Theory of Animation

It was funny to me to read Wells' idea that the Disney type animation and other things like it is so much of what we consume that it takes over the imagination of the viewers, because I thought about it and I couldn't really think of many other kinds of animation, besides stop animation.

In the 'absence of the artist' portion of the text, I started imagining the early animation styles that included the artist, and the first thing that came to my mind was "Duck Amuck" which is later mentioned by Wells as a later interpretation of the style that only uses the artist as a figure in the narrative to create comedy.  I was interested in the Koko the Clown "out of the inkwell" cartoon, so I found it on Youtube, and it does look like a very early way of doing the same effect from 'duck amuck', but it was pretty funny as well.  It would be interesting to see the original animators figuring out just how to get the effect they were looking for by including the hand and the blank paper background.

It was an intriguing thought to me that abstraction, the type of animation that resists using the body or real-life identifiable forms, is the purest and most difficult type of animation according to the text.  It got me started thinking about what shapes or forms I would create if they could be anything but real-life identifiable forms.  The idea of aligning this type of animation with sound to create rhythm or harmony seems to be pretty wide open as a realm to explore, while animating talking animals or cartoon people has been covered in so many ways that there aren't that many new ways to do it.

The text's frequent mention of the relationship between the animator and the image got me thinking about an artist named Stephen Gammel, who did illustrations for a book I had when I was younger called Scary stories to tell in the Dark, or soemthing.  His type of drawing shows a lot of evidence of the ink or pencil that he is using, so it borders on sloppy with sort of ink scribbles on it, which adds to the creepiness of it.  But Iw as thinking that if his type of image was animated, it would walk the line between animations that are hyper realist and those that show the presence of the artist/medium. Either way it would be cool...I will try to find a Stephen Gammel illustration to include here.