Chapter 6

Getting Animated about Animation

In This Chapter

Analysing the appeal of cartoons for children and grown-ups

Understanding the workings of the greatest animation studios

Encountering animation from all over the world

Those poor misguided people who think that studying films is a waste of time sometimes use the term ‘Mickey Mouse Studies’ as an insult. But what’s so wrong about studying Mickey Mouse anyway?

Mickey Mouse was a vital pioneer in the world of character animation and went on to become one of the most recognisable fictional characters ever created. If that wasn’t enough, he’s also a formidable brand representing the enormous power of one of the world’s biggest producers of entertainment, Walt Disney. Surely that’s worth taking seriously.

But there’s so much more to animation than just lovable Disney characters. In this chapter you encounter a wide range of styles and techniques aimed at kids and adults alike, as well as taking a tour around a world filled with cartoons.

Considering Much More than Kids’ Stuff

Yes, most short cartoons and longer animated films are aimed at children, but that’s no reason to write them off as irrelevant. Animation instantly fascinates young children who don’t glance twice at a live-action film. Why is that? Is it most animation’s graphic boldness and rich colours? Or because the boundless magic of animated worlds – where animals can burst into song or smack each other with frying pans – is closer to the way kids see life? Whatever the reason, animation and childhood (and therefore nostalgia) are closely linked.

But of course not all animation is kids’ stuff. Classic Hollywood cartoons, such as Merry Melodies and Looney Tunes, were screened in cinemas as part of a varied programme of entertainment aimed at the entire family. The evidence suggests that such cartoons were (and remain) just as popular with grown-ups as with their kids. Plus, animation’s potential for creating abstract images or wild flights of fantasy is also appealing to artists and film-makers outside of the mainstream. Finally, the boundaries between live-action cinema and animation are increasingly blurred in the digital age.

Bringing images to life

The noun animation comes from the verb ‘to animate’, which essentially means ‘to bring to life’. Thinking of animation in this way brings into focus the close relationship between animation and cinema as a whole. After all, film is essentially animation that uses photographs rather than drawings (flip to the nearby sidebar ‘Drawing real life?’ for details). The well-known toys that prefigured cinema, such as the spinning zoetrope or even the simple flick book, used drawings not photographs to tell stories. So in a way, animation gave birth to cinema rather than the other way around.

In this book, I use the term animation to mean any type of moving image that doesn’t require photographs as a source, and it includes a wide variety of techniques (roughly from the oldest to the most recent):

• Cel animation: Traditional animation using hand-drawn images traced one on top of the other (using clear celluloid sheets or ‘cels’) and then photographed. This type of animation can be basic, where only sketched characters appear on screen, or complex, with rich, multilayered backgrounds.
• Rotoscoping: A process that traces photographic moving image stills, turning them into animation that moves realistically. Rotoscoping was widely used in early cartoons to increase the speed of production, but also provides the eerie quality of Disney’s human protagonists such as Snow White. It has also been revived in digital form, for example in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001).
• Stop-motion animation: Uses physical objects that are manipulated between frames to produce the illusion of movement. Variants abound, including claymation that uses modelling clay (such as Wallace and Gromit), models combined with live-action photography (Ray Harryhausen’s special effects monsters) or paper-style cut-outs (early South Park (1997 to present day)).
• Computer animation: Involves digitally created images. This technique has developed rapidly from simple lines and vectors in the 1970s to the complex, photorealistic 3D environments of today’s Pixar films. Motion capture allows animators to record realistic movements from actors and apply them to digital characters (Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy).
• DIY animation: Has grown exponentially during the digital age, with fans developing their own hybrid forms of animation such as machinima, which creates stories using videogame engines and characters, or Lego films, using the popular children’s building toys. Distributed on YouTube, these films can gain millions of fans around the world.

Making kids (and grown-ups) laugh

The connection between cartoons and comedy is as fundamental as the link between animation and childhood. Drawings or other types of animated objects disrupt the fabric of reality, encouraging absurd, impossible characters, environments and events that are often extremely funny. The term cartoon was first used for artists’ sketches, and then in the 19th-century print media it became associated with grotesque caricatures of well-known figures. London’s Punch magazine was loved by the public and hated by politicians in equal measure. The ability of cartoons to puncture the egos of the powerful is still evident today in TV shows such as South Park.

