Assistants and Inbetweeners - Text 2
When we compare the phases of the action in an animation of Bambi by Walt Disney in 1942 with those of a character in a cartoon from the late 1920s, we can see quite clearly that the key frames of the movement were sufficient at this earlier date to indicate the high points of the action depicted (an open/closed mouth; furrowed/unfurrowed brows). This aesthetic system was what was being called into question in the era of the animated drawing’s industrialisation. The automatisation of the manufacturing process was headed in the direction of the animated drawing “becoming a shot,” the metronomic capturing of any described moment replicating the internal operation of the camera. And it was indeed “nondescript moments” which were conveyed by the in-between drawings: these depicted insignificant moments (a character half-turned from the viewer in the process of carrying out an action) – potentially superfluous images in purely informational terms. But they ensured the animation’s smooth unfolding so that it would, on a perceptual level, approach the depiction of filmed movement in live-action images.
Thus, as Hervé Joubert-Laurencin has remarked:
in the cartoon the drawing properly speaking was only an avatar: it was negated by the in-betweening and the timing... and the many hands involved. In short, the aesthetic incompatibility of the artistic drawing and the cartoon is just the counterpart of the complete compatibility – at least in an ideological sense – of the cartoon and photographic cinema. The enslavement of the hand and the whittling away of individual style characteristic of Hollywood are nothing other than a return to the regulated machine, to the kinematograph: an imitation of direct cinema more radical and invisible than rotoscoping.[8]
The connection with the technology of rotoscoping is in no way surprising, because it is another good indication of an approach to the animated drawing in which it sought to be the equivalent, in a certain sense, to live-action cinema, under the cover of mechanising its production process.
