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“…if you do pretty movement…”

// March 1st, 2009 // Acting, Personal Posts, Rambings

“…if you do pretty movement, people will think that it’s good animation. And, man, it is not! It’s about acting, man, and it’s about performance and individuality.”

-Brad Bird

I’m excited. I’m way excited. I feel like a born again animator since joining Lumenas. The major difference between animating in film and animating in any other medium is quite simply acting. I feel truly blessed to have another opportunity at figuring this acting thing out.

On Monday I am hosting an Alumni Q&A for Animation Mentor. When asked what topic I was going to talk about, I kinda freaked. I am nowhere near an expert on anything animation. So I decided I would talk about something that I have barely begun to scratch the surface of with my own understanding, which is acting and the thought process in animation.

The best part is that choosing this topic has forced me to start studying and really start thinking about the subject. I’m going to post a series of notes and resources I’ve found on acting as it relates to animation and throw in a few thoughts I have on it myself. To start, check out what Brad Bird said in an interview that took place in 2005 at the Museum of Moving Image.

GOODMAN: That’s beautiful. Chuck Jones was on this stage about ten years ago, and he had, for him, an epiphany when he was younger watching his cat, named Johnson, devour grapefruits. He had this bizarre habit of devouring grapefruits. He said something to the effect of “Character is the point; it’s all about character.” And it’s not about what they look like or how they sound, but how they move.

BIRD: That’s right. And that’s something that people… You’d be surprised at how little people think of that most of the time. And I mean a lot of animators, too. The strength of our generation of animators—meaning the generation after the great old guys that really developed everything—is also our weakness. And that is that there are more A-level animators now than there has [sic] ever been in the history of—even in the golden age of animation, the so-called “golden age.” There are more great animators now that are capable of putting really beautiful animation onscreen. At the same time, because we are—and it’s because we know every trick in the book, because we can look at all the work that they’ve done, on DVD and all that stuff, and study it. And they didn’t have that, and they couldn’t do that.

At the same time, it’s our weakness, because we tend to animate collections of movements that we’ve seen before, rather than drawing from life. And so, you know, if you really know animation, you can look at people’s stuff and go, “Yeah, that’s that little shoulder turn that they got from Frank Thomas in Pinocchio,” and, “Oh, yeah, there’s the blink that so-and-so did in The Sword in the Stone,” and “Oh, there’s the…da-da-da.” You can literally go through the scenes and see a collection of things that people have studied and picked up on. They’re almost Frankenstein-ing their scenes together. You can fool critics a lot of times, because if the movement is beautiful, if it moves smoothly, they’ll go, “Wow, that’s great animation.” And, you know, no, not necessarily. You could have beautiful movement that is not specific to the character, not specific to the moment, [that] doesn’t reflect the character’s sex or age, or where they’re coming from, or where they’re going to.

When you go to acting class, they teach you that you’re not starting a scene at zero, you’re coming from somewhere and you’re going to somewhere. There’s something that you did, your character did, ten minutes prior that is going to affect how they come into the room. And animators are not used to thinking that way—a lot of them aren’t. At Pixar, I feel like I was pre-sold on the place because I love their stuff, but [also] they are thinking more in depth. Like: take a shot of the audience right now. Everybody here is facing forward, they’re all sitting down, they’re all here watching us. But everyone is sitting in a slightly different way. This woman right here’s got her little shawl pulled up, she looks very comfortable, she’s sinking down lower. (Laughter) The only thing missing is maybe a cup of cocoa. (Laughter) But the guy next to her is kind of up here and, “Yeah, prove it to me that you deserve to be on that stage.” You know? And the girl sitting next to him is kind of leaning forward, kind of leaning toward him a little bit, kind of taking it all in. And every single—if you took a great high-resolution snapshot of this audience, everyone is sitting in a unique way. They’re sitting in a way that reflects who they are and where they’re coming from and where they’re going to. I think that that is really the home of animation—of character animation, anyway—and the thing that’s neglected the most. Because if you do pretty movement, people will think that it’s good animation. And, man, it is not! It’s about acting, man, and it’s about performance and individuality.

We tried to make every single character in this movie move differently. Syndrome has these kind of flashy, aggressive gestures when he gets full of himself. When he’s a kid, it’s a little more like a pup. But it’s the same guy, moved up the scale. Edna’s movements are very confident. She’s never experienced doubt in her life. Bob feels like an athletic guy gone to seed. There’s a certain physicality to the way they hold themselves. Helen’s got these buttery movements that suggest that she could fit into any situation. I just feel like that is the home of—that’s what makes the old Disney stuff so great; that’s what made [Chuck] Jones’s films great. And it’s missing, I think, in a lot of animation.

View the whole transcript from the interview here: Transcript

And listen to the interview here : Listen

The amazing part of studying acting is that when you realize its about your character and WHO this person is and WHY they would move the way they move, it changes everything about how you handle a shot. You stop getting wrapped up in trying to force animation for the sake of animation. Suddenly your poses have a purpose and a personality behind them. Suddenly your animation has a reason to be animated, it has a story to be told and a living character to tell that story. Which is why we animate and why people want to watch it.