What I like in animation

I have recently finished working on an animated trailer for my Milla in the Misty Woods book, which, though only 1.22min long, turned out to be a vast amount of work. And that’s despite the fact that I’ve been working with a digital form of animation which means I didn’t have to hand-draw 12 drawings (as you do with traditional animation) or, with stop-motion animation, take 12 or 24 photographs for each single frame (the distinction between 12 and 24 comes from the fact that moving characters are often shot “on twos”, i.e. one drawing is shown for every two frames of film so there are only 12 drawings per second in a 24 frame-per-second film).

What I am practising is computer-assisted animation (not to be confused with computer-generated animation which is 3D – like Toy Story or Shrek) which means that I import my hand drawings into software (Adobe After Effects) and place them into different key frames to create an outline of the most important movements. I then make decisions about what I want to happen in between and how, including movements, transitions, effects etc. and I set up routes, commands and timings for that (which, admittedly, is quite laborious). But the wonderful thing is that After Effects fills in all the “in-between frames”, a process colloquially referred to as “tweening”, which cuts down the time scale that traditional animation would normally take, and at the same time preserves the hand-drawn quality which I like so much. As much as I appreciate CGI achievements, I have no desire to learn Maya or Max. I enjoy watching the work of various SFX masters though, and an example of a lesser-known film where I find the computer-generated animation particularly clever, is a Polish film by Jan Komasa, Suicide Room (2011). It is a story about a fragile teenage boy who is bullied at school and retreats to a virtual world of morbid avatars and screen-names.

There is also a brilliant science-fiction short animated movie, Cathedral, by Tomasz Bagiński, based on a short story by Jacek Dukaj under the same title. The film portrays a man visiting a medieval-like mystical building with live human faces embedded in its structure. In 2003 the film received an Oscar nomination in the category “Best Animated Short Film”.

There are so many different types of animation that I wouldn’t dare attempt to present a comprehensive list. Instead, I would like to give a few examples of styles and artists I find most interesting and inspiring.

According to the Wikipedia, the last major feature film to use traditional ink and paint (as opposed to “digital ink and paint,” where the animators’ drawings are scanned into a computer, then processed and coloured by software) was considered to be Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke (1997). However, the Studio returned to the technique in 2008 for Ponyo and their later films. I can’t recommend Studio Ghibli’s productions highly enough; their exquisite imagination, complex plots and characters, and lack of tedious happy endings make Disney films look terribly dull and one-dimensional.

Princess Mononoke by Hayao Miyazaki is mostly hand-drawn, but also incorporates some use of computer animation during five minutes of footage throughout the film which was used to support the traditional cel animation and help with the flow and blending. Most of the film is colored with traditional paint, though a further 10 minutes uses digital paint. It is a gripping story about a conflict between the supernatural guardians of a forest, supported by San who had been raised by wolves, and a community of people in the Iron Town, led by a charismatic woman Eboshi, who consume its resources. I really love the pace of the movie, and the two strong female characters.