This chapter looks at the nature of performance, its history, and the way theories of acting have developed and how that is related to ideas of performance in animation. We examine the ways in which we can use performance ideas from theatre and cinema to add to what we do in animation and the things that animation can do that are not open to other media.

From its inception as a novelty to its current status as one of the world’s box office champions, animated cinema has developed alongside live-action cinema and has dealt with the same kinds of subject while creating its own special kind of appeal. Those who make the mistake of calling animation a “genre” are corrected in no uncertain terms; animated films have been made in all genres, and animation is just another way of making films. There has long been a cross fertilization between the two arms: from animators using live action as reference footage at the Disney Studios to directors like Brad Bird moving over to make live action films, and from the combination of the two in the Fleisher’s Out of the Inkwell cartoons and Disney’s Alice in Cartoonland through Jerry Mouse appearing in films like Gene Kelly’s film, Anchors Aweigh (1945, George Sidney, to the full on blend of live action with animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Robert Zemeckis.

Frank Tashlin is a director who started out in animation, working for Paul Terry, Warner Bros., and Disney, and then moved into live action as a gag writer for the Marx Brothers and Lucille Ball and finally as a director with films like The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), which he moved along at the pace of a cartoon and stuffed full of sight gags. Tim Burton is a director who, from the time he attended college, has seemed at home in both animation and live action, producing films that owe nothing to the idea that there are restrictions on creativity created by artificial demarcation lines within cinema.

Fewer live action directors have moved the other way until relatively recently; although Steven Spielberg has had a long involvement in animation, mainly as a producer, and his 1979 film 1941 contains a host of gags that nod to Warner Bros cartoons, he didn’t direct an animated movie himself until TinTin (2011). Latterly, we have seen names like Gore Verbinski, Rango (2011), Wes Anderson, Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), and George Miller, Happy Feet (2006), directing animated movies.

Many animation enthusiasts will question whether we can call motion captured movies animation at all and look with disdain on the recent output of Robert Zemeckis, in particular. I think we have to acknowledge that it is becoming harder and harder to define what animation actually is and that there are scholarly journals that spend a lot of time arguing the point. This is not the place to try to settle the question, rather, I would say that, unless we want to paint ourselves into a small corner, we ought to embrace the fact that animation is now present in every area of film, TV, games, etc. and be happy that we have a larger canvas on which to work.

The amount of what we once have called animation appearing in live action movies has increased to an incredible extent with few big movies appearing these days without some visual effects content. Visual effects are present not only in the obvious genres, like science fiction and fantasy, but period films have entire harbors of sailing ships recreated in the computer or armies of Roman soldiers digitally inserted into dusty battlefields. Titanic, James Cameron (USA, 1997), wasn’t the first film to insert digital “extras” into a film, but it arguably brought the idea of the “synthespian” out of the world of the VFX technician and to wider public attention. Now we realize that large portions of the vast crowds we see on screen were not actually present when the main action was shot or that the secret agent falling out of the helicopter is neither the star, nor his stuntman, but a computer-generated figure.

As the two worlds of animation and live action have come closer together, this synthesis has thrown up questions for the art of animated performance and about the nature of the reality of a screen image. On the one hand, there are different outlets and usages for the animated image and therefore different ways a character performance must be constructed; on the other hand, there is the question of where we pitch the level of realism in our work.

Stanislavski, of course, is the person who is credited with having the greatest influence over acting and performance on stage and screen for the last 100 years or so, and it is worth looking at what he achieved. Stanislavski was the stage name of Constantin Sergeyevich Alexeyev, born in 1863 to one of the richest Russian families of that era. He took a stage name to hide his interest in acting from his family, since actors in Russia, at that time, had very low status.

Although Stanislavski is, to many people, the creator of a new tradition and a radical break with the old ways of acting, he was actually part of a movement that was dedicated to bringing realism to the arts and theatre.

Stanislavski’s System

Stanislavski’s intention was to put together a kind of toolbox that actors could use to create a truthful performance and to that end came up with a set of principles that could become the basis for such a thing. Let’s go through them and look at their relevance to animation.

