Animation, Sport and Culture

P. Wells

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137027634
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Animation, Sport and Culture is a wide-ranging study of both sport and animated films. From Goofy to Goalkeepers, Wallace and Gromit to Tiger Woods, Mickey Mouse to Messi, and Nike to Nationhood, this Olympic-sized analysis looks at the history, politics, aesthetics and technologies of sport and animation from around the globe.

1

Body Languages – Early Sporting Animation

Why Sport?

If the opening question of the introduction to this discussion was ‘Why animation?’, implying that it might seem unusual to bring sport and animation together, the first question of the opening chapter is the very opposite. What was it that seemed to attract proto-animators and those who later became established as professional animators to sporting activity, and more specifically what did they identify as ‘sport’? This enables me to ask the broader questions about what distinguishes sports from games and other leisure pastimes, and how far these possible distinctions are also embraced by animators in animated films. The ‘What is sport?’ question, of course, has been intrinsic to most histories and theoretical accounts of sport, and while I do not wish to dwell on what might be viewed as a problematic theoretical question here, it is nevertheless worthwhile exploring some of its key aspects. Clearly, the recognition of a sporting activity is crucial to the maker of an animated film, in that the deployment of a sport in a narrative assumes that the audience shares knowledge of that sport, and the rules and conventions that define it. This assumption alone, though, suggests that sport has particular rules and conventions, which, for example, distinguish it from a game, or a pastime, or, indeed, a non-sporting activity.

Connor has suggested that approaches to analysing sport have seen ‘sport as a problem of definition or categorization, and typically attends to problems of rules, norms and conventions’ (Connor 2011:12). The same problem, of course, has attended animation, which has had to necessarily define itself as an argument for its legitimacy as a separate subject/object of study beyond the generic idea of ‘film’. There are few books published throughout the 1980s and 1990s on animation that do not posit the ‘What is animation?’ question in some way. This has been problematised further in the 2000s by the digital shift, as mainstream ‘live action’ cinema itself has moved more closely towards the condition of animation. Film’s multiple and extensive degrees of constructedness in the computer is now a far cry from its original status when purely defined and evidenced through raw photographic footage. Again, I do not wish to make this a major preoccupation of this particular discussion, but through the consideration of the relationship between animation and sport it will be possible to say something about the definitions of both. I have already suggested, for example, that the constructed artifice of sporting practice, though real and serious in and of itself, is still grounded in the degrees of ‘belief’ that accept its specific terms and conditions of execution and exhibition, and it is clear that animation very much shares this condition. Audiences and spectators must recognise, accept and invest in those terms determined by sport and animation as the means by which they consider and construct their own related identity, even if it is one of dismissal or disengagement. (As an aside, it is worth mentioning that when I told several people that I was writing a book on sport and animation, they demonstrated their inclination or disinclination to read it on the basis of liking or disliking one or the other or both!) This in turn thereafter speaks to models of fandom, and the degree to which both sport and animation become ‘meaningful’ at whatever level (see Brown 1998). Both sport and animation self-consciously and self-reflexively enunciate the particularity of their presence and modus operandi, and implicitly require audiences to accept the apparent ‘difference’ and ‘distinctiveness’ that is foregrounded by their outcomes. The everyday understanding of the presence of sport and animation, both separately, and when one is reflected through the other, is about these conditions of recognition, and this in turn signals the terms and degree of their defining characteristics.

Connor again, points out:

Sports that are played virtually, that is to say, without any corporeal involvement, are to that extent games. For these reasons, sports must always involve material conditions; there must be a specific place in which they are played . . . they must also have a temporal dimension . . . and one that is specific to the involvement of physical bodies, namely that they are subject to the inevitable increase of entropy, the horizon of all sporting exertion being fatigue leading finally to exhaustion.

