The reading in the first chapter of Understanding Animation is very interesting because of its explanation of how animation developed through time. Animation started out as very primitive and slowly developed into more complex ideas with themes shifting from more surrealist to realist. Some interesting people introduced innovative concepts to the scene of animation. One of there people was Norman McClaren; he said that the most important thing about animation is what happens between each frame, not the actual frames themselves. A very meaningful quote that I found from Czech surrealist , Jan Svankmajer, is, “animation enables me to give magocal powers to things.” The surrealist view embraced the fact that animation is anything you wanted it to be; one could break the bounds of reality.
At a point, animation became less about the imaginary and more a way to blur the lines between reality and fantasy. This subtle shift towards realism was started by McCay with his animations like the “Sinking of the Lusitania.” His conjunction of real world conditions into animation started a trend. Disney also became a part of this trend with cartoons like “Felix the Cat,” “Willie the Steamboat,” and “Flowers and Trees.” Disney kept moving further and further toward realism with life-character movements and realistic scenarios. This shift was also enhanced by Disney’s introduction of the multiplane camera, used to maintain realistic aspect ratios in animations.
In chapter one of Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics, the definition of animation is debated. Some do not believe that animation id real art because of its hypercommercialization and youth audiences. Many others, including myself believe that animation is art because of the extreme amount of craftsmanship that goes into it. Charles Solomon tries to define animation as imagery recorded frame by frame to create the illusion of motion, which is very similar to Norman McClaren’s view of animation discussed earlier. Solomon attempts to put bounds on exactly what animation is by putting certain works in a continuum of ‘animation’ to ‘live action’ or ‘abstraction’ to ‘mimesis,’ but the reach of animation is inescapable.