Study

It is obvious that, as we grow up, we develop our own particular way of moving and talking, things that our friends recognize as part of our personality. Our body language, although it might contain universally understood nonverbal signals (See Chapter 5, Principle of Performance—Body Language), will be modified by our own particular physique and emotions and contains things specific to us. Obviously, if an actor fails to take this into account when on stage, his performance will be undermined by the presence of physical actions that do not relate to the character he is playing.

As animators we can’t just walk on stage to perform, we have to learn the skill of making things move in a believable way, so we might think we are already ahead of the game here. However, if we are honest, once we have started to learn how to make things move, there is a great temptation to rely on those principles for everything we do. Sometimes it can become easy to recognize one animator’s work, no matter what the character he is animating, and he therefore loses the particularity and thus the reality of that character. We all need to keep observing real life and finding ways to incorporate it into our animation, even if we are creating imaginary characters, so that there is always something real there.

Emotional Memory

One of the techniques that Stanislavski developed required the actor to find something in his own life that would allow him or her to understand what was going on within the character. But even further, by looking back at an incident that had triggered sadness in her own life, the actor could not only understand what the character might be feeling but, by calling that memory up in preparation for going on stage, or actually on stage, the performance would come from a much more truthful place than if the emotion was merely imitated.

Stanislavski felt that performances needed to come from the inside as well as the outside and developed a way of using physical actions to help generate internal feelings. His focus was on the way in which internal feelings and external, physical actions are linked in a two-way communication and the way in which any psychological experience will give rise to a physical display. Therefore, a man waiting impatiently for the cab to take him to an important interview will manifest that impatience in actions that might include pacing, drumming fingers, an annoying whistle, or even rearranging the magazines on his coffee table.

How might these ideas be useful to animators? Well, as we explore later, to create a performance that works, and is convincing, we need to be able to get inside the character and understand his mental processes and, in the case of Empathy, we have to look at our own experiences to find a way of connecting with what drives a character. If we can call on a memory of some incident in our own life that gives us a purchase on the motivation of the character we are animating, we might be able to find some specific of that experience that will inform the performance and change it from something obvious into something with that extra spark of real life.

Analyzing the Script and the “Magic If”

One of Stanislavski’s innovations was to get actors and director together to analyze the script and the nature of the characters and try to come to an understanding of their personalities and motivations. One of the ways in which this analysis would work was by having the actor put himself in the shoes of the character by asking questions, as in, “What would I do in this situation?” They would pose the question as to how they might act if they had had the same life experiences as the character, drawing on their own life to find some empathic connection to that character. Then, having begun to get a feeling for the character, they could ask, “What might (my character) do if the situation was different?”

The way to do this through the “magic if” is, of course, through Empathy. By identifying experiences that we have had that approximate to those of the character, we can begin to understand the driving forces in that character’s personality. It doesn’t matter that our experience is, perhaps, less intense or of a different magnitude because, thankfully, we can empathize without fully understanding someone. I may not be a tiger, like Shere Khan, but I can understand that he feels threatened by the presence of the “Man Cub” in “his” jungle. Shere Khan is the boss, everybody defers to him, but he knows that Man is different and dangerous and individual men might be easy prey, but when they get together and come hunting with their fire and their spears, they are a different proposition. If I were in his position, what would I do? I’d want to pick off this interloper while he was still relatively helpless and before he brought any of his tribe back into the forest. But would I go round looking anxious and asking all the other animals to help? Certainly not, I have a reputation to keep up, and my approach would be as cool as I could make it.

We aren’t tigers, ruling the jungle, but many of us have been on top of the heap in some way and then found someone else come in who threatens to unseat us, whether it be a new sibling or a new animator on the team, and we know how that feels.

As Stanislavski said “Never allow yourself externally to portray anything that you have not inwardly experienced and which is not even interesting to you.”

