Rotoscoping - Text 4
In each case, we see how these assemblages of singular devices, employing the logic of industrial production in the 1910s, tended to put the animated drawing and live-action images on an equal footing. The mechanised manufacture of drawings, conceived with productivity and efficiency in mind, in fact opened the door to an imaginary of the animated drawing in harmony with the operation of a traditional moving picture camera and by breaking down the principle underlying it. The Rotoscope and the Rotograph can be seen as both the culmination of this approach and as a technical dead end. If animated drawings are created out of live-action images and are the equivalent of photographic cinema to the point of being able to merge with it, is it still a form of animation? Many detractors of rotoscoping would point to the “trickery” involved in this system, which is not, properly speaking, animation. In this sense, the industrialisation of the animated drawing raises questions and blurs distinctions when it comes to defining this technique, which encompasses a number of radically different procedures. Yet a kind of imaginary was developing at this time, one taken up in the following decades in most animated films; Walt Disney would be one of its most obvious representatives. The combination of the production methods described here (whose goal was efficiency and productivity) and the technical imaginary arising directly out of them (the “mechanical future” of the production of animated pictures) in fact resulted in a certain aesthetic approach to the animated drawing. This approach was in keeping with that inherited from live-action photography: the realism of its movement, depth of field, camera movements, etc. In this sense, the “cinematographisation” of animated drawings in the 1910s and 20s was not so much a case of adapting to these representational codes, believed to be more in tune with audience expectations of the day, as it was the direct consequence of the birth of an industry which conformed to the technical dimension of live-action photography, seen as an ideological model to be followed. This determined the mechanical nature of animated drawing production and, on that basis, its productivity and profitability, as this was based on assembly-line production and the division of labour. We are thus in the presence, in a sense, of the invention of a “human camera.”
