Over past while I`ve been reading Understanding Animation, Paul Wells,Routledge Press, New York, 1998.
Notes:
page 2, Praxiniscope treated as toy, begins tradition of animation association with children.
Emile Reynaud, Theatre Optique, painting on a ribbon.
Page 5, five areas of study, Construction, Distinctive narrative devices, comedy, agenda of representation, and spectator-ship.
Page 9, `See the Brick`Robert Breer says animators darw bricks and tell audience they have hidden bricks. Increases viewer`s observation when they are looking.
Page 10, McClaren quote; `animation is not the art of drawings that move, but rather the art of movements that are drawn. What happens between each frame is is more important than what happens on each frame`.
Page 14, `Blackton`s Haunted Hotel ... south to extend the popularity ... by deliberately mystifying the process`.
Page 19, Reach through phone, `Create the impossible`.
subversive.
Page 21, Felix, unlike American standard convention, no need to wake up from the dream.
Page 23, DisneyéOswallÉAlice, form and content (mechanism) over surrealism.
Page 24, `realism ... attempts to rid itself of obvious cinematic conventions`. Unmediated.
Page 25, Disneyland `Completely real, becomes identified as `completely fake`(Eco).
- list of hyper-realism characteristics.
Page 26, `realist agenda was an abnegation of animation`s capacity to authenticate fantasy`.
Page 31, dot as primal form - list on page 32 and ànimism
Page 38, artist seen in animation disappears with cel development.
Page 43-46, Good defintions of categories of experimental animation, especially see Moritz qhot on Page 44, `True abstraction ,,, why bother`
Page 47, the Nose, Nikoai Gogal story, pinscreen film in 1963.
Page 48, the uncanny.
Page 51, `Animation ... interogates dominant perceptions of reality and the recieved imagery which apparently represnts it`.
Page 57, Placticine invented in 1897. Key clay animators; Nick Park, Will Vinton, Jan Svankmajer, J Stuert Blackton (Chey chew), Willy Plopkins (Miracles in Mud), Helena Smith Dayten.
Page 64, Puppets and models could be used in a more sophisticated way and fulfill their capacity to mediate the `consciousness`of the animator through their metaphoric role as neo-humans.`
Page 89, metaphor, preferred meaning, attendent meanings.
Page 91, Quay listed as American. uncanny discussed again.
Page 92, `Fabrication in animation may, therefore, be understood as the redefinition of materiality and the physical world by the preconscious imperatives of the artist filmmaker. A child`s playroom is this, not merely the location of childhood experience, but the context where all the anxiety and trauma of becoming a human being may be expressed by the artist through the reappropriation of apparently innocent objects.`.
Page 130, Disney, captivation rather than entertaining, resists gags.
Page 133, The literal can become the figurative.
Page 136, signifier-signified. Comic objects ideas.
Page 140, Tex Avery on adult themes.
Page 142, #8 Tex Avery and Bertolt Brecht.
Page 159, in animation, symbols might be of equal status to each other.
Page 170, comic rule of three.
Page 192, spinach is Popeye's talisman.
Page 219, George Pal, crass caricatures of Jasper, regretted.
Page 228, Two spectatoral reactions to animation, empowerment and denial.
