Cel Animation - Text 5
Here the background is superimposed on the character, and only the overall homogeneity of the final image lets one think, through the graphical illusion of depth, that the character is in the foreground. This technique, for which a single decor was created, to be completed by a character, was used by various studios but not patented. It stands out for its “jury-rigged” quality, far removed – at least in appearance – from the practicality of cel animation. This was the main reason it was abandoned. In the latter half of the 1910s, various other techniques were tried out, among them a technique described in these terms by John Randolph Bray:
I make my background on a sheet of heavy paper, which is then transferred to many sheets of tracing paper. When this is done it is only necessary to draw the parts which are to be in motion on the screen. The background remains absolutely steady all through the scene. If I have a man standing still for any length of time, he does not have to be drawn again until he is supposed to move.[1]
One might see in this description a resumption of McCay’s method, but the difference resides in the way the decor is reproduced, which does not require any “tracing.” In fact the decor is reproduced by means of a printing technique, one which leaves an empty space for those elements (characters, objects, etc.) to be endowed with movement.
This printing technique, which was unnamed in the patent application filed by Bray on 11 August 1914, is briefly mentioned there, and we can recognise it as zincography, or engraving on zinc, which operated on the same principle as lithography. The decor is traced on a sheet of moistened zinc before applying to the plate a mixture of phosphoric acid and gum arabic. This stage made it possible to fix the drawing on the plate before removing it with a solvent: only the grease from the drawing remained on the plate, which was covered in ink (transfer ink does not adhere to water, but only to the initial image, made with an oily substance), and it was enough to press a sheet of paper onto the zinc to obtain a reproduction of the initial drawing. Drawings of the decor were printed in tracing paper, on which animators worked and later created their characters. Bray did not explain why he chose zincography, but one sees the logic: this kind of printing was less costly and more practical than lithography, which used limestone: stocking and handling the zinc was easier, making this stage of the production even quicker. The process thus quickly yielded several copies of the background drawing without having to redraw it each time; it also accurately transferred from one drawing sheet to another the registration marks in the four corners of the frame.
Once the drawing was transcribed onto the tracing paper, animators were able to sit back, thanks to the marks previously placed on the zinc and printed in identical fashion using this technique. But it also provided them, through transparency, with an immediate visual reference so that they could respect as much as possible the character’s proportions and the shifting objects each time they were drawn. Using a stencil placed on the zinc plate, the draughtsperson could avoid reproducing the entire decor with each printing, thereby leaving an empty area into which the moving element of the film could be inserted. The idea was to avoid having to partially erase the background each time. This was a considerable time saver and was in keeping with an industrial logic which sought to produce films more quickly. This technique, unlike that of Winsor McCay, made it possible to “freeze” the background and foretold the greater “automatisation” of animation by varying the reproducibility of the drawings – the equivalent of the technological reproducibility made possible by the moving picture camera. It is quite apparent, however, that this logic was not “aesthetic”; in the end, this reproducibility principle was soon abandoned in favour of a much quicker technique. The practicality of this latter technique was the sole reason, moreover, that it was adopted by every animated drawing studio. The technique in question was cel animation, or animation on celluloid. Here the decor would be created on a regular sheet of paper, while the characters were drawn on a sheet of cellulose triacetate.
On the topic of celluloid, Bray had already mentioned, in his second patent application on 29 July 1914 (but granted on 9 November 1915), that his goal was to make it possible to produce decors in shades of grey rather than just black lines on a white background. The transparency or semi-transparency of the supports he mentions had the goal in this case of conveying information in shades of grey coming from previously coloured supports placed in the background. This earliest mention of celluloid does refer to an aesthetic project, because its goal was to “render the picture more attractive and effective and cause desired parts of the picture to stand out more distinctly.”[2]
On the other hand, the patent regarding the use of celluloid deposited by Earl Hurd and granted on 15 June 1915, was clearly conceived as part of a logic of facilitating production logistics: “one of the objects of my invention is to enable such animated cartoons to be made with the minimum of effort and expense and to facilitate the rapid execution of any series of poses relating to or constituting a single scene.”[3] Far from being any kind of “cinematising” of the animated drawing (which appeared, in particular, in spin-offs of the practice, such as that patented by Earl Hurd which made it possible to create “tracking shots”), this invention was a new step forward in the standardisation of efficient practices.
