Caricature, traditionally, refers to a picture with accented features to create a recognizable face based on features unique to different individuals. Caricature in animation refers more to giving something life and thought of its own - believability of life. The "real" that is used to discuss Disney's philosophy on animation is not realism, such as a movie like Final Fantasy. No, this "real" is just as magical and unreal as any Disney movie. Caricatures are used to trick people into forgetting that who they are watching is not a real person, not forgetting because everything is so realistic looking. Character readability is extremely important to pull off making something real for an audience. Realistic caricature could make a sad character’s eyes huge and cute, making them more real of a person. Realistic realism may show a sad character look down at the ground and subtly shift their bodyweight from one realistic leg to the other.
The job of caricature is to take something real and enhance it. Thus, caricatures need to be based on real things. If an animator has no idea how the real works, he could never use caricature to enhance the animation. If an animation goes too far out of reality, it can and will take an audience out of the story. There seems to be some sort of limit as to how much exaggeration an audience can take before unrealistic body movements take one out of the believability of a story.
Example1: A character throws a ball through a window. The glass flies from the left of the frame to the right of the frame until it is all out of the frame. Well, in reality, the glass would also be constantly moving down because of gravity. So, even though this larger than life glass break isn't supposed to be realistic, it should still follow the rules of gravity - or at least give the idea that there is some gravity in order to keep the audience from being distracted.
Example2: A character bends from the middle of the chest, where the torso would normally not bend. An animator could get away with a subtle bending of this, but if a character were to turn with this unrealistic turning point of the body, the character would look distorted and members of the audience might question what was going on.
Example3: A character throws a rock. During the throw, the arms and or fingers bend past where bones would normally allow. If this is only done slightly, it can enhance the movement of the shot and add to the aesthetic with arches. However, if done too much and not understanding how the body works, it could look like a character's limbs are broken and make that character look weak and flimsy rather than strong.
So, understanding reality before enhancing it us a must for animators.
So, what is more true, caricature or realism? There is no correct answer. As for most things, there are pros and cons for both approaches. It just depends on the style in which one is attempting to achieve their communication. To this question, I would answer: what is truth? An important job of a storyteller is to find the best way to achieve communicating ideas to his or her audience. So, if doing things in a larger than life manor and exaggerating animation gets your ideas across better, this is the best way to go about telling your story. Or maybe using realism would highlight things that aren't realistic in the story and make them more believable; this, then, might be the better way to go. It is the decision of the person(s) telling the story as to what would be better for that particular tale.
UPA's animations don't really fall into either category fully. But, because all of the art is set up as unrealistic with the main purpose of efficiently communicating ideas (such as showing what is on a table by tilting the top unrealistically toward the viewer or extending someone's legs to peer over someone else), UPA is able to pull it off without distracting the audiences eye. Disney follows more realism, but breaks the rules nonetheless. A major difference in the two works is detail. Disney animations would never have a table that is at an incorrect angle, however they might extend someone's arm slightly to add to a certain effect that they were going for. Bakshi, on the other hand, attempts as much realism as possible in his animations by rotoscoping most frames from live film footage. It would never extend a limb or show anything moving or standing the way that you would not see it in real life.
In The Illusion of Life, by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, the authors describe Walt Disney as "exploring all facets of the entertainment world, as long as he remembered always to captivate the audience by making it all believable - by making it all real." Again, something to realize when looking at this work is that when Disney animators are talking about real, the realistic animations of today were not around. They were not talking about realistic looking animations. They were talking about creating the illusion for an audience to forget that characters were not real people - not the illusion that what was happening on-screen was happening or could happen in the real world. Believability and realism are different. In the book, Wilfred Jackson said, "Walt wanted his drawings that were animated to seem to be real things that had feelings and emotions and thoughts, and the main thing was that the audience would believe them and that they would care what happened to them . . . and he used to stress that." And not to beat a dead horse, but later in the book, Ben Sharpsteen said this about Walt Disney: "I think that Walt was initially inspired by animation that stressed personality... This was one of the biggest factors in the success of our early pictures; Walt recognized the value of personality animation and he stressed it in story development." Caricature is to create a hole into a character's personality. This is what makes something real to an audience. And, this is the real that is written about in The Illusion of Life.
So, when Walt Disney said, “I definitely feel that we cannot do the fantastic things based on the real, unless we first know the real", he was talking about staying within the realm of things that we perceived as natural. Because when we break that realm, and we are not careful or good at it - like UPA - we can and will take our audience out of the animation. So, know the real, stay real, and break the rules from there.
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