Animation functions as a conscious choice by directors. While examining a variety of animated films including mixed media films utilizing live action and animation combined, as well as fully animated films, we can begin to explore why animation has been co-opted into certain film narratives, and what the desired effect of this technical method has on viewers.
Animated films tend to depict either the adult imagination or a child’s imagination. The use of animation in films to depict the imagination of an adult is a way of connecting to adult subject matter and adult issues safely. The animation reflects an altered mental state, which either the child or adult experiences or engages with in order to escape reality. There are four altered mental states depicted in films, which are visualized by the use of animation: the dream state, the intoxicated state, the post-traumatic state, and the imagination (which is an often forgotten or ignored realm after one has entered adulthood). Please note that many films deal with more than one of these themes simultaneously. Also, it is often times up to the viewer to interpret and give meaning to the presence of animation, allowing multiple possibilities.
Animation used to represent the dream state in the adult world differs significantly from a representation of a child’s dream. Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001) presents a young adult who cannot escape his dream. It is a “visually and philosophically surreal journey exploring theories of consciousness as viewed through the eyes of an unnamed protagonist” (Dobson and Iftody 67). He meets multiple people along his journey and each one offers a new philosophical perspective about the dream state in which he is perpetually entrapped. Certain aspects of the character’s dream world do not make sense, nor do they need to, since it is a dream we are seeing. Animation is used to signify to audiences that the protagonist is still dreaming, and what we are seeing is not a state of reality. He is unable to wake up from this dream, this altered mental state.
What is especially interesting about this film in particular is that the subject matter of the narrative content and the animation technique of the form mirror one another. The film is “rotoscoped”, which is “a process that entails drawing over live-action footage to create animation” and was first invented in 1917 “to capture the complexity of human movement” (Dobson and Iftody 68). Although the technique is not new to filmmakers, Linklater’s film differs, as its goal is to avoid consistency and photorealism, which is usually the common goal amongst major animation houses such as Disney and Pixar when employing rotoscoping techniques. The film was shot on handheld digital video cameras and Linklater gave the final picture cut to a team of animators who used newly developed software to “paint” or “draw” over the existing footage. The team employed a “style that is unprecedently artful,” using the software to create “variants on, rather than copies of, reality” (Bainbridge qtd. In Dobson and Iftody 68).
The film is subversive as it neglects typical conventions of rotoscoping. It is used here to make unclear the boundaries of reality and fabrication; waking state and dream state; consciousness and the subconscious. The use of live-action footage realism mixed with unnerving, unpredictable animation, projects a certain confusion concerning what is real and what is not real. As a reviewer notes, “something that looks disconcertingly like physical reality is perpetually swarming and re-settling and re-configuring itself: an effect which is comic, playful, but also disturbing” (Bradshaw qtd in Dobson and Iftody 69).
One scene in Waking Life, like many others in the film, begins with a conversation between the unnamed protagonist dreamer and a second unknown individual. However, one scene specifically, presenting the “self-destructive man”, is particularly disturbing, undoubtedly drawing a reaction from the audience. While he is talking to the young protagonist, they walk down the street, reach a gas station, and stop momentarily while the man fills a red tank with gasoline. They continue to walk, and he asks for a match mid-conversation. The young man hands him a match. He sits down, cross-legged, finishes his rant about destruction, death, chaos, the system, and then announces that this is his way of letting his own lack of a voice be heard. He pours the gasoline all over himself, lights the match, drops it in his lap, and immediately goes up in bright orange and yellow flames. Black smoke billows from the ignited man. His body quickly burns, becomes unrecognizable, an unidentifiable human figure made up of blackened muscle tissue. Passers by stop and stare. He falls to the side and continues to burn. The scene cuts and the film continues.
