ABSTRACT
My essay will be a comparison and contrast between the animatic work of Ladislas Starevich and
Nick Park, looking at the impact of their work on digital technologies.
INTRODUCTION
The aim of my essay will be to analyse the work of the pre digital animator Ladislas Starevich in
contrast to the more recent work of British animator Nick Park and compare where the works have
similarities and differences.The essay will focus on comparing how the works are made, on their
visual appearances, seeing if there are similar styles and themes, addressing what impact, if any
did they have on technology and society at the time and what their legacy in the film world has
been.
Animations are made up of a number of pictures or frames projected at high speeds so we
perceive them as natural motion, the speed at which we recognise them to be similar to that of
everyday life. This is also known as frame rate. It is a perception of our eyes that creates this
illusion and allows a sequence of images to become an animation.
Animation in some form has arguably been around since the 17th century, but it wasn’t until 1892
that the first known animated film was publicly projected onto a screen by Charles-Émile Reynaud
in France.(1) Fast forward 30 years to as late as 1923, when Walt Disney arrived did animation
take on its familiar form.(5) Over this period the techniques and methods used have greatly grown
and differed which is why comparing the works of a traditionally ‘pre-digital’ artist with the works of
a ‘post digital’ one will be interesting to note what has changed and what has not.
Ladislas Starevich was a stop-motion animator from Russia born in 1882 and is most known for
being the author of the first ever puppet-animated film in 1912 called The Beautiful Lukanida.(11)
He was also notable for his use of insects and other animals as protagonists of his films, with his
best work often being cited as ‘The Tale of the Fox’ – his first animated feature, which he made with
the help of his daughter Irene.(11)
Nick Park is an english animator and most famous for being the creator of the Academy Award-
winning Wallace and Gromit Claymation films.(12) Park has been nominated for an Academy
Award a total of six times, as well as numerous Oscars, for his work with stop-motion.(12)
These two animators share a lot of similarities, with them both being keen stop-motion pioneers
there will be a lot of crossovers in the techniques used. They are both very story-driven animators
and It is also worth noting that like Starevich, Park too is known to have an interest in using insects
and other animals as the protagonists of his films.There will also be differences between the works,
most notably the time difference between when they were produced. Since the 1920s, animation
has changed remarkably and it is now possible for animators to create sequences that could not
have been imagined just a few decades ago. Therefore the believably or illusion will be completely
different between the two films.
BODY
According to Oxford dictionaries, an Animation is defined by;
“The technique of photographing successive drawings or positions of puppets or models to create
an illusion of movement when the film is shown as a sequence”(2)
FPS stand for frames per second, a measurement for how many unique consecutive images a
camera can handle each second.(13) The human eye and brain can process between 10 to 12
separate images every second, perceiving them all individually.(3) When the brain and eye tries
to deal with incredibly short exposure to the visual material, they may confuse the images to
appear as one continuous entity. As such your eyes create an illusion of continuity, allowing a
sequence of still images to give the impression of motion, ergo animation.(14) Projections of
images go back as early as the 1650’s to Christiaan Huygens or Athanasius Kircher’s ‘Magic
Lantern’ or ‘lantern of fright” because it was able to project spooky images that looked like
apparitions.(1)
The Phenakistoscope was another early animation device.(4) Invented in 1831, by Joseph Plateau
and Simon Von Stampfer, the device was essentially a disk, with a series of images drawn inside
and evenly spaced around the centre. As it spins, the viewer would look through a slot at the
drawings, which are only visible for a brief moment as they past by the slot and the next image
comes into view. It is the speed at which the sequential images are delivered to the viewer
that creates the illusion of motion.(4)
In 1906, the first entirely animated film was created by John Stuart Blackton called the
Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, who is considered to be a revolutionary in American motion pictures.