(Connor 2011:16)

This immediately confirms the difference, for example, of sports such as football (both codes), rugby (both codes), tennis, basketball and cricket from games such as chess, backgammon or roulette, and children’s games such as blind man’s bluff, Chinese whispers, hide and seek, marbles, and Simon says, but does not take into account darts, snooker or table tennis, for instance, which are ostensibly understood as games but are played as professional sports. This may be a matter of semantics or a comment about the nations, cultures and contexts in which the practices emerged. Blanchard notes that ‘the treatment of sport, defined here as a game-like activity having rules, a competitive element, and requiring some form of physical exertion, has generally been included within the broader category of “games” in the history of anthropology’ (Blanchard 1995:9). This is largely because anthropology views regulated and professionalised ‘sport’ to have mainly developed out of improvised games and pastimes in indigenous folk cultures, engaged in developmental aspects of ‘play’ as humankind evolved from primitivism to modernity. In the case of the former, sports were more directly related to man’s attempt to cope with the immediate problems of adaptation, survival and defence. On the other hand, the latter used sport to perfect the human body, for competition, and simply for pleasure, and was not as practically or ritually oriented in sports activities (Blanchard 1999:14). Additionally, Dunning notes

in the popular consciousness of Western societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the term ‘sport’ has been increasingly withdrawn from the hunting and killing type activities . . . Correlatively [it has] been applied to more competitive leisure activities involving physical exertion which either do not involve violence as a legitimate component . . . or in which violence is centrally involved but subject to more civilizing controls.

(Dunning 1999:53)

It is these changing and developing infrastructural dynamics of sport that animation has been particularly responsive to, playing out tensions in the ‘civilising’ of sport, by exaggerating the tensions between serious and nonserious play; the violence embedded and embodied in many sports; the nature of physical activity and the purpose of its expression. One immediate observation, then, is that animation is as preoccupied with the transformative and adaptive processes that create and define sport as it is by the activity of the sport itself. In an almost reciprocal way, it seems, sport is a ready vehicle by which to observe the transformative and adaptive qualities of animation.

Inevitably, matters of definition, investment and reception are often grounded in the model or discipline chosen to evaluate sport and animation. The development of the literature on animation has been slow and piecemeal, and in the first instance was based on arguing for its legitimacy and significance as a form; thereafter, animation has seen various kinds of theoretical tools applied to it in the hope of reconciling the differing perspectives of its historians, theoreticians and practitioners (see Cholodenko 2007:13–95; Furniss 2008; Wells & Hardstaff 2008; Selby 2013). At the time of writing, there is a strong burgeoning literature in new cross-disciplinary theories of animation, largely configured towards film, art and cultural theory in Suzanne Buchan’s Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and work exploring animated documentary (see Honess Roe 2013). Research in sport is more developed in that there is a core literature in sports history, sports science and the sociology of sport, all sharing interfaces with media and cultural studies. It is for these reasons that my own study is characterised by cross-disciplinary choices, since on the one hand, for example, sport might be viewed as emancipatory and liberating in some ways, characterised by the possibility of open ended interpretations, like many cultural performances, while on the other hand it could be suggested that ‘today’s dominant structures and meanings of sport, and the bodily practices they animate, now take virtually all of their cues from capital, advertising, commercial media, the entertainment industries, and the development strategies of modern nations’ (Gruneau 1993:98). In recent times, this leftist critique has perhaps reached its zenith in the critical theory of Perelman’s Barbaric Sport: A Global Plague, cited earlier – which mobilises, among others, Freud, Kracauer, Benjamin, Bloch, Adorno and Horkheimer to accuse sport of the ‘colonization of the body’, ‘a mutilation of awareness’, ‘[being] responsible for the barbaric society to which we are subjected’ and ‘[having the] capacity for insidious infiltration, its innocent seeming mischief’ (Perelman 2012:Preface). In some senses these seem extreme claims, but even in this, as noted earlier, animation can make a viable intervention, challenging the ways in which the body might be perceived and understood, or addressing different scenarios about consciousness, violence and play. Indeed, animation may be the ultimate ‘body language’ by which to explore ready-made assumptions about sport as the vehicle for the worse excesses of capitalism, as surely sport in itself is only a filter for, or a distraction from, the real issues of governance and banking. So, why sport?: because sport carries with it a ‘baggage’ of such critical assumptions, and given the kind of ‘parallel’ alignment I have sought to argue for in relation to animation, it is hoped that the following analysis will offer some fresh and valid insights as well as engaging with some established perspectives on sport’s historical and global significance.

