We have seen that Kracauer viewed animation as an inverse form to live-action cinema, where fantasy reigned (or should reign) and real life was anathema. The problems of creating realistic motion that I have discussed certainly highlight the difficulties involved in achieving a basic believability of such a simple act as a character walking from one side of the screen to another (Richard Williams’ book of animation techniques, for example, spends 74 pages showing how to animate a walk).[1] This makes complex narratives a challenge. While narrative is an artifice, in live-action cinema it is constructed from the building blocks of reality that Kracauer valued so much but which are unavailable to animation: real people, objects, and settings. Yet at all levels - production, distribution, exhibition - Golden Age animation was inextricably intertwined with Classical Hollywood live-action cinema, which was founded upon a particular narrative paradigm. Even when Hollywood productions turned to elaborate fantasy, the fantastic was structured around narratives driven by believable characters, causal plot structures, and a closed story world.[2] The quest for realism in animation was driven by many imperatives, but the ability to sustain audience interest in a narrative was key amongst them. In Snow White, for example, Disney had to prove that audiences would respond to the narrative of a feature length cartoon - a possibility seriously doubted by many at the time - and this required a belief in and identification with the characters. It is this sense in the audience that characters really exist, and that narratives really occur, that I have described as narrative and character realism. This is a different level of realism to that that has already been discussed: narrative and character realism is an end in itself, where visual realism and realism of motion are means towards that end. A full discussion of the ways in which audiences identify with characters or events on the screen is not possible here: to attempt such a discussion would be to open one of the great Pandora’s boxes of film theory. What I wish to discuss here is the particular types of narrative and character reality that Disney animation seeks to create.

Early animated films tended to downplay any sense that the animated world was “real.” Particularly in earlier examples, animation is very much part of the “cinema of attractions” as described by Tom Gunning.[3] The novelty of the form was integral to the appeal of much early silent animation, and this is highlighted and exploited through a number of devices. Predictably, gags and situations that are impossible to perform in live action are a key element, and the process of animation itself was often foregrounded. Donald Crafton has noted that the interjection (literally or metaphorically) of the figure of the “life-giving” animator is a key theme of early animation, from Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) to Max Fleischer’s “Out of the Inkwell” series.[4] While the act of giving life is often shown as a magical rather than industrial process, such intervention nevertheless highlights that the animated world is not a closed, hermetic story world in the sense encouraged by classical Hollywood narratives. As animation became a familiar form, advancing technology continued to be an attraction, and the coming of sound brought its own changes. Hank Sartin has noted, for example, that Warner shorts of the early to mid 1930s often mimicked the aesthetics of vaudeville, even to the extent of having singing characters lined up as a chorus, as if on stage, with narratives driven by vaudevillean “bits.”[5] Characterisation could be quite sophisticated, as characters could be developed across a series of films (the best example prior to Disney being Pat Sullivan’s Felix the Cat series).[6] Even where this occurred, however, there was not the sustained interest or involvement in the lives or world of the characters that occurs in Classical Hollywood narratives. The overall effect of these conventions was that the story world of the animated cartoon existed as an anarchic space, with little narrative motivation for events and no attempt to create a closed story world.

This needs to be kept in mind when considering the contrasting emphasis on narrative and character reality that emerged in the Disney features. The shift in emphasis in Disney’s work in the 1930s was a result not simply of a creative urge, but also economic reality. Disney understood that no matter how good his shorts were, he could never charge a premium for them in theaters, since it was feature films that drew audiences and hence the highest rentals. By 1933, Disney had decided to produce a feature film,[7] and his short subjects were from that point on subservient to that aim: through the mid 1930s they were used to experiment with techniques and refine the skills necessary for Snow White, and after that film’s success the studio’s best animators worked predominantly on features. The shift to the feature form increased the move away from the cinema of attractions or pseudo-vaudevillian approaches that had already commenced in Disney’s 1930s shorts. In approaching Snow White there was a need to at least ensure audience interest was maintained throughout the picture, and preferably make audiences grieve with the dwarfs at Snow White’s funeral. In accounts of the history of the production of the film, it is striking the level of fear that the thought of such a dramatic focus raised in the artists.[8] Today, with the feature cartoon a familiar form, it is common for animated features to be highly self-reflexive even when emotional involvement is sought: The Lion King (1994), for example, switches gears quickly between an emotional death scene and a bird mocking the Disney theme park anthem “It’s a Small World.” In the early features, however, the artists tended not to highlight the means of construction of cartoons: the films utilise much the same conventions adopted in classical Hollywood cinema, and similarly aim to achieve an audience involvement in a closed story world.

The idea of closed narratives is familiar enough, but it is interesting to note the particular way that the Disney features reconciled such closed story worlds with the traditions (or, if you believe Kracauer, the “inherent affinities”) of the animated medium. If the appeal of animation had relied for so long upon the effortless realisation of the impossible and a flagrant celebration of the form’s artifice, how could this aspect be maintained without the sense of narrative and character realism being jeopardised? The answer, in the early features, was to carefully justify the types of magical display traditional to cartoons through plot construction, character psychology, and even thematic devices. The fairytale world in which the early features take place is itself a narrative ploy to situate magical acts within an accepted generic framework. Yet Disney further invests his simple fairytale narratives with a psychological intensity that transforms the visual trickery of animation from a source of humour to a form of expressionism. In Snow White, the title character does not simply flee through a dark forest: her distress is pushed to hysterical extremes to the point where the trees come alive and branches become grasping hands.

Many other examples are more elaborate still. When Lampwick turns into a donkey in Pinocchio, it is after several minutes have been spent establishing the island as a place of dark magic, and the idea is further justified through dialogue (Lampwick’s question as his head turns into a donkey’s is “What do I look like, a jackass?”). Perhaps more importantly, though, the transformation is thematically justified (through the opposition between Jiminy Cricket and Lampwick as good and bad role models) as a lesson in the consequences of avoiding responsibility. Likewise, the Queen’s transformation to a crone in Snow White is motivated not only by exposition about a magic potion (and the generic acceptance of such devices in fairytales), but also by character psychology: it manifests the vanity and fear of ageing that appears to be at the root of her hatred of Snow White. Even the most foolproof method of explaining away an apparent breach of logic - the dream sequence - is additionally motivated by thematic material in the form of lessons to be learned: the dangers of alcohol in Dumbo, and the consequences of shirking chores in the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” segment of Fantasia. Disney has his cake while eating it too: the “magical” or “anarchic” possibilities available to animation are deployed to reinforce, rather than rupture, the reality of narrative and character.

What is interesting about the instance of narrative and character realism is that the conventions construed as realist have been adopted wholesale from a tradition of live-action cinema. Faced with the uncertainty and challenges of producing an animated feature, there was an increased adherance to narrative conventions that, while certainly not unknown in animated shorts, had tended to be loosely applied. Interestingly, once the Disney feature was well established as an animated form, these conventions would be relaxed: more recent Disney features are much more willing to highlight the artifice of the form and readopt the distancing narrative strategies found in silent or other Hollywood animation (such as shorts in the Tex Avery / Warner Bros. style).

Continue to Part 6 - Social Realism

Contents

Introduction

Visual Realism

Aural Realism

Realism of Motion

Narrative & Character Realism

Social Realism

Conclusion