Designed by Chance: Form and Recorded Motion

Abstract

Designed by Chance:Form and Recorded Motion Jordan Schonig (bio) A new jargon was heard around the [Disney] studio. Words like "aiming" and "overlapping" and "pose to pose" suggested that certain animation procedures gradually had been isolated and named. Verbs turned into nouns overnight, as, for example, when the suggestion, "Why don't you stretch him out more?" became "Get more stretch on him." … As each of these processes acquired a name, it was analyzed and perfected and talked about.1 At first glance, not much is remarkable about this anecdote from Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston. A specialized vocabulary is a necessary feature of any craft, and phrases such as "squash and stretch" and "rubber hose" are ubiquitous terms for categorizing stylistic differences within the history of animation. But when viewed from the vantage of the history of film theory and criticism, a striking set of distinctions emerges. Whereas film scholars have devised a formal vocabulary to describe variations in shot scale and angle, editing patterns, and approaches to mise-en-scène, animators and animation scholars have developed terms to describe forms of onscreen movement. To identify a "squash and stretch" within a character's leap or to compare a flailing limb to a "rubber hose" is to identify a sense of unity—a form—perceived across a succession of visual sensations. In what follows, I'll show how film studies stands to gain from thinking of movement in this particular way and how an attention to forms of movement can change the way we think about film form more generally.2 [End Page 173] By forms of movement, I do not simply mean types of movement, where such types might be divided into the movement of human subjects, the camera's movement, or the movement that results from editing.3 Rather, I mean perceptual wholes or shapes of motion mentally stitched together through time. Think of forms of movement as temporal gestalts, except instead of perceiving the aural unity of a melody across the succession of individual notes, we perceive a visual unity: a shape or pattern of motion. In everyday life, forms of motion enable us to identify things in the world, such as when we recognize a friend from behind by their gait.4 Our friend's way of walking—as distinct from, say, the contours of their body—has a motion signature that we are able to identify across time. For animators, this ordinary cognitive faculty of stitching together forms from fields of motion is indispensable. Animators don't simply see characters who move; they see forms and styles within and across those movements. This way of seeing undergirds Norman McLaren's oft-cited definition of animation as "not the art of drawings-that-move, but the art of movements-thatare-drawn."5 For animators, forms of movement such as squash and stretch or rubber hose often take perceptual priority over the design of the object or character that is moving.6 This faculty is as well documented in animation scholarship as it is in animation practice. We can see it in Sergei Eisenstein's notion of the "plasmatic," a way of moving marked by the metamorphic flexibility of a figure's contours, or in Thomas Lamarre's distinction between cinematism and animetism, two opposing aesthetic tendencies for representing mobile views of animated space.7 We can see it in Vivian Sobchack's phenomenological analysis of the computer-animated "morph"—itself a form of motion subsumed within the broader form of the metamorphic—and Aylish Wood's study of the "spatial transformations" in Caroline Leaf's sand animations.8 In each of these cases, forms of movement are identified and named as a means of expanding the reader's ability to see those forms.9 While forms of movement abound in live-action film—such as the onrush of space typical of forward camera movement or Charlie Chaplin's [End Page 174] tramp walk—they are rarely presented as objects of analysis. Part of the reason for this is that form has been understood in film studies as the product of artistic choices. Moreover, in live-action film, movement is recorded rather...