2012 NOTES FOR JONNI
AKA A NARRATIVE MANIFESTO FOR THE ANIMATION-MAKING YOUTH PART ONE by ingo raschka
Watch Ingo’s fim “2012” for reference
DISCLAIMER: This essay is currently not backed up by any sources, and is mostly informed by my own experience and perceived understanding of the history of animation. That said, I have tried to only present things as fact where i know them to be, and be clear about what is opinion and what is not. Please approach reading this with caution and a critical lens, and definitely cross-reference my points before repeating any of them as fact.
In animation discourse it is commonly said that “story” (whatever that is) is the most important part of a film. There is also an idea that when making a film your “story” is never finished-- it can always be tweaked or perfected. These two unsavory ideas combine to create an institutional pressure to have your story (whether it takes the form of script, boards, animatic or else) constantly critiqued by your peers, and to continue ‘refining’ it right up until the last minute before you start actually making it.
However, these ideas are baseless and useless. And they can have consequences which may inhibit the growth of young animated film makers. In this write-up I will both debunk these ideas and propose an alternate approach for making animated films-- and how I developed this alternate approach through making my student film, 2012. Some of this knowledge is not medium specific- it can also be applied to storytelling in other forms. But since I make animation, it will mostly focus on the specific concerns of the medium of animation- which is a unique medium that requires special attention due to the fact that even small animations require massive amounts of work. It is also my belief that because of this, these ideas can cause excess harm to animators over live-action filmmakers- in ways that i will describe.
So: “The Story is the most important part of a film,” is what they would have you believe. This statement reveals itself to be founded upon the idea that a film can be separated into parts. But when does this separation happen? Is it separated by the film’s creators, when the film is in the process of being made? Does the viewer split the film into parts in her head, when watching the film? Or after viewing, when analyzing and critiquing what she’s seen?
When we are in the process of making a film, we separate it based on the type of work that has to be done. This seems to be useful since we can only focus on one thing at a time- especially when we are working alone. And if we work as part of a team or group, they say, we can get a more “finished” product by assigning specialists to each separate part of the work. This way, each part of the pipeline can be addressed by a specialist in that specific area. The industry has grown to be dominated by specialists of this type. I only do “story,” I only do “animation,” I only do “layout”-- or perhaps I only do (god forbid) “ink and paint.” We need only to look back a few decades to see that separating animation labor into parts based on importance can manifest in the creation of hierarchies, which usually result in the perceived “important” work being regulated to certain types of people (generally men), and the work that is seen as more menial, tedious, or worst of all ‘unskilled labor,’ such as ink and paint, being regulated to others- in the case of disney, being explicitly regulated to women. We’re not often reminded that almost every image we have ever seen in a 20th century cartoon is a physical painting made by women workers.
But can a film even be stratified like this in the first place? Even if you can understand a film’s events by watching an animatic or reading storyboards, I’ve never heard of anyone having fun doing those things. I could know the events of a film by being told them, or reading a summary, but no one would say that reading a description of a film is a replacement for watching one. What all this implies is that at some point during production, the film goes from being a boring chore to something that is fun and entertaining to watch. The production stage, which is usually thought of as including animation, backgrounds, cleanup and color, provides the physical images we see in a finished film. It’s also normally thought of as the most tedious, repetitive, and boring part of the filmmaking process. But the main thing that production provides to a film is the elusive ingredient- something whose importance is overlooked. It might be referred to as finishedness.
Finishedness is something whose definition changes with time. It exists in most art forms, but in animation, its definition is directly linked to the development of the technologies we use to make animated films. People think of it as a certain standard, or threshold, which separates unwatchable, sketchy animatics from refined color cartoons. But what finishedness really is is anarbitrary visual style.
When we think of a finished animation, we think of painted backgrounds, and characters with hard outlines and smooth color fills. This sounds like a description of a visual style- a style which comes from the cel painting era. When we think of the process of cel painting, we conjure up hellish images of sweatshops and endless labor. While this image isn’t necessarily untrue, the invention of cel painting was rooted in pure practicality. The use of cels meant that artists no longer had to redraw the background every single frame. It also meant they could draw characters and props on different layers, which saved them from having to draw even more frames. Another benefit of cels was that if you colored them on the opposite side, you would get a smooth, flat color. While this is not necessarily more “finished” than rough color, nor is it somehow more artistically viable, flat color is preferred because it doesn’t flicker from frame to frame. Flat color was used because when the cels were shot, the viewer’s eye wouldn’t be distracted by the constant flickering of rough paint texture every time a character moved.
