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Character animation and the California Institute of the Arts
May 2, 2007
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The California Institute of the Arts, or commonly known as CalArts, was founded in 1961 and has its roots in Disney animation.
I’m Justin Teo and this week in Undertones, I speak to Prof. Frank Terry to find out more about this famous art school in the US and why the best character animators graduate from it.
FT: Well it was set up by Mr. Disney. The question is where did Mr. Disney get it all? He actually put together three or four other schools and formed CalArts. One of the foundation schools for CalArts was the Chouinard Art Institute. So Mr. Disney stepped to get the rights for three or four schools and put them together in the scenario which he felt was really important for a comprehensive filmmaker to explore and understand all of the arts and all of the interconnectivity of dance, music, sculpture, animation and so on. So his dream was to put together a really unique art experience not just for animators but for any art student. So it started off as a strong arts school and over the years, the other programs got up to that standard, including character animation. About ten years ago, the quality of students which we were producing in the undergraduate program was certainly every bit which Mr. Disney would have wanted. They were well-trained, well-educated and they were able to take the fundamental traditional curriculum and use it for fine arts, use it for sculpture, use it for painting, use it for story design, use it for animation, use it for anything that required visual problem solving.
If you’ve noted the good animated features from Hollywood, one common thread that stands out is a great story and not so much fantastic visuals.
In fact, Prof. Terry believes good character animation need not even come from high-tech three dimensional visuals.
FT: Good character animation does not have to be as laminated to a predictable illusionary three-dimensional world as the computer would want us to be. A good piece of animation could be as formalistic or just as pattern-oriented as any traditional folk painting of years past. The gravity is indeed defined by how the film is done and the audience generally has no problem of making the attachment to what the reality of that film is simply by the way that film is designed. So a formulistic UPA approach is just as believable as a current CG piece of work that has come out of Pixar.
Digital animation has transformed that way we view the moving image.
But with so much global emphasis on digital animation to grab a slice of the international animation market, is there anything we should watch out for?
FT: I think in the process of trying to get a global, marketable piece of work done, sometimes they are pushing a little too hard and losing what was the strength of the culture from which that film comes from to begin with. So there’s a lot of cultural loss in trying to mimic or get a film done the way Disney would do it or the way Pixar would do it. Following paradigms is never a good idea, imitating and imitation is never a good idea. So I’m really for all of the activity that has gone on, I mean there have been films that have come out of northern Europe that have made me jump up and down in cinemas, animated films like the Triplets of Bellevue. I thought that was a brilliant film and thank goodness it didn’t adhere to a tried and true worn-out story structure. So we need more of those and a little bit less of the predictability that we can find in some American films that we see at the moment. So I’m really in favor of all that global activity in this field provided that they don’t forget where their source of inspiration comes from.
CalArts is not only a leading school in character animation but one which has pioneered arts education in the United States.
To find out more the school and character animation, visit rsi.sg/english.
This has been Undertones here on Radio Singapore International.
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