Rotoscoping made this scene possible, but the inclusion of live action footage and recognizable actors brings a disturbing and unsettling level of humanity and reality to the film. When paired with animated additions such as the flaming man and the other impossible scenarios depicted throughout the film, the audience is forced to look self-reflexively at the film and question what is real and what is not. The presence of recognizable humans paired with animated distortions causes an uneasy and uncomfortable effect on audiences. The disturbing conversation the audience has been listening to while the two men walk for several blocks is suddenly interrupted by the man’s self-inflicted incineration. A purely animated film would not have had the same unsettling impact on audiences, as fully animated characters are not associated with reality. We are accustomed to seeing cartoon characters injure or kill one another for comedic effect. Films employing rotoscope techniques that maintain a certain level of reality, as seen in Waking Life, constantly interrupt the viewers’ notion of reality, humanity, and realism, with sporadic, unnerving doses of animated falsity, challenging the audience’s conventional, passive viewing practices.
Satoshi Kon’s Paprika (2006) is a fully animated film, playing with similar philosophical questions regarding the dream. In the film, a mechanism has been invented that can be used to enter others’ dreams. The invention is used for psychology purposes. The entire film is animated, both the dream state and the conscious state of the characters. However, as the film progresses, the antagonist becomes obsessed with taking over the dream world, controlling everyone’s dreams. He has enabled dream objects and people to enter reality, and real people to see dream objects and people in real life, even while awake. The borders of the dream world and reality become increasingly blurred, and both the audience and the diegetic characters are unaware as to what is real and what belongs in the depths of one’s subconscious.
In contrast to films constructing the adult dream state, Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951), conveys the imaginative dream world of a child. Alice dozes off during her history lesson and finds herself in an enchanting place called Wonderland where the flowers can speak and a caterpillar smokes from a pipe. Leading up to her falling asleep she proclaims that if she had a world of her own, everything would be nonsense. Once asleep, we are offered a mesmerizing dreamscape where everything and everyone are nonsensical.
While considering the intoxicated state, Linklater’s 2006 film A Scanner Darkly must most definitely be discussed. The film, like Linklater’s Waking Life, is rotoscoped, which is consciously chosen to blur the lines between reality and an altered mental state. We are exposed to famous actors who are recognizable through the animation. Simultaneously, we are shown animated nonsensical objects and manipulations of the human face and figure, which serve to distort our perception of reality, reflecting the intoxicated character’s mental state in the narrative. Keanu Reeves plays a drug addict named Robert Archer, who lacks a stable identity. He is addicted to a drug referred to as “Substance D”. He works as an undercover narcotics agent, and wears a suit that makes him look like “a constantly shifting vague blur”. The suit is constantly shifting identities, scrambling various human features. Medical professionals tell him that he has a defect in his perception. This suit visualizes Archer’s unstable identity and scattered, intoxicated mental state.
Another notable image in the film is when Freck decides to commit suicide. He turns on his radio, and the voice narrates to the audience Freck’s decision and subsequent plan. He meticulously plans his death, and when he finally chases a whole bottle of pills with a connoisseur wine, he begins to hallucinate instead of drifting away into a quiet death. He is faced with a “creature from between dimensions” that reads him his sins. The creature is a bright yellow colour, with dozens of eyeballs all over his head. Because of the use of rotoscoping, this scene is able to construct and present to the audience what it is that Freck is hallucinating about after he takes the drugs. It is a peculiar and unsettling image, let alone the immeasurable list of sins Freck must painfully endure. Furthermore, the abundance of recognizable Hollywood actors featured in this film, once again, take hold of the audience’s preconceptions of these stars, placing them in reality, and then are taken aback whilst the bizarre and unthinkable unfolds onscreen.
