Waking Life and Liquid Caricature
Any isolated frame of this sequence, if frozen, would make Healy look like a grotesque. But in motion, he actually appears intensely vibrant and alive. This moving caricature gets at Healy's living self, as both a body and an intellect: the restless wiggle of his figure, which seems always on the edge of mitosis, visually puns off Healy's idea that the next level of human evolution will be driven by the mind, rather than by purely physical processes. The animation allows him to become a figurative fulfillment of his own prophecy.
The expressive flow of gesture that rotoscoping is here used to capture, for the sake of artistic exaggeration, is very unlike the rehearsed gestures of Snow White. There, the gestures were coached beforehand, in order to match the plan of the animation: gesture was used to give form to a theatrical idea. The gestures express, but they don't reveal. The body and movements of Marjorie Belcher, the dancer and actress used as filmic reference for Snow White, were used as intermediaries -- placeholders between idea and execution.
Film captures gesture in a way no other medium can; the motion picture camera is the technology that has brought all the subtle nuances of gesture into the fold of artistic contemplation. The way the camera "notices" incremental movements and expressions has transformed the physicality of acting, moving it from melodrama that could be "read" from the back seats of the theater, to a more subdued naturalism (the most visible contemporary trace of the earlier, theatrical mode of acting is of course the cartoon, where the use of the emphatic still seems "natural").
The physical acting behind the rotoscope of Snow White stands at an interesting pivot-point. While that telegraphed, pantomime style was already well receding from the screen by 1937 -- brought about by a technology of vision that essentially magnifies small gestures, collapsing the space between the physicality of the performer and the eye of the audience -- Belcher was being coached to push her style in the opposite direction, back toward the emphatic, so that it wouldn't clash too much with its cartoon environment. So the camera-eye is both destroying a mode of acting, and being used to project that mode of acting into a reinvigorated art. Rushing forward and backward at once, old styles are meeting with new forms, turning on the fulcrum of the rotoscope.
(If this seems a too coldly technical eye to put on the use of motion in film, consider that the rise of caricature as an art form was facilitated partly by technical means: it was the rise of etching that allowed the reproduction of the fine, light linework that best abetted caricatural wit. The line engraving that preceded etching was too stiff and formal to support such tossed-off fancy.)
Both the animated gestures of Snow White and Eamonn Healy can be understood as caricatures of motion. The first is analogous to the caricature of "types;" the distortion of gesture doesn't reveal anything of the essence of the individual performer, rather it amplifies emotional states. It is meant to evoke qualities, not personality. The latter example is nothing but personality.
The kind of gestures Waking Life pays such heightened attention to are usually noticed, in ordinary film, at the margins of performance. But in Waking Life, the revelatory qualities of gesture are nearly the whole film itself. It is a movie that repeatedly asks: What is identity? What is self? It offers no final answer except the evanescent, living dance of forms, expressions and gestures -- quivering over the surface of a dream, like a skin of colors stretched across the spheral screen of a bubble.
Perhaps this is part of the eerie magnetism of the spectral Walrus. Calloway himself has gone to the boneyard. By capturing Calloway's idiosyncratic dance (not only has no Walrus ever danced that way -- no other human being has), that rotoscoped trace -- emanating yet also isolated from his body -- captures some mirror ricochet of his soul.
Chris Lanier is an animator, writer and cartoonist living in San Francisco.
Printer-friendly version
Post new comment