would “tend to contain depth cues like attached and cast shadows, linear perspective, detail perspective, and occasionally even aerial perspective.” The toons themselves, on the other hand, “rely on far simpler cues like size, colour and overlap,” due in part to the difficulty of repainting shadows and highlights for each individual frame. Whereas in early drawn cartoon works, such as Fantasmagorie, the background has the ability to move with and around the character, in later cel animation developments the characters’ ‘squash’ and ‘stretch’ motion is heavily contrasted with the solid, unchanging environment within which they move. By nature of the 2-D space in which the animation ‘world’ is constructed, the background artists are forced to create depth and realism by means of overlap, shading, size, perspective, and “filled vs unfilled space.” In Thompson’s view, this means that “cel animation creates space in a manner more like the traditional graphic arts than live-action filmmaking.”

Here we begin to find an alternate painterly history of (cel) animation, as opposed to the traditional view of animation as either proto-filmic, ‘truly’ filmic, or somehow otherwise purposefully maligned within film historical endeavours (as is the implication given by many animation scholars). This painterly history is elaborated on by Donald Crafton, who recounts how initially intertwined the worlds of American animation production and traditional graphic arts were. In 1930, after former lead animator Ub Iwerks left the studio, Disney recruited a new generation of potential talent from a variety of artistic fields and backgrounds; a decision which, according to Crafton, “led to changes in the pictorial concepts that Iwerks and Disney had established.” Some of the animators began to attend life drawing classes at Chouinard, and these sessions later became informally sponsored by Disney himself. In 1932, Don Graham, a tutor at Chouinard, was invited to the studio by Disney to give formal classes, before eventually being installed as the “director of new expanded studio classrooms.”

Graham’s exact influence on the visual style of Hollywood cartoons is hard to quantify, but according to Crafton it was during this time that the “fundamental concepts of pictorial space, the colour palette, and performance philosophy […] began to change into what [Mark] Langer calls the West Coast style of Animation.” Graham was particularly interested in “colour, line drawings, and the construction of classical space,” and he insisted that “the animator must be proficient in pictorial space in order to create a believable fantasy world.” Further to this, he was of the opinion that the movement of the animated cartoon began within the spatial composition of the images, claiming that the best compositions would “establish a tension between perspective and variations in colour that make ‘space seem real’ and, at the same time, they suggest action and movement by ‘generating a sense of disturbance in those who view [the artist’s] work.’” In his book Composing Pictures, Graham describes how depth, perspective and rendering interact with animation planes and surfaces. “Animation deals with photographs of drawings and paintings projected in time,” he writes, “But we should remember that no matter how the illusion of action is achieved, the images we see occur on the screen, a surface. The motion picture and the still picture have one thing in common, each is an image on a surface.”