Films that exemplify traumatic experience using animation as a means of escape include Ralph Bakshi’s Cool World (1992) and comic illustrator Dave McKean’s Mirrormask (2005). In Cool World, Brad Pitt’s character takes his mother for a motorcycle ride and she is killed. He becomes trapped in an animated world as the unfortunate events replay in his mind for what seems like an eternity. Mirrormask is a beautiful blend of live-action and digital animation. It is about a teenage girl who is dissatisfied with the life she has been dealt. She is the daughter of two circus performers, and she must partake in their theatrical escapades. After an emotionally charged tantrum she throws toward her mother, only to find out that her mother is very sick and is soon in the hospital, she enters a world filled with animated creatures and surreal landscapes. The characters she meets and the world in which they inhabit are in animation, while she remains live-action. She watches through windows as her ungrateful, inconsiderate “other” self acts out, disrespecting her parents, and herself. She must find the mirrormask and save the kingdom before she can return home. She must escape from this fantastical realm in which she has become trapped. She left reality to enter a world of escape, and now she needs to escape the parallel world to return to reality and make things right. McKean explains his intentions in creating a fantasy film:
What I wanted from MirrorMask is to connect the fantasy to real human life. Films about fairies and hobbits mean absolutely nothing to me. I'll never meet a hobbit. It will never be an issue in my life. But a film about someone who needs to believe in fairies can be fascinating. What drives that person, what's the problem, what's happened in their brain to make them believe? That stuff is fascinating and wonderful. But a film about fairies couldn't be more uninteresting to me. (McKean qtd in Silverman)
McKean utilized elaborate digital animation to create a fantasy world, but chooses to combine the brilliant animation with live-action footage in order to communicate to audiences that this fantastical realm and these mystical creatures are products of a young girl’s tormented imagination which can be attributed to the obstacles she must face in reality and ongoing life lessons she must confront.
Many animated films center around a child and their submersion into a world of their own imagination. Wolfgang Petersen’s 1984 film The NeverEnding Story is about a child’s running imagination while reading a fictional story. He reads about enchanting creatures, touching friendships and a heroic journey. The animation encapsulates the expansive capacities young children’s have to imagine.
Spirited Away (dir. Miyazaki, 2001) is a magical story about a young girl who is apprehensive about moving to a new house in a new place. It is “a coming-of-age quest, a reflection on alter egos, an adult fable and, no less crucially, an adventurous experiment with both traditional and burgeoning animation, fairytalish and comical, with effective […] forays into horror” (Cavallaro 146). The child’s imagination runs wild, as the family gets closer to the mysterious destination. The beginning of the film has a “fairy-tale simplicity” prior to the young girl’s emersion into the surreal world. During the course of the film she must learn responsibility and independence, and ultimately becomes a mature young woman. Andrew Osmond delves into Miyazaki’s film in his book named after the film. He explains that “cartoons were busting out of the children’s ghetto, following the lead of ‘The Simpsons’”, and additionally, “Western animated films were praised for including split-level, dual-response jokes and references, many designed to fly over children’s heads. Dani Cavallaro quotes Hayao Miyazaki directly, stating that this film is “for the people who used to be 10-years old, and the people who are going to be 10-years old” (134). Cavallaro goes on to say that, “this statement is highly evocative in concisely encapsulating Miyasaki’s approach to the worlds of children and adults as frequently incompatible yet also inveterately complementary realms” (134). Spirited Away stood out because of its lack of obvious split-level humour and also because its most obvious inspirations (to Westerners) weren’t cartoons or comics, but children’s books, especially ‘Alice in Wonderland’” (8). The young protagonist, Chihiro, initially has an immature outlook, is close-minded and uninterested in moving, and appears rather selfish. Osmond notes that, “the ghost town at the start of the film may look lost, forgotten by a superficial modernity […] but then the perspective switches, and its Chihiro who’s lost amid Japan’s heritage of gods and bathhouses, stripped of even her name” (9-10). Later on in the film, while enveloped in the parallel world, she has the “grave, determined expression of a weathered adventurer in a children’s story; Alice in Wonderland, perhaps, or The Wizard of Oz” (Osmond 7).
