Post by veu on Oct 11, 2020 6:07:40 GMT -5
From Vulture:
VULTURE LISTS OCT. 5, 2020
The 100 Sequences That Shaped Animation
From Bugs Bunny to Spike Spiegel to Miles Morales, the history of an art form that continues to draw us in.
Edited by Eric Vilas-Boas and John Maher
The 100 Sequences That Shaped Animation
Brought to you by
This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
All animation, whether it depicts a whistling mouse, a walking dinosaur, or a leaping superhero, is a kind of magic trick. It’s right there in the name of one of the earliest devices used to project slides: the magic lantern. If you take an image of an open hand and an image of a fist and project the two in sequence, you’ll convey the illusion of a clench. “What happens between each frame is more important than what happens on each frame,” the prominent experimental animator Norman McLaren (who makes the list with his short Neighbours, below) once explained. “Therefore, animation is the art of manipulating the invisible interstices between frames.”
That has largely remained true throughout the medium’s history, both frame by frame and over the course of a two-hour children’s movie. Animated cartoons fool the brain into believing that static images can move; characters are “brought to life” by putting pen to paper or finger to a computer’s trackpad. The medium that began to crawl thanks to the live performances of inventor Charles-Émile Reynaud and illusionist Georges Méliès has now matured into a complex and diverse art form — one that has seen new processes and cultural innovations in every decade since its inception. The characters and intellectual properties it has drawn into existence are as relatable as Daffy Duck and as lucrative as Mickey Mouse. Today, vast audiences understand what artists like McLaren were observing: that the invisible holds a marvelous power over us.
To capture an idea of that power and to narrate its history, we have charted the evolution of animation by considering 100 sequences throughout the medium’s history. We chose the deliberately flexible element of a “sequence” because it felt the most focused: It is often in one inspired moment, more so than a single frame or entire work, that we are able to see the form progress. Focusing on full cartoons would create a bias in the favor of studios with the resources to produce theatrical features — but history has shown that many landmark achievements in animation have been produced with a variety of budgets, formats, and lengths. By focusing on sequences, we can let creators and their individual decisions shine in a way full-length works may not.
The arc of this history begins in 1892, the year Charles-Émile Reynaud first used his Théâtre Optique system to screen his moving pictures — to our mind, the first animated cartoons ever produced — for the public (and long after the invention of the magic lantern). From there, we address sequences in every decade well into our own era, touching on a range of formats, innovations, and historical moments, from the patenting of rotoscoping to the invention of the multiplane camera to the rise of anime and everything in between and after.
This list is not intended to be comprehensive. One hundred is a crushingly compact number of slots with which to encapsulate the totality of a medium. That isn’t to say we didn’t try. We arrived at our list after months of discussions and arguments among a brain trust of animation professionals, historians, and other experts. More than 600 nominations were considered based on the criteria we established: Since this list is for an American audience, entries skew toward what influenced American animation; to be eligible, sequences had to have been made available, at some point, to audiences in the U.S., whether in limited screenings, wide release, or bootleg importation. You’ll notice Japan’s output is better represented than that of French or Czech animators, which we felt reflected American audiences’ evolving, decades-long relationship with Japanese animation. We excluded porn, video games, and advertising, reasoning that they didn’t jibe with a list of art intended to be consumed, rather than interacted with. We were especially choosy about which examples of combined live action and animation to use — a gimmick that had been deployed long before Mary Poppins — and how to handle the question of special effects, which we tried to limit to moments when we felt the tools and forms used by animators crossed over most dramatically with those of live-action filmmakers.
Entries by Rebecca Alter, Elly Belle, Kambole Campbell, Jen Chaney, Amelia Cook, Alex Costello, Marley Crusch, Toussaint Egan, Christopher L. Inoa, Genevieve Koski, Willow Catelyn Maclay, Rafael Motamayor, Sammy Nickalls, Joshua Rivera, Daniel Schindel, Ayoola Solarin, Drew Taylor, Alison Willmore
All of the nominees were subject to the forces of capturing an accurate historical progression: Necessary inclusions meant omissions, some of which may feel crushing as you notice them. Many a beloved character (Mr. Magoo), creator (Mamoru Hosoda), film (Barefoot Gen), or series (Avatar: The Last Airbender) went unrecognized. Such cuts were typically made because while the titles were important to the history of animation, it was often the case that their impact was not showcased in one specific sequence, and we felt it would be disingenuous to present them in that way. We also didn’t want to sanitize the complicated contributions made to the medium by problematic figures; members of our brain trust ultimately decided work by Bill Cosby, John Kricfalusi, and others ought to be reckoned with in any honest history of the form. And finally, the works of white men ended up disproportionately represented here, for similar reasons, since white men have been disproportionately represented in the American animation industry since its formation.
