Bridging Realities: The Effect of Animation on Perception - Essay Example

Bridging Realities: The Effect of Animation on Perception Submitted by: Submitted Introduction Animation is the method of creating an illusion of movement through a rapid display of a sequence of 2-D or 3-D images. The art is highly developed around the world especially in the United States and in Japan made possible with the advent of new technologies that widened the portfolio of available animation techniques. Nonetheless, the Golden Age of animation in the United States actually began in the early 1930’s with the advent of sound cartoons. It was in this period where Disney released Steamboat Willie and began to dominate the animation field especially with the introduction of Mickey Mouse whose popularity rivaled that of the real life screen personalities such as Charlie Chaplin. Within a short amount of time, the world came to know and adore Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Popeye, Tom and Jerry and Droopy Dog. Since this age, animation has grown by leaps and bounds. However, Sergei Einstein argues that the real legacy of animation is the ‘rejection of once-and-forever allotted form, freedom from ossification and the ability to dynamically assume any form’. Sean Griffin adds that animation’s use of metamorphosis and inanimate objects brought to life creates a constant potential for queerness to be read by audience members. The purpose of this paper is to determine the meaning associated with the remarks made by the two. Specifically, this paper will attempt to answer whether animation does really carry an innate potential for instability and subversion. The focus shall be on Disney and its associated animation portfolio precisely because the company stands as the most recognizable icon, perhaps the most influential, in the animation industry. Subversion and Instability Encarta (2009a) relates that the word subversion comes from the Latin subvers, the past participle of subvertere, and was in common usage in 14th century France. There are two highly-related definition of the word. First is that it can be a plan, an action or an activity that overthrow those in power in the institution. Second is a more general definition and involves the destruction or ruining of something usually with attached value. The word ‘instability’ is defined in Encarta (2009b) as the absence of stability or order in an established system. Animation film production is regarded by many to be a harmless children’s entertainment and the result of creative and artistic minds. The idea of relating well-loved characters such as Mickey Mouse of Disney and Bugs Bunny to subversion and instability is seen as rather inappropriate as these are not meant to be taken seriously because the whole story is fictional. However, there have been quite an interest in this subject and a close observation of selected animated films do reveal that animation do provide a setting wherein viewers can be inclined to harbor subversion and instability tendencies against a system. This is especially true when the storyline involves historical events and characters. The use of animation in trying to undermine or destroy the reputation of a system or person is highlighted in its use as propaganda material during the Second World War. Short animation movies were used by the United States, Germany, Russia and the Eastern Europe either to portray the enemy as sadistic and mass-murderer or to inspire individuals to join the cause of destroying the other side. Indeed, the propaganda films during the 1940’s were far short from entertaining children but the most interesting factor was the use of animation drawings to ‘over-draw’ and exaggerate the unlikable features of the respective enemy to ‘mentally condition’ the viewers to dislike the other side. In extreme cases, as in propaganda material, the viewer is influenced to inflict harm on people belonging to the other part of society. This conditioning can lead to subversive behavior and can cause an individual to accept the fictional events as a true-to-life account. Animation as Propaganda A good example of an animated film is Education for Death produced in 1943 by Disney Studios which was by then under military control. In the film, Nazi Germany was a scene of burning classic hardbound volumes of literature and philosophy with the Bible morphing into the first-edition of Mein Kampf. Crucifixes were transformed into Swastika flags by swift arcs of lightning. The government of Adolf Hitler was portrayed as conditioning the minds of pear-shaped children into joining the army and goose-stepping in grids for miles across the globe as they hail Hitler over and over. Hitler youth, as they were called, were being taught by ‘sinister bulldog style’ German adults: small rear end, barrel chest, bowed legs and no neck. The ‘teacher’ is drawn and animated to have his jowls flap around like coattails as he conditions the children depicted to have pear-shaped heads. Some of the scenes are portrayed in Figure 1: Figure 1: Scenes from Education for Death (Antville Org, 2009) Daffy - The Commando, another animated propaganda film, was released by Looney Tunes in 1943 and directed by Friz Freleng. In the animated film, Daffy is a commando dropped in German territory with the goal of creating chaos for the German Commander, Von Vulture. The general tries to capture Daffy but the latter evades all efforts and even get to whack