Introduction

The relative scarcity of serious theoretical writing on animation in the early years of establishing film studies as a discipline has fundamentally influenced the nature of animation theory. In this essay I wish to highlight one such oversight: the dearth of writing on realism in animation.[1] By this, I mean theory that looks at the way in which the animated depiction of reality resembles the actual physical world, and the implications that the similarities and differences between the representation of the cartoon and the actual experience of life in the real world have for the way in which cartoons are understood. This is an extremely wide area of study, and I cannot attempt to outline a realist theory of animation here. Rather, I want to briefly outline some contrasts between classical notions of film realism (developed with reference to live-action cinema), and the ways in which writers on animation have discussed the subject. Much writing on animation is structured around certain assumptions and arguments about animation's relation to the real. With a few exceptions, however, these arguments tend to be made implicitly. I wish to make explicit some of the approaches to realism that occur in writing on animation, and to extend the existing work that has explicitly acknowledged the realism question. A single unifying theory of animated realism is, I believe, no more achievable or helpful than attempts to outline a realist theory of live-action cinema. However, the study of live-action cinema was given a robustness by the variety of early theorists who posed alternative competing theories about cinema's relation to the real. I want to outline a vocabulary, and make some preliminary comments, to allow similar approaches to animation.

The work of such "classical" film theorists as Siegfried Kracauer, Rudolf Arnheim, and André Bazin was heavily preoccupied with a shared central theme: the medium’s mechanical reproduction of reality. Generally taking as their subject the most typical forms of cinema (live action classical Hollywood cinema, or art cinema from the United States and Europe), these theorists left variants such as animation to be the subject of later study. Meanwhile, little serious writing on animation appeared until the 1970s, and most early works on the subject were either historical accounts, or Sarris-like auteurist studies.[2] By the time more substantial work appeared in the 1990s, the debates about cinematic realism had long ago ceased to occupy centre stage in academic discussion. While the debates in film theory about realism might seem, in retrospect, to have been something of a red herring, the grounding of the discipline in a strong understanding of the ways in which film both reproduced and distorted reality was an important foundation for later study. Yet writing on animation largely bypassed this debate. This is despite the intriguing differences between the ways in which live-action and animated cinema relate to the real. Animation, after all, is cinema that belies the founding assumption of realist theory: it is not based upon photographic reproduction of the real world.

A number of different approaches to negotiating animation’s unique relation to reality can be identified in existing work on the subject. One might be called the “inversion” view of animated realism. Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film - a volume seemingly intent on making the definitive statement the role of realism in film - provides a good summary of this position. Kracauer bases his work on the assumption that “achievements within a particular medium are all the more satisfying aesthetically if they build from the specific properties of that medium.”[3] Thus, Kracauer believes filmmakers should work with cinema’s “inherent affinities” and to do so is to take what he calls the “cinematic approach.” The photographic reproduction of the real is, for Kracauer, central to defining these affinities. Animation, however, is a form of cinema that does not depend on a photographic reproduction of the real. In animation, nothing on the screen exists in real life, except in the very literal sense that the camera photographically records a particular set of drawings placed in front of the lens.[4] What I have called the “inversion” approach allows Kracauer to avoid this problem:


For Kracauer animation is the film medium’s mirror world: the mere absence of photography reverses all his aesthetic arguments, and gives the animator the freedom - indeed, the obligation - to abandon reality that Kracauer is so reluctant to grant to live-action filmmakers who wish to pursue fantasy subjects.[6]

The inversion position recasts notions of medium specificity to portray animation as an inherently fantastic form of cinema: an inversion of classical film theorists’ arguments for realist positions in live-action film. While I have highlighted a form of this position that emerges explicitly from realist theory, subtler forms of this argument can be seen in work that makes no reference to such theory, but that adopts medium-specificity type arguments about what animation “should do.” Realism is not what animation is best at, such a position holds, and therefore works that show freer invention and fantasy are privileged. This assumption surfaces, for example, in work that privileges the “cartooniness” of films in the Tex Avery / Warner Bros tradition, as opposed to the Disney aesthetic, which is criticised for being too realistic.[7] As Leonard Maltin put it in introducing his discussion of Tex Avery’s work at Warner Bros, “If an animated cartoon, with its unlimited potential for exaggeration and flights of fancy, couldn’t venture beyond the realm of a live action film, what was the point?”[8] However, the over-simplicity of such an approach is borne out by a competing approach to realism that can, at times, be found in some of the same texts that espouse the inversion view. This might be thought of as the “quest for realism” approach: work that stresses the artistry involved in overcoming the obstacles to a realistic effect in animation. It would be almost impossible, for example, to recount the history of the Disney studio in the 1930s without detailing its striving towards a particular kind of realism in its cartoons, and indeed this is the principal narrative thread of the relevant sections Michael Barrier’s history of studio animation.[9] Realism becomes central to this narrative because it is so difficult to achieve in animation, and arguably the Disney studio’s principle creative achievement was the extent to which the animators achieved this goal.