Scopes and tropes

As in any creative practice, the first issue for consideration is what the artist wishes to express and how he or she wishes to express it. If an artist has chosen to work in animation, it is a reasonable assumption to make that the artist believes that it is a particular form of expression, and the one most conducive to representing the ideas and concepts the artist is dealing with. In the case of animation, of course, this could be the appeal of a range of techniques – drawing; painting; 3D stop motion animation with clay, puppets or objects; 2D stop motion collages using images, materials, and artefacts; ‘under the camera’ manipulations of sand, ink or other malleable fluids and substances; pixilation; and in recent years, 3D and 2D digital computer applications and so on. This seemingly more hand-crafted, vernacular approach, also determines different kinds of production contexts from large-scale studios to low-rent back-bedroom set-ups for independent auteurs. This in turn has resulted in the development of a myriad of techniques and approaches, and any number of animators working with the form from a variety of backgrounds in the fine arts, illustration, graphic design and other disciplines. The subsequent work has ranged from the experimental and abstract through to cartoon character animation through to photo-realistic figures and effects. To some extent, this renders animation as everywhere and nowhere, and this discussion is necessarily selective in choosing its sporting animation, bringing it to the foreground both as significant animation and as engaged consciously with sport. At the outset, though, sporting animation is best explored chronologically, and largely, and perhaps surprisingly, in Britain.

Animation itself can be first discovered in pre-cinematic novelties. David Robinson has suggested that animation as a form long precedes cinema as it is usually configured, and that some of the early developments in primitive optical technologies should not merely be understood as evolving mechanisms in the inevitable development of film, but as technologies which could produce ‘masterpieces of animation’ in their own right. As Robinson explains, ‘the art of animation did not begin with the cinema proper. Although the cartoon film-makers were using a new medium – in the camera and the celluloid film – they were employing basic animation techniques that had been practised and developed for upwards of sixty years before the cinema’ (Robinson 1991:8). The relationship between animation and sport begins, then, as early as 1824, when the inventor of the thaumatrope, John Ayrton Paris (though this is sometimes disputed; it was perhaps Sir John Herschel) used the device to demonstrate the concept of persistence of vision to the Royal Society of Physicians, and in 1827 subsequently wrote his volumes Philosophy in Sport made Science in Earnest, with its prefacing sub-title, ‘being an attempt to implant in the young mind the first principles of natural philosophy by the aid of the popular toys and sports of youth’ (Crook 2004) A thaumatrope is a simple disk with images drawn on either side, which when spun by string attached to each side, creates the illusion of animated motion by seemingly superimposing one image over the other. It is the first formal evidence that sports and games were used as vehicles to explore the idea of motion through devices seeking to create the illusion of a moving image. These were followed by images of dancers moving on Joseph Plateau’s phenakistoscope in 1833; Thomas Talbot Bury’s work for phenakistoscope included circus horses, whose movement anticipates Muybridge’s early motion sequences, in the same year. By the time that William Horner’s zoetrope appeared commercially in the 1860s, zoetrope strips produced by Britain’s most successful production house, the London Stereoscopic and Photographic featured ‘Foot ball’, ‘Base ball’, ‘The Gymnast’, ‘Steeplechase’, ‘The Skipping Girl’ and ‘The Sportsman’ (Robinson 1991:47). Emile Reynaud’s later praxinoscope featured swimmers, skipping girls, and horse riders by 1877, and with the publication of Eadweard Muybridge’s animal locomotion photographic studies the same year, emerged the idea of reanimating his stop-motioned action sequences, reconstituting the original movement using previous novelties such as the phenakistoscope, the zoetrope and the praxinoscope, These devices all privileged cycles of repetitive movement that were common in physical sport and game practices.

