Introduction - Text 1
Whereas the “traditional” animated drawing, in its logic of mechanization, brings to mind the functioning of a movie camera, which it tends to imitate from both an aesthetic and a technical point of view, drawing on film animation, for its part, offers the animator the opportunity to bypass entirely the mechanical artefact which is the camera, at least during the creation phase. The issues this raises are of course ideological, because the camera metonymically represents the film industry as a whole, but they are also economic, because this fact implies that any artist can make an animated film without this potentially costly device. Animators who use this technique work directly on the film stock, etching or painting frame by frame the components and movements of the image which will appear in projection. As a major representative of the technique, Pierre Hébert, has written,
everything is already in the original idea, completely crazy from a technological point of view. Film stock is not a surface designed for drawing on, but rather a highly specialized technical object which has a very precise role in cinema’s technological-industrial chain. The idea of using it to draw on, which first came to Len Lye and Norman McLaren, turns the technological logic completely upside down. This has consequences for every stage of the technical process, making drawing on film a kind of ironic and deviant double of the true technique.[1]
Without a movie camera, there is no “view” precisely, no more logic of perspectival representation, as inherited from the Quattrocento and inherent in the camera recording apparatus, something the industrial animated drawing, for its part, reproduces artificially. In this case, what matters much more than the content of the images is what happens between each image, in keeping with the definition of animation given by the person who is perhaps the principal representative of this technique, Norman McLaren:
Animation is not the art of drawings-that-move but the art of movements-that-are-drawn. What happens between each frame is much more important than what exists on each frame. Animation is therefore the art of manipulating the invisible interstices that lie between frames.[2]