Hitler on the head with a mallet. All throughout the film, scenes are replete with action such as bombs and air fights. Von Vulture is portrayed to be an abusive commander who hits assistant, Schultz, with a mallet. He is also seen as obsessive and destructive as he chases the elusive Daffy. The enemy is portrayed to be evil and capable of hurting even his own comrades. Parts of the animation are shown in Figure 2. Figure 2: Daffy the Commando (IMDB Online, 2009) (a) (b) Hubley and Schwartz (1946, p. 361) conducted a study under the auspices of the United States Air Force regarding the effectiveness of animated films in providing technical information and orienting army men during World War II. They found that this type of film was actually superior in providing information when compared to documentary film, oral instructions and printed media. German Animation Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist, was also aware of the value of animation in the war effort. The interest in animated films began when Hitler asked his media people to produce cartoons like Disney was doing. Goebbels was put in charge of the production and began to assemble a team. Disney’s technology has been adapted even before the takeover of the Nazi and Goebbel’s team tried to be at par with the American animator. During the Second World War, animations were increasingly included in the propaganda machinery. One of the films produced was ‘The Intruder’. The main plot of the ‘The Intruder’ was the organizing of forest animals to drive a hated fox. Hedgehogs were shown marching with helmets and wasps were flying in aircraft fighting formation. Production of other films was slow because the German venture was in its infancy but Goebbels and his team produced ‘Armer Hansi’, an animation film that was almost at par with quality of Disney film. Other short films included Peterles Abenteuer produced in 1941 and Der Störenfried produced in 1940. (Cyranos Online, 2009) Anti-Nazi animation was also present in Nazi Germany. In his article on the animated propaganda films, Hansen (1993) discussed how the prominent German Commercial cartoonist Hans Fischerkoesen drew the Verwitterte Melodie (Weather-Beaten Melody). The storyline involved a bee who found a phonograph in a meadow. When it was played, the music produced was jazz and the resulting interaction of different bug species were actually a subtle criticism of Nazi ideals. Moritz underscored the specific quality of animations: the capacity for metaphoric and encrypted-narration strategy to get a message across. The Power of Animation a) Flexibility in Cinematic Style In the discussion above, we were able to identify the subversion capabilities of animation and the following, we will be focusing on the freedom of form that Einstein forwarded. The role of Disney in the animation industry was indeed historical as it even inspired and influenced the Germans. Hence, it would be prudent to focus more on the company for the discussion of the power of animation in subversive behavior. Disney portrays itself as a producer of animated characters and stories in an enchanted world or less subtly, a magical kingdom. The company excels in making full use of the capacity of animation to exhibit and employ visual and audio communication to portray human interactions but in a manner that blurs the viewer’s notion of fictional and real. As stated earlier, Sergei Einstein noted that animation was capable of nurturing the tendency for ‘rejection of once-and-forever allotted form, freedom from ossification and the ability to dynamically assume any form’. This is exactly what Disney and animators are able to do. According to Chesebro & Bertleson (1996), animation achieves this by allowing the animator to be as creative as can be with the limitation only being the budget and technical prowess made available to him. Unlike films involving real-time settings and live actors and actress, animated films can give life to inanimate objects and make animal portrayals act and talk in the same way as we do. Characters can also be placed in situations where entertainment is optimized rather than the confined space offered by real time settings. There is just no boundary for creativity. The shot, the scene, the frame, lighting, color, degree of movement and continuity can be easily made and revised to articulate cinematic images with just the stroke of a pen or key. Characters and action scenes can also be produced with a great degree of flexibility as animation considerably has more representational latitude than non-animated film. One cannot deny that animation has changed our view of our world, of what is fictional and what is real, of what is possible or not. It is through animation that we were made open to the possibility of a talking rabbit or bunny. It is through animation that we opened our senses to ‘other’ magical worlds. This is the freedom of ossification that Einstein was talking about. Essentially, animation is able to evoke a desired psychological response and attitudes towards an object. Animated characters, representations and settings, as opposed to those available in other types of film, can be graphically adjusted to empower desired meanings. They can either make the characters likeable or unwanted. Disney’s most popular character, Mickey Mouse, was drawn to have a head of three symmetrically attached circles. Disney artist John Hench (in Brockway, 1989) explains that the circles