Inevitably, a list like this can only scratch the surface of an art form unparalleled in its elasticity and capacity for wonder. And yet the sequences included here, listed chronologically, speak as much for the evolution of animation as a medium as they do for themselves. The creators of the early, tastelessly minstrelsy-laden shorts on this list could not have imagined how our entries would make vast audiences vibrate with joy — and the basic compact of the craft still holds, firm as ever: Animators continue to fool us into believing still images can move and breathe, and we in turn remain delighted to live between the frames.
“Part of Your World,” The Little Mermaid (1989)
Walt Disney Feature Animation
Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker
Very few artists had as widespread an influence on the history of animation as lyricist and playwright Howard Ashman, and he wasn’t even an animator. When Ashman started working with Disney in 1986 after he was commissioned to pen the lyrics for a song in the creative failure that was Oliver and Company, it began a relationship that would help birth the so-called Disney Renaissance and chart a path for the animation giants that they are still following to this day.
With The Little Mermaid, Disney’s output returned to the world of fairy tales and tapped into a feminine yearning for something more that resonated deeply with children everywhere. “Part of Your World” is an expertly crafted song of rising, bombastic vocals from Jodi Benson and firmly situated Disney in a new Broadway-influenced style of animated musicals. In the sequence, the mermaid Ariel retreats to her secret treasure trove, where she collects things from the human world, and like a teenage girl’s bedroom, it is decorated with her hopes and dreams. Much of the animation in this sequence is catered to the way Ariel moves, with her gorgeous flowing hair seeming to have a life of its own and her skyward gaze to emphasize her longing for more. (It would be the last fully traditionally cel-animated Disney film, before the process was replaced by Disney’s Computer Animation Production System, or CAPS.)
“Part of Your World” tapped into something fundamental about girlhood, and those sweeping, beautiful enchantments about being liberated and free from the restrictions of where you grew up, or who you are, or what your body looked like, still strike a chord to this day. Disney knows this too, as it has been tapping into the Ariel model ever since with the likes of Elsa from Frozen. “Part of Your World” is not only the start of Disney’s resurrection, but gave them an emotion to inhabit for the next 30 years, and that all started with Howard Ashman. (Click here to watch on Disney+.)
The others here
VULTURE LISTS OCT. 5, 2020
The 100 Sequences That Shaped Animation
From Bugs Bunny to Spike Spiegel to Miles Morales, the history of an art form that continues to draw us in.
Edited by Eric Vilas-Boas and John Maher
The 100 Sequences That Shaped Animation
Brought to you by
This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
All animation, whether it depicts a whistling mouse, a walking dinosaur, or a leaping superhero, is a kind of magic trick. It’s right there in the name of one of the earliest devices used to project slides: the magic lantern. If you take an image of an open hand and an image of a fist and project the two in sequence, you’ll convey the illusion of a clench. “What happens between each frame is more important than what happens on each frame,” the prominent experimental animator Norman McLaren (who makes the list with his short Neighbours, below) once explained. “Therefore, animation is the art of manipulating the invisible interstices between frames.”
That has largely remained true throughout the medium’s history, both frame by frame and over the course of a two-hour children’s movie. Animated cartoons fool the brain into believing that static images can move; characters are “brought to life” by putting pen to paper or finger to a computer’s trackpad. The medium that began to crawl thanks to the live performances of inventor Charles-Émile Reynaud and illusionist Georges Méliès has now matured into a complex and diverse art form — one that has seen new processes and cultural innovations in every decade since its inception. The characters and intellectual properties it has drawn into existence are as relatable as Daffy Duck and as lucrative as Mickey Mouse. Today, vast audiences understand what artists like McLaren were observing: that the invisible holds a marvelous power over us.
To capture an idea of that power and to narrate its history, we have charted the evolution of animation by considering 100 sequences throughout the medium’s history. We chose the deliberately flexible element of a “sequence” because it felt the most focused: It is often in one inspired moment, more so than a single frame or entire work, that we are able to see the form progress. Focusing on full cartoons would create a bias in the favor of studios with the resources to produce theatrical features — but history has shown that many landmark achievements in animation have been produced with a variety of budgets, formats, and lengths. By focusing on sequences, we can let creators and their individual decisions shine in a way full-length works may not.
The arc of this history begins in 1892, the year Charles-Émile Reynaud first used his Théâtre Optique system to screen his moving pictures — to our mind, the first animated cartoons ever produced — for the public (and long after the invention of the magic lantern). From there, we address sequences in every decade well into our own era, touching on a range of formats, innovations, and historical moments, from the patenting of rotoscoping to the invention of the multiplane camera to the rise of anime and everything in between and after.