So while the advent of time-saving digital technologies has rendered our understanding of cels as being slow, wasteful, tedious and inefficient, the introduction of cels as the dominant form of mainstream cartoons was in fact motivated by a drive to cheapen and expedite animation production. But the main thing we owe to cels is the ability to use backgrounds, layers, and color. Previously, most narrative animations either repeatedly hand-drew the same background in every frame (McKay’s Gertie the Dinosaur) or physically cut out the character drawing in order to to avoid redrawing, such as the “slash and tear” technique of Raoul Barre (or the cutout technique of Jonni Phillips). However these pre-cel techniques were only used if the animator was even interested in using backgrounds at all. Often, artists would just make do with the limitations of animation by telling stories that did not require an environment, or by suggesting a background by only drawing select props or environmental elements in addition to the character.
What this reveals is that a film’s “story” is not the all-important, essential agent of animated communication to which all other aspects are ancillary. In true fact, the contemporary process of writing animated stories owes its very existence to the process of ink and paint. Ink and paint provides us with tools that most animated storytellers today couldn’t imagine having to work without. These tools include color, environments, props, layers, multiple characters sharing a screen, interaction between character and environment, background, foreground, perspective parallax, depth, scale, chroma key, special effects; the list encompasses literally everything we expect a “finished” cartoon to have. While contemporary animators such as Jonni, Sam Maurer, Victoria Vincent, Luca Depardon, Isabelle Aspin and many others continue to prove that cartoons can contain “finishedness”- and more importantly communicate an emotional reality- without using all or even most of these tools, it is only because these artists marry the ‘telling’ of this reality to the process of production, rather than desperately trying to affirm the existence of a film’s reality outside of the context given to it by that process.
Despite all of this, the idea is still espoused that your story should somehow “exist” before a film is made. We are told to make mock films, “animatics”, which must contain all of the so called structure and emotional depth of a story without ‘wasting’ time on the aspects of production that are thought of as more labor intensive and time consuming (ink and paint). We are then told to refine the mock film until every aspect of it is completely clear and plain to the viewer. The basis of this obsessivity is the idea that the beginning of production is the death of your story in the sense that changes to a story cannot be made during production. However, for independent artists, and certain studios (including Ghibli, one of the most influential studios to ever exist, who starts production before the story is even halfway done), this is untrue. This concept that production is a fixed, cement process is a direct descendent of the hierarchies that transformed ink and paint into a woman’s labor in the 1910s. For many decades, ink and paint served as a black box for people higher up on the hierarchy of animation production.
The problem with animatics is that when they are presented for critique, they are expected to convey a story without using any of the tools in the vast arsenal allowed us by ink and paint- whether digital or un-digital. This results in people saying things like “this isn’t as clear as it could be” when quite often the problem of clarity could be very easily solved with the use of the tools of production: color, backgrounds, animation, etc. It has seemingly been completely forgotten that animatics aren’t supposed to be watched. They were invented to get a time estimate so that TV networks could ensure the full story of an episode will fit in its given time slot. By no means were they ever intended to be full, standalone emotional experiences to ensure that your “story” “works” by some invisible standard. You could create an entire animatic by by using blocks of text describing what happens in each shot instead of drawings and it would still do its job. I present this condensation of my points:
The idea that an animatic or script should stand alone as an emotional motivator independent of the communicative powers of color, movement, and location, transforms the process of cel painting into an afterthought, robbing the story of it’s enmeshment in those powers. It reduces a story to its events, mocking the materiality of our experience of life as well as marginalizing the workers who are forced to work directly with the materiality of film.
This results in crucial storytelling tools being explicitly regulated to the work of “helping” a story, rather than telling it, just because the work required to use those tools is considered boring and “hard.” This is why animated stories have become ruthlessly simplified, and why every aspect of industrial animated films seem to be yelling some kind of message at you.