The visual gags in early cartoon shorts developed into the complex set of visual codes found in the series produced by Warner Bros. and MGM, such as Looney Tunes. As described by animation scholar Paul Wells and distilled in Table 6-1, this comedy shorthand established a world in which everyday expectations are turned on their head or exaggerated to an absurd degree.

Table 6-1 Common Visual Gags in Cartoon Comedy

These visual gags or puns are working with language in complex ways. The literary theory of semiotics says that language is a code that uses symbols (or signifiers) to produce meanings (the signified). Animation plays with these codes to comic effect. To consider an example from Table 6-1, the idea that eyelids are like rollerblinds is a simple visual rhyme and a figure of speech, in that you can consider windows to be the ‘eyes of a house’. In animation, the figurative (eyelids are like rollerblinds) can become the literal (eyelids are rollerblinds!). The reverse is also possible: the figurative birds circling a character’s head after being whacked can become literal birds and fly away.

Many more cartoon gags centre around the body or bodily processes such as eating, snoring and so on. Bodies in cartoons are also often subject to horrendous violence. In Tom and Jerry the beleaguered Tom is regularly burnt, drowned, decapitated or flattened. Why is this funny? Sigmund Freud claimed that jokes give pleasure because they relieve the pressure of behaving normally in a civilised society. When you watch cartoons, you can enjoy the embarrassing, uncontrollable nature of your own body, as well as indulging in a spot of schadenfreude, the pleasure taken in other’s misfortunes.

Animating counterculture

Although every society has its protest movements, the counterculture of the late 1960s gained significant momentum in part due to the large number of teenagers and young adults born during the post-World War II baby boom. This generation’s radical ideas around war, race relationships and gender were already driving contemporary art, literature and music, and this exploration was soon extended to animation.

To understand how quickly countercultural music, style and art spread into the mainstream of Western culture during this decade, just compare The Beatles of 1963 with their late 1960s reinvention. They went from the ‘Fab Four’ pop band playing cheerful 1950’s rock and roll, to long-haired hippies releasing experimental concept albums in just a few short years. Their first two hit films, A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965), are cheeky and irreverent performance pieces, with the band members playing zany, cartoonish versions of themselves. In 1968, The Beatles became cartoon characters in the British animated film Yellow Submarine (1968), with even their on-screen voices being supplied by actors.

Yellow Submarine was directed by George Dunning, a Canadian and a former colleague of influential avant-garde animator Norman McLaren. It’s a perfect distillation of the countercultural psychedelic movement in animated form:

• Visuals are flat but complex and richly coloured, with motifs including rainbows, flowers and the word ‘LOVE’ in bold capitals.
• Narrative logic is surreal and dreamlike. During the sequence accompanying the song ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, time flows backwards and forwards, and at one point the Yellow Submarine carrying the band members meets itself coming back in time.
• Characters are stylised incarnations of countercultural ideas. The bad guys (the ‘blue meanies’) are music-haters who steal colour out of the world, and John Lennon is introduced as a chemically altered Frankenstein’s monster.
• Several sequences are designed to resemble the hallucinations prompted by the drug LSD, particularly ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, which rotoscopes (see above section ‘Bringing Images to Life’) a chorus girl into abstract forms with realistic movement and also uses rapid flashing effects.

Yellow Submarine was an international hit and paved the way for other animated films aimed at adults. Few were more ‘adult’ (as in ‘rude’) than Fritz the Cat (1972). Based on underground comic book artist Robert Crumb’s character, Fritz the Cat was animated by former Paramount cel artist Ralph Bakshi. It showcases cartoon nudity, group sex, prolific drug use and violence, all within a stylised urban environment filled with anthropomorphic characters. Although the film’s anarchic spirit and free-love ethos are true to hippy counterculture, its representation of female and black characters attracted criticism, particularly after it became a surprise smash hit.