Motivation

Stanislavski asked actors to look in depth at their character’s motivation, what it was that was causing the character to act in the way she was doing. Motivation can spring from many different places and we will go into the question in greater detail in Chapter 5, Principles of Performance, but what is important here is to ask the question, “Why am I doing this?” In the example above, Shere Khan acts as he does because he feels threatened by the presence of Mowgli in the jungle and motivation often comes out of the most primitive of desires, the desire to merely survive. This may have been the initial case with Wile E Coyote too, since we often see him flipping through the cookbook to the page with the Roadrunner, but I get the sense that this part of his motivation often gets overlaid by a desire to get even with the bird that has humiliated him so often.

The character is mostly unaware of his own motivation or believes it to be other than what it actually is, but the actor, or animator, needs to be aware of it so that he can go on to the next part of the system, the character’s objectives.

Objectives

“What do I want?” This time, the character may be able to articulate an answer to the question of what his goal might be, although in terms of acting, the answer will not cover the whole of what the actor needs to think about.

Stanislavski taught that every character must have an objective, a goal that they want to achieve and that this goal could change. A character’s over-arching desires are called the super-objective, and this will run through the play or film: the Coyote wants to eat the Roadrunner, Cinderella’s stepmother wants her daughters to marry well, preferably to a prince. Such objectives can change; for example, what Shrek wants, and what drives him for most of the film, changes as he discovers more possibilities in life.

Within this structure there will be other objectives, each scene will have an objective for the character and within the scene there will be smaller objectives. Take the scene in The Incredibles (2004) Brad Bird, where Mr. Incredible goes to see Edna Mode to get his superhero suit fixed: Mr. Incredible’s super-objective (no pun intended) is to carry on being a super hero and doing all the crime fighting and world saving he used to do. A secondary objective, due to the fact that such derring-do is outlawed, is not to let anyone know that he is doing it. In his visit to Edna, his objective is to get his suit repaired and not to let her know what he is doing with it, so the actions he performs in the scene are all in pursuit of this objective, including the way he acts as he tries to gain entry to her house. When Edna looks at his torn suit and throws it in the bin, his reaction is to quickly retrieve it because, without it, he can’t pursue his main objective. The way he looks at the suit is a wonderful illustration of the hopes and fears that it embodies, the sentimental tenderness of a man attached to the past that it represents, and the fear that, without it, he will no longer be the (super) man he was. Edna then offers to make him a new suit and he momentarily forgets that he isn’t supposed to be doing this any more; his objective shifts to wanting to accept and get a great new suit; “something classic, like Dynaguy”. Moments later, after Edna has vetoed the idea of a cape, he remembers he is supposed to be keeping this stuff secret and his secondary objective re-establishes itself as he goes back to asking for his old suit to be repaired. In doing so, he takes on a blatantly false jollity that doesn’t convince Edna (or us) for a moment.

Even background characters are important in this respect, and if we have the opportunity (i.e., the budget) to give them something to do, they can help to underpin the believability of the scene, as in The Iron Giant when Agent Mansley comes into the room filled with town officials. There isn’t much movement from them but the way they look at him and shift ever so slightly creates a palpable nervousness in the room and a deference to his rank that is very clever.

If you can find your character’s objectives in each scene and then take a look at how often he achieves them, you’ll get a fair idea of what his emotional state is going to be throughout. He doesn’t have to constantly manifest these emotions, but by understanding them and the character’s “wants,” you’ll be able to come up with a more convincing performance. Once again it comes down to believing in your character, whether he’s a snake or she’s a dragon, and going with the reality you are trying to create.

Obstacles

The things that crop up to get in the way of our character’s objectives Stanislavski called obstacles. These obstacles may be minor bumps in the road or they may be very serious upsets, they may be natural occurrences, like the lack of a corkscrew when the character is trying to entertain a new date, or they could be the deliberate result of another character’s objective, such as when Edna throws away Mr. Incredible’s old suit because her “want” is to make a better one.

Tools or Methods

Tools or methods are the different ways a character devises to get around obstacles and get to their objective; Richard sends murderers to kill his brother, the Duke of Clarence, who is ahead of him in line to the throne; the Coyote orders another great gadget from Acme; Mr. Incredible retrieves his costume from the bin.

