Animation

3D STOP-MOTION ANIMATION

Three-dimensional stop-motion animation has two distinct histories. The first is the largely European tradition of short stop-motion films made by individual artists and stop-motion series made principally for children's television. The second, predominantly Hollywood tradition, is the "invisible" history of stop-motion animation as a branch of special effects for feature-length films. This is complicated further by the fact that 3D stop-motion animation also has two principal approaches, using either puppets or clay models, but also includes films made with objects and artifacts.

Though J. Stuart Blackton (1875–1941) and Albert E. Smith (1875–1958), Britons working in the United States, have been credited with making the first puppet film, The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1908), the British filmmaker Arthur Melbourne Cooper (1874–1961) made the first 3D advertisement ("Matches: An Appeal," featuring animated matches) perhaps as early as 1899. Cooper's "toys come to life" stories, including Dreams of Toyland (1908) and The Toymaker's Dream (1913), became a staple of early British animated film. Similar preoccupations informed The War and the Dreams of Momi (Giovanni Pastrone, 1913) and, later, The New Gulliver (Alexander Ptushko, 1935); but it was another Russian, Ladislaw Starewich (1882–1965), who first developed an extraordinary technique, following his interest in entomology, in animating three-dimensional insect characters. The Cameraman's Revenge (1911) is a melodramatic love triangle, and highly self-conscious in its reflexive tale of cinema about cinema. His later films Town Rat, Country Rat (1926) and Tale of the Fox (1930, released 1938) are masterpieces of the stopmotion form, drawing upon a darker, more amoral tradition of the folktale, yet they remained singularly unsung until recent years.

This neglect is a signal that animation made outside the US cartoonal tradition, in the long shadow of Disney, has been often marginalized in animation histories. This does more than negate important, aesthetically different work; it dismisses significant indigenous works that reflect national cultures and alternative perspectives on human experience. It is also true to say that the US tradition, particularly in its formative years, is largely a comic tradition. Other countries have aspired to different kinds of storytelling and have different thematic and artistic preoccupations. Indeed, even the comic work inevitably reflects different traditions of humor. The recovery of this work is paramount to a full understanding of the place of animation in international film culture.

Back in the United States, though, it was the pioneer Willis O'Brien (1886–1962) who inspired generations of what came to be called "effects artists." Amused by his brother, who playfully changed some of the postures of clay figures created for the exhibits in the San Francisco World's Fair of 1915, O'Brien experimented with his first stop-motion film, of a boxing match, soon to be followed by a prehistoric comedy, The Dinosaur and the Missing Link (1915). In 1925 he made The Lost World , based on a story by Arthur Conan Doyle, assisted by the gifted model maker Marcel Delgado (1901–1976), who constructed 18-inch models influenced by Charles Knight's acclaimed dinosaur paintings in the American Museum of Natural History. RKO then employed O'Brien on the groundbreaking King Kong (1933), which changed the status of special-effects work, fully deploying O'Brien's "rear-projection" system, which combined background live action with foreground miniature animation, first seen in O'Brien's aborted project, The Creation (1930). King Kong has generated a high degree of critical attention, playing out considerations of its sexual and racial subtexts, and the complex implications of its bestial and imperialist agendas. These issues were revisited in the 2005 remake by Peter Jackson (b. 1961), which uses the same combination of motion-captured performance, 3D puppet animation, and 3D computer animation so successfully deployed in the creation of the character Gollum for Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001, 2002, 2003).

O'Brien later became mentor to the most famous of all stop-motion animation artists, Ray Harryhausen (b. 1920), who, inspired by King Kong , sought to ape the technique in his own short films. After working with the renowned George Pal (1908–1980) on his Puppetoons , Harryhausen made his own short educational films, the first of which was the Mother Goose Stories , then joined O'Brien in making Mighty Joe Young in 1949. This was the beginning of a long and distinguished career in which Harryhausen created many fantastical and mythical creatures in films such as The Beast from Twenty Thousand Fathoms (1953), The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), and Clash of the Titans (1981). The effects tradition essentially defined by Harryhausen has the inherent contradiction that an effect must operate as something that draws attention to itself as "spectacle," but at the same time remains invisible as an "effect." Harryhausen's painstaking efficiency in the frame-by-frame compositing of increasingly complex miniature figures and creatures with live-action characters and environments represents a major achievement in cinema practice. As such, he is cited as a major influence by contemporary animators and artists from Phil Tippett (b. 1951) to James Cameron (b. 1954) and is referenced in animated films from Nightmare Before Christmas (Henry Selick, 1993), in which skeletons battle underwater, echoing Jason's fight with six skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts , to PIXAR's Monsters, Inc. (2001), in which a top-class restaurant is called Harryhausen's.