Although mass cinema audiences for radical animation proved a short-lived phenomenon, these films had an impact on generations of animators to come. On TV, Terry Gilliam’s animated segments for Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969–74) are very similar to the cut-out, Pop Art college sections of Yellow Submarine. And the 1980’s ‘ban the bomb’ movement, which protested against nuclear weapons, found expression in Jimmy Murakami’s film adaptation of Raymond Briggs’s When the Wind Blows (1986). This movie looks like Murakami’s gentle Christmas classic The Snowman (1982), but don’t be fooled: it’s a devastating tale of a loveable old couple dying in a nuclear holocaust. Fun!

Going full circle: Cinema gets animated

At the birth of moving pictures, cinema and animation were one and the same thing. The zoetrope and the magic-lantern technology that preceded cinema used drawings, not photographs. Even after the Lumière brothers startled audiences with their photographic actuality films (scenes taken from real life), early film-makers continued to experiment with different techniques for creating moving images, often blending animation as defined today with live-action film. For a good example, check out J Stuart Blackton’s Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906): it shows a hand drawing faces on a blackboard, which then magically come to life.

Between the 1920s and 1940s, when audiences consumed cinema as a continuous stream of mixed programming (see Chapter 9), animation was separated off into cartoon shorts, while the features (Disney excepted) were films that used photographic moving images. Then TV arrived, and even animated shorts were lost to cinemas. Only a few films, such as Disney’s live-action extravaganza Mary Poppins (1964), continued to use animated segments as a kind of added production value. The main element of mainstream cinema that remained open to animation was the title sequence (such as in Grease (1978)).

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) was, at the time, a landmark achievement in special effects. Its story of ‘toons’ who live among (or at least alongside) humans required complex animation and compositing techniques (that is, overlaying photographic images with animated ones) to blend the two elements together. The toon characters, including the sexy femme fatale Jessica Rabbit, are carefully lit and shaded to appear 3D. They also interact with props, which were suspended on robot arms or cables during filming. All very impressive, but viewed from today’s perspective, Who Framed Roger Rabbit feels like the end of an era, the pinnacle of the combination between traditional cel animation and live-action cinema.

In the 1990s, computers took over animation:

• Beauty and the Beast (1991), Disney’s return to form, uses cel animation laid on top of computer-generated backgrounds, allowing spectacular camera movements around the Beast’s castle.
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and Jurassic Park (1993) blew audiences’ minds with digital morphing and photorealistic dinosaurs.
• Toy Story (1995) was the first feature-length digital animation film, a form that all but replaced traditional animation in mainstream cinema within a couple of years.
• Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace (1999) uses computer-generated images (CGI) extensively for backgrounds, vehicles, weather and even supporting characters (though Jar Jar Binks is probably best forgotten).

Developments since the 1990s have only served to bring the status of big-budget cinema as ‘live action’ further into question. The use of motion capture to create realistic movement for digitally animated characters blurs the boundaries between performance and technology. (When will Andy Serkis, renowned as the king of motion capture acting after Gollum, King Kong, and the chimpanzee Caeser from Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), finally get an Oscar nomination?)

In a sense, CGI has returned cinema to its animated roots. Digital stand-ins for real actors are also used extensively in fight sequences or action shots. Just watch any of the big superhero movies of the last five years and try to spot where reality ends and animation begins.

Touring the Great Cartoon Factories

John Lasseter, Pixar supremo, often speaks of his fond memories of going to the pictures in his childhood, when cartoons still had a place in cinema schedules. Children and adults alike loved those brief, seven or eight minutes of brightly coloured chaos. True to his words, Lasseter ensures that every time you pay to see a Pixar feature film in the cinema you get a little animated surprise beforehand, as a playful reminder of the Golden Age of Hollywood cartoons.

In the following sections we track Disney’s unstoppable rise from small animation studio to global entertainment giants, noting their collaboration with the kings of digital animation, Pixar. We will also pay overdue attention to innovators and pioneers the Fleischer brothers – creators of iconic characters Betty Boop and Popeye – and take a dangerous leap into the anarchic world of Warner’s Looney Tunes stable.