By suggesting that the “quest for realism” and “inversion” views of realism are often simultaneously implicit in histories of Hollywood animation, I am not implying that this is due to confusion or contradiction on behalf of these writers. On the contrary, this seems to me to reflect a legitimate tension found in Hollywood cartoons, and this is often acknowledged, even in early studies.[10] However, a sophisticated reading of the issue of realism demands more careful attention to the question of what is considered “realistic” in an animated cartoon. The inherent artificiality of animation means that the slippery concept of “realism” becomes even more suspect than in the live-action context, and demands more interrogation than it has usually received. Only then can the tension between “realism” and other imperatives - be they a devotion to fantasy, comedy, character, music, or any other aesthetic goal - be described and studied with any precision.

One of the most sophisticated attempts to do this has been that of Paul Wells in his Understanding Animation (1998), who turns to the works of Umberto Eco to try to solve this problem.[11] He notes that Eco uses the term “hyper-reality” to describe Disney theme parks, suggesting that theme parks offer a completely artificial environment as a representation of the real. For Wells, this concept of a realer-than-real environment can usefully be extended into animation. Like Disney’s theme parks, animation is a “completely fake” environment. Yet like the theme parks, cartoons seek to artificially create their own “world” which is represented as real. This idea applies to animation in general, says Wells, but he argues it is particularly true of Disney animation. He echoes Kracauer in suggesting that Disney films make a point of emulating live-action cinema “even when making films with fairytale narratives or using animals or caricatured humans as the main characters.”[12] While he expresses misgivings about the concept of realism in film, he nevertheless suggests that:
 
 
For Wells, realism makes a good starting point for the entry into a close analysis of any animated film. The greater the variation from the hyper-realist model, the more an animated film will “demonstrate different kinds of approach and purpose.”[14]

Wells’ view essentially paints a picture of a spectrum on which animated films can be arranged by their degree of realism, with Disney cartoons at one end, and totally abstract films at the other. Wells suggests several conventions that mark out the “hyper-realist” end of the spectrum:[15]

One difficulty with applying these criteria is that they challenge Wells’ suggestion that Disney cartoons might act as yardstick by which relative realism can be measured. Certainly, perusal of these criteria makes it clear that Disney films are not close to being the definitive “hyper-realist” films. There are actually two comparisons being made in the above list: with live-action film’s depiction of reality in the first criterion, and with the real world itself in the others. While Disney films might be said to correspond closely to the conventions of Classical Hollywood live-action cinema, they are a long way off being a faithful representation of reality. Wells’ third criteria, relating to diegetic sound, in particular seems to be describing a hypothetical animated neo-realist approach that bears little relationship to Disney’s films. Even limiting our examples to Disney’s first five features, it is clear that non-diegetic sound is ubiquitous. Yet sound is just one of the problems encountered in labelling these films as realist. They abound in magical acts (the Queen’s transformation in Snow White, boys turning into donkeys in Pinocchio), animation of usually inanimate objects (Pinocchio himself, and the living mountain, flowers and broomsticks in Fantasia), animals being able to speak (Dumbo and Bambi), and decidedly unreal bodies (an elephant that can fly with its ears in Dumbo). If Wells’ criteria are to be taken as a way of measuring realism in film, it seems we must abandon the idea that Disney films are at or close to one end of the extreme.

Yet the idea that Disney represents the pinnacle of some kind of realism in animation nevertheless holds an intuitive appeal. If Kracauer can condemn films featuring magic mirrors, dancing mushrooms, walking broomsticks, blue fairies, flying elephants and a talkative bunny named Thumper for betraying the animated medium’s potential for fantasy, there must be something else about Disney film that strongly begs description as realistic. One way of reconciling this idea with the apparent unreality of even Disney cartoons is that they represent the height not of reality, but of a particular type of reality. Wells’ term “hyper-reality” seems to capture the sense of what Disney animated films strive for more adequately than the definition he provides for the term does. That is, Disney films do not seem to strive for an exact duplication of either reality or of live-action filmmaking. Wells makes the point that in animation, the depiction of characters, objects and environments are “over-determined:” exaggerated so that they move into “a realism which is simultaneously realistic but beyond the orthodoxies of realism.”[16] This slightly tortuous definition is perhaps better explained through example, and Wells cites the accepted Disney style for animating movement from around the start of the 1930s: “squash and stretch” animation. This style over-emphasises movement, and in particular highlights the way in which the body anticipates or reacts to movement. This is a good example of animation exaggerating reality in order to create a greater impression of realism. The term “hyper-realism” seems ideal to describe such an exaggerated realism, but since Wells defines that term slightly differently, I will instead use the term “ultra-realism” to describe this tendency towards a heightened or exaggerated depiction of the real.