Actions

Actions take the idea of an objective right down to the scale of the individual line and encourage the actor to find a reason for each thing he says or does. This doesn’t have to mean that every single action is driven by the main objective, even the Coyote isn’t that obsessed and his actions, although they come about in pursuit of his obsession, change due to the situation he’s in. So, although he wants to eat the Roadrunner, his attention will soon enough be focused on trying to keep from getting squashed by his own machinery and each movement will come from that.

In Stanislavski’s system, the idea of playing an objective (sometimes also called a task) is to take the actor’s focus from playing the line (of dialogue) and keep them “in the moment” on stage. Actors may take their time to say a line or move across the stage, but this doesn’t go on for too long and they can afford to be “in the moment”; for animators who may take a day, or even days, to make the same line or movement work, there is no way we can do the same thing. What we can get out of this idea of objectives is the way to approach a scene to make it shine, to stop it simply going from A to B.

Method Acting

It is likely that Method acting (developed by Lee Strasberg of the Group Theatre) is the only theory of acting that a member of the general public would be able to recognize; if asked, such has been the effect that it has had on film acting and thus the star system of Hollywood. Strasberg’s students include some of the all-time greats of the movie world of the last fifty to sixty years, names like Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Paul Newman, Jane Fonda, Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, and Robert De Niro. This is more to do with the fame of those actors than it is with whatever system of acting they espoused, but it has certainly made The Method a recognizable “brand.”

The “method” is derived from Stanislavski’s “system” but was modified by Strasberg and his colleagues. We can’t go into all the differences here but the main ones (and the ones that give rise to much of the notoriety) are the ideas of substitution and emotional memory. Stanislavski had asked the actor to imagine “What would I do in this circumstance?” Strasberg’s question was, “What would motivate me, the actor, to behave in the way the character does?” This asks the actor to replace the play’s circumstances with his own and is called a “substitution.” Emotional memory requires the actor to draw on his own memories and experiences to use when playing a part so that, for example, when playing the part of someone with a dying father, the actor might bring to mind the time when a relative was dying. The Method differs from Stanislavski in that these memories need to be dredged up on stage or in front of the camera, rather than using them in an empathic fashion to get into the mindset of the character.

Naturalism and Reality

What we are talking about when we talk of naturalism or reality in animation are two things, one being the attention paid to the physical reality of the performer and setting and the other being the psychological truth of the performances. In terms of physical reality, we are talking about the animation principles that the Disney animators are credited with formalizing in the early 1930s that we know as the 12 Principles of Animation (Trumpets, drum roll). We’ll talk more about them in Chapter 6, Making a Performance, but, for now, we can précis them as the creation of a character that has personality, weight, solidity and whose movements not only betray a quality of agency but adhere to a physical reality, even if it is a cartoon physics. After the Disney studio enshrined these ideas in a system, there would be no more times when a character could pull off its tail and use it as a hook, as Felix the Cat used to do until years later.

Playful Pluto (1934), Burt Gillett, is held up as the first time a cartoon character really appeared to have a mind of its own and seemed to be thinking, and Norman Ferguson, the animator of the sequence where Pluto gets stuck in fly-paper, is credited with kick-starting the move to a more real sense of character. It isn’t exactly what you’d call realistic, but the fact that Pluto changes how he feels about the situation he’s in, as he gets more frustrated about being stuck, registered with audiences, and was eye opening for the animators involved.

The work of development undertaken by the studio in their films from this point on would culminate in the big breakthrough of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), David Hand, William Cottrell. Walt Disney had, by this time, become convinced that, although animation should not seek to ape reality, it should at all times be based in reality. “I definitely feel that we cannot do the fantastic things based on the real, unless we first know the real” were his words to his animators. To this end, the animators attended a new life drawing class, and the film is also noteworthy for its use of live action reference for the character of Snow White and the Prince (some of the scenes were actually rotoscoped, despite the objections of some of the animators). Where the film really scores in terms of its animation and the way in which a quality of real life is infused into the characters is in the dwarfs, each of whom is given an individual personality through the way in which they are designed and animated.

