ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.05 - AUGUST 2000

The Aesthetics of Internet Animation
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A Different Interactivity
Take a crude example: first, we see a panel of an angry mouse, his arm cocked back, a brick clutched in his hand. In the next panel, we see a cat, lying prone on her back, a welt raised on her forehead and a cracked brick lying in halves at her feet. The brick has certainly met up with the feline cranium (Heisenbergian metaphysics left temporarily aside), but where has this meeting taken place? The quick answer is in the "gutter," the white space between panels one and two. However, the truer answer is: within the reader's head.

The "gutter" is spatial, but, applied temporally, it becomes an edit. Both the gutter and an edit mark out the boundaries between self-contained semantic units, the panel for comics and the shot for cinema. Some degree of "closure" is necessary to piece things into a narrative in both cases, and both the "gutter" and edit can be used to either extend or minimize the amount of closure. In a comic, staying with my above example, you could insert another panel between the first and the second, showing the brick fused to the cat's forehead, in a moment of perpetual contact, throwing off a handful of frozen stars. In a film, you could have a 3D POV shot of the brick leaving the mouse's hand, tumbling through the air and striking the cat. You could have an x-ray shot of the cat's skull fracturing. The Dolby sound system could wallop your eardrums. You could even employ a friend to whack you over the head with a two-by-four at the moment of impact for complete authenticity. However, to have a shot of the mouse cocking his arm back, followed by a shot of the cat lying supine, a welt on her forehead, etc., is far more suggestive. Instead of providing a sensory stimulus, you've presented a puzzle for the audience to solve.

Abstracted Storytelling
Of course, this brick-and-cranium example is crudely mechanical. The extension of closure becomes far more exciting when, instead of being applied to mechanical causalities, it is applied to ideas. Taking the notion of closure from comics, where it is explicit, and applying it to cinema, where it is less obvious, we can push animation into the territory of a lucid, complex picture-language. In this manner, animation can deliver us into a world where the differences between words and shapes are blurred: a world of motile (and perhaps even emotive) hieroglyphics.

In this regard, I pay more attention to the progression of images than I do to fluidity of movement. I try to articulate sequences of imagistic comparisons and contrasts, to render abstract ideas into concrete forms, and to nudge concrete forms into the realm of abstraction. I utilize text not to explain, but to suggest -- to begin a thought that the audience must finish.

So finally, I've come to accept (or rationalize) the technical limitations of Web animation as a departure point for greater imaginative investment. Through juxtapositions, comparisons and transformations, meaning is made. The aesthetic spark is not one of spectacle, but of making connections; drawing information and images together into constellations of meaning. Of course, this causes me to view the advent of broadband with a degree of trepidation, hoping that the pipeline won't simply be a lab-rat wire, aimed directly at my helpless ganglia. In the meantime, I'm happy to cultivate an aesthetic approach that draws viewers into a created world by appealing to their curiosity and to create puzzles that find their solutions in poetry.

Chris Lanier is the creator of the Web cartoon Romanov, running on www.wildbrain.com.
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