Animation Art Appreciation – by Prakash Moorthy

It is essential for all animators to understand animation as a medium and appreciate it in a deeper sense. All famous classic animation films have a certain artistic way of expression which sets them apart from the rest.

Animation is art and many artistic elements are involved in the making of animation films. Professionals and students alike need to understand the importance of knowledge of art for animation and the need for originality of ideas and method of expression.

The second session of the day at Anifest India '08, on Animation Art Appreciation by Prakash Moorthy was dedicated to the purpose of awakening the aesthetic sense in animators.

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"A baker bakes bread, prepares the dough, sweetens it, and puts in all his love in kneading it. When the bread is ready, he slices the bread. Each slice of the bread carries the fragrance of the bread and celebrates the wheat that went into making it; the hard work; the green grass and the sunshine. In the same way, photographs or images are like the slices. They retain the texture, fragrance and the whole story from which it has been taken. They represent the recorded event in all its totality."

In the same way, an animator must strive to make a film which represents the whole of the bread; it should talk about the larger picture through its single slice.

"Animation," Moorthy said, "is the art of movements that are drawn; not drawings that move."

The one thing that inspires all artists and animators alike is - expression. During the era of Expressionism, artists realized that art provides an ideal medium to express themselves and they began making paintings that depicted subjective feelings that were reactions to reality.

With a brief introduction to the history of art, using some classic animated films, Moorthy tried to show the audience that at some point, some moment in artistic history instigated animators to express their concerns and the Expressionist era played a very important role in this. He ended the narration of history of art by emphasising, "Let's agree that animation is indeed art."

Moorthy then went on to demonstrate in detail, the essential aesthetic elements that an animated film should include. These elements include studium and punctum, time, mimesis and abstraction, humour and the idea of freedom.

The elements that really draw the audience into a film are studium and punctum. Studium is the entire image or the frame while the punctum is a particular object within the frame or a studium that draws the attention of the audience and attracts them. He also added that punctum are used to bring out the right message to the audience. A clear understanding of these concepts can be found in Miazaki films.

"Animation is art moving in time." The whole idea of the depiction of time changed when a certain film based on a book called An Incident at Owl's Bridge. A short-film made completely on the split second imagination of a man while he was being hanged, opened people's imagination to what they could do with time. One can go back in time and reverse time in their film.

Mimicry is done through the desire to produce natural reality such as is shown in a live action movies where one constructs reality. It is born out of a desire to produce reality whereas abstraction is pure form, such as art, a drawing, a sculpture. Through the film called It's Tough to be a Bird by Walt Disney, he showed that some films attempt to suggest the concept rather than an attempt to explicate it in real terms.

Humour exists in many forms such as sarcasm, dark humour, slapstick, surreal, parody, etc but one cannot dissect it to understand it. One can only make general observations on how different kinds of humour work. This was demonstrated through the screening of Screwball Squirrel and Killing of an Egg.

Moorthy also pointed out a surprising fact that every film or artistic concept deals with the ideal of freedom. A film depicts either the lack of freedom or the celebration of freedom which he pointed out with a short film, Paradise.

The presentation was followed by a Q&A session. Some of the questions asked were about the effective usage of studium and punctum in animation and about why Indian art form was not very popular in the world.

In reply, Moorthy pointed out that in live action films, stadium and punctum are used in production design which includes costumes, lighting, etc. Here, the punctum would mainly be the casting and the actions and features of the actor who could draw the audience with his/her vulnerability. The trick is to make the character enduring by making him vulnerable.

Combining the art of film making and the concepts of art itself, Moothy drew the attention of the audience to the importance of understanding the aesthetics of animation.

The message that he was looking to bring out through his presentation was that animators have a responsibility to say which art is good, bad, progressive or regressive. They should be aware and responsible for the kind of message they are bringing out through their films and that they should try and have some originality in their work, which is only possible once they explore art and animation as an art.

ankita.shah@animationxpress.com