This is the first in a series of posts in which I will evaluate some of the one-volume histories of film in English. Nominally, it will be from my perspective of their suitability of their use in the classroom, particularly those I teach on the undergraduate and graduate level at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Initially, I thought of focusing on the way they deal with (or ignore) animation and television. (I should note that SCAD’s TV production majors are required to take History of Cinema and a number of animation majors take the class as an elective.)

On one level, when I first examine a book on film history, I look to see if they include films I want to screen, especially those that I feel have sort of fallen from grace, e.g., Henry King’s Tol’able David (1921) and Morris Engel’s Little Fugitive (1953); Gerald Mast and Bruce F. Kawin’s A Short History of the Movies does put the King film in context, showing how it influenced Pudovkin (seen rather clearly in Mother), while Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell’s Film History: an Introduction does briefly mention Engel’s film and its role in the American independent film movement and the way it anticipated Direct Cinema documentaries (but not how it influenced Truffaut’s The 400 Blows).

There are other, more important factors I take into account, including but not limited to the book’s accuracy, scope, narrative sense, illustrations, price and how it fits in with the way I teach. For instance, when I first started at SCAD, I used The Oxford History of World Cinema, edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, which has a lot going for it, featuring as it does in-depth articles and informative sidebars by a host of specialists (the pieces on animation by William Moritz and Donald Crafton blow away the competition, as do its sidebars on Max Linder, Karl Freund and Alexandre Trauner). With a list price of $34.95, it’s also a real 

bargain. Yet, I dropped it because its lack of overall narrative didn’t fit in with the way I taught. (The fact it hasn’t been revised since its 1996 publication doesn’t bother me, but might concern others.)

I then switched to David Parkinson’s The History of Film, one of Thames & Hudson’s inexpensive but well written World of Art paperbacks; at the time, I compared it to an edition of Jack C. Ellis and Virginia Wright Wexman’s pricier A History of Film (Wexman has since taken over authorship) and found it much its equal. Though I would have had to drop it when it went out of print, I ceased using it because my students (who were then largely film majors) found that it lacked enough detail; as I now teach History of Cinema mostly as an elective, I would certainly think about using it again, especially as a new edition is apparently in the works. Since then, I have mostly used Thompson and Bordwell, with a brief experiment with Mast and Kawin; this fall I am finally trying Wexman. (Needless to say, I find it hard to make up my mind; m y wife has suggested I consider not using a textbook at all, but I’m not ready to go that route.)

In addition to those mentioned above, I will consider several other books, including David A. Cook’s A History of Narrative Film, Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn  Audrey Foster’s A Short History of Film, Louis Giannetti and Scott Eyman’s Flashback: A Brief History of Film and Mark Cousin’s The Story of Film. (The Cousins book has just gone out of print, but is worth looking at.) In addition, I will briefly look at books on animation history, as well as look at some of the reasons why animation and television are dealt with they way they are.

That’s me in the middle, after my wife Vickie and I gave our paper at the SAS Conference at the Edinburgh College of Art, sitting between Binary Fable’s Helen Jackson (panel moderator on left) and fellow panelist Colleen Montgomery from the University of British Columbia. (This and other photos are by Van Norris, of the University of Portsmouth, who generously allowed me to download them from his Facebook page for use here.)

Early last month, my wife Vickie and I attended Animation Evolution, the 22nd Annual Society for Animation Studies conference, where we presented a paper, “Crossing Boundaries: Communities of Practice in Animation and Live-Action Filmmaking.” This was our first collaboration, something which came as a surprise to both of us, as after 23 years of marriage we belatedly discovered that our professional interests actually overlapped. Basically, we used social theory to take a look at the ways animation and live-action filmmakers  see themselves and each other, and how technology in the form of motion capture has affected things. (Vickie is pictured above along with fellow panelist Brian Fagence, of the University of Glamorgan.)

It was a somewhat strange and wonderful experience for me, as Vickie had witnessed the birth of SAS when I started it in 1987 and even brought our new-born daughter, Allegra, to the first conference at UCLA in 1989. Over the years, she helped me edit my writings, including my Animation Report newsletter. However, it was an offhand comment she made regarding my posting about Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox that led to our collaboration, which I hope we will be able to repeat more than once.

