Good Girls and Wicked Witches. Amy M. Davis
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both in the cinema and in vaudeville.
In the early days of cartoons in America, the majority of the cartoon studios were located in New York City, and, consequently, the major distributors were there as well. Walt Disney’s studio (founded in 1924 as the Disney Brothers studio) was the first animation studio to be set up in Los Angeles, and, when Disney wanted to distribute his cartoons, he had to deal with people in New York. It was not until the 1930s, once sound production had become industry-wide, that the animators based in New York and Kansas City (where animators such as Disney, Iwerks, Hugh Harman, and Rudolph Ising began their careers) began to follow Disney to California, as studios such as Disney, Warner Brothers, and MGM began to lure artists westward to create cartoons for them. It was during the 1930s that, initially, the main strategy of many animation studios for competing with Disney was to attempt to copy Disney as much as possible. Indeed, Warner Brothers, MGM, and various other animation studios, in their efforts to compete with the increasingly successful Disney studio, did all they could to persuade Disney artists to come and work for them.67
Although, in April 1929, Universal became the first of the major studios in Hollywood to invest in the formation of an animation department for the sole purpose of making their own cartoons, it was during this period, mainly 1928 through to the late 1930s, that the Disney studio became the leader in its industry, mainly owing to the exceptionally high standards it set itself (at least in comparison with other American animation studios at that time), as well as to the Disney studio’s constant striving for improvements both in the organisational methods employed in producing cartoons and in the technological aspects of animated film production. It was the Disney studio, for example, which has been credited with the invention of the storyboard as a way of organising a cartoon’s story and communicating it to the animators. In the technical aspects of filming the cartoon with the greatest degree of realism68 possible, Disney led the way for other animation studios with its various technological innovations, an example of this being the invention by a Disney studio employee of the multi-plane camera, which was a way of photographing the various cels so that the overall shot had greater depth and dimension. The innovations of the Disney studio, however, will be discussed at a later stage.
How to make an animated film
The importance of a discussion of animation techniques here is this: because of the artistic and technical limits of animation as an art form, many of the stylistic and visual aspects of the characters, stories, and films are sometimes influenced less by the original vision of the animators and more by the technical constraints of the medium. The trade-off for these technical constraints, however, is the greater “control” which the makers of animated films have over their “actors”. In a live-action film, an actress may disagree with the overall perceptions and/or vision of the director of a film in which she is appearing. Although she may speak her lines and hit her marks as she is directed, she still has the power to influence her audience’s perception of her character through her eyes, her face, and her body language, as well as through the tone of her voice, so that what spectators see in the character is different from what the director had intended for them to see. It is in this way that Annabella Sciorra claims to have not only differed with director Spike Lee, but even to have subverted his intentions for her character, in the making of Jungle Fever (1991). As one writer commented,
Spike and Sciorra would look at the same words in the script every morning, yet take away two entirely different ideas of what they were supposed to mean. As both writer and director, Spike had the final say in the matter: he had the power to make her say his words. But he could not control the way Sciorra delivered these lines, or how … she held her head or set her facial muscles. Through this subtle subversion, Sciorra got her way.69
This sort of subversion, however, is largely impossible in an animated film. After all, there is nothing in the portrayal of an animated character – not a blink of an eye, not a tilt of the head, not even the movement of the folds of a skirt – which is not decided upon in advance, carefully mapped out, and then drawn to suit the expectations of the director of a film. All that the actor or actress contributes to the performance is a voice. And, since the dialogue is usually the first step in the process of producing an animated film, the visuals can be made either to complement or counteract the performer’s tone of voice.
It is not known how often an actor or actress who is lending his/her voice to an animated character has tried to change the main perception of a character from that of the director to his or her own. Admissions such as Annabella Sciorra’s are hard to come by in Hollywood cinema. To find such a comment on an animated film – especially a Disney film (coming as it would from the feedback surrounding the output of one of the most notoriously litigious of Hollywood studios) – is, in my experience, impossible. However, it is important to bear in mind when watching and analysing an animated film that no look or gesture is there by accident. All of the visual aspects of a character which come together to influence our perception as spectators are there on purpose, and their inclusion was decided upon not by the actors, but by the director. This point cannot be stressed enough. Indeed, it is upon this concept that the key arguments of this study rest.
During the last five to ten years, animation techniques, thanks to the increased use of the computer, have undergone some of the most dramatic changes in their history. Yet, throughout the period from 1911 to roughly 1985,70 the basic aspects of the mechanics of animation remained the same. Characters and backgrounds were drawn by artists, their drawings were photographed onto cels, and the cels were photographed onto film reels. Various people checked to see that the drawings were in the proper sequential order, that continuity was maintained (i.e. that the colours used, the look of each character, and the story elements were consistent throughout the film), and that the story – as it was presented – made sense. This is not to say, however, that there were no innovations in animation during its first eighty years. It is important, however, that an overview of the subject be included in order to give the reader a better understanding of why various aspects of the look of each film evolved as they did.
Animated films, like live-action films, are made up of a series of sequentially arranged individual photographs, called frames. Like the thaumatrope, zoetrope, and other such devices, film relies upon the phenomenon of persistence of vision for the viewer to be able to link the series of frames into what appears to be a moving image. In order for this to be achieved, the film is run at a speed of twenty-four frames per second. In a ninety-minute film, therefore, there are 129,600 individual frames. This means that, for a ninety-minute animated film, a team of artists must produce a number of individual drawings which is many times the number of frames (since there are at least two drawings which are put together to create the layers of a single frame) – an enormous amount of work. It is a gigantic effort which requires that the project possess meticulous organisation and co-operation, but still be run in such a way that individual creativity can easily be admitted into the overall process. It was also during the 1920s that the process of animation became increasingly more factory-like in its “assembly-line” production methods, methods which arose in the various studios as a way to make their work go more quickly from start to finish, thereby making themselves more competitive in terms of both out-put and expenses.
The creation of an animated film of any length involves various stages. In the pre-production stage, the story is chosen and planned, the backgrounds are designed, aspects of how the film’s characters look and act are decided upon, and the music, sound effects, and dialogue are recorded and timed to correspond with the correct frames of the film. It is at this stage of production that the storyboard for the film is put together, an invention which today seems logical and simple but which, when it was first created in order to help the artists at the Disney studio organise their work on “Steamboat Willie” (1928), was a revolutionary idea both for animation and the film industry as a whole. Alfred Hitchcock, for example, later adopted the storyboard method in planning certain sections of his films, with some of his scripts having as many as 600 set-up sketches for the more complicated shots.71 The storyboard is mainly used as a tool for organising the story as a whole, as well as a way of deciding which lines will be spoken during particular shots in the film. Besides providing a visual aid to the directors and artists of a film, the other advantage of a storyboard is that, especially in the planning stages