Disney: The mouse shall inherit the Earth

Charles Pathé of Pathé Frères – the first internationally successful film production company – said ‘I did not invent the cinema, but I industrialised it’. Walt Disney could legitimately make the same claim in the field of animated films.

Before Disney, other animators invented techniques, streamlined the animation process and created popular characters, but none had the long-lasting cultural and economic impact of Mickey Mouse. Other animation studios came and went, and though Disney’s journey from fledgling cartoon producer to global entertainment juggernaut was hardly smooth sailing, Walt’s combination of business sense and storytelling ability continues to animate the company nearly 50 years after his death.

Walt’s success didn’t arrive overnight. Together with his first business partner and fellow cartoonist Ub Iwerks, Disney tried and failed to break into the animation business for around ten years before the company struck gold with a certain loveable anthropomorphised rodent. Mickey’s debut short, Steamboat Willie (1928), caused a sensation due to its strong visual characterisations and innovative use of synchronised music and sound effects (see the nearby sidebar ‘Mickey Mousing’). Mickey’s curvy design was comforting to the eye, his falsetto voice was childlike and innocent, and his adventures were non-threatening enough to reassure even the most anxious of parents.

Recognising the immense value of his creation as not just a cartoon star but also a visual brand, Disney began merchandising in earnest, producing clothes, toys and most famously watches featuring Mickey. Meanwhile his studio produced a popular series of music-driven shorts known as Silly Symphonies including the following:

• The Skeleton Dance (1929) demonstrates the darker, spookier style of Walt’s business partner and animator Iwerks. Skeletons in a graveyard dance to specially composed music, without a cute animal in sight.
• Three Little Pigs (1933), a bright Technicolor confection with detailed character animation of its piggy trio, was a huge success. It won an Oscar and spawned the hit song ‘Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?’ But the sequels failed, fuelling Walt’s antipathy towards repeating himself, or as the great man said: ‘You can’t top pigs with pigs!’
• The Old Mill (1937) showcased Disney’s development of the multiplane camera, which automatically moves several layers of background artwork in front of the lens, creating a deeper image. See The Old Mill’s opening scene: a spider’s web superimposed over a mill at sunrise. This short represented a shift towards a more ‘realistic’ animation style (check out the earlier sidebar ‘Drawing real life?’) with spectacular atmospheric effects such as lighting and reflective water.

Above all the Silly Symphonies allowed Disney to experiment with techniques and refine style in pursuit of Walt’s ultimate goal, a feature-length animated film. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) was a hugely expensive gamble, taking around 1,000 artists three years to produce and going six times over budget. Walt was forced to remortgage his house to pay for its completion. Luckily for his wife and kids, the film was a huge hit all over the world, and thanks to its many re-releases it remains one of the most profitable films ever released. Disney was awarded an honorary Oscar for innovation: one full-size statuette and seven small ones.

The Disney house style that was established by the early animated features (and barely changed over the coming decades) is one of lush, multilayered landscapes, detailed character animation and dense orchestral scoring. It’s so recognisable that other film-makers can easily parody it. In Shrek (2001), Princess Fiona waltzes through a Disney-esque forest before engaging in a duet with a bluebird. When Fiona’s warbling gets too high pitched, the bird explodes, representing DreamWorks Animation’s confidence about dispatching the Disney legacy. The recent phenomenal success of Enchanted (2007) and especially Frozen (2013), however, demonstrates that the Disney animated feature is alive and kicking. And warbling … Let it go! Let it go!

The Fleischer brothers: Betty pops out of the inkwell

Unlike Walt Disney (see the preceding section), Max and Dave Fleischer are barely remembered today, which is a shame, because not only did they create enduring cartoon characters, but also they advanced the art of animation through technical innovation.

Their first invention came to Max in 1915 while he worked as a strip cartoonist for a popular science magazine. His invention, the rotoscope, offered the first mechanical method for creating animated images. Single frames of a series of moving photographic images were projected onto a light box where an artist traced them. In this way realistic movement, and hence character performance, were more easily created.