This year’s conference was probably the largest, at least in terms of papers presented and the quality certainly did not suffer because of that. If there was any trend evident it was in regards to the increasing use of motion capture (which included the paper Vickie and I gave). But I did not and could not properly sample the wide variety of presentations, so I can only provide some random thoughts, observations and photo captions.

Clare Kitson gave the opening keynote address. She is the author of Yuri Norstein and Tale of Tales: An Animator’s Journey and British Animation: The Channel 4 Factor; the latter deals with her stint at Channel 4 commissioning animated shorts and series which sparked a golden age of British animation; it was also the topic of her talk. One thing that struck me was her observation that she noticed a number of the experimental filmmakers she worked with have shown up with prominent credits on films from the likes of Pixar and DreamWorks; this only goes to show that if your ambition is to work for a major Hollywood studio, it doesn’t hurt to do your own thing.

One of most unusual papers was by Jessica Hemmings (seen here with Edinburgh College of Art colleague Jonathan Murray) whose talk on “Textile & Animation Theory: Who Needs It?” stirred an unusual amount of interest among conference goers.

Heather Holian, of the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, who talked about “Art, Animation and the Collaborative Process,” whose interest in the collaborative nature of studio animation is not unlike my interests regarding animation labor.

Pierre Floquet, of  Bordeaux University, gave one of a number of talks touching on the digital revolution that has affected both live-action and animation in recent years. Specifically, his paper, “Actors in Sin City’s Animated Fantasy: Avatars, Aliens, or Cinematic Dead-ends?, discussed what happens to actors in an animated environment.

With Vickie taking a quick side trip on Saturday, I went out to dinner with Tony Tarantini, of Sheridan College (left), and Van Norris (right). I previously blogged (here) about Tony’s comments about the motivations behind James Cameron’s assertion that motion capture is not animation.

Here’s conference organizer extraordinaire Nichola Dobson at the Saturday Conference party. Otto Alder is on the left. As someone who has helped organize several past SAS conferences, I cannot say enough about what a terrific job she did.

Prolific author Paul Wells, of Loughborough University, who gave the closing keynote speech, “Another Fine Messi: Animation, Sport and Theorising Fascination,” is seen here at the conference party. Paul is certainly one of the more charismatic personalities in animation studies and his closing address did nothing to dispel this myth.

Australia’s Alan Cholondenko speaking on “(The) Death (of) the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix, Part III: Death and the Death of Death.”

Charles daCosta, my colleague from the Savannah campus of the Savannah College of Art and Design; his paper, “Who’s Out There: Halas, the Relevance of Oral Traditions and the Animated Documentary.” Charles not only ably assisted me in organizing the 2009 Atlanta conference, he took over my job when I had to go in for surgery, for which I cannot thank him enough.

Finally, many, many thanks to Nichola Dobson and the wonderful people at the Edinburgh College of Art for organizing and hosting a wonderful conference, and to Van Norris for allowing me to reprint his photos.

Two forthcoming animation events in Los Angeles caught my eye. The first  is the 2nd AniMazing Spotlight Animated Shorts Festival, which will be held Saturday and Sunday, September 4-5, at Woodbury University, Burbank, under the able direction of Tee Bosustow. (Tee is the son of UPA co-founder Stephen Bosustow; the festival website also hosts the all-important UPA Legacy Project website; I should also note that I am friends with Tee’s brother Nick.)

In addition to screening of films in competition, there is Tom Sito speaking on  “Animation & Politics: the Blacklist, the Mafia and beyond,”  a presentation by the UCLA Film Archive of the work of computer animation pioneer Robert Abel,  Teddy Newton giving a behind-the-scenes look at Pixar’s Day & Night, “The Legendary Fred Crippen” (UPA & Roger Ramjet to Sesame Street), “More Women than Ever” presented by Women in Animation, etc., etc.

Film Historian and Oskar Fischinger biographer William Moritz, Elfriede Fischinger and animation filmmaker and teacher Michael Scroggins, c.1986, in The Hague. Source: Center for Visual Music.

