The Hands of the Animator: Rotoscopic Projection, Condensation, and Repetition Automatism in the Fleischer Apparatus

2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Cartwright
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Object Relations Theory ◽  
Repetition Compulsion ◽  
Media Archaeology ◽  
Bodily Movement ◽  
Action Film ◽  
Production History ◽  
Animated Film ◽  
Secondary Objective ◽  
Live Action

This article is concerned with the affective relationship among bodies and film technologies in the process of building and using filmmaking instruments, taking as its object the early Rotoscope, a device patented by the legendary American animator Max Fleischer that entailed the projection of live-action film for use as a template in the drawing of animated figures, to which the live-action trace was thought to impart life-like, normative patterns of movement. Drawing from media archaeology, psychoanalytic theories of repetition, projection, and condensation, and object relations theory, this article offers an interpretation of some of the kinds of psychic interactions offered in animated film through traces of the Rotoscope’s production history found in the device’s patent drawings, its patent embodiments, and its published family legend. It is proposed that the device was the locus of a collective fraternal performance, serving as a shared ground for an array of condensations and displacements and enactments of repetition compulsion among the multiple bodies engaged in the production of the device, as well as among the multiple animated and live-action film bodies that crossed its production screens and patent pages. One objective of this article is to shift the interpretive and analytic focus in film studies from the filmstrip and the projected screen image to the relationship between bodies and technologies in the experience of making films, and making the filmic apparatus. A secondary objective of this article is to suggest that the approach to bodily movement embedded in the design of the Rotoscope was hardly normative. The device offered a means to stretch and distort both norms and stereotypes of human expression through movement. The rotoscoped body sometimes performed in ways that pushed the limits of viewer expectations about how a given body will, or should, move, in space or across the screen.

Visual affect in films: a semiotic approach

Semiotica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (239) ◽  
pp. 99-124
Author(s):  
Yi Jing
Keyword(s):  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
Meaning Potential ◽  
Action Film ◽  
Semiotic Approach ◽  
Semiotic Perspective ◽  
Affective Meanings ◽  
Live Action

Abstract This study investigates affective meanings expressed in facial expressions and bodily gestures from a semiotic perspective. Particularly, the study focuses on disentangling relations of affective meanings and exploring the meaning potential of facial expressions and bodily gestures. Based on the analysis of over three hundred screenshots from two films (one animation and one live-action film), this study proposes a system of visual affect, as well as a system of visual resources involved in the expression of visual affect. The system of visual affect makes a further step in the investigation of affective meanings afforded by facial expressions and bodily gestures, and can provide methodological insights into the examination of affective meanings expressed visually. The system of visual resources provides a more meaning-motivated framework for systematic tracking of the visual resources, which may be applied to the analysis of other visual media apart from films.

Reiniger, Lotte (1899–1981)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Leskosky
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Gender Issues ◽  
Emotional Impact ◽  
Paul Hindemith ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
Animated Film ◽  
Lotte Reiniger ◽  
Live Action

Berlin-born Charlotte ‘Lotte’ Reiniger, the first woman animator, was the foremost practitioner of silhouette animation (paper cut-outs lit from beneath and manipulated one frame at a time under the camera). She anticipated Disney’s multi-plane system of separating image levels under the camera to create illusory depth by a dozen years. Chinese shadow plays fascinated her as child, and a lecture by German Expressionist director/actor Paul Wegener on animated film inspired her as a teen. While a student at Max Reinhardt’s acting school, she published a book of silhouettes of his actors. Reiniger made her first silhouette film in 1919. She gravitated to fairy tales, fantasies, and operatic themes, but her films nonetheless usually contained wry social commentary, often on gender issues. She also made theatrical commercials and special silhouette effects scenes for live-action features. In 1926, assisted by husband and live-action director Carl Koch and animators Berthold Bartosch and Walther Ruttmann, she completed her feature-length masterpiece, Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed [The Adventures of Prince Achmed]. The first animated feature made in Europe, it employed tinted film stock to reinforce the emotional impact of each scene. Her second silhouette feature, Doktor Dolittle und seine Tiere [Dr. Dolittle and His Animals] (1928), premiered in Berlin with a score by Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith. Reiniger’s filigreed images are intrinsically abstract and expressionistic, and her stories partake of the surrealism of dreams. After World War II, she worked mostly in Great Britain.

scholarly journals Animation and Automation – The Liveliness and Labours of Bodies and Machines

2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jackie Stacey ◽  
Lucy Suchman
Keyword(s):  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
The Body ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Production History ◽  
Relevant Work

Written as the introduction to a special issue of Body & Society on the topic of animation and automation, this article considers the interrelation of those two terms through readings of relevant work in film studies and science and technology studies (STS), inflected through recent scholarship on the body. Drawing upon historical and contemporary examples, we trace how movement is taken as a sign of life, while living bodies are translated through the mechanisms of artifice. Whereas film studies has drawn upon work ranging from production history to semiotics and psychoanalysis to conceptualize the ways in which the appearance of life on the cinema screen materializes subjectivities beyond it, STS has developed a corpus of theoretical and empirical scholarship that works to refigure material-semiotic entanglements of subjects and objects. In approaching animation and automation through insights developed within these two fields we hope to bring them into closer dialogue with each other and with studies of the body, given the convergence of their shared concerns with affective materializations of life. More specifically, an interest in the moving capacities of animation, and in what gets rendered invisible in discourses of automation, is central to debates regarding the interdependencies of bodies and machines. Animation is always in the end a relational effect, it seems, while automation implies the continuing presence of hidden labour and care.