were chosen because it did not cause any negative feedbacks as opposed to angles and sharp points. Circles were reassuring and reflect the things most people have fun with. Disney had attributed Simba, the Sultan, Pocahontas and Ariel with juvenile traits such as round cheeks and big eyes the goodness of their being. The company has made it a point that its heroes were to be drawn in smooth, soft, bright and round curves to emphasize the goodness in them while villains are attributed with sharp angles, darkly features and are often oversized to highlight their imposing nature. Examples of this includes Ratcliffe, Ursula, Jafar and Scar. In real live films, actors and actresses are chosen through intensive and exhaustive auditions where directors and consultants try to find the desired characteristics. In some cases, they find the right actor for the job. In other cases, they have to resort to artistry, make-up and accessories to compensate for the lack of character traits. In animation, if you need to portray the ugly nature of some person or some system, you can easily characterize it as a ‘vulture’ such as what was done in Daffy the Commando. Animation provides flexibility whereas real live media can offer it only to a certain degree even with substantial budget and even integration of animation techniques to the films. b) Fiction and Reality Film expert Whittock (1990) remarked that ‘all films claim to show the truth but they are inherently trying to deceive’ for the purpose of entertaining the audience and delivering the message. Animations excel in both portraying the truth and deceiving at the same time because of its technical and artistic flexibility. For example, Disney’s Little Mermaid (1989), Tarzan (1999) and Lion King (1994) appear to be real because of their humanized characters and most children often believe they do. Other type of films such as documentaries can portray the truth but they often lack the ability to emphasize the meaning it is trying to portray. The flexibility in style and form that animation affords us provide what Hansen (1993) would call ‘a new region of consciousness’ where limitations on perception of what is possible and what is not as well as the constructed barriers of what is real and what is fictional is eliminated. Moellenhoff (1989) argues that this freedom from limitations of physical laws and formulas results to lowering our guard and disarms us further from fiction and fantasy. Accordingly, animation makes use of symbolic personification through visual metaphors where disparate elements are visually incorporated in a single spatially bounded, homogeneous entity. While this is also possible in other films through the creativity of screen writers and cinematographers but animation easily offers more technical opportunities as it less creative obstacles. In a research involving children watching Disney animation, Addison (1993) observed that animation transforms fictional settings and characters into a form of reality through motion and sounds. Although the animation was purely graphical fiction, what was remarkable was that the pre and grade-schooler watching Disney were affected emotionally. Their eyes widened and their bodies quake in response to an event in the animation. Laughter was spontaneous and fright was discernible which indicated that they somehow believed in the reality of what they were watching. Takahashi (1991) previously found that children viewing Japanese anime were responding cognitively and physiologically to the animation’s meaning. Hence, it can be said that the animation visually stimulated the children’s emotions thereby lowering their perception of the graphical fiction. Children, innocent as they are, were particularly susceptive to animation. Child viewers have their notion of consciousness and physical existence widened by the experiential meaning provided by animation. The graphical fiction forms a bridge between real and unreal as it accesses a realm of understanding not possible to open via literate or non-cinematic physical activity. This is further enhanced by the capacity of Disney to provide material that appeal to the thoughts and feelings of the young generation better than any filmmaker. Our discussion has so far involved children and discounted a more-subversive capable audience, the adults. As people get older, animation such as Mickey Mouse tend to have lesser meaning but adults have been found to interact in animated cinema though in a less transparent manner. This is partly due to their constructed notion of behaving properly and controlling one’s self. Nonetheless, recent 3-D animation such as the movie Transformers, Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen and G.I. Joe have gained wide acceptance from children and adult alike. The power of the animation in adults lies in its ability to further reinforce beliefs. One of the major settings for conflict in Transformer, for example, was the Muslim nation Qatar where an army camp was destroyed by an evil force. The timing of the release of the film coincided with the time America was waging war against suspected Muslim terrorists especially in Iraq. As Moellenhoff (1984) put it, animation is capable to eliminate the competition between reality and fantasy as it unites it in a “droll way”. The ‘cartoon’ nature of the stories exempts it from association to moral and historical issues which real live films often do. Animation is capable of bridging