In this chapter, we take a look at some of the underlying principles governing a performance and an audience’s reactions to a performer that we need to understand to create a character that will engage an audience and be believable. We will be looking at the idea of Empathy and its importance in helping to create an identification with a character and how this might be achieved and at what motivates a character and how that character’s needs and desires work their way through into their behavior. Understanding the forces that motivate a character helps, create the “hinterland” that makes a more rounded character with the power to make the viewer laugh or cry.

We also examine the question of what the director or animator is trying to say with the film or performance and see how, without falling into the trap of being obvious, working with a theme can make for a more adventurous and more powerful result.

Lastly, we consider how external elements like props and costumes can help in fleshing out the character’s personality and, in purely practical terms, give the animator something to use to create “business” that will make the performance lively and fluid.

Empathy and Engagement

When we empathize with another person, we tune into their feelings and understand their subjective experience while remaining observers. We “put ourselves in their shoes” to take part in their experience vicariously, but we remember that those shoes don’t belong to us.

If we cross the line into feeling the same thing as the person, that becomes sympathy; as we share suffering or opinions, the distance between us and the other person is reduced or nullified. We can empathize with someone with whom we disagree on the basis of shared human traits, but we find it hard to disagree with someone when we sympathize with their point of view or situation.

Why Empathy is Important

When watching actions on screen, an audience will be looking for ways in which to understand the characters portrayed; they want to find ways in which to empathize with them. It is a classic human trait and absolutely necessary if the audience is to be engaged by the film; otherwise, they will be but disinterested observers whose attention will wander as soon as something more interesting comes along. If we make things too obscure, then we are actively keeping our audience at arm’s length, not letting them participate or engage with the ideas we are exploring. If we are too explicit, shallow, or simplistic, then we leave our audience with nothing to do. Both can result in a breakdown of a shared experience.

To tread this fine line between the obscure and the obvious, we need to understand what the audience brings to a work before we begin to respond to their expectations.

At this point, we need to remind ourselves that, although we talk about “the audience,” there are a wide variety of audiences with differing sets of experience, most notably that between adult and child. For the moment, we’ll discuss empathy from the point of view of an adult audience and catch up with the children later.

We have, as a matter of day-to-day life, been observing our fellow human beings. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we are constantly scrutinizing each other’s body language, speech, reactions to events, and clothing. At a very basic level, this is what we do to survive. Each time a new person enters a room we’re in, we look up to see who it is, if they pose a threat or can become an ally, we need to know who is dangerous, who is trustworthy, and who is not. Each time a new character walks on screen, we are doing the same sort of thing we would do if they had come into the room.

In addition, we are hard-wired to read certain facial expressions in the same way, whoever we are. Expressions like anger, disgust, fear, joy, and sadness cross any cultural divide.

Finally, we use our powers of reason, drawing on all of the above, to try to understand each new character as we come into contact with them, we read the character in the same way we do when we come into contact with another human being, even if that character isn’t a human one at all, and whether they are like us, agree with us, or not.

Children come to a work with many differing levels of experience, but we should never be guilty of talking down to our audience.

Since we must understand our audiences and the depth of understanding they are “likely” to have, this is where our own empathetic skills must come in, and the performances we create for children will need to be equally as subtle and skillful as those we intend for an adult audience.

Bambi is the classic example of a film created with enormous integrity. Walt Disney bravely pushed ahead with a story that others felt too dark for a family film, held up production so that animators could learn new skills in the depiction of realistic animal movement, and even brought real deer into the studio to facilitate that instruction. What he and his team created stands as one of the classic films for children, capable of uniting parent and child in tearful empathy in the darkness of the movie theatre.

Identification and Lack of Empathy

The audience is ready and willing to empathize with a character, they want to find some point of contact because the character then comes alive for them, and they are more invested in the story. As an audience member, we suspend our disbelief to enter into the story that is being told. In film, we can be presented with amazingly realistic scenarios and, as animators, we may be called upon to create a character that can live alongside a real actor, but the whole construct is still artificial—turn your head and there may be a friend or stranger sitting in the comfy seat next to you, unharmed by the warfare on the screen.