It was Blackton alongside Albert E. Smith that formed one of the first movie studios, Vitagraph
Motion Pictures, from which they produced the Haunted Hotel, another of his animated films,
most noteworthy for its effects of animation of 3D objects, introducing 3D animation to the world.(15)
However, the first animated film created by what is now called ‘traditional animation’ (hand-drawn),
was in 1908 by Émile Cohl called Fantasmagorie.(5) These methods remained in use, but it wasn’t
until 1928 when Walt Disney was working on the third Mickey Mouse, ‘Steamboat Willy’, that
motion picture sound arrived. This changed the whole scene and recognising the breakthrough as
an advantageous one Disney added sound to the third Mickey and watched it become the first
successful sound animated film. It was this that made Mickey a global star, and launched Disney
into the studio we know today.(5) These same methods would continue to be used, until the
invention and continued use of computer generated animation in the 1980s, which has since come
to the fore-front in modern times.(5)
Ladislas Starevich was born in Moscow in 1882, and by the age of 28 (some 20 years prior to the
arrival of Disney) was the director of the Museum of Natural History in Lithuania, making his first
films, using the new cinema technology of the time to capture various animal behaviours. Originally
he wanted to film stag beetles fighting, but realised as soon as he turned on the stage lighting the
beetles, (who are nocturnal), would go to sleep. Instead inspired by the work of Émile Cohl,
Starevich decided to combat the problem by recreating the fight using the beetles’ exoskeletons.
He replaced their legs with wire and used stop-motion techniques to bring the battle to life.(6)
In 1911 he moved to Moscow to make more live action and stop-motion films. He had become
accustomed to using dead insects as his characters in his animations, but after emigrating to Paris
post First World War, he started to make longer, more fantastical films using puppets he would
create. He also began to experiment with both sound and colour, and mixed live action with stop-
motion.(6) It was here that he and his daughter Irene produced his first fully animated feature
length film ‘The Tale of the Fox’. This featured Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe’s particularly lasting
rendition of the adventures of Reynard the Fox, a trickster from medieval European myth and folk
law and tells the story of Reynard’s attempts to live his life of tomfoolery as the lion king of the
animal kingdom tries to stop him.(7) The animation style Starevich used was pioneering for it’s time
and even decades later still resembles no stop-motion animation or puppet show you’ve ever seen.
(7) Over a pain-staking 18 month production period he hand modelled and animated all of his
characters using traditional stop motion methods (i.e. take a picture, move the character slightly,
take another picture and repeat). Yet it was the intricate detail of his character models, mixed with
the fluidity and realness of Starevich’s animation style that allowed for a film made in a completely
alien medium to be a commercial success but most importantly, was the first time viewers were
able to make a connection with the narrative of a film made in this way.(7)
Over the next few decades the stop motion and animation process would undergo a massive
evolution and refining process to the point where it was done on a much larger commercial scale.
With Disney’s obvious success with its many feature length films, for the first time there was
animated cartoons shown on television as shows.(5) Growing up in this world, the process to make
these films was suddenly way more available to the average person. Once such person was Nick
Park from Preston, England. Raised by a seamstress, and an architectural photographer, he grew
up with a keen interest in drawing cartoons, and as a 13-year-old had already started making films.
Park studied art at Sheffield City Polytechnic before moving to the National Film and Television
School, where he began work on his first Claymation film, and the first Wallace and Gromit – A
Grand Day Out. The unfinished product caught the eye of Peter Lord and David Sproxton, who
hired Park to work at Aardman Animations where he would finish the project.(12)
Park is known for his Oscar winning films Creature Comforts that saw animated zoo animals
overlaid with a soundtrack of people talking about their homes(17) and Chicken Run, a claymation
adventure of two runaway roosters fighting an evil farmer intent on keeping them under her control.
(16) However, Park is mostly known for the creation of Wallace and Gromit, another of his clay
animations, consisting of four short films and a feature-length film. The series centres on Wallace,
an eccentric inventor and his silent canine friend Gromit.(18)The Wallace and Gromit movies are
shot using the stop motion animation technique.(19) After months of detailed storyboarding and the
set and character models have been constructed, the films are shot one frame at a time, moving
the characters slightly each time to give the impression of movement when these images are
rendered out to film.(19) Each character moves 12 times a second to achieve that life-like
animation, so even a short film such as A Matter of Loaf and Death, a half-hour BBC special
featuring the duo in a bakery-based murder mystery, took 18 months for the team to complete.(8)
Although they were made 50 years apart, when you compare Wallace and Gromit with Starevich’s
‘The Tale of a Fox’ you find there are many similarities. Firstly and most obviously, the stop-motion
technique used is almost identical. Aside from Park having a better camera and easier methods of
post-production with the images, the physical act of moving their creations frame by frame was a
technique used throughout both. The films took many months to complete added to by the
obsessive detail they both put into making the animation not only move right but also look right,
and were actively involved in creating all the puppets or models they used. Spookily they even
shared the idea of narrative driven animations, involving animal protagonists (except Wallace,
obviously), which were very unique for their time but immediately accepted and admired for the
hard work clearly involved. Both Starevich’s ‘Tale of a Fox’ and Park’s ‘A Grand Day Out’ are often
cited as the artists crowning work, which is surprising when you consider both films were the first
feature lengths each of the artists had released. There are even some shared themes between
Reynard’s mischievous behaviour and some of the more shady characters we meet in Wallace and
Gromit, such as the diamond stealing penguin in ‘The Wrong Trousers’.(20) It would not go amiss
to say both works are exemplary stop-motion pictures and since their existence have had an
impact on the way the medium was used and is still used today with very recent films like Boxtrolls
utilising the same core techniques.(9) The main difference between the two is technology. Neither
film tries to make you believe it is real and there is a definite sense of a traditional stop-motion style
within them, unlike hyper-real stop-motion sequences in other films such as Frank Henenlotter’s
Basket Case that didn’t work and have aged badly because of it.(10) Starevich’s film has the same
feel as Park’s work, however the camera and post-production quality betrays him as imaging
technology only increases in advancements and we get used to watching sharper, brighter films.