scholarly journals Roses in Amber: Gendered Discourse in Disney’s 2017 Adaptation of Villeneuve’s Fairytale Beauty and the Beast

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Atoof Abdullah Rashed ◽  
Laila. M. Al-Sharqi
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
Beauty And The Beast ◽  
Diversity And Inclusion ◽  
Action Film ◽  
Feminist Discourse ◽  
Gendered Discourse ◽  
Live Action ◽  
Made In

This study considers the dialogic relationship between the 2017 Disney live-action film Beauty and the Beast with Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve’s fairy tale and Disney’s 1991 animated version. Drawing on cultural and feminist discourse, the study seeks to examine Disney’s live-action film for incidents of cultural appropriation of gender representation compared to Villeneuve’s fairy tale and Disney’s 1991 animated version. The Study argues that the 2017 film adaptation reverses the traditional patriarchal notions and embraces a transgressive feminist discourse/approach as part of Disney’s strategy of diversity and inclusion of gender, race, class, and sexual orientation as constantly evolving cultural categories. This study finds significant alterations made to the physical and psychological attributes of the 2017 film’s three characters: Beauty/Belle, the Beast, and the Enchantress, changes that align with the film’s gendered discourse. By reversing the characteristic privileging of the male and the empowerment of the female, the live-action succeeds in addressing the contemporary audience demands of diversity and inclusion. The study concludes that the changes made in the 2017 film adaptation displace the oppressive patriarchal notions and stereotypical modes of representing the male and female as they have been perceived in the original fairy tale, for they are no longer compatible with contemporary cultures’ assumptions on gender.

From Contextualisation to Categorisation of Animated Documentaries

2018 ◽  
pp. 15-30
Author(s):  
Pascal Lefèvre
Keyword(s):  
Documentary Film ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Film Production ◽  
New Journalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Documentary Filmmaking ◽  
Artificial Nature ◽  
Live Action

This chapter provides a wide-ranging account of animated documentary cinema’s evolution, one which relates that ongoing history to analogous developments in related fields including live-action documentary, painting, photography and New Journalism. By their overt artificial nature animated documentaries seem to challenge the traditional documentary epistemology. Lefèvre considers the extent to which established Film Studies conceptual and analytical paradigms offer pre-existing tools that contemporary scholars can readily transpose to the study of animated documentary. This essay questions if the animated documentaries still fit in the six categories or modes of documentary film production that Bill Nichols defined: the poetic, the expository, the observational, the participatory, the reflexive, and the performative mode. This chapter highlights many of the critical and conceptual questions which that partially obscured history raises, laying out ten distinct sets of logistical, aesthetic and ideological issues that repeatedly manifest themselves across the history of animated documentary filmmaking.

The Artist and the Poetic Provocations in the 1980 Bulgarian Live-Action Film Illusion

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 229-248
Author(s):  
Maria Panova
Keyword(s):  
Modern Art ◽  
Action Film ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Live Action

This text highlights the aesthetic explorations of Bulgarian cinematographers from the 1980s, specifically those aimed at people of art. The article offers, first, a brief overview of films that examine the symbolic potential of the artist, which defines the consideration of an established and meaningful tendency in the development of Bulgarian cinema. The article focuses then on the live-action film Illusion (1980, directed by Lyudmil Staykov and written by Konstantin Pavlov) and examines the figure of the artist in the piece. The presented interpretation supports the view of the film as a morally valuable expression of modern art.

Transmedia storytelling and transmediated bodies in Fullmetal Alchemist (2017)

Asian Cinema ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-202
Author(s):  
Kukhee Choo
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Fan Culture ◽  
Transmedia Storytelling ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Action Film ◽  
Racial Performance ◽  
Live Action ◽  
Globally Distributed

Hagane no Renkinjutsushi (Fullmetal Alchemist) (2001, Hagaren in short) is a Japanese comic book franchise that not only expanded into a larger supersystem through its transmedia storytelling on multimedia platforms, but also through the global fandom of cosplay (the Japanese term for costume play), a form of popular culture that is heavily promoted by the Japanese government’s Cool Japan policy. Hagaren is set in an unidentifiable European landscape, a common depiction in many Japanese manga and anime, yet, in the 2017 live-action film that was globally distributed on Netflix, audiences witness a full Japanese cast performing European characters. This cross-racial performance, or yellow washing, challenges the border-crossing narrative and global viewership of the Hagaren’s manga and anime franchise. By examining how Hagaren’s supersystem developed out of the interplays of media industries, fan culture and broader governmental policies, this article aims to excavate the multifaceted politics of not only cross-border consumer identities, but also cross-racial performances propagated by the transmediation of Japanese popular culture on the global stage.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document