Ambitious studio Paramount hired Max to contribute short animations to its entertainment programming, resulting in the Out of the Inkwell series, a popular blend of live action and rotoscoped characters. In these shorts, the character Koko the Clown grows out of the inkwell and interacts with the animator and the physical environment around him. The effect remains striking and it formed the basis of later live-action-animation mash-ups from Mary Poppins to Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

After setting up their own studio in 1921, the Fleischers were bursting with new ideas, including:

• The ‘bouncing ball’ leaping from word to word in song lyrics printed as subtitles, for their Song Car-Tune shorts made from 1924, which helped audiences to sing along with a live musical accompaniment. The brothers even developed their own sound-on-film system, but this innovation didn’t catch on.
• The method known as in-betweening, where the best animators draw the key action frames and leave juniors to fill in the gaps. Delegating labour improved efficiency of the notoriously intensive animation process.
• Using 3D model backgrounds instead of flat drawings to help create the illusion of depth. Disney later modified this technique with its multiplane camera (check out the preceding section for details).

But none of these inventions were enough to sustain the studio without engaging characters. Fortunately, the Fleischer Studios’ first star Betty Boop was capable of provoking strong audience reactions. Betty was a sexy flapper, with short hair and even shorter hemlines. Her antics included being chased by men who tried to steal her ‘boop-oop-a-doop’. Not surprisingly, Betty provoked disapproval from moral guardians, and after the Hays Code restrictions were imposed in 1934 (as I describe in Chapter 9), she was redrawn as a career girl with a full-length skirt and an aging sidekick, Grampy. Not surprisingly, audiences missed the racy party girl Betty.

The Fleischer brothers’ next star was Popeye the Sailor, whose popularity eventually rivalled that of Mickey Mouse. Popeye started out as a comic strip character in 1929 and made his animated debut in a Betty Boop short in 1933. His trademarks were his unintelligible accent, his oversized, tattooed forearms and his love of canned spinach – which resulted in soaring sales for the leafy vegetable in the US. His appeal to serviceman kept him relevant during World War II and beyond, and his character was revived several times on television. (A live-action Popeye starring Robin Williams was a notable flop of 1980. Its visuals are weird, but even weirder is the fact that New Hollywood auteur Robert Altman directed it.)

Warner Bros.: Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and related anarchists

If the classic Disney style featured sweet, innocent characters in beautiful, realistic settings, its main competition in the field of cartoon shorts, Warner Bros., was quite the opposite. These ’toons are literally loony: crazed, manic characters with speech impediments, raging against a brutal world filled with Acme bombs and falling grand pianos. Warner Bros. established a dream team of animators in the mid-1930s made up of Tex Avery, Chuck Jones and Bob Clampett. Audiences then and now love their combined whacky and irreverent style.

The impressive roster of Warner Bros. cartoon characters includes:

• Bugs Bunny: The smart-mouthed, wise-cracking trickster who easily outwits his rivals including big-game hunter Elmer Fudd. His catchphrase ‘What’s up, Doc?’ is an amusingly calm enquiry into whatever ridiculous situation unfolds in front of him.
• Daffy Duck: The zaniest, most screwball of all the Looney Tunes characters: prone to manic laughter, furious anger and frantic dance routines. Duck Amuck (1953) is the closest Hollywood animation ever got to producing an avant-garde animated film.
• Porky Pig: A slow-witted, stammering straight ‘man’ who’s often the foil for the crazier characters. Bob Clampett’s Porky in Wackyland (1938) is a black-and-white short that rivals Yellow Submarine (1968) for surrealist inventiveness.

Warner’s visual trademarks reject the realism of Disney animation for a bolder, comic-strip style. Colours are bright but flat and unshaded, outlines heavy and black, and backgrounds simplified, sometimes to the point of becoming abstract geometric shapes. Music is completely subordinate to the movement on screen, echoing or illustrating the characters’ movements, or a backdrop to big production numbers – most famously in What’s Opera, Doc? (1957), in which Bugs and Elmer parody Wagnerian opera, modern ballet and even Disney’s Fantasia (1940).

