Brown Blog Films

“Animation is not the art of drawings that move but the art of movements that are drawn.”  -  Norman McLaren

Actions speak louder than words…

Pixar's One Man Band

 I went to the recent AIB World Street Performance recently and saw some fantastic acts. They had a huge variety of different types of street performers who were some of the best in the world at their particular craft.

 What really got my interest was a performer called “That Man” from Northern Ireland. As his press notes say to perfection, “Take two cups of charm, half an ounce of style, a sprinkle of Diabolo and a pinch of mind-blowing choreography. Top it all off with as much skill as you can and what you will end up with is a seriously slick show which is perfect for the whole family. That Man’s sharp, clever entertainment masterpiece is living proof that you don’t need words to create something amazing.”

He got me thinking of the basic principles of animation and how a great story can be told without any words.

So many animated films and TV shows are now all about wise-cracking main characters or side-kicks. They have way too many über smart, fast talking characters and it seems pointless to make many shows into an animation  at all.

 Since the indie boom of the early nineties, and in the films of Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino, lots of films have every character talking like they’re a stand-up comic.

Everyone has a genius putdown or a phrase at hand to respond to any situation. This rapid response syndrome has since seemed to seep through to the rest of the new wave of rude, crude and irreverent script writers. This is fine for some films or television shows but films can get very repetitive when every character seems to have the same amazing knowledge of music, comics and pop culture is general. Sure it would be quite boring if they all talked as mundanely as the average Joe on the streets ,but having them all talk like Kevin Smith himself gets very tiresome and unbelievable very quickly.

Shrek was never a favourite of mine but one thing it did have in its favour was that the reference points it lampooned were not very modern. The film took a dig at all of the old fairytales, Disney or otherwise, that people know and love and are in the general psyche.  Unfortunately because of its success, uncreative execs in the same and other studios released more and more animated films that have the same type of irreverent characters and too many ‘of the now’ cultural references. This makes the films  become instantly dated and not worthy of any repeated viewing.

So what I’m saying is please less talking more acting (animation).

Animation is a visual language. This should always be the main reason why a film is made in animation and not live-action. Now with so many special effects films the dividing line is getting smaller, but that is where animation needs to take a stand and be distinguished as a separate medium.

Style is one major factor in this. Everyone has seen the lifelike effects being produced in computer animation but few have seen a computer animation piece with a very distinctive or even brand new style in a mainstream feature film.

With every medium at its infancy, people always try to recreate reality. Be it in the renaissance and even early 2D animation, people always tried to fool the audience into questioning what was real or not. But then after a while this gets tiring until someone like Picasso comes along who could make it look perfectly real but instead bucks the trend and creates an entirely new amazing style. This happened in 2D and can be seen clearly in the genius work produced by UPA Pictures in the 1950’s.

However even with this studio it style eventually became more important then anything else and viewers got bored. It’s fine to view a single image in a brand new style, but if you are expected to view 5mins or more of this then it needs to complement and work with the story, story, story!

SO…back to the “That Man”!

Well without any words in his act that lasted about 30mins, he got every message, emotion and theme across perfectly, just with his skilled movement.

This is what animation is all about.

Observing real life and exaggerating it.

Having read so many scripts with long winded dialogue telling us how the characters feel, I always see what can be removed and be shown simply and more effectively with an action. As I said, this is a visual medium so you can say much more with a well timed blink or eye movement, a raise of the eyebrow, a shrug of the shoulder or a puffing of the cheeks.

A great modern example is to look at the Pixar short films. They have made 12 short films (independent of feature tie-ins) and although only one of them uses words, every single one carries its story perfectly.

Just look at the acting in the piece “One Man Band” and see how much emotion can be derived from action alone. The girl’s performance is one of the most touching and funny I’ve yet to see in animation. My favourite part is…well…let’s just see…

 After all, actions do speak louder than words!

So until next time stay animated!