On September 23rd, at 7:00 p.m., the Center for Visual Music, in Los Angeles, will be putting on “A Fischinger Celebration — Benefit Art Exhibition and Reception,  Celebrating Elfriede Fischinger on her 100th Birthday.” Though not as well-known as her husband Oskar, the pioneer abstract animation filmmaker, Elfriede Fischinger was an important figure in animation not only for her tireless efforts to promote her husband’s films, but also for her support of filmmakers and a number of animation-related organizations. Thus, when the Society for Animation Studies held its first conference at UCLA in 1989, it was not a surprise that Elfriede showed up.  I got to know Elfriede in the last decade of her life and always found her an inspiration. In a very real way, her home was a salon for animators and filmmakers, and she is well-deserving of this tribute.

The Center notes,

The evening features an Exhibition of selected photographs, artifacts and Paintings by Oskar Fischinger, a Wine Reception, and a Screening of Home Movies and Videos of Elfriede. Highlights include Oskar’s first Stereo Painting (1949), The Lumigraph film (1970) made by Elfriede, and unshot animation drawings by Oskar. Proceeds from the evening, which includes a silent auction, will benefit the Fischinger preservation, conservation and digitization work being done by Center for Visual Music, a 501(c) 3 nonprofit Los Angeles archive.

My March 9th posting on motion capture, “Oh Motion Capture, What Art Thou?,” elicited an interesting comment from Vita Berezina-Blackburn, an animation specialist at Ohio State University, who finds motion capture

to be closer to traditional puppetry than cel animation and wish there would be more films featuring experimental use of motion capture which has infinite possibilities in terms of setting up virtual rigs driven by human movement.

Her wish that more artists would use motion capture for experimentation is not often heard, but did ring a bell. Back in 1999, in doing a story for Animatoon on the University of Southern California’s Division of Animation and Digital Arts, I interviewed Vibeke Sorenson, its founding chair, who mentioned she first developed an interest in the area in graduate school, when computer animation was still in its infancy; she recalled, “the real time approach was important because of the roll of the spontaneous gesture in the act of creation.” And in the “Philosophy Statement” she wrote about the program she sent me said,

The computer provides unprecedented opportunities for data transformation, both in real-time and not in real-time. It allows animators to work with both 2 and 3-D animation, in real-time interactive virtual environments. They are a hybrid form of filmmaker, functioning at various times as directors, actors, cinematographers, and editors. Computers are transformative instruments providing vast new spaces and possibilities for animators.

Sorenson is now Chair of the School of Art, Design, and Media at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Berezina-Blackburn’s feeling that motion capture is a form of puppetry is also a view strongly held by John Clark Matthews, the award-winning puppet filmmaker (The Mouse and the Motorcycle trilogy, Frog and Toad are Friends, Mouse Soup, etc.), who I recently talked to about the topic. (I must note John and I are friends and in 1992 I presented a paper on his films, “Experiments in Style: the Animated Puppet Films of John Matthews,” at the Society for Animation Studies conference at CalArts.)  When his studio went under in the mid-90s, he took a job as a computer animator with Sony Imageworks, where he was a lead/supervising animator on such films as Stuart Little (the design of the title character was based on the ones he did for The Mouse and the Motorcycle films) and Polar Express; he retired five years ago, but has not lost his interest in films and performance capture.

Before Polar Express, John experimented with motion capture at Sony Imageworks (samples of this work can be found here) and realized that “performance capture is nothing more than puppeteering.” As a puppeteer he is a big booster of the process and feels there is considerable room for creativity using the process.

(In commenting on the complaints animators had with Wes Anderson’s problems had with his decision to direct Fantastic Mr. Fox long distance, he feels it “is much better [using performance capture] than an animator trying to figure out what a director wants, especially when the director is not present.”

While there’s much suspicion about the validity of Avatar’s box office performance due to inflated 3D ticket prices, the UK Film Council’s 2010 Statistical Yearbook paints a different picture. As reported by The Guardian,

last year was the best ever in terms of box office takings and the second best year since 1971 in terms of admissions, fuelled by the continuing growth of 3D and the through-the-roof success of Avatar, as well as the enduring, recession-resistant appeal of the big screen.

