Realistic or Real?

At a fascinating blog which is about to gobble up several hours of my time, someone posted an eight-page memo that Walt Disney wrote to Chounard Art Institute teacher Art Graham in 1935. The memo outlines what kind of training and instruction Disney would like to see Graham use in helping his animators improve their skills.

Disney goes into several specifics, such as the need for training in actual drawing, thinking about how characters should move on the screen, what kinds of drawings enhance comedy or other moods that an animated feature is portraying, and so on. He believed his artists should be able to think up funny bits or "gags" on their own, in addition to whatever comedy a writer might have in a script. He suggested Graham have the animators study music as an aid to seeing the rhythms of movement in their minds before they started drawing.

When you realize this idea took shape and Disney studio animators started this training in 1936 or so, and after Disney's ideas were put into practice the studio released movies like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Dumbo and Bambi, you can see what kind of results Walt Disney's vision brought about.

What struck me was a sentence on the second page of the memo, in which Disney says, "The first duty of the cartoon is not to picture or duplicate real action or things as they actually happen -- but to give a caricature of life and action -- to picture on the screen things that have run through the imagination of the audience..."

I think Uncle Walt was onto something there. Computer animation has given us some incredibly realistic characters using motion and performance capture techniques, but those film seem to bomb compared with more stylized animated movies, even when computer imagery is used in them. For example, The Polar Express was absolutely destroyed at the box office by The Incredibles, even though Express featured one of America's favorite actors, Tom Hanks. Other hyper-realistic animated films, like Final Fantasy, have had nowhere near the success of the Pixar line or of Dreamworks Productions Shrek series (Final Fantasy, in fact, was an expensive enough bomb that it's given credit for shutting down the studio division of the Square video game company).

I'm sure someone has done a study on this, so I might be completely wrong, but my own reaction to Polar Express, Final Fantasy and even Avatar is that the hyper-realistic type of animation is, for lack of a better word, creepy. My eyes see what looks like a real human being on the screen and my ears hear a real human voice, but something about the image doesn't connect. A friend said the characters in Final Fantasy seemed to him like zombies or something, because they looked like people but had dead eyes.

Maybe there's something in the brain that we haven't found yet that knows it's being fooled when it sees a pretend human being trying to act like a real one. Or maybe the effect stems from knowing that those human faces on the screen don't belong to real human beings and might go away if I saw one of the motion-capture type films without knowing it was animation, but I don't know if that experiment's been done.

Something to think about, either way. And certainly an indicator that ol' Uncle Walt knew his cartoons.