The key here is, I think, not reality but believability. If we can believe in a character, we can begin to empathize with them, their situation, and the decisions they make. This is how we are able to cause the audience to identify with a character and bring about the necessary “suspension of disbelief.”

What the audience does not do is to identify with a character based on the specific facts of, for example, age, sex, or occupation. These may be providing clues to the make-up of the person, but, if they were to identify too closely with specifics, an audience would never be able to empathize with anyone, since everyone is different. As creators, thinking we have created a character merely by giving him a specific job or visual attribute is laziness and won’t work since, on the one hand, not everybody will have the same reaction to said job or attribute and, on the other hand, we fall into the use of stereotypes and bore the audience.

Engaging the Audience

It is important to remember that the suspension of disbelief involves the audience accepting the character as a real individual, although what is really happening is a communication between the audience and the creator of that character: people talking to people.

As an animator or director, you are trying to tell a story, but story does not exist independently of the people in it. A news report of a disaster is merely that, a report; it does not become a story until we find out about the actions and reactions of the people involved, the human story.

The story starts when we follow the person searching for their family in the rubble or the official who could have done more to get help to the victims. Then what we are trying to do is to communicate what it is about the character that causes them to act as they do; we try to reveal the things in their personality that are the important drivers of the story.

Narrative is driven by character progression, and this arises from tensions between characters or tensions within the character. As new facets of a personality are revealed, engagement comes from the audience being surprised and wanting to learn more.

While it is obvious we need to understand a character and are often called to care about him or her, we do not have to like that character, indeed, at times, we can come to dislike them, even if the character is not the villain of the piece. We’ll deal with empathy for the antagonist a little later, but consider this; is it possible to have a truly well-constructed and deeply engaging character without them having a flaw?

Nobody is perfect, and perfection can become very boring. Often, it is the flaws in a character’s personality that make us warm to him or her and, even more often, it is the flaws that propel the story onward. The hero may set off on his quest full of good intentions and determined to right wrongs but, somewhere along the line, he will come face-to-face with his shortcomings, and it is in the way he overcomes the flaws in his personality that demonstrate his true heroism.

A classic example of the boring hero can be found in comics. DC Comics’ Superman started life able to leap tall buildings and have bullets bounce off his chest but he wasn’t the god-like creature he later became. As time went by, the writers added more and more powers to his arsenal so that the character effectively became one-dimensional and they had to resort to “imaginary” and “parallel world” stories as well as tons of Kryptonite to put him in any jeopardy at all. Not only was he invulnerable, he was no more than a goody-two-shoes with no real flaws in his character and therefore very little with which the audience could empathize. The advent of characters with greater depth from DC’s great rival, Marvel Comics, brought about a revolution in the way superheroes were perceived and, in Spiderman especially, they changed the landscape completely. Here was a character who not only had to cope with a set of strange new powers but had to do so while attempting to negotiate the troubled waters of adolescence; the audience was able to empathize with his problems and his delight in his new abilities, they could certainly imagine themselves in his shoes because the fantastic elements were grounded in life as they knew it. Peter Parker didn’t stop being the nerdy high-school kid because, as Spiderman, he could climb walls and shoot sticky webs at criminals, but it is his attempts to live up to the character he has become and the expectations of his public that provide the interest in his story.

In some ways, the capacity to empathize can be linked to the harm the character can suffer. If they can be hurt or killed, we tend to empathize more with them. We identify with people in danger; unlike the world of Tex Avery or John Kricfalusi, where characters can be smashed, shattered, or squashed and still come back for more, or Superman before he was remade as a more vulnerable individual, we feel for Bambi because his world has been set up in a way that establishes that the normal process of life and death goes on.

And maybe we can even empathize with very “cartoony” characters to an extent if they suffer the same frustrations we do, like the Wolf hounded by Droopy in “Northwest Hounded Police.” (Droopy himself never had much of a personality, so it would hardly be fair to see him as the protagonist in his own cartoons, that is pretty much the role of whatever poor sap has to share the screen with him.)