…

In terms of box office, it was a record year with takings topping £944m [about $1,457,000,000]. Cinema admissions also shot up from last year’s healthy 164 million to 174 million, not quite beating 2002 (176 million), but still up 6% and the second highest number since 1971.

As to the impact of 3D,

The 3D revolution arrived in earnest, with 14 3D films accounting for 16% of UK and Ireland box office revenues, up from 0.4%. There are still sceptics but [David Steele, the council's head of research and statistics] said: "It does not appear to be a flash in the pan."

The young David Lloyd George’s dream of David and Goliath in Maurice Elvey’s The Life Story of David Lloyd George.

On July 14th, the UK’s National Commission for UNESCO announced the 10 items and collections to be included in its first UK Memory of the World Register, which follows in the footsteps of  UNESCO’s worldwide Memory of the World Programme, which I previously posted about here. Included are two films, both rather obscure — one because of its subject matter and the other because it was a film that was never shown publicly and believed to be lost. The latter is Maurice Elvey’s The Life Story of David Lloyd George (1918),  a biography of the British prime minister, which was repressed and presumed destroyed; the latter is  St Kilda, Britain’s Loneliest Isle (1928), a documentary of  life on a island in the Hebrides that was soon to vanish.

Luke McKernan provides a fascinating rundown of the history of Elvey’s film on The Bioscope, his invaluable blog about silent movies. He notes that the film has

a remarkable history of idealism, political intrigue, slander, subterfuge, disappearance, rediscovery and restoration. The Life Story of David Lloyd George was made in 1918, vanished before any cinema audience had a chance to see it, and re-emerged to astonished acclaim in 1994. Its place must be in virtual history rather than actual film history, because its story is one of if onlys and maybes. But what a story it is.

The 152-minute film is available on DVD from The National Library of Wales here and includes 47 minutes of extras, including an interview with ace film historian Kevin Brownlow.

As to St Kilda, it is

A filmed voyage by steamer from Glasgow to St Kilda, containing scenes of the ports en-route and life of the population on St Kilda. Research supports the conclusion that the scenes on the island of Hirta were taken in May 1923, with footage of the voyage from Glasgow out to St Kilda shot later, c. 1928. The film was made on the eve of the evacuation of St Kilda, August 1930, and with it the end of two millennia of human habitation on the island.

The film can be seen on YouTube in two parts (part 1 is embedded above), though you can also see in one sitting on the Scottish Screen Archive site here, which contains additional information on St Kilda.

Meanwhile …

In preparing for this post, I checked UNESCO’s Memory of the World site and discovered its list of Current Nominations, which include a number of film-related items. These include the EYE Film Instituut Nederland’s Desmet Collection, that includes “films, company documents, posters and film stills from the 1910’s” collected by Jean Desmet and Rossellini 77 Triptych, about Roberto Rossellini’s final project. Others include the Audiovisual Collection of Max Stahl, which includes material relating to the founding of Timor Leste, the Thor Heyerdahl Archives (Heyerdahl, the 20th century explorer, made Kon-Tiki (1950),one of the most popular post-war documentaries), and Collection of note manuscripts and film music of Composer Aram Khachaturian.

Thanks to The Bioscope, from whose site I cribbed the frame grab at the top from The Life Story of David Lloyd George.

Ace cinematographer John Bailey’s newest posting on 3D, “3-D, 3-D, 3-D, in All Directions,” is essential reading for those interested in stereoscopic cinema.  In it, he reports on “a 3-day 3-D workshop sponsored by IATSE Local 600 and longtime master 3-D guru Buzz Hays” as a jumping off point to discuss the problems and possibilities of the technique.  Among other observations, he notes that,

One thing quickly became apparent to me. Working in stereo movies in a responsible way is not simply a point and shoot affair, even in the most simple of conditions. Oh sure, you can do that—but that kind of off-the-cuff approach is what partly undid 3-D moviemaking in the past. Such a slipshod effort is one of the principal sources of viewer eyestrain. There is a dictate that became a mantra doled out by the workshop instructors and taken to heart by we eager students—3-D in movies is NOT REAL. Like an Escher drawing, it is an illusion. Our actual eyes simply don’t function the way 3-D movie imagery does. In constructing the 3-D movie frame we professional cinematographers have to evaluate carefully all the visual elements contained within the shot, as well as their cumulative effect as the sequence develops, shot by shot. One of the gravest mistakes we can make is to create exaggerated depth cues. This makes for an unreal sense of space that conflicts with the ability to integrate more dominant monocular cues. The result is a confusing sense of scale.

