Category: Critical Practice

Experimental Animation

Significance:

• Experimental pioneers and seminal works form the foundation for contemporary practical and theoretical investigations in animation.

Context:

• The ability to manipulate multiple images allowed artists to transform their ideas into movement, often as a reaction against traditional artistic ideologies.
• In the early 1900s, avant-garde artists focused on the formal aesthetic potentials of film and animation, exploring line, form, movement, rhythm, color, and light.

Abstraction:

• Expresses ideas appreciated intellectually, not related to concrete objects.
• Focuses on internal structure and form, emotionally detached.
• Represents qualities, emotions, or ideas rather than depicting objects.
• Develops thoughts from concrete realities to general principles or intellectual ideas.

Early Visual Effects; Sound and Image:

• Hans Richter’s “Filmstudie” (1926)
• Len Lye’s “Kaleidoscope” (1935)
• Len Lye’s “Rainbow Dance” (1936 highlights)
• Oskar Fischinger’s “An Optical Poem” (1938)
• Norman McLaren’s “Boogie-Doodle” (1941)

Importance of Experimental Work:

• Technological advancements fuel independent and groundbreaking work in visual and film language.
• Personal vision through independent film and animation remains central to the medium’s development.

Elements to Consider in Analyzing and Implementing Formal Experimental Animation:

• Categorization: Genre, sub-genre, background, setting, mood, tone, theme, and topic. Determine if the work fits a category or is unique.
• Form and Function: Interpret meaning in relation to format or presentational mode, considering artist objectives and limitations.
• Process: Techniques, materials, and technologies used, and their relationship to the message. Determine if the process or tool becomes the message.
• Formal Elements: Use of space, composition, light and color, movement, rhythm, timing, pacing, transitions, and audio relationships. Analyze how the work investigates these elements.

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Conceptual Abstraction

Definition:

• Involves the abstraction and juxtaposition of narrative structures, storytelling tools, traditional canons, and communicative vehicles.
• Aims to question and build film language, challenge perception, and exploit semiotics, metaphor, and symbolism.

Key Points:

• Historically, these experimental approaches are produced outside the commercial mass media industry.
• Movements like Futurism, Surrealism, Dadaism, and Cubism have significantly influenced formal language and conceptual approaches to film.
• Personal vision through independent film and animation remains crucial to the medium’s development.

Example:

• Jan Svankmajer’s “Dimensions of Dialogue” (1982)

Non-Dialogued Film

Definition:

• Films that develop narrative or themes without dialogue, relying on gesture, performance, filmic language, special effects, and alternative audio components.

Key Points:

• Challenges the communicator to convey information without spoken words.
• Significant examples span from Hollywood’s silent films to Surrealism, children’s narratives, and Expressionism.

Examples:

• Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1927)
• Max Hattler’s “Serial Parallels” (2019)
• Balázs Simon’s “Bastille ‘Thelma and Louise’”
• Balázs Simon’s “BBC ‘Winter Olympics 2022’”