In a funny way the cartoon within a cartoon, “Itchy and Scratchy” in “The Simpsons” (which takes the Tex Avery worldview and adds blood), makes the characters in the rest of the show more real. Since Itchy and Scratchy can come back to life from horrible injury, it adds another “cartoonier” level of cartoon reality.

Empathy for the Villain

Most of the early Disney heroines fall into the Superman trap, because they are too good and because their personal journeys have no room for development. Snow White, Cinderella, and Beauty are all being acted upon rather than acting, and waiting for the Prince to come along rather than changing their own situation. The Prince himself is even worse, little more than a vacuous clotheshorse with no personality at all. It must have been very hard to animate those characters with nothing to fall back on—not even an interesting design. Consequently, it is the villains and the comic characters we all remember from those films.

Let’s assume, though, that we have an interesting and complex protagonist for our story. If the villain is to be a worthy antagonist for the hero, he or she has to be just as complex as the main character. It is too easy to fall back on the stereotype of the ranting megalomaniac. But writers and directors (and animators who have ended up with a more nuanced script) should realize that, not only will a more complex villain be more interesting and more human, but that such an antagonist will also make the hero look better. By creating a depth of personality, there is the possibility that the story will not proceed like a train on rails but could veer offat any time, that the future is not set and that the hero will have to be more flexible and will have to think rather than simply react. The audience will not be sure of the outcome and be more engaged in the twists and turns of the story.

First, I believe the only way to create a depth of personality for a bad character is for the creators of that character to develop an understanding of what causes him to act in the way he does. “Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story” (John Barth), so we need to understand what we have in common with the character and that, at root, we are all doing many of the same things and we are all trying to find a way to survive. What we as artists need to find out is why the bad choices are made, why the Queen wants to kill Snow White, or why Syndrome wants to destroy Mr Incredible. In many cases, we find a simple connection to our own life and emotions and that it is merely the scale of the reaction to a stimulus or the lack of boundaries that separates us from the bad guys. Our task as animators is to step into the villain’s shoes and work out what will make his actions believable on screen.

But we’re talking about cartoons here; does all this emphasis on empathy work with cartoon ducks and hares or tigers and deer?

Well, clearly it does, as we have already noted with Bambi, and how about Daffy Duck?

Audiences are drawn towards Daffy not despite his flaws (and he has many) but because of them. However, while an audience may want to see Daffy getting his comeuppance and to see a form of natural justice playing out, I believe they do feel an amount of compassion for him. They understand his greed, jealousy, anger, and fear, because they themselves have felt those emotions and, because of this, they share in his mishaps to some degree.

Animation has a long history of using animal characters, one that grew from the ancient storytelling tradition that gave us Aesop’s Fables.

James Gurney (author and illustrator—”Dinotopia”) wrote in his blog that “Tony the Tiger is a purely human type: a hearty enthusiastic salesman. But Shere Khan is more like a real tiger. He has a mind we can fully understand. Disney was adamant that the “heavy” in Jungle Book not be a slavering monster. As drawn by master animator Milt Kahl, he is cool, understated, arrogant, and poised—very much a tiger. Kahl spent a long time studying tigers from life. When it came to the animation, he didn’t need to refer to photos. He drew most of the sequences from memory.”

But, despite the undoubted genius of Milt Kahl, all that is waffle since Shere Khan is still very much a human in animal form. Tigers are NOT cool, they are NOT arrogant, and they are not vengeful, as Shere Khan is. They are tigers… animals. All of those traits are human traits projected onto a tiger or extrapolated from the traits we see. The tiger moves slowly when not chasing prey, so we call it understated and poised rather than what it is, merely saving energy for when it will be needed in the task of getting food.

There are purely animals in many animated movies, like the dogs that run through the city at the start of Waltz with Bashir (2008), Ari Folman (Although they exist as symbolic creatures, from a person’s dream, they have no human qualities.), and we feel no empathy for them. Any connection the animator might feel with them is only there to help him do a better job of making them move in a convincingly animalistic way.

The amount of “real” animal we put into an animal character is dependent on the scenario; Daffy Duck would not look at home in “The Jungle Book” any more than Bambi would in a Looney Tune.

