Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in Fifties Animation
Amidi,Amid.
Cartoonmodern:styleanddesigninfiftiesanimation.ChronicleBooks,(2006):292-296.
During the 1970s,when I was a graduate student in film studies, UPA had a presence in the academy and among cinephiles that it has since lost. With 16mmdistribution thriving and the films only around twenty years old, one could still see Rooty Toot Toot or The Unicorn in the Garden occasionally. In the decades since, UPA and the modern style it was so central in fostering during the 1950s have receded from sight. Of the studios own films, only Gerald McBoing Boing and its three sequels have a DVD to themselves, and fans must search out sources for old VHScopies of others. Most modernist-influenced films made by the less prominent studios of the era are completely unavailable.
UPA remains, however, part of the standard story of film history. Following two decades of rule by the realist-oriented Walt Disney product, the small studio boldly introduced a more abstract, stylized look borrowed from modernism in the fine arts. Other smaller studios followed its lead. John Hubley, sometimes in partnership with his wife Faith, became a canonical name in animation studies. But the trend largely ended after the 1950s. Now its importance is taken for granted. David Bordwell and I
followed the pattern by mentioning UPA briefly in our Film History: An Introduction, where we reproduce a black-and-white frame from the Hubleys Moonbird, taken from a worn 16 mm print. By now, UPA receives a sort of vague respect, while few actually see anything beyond the three or four most famous titles.
All this makes Amid Amidis Cartoon Modern an important book. Published in an attractive horizontal format well suited to displaying film images, it provides hundreds of color drawings, paintings, cels, storyboards, and other design images from 1950s cartoons that display the influence of modern art. Amidi sticks to the U.S. animation industry and does not cover experimental work or formats other than cel animation. The book brings the innovative style of the 1950s back to our attention and provides a veritable archive of rare, mostly unpublished images for teachers, scholars, and enthusiasts. Seeking these out and making sure that they reproduced well, with a good layout and faithful color, was a major accomplishment, and the result is a great service to the field.
The collection of images is so attractive, interesting, and informative, that it deserved an equally useful accompanying text. Unfortunately, both in terms of organization and amount of information provided, the book has major textual problems.
Amidi states his purpose in the introduction: establish the place of 1950s animation design in the great Modernist tradition of the artsIn fact, he barely
discusses modernism across the arts. He is far more concerned with identifying the individual filmmakers, mainly designers, layout artists, and directors, and with describing how the more pioneering ones among them managed to insert modernist style into the products of what he sees as the old-fashioned, conservative animation industry of the late 1940s. When those filmmakers loved jazz or studied at an art school or expressed an admiration for, say, Fernand Leacute;ger, Amidimentions it. He may occasionally refer to Abstract Expressionism or Pop Art, but he relies upon the reader to come to the book already knowing the artistic trends of the twentieth century in both America and Europe. At least twice he mentions that Gyorgy Kepess important 1944 book The Language of Vision was a key influence on some of the animators inclined toward modernism, but he never explains what they might have derived from it. There is no attempt to suggest how modernist films (e.g. Ballet meacute;canique, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari) might have influenced those of Hollywood. On the whole, the other arts and modernism are just assumed, without explanation or specification, to be the context for these filmmakers and films.
There seem to me three distinct problems with Amidis approach: his broad, all-encompassing definition of modernism; his disdain for more traditional animation, especially that of Disney; and his layout of the chapters.
For Amidi, stylized greeting cards. He does not distinguish Cubism from Surrealism or explain
what strain of modernism he has in mind. He does not explicitly lay out a difference between modernist-influenced animation and animation that is genuinely a part of modern/modernist art. Thus there is no mention of figures like Oskar Fischinger and Mary Ellen Bute, though there seems a possibility that their work influenced the mainstream filmmakers dealt with in the book.
This may be because Amidi sees modernisms entry into American animation only secondarily as a matter of direct influences from the other arts. Instead, for him the impulse toward modernism is as a movement away from conventional Hollywood animation. Disney is seen as having during the 1930s and 1940s established realism as the norm, so anything stylized would count as modernism. Amidi ends up talking about a lot of rather cute, appealing films as if they were just as innovative as the work of John Hubley. At one point he devotes ten pages to the output of Playhouse Pictures, a studio that made television ads which Amidi describes as modernecause was driven by a desire to entertain and less concerned with making graphic statementsI suspect Playhouse rates such extensive coverage largely because its founder, Adrian Woolery, had worked as a production manager and cameraman at UPA. At another point Amidi refers to Warner Bros. animation designer Maurice Nobles work as
This willingness to cast the modernist net very wide also helps explain why so many conventional looking images from ads are included in the book. Amidi seems
not to have considered
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卡通摩登:五十年代动画的风格与设计
Amidi, Cartoonmodern:styleanddesigninfiftiesanimation.ChronicleBooks,(2006):292-296.