Among other things he discusses the process he went through in ultimately deciding not to use 3D for a film he will soon be shooting in the Arctic. As usual with John’s writings, it is essential reading.

No, I haven’t seen any part of The Twilight saga and am not about to pass judgment about it sight unseen, but thought I would bring Charlie Brooker’s latest column for The Guardian, “Twilight’s sulky vampires are less frightening than a knitted cushion,” which notes in part:

The central theme, apparently, is abstinence; the heroine, Bella, is contemplating whether she wants to lose her virginity to a vampire or a werewolf. She’s not allowed to try them both out, or get to second base with one and third with the other. And she’s certainly not allowed to take them both on at once, although that would clearly make for a far better film.

I’m writing this from Edinburgh, Scotland, where my wife and I have been enjoying a really wonderful Society for Animation Studies conference. A full report will follow when I get back home, but I can’t help responding to the Motion Picture Academy’s new rules for defining what is animation (see press release here), which states in part that,

a sentence regarding motion capture was added to clarify the definition of an animated film. The language now reads: “An animated feature film is defined as a motion picture with a running time of greater than 40 minutes, in which movement and characters’ performances are created using a frame-by-frame technique. Motion capture by itself is not an animation technique. In addition, a significant number of the major characters must be animated, and animation must figure in no less than 75 percent of the picture’s running time.”

It was mentioned during one of the conference’s many discussions of motion capture and drew some incredulous responses from the packed room (the person reporting it wasn’t sure if it was correct), but a comment by Sheridan Institute of Technology’s Tony Tarantini made around this time about James Cameron’s assertion that there’s no animation in Avatar is worth reporting. He basically felt that at a time when animation is becoming the dominant mode of production, Cameron is try to take it [the field] away from animators.

In the paper my wife Vickie and I gave yesterday, we discussed how live-action directors, like Cameron, liked motion capture because it enabled them to do animation in a way similar to the way they film live-action (i.e., they direct actors instead of animators). For whatever reason, he does not want to see himself as an animation filmmaker and I suspect the new rules regarding motion capture were added in part to assuage people like him; it would also please Pixar, DreamWorks Animation and Blue Sky, as it would reduce possible future Oscar competition. (Needless to say, I feel motion capture is animation.)

In a discussion about the new rules at Cartoon Brew, a number of people felt that motion capture films could still be considered animation if the data was finished by animators frame-by-frame, while Ryan McCulloch asked whether this would disqualify Happy Feet, which won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature several years ago (I believe it was the same year that another mocap film, Monster House was also nominated)? And the ever sane Floyd Norman said, “This is only going to get crazier.”

Animation Evolution, the 22nd Society for Animation Studies conference, which will hold forth between July 9-11, and is being hosted by the Edinburgh College of Art, is coming up shortly, and I will be there to present a paper I am writing with my wife, Vickie. As someone who has been involved with the Society from its beginnings, I must admit to being a bit prejudiced, but for animation scholars and some filmmakers, it seems like the place you want to be.

Animation Evolution maybe the busiest of all SAS conferences, at least in terms of papers being presented — I counted 78, which is almost twice that of the first SAS conference back in 1989, and even more than last year’s event which I organized.  There are papers on such topics as Guinea Coast Animation, Animated Gay Porn, Soviet Animation of Brezhnev Period, The Nintendo Wii, Motion Capture, Anij in Ghana , Music and Norman McLaren, as well as panels on Animated Documentaries, Animation in Iran and Theorising Animation and Death.

The paper Vickie and I will be giving, “Crossing Boundaries: Communities of Practise in Animation and Live-Action Filmmaking,” is scheduled for Friday, 15:45-17:00, as part of a panel on “Live Action and Digital Cinema” (we’re talking about how digital technologies have enabled live-action directors to do animation).

