Vicky Smith - Experimental & Expanded Animation

This book makes its appearance at a time when, more than ever before, it is possible to question what exactly is animation? The employment of CGI in many Hollywood feature films has irrevocably blurred the boundary between animation and live action. This, in a way, returns us to cinemas first decades, when there were no definitions to concern us; the attraction of the medium was things in motion, be it Louis Lumires wall being demolished and rebuilding itself, or Georges Mliss multiple self-portraits singing on a musical stave, or mil Cohls Fantasmagorie (1908) of white-lines-on-black seamlessly morphing from one image to another. In the following decades, animation largely took its own path, and became a branch of cinema generally subservient to the live-action mainstream, no longer the main attraction, but with the compensation of being more open to individual expression.

The early animators (Cohl and Winsor McKay) would have appreciated the French term for animation, Le Dessin Anim , the animated drawing. Better than bald animation, it captures the sense that the drawn-image should be totally and constantly in motion; no dead inanimate parts. After his first fully animated Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), McKay himself struggled to maintain this dynamic, and invented many of the tricks that would be used by later animators to minimize the labour involved, (cels, cycles of drawings, etc.)in effect, accepting the killing of part of the image. Hollywood animators largely accepted these compromises; the storys the thing, although there are moments in early Disney and Fleischer where gloriously the whole image is involved in motion. But these are rare. To see the struggle for full animation (for life) continued, one turns to the parallel history of experimental animation and the work of artist animators Walter Ruttmann, Len Lye, Lotte Reiniger , Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker, Robert Breer, Caroline Leaf, et al. These animators demonstrated that anything material could be animatedwet paint, the filmstrip, silhouettes, a screen of pins, postcards, sand; and so began the process of medium-expansion.

Such animation is labour intensive. It takes time, but time can add its own enrichments. The tortuously long process of Yuriy Norshteyn making his (unfinished) The Overcoat (1981) comes to mind, or the digressive reverie of Susan Pitts Asparagus (1979), which must have taken years of labour, or Fischli and Weisss live-action-as-animation Der Lauf der Dinge (1987), the latter two of which are discussed here. All benefit from ideas developed en route originating in the intellectual curiosity that is every artists starting-point. Once questions are asked, boundaries fall away and the imagination expands. So, as this anthology put together by two outstanding practitioners clearly demonstrates, animation continues to sustain the excitement of cinemas first decades.