Introduction - Text 1
When we use the expression “animated drawing,” a certain image comes to mind immediately, one whose main features draw in large part on the industrial model descended from the work of Walt Disney.[1] Much could be said from an epistemological point of view on the reasons for this sense of the expression, reasons which become clearer when we examine the technical dimension of these filmic objects. This industrial model evidently did not come from nowhere, and the technological logic underlying it has a long history, one begun in large part in the United States in a context which it is worthwhile to examine.
It would be easy to assert that the industrialisation of the animated drawing took place as part of a logic of aesthetic evolution: here we will see how animated drawing producers sought to integrate regular film production by means of various new techniques for producing animated drawings of greater “realism,” meaning closer to the animated photographs viewers were used to seeing at the time. However, beyond the questions posed by this hypothesis – how should we understand the term “realism” here, other than as an adaptation to representational codes tied to a singular context, that of cinema in the 1910s? – we should note that it can in no way be seen as the initial goal of the earliest animated drawings studios in New York.