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So what does all this have to do with my 6 minute, amateurly produced student film? Well in actual fact I wasn’t really thinking about most of these things when making it- and I certainly didn’t use cels as some kind of gesture of solidarity with the ink and paint workers of history. One of the reasons I used cels was because when I was writing the film, I was very unconfident in the validity of my film’s concept, but since I didn’t have any better ideas, I thought that I might as well produce it use an archaic, now “artisanal” form to give my ideas validity in the eyes of the viewer. My theory, based on the positive receptions I’d had with some of my previous films in contrast with the vaguely skeptical and condescending feedback I got when writing them, was that presenting a film to people in the form of an animatic serves as an invitation for critique- even when all of the “clarity problems” that people would point out are usually very easily solvable with the addition of color or backgrounds or any of the ingredients of “finishedness” that I was planning to include. Even an animatic that is independently picture perfect and clear is an invitation for critique simply because the visual style of an animatic- usually black line on white backgrounds- is a cue for people to look for problems. But by showing a film to people and claiming that it is “finished”- or by producing the film in a style that telegraphs finishedness to the viewer by calling back to “finished” cartoons of the past- or showing it to them in a context that affords it finishedness such as a theater- magically transforms anything that might be called a “mistake” into an intentional decision to be parsed, not criticized. “Wow, that person spent so much time painting that, even if I don’t understand the idea, i can at least acknowledge that it was important to the filmmaker due to the sheer hours of work that she put into it, so at least I’ll try to understand why they made that decision instead of writing it off as a mistake.” That’s the narrative that I vainly hope runs subconsciously through the minds of would-be critics who watch my film- instead of seeing the many mistakes in my film as what they “are.” Although that’s only part of the story- My filmmaking process is not defined only by an overwhelming neurosis and lust for validation. I also believe that a filmmaker is permanently and tragically estranged from the ways that her film is perceived by an audience. While I personally don’t think that films should be completely self-indulgent- they should at least hold some kind of attempt to communicate with their audiences- I do know that no matter how hard i try to manipulate a viewer into a certain viewpoint, my film will be viewed on the terms of each individual viewer, and interpreted on those terms as well. I thought that rather than twisting myself into knots trying to arrive at some sort of ethereal standard of “story structure” that is universally understandable, I would instead try to approximate the feeling of dramatic progression that those “structures” generally give, even though neither the events of the film nor the emotional reality of those events need necessarily match up to that feeling if you consider the film from the point of view of the characters that live in it. The ending of the film is a car crash- because it seems like it should be something that happens at the end of a film. It’s dramatic and attracts attention to itself. The boy isn’t really s upposed to have died in the film- it’s supposed to be more like a conglomerated fantasy that exists in both, and neither, of their minds. And it dramatizes what I consider to be the main point of my film, which is the way our attempts at connection can be obliterated by our insistence on living our lives according to false projected narratives, which in this case took the form of one of the most aggressively hawked cultural narratives of all time, which is of course the cisheterosexual first date. But that same point is insisted on earlier in my film, and throughout- so the car crash isn’t really the most important or even the most emotional part of the film for me- it’s just the most visually dramatic, so it goes at the end. And a “date” has a beginning, a during, and an after, just like what the traditional story structure of a film supposedly has. And even though my film jumps around in time to simulate the way we experience life through memories and projections, it still progresses in a fairly traditional temporal way.
Returning back to the topic of cels, I think the tendency is to think that people who make films traditionally are in some way perverted workaholic show-offs who sacrifice their health and relationships to make films- but for me, in addition to the neurotic motivation I described earlier, my decision to produce my film on cels was actually an attempt to make my life easier- let me explain.
At calarts there is something called the “labs,” which are offensively unhygienic and badly lit rooms full of computers intended to be used to make animations using useful software programs like photoshop and tvpaint. Unfortunately, the layout of the rooms is designed to fit as many of these computers as possible with no consideration that the user might be using additional materials to make her film, meaning the encouragement of these spaces is to make a film entirely within the computer, usually using digital painting tools which are allegedly “faster.” The experience of being in one of these rooms, combined with unrestricted access to the internet and 20-30 teenagers, is one that I grew to realize is distinctly unhelpful for making work. Not being financially ready to purchase a cintiq for myself, I was prevented from making a digital film outside of these labs, but I also felt that working on the computer, with all the harm it does to the human attention span, is not the best for working in a medium that requires as much patience as animation. I developed a half-theory half-fantasy that the amount of time lost working on a computer through procrastination and waffling with the undo button might be about equal to the extra time one might spend painting cels. It turned out that even with help, my film took a long time to finish- way past the deadline set for films to be done- but I still got it done and it is much longer than the standard length of film made in the character animation program.
I don’t denounce digital-only filmmaking, and there are many exclusively digital films that i love, but I do think that it’s worth pointing out that the mentality of digital being more expedient than traditional animation usually seems to uphold this binary of digital and traditional being opposed and separate- while erasing the fact that digital tools have also evolved to be very accomodating of the use of traditional materials- there are photoshop functions that are explicitly designed to help with the management and correction of scanned materials in ways that no one talks about- and they can help avoid the endless and seemingly un-self-aware project of digital artists to make digital work that “looks handmade.” My film wasn’t even originally intended to be entirely done on cels- I wanted to have a couple of gaudy CG sequences to emulate the tacky motion graphics usually accompanied with news coverage of the 2012 apocalypse panic, such as the ones used in Ancient Aliens. My ultimate scrapping of the idea was motivated by laziness and time-sensitivity-- I didn’t want to spend a lot of time learning blender or maya enough to get the effect that I wanted- and I knew that would probably turn into a black hole of perfectionism that would ultimately sap valuable time from my process. So I ended up doing a whole film on cels and avoiding digital art primarily to save time and make my life easier- who knew!
-ingo raschka, 7-17-2018.
An example of the roughness of a reversed cel (The End Of Evangelion, 1997).
Windsor McKay resorted to redrawing the entire background each frame before cels were introduced as an animation technique.