ANIMATION = MIND-CONTROL
With this new emphasis on exploring and clearly defining personality in animated characters a more primitive “language” of cartooning gradually gave way to greater expressiveness in the drawing.
Originally, character animators had done all of the effects in their own scenes: even throbbing lines to represent pain and question marks to show confusion. But Walt felt that these all lacked style and asked his men to be more observant and to draw more accurately.[1]
For example, in those many instances of early animation when a character got clobbered the animator would insert a halo of stars, moons and planets circling above its head. Or alternatively, tweeting birdies. This was practically a universal standard of animation “vocabulary”. In his features Disney abjured this effect because it violated the realism he sought. (Except in Peter Pan when Captain Hook gets knocked silly and in Song of the South when B’rer Rabbit takes a blow to the head from B’rer Bear’s cudgel but in these cases it is a deliberate reference to “primitive” animation technique. The effect is lampooned in Robert Zemekis’ (1951-) Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) when the filming of a cartoon gets interrupted because the title character sees tweeting birdies instead of the orbiting stars which are required by the script.)
It has been assumed by many that the Disney process actually photographed 24 different pictures per second. However in examining actual footage from Alice in Wonderland and The Sleeping Beauty frame-by-frame I counted only eight unique images per second of film each one duplicated three times successively to achieve the requisite total of 24. Only eight per second? That’s still a whole lot of individual pictures! And some sequences I suspect may actually use more than that. This degree of control over what you are so rapidly seeing allows a lot of visual information to enter your brain quite subliminally, evoking responses that may mystify – fear, compassion, sorrow, most often hilarity and/or delight.
For example, as the techniques of animation matured over the decade preceding production of Snow White Disney’s artists discovered – among many other fun effects – something they dubbed “squash and stretch”. In order to emphasize a character’s gesture they would scrunch it down tight then within a few further drawings elongate it. For example during the Mad Tea Party sequence in Alice the March Hare shouts this line: “The time! The time! Who’s got the time?” He is hanging onto the back of the Mad Hatter’s neck and speaking over the milliner’s shoulders. During the first two phrases his entire body stretches out first to the left then to the right. Between the phrases he squashes way down. This exquisite bit of animation happens so fast that its zaniness escapes before any appreciative observation can register and besides, the action continues unabated with further similar frenetic abandon. After repeated viewings of these films I have found that for some reason such moments become more and more visibly apparent as though with repetition your mind is able to see “quicker”!
…the older you get, the more likely you are to pick up on some of the truly inspired nuances that are nestled between the lines.[2]
A couple further examples: after repeated viewings of that same sequence I realized that the animator has the March Hare fluff Alice’s golden tresses as the three characters change seats among an odd assortment of chairs surrounding the long tea table. Also – in the midst of his frantic retrieval of watchworks as they fly past him during the Hatter’s “repair” of his timepiece – the White Rabbit’s prinz nez eyeglasses spin completely around his nose like a propeller. Unremarked by the casual viewer these trifling touches are obviously “insider” jokes on the part of the animators. At the same time their accumulation over the course of a film lends an inexplicable aura of delight over the entire experience.
Additionally animators Thomas and Johnston call attention to another sly subliminal effect specific to animation:
“The second sequence… is all done to pre-scored music with the characters moving in sync to every beat, actually dancing their way through the song. Even the secondary actions are put on the beat as much as possible, since this always conveys a happy, exuberant feeling that can be achieved in no other way.”[3]
This is definitely a sort of “mind control” but of a positive and pleasant intent rather than pernicious.
Of course, repeated viewings can also reveal occasional errors: in Bambi for example a background duck flaps its wings in front of a foreground cattail during the April Shower sequence and a racoon’s baby suddenly shifts across the screen way out of reach of its mother’s tongue as she continues licking soot off it after the forest fire. (This latter flaw has been somehow corrected in the more recent DVD releases of this film.)
The editing of animated films is also subject to similar careful detailed control. The final task in wrapping up a live-action movie is this process – the selection of the best “takes” out of the often numerous nuanced repetitions of any particular scene or even single shot, then trimming their lengths and finally splicing them together with appropriate transitions between – cut, cross-fade, dissolve, blackout, what-have-you. The all-important pacing of the entire enterprise is determined during this editing process.
In an animated film however – since it is such a labor-intensive endeavor – all editing must be accomplished in advance of the photography. Ceaseless fussing at the storyboards of each sequence accomplishes this pre-editing. Once perfected these drawing-by-drawing visualizations get photo-copied and delivered to the animators accompanied by exposure sheets nicknamed “greys” which were long scrolls with incredibly-detailed frame-by-frame instructions regarding exactly how each shot was to be animated. Thus the artists were spared spending expensive time/talent laboriously drawing scenes or even portions thereof which might end up “on the cutting room floor”.
However, this careful storyboarding was not infallible. In Snow White for example Walt jettisoned anything that slowed down the momentum of the story whether the discard was a whole scene or snippets of one. This “tightening” – either before or after the fact – culminated in films whose overall narrative arc is well-paced, clear and intensely compelling.
[1] Johnston, Ollie, and Thomas, Frank: op. cit., p. 251.
[2] Kranc, Lauren: “The Best Animated Films of All Time Have No Age Limit”, Esquire Magazine, June 7, 2020.
[3] Johnston, Ollie, and Thomas, Frank: op. cit., p. 409.