In addition to the paper sessions, the conference opens Friday with a roundtable session on “Norman McClaren’s Legacy,” which looks forward to “the centenary of Scotland’s most famous animator in 2014.” That evening there is a retrospective of Scottish Animation presented by the Scottish Animation Network at the Filmhouse.

The closing keynote address will be given by Paul Wells, Director of the Animation Academy at Loughborough University; Paul is easily one of the most prolific and influential writers on animation. His books include Understanding Animation (which I have used in teaching animation aesthetics), Animation: Genre & Authorship, and Drawing for Animation’ (with Joanna Quinn); in addition, he will be editing the forthcoming Animation Practice, Production & Process, a new “journal presenting, analysing and advancing how animation is created and shown” to be published by Intellect.

So, if you’re planning to be in the Edinburgh area early next month, by all means come.

Quirino Cristiani: The Mystery of the First Animated Movies, Gabriele Zucchelli’s 2007 documentary on  the Argentine animation pioneer, whose El Apóstol  (1917) was the first animated feature film, is now available on DVD.  The film was inspired by the research and writings by ace animation historian Giannalberto Bendazzi. (For instance, see his Animation World Magazine article on Cristiani here.) The film, which was produced by London-based The Caravel Animation is available on a region-free (Region 0) PAL DVD along with such extras as Oscar Grilo on Quirino Cristiani and Plus Ultra, a 1925 animated documentary by Romeo Borgini; it can be ordered via the movie’s website here starting at £12.00 for standard delivery in the UK. Needless to say, highly recommended.

After seeing How to Train Your Dragon and The Secret of Kells back to back, I noticed that both films finished with rather elaborate and visually complex climaxes. Such sequences have become commonplace in animated films these days, and can be seen in movies ranging from Astro Boy to  Shrek Forever After, a trend that seems to have been  facilitated by the introduction of digital technologies. It is a development that can most easily be explained by what I call (for lack of a better term) Deneroff’s Law, which is admittedly a variation of Parkinson’s Law and applies to both pre- and post-digital animation and live-action filmmaking.

In 1958, C. Northcote Parkinson, famously stated in Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress, that, “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” And Deneroff’s Law basically states: Given more powerful and complex tools, filmmakers will inevitably use them to make more complex films.”

This rather simplistic observation is by no means original and in fact was inspired by a comment John Lasseter made during a phone interview about Toy Story 2. If I remember correctly, he said something like when presented with a computer 10 times more powerful, rather than using the added power to produce animation 10 times quicker, animators will usually opt to make their animation 10 times more complex and expensive.

I then noticed something similar in Michael Barrier’s Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in its Golden Age that

When Disney ordered the switch to rough animation [around 1932], that procedure made it possible to pass down much more work to the lowest — and lowest-paying rungs — and so greatly increase the animators’ output.

In fact … everything indicates that the animators’  footage actually declined sharply as they delegated more work. Although the Disney studio’s staff more than tripled between 1930 and 1932, the number of films changed hardly at all. In 1930, the studio completed nineteen cartoons; in 1931, twenty-two; and in 1932, twenty-two again. … As Disney pursued an ever more refined division of labor, breaking the work into smaller and smaller components, each worker’s output did not rise — as could be expected in a normal manufacturing operation — but fell. (104)

In other words, Disney expanded his staff in the early 1930s for some of the same reasons that companies like Pixar or Weta Digital will add additional computing power. I would also, for instance,  argue that Willis O’Brien, Ub Iwerks, Max Fleischer and Walt Disney adopted the multiplane camera (first developed in Europe by Lotte Reiniger and Berthold Bartosch) in the 1930s for some of the same reasons. (See my earlier post on multiplane technologies here.)

For O’Brien, the multiplane setup he devised for King Kong enabled him to create imagery far more complex than he could previously do using traditional stop motion techniques, as well as more credibly blend it in with live action than was possible with his earlier work on The Lost World.

