The form of animation recently has become wider and unlimited with how it is also related to games and special effects. However, normally when the word “animation” is mentioned, the majority of people will think of it as a form of “cartoon” or “animated movie” rather than just the effect of moving images. In this paper, I would like to talk about animated movie particularly and show how it is different from other art forms of story telling: live-action movie and puppet show, using information from the study of Ülo Pikkov, as well as how it means to me compared to the other two. For animated movie, the most important element that distinguishes it from any other forms of animation is narrative. It is what makes the animation (also other story-telling forms of art) have meaning and attract the audiences. Narrative has a strong impact on me and it is what makes want to work with animation. There have been so many times when I watch an animation and cry because of the story, or immerse myself into the journey of the character and feel exactly how the character is feeling at that moment. I believe that if an animator knows how tell a good story, they will be able to manipulate audience’s emotion. In this essay I will demonstrate the definition and the theory, the structure of narrative that is commonly used. After that, I will explain why and how it can affect on the audiences’ emotion as well as how it can evolve them into the journey of the story. As an Asian girl who has grown up with both East Asian and Western cartoon in general and Japanese animation (anime) with Disney animation in particular, I would also like to compare the differences between narrative in East Asian animation and Western animation. From that I will consider into which aspects has lead into those differences between the two animation industries including cultural effect, emotional effect, etc.
Let’s have a brief definition about animation that is involved with narrative. In Latin, the word “anima” means “the breath of life” or “vital principle” or “soul” (Pikkov and Näripea, 2010, p. 15). In a study about Animasophy, Ülo Pikkov has stated animation is a show of still images that are put together and projected for the audiences. He gave out two comparisons between animation and puppet show, and between animation and live-action film. Although the three forms above all have narrative, each is different from the others. The motion of marionettes is real-life motion, while in animation viewers are showed movement that does not take place on screen but in the audiences’ mind. For live-action movie, although there is also a series still frames putting together, there was real motion with physical transformation occurred. In another way of saying, while live-action movie captures and reproduces an illusion of motion, animation creates it (Pikkov and Näripea, 2010, p. 14-15). In this essay, I will particularly talk about the narrative in the form of animation.
Narrative is one of the main elements of animation; it distinguishes animated movie from any other forms of animation. Narrative helps satisfy the primary purpose of the “film” part in “animated film”, which is to tell a story (Albers and Gallege, 2011, http://pages.cs.wisc.edu). Among many different narrative theories, the theory of Vladimir Propp (which is also called Propp’s theory) is one of the most basic and common ones. Propp’s theory was based on Russian fairy tales and from that, he discovered there were always 8 types of characters (the hero, the false hero, the villain, the helper, the dispatcher, the donor, the princess and her father) with their 31 they ever do (character function). Each character has a SPHERE OF ACTION that once the audience can identify the character type, they could guess what the character will do in the film (Esfmedia.com, n. d, http://www.esfmedia.com; http://people.uncw.edu). Many of Disney’s animation are believed to apply the Proppian model, such as The Lion King (NORMAN, n.d, p.16-17). For the structure, the most well known structure of narrative dates back to one of the best written works of Aristotle about story, Poetics. According to Aristotle, the narrative of a story is divided into three-act structure:
Act I: Introduction of the setting, the characters, status quo, and catalyst.
Act II: The conflict rises with where the turning-point occurs.
Act III: Climax and then the problem is solved. (Economopoulou, 2009).
As narrative is like a series of events, Hochberg and Brooks stated that those events are defined at three levels: “low-level mechanisms, relation parsing, and action schemas” (Hochberg et al., 2007, in Albers and Gallege, 2011, http://pages.cs.wisc.edu). The low-level mechanisms is just a low-level of motions of objects on the screen, whereas the other two levels, as quoted, are “the higher-level processes of relational parsing and generation of action schemas initiate internal mechanisms defined by Helmholtz likelihood principle.” (Albers and Gallege, 2011). They allow the author to create storyline based on normal life experiences, and from that, the viewers are enabled to sympathize and engross themselves into the narrative. That explains why normally audiences are attracted to a particular animation because of its narrative (although there is also a part of audiences interested in abstract animation without a story, which is called “pure cinema”, but I will not go further about that aspect in this essay) (Hsu, 2008; http://www.esfmedia.com).