Motivation

The question of defining a character’s motivation is fraught with confusion; many people are loath to embark on what they see as deep psychological enquiries into something they don’t feel has too much bearing on the here-and-now of a character’s life. “What does it matter what his childhood was like”, they ask, “he’s only trying to get served in the restaurant?” Likewise, the actor asking: “What’s my motivation?” has become a cliché of TV comedy, indicating some self-obsessed disciple of “Method Acting.”

Of course, the way motivation works does not necessarily depend upon an over philosophizing of any given situation or response. Motivation is at the heart of most actions, whether extreme or mundane. The motivation of a woman returning to a burning building to save her child is love. We need to dispel the idea at the outset that motivation is an unnecessary add-on to a performance.

All actors, whatever their chosen strategies, have to find something to connect with in a character they are playing, and delving into motivation ultimately boils down to a simple question: “Why is my character doing this?”

The answer to that must make sense. Otherwise, the audience, those people you have asked to empathize with your character, will sit there thinking: “I wouldn’t do that”, or “But why doesn’t he just go to the police?” A large part of the work here has to be done by the writer, who needs to have thought about all these questions before the script goes into production, and if you’re writing your own script, you should be aware of the possible problems because people will notice if there is a gaping hole in your reasoning. If, as a director, you get a script like this, it’s your job to chase the writer about it so you can convincingly explain things to the animators and, as an animator, you need to go back to the director and get an explanation of things you don’t understand. If the animator doesn’t understand why a character he is animating is doing or saying a certain thing, then the audience is highly unlikely to know why the character behaves in this way.

However, please don’t imagine I’m asking for everything to be laid out in obvious black and white on the page. Characters who really live on the screen are never obvious and their motivations are generally complex and not easily fathomable. But that does not mean we can avoid thinking about motivation or throw together a stew of character traits in the hope they will coalesce into a real person.

One name that starts to crop up when we read discussions of motivation is that of American psychologist Abraham Maslow whose “Hierarchy of Needs” is seen as a way to understand human motivation. Often represented as a pyramid (see Figure 5.1), the layers of need start from a basis of purely physiological need, like air and food, and rise up to a level where the human is concerned to gain self-knowledge and realize his or her full potential.

This layering is a rather simplistic view of a complex interaction, and there is much more of an exchange between these layers than the pyramid illustration shows. The Social (family, friends, love, and belonging) and Esteem (need to be respected and valued by others, as well as by self) layers could almost be one, since if one is loved, then it must bring with it a sense that one is valued and esteemed. It could also be objected that, for example, people have striven to understand themselves and the world and create beauty even while hungry or rejected by society, but these headings give us helpful pegs on which to hang an understanding of what drives a character to action.

We can use these “needs” to examine the motivation of all our characters—not just the heroes—since motivation also comes from the need to protect what we have gained on our way up the pyramid.

Let’s take the Wicked Queen from “Snow White” as an example. As a queen she is rich and powerful, so the first two levels of the pyramid are taken care of, but when we come to the Social level and the level of Esteem, we can see that the Queen seems to have by-passed family, intimacy, and friendship and seems to be fixated by the need to be esteemed for her beauty. When the magic mirror tells her that Snow White is now the “fairest in the land,” she sets out to destroy her rival.

The prologue to the film doesn’t give us many clues, merely stating that the Queen is Snow White’s stepmother and that she fears that one day the girl’s beauty will surpass her own; not really much to go on. But the fact that the Queen is Snow White’s stepmother does give us some clues. Was it her beauty that caught the King’s attention? Does she fear that the loss of her position as the “fairest in the land” would mean the loss of her position in society? If so, it is not merely vanity that provokes her to thoughts of murder, but the very real danger that she will lose all she has gained and be thrown down to the bottom of the pyramid where she will have to struggle for the basics of life.

I realize that the Wicked Queen is perhaps not the most deeply rendered character in animation, and I could be accused of “overthinking” the issue of her motivation, but it isn’t enough to fall back on the sneering villain and clean cut hero when we have examples of characters as deep and complex as Woody from the “Toy Story” films or Lady Eboshi from “Princess Mononoke.”