Harryhausen's legacy is great, but George Pal, his one-time employer, also produced fine work. His "replacement" technique was slightly different from Harryhausen's method: whereas Harryhausen manipulated his models by small increments and recorded them frame by frame, Pal created replacement pieces of his models—faces, arms, legs, and so on—which progressed the cycle of movement he was creating, and which he inserted and changed, once more recording the incremental progression frame by frame. Though a more cumbersome technique, it survives into the modern era, particularly in clay animation, and has been used in films by Aardman Animation in England. After making early films in Germany, Pal moved to Holland, fleeing the rise of Nazism, and established the biggest puppet studio in Europe, principally making striking advertisements for sponsors such as Phillips and Unilever. His Puppetoons , made in Hollywood, included Jasper and the Beanstalk (1945), Henry and the Inky Poo (1946), and Tubby the Tuba (1947). They were highly successful, though sometimes they fell afoul of what might be termed "cultural difference" in regard to the representation of race issues and the interpretation of Western humor. These films nevertheless secured Pal a reputation that enabled him to produce and direct feature-length science-fiction and fantasy films such as The War of the Worlds (1953), Tom Thumb (1958), The Time Machine (1960), and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1963). These films all included tourde-force sequences of puppet animation—"the yawning man" from Tom Thumb being one of the most remembered. The quality of the animation by Harryhausen and Pal overshadowed similar efforts in the field such as, for example, Jack the Giant Killer (1961) by Tim Barr (1912–1977), one of a number of variations on The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958) that sought to cash in on its popularity. Barr later joined up with Gene Warren (1916–1997) and Wah Chang (1917–2003) to work on visual effects for Pal and on their own work in Projects Unlimited.

Pal's legacy in Europe has been sustained, consolidated, and advanced by two major figures of Czechoslovakian origin. Influenced by indigenous marionette and theatrical traditions, Jirí Trnka (1912–1969) and Jan Svankmajer (b. 1934) produced a range of extraordinary films pushing the boundaries of stop-motion and other techniques as well. Trnka's politicized if romantic vision inspired masterpieces such as Staré povesti ceské ( Old Czech Legends , 1953), Sen noci svatojanske ( A Midsummer Night's Dream , 1955), and Ruka ( The Hand , 1965), while Svankmajer's more subversive and challenging view, genuinely taboo-breaking in its daring, appears in such features as Alice (1988) and Otesánek ( Little Otik , 2000). This altogether darker work inspired the Quay Brothers working in England, Kihachiro Kawamoto (b. 1925) in Japan, and Tim Burton and Henry Selick in the United States. Svankmajer's work is an important example of the ways in which the principles of modernist thought and political insight may be accommodated in experimental film. His "agit-prop" (strident critique of authoritarian regimes and political repression) and "agit-scare" (use of surreal images drawn from the unconscious to prompt moments of fear and revelation in his audience) are conceptual applications to the medium and should be understood as a methodology in the creation of distinctive imagery and alternative narratives. Svankmajer's masterpiece, Moznosti dialogu ( Dimensions of Dialogue , 1982), is a tripartite meditation on the breakdown of communication, illustrating the brutal and destructive tendencies inherent in human exchange. The film is a complex metaphor and a challenging comment on humankind's inability to resolve its differences.

The contemporary era has seen the emergence of the Will Vinton studios in the United States and Aardman Animation in England as masters of clay animation. The two styles vary, but both studios value the "clay" aesthetic as something visually distinctive and engaging. Nick Park (b. 1958), Aardman's most famous son, created Wallace, the eccentric inventor, and his altogether smarter dog, Gromit, a now globally famous partnership, who have featured in Park's shorts A Grand Day Out (1989), The Wrong Trousers (1993), and A Close Shave (1995). Park's work, though speaking to a wider tradition of English wit and whimsy, nevertheless has clear affiliations with the stop-motion animation made for children's television in England by Gordon Murray (b. 1921) and Bura and Hardwick ( Camberwick Green , 1966, and Trumpton , 1967); Oliver Postgate (b. 1925) and Peter Firman (b. 1928) ( The Clangers , 1969, and Bagpuss , 1974); and Ivor Wood (1932–2004) at Filmfair ( The Wombles , 1973, and Postman Pat , 1981). The high quality of 3D animation for children in England has been sustained by Cosgrove Hall, S4C, and BBC Animation, and has been only echoed in the United States by the early 1960s work of Jules Bass (b. 1935) ( Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer , 1964, and Mad Monster Party , 1968) and by Art Clokey's (b. 1921) simple clay figure, Gumby (1955 onward). Inevitably, Will Vinton's (b. 1948) Martin the Cobbler (1976), The Adventures of Mark Twain (1985), and the 1990s' advertisements for the California Raisin Advisory Board, featuring raisins singing popular songs, have in their various ways created a high-water mark in clay animation in the United States, which has always had to compete with the Disney tradition, but also in recent years with the now dominant CGI aesthetic.

Stop-motion and clay animators have always championed the "materiality" and "textural" aspects of their work as the distinctive appeal of 3D stop-motion, but one of the most significant aspects remains the necessarily artisanal approach to the work, which is reliant not on off-the-shelf software but on the ability to make and build things, as well as to respond to the miniature demands of theatrical practice and live-action filmmaking techniques on a small scale. The fundamental belief in the sheer "difference" and visual appeal of stopmotion animation has also prompted the emergence of important individual artists, from Serge Danot ( The Magic Roundabout , 1965) to Joan Gratz ( Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase , 1992) to Barry Purves ( Gilbert and Sullivan , 1999), each bringing a specific vision to the materials, as well as a sense of theatrical space and the fluid timing of their narratives. Peter Lord (b. 1953) and David Sproxton's (b. 1954) Animated Conversations (1978) and Conversation Pieces (1982–1983) were also groundbreaking in their combination of animation and "documentary" soundtrack. Chicken Run (2000), an Aardman feature, proved hugely successful, and crucially represented the maintenance of 3D work in a physical and material context. The persuasiveness of 3D CGI has proved a serious threat to such work, but the sheer tactility, texture, and presence of 3D stop-motion work with puppets or clay has endured and has maintained its own aesthetic distinctiveness. Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (2005) and Aardman's feature Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) are testaments to the style's achievement and future.