Saturday 1 June 2024
Be still. Is your movement really necessary? Stop all that flickering. Hold still a minute or two, or five, or ten. Six frames a minute is plenty, or better yet, six frames an hour. Relax, and take it easy.
Animation can make me anxious. The worst, as my daughter Peggy points out, is being subjected to the two-frame boil, the beginner’s trick for keeping everything on screen in a state of aimless agitation. You’re looking at a film where nothing is actually happening, no-one is doing anything, there is no progress, but to underline that this is animation the filmmaker gives everything the jitters.
I have been watching and re-watching a talk by animator Tissa David where she describes the power of a hold, a period of several frames where a character stops moving entirely. A hold can be used for emphasis, or to build up potential energy before a violent action. The technique of boiling or shimmering destroys this, drowning out any potential drama with a continuous visual buzz.
On stillness, three moments in the Disney film Lady and the Tramp (1955) come to mind. One is a glimpse of Jim Dear and Darling’s baby. In a film where everyone moves constantly, the baby is totally still, as if dead in its cot. Perhaps here’s a clue as to why some animators are scared to stop moving.
Another memorable moment is where the two lover dogs, Lady and Tramp, follow a strand of spaghetti into a kiss — almost, but not quite, a hold.
And finally, after a night of romantic bliss, the quiet moment of Lady and her Tramp lying together under the trees in the early morning light. This isn’t quite a hold either, as the movement never totally stops, but it is the closest the film comes to pausing.
We try to hold the moment, but the animation is relentless — animation is life, and life is time, and all too soon Lady will awaken, she will recall her responsibilities and anxieties, will realise she is pregnant, and will see death’s shadow following every life that she loves, on towards that final long hold.
There are various possibilities between absolute stillness and full movement, the scenic shots with wind, or rain, or changes in lighting, or multiplane shots with parallax effects to give a feeling of stillness with subtle change. I talk to a friend, a painter, about my perverse interest in stopping movement in animation — “You will end with painting,” he says.
But when my friend describes his excitement in painting, he talks about the change the painting passes through during creation. The finished painting is at an apex, at the proscenium plane, and like Lady and the Tramp about to awaken, it is at a culmination of movement by the painter, to be followed by a second period of movement, into the eyes and minds of its audience, and on into meaninglessness as the audience passes away.