The film’s original Japanese title is Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi. Dani Cavallaro explains, in his book “The Anime Art of Hayao Miyazaki”, that the term “Kamikakushi literally refers to the situation of a person who is missing from the ordinary world as a result of having strayed into the world of the spirits” (135). Osmond explains that many Japanese animated films “could be live-action; the animation heightens details and atmospherics that become powerfully expressionist by being drawn” (22). Furthermore, he states that Miyazaki’s films are “taken to another level by their world-building, depicting characters in and of their worlds, where we feel their surroundings are as richly detailed, imaginatively boundless and paper-thin” (Osmond 22). Not only is Hayao Miyazaki’s film visually mesmerizing, he also repeatedly alludes to adult issues and tensions throughout the narrative: issues of consumerism and materialism, environmental depletion, the horrors of war, totalitarian regimes, societal atomization, the sinister realities of juvenile prostitution, child abuse, and pedophilia (Cavallaro 139) “The exploration of these tensions that inevitably occur between and within natural, social, political, economic, domestic, and fantastic environments in such a fashion as to convey the impression that what is unraveling before our eyes is a grimly familiar dream” (ibid 141). This film is presenting audiences with the imagination of a child, but is able to communicate adult issues and tensions seamlessly. Many films with the intention of portraying the curious mind of a child often use animation, including Spirited Away, as well as Terry Gilliam’s Tideland (2005), Jan Svankmajer’s part-animated Alice (1988), Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010), Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951), Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are (2009), and Mirrormask (2005). These films present a child in “surreal, threatening environments” (Osmond 10).
Henry Selick’s Coraline (2009), very similarly, is about a young girl who is also hesitant about moving into a new house. She begins to explore the uncharted house and surrounding property, discovering her bizarre neighbours and alter-ego parents. The stop-frame animation is used throughout the film, but becomes more vibrant and elusive when Coraline is in the alternate realm. The story is reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland complete with a talking cat mentor, a dark, transitional tunnel, an evil maternal figure, compliant father figure, and a world filled with everything Coraline thought she wanted. The animation is used to signify an altered space that the child has concocted in her imagination during her exploratory adventures and escapist dreaming. This new space is filled with all of Coraline’s greatest desires and imaginative experiences.
Where the Wild Things Are (2009) features a young boy who does not understand why his older sister is mean to him, and why his mother doesn’t do anything about it. He goes to bed without dinner. The frame narrative is live-action. The boy runs away from home and finds himself in a strange place where he meets a group of large creatures that look to him for guidance. In a position of authority, he learns to understand what his mother is going through. The creatures are computer animated, reflecting the boy’s running imagination as he comes to understand reality. Guillermo’s 2007 dark film Pan’s Labyrinth is a story about a young girl who escapes her miserable reality and torturous stepfather only to face an equally horrifying monster in her imagination. She must overcome her deepest fears in her mind before she can muster up the courage to take on the antagonist who consumes her unfortunate reality.
Persepolis (2007) is a film that tells the story of a child trying to understand the adult world, eager to learn more and more. This film is an adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel memoir, offering an accurate and realistic depiction of a young girl’s childhood growing up in Iran. Paul Wells and Johnny Hardstaff discuss the film in their book “Re-Imagining Animation: The Changing Face of the Moving Image”, stating that the film “offers an insight characterized by the politicization of her gender and race identity, and is charged with ideological challenge by virtue, first, as its status as a graphic novel, and second, by its adaptation as an animated feature” (40). We enter her young mind as she overhears bits and pieces of information throughout the narrative, concerning the ongoing political happenings, and we are offered the visual theatrics of a young, curious mind projected via animation. Alternatively, there are animated films that strive to explore and depict the often forgotten or ignored imagination of adults, such as Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (2009). While Dani Cavallaro discusses Spirited Away, he discusses the cinematic approach to adults and imagination, “adults who are willing to revisit imaginatively their childhood and to let the film guide them in that direction” (135).