Wells seems strangely reluctant to fully embrace the idea that Disney animation is aspiring to such a heightened realism, downplaying the idea by noting that “figures within the Disney canon correspond more directly to ‘realistic’ movement than work informed by other approaches.”[17] This is of course true, but that other approaches are less realistic should not be surprising in a medium with almost unlimited potential for abstraction. That Disney animation is more realistic than abstract animation does not in itself suggest Disney animation is aspiring to literal depiction of reality. Of Bambi (1942), a showcase of classical Disney animation of animals, he notes that “[t]he realistic attempts of Bambi to stand up and walk are indeed over-determined, but the sequence only moves beyond realist orthodoxies through the anthropomorphised exchanges between the animals.”[18] If, by this, Wells means that the only thing that is strictly impossible in the sequence is the animals talking and behaving in an anthropomorphised manner, then this is true enough. Yet the sequence “moves beyond” realist orthodoxies in other ways. The over-determination of movement is itself moving beyond realist orthodoxies in the sense that it does not aim to reproduce “the orthodox physical aspects of …creatures in the real world.” The variations from the manner in which a real deer actually moves may be subtle, but they are important in this context because they are deliberate. The movements of Bambi are over-exaggerated, even if only slightly, to heighten comic effect and better reveal character. Such imperatives drive the animation to pursue an agenda that is not strictly realistic.

The need for such approaches to realism may arise on a film by film basis, and certainly Disney films vary in the extent of departures from realism. Yet it is also possible that over time, such over-determined movements (and other such conventions of exaggerated reality) can shape expectations of the medium to the extent that they become a codified convention that is understood by audiences to connote reality, even while it is clearly not literally realistic. If we return to the idea of a “spectrum” of realism, Disney can indeed be placed at the realistic end of the spectrum, if only because the studio’s dominance of the form means that other traditions tend to be read in opposition to it. Yet the “realism” is not defined by the correlation between the animated world and the real world (or classical live-action cinema), as Well suggests, but instead by a set of conventions that serve as animation’s particular substitute for reality. Different films will treat reality in divergent ways, and it would be a mistake to treat such conventions as a set of unbreakable rules (just as it would be to assume the conventions of classical Hollywood filmmaking, or particular genres, are unbreakable). Yet a more detailed analysis of the conventions that generally define the notion of “realism” in animated cartoons is clearly necessary, and such a study needs to be sensitive to the different types of realism found in cartoons. Wells is right to say that the relative realism of an animated film makes a useful starting point for the close analysis of the film,[19] but such a discussion will have little value - and most likely descend into confusion - if the different ways in which a film is realistic are not carefully thought through. Is Pinocchio (with its elaborate animation and backgrounds depicting a fantasy scenario) more or less realistic than an early episode of “The Simpsons” (which uses stylised animation to depict a relatively realistic domestic scenario)? While this question is deliberately facetious, I pose it here to highlight what must be the next step of analysis: constructing a framework that allows the differences between two such texts to be properly described and understood. Several types of realism might be identified, such as:
 

 
Several points need to be made before moving on to a more detailed description of these types of realism. Firstly, the first three definitions are deliberately made more tortuous through the insertion of the qualifier “understood by the audience.” This is because realism of motion - for example - is not necessarily constructed so as to resemble the actual real world. Instead, I will suggest that conventions exist in each type of realism that have become accepted as faithful animated depictions of the real, even when upon close examination, the resemblance to the real world is in some way highly qualified. Secondly, in any given film each of these modes of realism can serve to reinforce the other, or one type of realism might be prioritised over the other. Only through the careful description of the particular conventions understood as realistic in each type of realism, and the interrelations between the different types, can realism be understood within any particular tradition of animation. Finally, I make no claim that these “types” are the only types of realism that could be identified: the degree of overlap and reinforcement that occurs between even these types is indicative that notions of realism could be described in multiple ways. These types are suggested as a starting point for further discussion, without any suggestion that they amount to an all-encompassing framework.

