Introduction - Text 2
If we were to think about this remark from a techno-centric perspective, what is of course being called into question here, apart from live-action filming, is the animated drawing industry which, just by chance, was the preserve of the studio where, precisely, Hébert and McLaren officiated: the animation studio of the National Film Board of Canada. The NFB animation studio, whose English section was founded by McLaren in 1941 and which was then rounded out with a French branch in 1966, brought about in each case a creative project whose ambition was to offer a “vision much more artisanal than industrial”[3] as an expression of the rejection of a certain way of making animation, in particular that of the Disney model, whose division of labour adopted the logic of Taylorism. In this case the idea was to renounce the logistical unwieldiness of traditional animation in order to enable the filmmaker to be solely in charge of his or her creation by privileging “easy tools, things one had to hand.”[4] Drawing on film animation was clearly a part of this logic, and McLaren himself described it as “an operation of disconcerting simplicity.”[5]
We should note, however, that the fundamental goal of this technique, unlike industrial animation, is clearly not to simplify in order to facilitate and accelerate production. What is at stake is something different, because this dissenting approach sought to produce new and different forms, with the NFB defining itself as a “creative laboratory”[6] more than a production studio.
Within an organization which privileged experimentation and a DIY approach, we can look beyond the seeming “simplicity” of the technique to understand that it is at the root of numerous and plural practical questions which depend in reality on the way they are treated by every filmmaker who ventures into the field. Although to speak of “animated drawings on film” lets one suppose that there exists a single method, repeated from one film to the next and which could almost be taught in how-to manuals, we must acknowledge their evident plurality. As Pierre Hébert has written, “from the outset it is something of a challenge to write from a technical perspective about animation made directly on film, because there is not and cannot be a received or standardized form of practice. Everyone must invent their own technical or even technological method.”[7] To study animated drawings on film is thus to think about the way in which this technique, in its underlying principle, gives rise to the adaptability which appears intrinsic to it, and to the way in which the policies of the NFB studio appear to have contributed to this by instituting new forms of animation through its constant invention.
