Through
a post at Mark Mayerson's blog, I found
this set of transcripts from a Disney "action analysis" class in 1937. It's kind of interesting that they had special classes for analyzing action in the first place (although it's not that surprising considering the business they were in), but what's more interesting is how much Don Graham disapproves of
rotoscoping.
Rotoscoping almost invariably produces boring, uninteresting results, it's true. Think about Disney's
Snow White and
Cinderella, both of which are arguably saved from being unbearably dull by secondary characters (the dwarfs and the mice, respectively). Then there are pictures like Fleischer's
Gulliver's Travels that, in spite of lively-looking secondary characters and initial box office success, have nearly been forgotten altogether.
The use of the rotoscope is visiting us again in the form of
motion capture technology: basically, rotoscope for 3D digital animation. Some of this year's animated hits,
Monster House and
Happy Feet, used it extensively. I didn't see
Happy Feet, but I know
Monster House suffered a lot of the flaws and artifacts that show up in rotoscoped footage: weird, unnatural-looking movements or expressions, and movements that seem too small, puppeteered rather than "acted" by the characters. Some of the life of the human characters is lost in translation somewhere with mo-cap, just as it was with rotoscope. Consequently, the house itself is the real star of
Monster House.
It's not that I don't like these motion captured or rotoscoped movies. I did like
Monster House (but felt it could have been significantly improved by having it done in live action with practical special effects instead of computer graphics), and I enjoy the old Disney features that employed rotoscope. I just think they could have all been improved by using different methods.
Frankly, I can only think of a couple good examples of the use of rotoscope. One of them was in this summer's
A Scanner Darkly, where it was just used to enhance the appearance of live action recording and add some special effects that would have been difficult to pull off without the footage looking like drawings.
The other is this 1933 Betty Boop cartoon by Fleischer Studios, "Snow White." It was back when they were still very experimental. Rotoscoping is used to recreate the motion of Cab Calloway in Koko the Clown's singing sequence, but notice that the animators mix it with lots of crazy, surreal animation of things that could never happen in real life.
There are a few other Fleischer cartoons that involve rotoscoping of Cab Calloway, but the rotoscoping itself in those cartoons doesn't look as good as it does in Betty Boop's "Snow White."
Labels: animation, art, video
