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action, and work it backward and forward. But if you choose to be simple, naive, direct, open, and follow your nose, your nose will take you places you can't foresee, and that leads to so-called metamorphosis. That's where the spirit of spontaneity comes in. In my films spontaneity is mostly in the beginning stages; then in the editing I contradict my spontaneity by encapsulating these bursts of spontaneity in a structure of some kind. A structure can come either through the editing or the planning; in my case, it usually comes through editing.
MacDonald:
You always seem at pains to show figuration and narrative as one of a very large number of possibilities that an animator can work with. We always know that you could do conventional animation if you wanted to.
Breer:
One thing about narration is its effect on figure-ground relationship. One common form of narration is to have a surrogate self on the screen that people can identify with. In cartooning it's a cartoon figure. Grotesque as he or she might be, the figure becomes an identity you follow. If that figure is anthropomorphic or animal, it has a face, and that face will dominate, the way an active ingredient in a passive landscape dominates the field. It sets up a constant visual hierarchy that to me is impoverished. I want every square inch of the screen potentially active, alivethe whole damned screen. I don't want any one thing to take over. The problem with narration is that the figures always dominate the ground. In the theater, the actors have their feet planted on the stage, and there's a large space above them. That space is justified because the actors are three-dimensional, living, breathing, sweating human beings who make sound when they move and have real physical presence. It doesn't matter that gravity keeps them all at the bottom of the stage. But when it comes to a flat screen, I don't have to have gravity dominate, and I don't want it to dominate.
Felix the Cat is an interesting case. It was one of the first times cels were used. They drew the background on the cels and the animation on paperjust the reverse of what the cel process was finally used for. So that meant that Felix was on paper
underneath
his background. If he went over to a tree he'd have to go behind the tree. There was no way for him to go in front of the tree because the tree was on a cel on top of him. I think that made for a nice, agreeable tension between the background and the foreground. The foreground (which would normally be the background) fought back against the domination of the figure. And, of course, with Felix the foreground was very busy: everything was animated in those films. That's a case where all eyes were on Felix, but there was a nice playoff between the physical, plastic environment and the narrative of this little creature.
It came naturally to those early cartoonists to see narrative as a