No one would contend that the dwarfs are very realistic characters, in the sense that we see people like that every day (I’m talking about their actions and personalities rather than their stature), but we can connect with them since their drives are so human. What they do is based on observation of real people, so that though they may act in an exaggerated manner, they are still portraying real emotions rather than using signs to denote emotions.

But, even if the performances are based on reality in some way, are we seeing some form of reality on screen? From today’s perspective, I would argue that the acting in this, and many subsequent Disney movies, really could be categorized as very broad and not in the least bit naturalistic and that this is a stylistic choice that was new and exciting at the time and opened up new avenues for animation. What we had on screen were characters that seemed to have an inner life and reacted to the circumstances of the plot with realistic emotional intensity.

It can be argued that Felix could walk along and seem to be considering things, and, of course, Winsor McCay’s creations always had a real sense of life to them that came from being drawn by a genius, but this was the moment that the way to make this trick work was turned into a workable system that could be adopted and refined by any able animator. In saying this, I don’t intend to imply that it was a way in which anybody could get the same results that animators like those at the Disney studios were capable of. This was a system in the same way that Stanislavski had a system, a codified set of principles that could be used by a talented individual to produce good work and that can be built upon by diligent study and practice, which necessarily includes observation of the real world. As Bill Tytla said about his work on “Dumbo” (1941), Samuel Armstrong, Norman Ferguson: “I don’t know a damned thing about elephants; I was thinking in terms of humans and I saw a chance to do a character without using any cheap theatrics. Most of the expressions and mannerisms I got from my own kid. There’s nothing theatrical about a two-year-old kid.

They’re real and sincere-like when they damn near wet their pants from excitement when you come home at night. I tried to put all these things in Dumbo.”

Disney, of course, is no longer the only game in town when it comes to the animated feature. Although for a long time the studio lead the way in both the artistic and commercial development of the form, there have always been other studios, other countries producing films, and other styles of film. One of the greatest directors of animated features working today is Hiyao Miyazaki, founder of Ghibli Studios and a man revered by animators both east and west. Although his films are not quite as successful in the west as they are in his native Japan (where they are always coming top of the box office), they have a devoted following, including people like John Lasseter of Pixar and animators at Aardman Animations.

The animation in Miyazaki’s films, while observing many of the concepts of the Disney Studio’s twelve principles, has certain differences that set it apart and provide an alternative example of a naturalistic style. For those who are wedded to the Disney style, the character animation in a Miyazaki film can often seem a little opaque and the characters underpowered in some ways. Though, at the start of his career, he worked on several films that used the Disney style, he never adopted it as his own, and what his films specialize in are characters who, I feel, cannot be completely known by the viewer. Like our own acquaintances, who we may have known for a long time, but can still surprise us, Miyazaki’s characters hold back a little of themselves even as we recognize them as real people. In Spirited Away (2001), Hayao Miyazaki, the main character, Chihiro, is a recognizable little girl who pulls at the hem of her T-shirt and, at the start of the film, runs in a funny childish manner with her hands held up to her chest. Miyazaki has obviously looked at how little girls act, and indeed this production came about because he wanted to do something that would appeal to 10-year-old girls like the daughters of the friends with whom he went on holiday.

“Every time I wrote or drew something concerning the character of Chihiro and her actions, I asked myself the question whether my friend’s daughter or her friends would be capable of doing it. That was my criteria for every scene in which I gave Chihiro another task or challenge. Because it’s through surmounting these challenges that this little Japanese girl becomes a capable person.”