A detailed study of realism that covered varying traditions of animation would be a project of enormous scope. Instead, here, I will attempt in the remainder of this paper to use the above model to give a brief example of how these types of realism can interrelate. I will take as my principal examples the first five features produced by the Disney studio, since it is the Disney features of this era that Wells suggests can be used as a “yardstick” of realism, and since these films have come to exert such a disproportionate influence not only over the popular perception of what a Disney film is like, but indeed of the practice of animation in general.[20]

Continue to Part 2 - Visual Realism

[1] The use of the unqualified term “animation” should be read as a reference to cel animation, which is my primary focus here. I hope it will be evident that forms such as stop-motion and computer animation will show both parallels and interesting differences from the points I make about cel animation, but for simplicity I have ignored these unless the similarity or contrast is revealing about the instance of cel animation.

[2] In the former category I am counting such work as Maltin, L. 1987, Of Mice and Magic: A History of Amercian Animated Cartoons, New York: New American Library (Revised Edition) and Crafton, D. 1993, Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898-1928, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, while in the latter I am thinking of Adamson, J. 1975, Tex Avery: King of Cartoons, New York: Da Capo Press or Lenburg, J. 1993 The Great Cartoon Directors, New York: Da Capo Press.

[3] Kracauer, S. 1960, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, London: Oxford University Press, 12. This idea itself has been sharply criticised. See, for example, Noël Carroll’s series of articles anthologised in his book Theorizing the Moving Image. Carroll Carrol, N., 1984, “Medium Specificity Arguments and the Self Consciously Invented Arts: Film Video and Photography”, andn 1985, “The Specificity of Media in the Arts,” in Carrol, N, 1996, Theorizing the Moving Image, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[4] I have chosen not to labor this point in the text, but it requires clarification. For simplicity I have interchanged the concepts of “photographic reproduction” and “indexical link to reality” somewhat. While adequate for my discussion, this is not strictly accurate. Photographic reproduction is of course not absent in animation: it is the mechanism by which hand-produced drawings are reproduced on the screen. What is absent is in fact the direct indexical link to the real that photography usually affords. In photography or live-action film, an object such as - for example - a chair, is represented on-screen by an image of an actual chair. In animation, we instead see on-screen an image of a drawing of a chair. In semiotic terms, it is the difference between an indexical and an iconic representation.

[5] Kracauer, 89-90. A similar discussion of animation in the realist context can be found in Armes R. 1974, Film and Reality, Harmondsworth: Penguin, chapters 16 and 25.

[6] Failure to utilise the “cinematic approach” is for Kracauer at best a defiance of the properties of the medium. The “drawings brought to life” of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1934), for example, are described as a “retrogression.” Kracaeur, chapter 5, and page 85 for the reference to the retrogression of Caligari. Kracauer, of course, made the psychological and social implications of Caligari’s aesthetics the subject of his From Caligari to Hitler.

[7] Schneider, S. 1988, That’s All Folks: The Art of Warner Bros. Animation, New York: Henry Holt & Company, 44: “Rather than creating ‘the illusion of life,’ the Warner animators began asking audiences to recognize that theirs was an art of pure illusion - but even so, go with it, folks; jump on for the rip-roaring ride.”

[8] Maltin, 229.

[9] Barrier, M. 1999, Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,  See especially chapters 5 and 6.

[10] Joe Adamson’s extended study of Avery’s work, for example, could easily have lapsed into simple “Avery = fantasy = good, Disney = reality = bad” dichotomies, but instead notes that an element of realism was needed to give the fantastic elements a comic charge. Adamson, 40.

[11] Wells, P. 1998, Understanding Animation, London / New York: Routledge, 24-28.

[12] Wells, 25.

[13] Wells, 25

[14] Wells, 26.

[15] These dot points are direct quotes from Wells, 25-26.

[16] Wells, 27.

[17] Wells, 27.

[18] Wells, 28.

[19] Wells, 25.

[20] These being Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941), and Bambi (1942). Disney animation - encompassing shorts and features from the early 1920s to the present day - represents an extremely wide range of practices. These five films, however, seem usefully to define the “definitive” or “classic” Disney practice: the mature Disney style, prior to production disruptions of the early 1940s, and  with maximum involvement of Walt Disney himself.

Contents

Introduction

Visual Realism

Aural Realism

Realism of Motion

Narrative & Character Realism

Social Realism

Conclusion