5 - On Pixar’s Marvellous Astonishment: When Synthetic Bodies Meet Photorealistic Worlds

Summary

Animation is an art of affect, and not only in the human register of enticing feelings of nostalgia, marvel, or wonder but in the nonhuman or more-than-human one as well, because animation experiments in practices of affecting and being affected, of pen to paper, ink to celluloid, hand to clay, photo to projector, light to shadow, colour to colour, and, today, line of code to line of code, or digital model to 3D simulated environment. Each of these relations of affecting and being affected pose implicit questions. How might light and shadow be related such as to convey a sense of three-dimensionality? How might figures be drawn that enable an illusion of movement and even life? How might photographs be taken to enable flat drawings to appear as if a moving figure occupies the foreground of a more distant background? The evolution of animation is the discovery of different answers: shading, squash and stretch, the multiplane camera.

Although CG animation borrows many techniques and practices from the history of hand-drawn and stop-motion animation, it also introduces new questions. Indeed, CG animation presents Spinoza's famous question in stark relief: what can a body do? CG animators must ask, first, how can a digital body (model) be rigged? What are its potential relations of movement and rest, to invoke the ‘longitudinal’ aspect of bodies understood as modes outlined by Deleuze (1988) via Spinoza? Second, how might these digital bodies relate to the three-dimensional simulated environments? What are the capacities to affect and be affected that constitute the ‘latitude’ of modal relations? The spectacular power of CG animation rests in the breadth of potential answers to these questions, in the fact that relations of movement-rest and affective capacities are less limited by the laws of physics because the animator works in the realm of the virtual, first constructing potentials that will become actualized by the rendering of computer software. Whereas drawn and stop-motion animation begin from the actual (character sketches, material objects), CG animators begin with the virtual, modelling a range of potential movements and crafting rules of affection that will serve as the physics within which the characters and animators work. Analogue animators, in contrast, must work with rather than craft the laws of physics, bound as they are to material actualities.