While Miyazaki’s films are full of wonders, they all have a very real background that makes the science fiction or mystical elements work in context; they have all been developed in a way that feels real, even if not everything is completely clear. The world of each of these stories has a logic that makes even the strangest occurrences completely believable; all the characters, even the soot sprites that appear in My Neighbour Totoro (1988), Hayao Miyazaki, and reappear in Spirited Away, have a function, and even if we don’t know what it might be, the context reveals their purpose without necessarily explaining it. In Totoro, once the house the sprites are living in becomes inhabited by a new family, they drift away, and in Spirited Away, they actually have a job helping the boiler man. In the first case, although we don’t know their function in the world, we can see that they are responding to what is happening and so, like any natural phenomenon, we accept their reality, and in the latter film, they are given a job to do that accords with their look and feel. The way they are animated, with a wide-eyed singleness of purpose, tells us just how simple they are. The behavior they exhibit is not that of insects, which have such a single-minded directness that we cannot connect with them, nor is it the flocking behavior of birds, because they exhibit interest in what other characters are doing, but it is a brilliant depiction of a very limited, but real, intelligence.

The depth that Miyazaki gets into his worlds, the design, the depiction of believable places, the concern for real problems like environmental ones or the role models for young girls, proves a very strong support to the characters, and it is impossible to think of them apart from each other. People tend to describe the realistic feel of the whole film before they pick out any character, and this may be a reason some feel his characters lack expression, they cannot, perhaps, see these characters in another story or outside this one. However, that criticism could be leveled at any number of films, and I think that few people would be desperate to see what Pinocchio did after his story had been told and he had become a real boy.

I must admit that, in some cases, the animation in a Miyazaki film can be a little too like conventional anime and that some of the human characters are sometimes, especially facially, a little immobile. No film is perfect, and to my mind, this is the counterpart of the animation excesses in a Disney film where too much business and distortion can go on without it adding anything to the understanding of the character.

So both Pinocchio and Spirited Away can be seen as real and their characters’ performances are natural to their own worlds; they both benefit from the animators’ close observation of the real world and their attempts to use that knowledge in pursuit of greater truth.

Epic Theatre

Germany’s Bertolt Brecht’s created theatrical events that, while making believable characters, never asked the audience to believe that the actor had become the character. The play is, at all times, merely a construction and a representation of the real world and not the world itself. By emphasizing the construction of the play and the way it could be altered, he hoped to show that everyday life was itself a construction. He wanted the audience to realize that the character was, at all times, making choices and choosing one action over another, as a way to show that the state of the world was caused by the actions of people and that people could choose to change the world. In his plays, he allowed the actors to talk to the audience or “break the fourth wall” as it is known, and they tended to play several parts. Captions and the speaking of the stage directions were other techniques to promote what he called the “verfremdungseffekt”, translated as “distancing effect or estrangement effect.”

I have seen nothing to suggest that Brecht had any thoughts on animation or that Hollywood cartoons contributed in any way to the formulation of his theories, but it seems to me that animation does contain a lot of what Brecht was talking about. In the first place, we are automatically distanced from the film due to the nature of how it is made. We, as an audience, have to accept that what we are looking at are drawings or puppets or computer generated characters, and we have to suspend disbelief to enjoy the film. It is obvious that, though they use all twelve of the Disney studios animation principles, Warner Bros cartoons featuring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, the Roadrunner, and the others refuse to conform to the tyranny of the plot or sentimental happy endings. As in Brecht, characters often break the fourth wall and talk to the audience and captions are used extensively, especially in the films of Tex Avery. More importantly, in this regard, the characters are always playing at being whatever they appear to be on screen. Even when we find Bugs hanging out in a rabbit hole before being hunted by Elmer Fudd, we always get the sense that he is there only to get the picture going and that a sophisticate like him is really at home with the other stars and probably has an apartment in Beverly Hills. Indeed, we often see him doing other jobs or in other situations in the manner of a star cast in a different role, including in Duck Amuck Chuck Jones (USA, Warner Bros. 1953) as the animator of the titular cartoon. Duck Amuck takes the self-reflexivity of the Warner cartoons to its logical conclusion with the unseen animator tormenting Daffy, the “star” of the cartoon, by repainting his backgrounds to make his Musketeer costume inappropriate, then repainting him as a different character and then going into even wilder flights as Daffy is broken apart and rebuilt, and the very film itself is restructured around him.

