The Drive to Realism: From Disney to Harryhausen to Landreth — Part 1
In these films, something impossibly real was being inserted into our world, creating an altered reality rather than a totally new one. So the more realistic the design and movement of the animation, the better. The real elements such as the actors had such absolute, automatic audience identification built into them that they naturally set the standards for credibility. It was the animator's job to match that, not fight it.
Harryhausen had a deep sense of the importance of this. Pioneering as he went along, he not only advanced the standards for building and animating creatures, but also accounted for atmospheric details like the draft that would be created by the wing action of a giant bird. So when the live-action plates were being shot, he would have fans available to stir up waves and dust. The result was a much greater sense of integration between the fantasy elements and the real ones, which set a new standard for what audiences would accept.
For a long time, classical and model animation existed side by side, each dealing quite separately with realism within the boundaries of their particular technology. In fact, though Harryhausen identified himself as an animator (and, of course, was the true, if uncredited, director of most of his films) he did not identify with the cartoon community. Frustrated that, for the general public, the word "animation" had become a synonym for cartoons, he even gave his process a new name, Dynamation, to clearly distinguish it. And for classical animators, model animation was barely a blip on the radar.
Then along came CG and suddenly, worlds collided. Model animators and classical animators each brought different advantages to the development of the new technology. But whose approach would dominate? Would classical animators simply add the extra dimension to their existing technique and carry the field? Or would the model animators exert their obvious superiority with 3D and finally get a little respect? And most importantly, how did this effect the development of realism?
In spite of appearances, the dust hasn't settled on this subject yet. In the next article we'll explore these questions, which have everything to do with the future of realism in animation, of animation itself and by extension, of cinema in general. This is more of a cliffhanger than you may think.
Ellen Besen studied animation at Sheridan in the early 1970s. Since then she has directed award-winning films both independently and for the NFB, worked as a film programmer and journalist, taught storytelling and animation filmmaking at Sheridan and given story workshops at many institutions and festivals, including the Ottawa International Animation Festival. She is the director of The Zachary Schwartz Institute for Animation Filmmaking, an online school that specializes in storytelling and writing for animation.
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