You can tell it is very old as soon as you start watching it, compared to Wallace and Gromit – that is
very clear and polished, there is the familiar flickering of the image and the particular sepia tone we
associate with older works. Although Wallace and Gromit itself is beginning to age, purely in terms
of picture and sound, it is an almost timeless piece, similar to a number of disney films that we
have no problem with being un-realistic. It is the uniqueness of the art style coupled with the
adoration of the rich characters that transcends the technological gap and increasing problem of
old films looking ‘rubbish’. Another difference would be the actual mood of the animation.
Starevich’s work, although about a mischievous fox tricking other animals, has a much more
serious tone to it, when compared with Parks almost slapstick comedy styling. There is also
probably a notable difference in the finished products of the two works that might have been
contributed to by the number of people involved in its creation. It’s a lot easier to have way more
accurate, detailed models and scenes if you have ten times as many hands involved in its
production. Although Nick Park is undoubtedly at the centre of all modelling for his films, it would
not be un-realistic to assume he had help from his fellow staff at Aardman Animations(12) and had
a lot more tools for them to do it with than Starevich and his daughter Irene.
CONCLUSION
Concluding, I find that there are distinct differences and similarities when comparing and
contrasting the two animations. Born several years earlier, Starevich’s stop-motion work was
pioneering for the time it was created and followed on from the work of front-runners Émile Cohl
and Stuart Blackton. He was a master of stop-motion and had a clear passion for working with
animal driven narratives and themes. Whether he used the exoskeleton of dead animals or created
his own puppets and models, hours of intricate work went into making his films as fluid and realistic
as he could. This has left a lasting feel, that even 85 years after its production is still un-like any
puppet show or stop-motion animation that exists today.(7)
Park, his pre-digital counterpart is another stop-motion animator most famous for his creation of
the much loved Wallace and Gromit. Park was a keen cartoonist and was already producing his
own films by the age of 13. His work has won him 4 Academy Awards and until his latest
nomination for ‘A Matter of Loaf and Death’, Park has the achievement of having won an Oscar
every time he was nominated for one.
The are a number of similarities between the works, most obviously in the techniques and methods
used to produce them. Although years apart, both utilise the illusion of stop-motion to animate and
bring to life their models and creations.(11)(12) They also share similar themes in that the films are
narratives based on mostly animal protagonists portrayed in distinctly human settings and
environments. Certain characters even share on-screen behaviours, such as Starevich’s
mischievous fox Reynard and Parks’ troublesome penguin character who revels in his taunting of
Gromit.(20) The pair also achieved commercial success with the release of their first feature length
films, a feat rarely achieved and not to be under-stated.
Aside from these similarities, there are however differences between the films, most of which
comes down to the visual style and when it was made. Starevich’s work clearly has an older feel to
it, chiefly due to the technology he used to produce it, that when compared with Parks’ still
relatively modern films, seems to look very outdated. This may also in-turn be due to how many
people were involved in making the films, with Park having received help from his employer
Aardman Studios, which when compared to Starevich’s team of two, partly explains the difference
in quality. Finally there is a contrast between the actual mood of the features, with Starevich
employing a much more serious mood than Parks’ relatively farcical comedy.Definitively speaking,
although they might visually differ, the techniques and narratives used mean the films have more
similarities than differences and have both made a positive impact on stop-motion technologies.
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