In a similar vein, Who Killed Who?, Tex Avery (USA, MGM 1943), is a parody of detective and horror films where the live-action host who introduces the show turns out to be the murderer in the end, and the victim can be reading about his fate in the book of the film he’s in. Playing with the method of making the film (2D cel animation), Avery has a scene in which a cupboard is opened and the butler, tied up, falls out toward camera. And keeps falling! The cels are repeated until they suddenly pause with the character in midair, and he looks out at the audience and says, “Quite a bunch of us, isn’t it?” and then continues falling.

In all these films, the characters act as if they know they are in a film and playing a role, and the acting is generally broadly played as a parody of whatever genre they have taken on but it can contain moments of subtlety, usually when the character finds himself frustrated by the limitations of the role he’s stuck with.

Of course, the other important way in which these characters differ from their Disney counterparts and what makes them fit into an examination of the Brechtian style is something that Brecht could never have seen from any of his actors, the completely extreme nature of their bodily distortion. These characters literally embody the emotions they have in a way that holds nothing back. So if the wolf sees an attractive female, he will hold nothing back in displaying what that attraction has done to him; his entire body will erect itself while his jaw will drop to the ground and his eyes will pop completely out of his head. Instead of the old fashioned theatrical way of making a gesture that acted as a signal to what the character was supposed to be feeling, in Avery’s work, the character’s whole body is a representation of an emotion in a way that Terry Gilliam calls, “the most wonderfully liberating spectacle”.

Though the director often uses his characters and the form of the piece to examine the nature of the type of film they are parodying, the main difference to Brecht’s theatre is the fact that these Hollywood cartoons are not political in the sense that Brecht was aiming for. Though a film like Duck Amuck reveals the methods of its own production, it does so only to make a joke at Daffy’s expense and not to show the ultimate hand behind the production, the money-men, who Brecht would, no doubt, have attempted to expose.

Nevertheless, the political, in whatever way you want to look at it, is present in much animation, and the style of performance can owe something to both the naturalistic style of Stanislavski and to the non-naturalistic style of Bert Brecht. A film like Britannia (1993), Joanna Quinn, takes the British Empire and uses the classic personification of it as a bulldog to look at what that empire did to the world. As it flows continuously from one image of conquest to another, the film portrays the dog rushing through a range of roles from the playful puppy he is at the beginning, through bully, thief, and lecher until he ends up as the bewildered lapdog of an old lady. The film uses all the classic principles of animation to bring out the body language and facial expressions and, as with all Joanna’s films, there is a masterful use of drawing to give the character weight and describe the forces running through the body. At the same time, these naturalistic tendencies are played at such speed and are combined with metamorphosis, as the dog turns into other characters like a judge and Queen Victoria, that there is never any sense that this is anything other than a didactic entertainment.

I Met the Walrus (2007), Josh Raskin, is an animated illustration of an interview John Lennon gave a young man called Jerry Levitan who had managed to sneak into the star’s hotel room in Toronto in 1969. A complex array of ideas and techniques serve to illustrate, comment on, and illuminate the ideas that Lennon is propounding and the performance element of the film is not restricted to the characters that appear throughout. The performance here is not about acting in the way that Dumbo is, though the individual characters all act perfectly well and the figure of John falls to the ground perfectly realistically when he is being denied entry to the US. Instead, the whole graphic style of the film is choreographed to elucidate the same connections that Lennon is making and uses animation principles to create a well-timed and snappy piece that blends education, comedy, and art. Smart timing and an apt choice of illustration are the important elements here.

Comedy

Comedy, possibly more than anything else, depends on us knowing our characters and our audience and getting the timing right. Unlike the stand-up comedian who can get an immediate reaction from the audience and adjust his performance to fit, leaving a bigger pause if the gag gets a longer laugh or changing direction if the jokes aren’t quite hitting the spot, we have to make the film and try to anticipate the reaction. Comedy can come from gags, both verbal and visual, from character and situation, and from a combination of all of them, and the way it is put over varies just as much in animation as in any other medium. The performance can be very broad or understated, it can be quick-fire and explosive, or it can be slow building, but the key to making the acting funny still seems to come from believing in the character, as you would for any other role.