Although narrative serves the same purpose of telling a story, it depends on region or country that the narrative will have a distinguishing style. According to Dani Cavallaro, animation in the West is usually regarded as a second-rate art form and therefore, should be dismissed all the superficial, violent, clichéd and technically “cold”… “they do not take into consideration the distinctive importance of cartoons and animated films in the context of Japan, failing to acknowledge that in that culture, manga (and their cinematic correlatives) are an integral component of literature and popular culture” (Cavallaro, 2006). For example, one of Hayao Miyazaki’s animated movie Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind when adapted into Western version the length was cut from 116 mins to 95 mins included mostly violent scenes, silence scenes and scenes that have complicated and political aspects. In Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, the most convincing excuse for the villain character Kushana’s bad action was considered as not available to Western fan. In the English dub version 1985 of Roger Corman, one of her most important line explaining the reason for her inflexible pursuit of revenge was also removed from the sequence: “Only the man who becomes my husband will see things are even worse”. This demonstrates how American audiences would prefer an animation with action sequences come along with a clear distinction between the good and the evil. All the scenes with complicated content were cut makes the film become more child-friendly. The fact that most of the action sequences were more emphasized and the slower moving scenes were removed in order to avoid the children from being bored with the original movie also proves that to the Western distributor, as the movie is an animated one, it should be edited to be more suitable for younger audiences (Erica, 2012).
There are reasonable explanations for how the theme and narrative is presented differently in Western animated movie and Eastern ones. The most convincing reason is the effect of different cultures. In Western countries, people tend to value the individualism, independence and autonomy whereas in Asian/ East Asian countries, the harmony, the welfare of group and the commune is more focused (Chua, Leu and Nisbett, 2005; Averill, Chon and Hahn, 2001). This shows why Western animated movie usually have their protagonist go their own way to fight against the villain, which sometimes is the society (e.g, Beauty and the Beast (Disney, 1991)) while in Asian, the main characters, in most of the time, win the bad people with an important role from the help from friends and the others (e.g, Sailormoon (Takeuchi, 1992)). From a research about “Culture and Diverging Views of Social Events” of Chua, Leu and Nisbett (2005), the three people have pointed out many cultural aspects that interfere with the style of narrative between Western and East Asian countries, these are:
Main Character Focus– Americans have been shown to be more self- focused than East Asians. By using a test, Cohen and Gunz (2002) found that Eastern people were more likely to recall events from a third-person, which is opposed to Americans with most of their first-person point of view. This effect on how much attention they focus on their main characters of the movie.
Intentionality– Westerners not only showed more emphasis on the main characters but also to their intentionality, which, as explained, is “the expression of agency, aims, motives, goals and plans that guide actions that a person intend to follow”. Asians, however, one’s actions need to coordinate with others. This also shows on Western animation with their main character establish their goal and maintain it from the beginning of the movie until the very ending, while in East Asians’, the protagonist sometimes even change their goal after half of their long run.
Emotions– after a measurement done by Azuma (2001), he found out that East Asians tend to show more emotions than Americans. With this particular emotion section, we also have study from Averill, Chon and Hahn (2001) explains how the West and the East Asia express the emotional story using their own narrative style. East Asians are believed to be more introverted, that is why their emotional expression is more subdued. Instead of directly showing emotion, they tend to emphasize on emotional refinement, for example, Chinese art and poetry are what follow the philosophy of “captures the “spirit” of the object portrayed” (Sundararajan, 1997, 1998 in Averill, Chon and Hahn, 2001). In contrast, emotions in Western countries are typically supposed to help “legitimize social actions”. For instance, anger helps legitimize aggressions; love helps legitimize social actions and so forth. This explains why most of Western animation characters express their feelings through the expressions while the emotion of characters in Asian animation is usually described through the way they act and things surrounding them. She and Her Cat of Makoto Shinkai (1999), a short melancholy animated movie about the life of a girl through her cat’s point of view is an excellent example for this interpretation.
In conclusion, although animation has different ways of interpreted, narrative is what identifies its “animated film” form and that is why I chose to analyse about the role of narrative in animation. With the comparisons between puppet shows, animation, and live-action movie, I have briefly showed how to define and distinguish animated movie from the other two other story telling forms even though they all have narrative and all serve the same purpose of visual presenting a story for audiences by showing motion. After that, an analysis of narrative in terms of its definition, its theories and its structure was also conducted- they are elements that later explained how narrative could effect to the audiences’ emotion. Finally, to get a deeper understanding about narrative style in animation, I compared the storytelling style between Western and East Asian animated movies then explained what had leaded to those differences (culture, main character focus, intentionality, emotions), with most of the examples were used from Disney animation and Japanese anime.
References
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--- Ann Nguyen --- 