Of course, not all of our characters are going to be as complex and well rounded, there will always be characters we don’t have time to explain or are simple one joke foils, but even a simple character should come on screen with a personality and an attitude. You have to animate him, why not take the trouble to think about what you are portraying with your animation and give him that little spark that will give the film more texture ?

Wants and Needs

Let’s say we have got a juicy character part to create and we’ve worked out what the character needs, we need to remember that doesn’t mean the character realizes it. Very often the story grows out of the realization that what she needs is different to what she wants in the beginning, and one important way of analyzing a story is by asking two questions of the character: what do they want and what do they need ?

In Shrek (2001), Andrew Adamson, Vicky Jenson, the title character, the ogre Shrek, lives alone in his swamp until it is invaded by fairytale characters banished there by Lord Farquaad. What Shrek wants is to get rid of the interlopers and go back to his solitary existence and for this reason he undertakes the quest to free the princess. We can empathize with his grumpy reaction to being invaded, we understand about personal space, and we’ve all been bothered by annoying people when we had other things to do. But we don’t go along with it completely, we don’t sympathize and want to see the back of all these newcomers, because, well, we’re getting a lot of fun out of his reactions and we sense there is something that Shrek needs that is different to his immediate desire. What it turns out that Shrek needs is the exact opposite of what he starts out wanting: other people. He needs society and it takes him the entire movie to find it out.

Shrek is an engaging character right from the start, and we recognize a childlike sense of fun and a child’s delight in doing just what he wants without an adult getting in the way; in his domain, Shrek delights in his farts and body odor and does just what he wants to. If we were there with him, we probably would be less tolerant but we are responding to our own irresponsible younger self and empathizing with his pleasure in his freedom. When the other fairytale characters arrive we can understand his reaction, at some point in our childhood, we’ve all had to cope with the expulsion from our own little Garden of Eden, whether it be the primal move from breast to bottle, the arrival of a sibling, or the first day of school but, whether we are a school age child or an adult, we know he has to grow up and live in the world with other people; we are enjoying the ride and eager to see how he copes and how he changes.

Shrek, like Snow White’s Wicked Queen, has reached stage two of the Maslow pyramid but the arrival of a problem (the invasion of his domain) starts him off on his journey to a realization that there is a gaping hole in his life, one that needs to be filled with other people (Social) who love and value him (Esteem).

To go back to Snow White; while Snow White mainly reacts rather than acts and has an insufficiently strong desire, other than to survive, the Dwarves and the Queen have very strong wants.

The Dwarves, although they are often taken to be merely comic characters, have very strong desire lines that are not a million miles away from those of Shrek. When we first encounter them, they have a settled and perfectly satisfactory life working and living together in the forest. When Snow White disrupts their grungy bachelor domesticity, they are resentful and their immediate reaction is to wish her gone so they can be left alone. But she wins them over (though Grumpy takes a little longer than the others) and their wish to see the back of her is replaced with a fierce need to protect her that sees them eventually hunting down the Queen who, disguised as an old hag, has poisoned the heroine.

By thinking about the basic needs of our characters, we can see why they want what they want and create characters that live in the mind and enhance the film in which they appear.

At this point, it is important to point out that many people share some of the things that motivate us, a desire for happiness, for example. That much seems very obvious, but what happiness means and how we set out to achieve that becomes very problematic. Then we can see that what motivates one individual may not motivate another: money, power, esteem, clothing, cookies… fish. This, of course, is completely enmeshed with our individual personalities. Even a heroic act like rescuing a baby from a burning building could be motivated by different things dependent upon personality. Bugs Bunny would perhaps be a very modest hero, accepting the accolades and esteem but NOT motivated by it. The only way Daffy Duck would enter that burning building is in the absolute certainty that he was going to get out with not a single feather out of place BUT, and here’s the rub, in the certain knowledge that he would be proclaimed as hero and receive all that he considers his due.

The novelist E. M. Forster, in his book, “Aspects of the Novel,” distinguishes between what he calls “flat” and “round” characters. Flat characters he says are “constructed round a single idea or quality,” are easily recognized and remembered, and are better if they are comic since a serious flat character has a tendency to be a bore. “The really flat character can be expressed in one sentence such as “I will never desert Mr Micawber.” There is Mrs Micawber— she says she won’t desert Mr Micawber; she doesn’t, and there she is.”