the gap between real and fiction by the ‘cuteness’ of the characters. Success of the animation company was due to the business model promoted by Walt Disney himself who instructed Disney artists and marketing executives of the company to keep the animated characters as cute as possible. O’Brien (1996) acknowledges that this innocence, ‘socially harmless’ and youthful entertainment are the reasons why people tend to view cartoon films as ‘uncomplicated representation of human ideas’. Since people know that the film is only fictitious, animation is able to lower our threshold for acceptance of an event and suspends our propensity for disbelief. This mechanism prepares viewers for a more tolerant acceptance of scene, character, action, plot and ideas. As O’Brien noted, animated realism remains unchallenged in popular culture primarily because the audience and other people believe that the material should be accepted and not analyzed. Subversive or Entertaining Even with the use of animation as propaganda material, can we really consider Simba the Lion King, Lilo and Stitch to be conditioning the viewers for subversive behavior or should it be taken as it is marketed to be, an entertaining movie fit for a family to watch? Many of Disney’s animations tell enduring stories about lessons in life such as the coming of age, personal responsibility and search for acceptance and happiness. However, Whittock (1990) argues that even with the seeming innocence of Disney characters and story plots, the endowment of good and bad traits makes it a vehicle for social perception. Disney is known for its portrayal of friendly animals as lead characters or companions but most of them are almost as always anthropomorphised or made to speak and act like humans. They can be a scholarly owl, a devious hyena or a playful bear. Nonetheless, it is the endowment of traits that makes animation not used as propaganda to be capable of inspiring subversive behavior. For example, Mustafa in Lion King had the accent of British nobility while the hyenas act and sound like black and Latino urban youth. Whittock (1990) refers to a case where a white toddler heard a group of black teens and exclaimed to his Mom that he saw a pack of hyenas. In effect, the characterization provides a setting where prejudices can become deeply rooted in culture. According to Hodge and Tripp (1986), the seeming innocent and entertaining nature of animation means that it is not subject to sanction. Thus, there is the possibility that the fictional happenings in the plot when woven with historical events could be translated as real especially by children. In effect, animation can impose an ideology and can influence cultural values as a whole. This is what could have led Hansen (1993) to state that Disney’s animation provides a stable diagesis for socialization. Real (1977) went as far as stating that Disney has replaced schools, churches and families in teaching the members of society of what is right and what is wrong. Comparison with Real Live Media: An Example There are real live films that can match the humor and portrayal in animated scenes. A good example would be that of the Three Stooges. The said real-live series of short film feature three characters Larry, Moe and Curly featured in entertaining and comic situations much in the same as animated films are. There are scenes of mallet banging, mimicking of historical characters and many of the ‘violent’ but comic scenes that can be found in animation. Three Stooges is popular among children and adult alike. However, the short films lack the flexibility in image and artistry that makes animation popular all over the world even with the when it is not translated to the viewer’s native language. The scenes are limited to what the director and the artists could conjure up while the characters could not effectively emphasize meanings much in the same way as animated characters can do. Conclusion As our analysis would suggest, animation has great communicative power and it has been manipulated especially in the Second World War to promote an ideology or belief against a certain individual or society. The fictional and comical nature of animation films lowers the threshold for acceptance of the content no matter how violent it is. As a form of entertainment, many people would not find it appropriate to analyze animation in a very serious manner such as what was conducted in this paper. However, a closer look in the nature of animation especially in Disney films indicates that there is indeed a great potential for subversive behavior. This comes in the form of mental conditioning, an identification and reinforcement of what is good and what is bad, what should be overthrown and what should be accepted. Reference: Addison, E. (1993). Saving other women from other men: Disneys Aladdin. Camera Obscura, 31, pp. 5-25. Antville Org (2009). Education for Death. Retrieved September 8, 2009 from http://news.antville.org/stories/1189700/ Brockway, R.W. (1989), The masks of Mickey Mouse: Symbol of a generation. Journal of Popular Culture, 22 (4), 2pp. 5-34. Chesebro, J. W., & Bertleson, D. A. (1996). Analysing media: Communication technologies as symbolic and cognitive systems. New York: Guilford Press. Cyranos Online (2009). German Propaganda: Animation. Retrieved September 9, 2009 from http://www.cyranos.ch/animat-d.htm Encarta Online (2009a). Subversion. 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