Despite high points such as What’s Opera Doc?, by the late 1950s Warner’s animation wing was about to become another victim of the breakdown of the studio system, and specifically the outlawing of block-booking that had ensured high exhibition fees for packages of entertainment (see Chapter 9). As cartoon shorts left the cinema, they found a natural home on television where they became a staple of children’s programming.

Warner’s more recent experiments with feature-length animation, such as Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant (1999), have won acclaim but not big box office success. But don’t forget that Warner Bros. is responsible for the heavily digitally animated Matrix and Harry Potter franchises, so the company is still doing very nicely indeed out of animation.

Pixar: Not just a Toy Story

The apparently unstoppable rise of Pixar Animation Studios demonstrates that the key to producing successful animation is to marry new technology with old-fashioned, character-driven storytelling. Pixar’s remarkable run of critically acclaimed and commercially successful films has taken the studio from small offshoot of George Lucas’s Lucasfilm to Hollywood major via its partnership with the Walt Disney Corporation. Although (geographically speaking) it’s not a Hollywood company at all, being based instead in Northern California near the high-tech hub of Silicon Valley.

The company’s technological innovator was Ed Catmull, a computer scientist who recognised the cinematic potential of CGI. But Catmull’s ambition to create entirely computer-generated movies required a lot more than technological know-how. Pixar needed an animator to inject warmth, humour and personality, and appropriately enough this came in the form of a staff animator fired from Disney: John Lasseter. Lasseter’s short films, especially Luxo Jr. (1986), created endearing characters out of inanimate objects such as Luxo Jr.’s desk lamp, which became the company’s corporate logo.

Lasseter’s CGI shorts created a big impression, but they weren’t financially viable in themselves. Pixar kept afloat by working in commercials as it entered the four-year long production process for its first feature. Toy Story (1995) was a big financial risk, even with the backing of Disney. But it succeeded, not only because it was the first film of its kind, but also because of a central idea with a strong pull for kids – many children imagine their toys coming to life when they aren’t around – coupled with a smart script filled with pop culture references that made parents laugh as much as their children.

Almost 20 years later, several Pixar titles (Finding Nemo (2003) and Toy Story 3 (2010)) rank among the highest grossing films of all time, and the company has won 27 Academy Awards. Although several competitors have joined Pixar in the market of feature-length CGI animation, particularly DreamWorks Animation with the successful Shrek franchise, Pixar films receive greater critical adoration than other studios’ output. For example, after the release of Up! (2009) and Toy Story 3 (2010), a rash of cynical film critics admitted that Pixar films made them blub like babies.

What accounts for these films’ tear-jerking power? Pixar films reassure adult audiences with clever, knowing humour before delivering their emotional kicks in the guts. In Up!, the montage sequence depicting Carl’s life with his true love Ellie is made even more poignant by its prefiguring comedic childhood scenes. Many of these films also contain a strong element of nostalgia. The Toy Story films present multiple layers of nostalgia for adult viewers: the loss of their own childhood, combined with parental anxiety about kids growing up and becoming useless burdens in old age. And you thought it was just about toys?

Spanning the Globe: A World of Cartoons

As a primarily visual medium, animation has always travelled well internationally, and it’s easily dubbed into different languages. Its close connection with the visual arts means that different styles of animation have developed all over the world, benefitting greatly from distinctive local visual traditions. Compared to live-action film-making, much smaller teams can produce animation with much lower budgets, provided the artists are devoted enough to work very long hours with little guaranteed financial return. These factors make producing high-quality, distinctive animation outside of the mainstream and without the backing of Hollywood possible.

In this section, I provide you with some examples of lesser-known animation traditions from around the Europe and the Middle East. Probably the best-known examples of animated world cinema are Japanese anime, but these films are so central to Japanese film culture that you can read about them in context in Chapter 12.

However, remember that Hollywood is also a global producer of animation, which can lead to some sticky situations – as I describe in the next section.

