What does it mean to see pictures that seem to move? What does it mean to create them?
Many nineteenth-century forerunners of film animation had an aura of magic around them. Technologically, they relied on optical illusion and “the persistence of vision”: the fact that we really see in our brain, not in our eyes. Presented with a quickly moving series of images, the viewer’s brain helps her to fill in the gaps with what she remembers should be there, and the drawing seems to move seamlessly. This could be achieved by twirling a circular object with images draw around its sides, or, later, through flip books and stereoscopes.
Before any of these, though, came the thaumatrope—or “wonder wheel.” Invented in 1828 by Paul Roget, this optical toy was a circle with two different images on each side— for example, a bird on one side and a cage on the other—suspended on a stick or string. If you twirled it quickly, the bird appeared to be in the cage.*
Animation is thus an art born out of science but imbued with notions of wonder. Part of the worldwide romance with animation comes from the history of the form itself. People want to know how it works, and it makes them love it even more. As an art form, animation has often intentionally revealed its tricks to enhance its sense of spectacle. Many early animated shorts took their cues from “lightning sketches:” vaudeville routines where a performer drew rapidly on a sketch pad as part of their act. Applying stop motion photography to this technique led to animated film shorts. The visible hand of the artist was initially a feature, rather than a bug, of the animation process.
Even once techniques changed and animation became its own “closed” world— even without that omnipresent hand— the idea of an animator interacting with their creation was a common comic technique. Characters sprang out of inkwells, or tried to escape from the frame. Film historian Nicholas Sammond** calls this “the repeating trope of the inkwell as primordial soup” (Kindle location 2123). In the Hebrew bible creation story of Genesis 1-2:4, that primordial soup is named tohu v’vohu, an onomatopoeic word evoking a mumbling chaos. (If you’re confused about Genesis’s two opening creation stories, this is not “the one with the Garden and the serpent”—it’s “the one with the days of the week”—one for lights in the sky, one for land animals, and so on).
Out of the inkwell’s gloppy black ink emerged something beautiful and new, and it was good.
Treatises on animation— and art more generally— evoke religious ideas about creation. If you draw a character into being on a blank page, is this creation out of chaos? Out of primordial matter? Or is it, to use a later Latin term, creation ex nihilo— the formation of something out of nothing? How could this be truly ex nihilo, given the need for a pencil, paper, and the gray matter of the brain?
And why do humans invest so much emotionally in the escapades of drawings? Two of Disney’s most famous animators, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson, subtitled their monumental volume on Disney animation,The Illusion of Life. Illusionists, magicians, gods (masters of the mystic arts?): animators went from individual virtuosos (like Winsor McCay, the creator of Gertie the Dinosaur) to collaborators in highly mechanized, efficient “Fordist” studios like the Disney’s, as Sammond explains.
(Decades later, when public credit was finally given to the lead character animators, they were again perceived as acting virtuosos, particularly in 1990s tours of Disney’s briefly operating Florida animation studios).
More than any other animation house, the Walt Disney Company has influenced how Americans see the story animation, as an art form, itself. In 1955, at the height of the studio’s cultural power, it produced an episode of the television show Disneyland called “The Story of the Animated Drawing.” The episode takes us into both the history of the art form and the practices of the studio, while also promoting a new book from the studios called The Art of Animation.
(Today, “Art of Animation” is also the name of a resort in Disney World. I’ve stayed there; 10/10, highly recommend).
The film begins with Walt Disney addressing viewers from the soundstage version of his office. He begins by flipping between images of Mickey Mouse on a pad. He tells us that viewers probably think of animation might as a modern phenomenon like the airplane. “But actually,” he corrects us, “the idea of imparting life and motion to still pictures is as ancient as man himself.”
He starts his history of animation with an image of the famous cave paintings from Lascaux, France, and then a painting of a boar from Altamira of a similar era— roughly 30,000 years ago. The boar has eight legs. If only the ancient painter had been able to alternate the leg positions as modern artists can with a camera, Walt tells us, “he would have achieved the miracle of animation.”
He goes on to more of animation’s antecedents— including hieroglyphics and the multiple limb positions of Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Anatomy of Man” sketch (In case you were wondering, has a fig leaf drawn over its genitals). The film then advances to more modern technologies, including the thaumatrope.
By invoking cave paintings, Disney presents animation as a primeval human instinct, as something natural. It’s the equivalent of college students who begin an essay with the phrase “since time immemorial”— and it’s very, very on brand. Disney stories are inherently universalizing ones. They go back to “the big beginning” in order to gesture grandly to our common humanity— and to the importance of Disney’s place in human evolution. We are meant to see Disney attuned to our earliest instincts but simultaneously integral to modern progress.
Yet in this telling, the “art of animation” is also a bit supernatural— Walt calls it a “miracle.” We are meant to believe that the impulse to capture our motion is something we all have in common—but only modern animators have successfully achieved this magic. In this story, the Disney animators, like priests throughout the ages, have captured our holy love of motion and given it back to us in the sacred vessel of a film canister.
Floyd Norman— Disney’s first black animator, pictured at work in the 1950s.
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*Though it is more about projection than animation, the “magic lantern” also had this kind of aura as a technology.
**Sammond’s The Birth of an Industry is probably the most important book on race and the early history of animation, period.