In 1879, W.B. Tegetmeier, the natural history editor of The Field, the specialist publication highlighting field sports such as hunting, shooting and fishing (and which had also been promoting the regulation of new sports such as football and lawn tennis since the early 1850s), collaborated with Muybridge to use his images in a specially constructed praxinoscope. In an early form of rotoscoping – tracing directly over the live action images – Tegetmeier produced Muybridge’s sequences in silhouette, effectively abstracting the specific movement of a particular horse into an animated motion graphic of a universalised iconic horse. Ottomar Anschutz also reconstituted the motion of a horseman and a runner from his chronophotographs (this will be explored later in my remarks on Étienne-Jules Marey) for a refinement of the zoetrope called a tachyscope, while Muybridge himself, once more using quasi-rotoscoping, had his locomotion series redrawn for the glass disks required in a zoopraxiscope (Robinson 1991:28). These, of course, included athletes, boxers and horsemen in a variety of specific sporting gestures. Muybridge’s motion studies made a significant impact on all aspects of artistic expression as well as other physical disciplines – crucially, much of his work was conducted with athletes who could perform sporting feats and gestures:

Mr Muybridge, the photographer, had every arrangement made at the racetrack for carrying out the work, and from ten o’clock in the morning until four o’clock in the afternoon boxing, wrestling, fencing, jumping, and tumbling followed in quick succession and all of their intricate movements were instantaneously and exactly pictured.

(Solnit 2003:1999)

Scientific American had marvelled at Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope projector – effectively a combination of a zoetrope, the phenakistoscope and a magic lantern – and saw the possibility of an ‘animated zoology’ (Solnit 2003:200). Muybridge’s animation of animals and athletes featured in his public lectures throughout the 1880s and early 1890s.

Even at this early stage, the athletic movement of humans and animals when photographed frame by frame had enabled the production of a prototypic model of animation also produced frame by frame. It had also proved that animation was best revealed by short metamorphosing cycles and sequences – a process repeated over 100 years later in the re-emergence of the animated gif or cinegraph mentioned earlier. And finally, it had evidenced one of animation’s primary characteristics in moving an image from its particular indexical status to a more universalised iconic status; the shift from ‘this’ horse to ‘a’ horse; from the literal to the symbolic; from photo-realistic naturalism to the self-enunciating artifice and illusionism of animation. These early years of producing mechanisms to suggest moving images had simultaneously instigated a relationship between sport and game practices, and the emergent animated form. This was especially consolidated in the work of French scientist and physiologist, Étienne-Jules Marey.

Marey’s chronophotographic gun, a forerunner of the camera, developed in 1882, recorded at high speed 12 consecutive frames of movement that were all ultimately captured on the same still image. With this he studied human and animal motion, and often reanimated the movement cycle by drawing sketches. Many of Marey’s images show up the movement through the strategic placement of small reflective rivets and tapes on key areas of the body, and this ‘data’ capture is reminiscent of the way in which motion capture uses similarly placed sensors on moving bodies in the contemporary era. Marey was also to prove that a horse had all its legs in the air during a certain instant of its gallop cycle before this was more clearly evidenced in Muybridge’s photos (see Marey 1879/2010). As O’Mahony has pointed out, though, Marey’s achievements in early photographic practice have overshadowed the research he undertook with colleagues from the department of physiology in the Collège de France during the 1900 Paris Olympic games:

At this time, he combined forces with physical culturist, Georges Demeny to produce a series of photographic studies of gymnasts in motion. Marey and Demeny, like [Baron Pierre] de Coubertin, were inspired by widespread concern regarding the potential physical degeneracy of the French citizen since the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–1871.

