The
line is an entity with no inherent indexical link to, or counterpart
in, the ‘real’, natural,
world,
but it can be used to represent the ‘real’, natural, world. The
linear implies a glimpse of
human
agency, of a subjectivity that can only be shown through drawing or
with drawn animation,
not
through the lens of a camera. (Birgitta Hosea, Drawing Animation,
2010) http://anm.sagepub.com/content/5/3/353
The
hand of the animator is the most reflexive expression of their
imagination and/or perception. Animation can display what would be
otherwise subversive in the minds eye of the filmmaker. A step beyond
the participatory documentary, Michael Moore used animation in his
documentary 'Bowling for Columbine' to express history briefly and
ironically, we have an insight in to the documentary makers mind,
rather than what we see reflected in their actions.
Space
can be manipulated to give the impression of events moving rapidly,
slowly, or to express a characters feelings or struggles, or the
space can be central to the meanings of the production itself. Never
has wallpaper being so fun to stare at when it is alive.
Central
to giving space experiential meaning is animation’sability to
transfer such character encounters to viewers, allowing them to also
find themselves caught between their expectations and the images that
resolve on the screen. (Aylish
Wood, Re-Animating
Space, 2006)
http://anm.sagepub.com/content/1/2/133
In
our memories space changes can be manipulated and even the feelings
we had about that experience can affect the way we recollect
environments. In fact, it is proven that doctoring photographs can
stimulate false memories in children and even sometimes adult
recollections.
(Maryanne
Garry and Mathew P. Gerrie, When Photographs Create False
Memories,
Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand)
Caroline
Leaf's work to me conveys that uneasy line between imagined and
remembered as memories haze into events and imaginative
recollections, truly documenting the subjective perception of the
animator.
Reverberating
space, then, can be approached through the ideas of
fluid
and unused space. For example Caroline Leaf, whose work I discuss
more fully later, animates in a variety of ways: sand on glass, oil
paint on glass, scratching on film stock. While each of these is a
very
different technique, they all share the property of fluid spatial
In
The Street, Caroline Leaf
uses ink on glass, he technique creates temporal metamorphic spaces,
trans-versing time and space to descripe perceptions of
recollections.
The
Street, perhaps Leaf’s most celebrated animation,
features
images created using under-lit ink on glass, with individual
frames
generated by small changes to the previous one. This
technique,
combined with the narrative, produces two senses of
space.
The first is one of enclosure, while the second is one of
transformation.
The
contrast between these creates the particular spatial
dynamics
of the animation, where being held in abeyance while
waiting
for a death in the family has to give way in the end to that
The
idea of space transformed by different habitations is useful in
thinking
about the content of Leaf’s animation, but it does not fully
address
another spatial construction within her work: a tendency for
the
insubstantial quality of the resolves to disassemble the relationship
between
time, space and action. This allows transformation to enter
more
forcefully into the organization of the images as the dissolution
of
an image results not so much in a hesitation but in a complete jump
in
time and space, where characters resolve from one to another, or
objects
turn into other objects.
Her
images are two dimensional, but the space she uses undergoes
metamorphosis, creating the illusion of moving through the spaces, in
and out and around, as well as her characters engaging with the
spaces in this way.
Cel-animations
generally, or the ink-on-glass technique
demonstrated
in The Street, are two-dimensional images projected on a
two-dimensional
surface, but depth is introduced through perspective
drawing.
And because of this, a viewer of animation is able to attribute
a
sense of depth to two-dimensional animation
The
very process of animation is therapeutic in the sense that the
animator feels they have some sense of control over events that they
would of liked more control over. Animation can reconstruct events
more suitably in the realm of thoughts and feelings of a memory,
dreams and experiences clouded by emotion.
The
very artifice of animation requires that the characters, situations,
narratives and designs ‘announce themselves’ as different kinds
of ‘phenomena’. This challenges the viewer to … invest in
engaging with animated phenomena as constructs which may relate
directly to the terms and conditions of human experience, but equally
may offer more complex meditations on socio-cultural and aesthetic
epistemologies. (Steve Fore,
Animation Reenacting
Ryan: The Fantasmatic and the Animated Documentary, 2011)
http://anm.sagepub.com/content/6/3/277
As
Craig Hight (2008: 14) has noted, while the visual images in
interview-based works tend to preserve animation’s usual
reflexivity, the soundtrack maintains (in a term borrowed from
Michael Renov) ‘acoustic indexicality in the form of interview
sound-bites and especially expositional voice-over narration’, and
as Paul Ward (2006: 122) writes, these animations ‘construct a
“world” that will metaphorically emphasise (or dramatically
undermine) what the viewer is hearing on the soundtrack.’ (Steve
Fore, Animation
Reenacting Ryan: The Fantasmatic and the Animated Documentary, 2011)
http://anm.sagepub.com/content/6/3/277
Animation
can both challenge and support the visual and verbal narrative, it is
truly reflexive and clearly doesn't deny that.
It
is in this way that the conventional reflexivity of animation
harmonizes especially well with the use of reenactments in
documentary film and video. Unlike animation, in documentary the
trope of reflexivity is not a pre-requisite component of the form,
but emerges either as a self-consciously deployed tactic on the
part of the producer, or more prosaically as a section in the film
that the viewer understands has been assembled with images of a
different ontological status from those used in other sections of the
work. (Steve Fore,
Animation Reenacting
Ryan: The Fantasmatic and the Animated Documentary, 2011)
http://anm.sagepub.com/content/6/3/277
