Motion is central to the question of realism. When writers such as Kracauer condemn the “realism” of Disney cartoons, or conversely celebrate the “illusion of life” they create, it is seemingly the way things move rather than the fantastic stories that are being referred to. The movements of characters such as Bambi or the Dwarfs are accepted as more realistic than those of other animated traditions. But what exactly are the properties of motion that are accepted as realistic?

As a starting point, we can consider the simplest hypothesis: that motion in Disney cartoons is accepted as more realistic because it more closely resembles a literal depiction of how things actually move. This idea holds true to a certain point. We have already seen that the visual realism of characters gradually increased throughout the 1930s as animation styles changed, and superficially at least it appears that these changes in animation style were part of a realist drive. In 1932 Chouinard School of Art staff member Don Graham was employed to teach first life drawing, and then “action analysis” classes, with the intention of increasing the realism of animation.[1] This meant the death of “rubber hose” animation, which favoured fluidity of movement over its realism. As Barrier puts it:
 

By the early thirties… many animators were relying on curving forms so heavily that they were sacrificing any sense of a body’s structure for the sake of smooth, flowing movement…. [S]uch “rubber hose” animation could not be reconciled with Disney’s emerging emphasis on telling coherent cartoon stories that would engage an audience.[2]

 
“Rubber hose” animation was therefore abandoned during this period because it did not meet Paul Wells’ final criteria of the hyper-realist film: the animated body did not “correspond to the orthodox physical aspects of human beings and creatures in the ‘real’ world.” Disney animators therefore studied live action film in great detail to discover the ways that bodies actually moved, in order to better reflect it in their animation. Sometimes this was simply an educational exercise; sometimes live footage would be used as reference for a particular sequence; and in some cases, this extended to the use of the “rotoscope,” whereby live action was actually traced as the basis for animation drawings. Heavily live action-based animation appears in a number of Disney features: the title character and (particularly) the Prince in Snow White; the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio; and most of the human characters in Cinderella (1950). Outside the Disney studio, the character of Gulliver in Gulliver’s Travels (Dave Fleischer, 1939) was rotoscoped, while the much later feature The Lord of the Rings (Ralph Bakshi, 1978) depended on the rotoscope extremely heavily.[3]

Such sequences highlight that while the movements in Disney cartoons do more closely resemble the actual motion of creatures and people than those in other traditions (such as the wild bodily distortions common in Rod Scribner’s animation for Bob Clampett, or limited animation seen in Hanna-Barbera television animation), it is not a strict literalism that is strived for. In Snow White, the live-action reference footage was heavily reworked, where possible, to disguise its rotoscoped appearance. While this can partly be explained by a desire to minimise the clash in style between Snow White and the dwarfs, it is also symptomatic of the failure of the traced drawings to achieve the desired result. The most heavily rotoscoped sequences (those involving Snow White and the Prince at the start and close of the film, which were prepared under extreme time pressure shortly before release) are generally regarded as the weakest in the film, and the Prince seems a far less vivid character than the non-rotoscoped Dwarfs.[4] While the effect can sometimes be striking for the particular kind of literal realism it brings (Leonard Maltin notes that in Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver’s “every move, every gesture, and every wrinkle of his clothing are uncannily right”[5]), it has rarely been used for more than a few characters or scenes at a time. Ralph Bakshi’s heavily rotoscoped Lord of the Rings seems to vindicate this approach: while the realism of the animation would be hard to fault against hyper-realist criteria, the animation (and hence the characterisation) seems flat. What is of interest, then, is what kind of conventions are dictating the realism of Disney animation, if it is not the hyper-realism that can be achieved through use of the rotoscope. Even volumes written by animators that attempt to outline the principles of classical Disney animation have some difficulty in explicitly formulating what kind of realism is sought.[6]

Richard Williams, in his instructional manual for animators, attempts to explain the paradox that both brought Disney animators to ever closer study of human form and movement, but then required them to move beyond it:
 

Many cartoonists and animators say that the very reason they do cartoons is to get away from realism… into the free realms of the imagination. They’ll correctly point out that most cartoon animals don’t look like animals - they’re designs, mental constructs… But to make these designs work, the movements have to be believable - which leads back to realism and real actions, which leads back to studying the human or animal figure to understand its structure and movement. What we want to achieve isn’t realism, it’s believability. [7]

 
Here, by referring to “believability,” Williams seems to suggest a criterion that animation might aspire to, if it is not literal realism. The difficulty of this formulation is that it seems to leave us where we started. After all, why isn’t (hyper) realism believable? The answer might be found in considering what is lost in the animation (or rotoscoping) process. We have already seen that character design is simplified to facilitate redrawing, and this loss of details (for example, the subtleties of the construction of a human face) naturally limit the potential for performance in an animated character. In his own discussion of how to animate, veteran Disney and Fleischer animator Shamus Culhane puts it bluntly:

We have no Oliviers or Chaplins among our cartoon actors, so there would be no point in writing an animated film that places the burden of subtle acting on the animator. This goal may never be reached; in spite of the efforts of the staff at the Disney studio … very subtle acting may never be possible to attain in this medium… In my opinion, the best use of animation is when it caricatures, not imitates, real life.[8]

This can be seen as the key to Williams’ idea of believability: the inherent stylisation (at the level of visual realism) in animation forces a performance style that uses motions that are based upon, but exaggerate, the way that things actually move. This is the “over-determined” depiction of movement to which Paul Wells referred.[9] We can define this as an ultra-realist, rather than hyper-realist, aesthetic.

The conventions of this style of movement can be compared to those arising from other artforms where meaning is communicated primarily through movement, due to the limitations inherent to the form: artforms such as dance, mime, and silent cinema. There seems great scope for instructive cross-disciplinary study that explores the links in performative styles between these forms. Certainly animators seem to be aware of the parallels: in his instructional manual for animators, Williams draws on the comments of Marcel Marceau and Charlie Chaplin to illustrate animation principles.[10] In the current context it is possible only to note some of the most important conventions identified by Williams and other animators about how things (and particularly characters) move in classical cartoons:
 

 
This is, by necessity, only a brief summary of a few key or representative principles: Williams spends 340 pages on the same material. However, they serve to illustrate the ways in which a loosening of reality is used to serve story and characterisation, and to overcome some of the limitations of the form. It should also be evident that these techniques tend to exaggerate reality rather than violate it directly (for example, the squashing and stretching of the body is based upon the actual distortions evident in live-action photography of human bodies). This is the kind of realism that I have already described as “ultra-realism,” as opposed to the more literal “hyper-realism” defined by Wells.

Continue to Part 5 - Narrative and Character Realism

[1] Barrier, 84 & 144.

Contents

Introduction

Visual Realism

Aural Realism

Realism of Motion

Narrative & Character Realism

Social Realism

Conclusion