For Iwerks, Fleischer and Disney, their multiplane systems similarly enabled them to expand beyond the limits imposed by traditional cel animation technology. Up until the introduction of the multiplane camera, drawn animation was constricted by the use of 12 field animation paper (10½" x 13½"), though Disney termporarily trumped his rivals by using 16 field paper (13½" x 16½"), which was over 50% bigger, thus allowing for more detailed drawings.

For instance, the following image from Fleischer’s Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor (Dave Fleischer/Willard Bowsky, 1936) in which Sindbad’s Roc is about the fly off to kidnap Olive Oyl, was done as a traditional cel setup, though possibly using 16 field paper.

Now compare it with a frame from the next shot using Fleischer’s Stereoptical Process which used three-dimensional instead of painted backgrounds that resulted in a sharper sense of perspective and detail.

But with the introduction of digital ink and paint, multiplane effects were much easier to implement and also allowed the introduction of computer animation into the mix. But in accordance with Deneroff’s Law, one could point to the ballroom scene in Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise’s Beauty and the Beast as a way of using technology to increase the scene’s complexity.

As time went on and digital imagery became more prevalent, so did the complexity of what passed for traditional drawn animation, as seen in this shot from the climax of Ron Clements and John Musker’s Treasure Planet.

The same effect could also be seen in live-action movies. Once upon a time, studios could boast of films with huge sets and cast of thousands, and actually mean it, as in this recreation of ancient Babylon in D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance.

Visual effects could substitute to a certain extent, but were limited by pre-digital technology (though not as limited as those available for traditional drawn animation). The following shot from Stanley Kubrick’s widescreen epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, while perhaps breathtaking in its splendor, is nevertheless rather static.

George Lucas’ Star Wars (Episode 4: A New Hope) pushed the technology a bit further and got more dynamic results, creating a greater sense of depth and detail, as seen in the film’s opening shot.

With digital technology, you could create vast vistas and populate them with both people and/or creatures, as seen in the scene where Forrest Gump addresses an anti-Vietnam War rally on the Mall in Washington, D.C. in Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump (the size of the crowd was grossly inflated) …

or in this scene from Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers populated by an endless numbers of alien insects.

Of course, the development of more powerful digital technologies need not always lead to increased visual complexity, but clearly the temptation is there.

(By the way, could the increased number of shots in movies in recent years be related to the introduction of  such non-linear editing systems such as The Avid?)

From this week’s edition of The New Yorker. (Click on image for larger view.)

I just received a copy of Tze-Yue G. (“Gigi”) Hu’s long-awaited Frames of Anime: Culture and Image-Building recently published by Hong Kong University Press, and distributed in North America by University of Washington Press ($28.00 paperback and $55.00 hardcover). Gigi, who teaches Asian Studies at the University of Oklahoma’s School of International and Area Studies, is someone I’ve known and liked for many years. Thus, when she asked me to write a blurb for her book, I was quite happy to do so. My blurb, which accurately sums up my opinion, was that:

Frames of Anime provides a wonderfully concise and insightful historical overview of Japanese animation; more importantly, Tze-yue G. Hu also gives the reader a much-needed frame of reference — cultural and historical — for understanding its development.

According to a Digital Home story,

Samsung Electronics has posted an advisory on its corporate web site warning that children and teenagers may be more susceptible to health issues when viewing 3D content on their televisions.

The company also recommends that pregnant woman, the elderly and anyone under the influence of alcohol should refrain from watching programming in 3D.

Samsung also says that wearing 3D glasses for any other purpose may be physically harmful and could weaken your eyesight.

Given such concerns and the tempting thought that glassless 3D technologies may displace the current crop of 3D sets (which require rather expensive glasses) throws doubt on the rapid acceptance of 3D television. 

Incidentally, while there are a number of companies working on glassless 3D TV, the fact that Sharp, one of the leading manufacturers of TV sets, recently unveiled its own entry, which is initially aimed at the cell phone and mobile device market. As DailyTech reported earlier this month that:

… Sharp aired its stunning new 3D display.  The mobile display offers switchable 2D and 3D display modes and best of all does not require the user to wear any goofy glasses.

The television manufacturing industry at CES 2010 revealed itself to be deeply enamored with 3D sets.  However, doubts remain over whether users will be willing to don special glasses every time they want to watch events broadcast in TV.