在20世纪70年代,当我还是一名电影研究的研究生时,UPA在学院里有一席之地,而在电影研究中,它已经消失了。随着16mmmmdistribution的蓬勃发展,这些电影只有20年左右的历史,人们仍然可以偶尔在花园里看到独角兽或独角兽。从那以后的几十年里,UPA和它在20世纪50年代培育的现代风格已经淡出人们的视线。在工作室自己的电影中,只有杰拉尔德·麦克波林和它的三部续集都有DVD,而且粉丝们必须寻找其他的旧版本。最受现代主义影响的电影是由年代较短的电影公司制作的,完全不可用。
然而,UPA仍然是电影史标准故事的一部分。在以现实主义为导向的华特迪士尼产品20年的统治之后,小工作室大胆地推出了一种更抽象、更有风格的造型,从现代主义艺术中借鉴而来。其他较小的电影公司也紧随其后。约翰·赫布里,有时和他的妻子信仰合作,成为了动画研究的典范。但这一趋势在20世纪50年代后基本结束。现在它的重要性被认为是理所当然的。我和大卫博德维尔
在我们的电影历史中,我们简单地提了一下UPA的模式:介绍,在那里我们复制了一个黑白的框架,从Hubleys的Moonbird,从一个破旧的16毫米印刷。到目前为止,UPA获得了一种模糊的尊重,而很少人能真正看到超过三四个最著名的头衔。
这一切使得阿米迪的漫画《现代》成为一本重要的书。它以一种极具吸引力的水平格式出版,适合于展示电影图像,它提供了数百幅彩色素描、绘画、电影、故事板和其他20世纪50年代的漫画设计图片,展示了现代艺术的影响。Amidi坚持美国动画产业,不包括其他的实验工作或格式,除了cel动画。这本书将20世纪50年代的创新风格带回了我们的视野,并为教师、学者和爱好者提供了一种罕见的、几乎没有出版的图片档案。寻找这些,并确保他们复制的好,具有良好的布局和忠实的颜色,是一个主要的成就,并且结果是一个伟大的服务的领域。
图片的收集是如此吸引人,有趣,而且信息丰富,它应该得到同样有用的文本。不幸的是,在组织和提供的信息量方面,这本书都有主要的文本问题。
Amidi在介绍中阐述了他的目的:在艺术的伟大现代主义传统中建立20世纪50年代的动画设计,事实上,他几乎没有。在艺术上讨论现代主义。他更关心的是如何确定个人电影人,主要是设计师、版画艺术家和导演,并描述了他们中那些比较前卫的人如何成功地将现代主义风格融入到他所认为的20世纪40年代后期老式保守的动画产业的产品中。当这些电影人热爱爵士乐,或者在艺术学校学习,或者对弗尔南多·莱格(Fernand Leger)的作品表示钦佩时,他说:“这是我的作品。”他可能偶尔提到抽象表现主义或波普艺术,但他依靠读者来读这本书,已经了解了二十世纪美国和欧洲的艺术趋势。至少两次他提到了Gyorgy Kepes在1944年的重要著作《视觉语言》是对一些倾向于现代主义的动画师的重要影响,但他从来没有解释过他们可能从中衍生出什么。没有人试图去暗示现代主义电影(例如,芭蕾舞剧《卡里加里博士》)可能对好莱坞的影响。总的来说,其他的艺术和现代主义只是假设,没有解释或规范,是这些电影制作人和电影的背景。
在我看来,Amidi的方法有三个截然不同的问题:他对现代主义的宽泛的、包罗万象的定义;他对传统动画的不屑,尤其是迪斯尼的动画;以及他的章节的布局。
对于Amidi, 程式化的贺卡。他不把立体派与超现实主义或解释区分开来。
他心里想的是什么现代主义。他并没有明确指出现代/现代艺术中真正属于现代/现代主义的动画与动画之间的区别。因此,没有提到像奥斯卡·费斯廷格和玛丽·艾伦·比特这样的人物,尽管他们的作品似乎有可能影响到主流电影制片人在书中讨论的内容。