It is evident that animation is utilized as a means to visually represent the altered mental state of the adult or the child as they attempt to escape their limited realities. Depictions of adult mental states can range from dreams to intoxication, trauma, or long lost imagination, while depictions of the child’s escaping mental states are often presented in the form of a dream or imagination as they attempt to live vicariously through their wild fantasies rather than their incomplete or dissatisfied reality. Different modes of animation are used to engage with audiences in varying but intentional ways. Live action and animation blends using “rotoscope” is employed to confront audiences with pervasive questions of reality and fantasy, while fully animated pictures lure audiences into alternative worlds where they must interpret the function of animation, which is often embedded in the narrative itself. When live action and animation is combined in film, it is often done to represent the dual realms evolving in the mind of the main character being fantasy and reality. While animated films pursuing adult narratives differ from children’s animated narratives, there is often room for adult audiences to engage with both, as we have all experienced the adventurous capabilities of the childhood imagination. We have only briefly forgotten.
Works Cited
Alice in Wonderland. Dir. Clyde Geronimi. Perf. Kathryn Baumont, Ed Wynn, Richard Haydn,
Sterling Holloway, and Jerry Colonna. Disney, 1951. Film.
Alice in Wonderland. Dir. Tim Burton. Perf. Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Mia
Wasikowska, and Anne Hathaway. Disney, 2010. Film.
A Scanner Darkly. Dir. Richard Linklater. Perf. Rory Cochrane, Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder,
Woody Harrelson, and Robert Downey Jr. Warner Independent, 2006. Film.
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Big Fish. Dir. Tim Burton. Perf. Ewan McGregor, Albert Finnet, Helena Bonham Carter, and
Billy Crudup. Columbia, 2003. Film.
Cool World. Dir. Ralph Bakshi. Perf. Brad Pitt, Kim Basinger, Gabriel Byrne, and Michele
Abrams. Paramount, 1992. Film.
Coraline. Dir. Henry Selick. Perf. Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, and Robert Bailey Jr. Focus
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Bacall, and Emily Mortimer. Buena Vista, 2004. Film.
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Mirrormask. Dir. Dave McKean. Perf. Stephanie Leonidas, Jason Barry, Rob Brydon, and Gina
McKee. Jim Henson, 2005. Film.
Osmond, Andrew. Spirited Away. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008.
Pan’s Labyrinth. Dir. Guillermo del Toro. Perf. Ivana Baquero, Sergi Lopez, Ariadna Gil, and
Maribel Verdu. Estudios Picasso. 2007. Film.
Paprika. Dir. Satoshi Kon. Perf. Megumi Hayashibara, Toru Furuya, and Koichi Yamadera.
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Persepolis. Dir. Vincent Paronnaud, Marjane Satrapi. Perf. Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine
Deneuve, Danielle Darrieux, Simon Abkarian, and Gabrielle Lopes Benites. 2.4.7. Films,
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Farrel, Jude Law, Andrew Garfield, Lily Cole, and Christopher Plummer. Infinity
Features, 2009. Film.
The NeverEnding Story. Dir. Wolfgang Petersen. Perf. Barret Oliver, Gerald McRaney, Noah
Hathaway, and Alan Oppenheimer. Neue Constantin, 1984. Film.
Tideland. Dir. Terry Gilliam. Perf. Jeff Bridges, Janet McTeer, Brendan Fletcher, and Jodelle
Ferland. Recorded Picture Company, 2005. Film.
Waking Life. Dir. Richard Linklater. Perf. Wiley Wiggins, Eamonn Healy, Trevor Jack Brooks,
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Where the Wild Things Are. Dir. Spike Jonze. Perf. Max Records, Catherine Keener, Mark
Ruffalo, and James Gandolfini. Warner, 2009. Film.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Perf. Bob Hoskins, Christopher Lloyd,
Joanna Cassidy, and Charles Fleischer. Amblin Entertainment, 1988. Film.
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