In the interview with Peter Lord of Aardman Animations, in the bonus chapter on our book’s companion website, he talks about the importance of “real moments,” when the audience recognizes a gesture or a look that really speaks to them of themselves or someone they know. This is as true of comedy as it is of drama, and we can look at great comedians and see this happening. Charlie Chaplin has often been cited as a performer who does this constantly, and Ed Hooks, in his book Acting for Animation, notes the performance where Chaplin gets his foot caught in a bucket and tries to get it off. Ordinary comedians, he says, would try to get laughs by frantic attempts to lose the bucket, but the difference with Chaplin was that he would look around to see if anybody had noticed his problem and try to conceal his embarrassment. In doing so, the audience becomes party to his thoughts, they understand and recognize the similarity of his emotions to their own, and empathy ensues.

Comedy, as we all know, is a very subjective topic, and we all have our favorite comedians and comedy films. Ed Hooks loves Chaplin and consigns Keaton to a much lower rung of the acting pantheon because he feels that Keaton ignores, or does not know of, the importance of empathy. He was, says Hooks, “uneducated and unsophisticated about the actor/audience contract and about empathy.” Despite this, his films got, and get, big laughs and in the last half-century have quietly worked their way to a position where they are often seen as funnier and more modern than those of Chaplin. Chaplin is lauded as an actor’s director and connected to a deep well of emotion or damned as a throwback to the acting styles of the 19 th century and a reservoir of cheap sentiment and pathos. Keaton gets praise for his brilliant staging and use of the camera and his cool persona, and he is done down for being detached or a little heartless. The argument goes on and on, and a good rundown is the debate between critics David Fear and Joshua Rothkopf in the New York Times : (http//newyork.timeout.com/arts-culture/film/75837/feud-chaplin-vs-keaton).

Suffice it to say, Chaplin and Keaton still both get laughs and they are both worth watching and learning from, as is Harold Lloyd, whose films often outperformed both of them at the box office. The Marx Brothers and the stars of Warner and MGM cartoons, as well as the characters in South Park and Life of Brian (1979) Terry Jones, are all regarded (though not by everyone, naturally) as funny. What unites these shows is the fact that the characters all inhabit fully realized worlds and what they do; the situation they are in is, for them, the most important thing in the world.

Steven Horwich (tipsforactors.blogspot.com) writes, “This is true of both comedy and drama. In fact, it’s especially true of comedy. A character must feel that what is happening to them is critical and as close to life and death as possible. Moliere’s great comic characters seem to be ever on the brink of utter ruin and destruction, and no one’s plays are funnier. The bigger the problem, the funnier the character becomes.”

The lesson for the animators among us is to make sure that what we do with our characters contributes to the whole scheme of the film or show. Mugging, overacting, or merely doing things that are more complicated than the other animators have done is just showing off and adds nothing to the work. The humor is the thing, and if the shot is working and getting laughs, then it isn’t about the animation anymore, and there is no need to do things just for it to be seen as great animation. For the director, it is an admonition to make sure that everything you have in the work is there for a purpose. If adding that extra gag will make the scene funnier and build the character a little more, that’s great, but beware the temptation to push things too far and lose the thread of the story or undermine the character. If that gag is funny but not really in the nature of the character, then you have to bite the bullet and get rid of it—even if it is already animated!

Summary

Performance is a multifaceted thing and there is more than one way of animating a cat. Animation allows us to choose where we place our emphasis on the spectrum of realism and what we regard as the right kind of performance for our material. Since we can work in two-dimensional space as well as three-dimensional space, we can use graphic visual tricks as well as realistic ways of portraying things, and so have a greater control over the way we present our characters. The performances our characters give can, therefore, be influenced by any part of the history of acting, so having a sense of the history of performance gives us a much wider range of influences and ways to solve the problem of how we present ourselves to ourselves.