(O’Mahony 2012:39)

The Paris Olympics took place within the broader parameters of the Exposition Universelle, generally regarded as a key founding moment in the understanding of contemporary modernity, when there was deep preoccupation with movement as the embodiment of social and cultural change.

As Nead has noted, ‘Motion in the early years of the twentieth century was concerned with mobilisation and velocity – in other words, the transformation from stasis to movement and the varied states between. It encompassed acceleration, pause, motion and arrest’ (Nead 2007:161). Crucially, then, Marey’s work was both a vindication of the changing pace of modern life, but also a desire to engage in some degree of contemplation of what motion actually was, and, perhaps even more importantly, what it now signified. To this end, the sporting body became the optimum body by which to explore the best aspects of physical condition, and as such posit ideas that might be a pertinent corrective for the improved health of the nation. Inevitably, too, this proto-sports science would be helpful in improving athletic performance, becoming a tool for analysis. This necessitated more precise intervention, so in order to remove the extraneous visual information of the context and the crowd in the stadium when recording athletic performances as they took place, Marey invited athletes to replicate their movement at a studio in Bois de Boulogne.

Alvin Kraenzlein proved the perfect athlete for Marey’s enquiry in that he won the 60 metre sprint, the 110 and 200 metre hurdles and the long jump at the games; Kraenzlein and shot put gold medallist and world high jump record holder Richard Sheldon were exemplary figures for physiological study. From the photographic material produced by recording Kraenzlein and Sheldon, Marey reconstructed the optimum movement of successful athletic practice as a sequential series of drawn images, demonstrating in a single frame how the body progressed through the technical choreography of a sporting action. This kind of sequential frame has become fundamental as a template not merely for assisting analysis and improvement of sporting performance but as an optimum example of the key poses and ‘in-betweens’ of classical drawn animation. Marey’s visual research had serviced emergent sports science, kinematic enquiry about velocity, the accurate graphic transcription of animation within the image, and as a continuity of movement articulating the animation from frame to frame. As Perelman points out, too, Marey’s achievement has also been situated in a wider philosophical context by his colleague at the Collège de France, Henri Bergson, who viewed Marey’s sequential phases of movement in a fixed image, as a model by which the human perception of the entire movement might be comprehended: ‘In just the same way the thousands of successive positions of the runner are contracted into one sole symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives, which art reproduces, and which becomes for everyone the image of the running man’ (Perelman 2012:87). This distillation, then, was an image of thought itself, embodied in a human figure.

Marey’s work, and Bergson’s intervention here, point to a more contemplative response to what might be termed the new motion practices of modernity, and is far from what Nead has argued was the dominant currency of audience reception of the new turn of the century visual culture; namely one of highly physical, emotive and corporeal engagement (see Nead 2007:173–178). This visceral response to both pre-cinema novelties, early proto-cinematic devices and the new wonder of projected film itself, is often overlooked, and is predicated fundamentally on both the ‘literalness’ of the imagery in showing the public back to themselves, and the primacy of the body as the subject and object of fascination. Nead stresses the importance of the sexualised body and new models of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Sport and Animation: A Good Match?: Why Animation?
• 1. Body Languages – Early Sporting Animation: Why Sport?
• 2. Good Sports – Re-Imagining the Cartoon: Animated History
• 3. Olympianimation – Global Forms and Perspectives: Games with Frontiers
• 4. Animated Art, Sporting Aesthetics: Sport Is Not Art
• 5. Animating Sporting Morals, Ethics and Politics: Thinking and Hitting at the Same Time: Yogi Berra or Yogi Bear?
• 6. Animation, Sport and Technology: A Tin Can on Wheels
• Conclusion: Sport and Animation – A Good Match? Redux: What Do They Know of Animation Who Only Animation Know?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index