A “round” character, by contrast, has the ability to surprise us convincingly and has dimensions to their personality that are revealed as the story progresses. A “flat” character does not change but a convincingly rounded character has to change. So when we look at motivation, we need to remember that, if we want to create a character that lives on the screen, we must not allow motivation to become a fixed and unyielding block, that it must be tempered by other facets of personality that keep the audience guessing, and the character must learn and change.

What are You Trying to Say?

Before we can get to the point of creating a great performance, we need to understand our characters, but before we can get to that point we need first to know what we are trying to say with them. The director, the writer, and the animator all need to bear this in mind; acting and direction must support the aim of the script as much as any other element does, and the aim of the script must be important to the writer.

We are asking what is this film about, not, what is the story?

Not all films are deep and meaningful; some are light and frothy and lots are somewhere in-between and sometimes that’s just what you want for a Saturday night’s viewing. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But enjoyment and thought are not mutually exclusive; it is possible to have fun with your brain switched on, and after the immediate pleasure has faded, there is that spark that leaps to life when some incident brings the film back to mind, and we make the connection between what we have seen and what we know. And maybe we start to understand life a little bit better. I don’t believe anybody would claim that “The Wizard of Oz” was a dour, overly serious movie without any fun or laughs, just because we can point out serious themes in it.

Amid all the fun, excitement, and music, “The Wizard of Oz” has themes that have continued to resonate and keep us watching for over seventy years: the quest—the voyage of discovery and return that gives us the ability to see our home with new eyes, the need to believe in ourselves and see the reality of our abilities rather than what we think they ought to be, and the allied need to see through falsehood and recognize things for what they are. It is difficult, if not impossible, to create an interesting performance if there is nothing on which to base the character: if there is no little man behind the curtain in “The Wizard of Oz,” then there is only what appears to be there, a big flat green face shouting at the audience. What is more interesting is that, or the fact that, the great Oz is a fake, a showman trying to impress the people with a light show and that as a fake he is revealed as another human with his own set of failings?

For the writer, or writer/director, it’s not necessarily a good idea to start with the theme and try to build a story and characters around it, since this is likely to lead to rather abstract plotting and flat characterization; the characters in the film become signposts or ciphers rather than real people. Whatever you do, even if you just want to make people laugh, you will end up portraying something of your own thoughts and opinions on screen and there is often a definite desire to do so on the part of any creator. Your characters are parts of your own personality, reflections of your beliefs even when you give them a life, or opinions at odds with your own. Therefore, it is likely that the themes and ideas that interest you will come out without you having to make a conscious effort to force them on to the page, and it may be that you won’t even recognize, until later, the themes you have created.

So how are the director and the animators going to support the intention of the script if the themes are buried in the writer’s subconscious? The first step, for the director, has to be script analysis. This will provide the basis for his or her instructions to the animators, and I hope that the animators would also take the opportunity to read and analyze the script for themselves to get a better understanding of how their characters fit into the narrative and the overall arc of the film.

Having worked out what the narrative is about and how the characters fit into it, it is important to remember that even though we know what we are trying to say, the character may be completely ignorant of the fact. He or she may be opposed to the message the film is trying to deliver; we may be animating one of the bad guys or it may be that our character only slowly comes to a realization of where he has been going wrong or why he has made so many wrong turns.

Acting often involves being someone the actor could never be, someone so temperamentally different that occasionally the character repels the actor but, to create a performance, the actor must find a way of understanding the cause of the behavior he is trying to portray.

This can work the other way round too. You can’t deliver an anti-war polemic if you are enamored of the trappings of war. Or rather, you can if that part of your personality is opposed by another part that is repelled by the idea. The duality can create a character that is more rounded than the cipher we mentioned above.

So there is no need to consciously go for a grand and serious theme when making your movie, but it should be remembered that by omitting to think of that element, you may end up producing an entertainment that has no more longevity than the time it takes to view it. If the theme is trivial or badly handled, the film may be fun while it lasts but it won’t be memorable. If you stick in a theme because you think you should, or you need one as an excuse for a piece of action you’ve always wanted to animate, you will come over as cynical or insincere and you may miss the very things that make the story interesting.