This list is not intended to be comprehensive. One hundred is a crushingly compact number of slots with which to encapsulate the totality of a medium. That isn’t to say we didn’t try. We arrived at our list after months of discussions and arguments among a brain trust of animation professionals, historians, and other experts. More than 600 nominations were considered based on the criteria we established: Since this list is for an American audience, entries skew toward what influenced American animation; to be eligible, sequences had to have been made available, at some point, to audiences in the U.S., whether in limited screenings, wide release, or bootleg importation. You’ll notice Japan’s output is better represented than that of French or Czech animators, which we felt reflected American audiences’ evolving, decades-long relationship with Japanese animation. We excluded porn, video games, and advertising, reasoning that they didn’t jibe with a list of art intended to be consumed, rather than interacted with. We were especially choosy about which examples of combined live action and animation to use — a gimmick that had been deployed long before Mary Poppins — and how to handle the question of special effects, which we tried to limit to moments when we felt the tools and forms used by animators crossed over most dramatically with those of live-action filmmakers.
Entries by Rebecca Alter, Elly Belle, Kambole Campbell, Jen Chaney, Amelia Cook, Alex Costello, Marley Crusch, Toussaint Egan, Christopher L. Inoa, Genevieve Koski, Willow Catelyn Maclay, Rafael Motamayor, Sammy Nickalls, Joshua Rivera, Daniel Schindel, Ayoola Solarin, Drew Taylor, Alison Willmore
All of the nominees were subject to the forces of capturing an accurate historical progression: Necessary inclusions meant omissions, some of which may feel crushing as you notice them. Many a beloved character (Mr. Magoo), creator (Mamoru Hosoda), film (Barefoot Gen), or series (Avatar: The Last Airbender) went unrecognized. Such cuts were typically made because while the titles were important to the history of animation, it was often the case that their impact was not showcased in one specific sequence, and we felt it would be disingenuous to present them in that way. We also didn’t want to sanitize the complicated contributions made to the medium by problematic figures; members of our brain trust ultimately decided work by Bill Cosby, John Kricfalusi, and others ought to be reckoned with in any honest history of the form. And finally, the works of white men ended up disproportionately represented here, for similar reasons, since white men have been disproportionately represented in the American animation industry since its formation.
Inevitably, a list like this can only scratch the surface of an art form unparalleled in its elasticity and capacity for wonder. And yet the sequences included here, listed chronologically, speak as much for the evolution of animation as a medium as they do for themselves. The creators of the early, tastelessly minstrelsy-laden shorts on this list could not have imagined how our entries would make vast audiences vibrate with joy — and the basic compact of the craft still holds, firm as ever: Animators continue to fool us into believing still images can move and breathe, and we in turn remain delighted to live between the frames.
“Part of Your World,” The Little Mermaid (1989)
Walt Disney Feature Animation
Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker
Very few artists had as widespread an influence on the history of animation as lyricist and playwright Howard Ashman, and he wasn’t even an animator. When Ashman started working with Disney in 1986 after he was commissioned to pen the lyrics for a song in the creative failure that was Oliver and Company, it began a relationship that would help birth the so-called Disney Renaissance and chart a path for the animation giants that they are still following to this day.
With The Little Mermaid, Disney’s output returned to the world of fairy tales and tapped into a feminine yearning for something more that resonated deeply with children everywhere. “Part of Your World” is an expertly crafted song of rising, bombastic vocals from Jodi Benson and firmly situated Disney in a new Broadway-influenced style of animated musicals. In the sequence, the mermaid Ariel retreats to her secret treasure trove, where she collects things from the human world, and like a teenage girl’s bedroom, it is decorated with her hopes and dreams. Much of the animation in this sequence is catered to the way Ariel moves, with her gorgeous flowing hair seeming to have a life of its own and her skyward gaze to emphasize her longing for more. (It would be the last fully traditionally cel-animated Disney film, before the process was replaced by Disney’s Computer Animation Production System, or CAPS.)
“Part of Your World” tapped into something fundamental about girlhood, and those sweeping, beautiful enchantments about being liberated and free from the restrictions of where you grew up, or who you are, or what your body looked like, still strike a chord to this day. Disney knows this too, as it has been tapping into the Ariel model ever since with the likes of Elsa from Frozen. “Part of Your World” is not only the start of Disney’s resurrection, but gave them an emotion to inhabit for the next 30 years, and that all started with Howard Ashman. (Click here to watch on Disney+.)
The others here