The Shifting Scales of Oral and Animated Narrative

 From Steam Calliope Scherzos:

So, what exactly prompted the switch into the less subjective, more consistent approach of the novel? The McLuhan-inspired answer would be: the advent of movable type, or in other words, the printing press. And I think it’s basically right. The rise of literacy from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries, and then later the invention of the printing press were the decisive factors in raising the visual sense to cultural dominance over all of man’s other senses. Once the educated members of society were accustomed to using their eyes to imbibe vast quantities of information, the printing press came along and removed all of the unique, distinctive qualities of transmitting information from one person to another, since it not only nullified the human voice, but handwriting as well. The uniformity through which the press conveyed human expression slowly massaged the European mind into understanding the phenomenal world primarily as a fixed, rational, and measurable space. And this shift in mentality affected not only narrative but images as well. The linearity, order, and segmentation of the printed book all played a role in developing the rules of perspective within the visual arts that we see during the Renaissance, and these rules of perspective further augmented our understanding of how we might similarly “paint a picture” of our surroundings using words only. So although it took some time and didn’t occur all at once, the printing press gradually objectified the worlds that stories inhabit, inviting mathematical, mechanical, and physics-based considerations that would not have been applied hundreds of years prior.

While the rise of the novel during the second half of the eighteenth century both reflected and reinforced this new, consistent sense of size and scale, it was the nineteenth century that marked its high-point, and thus one will rarely find counterexamples from that time. But all of this changed in the twentieth century, and the reason is pretty simple: narrative was no longer conveyed strictly through the word (or the theater stage, for that matter) but now the drawn image as well. While still predominately visual, drawn narratives nonetheless were based on sequential images, and thus they required modifications and simplifications that could not help but retrieve the hazy, hallucinatory qualities of folkloric and/or mythic narrative — the same kind that novels had temporarily extinguished. One reason is that characters needed to be drawn in a simple, repeatable fashion, and they could not so easily convey the complex emotions that novels expound upon at length. Therefore, both the characters and stories moved away from psychological realism and returned to the world of familiar tropes, topoi, clichés, and archetypes found in Aesop’s Fables and the Tales of Mother Goose. Yes: it was no coincidence that Laugh-O-Gram, Disney, Van Beuren, and other studios turned to orally-composed stories for their inspiration. Additionally, the use of sequential images as a means of conveying narrative encouraged more stories in which characters interact with either very large or very small environments, since such situations are universally interesting to see. And in such stories, obviously scale more easily loses consistency. Thus, animation and comic books both signaled a return to a more experientially subjective, mythological sensibility, and their inconsistent approach to size and scale, which this web site full of visual narrative "tropes" recognizes, was but one example of such a return.

There are too many examples of inconsistent scale to mention from the world of cartoons. They’re all over early Walt Disney, they’re found in Warner Bros. material, and Ren & Stimpy is one of the major examples from relatively recent decades. For the most part, any time you’ve got one character dealing with either a very large or very small character, the scaling is going to get screwy. Such inconsistency wouldn’t be limited only to these kinds of stories, either. In 1968, the Yellow Submarine animated movie was released, basically a series of animated vignettes attached to a loose narrative designed to showcase The Beatles and their music. It was directed by George Dunning, and his style left an impact on various animators, since it represented a third path away from not only the cost-prohibitive Disney style but also the cheaper but waning UPA style of animation. One such director influenced by Dunning, the Hungarian animator Marcell Jankovics, claimed that a major advantage of Dunning’s style was that its psychedelic quality meant that you didn’t have to keep the characters a consistent size. Therefore, when the storyboards were given to different individual animators, they didn’t have to collaborate with each other as tightly as they would if they were trying to maintain a mathematically precise sense of scale, and so a character in one scene might appear big, but in another, he might appear small. In 1973, Jankovics released János vitéz (“Johnny Corncob,” based on the epic poem by Sándor Petőfi), and this trippy, folkloric sense of narrative with derelict visual scaling was on full display, used to much greater effect than in Dunning’s work. (Read more.)

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