Props

So far, in this chapter, we’ve been talking about internal, psychological, themes, and character drivers. With props and costumes, we’re moving outside to look at the ways we can enhance a performance through the clothes and objects we associate with the character and those objects a character may use as part of the performance.

Props (Originally stage “properties,” items owned or provided by the theatre rather than stage clothes provided by the performers themselves) are those items the performer actually handles when playing a part, like the glass he drinks from or the letter he tucks into his jacket pocket. All the other stuffis set dressing and in animation terms will, in 2D, be part of the scene painting or, in model animation or CG, be modeled for its appearance only (rather than to be used). In live-action, a kitchen table would not usually be considered a prop, even if the characters used it as a barrier when chasing each other around it. In animation, of course, it could be if, for example, your giant character picked one up to use as a back scratcher. Mostly, though, we are talking about those items that the writer, director, or animator uses to create “incidental business”: nonverbal activity that conveys subtle indications of character. What could be more nonchalant than Bugs’ way of eating a carrot in the face of danger? Combine that with the precise animation timing and delivery of his famous catch phrase and “What’s Up Doc?” gives us the character in a nutshell.

Disney’s “Pinocchio” is full of ways in which props can be terrific signposts to character and personality. Look at Honest John, with his nonchalantly twirled cane that marks him out from the beginning as a showman, but that also says he’s a bit too flash. He uses the cane as an extension to his arm, allowing him to literally manipulate Pinocchio as he manipulates him mentally, letting him get just far enough away before pulling him back for more persuasive, honeyed words. Note how Honest John’s pretentions to learning and class are shown to be false the instant he picks up Pinocchio’s ABC and reads it upside down.

Props can also help out in the staging of a scene, giving the character a reason to move around a room, helping to get them into the right place at the right time. This will be looked at in more detail in Chapter 7, Scene Composition, but what I would like to concentrate on here is how the correct use of props can help directors and animators to get over the problem of “theatricality” or “staginess,” the effect that comes from concentrating too hard on what the character is trying to express. As we mentioned above, in scripting a scene, the good writer will avoid “on the nose” dialogue, and sometimes, when animating, it can feel like we are doing the same thing, expressing what the character is saying by a kind of pantomime that tries too hard to get over the message. I’m sure all animators have experienced a moment when they’ve asked themselves what the hell they should do with their character’s hands while he’s talking—and come up with “Flappy Hands”™ .

We know that it is not enough for the character to just say the words but even if we act out the speech, we find ourselves thinking about what our hands are doing, trying to add the right emphasis and ending up with something mechanical or something that looks like a demented seagull. (Though if that was what you were after, congratulations, you’ve got it!)

This sort of thing can bedevil actors when they find themselves failing to produce a convincing performance or line reading and start to focus too much attention on the line or the action. When this happens, a line meant to be throwaway will become overblown and self-conscious or an important line will start to signal its presence in a way that becomes completely unnatural.

By introducing a prop and devising a bit of “business,” the actor finds an activity that demands his attention and leaves the actual line as almost an afterthought and, therefore, easy to deliver.

In a purely practical way, the same sort of thing can happen with an animator; thinking about how to work with the prop and how to deal with the action, be it pouring a drink or opening a door, can take away the need for the character to “perform” the line and make it more significant than it needs to be.

In this case, concentration on an ordinary, everyday bit of business emphasizes the shock of new information, which can be aural or visual. This is a comedy standby; for example, a reaction will be more pronounced, and funnier, if the character is in the middle of an action, like the man who, suavely pouring himself a drink, suddenly realizes he has been insulted and, in his shock, pours the drink over his hand.

As an animator, you will be fortunate if the writer has been thinking in terms of character behavior when writing the script and has taken the trouble to provide a range of props and opportunities for their use. In this way, you can start to create natural physical behavior that helps characterization or motivation become visible without the words doing the work. That way, only the important lines of dialogue, the ones that really tell the story, can stand out and the dialogue takes a back seat to the action.

