VI. Nuestra organización comunitaria
4. El Gobierno general
T
he purpose of this chapter was to examine the act of encoding that takes place in animation production when an artificially constructed character is made to appear to be performing and to determine whether the animator can be seen as the performer behind that character. In the animation industry itself, it is commonplace to think of the animator as a performer by proxy who creates an artificial, animated body to enact a performance that she has devised as if an extension of her own body.In response to a century of historical precedents in the animation industry, whose practitioners studied and enacted performance as part of the process of creation that results in animated characters, I inhabited the paper skin of a cartoon character in order to examine the origination and performance of an artificial construct and to experiment with Butler’s notion of the performative. Adopting a strategy of participant observation, this project enabled me to use performance as a research method that would allow me to experience personally being in the site of animated performance, as opposed to being an exterior spectator. The Dog Betty project facilitated my un- derstanding of animation as a process extending beyond frame-by-frame technique or the confines of the flat screen. Furthermore, this project led me to make direct con- nections between animation, mask and puppetry; between the ecstatic rituals at the origins of theatre, in which the boundaries of the human body are transgressed, and the irrational, plasmatic world of the carton. Indeed, the roots of animation and live performance are deeply intertwined and, in this chapter, I have demonstrated a his- torical lineage that runs from the stage magician to the showman animator to the idea that the animator is a performer. Animation can be seen as an act of magic in which otherworldly worlds are created and artificial beings given the appearance of life.
A number of objections to the idea of the animator as a performer could be raised. Firstly, the practical issue of the complex authorship of animation may appear to chal- lenge preconceived notions of a direct correlation between the body of a performer and the performance that she gives. In the majority of animation productions, a team
2. Production: The animator as performer
works together to create the animated performance of one character. It would be rare for a single animator to be in complete control of one character without the as- sistance of co-workers, the influence of a voice-over artist and the creative overview of a director, writer, editor and character designer. It is clear from other types of live performance, however, that the creative intent behind a performance need not be enacted by the originator of that intent. In puppetry, for example, a puppet is made to perform through the non-matrixed actions of the puppeteer. Furthermore, work such as that created by Faulty Optic or bunraku puppetry, demonstrates how many hands can work together in a live context to create one character. Just as in factory animation production, multiple authors of performance (and even multiple techniques) can be unified by creative intent, consistency of appearance and characterisation and then understood as a coherent character in the mind of the viewer. I will go on to investigate in more detail the way in which character is understood by the viewer in Chapter 4.
Continuing the objection that the body of the performer is not the same as the body of the animator is the argument that, since the animated body never actually existed for the viewer in the form of corporeal flesh, there can be no clear process of identification with the character for the viewer. This train of thought could be con- trasted with the idea that the theatre is a place of incarnation, of the actual presence of original bodies and not their re-presentation, and, therefore, provides a more primal and authentic experience than that of viewing a performance that has been mediated through film. The former argument is that a real body must have once existed in order for the viewer to engage in identification. One of the limitations of this reason- ing is that it is dependent upon an understanding of performance as synonymous with naturalistic acting. It assumes that the viewer’s act of identification defines true performance. The latter argument is that even if the performing body were real, per- formance as reproduced on film lacks the authenticity and raw power involved in the experience of the performer’s body in close physical proximity.
In order to counter these points of view, I argue that a century of Modernist theatre practitioners such as Craig, Schlemmer, Kantor and Beckett have aimed for a more
2. Production: The animator as performer
direct and transformative form of communication than those established by naturalis- tic theatrical conventions: not through emotional identification with a human actor, but through the replacement, extension, negation or erasure of corporeal presence. Dif- ferent approaches to presence in the theatre disprove the idea that the authors of the intent need carry out that intent with their own bodies. Indeed, as Evans argues, with its play of absence and presence, animation could be seen as the ultimate Modernist performance. Moreover, all performed characters are fictions. Whether reproduced on film or experienced live, the human actor does not behave exactly as she would in ordinary life: planned and prepared, twice-behaved actions are enacted to create a fictional construct. Furthermore, assert that character is understood through the recognition of different types of movement informed by our lived experience rather than by the type of body that makes those movements.
A consideration of performance in animation enables the activity of performance to be seen as separate from the body that enacts the activity. As I discovered when creating, discussing and reflecting upon my performance Out There in the Dark, this contrast between absence and presence, between the live body and the animated character reveals the uncanny act at the heart of animation in which the lifeless is made to move. Following my Dog Betty research, this project began with a desire to examine the types of performance in animation and yet it ultimately led me to consider the animation in performance: the haunting of the corporeal by gesture; the physical body outwith conscious control; the undead enacting the performative intent of others and brought to the realm of the living through movement.
The results of my investigations in this chapter led me to the following conclu- sions: First, I argue that animation is a form of performance by constructed-actor, which has roots in mask and puppetry. Just as in puppetry, the body that conceives of and controls the behaviour of the character is separate from the character itself. The movements an animated character makes lead the viewer to experience the charac- ter as if it were autonomous and had agency. What differentiates animation from pup- petry is that the illusion of autonomous motion is mediated through a visual moving image technology such as film or digital video. Second, I assert that performance in
2. Production: The animator as performer
animation takes place at two levels: non-matrixed - the animators’ activities recorded over time; and substitutionary - a performance by proxy enacted by a substitute for the animator’s body. Finally, taken together, these ideas suggest that animation is not a reproductive technique, but an uncanny process in which the inhuman and lifeless are bestowed with motion and given the appearance of life.
If animation can be accepted as an activity in which a character is performed, the next area to explore is whether this could take place in a live environment. In the fol- lowing chapter, I will consider the impact of new, digital technologies on how animated performance is played back and delivered.