Animating Space: From Mickey to WALL-E

1. Early Animation: Of Figures and Spaces

25 1 EARLY ANIMATION Of Figures and Spaces One of the abiding images of early animation is of a hand reaching into the film frame to sketch a variety of characters or things on a sheet of paper, a large easel-mounted pad, or a chalkboard. Whatever is sketched then usually undergoes a series of amazing or simply amusing transformations at the hand of “the hand.” As most historians have noted, this signature scene, which we can find in the work of J. Stuart Blackton, Emile Cohl, Harry S. Palmer, Earl Hurd, the Fleischer brothers, Walt Disney, and others, emerged from the tradition of the “lightning sketch,” a common act in vaudeville programs and music hall shows of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Described by Donald Crafton as “a hybrid of graphic and performing art” (48), these live presentations centered on an artist, alternately facing the drawing matter and then facing the audience, as he quickly illustrated a figure or scene and proceeded, with a few rapid changes of line or shading, to produce a surprising alteration in the image. This standard type of entertainment is certainly one of the key influences on early animation, not only because it provided the subject matter for many films in an era that Tom Gunning has evocatively labeled “the cinema of attractions” (“Cinema” 63), but also because of the way in which it forecast the early animated film’s recurrent emphasis on amazing transformations. Yet in that reaching or sketching hand, I suggest, we might see more than just a lingering trace of influence, of the transition from one sort of entertainment to another. Animating Space 26 Almost like a pointing finger, the sketching hand directs our attention to a boundary—or several boundaries—crucial to the emergence of the animated film, almost as if it were tracing the form’s early history. Most obviously that hand calls our attention to a fundamental media border, that between the live lecture presentation from which these works emerged and the filmed entertainment that was already bidding to take the place of such vaudeville-style amusements. It also designates what we might term a generic border, one separating a live-action cinema that had first been unveiled to the public around 1895 and that had quickly developed a focus on narrative and a set of common practices for producing narrative, and a world of animated images that was still developing its own conventions and audience appeal, and for both of which it drew heavily on other media, such as the newspaper comic strip and magazine cartoon. Moreover, the sketching hand signals a fundamental aesthetic distinction, that between a three-dimensional world that was captured in the live-action portion of the presentation and a flat, two-dimensional one that often recalled those newspaper and magazine entries. It is in the crossing—or in some cases, the intentional blurring—of these different borders that our various standard histories of animation have essentially measured out the historical emergence of the form. But all these boundaries or borders share a more fundamental importance for the films in this vein, since they also point up some key dynamics of the form. All these early animated efforts “draw” much of their capital from the nature of that liminal play they depict, that is, from their filmmakers’ ability to violate or play at and with those borders. As an example we might consider a work that is still thoroughly informed by the lightning sketch model, is widely available, and is often cited today, J. Stuart Blackton’s The Enchanted Drawing (1900).1 This film produces its humorous effects through the depicted artist’s ability to “enchant” drawn material so that it seemingly—and in lightninglike fashion—turns into real objects that can then be grasped and used by the artist who has materialized them (Blackton himself). Thus, a sketched bottle of wine and a glass, thanks to stop-motion effects, become a real bottle and glass in Blackton’s hands, and the expression on the face of a man he has also drawn instantly changes to one of displeasure when the sketched material disappears from the paper world he Early Animation 27 occupies. Blackton then repeats the process with a hat and cigar, drawing both, liberating them from the canvas via stop-motion, demonstrating his use of these now three-dimensional objects, and then returning them to the...