Taking over, one toon at a time

The Walt Disney Corporation is a truly global enterprise. Led by the worldwide popularity of Mickey Mouse, its short cartoons and then its animated features have been shown successfully all over the world. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) was (for a few years) the biggest box office hit of all time and was screened in places as far flung as Shanghai in China. Although the company originally relied on RKO and United Artists for international distribution, Disney set up its own global distribution wing, Buena Vista, in 1953. Disney now has offices in over 40 countries and employs around 150,000 people worldwide.

This success has made the Disney brand synonymous with the process of globalisation, the international spread of big business. This issue is controversial, because local economies and cultures often suffer when big multinationals move in. Some critics use another, more loaded term to describe this process: cultural imperialism, which suggests that cultural products such as films, fashion and pop music invade other cultures around the world, replacing diversity with bland similarity. The introduction of Disney’s international resorts, first in Tokyo in 1983, and then near Paris in 1992, provoked widespread concern that local cultural traditions were being replaced or ‘Disney-fied’.

Disney animation also borrows (or steals, depending on your perspective) stories and characters from around the world. Just think about it, and you soon realise that very few of the company’s feature length films have a specifically American source and setting. Instead they’re generally imported from the following:

• British novels: Walt was a well-known anglophile (lover of England), and the studio’s output from the 1950s and 1960s has a strong British flavour, including Peter Pan (1953), One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) and Mary Poppins (1964).
• European fairy tales: Notable sources include the works of Hans Christian Andersen (The Little Mermaid (1989)), the Brothers Grimm (Tangled (2010)) and Charles Perrault (Sleeping Beauty (1959)).
• Global myths and legends: Films include the Arabic Aladdin (1992), the Chinese Mulan (1998) and the Greek Hercules (1997).

But Disney doesn’t just grab the best children’s stories from around the world – it also sells them back in glorious Disney-fied form. Consider the depictions of Eastern cultures in Aladdin and Mulan. In both films, the East is a place of magic and mysticism, which is implicitly contrasted with American rationalism and science and found wanting. Characters are either simple racial stereotypes (Aladdin’s love interest Jasmine is overtly sensual like a belly dancer) or just plain unrealistic, such as Mulan, who criticises ancient Chinese society with the moral compass of a modern American teenager.

Aladdin and Mulan are examples of how people in the West enjoy simplistic fantasies of the East, a process that cultural theorist Edward Said defined as orientalism. Orientalism makes Westerners feel better about themselves by defining the East as inferior, opposite or ‘other’. Orientalism in art and literature dates from the period when several Western cultures had extensive colonies abroad and therefore had a direct political stake in portraying colonised cultures as inferior. In today’s largely post-colonial era, these images and ideas survive in media including animated films.

Playing it straight? European animation

Compared to the large-scale industrialisation of cartoons in the US, animation in Western and Eastern Europe flourishes in small pockets of talent and innovation, but it has rarely gathered enough critical mass to become self-sustaining financially. Nonetheless this small-scale, handmade approach has consistently generated outstanding animators, new ideas and techniques, particularly given the close association between avant-garde film-making (see Chapter 7) and animation within European film culture. Although Europe produces relatively few full-length animated features, those that do get made and released internationally stand out as distinctive alternatives to the mainstream.

Western Europe

The following countries have produced notable animation:

• Britain: London provided a home for animators displaced by two world wars, and some government subsidy for experimental animation, such as Len Lye’s A Colour Box (1935) – check out Chapter 7 for more. Revenues from advertising allowed the animation company of Halas and Batchelor to produce a few features such as Animal Farm (1954). Channel Four Television has supported experimental animation for 30 years, and recently the Aardman company became a world leader in stop-motion animation thanks to much-loved characters Wallace and Gromit.
• France: As with live-action cinema, France produced animation pioneers, including Charles-Émile Reynaud and Émile Cohl, and has a tradition of quality animation. The series of films based on the French comic book Asterix the Gaul (starting with Asterix the Gaul in 1967) are made in Belgium but add Gallic flavour to European popular animation. In recent years Sylvain Chomet’s distinctive comedic style – notably Les Triplettes de Belleville (Belleville Rendez-vous in the UK (2003)) – found favour with international festival and art house audiences.
• Germany: The artistic hotspot of Weimar Berlin produced experimental animation by Hans Richter and Walther Ruttmann as well as Lotte Reiniger’s delicate cut-out Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed) (1926), probably the world’s first animated feature film. During World War II animation was produced as propaganda. In recent years Germany has attempted to enter the CGI animated movie market with films such as Tarzan (2013).
• Italy: Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra’s futurist films (1910–14), created by painting directly onto celluloid, are among the first abstract animations. Italy’s tradition of popular adult comic books translated into a few feature films, but most animation has been related to advertising and television. In the 1960s, Gamma Film in Milan produced animation auteur Bruno Bozzetto, whose best-known film, Allegro Non Troppo (1976), is a parody of Disney’s Fantasia (1940).