In an exercise taken from the 11 Second Club, my students had to animate one character accusing another of stealing something. One of the students decided to play the scene in CG with the stolen object as a car, which had obviously been retrieved, as it was present in the shots, but, having modeled the car, he chose to have it sit there while his characters talked face to face. Without an idea to inform the acting, the characters were left to flap their hands about in a way that filled up the time but achieved little else. My suggestion to him was to have the accuser, the one who had lost the car, play the scene, paying more attention to the car rather than to the thief, as if this was his pride and joy. This gave the car owner something to do, stroking the car as if it was a person, almost a love object, which meant the emphasis was taken away from the idea of pantomiming the words and to playing a real idea. In this way, the animator could present the reason the character was so angry and explain the vehemence of the voice acting.

Props may often be an obvious adjunct to body language—like taking off glasses or smoking a pipe. Dark glasses can be used to conceal the eyes, to add mystery, or used in the way Top Cat does to show how cool he is.

Props can be narrative tools, devices to move the story along, especially in the sense that Hitchcock called the “Maguffin,” the object that starts the story off and the thing the characters want to possess. The acorn that Scrat constantly pursues in the “Ice Age” films falls into this category as does the Ring in “Lord of the Rings.” With Scrat, the acorn is little more than the excuse for a chase, but the Ring not only motivates the characters and helps drive the narrative, it also provides a whole set of challenges for characters like Frodo over and above the need to avoid the bad guys. The power of the ring and how different characters react to the promise of that power creates character interaction and development and establishes personality.

Props can be an invaluable aid to establishing the theme of a film and the relationship between characters, as animator and educator Patrick Smith (http://scribblejunkies.blogspot.com) points out: “In Michael Dudok De Wit’s film “Father and Daughter.” the very first shot establishes the deep bond between father and daughter, illustrated by showing them riding bicycles together, the bicycle itself becomes a symbol of their connection and is used throughout the film, all the way to the end.”

Often an item, like Popeye’s pipe, is so integral to the character that it could be considered part of his costume or design, something without which he would not be complete. Popeye’s clothing is a good example of a functional costume design that does little more than denote his identity as a sailor. Much animation design is like this, with the costume simple and unchanging, designers just occasionally adding an extra note to give a tweak to an established character, like Daffy Duck putting on a deerstalker to establish that he is playing the part of a detective.

The advantages of such a system are obvious in terms of recognizability and simplicity of production, but getting the correct initial design is not easy; do we, for example, want to go with the obvious choice or should we play with expectations?

Summary

We have seen that human empathy is a trait that allows us to better understand our fellow beings to cooperate and survive. To get the audience on the side of our characters, we have to find ways of invoking that empathetic reaction and the best way to do that is if we, as animators, can make an empathetic connection to them first. We must study and understand our characters in depth before we can make them live for others. And in that study we should aim to bring out the particularity of the character by making acting choices that are not obvious and that emphasis the distinctiveness of the individual. In this way, even villains can be understood, and we can see how animal characters are but variations on ourselves.

What makes a person particular and creates a “rounded” character comes down to their motivations, their needs, and desires. Because the script cannot tell us everything about a character, in the same way that a novel can, we have more room for interpretation and need to work harder to explore motivation. A simple change in the way a character delivers a line can change the whole meaning of a piece.

Motivation has many levels and a character may be motivated to one action in pursuit of a greater motivating force, as when a young man chases after an unsuitable girlfriend to annoy his overbearing mother. Though the animator may understand the character’s motivation, the character often does not and story often grows out of the tension between what he wants and what he actually needs.

Despite movie mogul, Sam Goldwyn’s famous dictum that “Pictures are made to entertain; if you want to send a message, call Western Union”, there’s more power in a film that knows what it wants to say. Thought and entertainment are not mutually exclusive and a story with a powerful theme to it will provide the drive that makes for an exciting entertainment, whether that be a comedy, a tragedy, or an action film.

Props and costumes can be extremely useful in conveying nonverbal indications of character, and their use can become an adjunct of body language. The use of props can be built into a performance so that we can create natural physical behavior that helps personality and motivation become visible without an over reliance on acting out the words.