Waking Life and Liquid Caricature
More recently, Disney has moved from considering caricature as a source of inspiration to a mandate, modeling the character designs directly on their "name" voice actors. There's wit on display here, in the Hirshfeld-like desire to whittle the essence of a face down to its sparest lines. Though, unsurprisingly, this is wit inextricably entangled with the logic of marketing: if you pay the money for name voices, you want to make sure you can sell their celebrity. Celebrity is a kind of currency, and while a caricature is an expression of personality, it can also be "branding" -- the sublimate face as corporate logo.
We're such a celebrity-inundated culture that it may seem strange to speak of caricature outside the realm of fame and notoriety. Caricature has a number of modes outside of fame, however -- the caricature of definite, individual personalities was actually a late development, preceded by the caricature of "types," whether they be social, moral or racial.
And when the caricature of the individual did appear -- under the pen of the Italian Annibale Carracci, in the 1600s -- it first played on intimate physiognomies, not public ones. As the art historian E. H. Gombrich writes: "...the Italian caricature of the seventeenth century was a pastime for leisure hours only. The victims of such caricatures were not public heroes but friends of the studio, dilettanti and noblemen, enlightened enough to be flattered by these fruits of passing whim and gentle mockery."
While I have no way of knowing how many dilettanti and noblemen are on the roster of Waking Life, there are certainly many "friends of the studio;" people from the Austin film scene where Linklater made his name. In fact, the handful of performers in Waking Life who might be considered famous -- Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, Steven Soderbergh -- are animated without being caricatured. The is no desire to use caricatures to play off the recognition of a wide audience, but simply to amplify and distil the subject's individualized personal traits; and in this narrow regard, at least, Waking Life is a new-tech throwback to personal caricature's infant studio days.
Also, when caricature is used in Waking Life, it's very different from the usual fixed stylization of caricatural animation: an effect as though the subject's facial features had been extended and abstracted into an articulated mask. Rather, the caricatures exist as flickering, shimmering indeterminacies. This is an effect achieved through a novel usage of rotoscope, which is also employed by the animators to caricature something more intangible than physiognomy: at times, Waking Life moves into a personalized caricature of motion.
Rotoscoping at its most basic is the tracing of a photographic image, projected onto animation paper or an animation cel, in order to create a series of animated frames. Bob Sabiston's process doesn't exactly use those analog configurations, but it still deals with the tracing of figures over a recorded image, and he himself has referred to it as a rotoscoping process.
While rotoscoping's initial use was met with praise -- critics found rotoscoped animation amazingly fluid and "realistic" -- it has since then been generally looked down upon. The most obvious reason for this is that it appears less "artistic;" the hand isn't creating something out of thin air, rather it's following the lead of a mechanical apparatus.
But there are artistic possibilities hidden in the act of tracing and rotoscoping has never been a purely mechanical process; it produces its own peculiar artifacts. Waking Life is the first animated feature to embrace those artifacts and actually compound them until they make up a coherent artistic vision.
Printer-friendly version
Post new comment