Eastern Europe

Throughout most of the 20th century, Eastern European and Russian animators worked in a very different political and artistic context to their colleagues in Western Europe.

In the early years of the Soviet Union, state-sponsored animation was literally rolled out to the provinces on trains, which used carriages as theatres. Russia’s major animation studio Soyuzmultfilm had only limited freedom from strict state requirements that imposed so-called socialist realism. Only occasionally did animated films find international release, with one notable exception being Aleksandr Ptushko’s Novyy Gulliver (The New Gulliver) (1935).

The rest of Eastern Europe suffered a similar fate, with the Communist state providing funding at the expense of local cultural diversity. However animation has also proved a subversive tool of expression in these countries. In Croatia, Zagreb Film produced minimal, modernist animation that won international awards (Dušan Vukotic´’s Surogat (The Substitute) (1961)). The Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer was banned from making films for ten years after his Leonardu˚v deník (Leonardo’s Diary) (1972). As the Cold War thawed during the 1980s, Estonian Pritt Pärn’s rough and ready animated films shed new light on life behind the Iron Curtain. His colleague Igor Kovalyov moved to the US to make Nickelodeon’s hit children’s television series Rugrats (1991–2004).

Drawing a history of violence: Animation from the Middle East

Prior to 2007, even the most committed cinephile struggled to name a major animated film to come out of the Middle East: and then, like buses, two came along simultaneously. Persepolis (2007) is a French–American co-production adapted from Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel and tells the story of the Islamic Revolution through young Marji’s eyes. Waltz with Bashir (2008) is also an international co-production made by Israeli director Ari Folman; it’s also autobiographical in tone and looks back at traumatic political events – the 1982 Lebanon War – from a current perspective. Both films won widespread acclaim including major awards and enjoying widespread theatrical distribution.

Persepolis and Waltz with Bashir make creative use of animation to explore the intersection between memory, narrative and history against the backdrop of events beyond individual control. Persepolis places the audience inside young Marji’s mind, with the stylised (mostly) black-and-white animation allowing equal reality to her dreams, fantasies and childhood memories. The history of modern Iran is told in fragments of gossip and family encounters, as well as grander segments of official history, rendered in a cut-out silhouette style reminiscent of ancient Islamic art. In Waltz with Bashir, Ari must reconstruct events that he has wiped from his memory by visiting fellow soldiers and asking them to tell him what they can remember. The film suggests that Israeli culture has a kind of collective amnesia about atrocities committed within living memory.

The style and purpose of animation within the two films creates an interesting contrast. As Figure 6-1 shows, Persepolis has the feel of hand-drawn ink illustrations, with deep solid blacks, bright whites and not much grey in between. The style reinforces the sense that the film is a personal, subjective account of events remembered and then drawn by Marji. On the other hand, Waltz with Bashir is an animated documentary, which takes audio footage of Folman’s interview and overlays bold and vivid images created from a mixture of digital rotoscoping and traditional cel animation. The documentary’s claim for truth clashes with animation’s wild imagination in uncomfortable ways.

At one point, Folman asks whether he can sketch one of his interviewees playing with his son. Wanting to remain anonymous, the interviewee states: ‘That’s okay, if you draw it, it isn’t real’. This small comment feels like a rationale for the film’s use of animation as a distancing device and as an impressionistic tool to come closer to the confusing and disorientating experience of being caught in a war zone.