这可能是因为Amidi认为现代主义进入美国动画只是次要的,因为它直接影响了其他艺术。相反,对他来说,对现代主义的冲动是一种远离传统好莱坞动画的运动。在20世纪30年代和40年代,迪斯尼被认为是现实主义的典范,所以任何风格化的东西都会被视为现代主义。阿米迪最后谈到了许多相当可爱的、吸引人的电影,就好像它们和约翰·休布利的作品一样具有创新性。一度他写了十页的输出剧场的图片,一个工作室,电视广告Amidi描述现代 因为是由渴望娱乐和更少的关心使图形报表我怀疑剧场利率如此广泛的报道很大程度上是因为其创始人,阿德里安bull;利曾担任生产经理在UPA和摄影师。在另一个地方,Amidi指的是华纳兄弟动画设计师莫里斯·诺布尔的作品。
这种愿意将现代主义的网撒得很宽的意愿也有助于解释为什么书中包含了这么多来自广告的传统形象。Amidi似乎
没有考虑过,可能会有一个普通的,日常的风格,具有广泛的吸引力,可能最终源于一些现代主义的影响,这些影响已经过滤掉,不仅仅是进入动画,而是更广泛地融入到文化中。在20世纪40年代,尤其是20世纪50年代,现代设计有了这样的普及,它发生在美国流行文化的许多领域,包括建筑、室内设计和时尚。托马斯·海恩(Thomas Hine)在他1999年出版的书《Populuxe:从尾端和电视晚餐到芭比娃娃和防辐射物掩体》(Populuxe)中谈到了这一点。海恩斯不包括电影,但我们能看到的在卡通现代的插图中贯穿的风格与流行的电影有很多相似之处。皮克斯在《超人特工队》的设计中向他们致敬。
其次,Amidi试图通过把沃尔特·迪斯尼塑造成他的反派来确立UPA的重要性。在这里,迪斯尼代表了整个20世纪50年代前好莱坞动画的建立。对于作者来说,任何不是现代风格的东西都是疲惫而保守的。他在《UPA》上的一章开篇是一件轶事,旨在将这一观点带回家。它描述了1951年的夜晚,杰拉尔德·麦克博林·博林获得了1950年奥斯卡最佳动画奖,而迪斯尼,甚至没有在动画片中获得提名,他的真人短片《比弗谷》获得了冠军。UPA总裁斯蒂芬·博沃特和迪斯尼在一起,博弗罗称他看起来比他的老对手更年轻、更新鲜。迪斯尼只有10岁,但是对于Amidi来说,boliveow的电影是在20世纪50年代早期的迪斯尼电影中出现的,它显示了UPA电影的活力和新鲜感。
这条线我困惑。诚然,迪士尼在20世纪30年代末和40年代初的惊人产量,无论在数量上还是质量上都难以维持。但是,尽管灰姑娘(一个相对轻量级的项目)和短裤在很大程度上成为了常规,很少有人会说彼得·潘,爱丽丝梦游仙境,女士和流浪汉都很累。事实上,这两个迪斯尼的特色,后来被Amidi称赞为他们的现代主义风格,睡美人和一百个达尔马提亚人,经常被用来标志着工作室黄金时代结束的开始。
在Amidi的观点中,包括华纳兄弟在内的其他动画工作室,在整体上同样抵制现代主义,尽管他们的盔甲上偶尔也会有刺。作者选择性地表扬了个别的创新者。关于米高梅的一个非常简短的条目提到了Tex Avery,主要是他1951年的短句,交响曲的俚语。华纳兄弟公司(Warner Bros.)的莫里斯·诺布尔(Maurice Noble)赢得了Amidi的好评;他一直为查克·琼斯的漫画提供设计,最著名的是什么是歌剧《博士》?
这本书的第三个问题来自于把它作为一系列章节编排的决定,这些章节是按字母顺序排列的。至少有一些逻辑是按照时间顺序或主题来进行的,甚至是根据电影公司的重要性。按字母顺序排列是任意的,使得工作室之间的关系杂乱无章。这种策略的一个不愉快的副产品是,历史上最突出的工作室接近于字母表的末尾。在许多小的章节之后,
大部分都是不熟悉的工作室,我们最终进入了最后的章节:Terrytoons, UPA, Walt Disney, Walter Lantz,华纳兄弟,除了Lantz,这些都是与主题相关的主要工作室。Amidi只对读者做了简单的介绍,没有概述,所以没有设置为什么UPA是如此重要,或者是迪斯尼提供了什么样的风格的创新,这是本书的主要主题。
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