When the Menier Chocolate Factory, in London, revived Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George, the tiny theater faced a serious problem. The space was so intimate that people seated in the front row could touch the actors, who performed just six inches away. With scant room for the couples who populate Sondheim’s play —let alone for spectacular re-enactments of Georges Seurat’s “Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grand Jatte” —the director, Sam Bunt rock, arrived at an ingenious solution. He used computer animation projected onto back and side walls to form the set, a strategy that became the production’s signature even when it moved to a more typical stage, in 2008, for the New York revival.
Animation today has overflowed the childish boundaries designated by the word “cartoon.” It animates other art forms in astonishingly innovative ways, while thematically and stylistically becoming a far bolder medium itself. Once defined as drawing a narrative by hand, image after image, then photographing the results and linking them together to produce the illusion of movement, animation used to function much like those flip books that simulate motion when you fan the pages. Computer-generated imagery, or CGI, has changed all that. Using sophisticated software, it performs wonders not just in film, where we’d expect it both in full-length features and for special effects, but also, and in equally revelatory ways, in theater and in opera.
At Sunday in the Park With George, we begin and end with a blank proscenium stage, the classic white box we associate with the exhibition of modern art like Seurat’s 1884 pointillist masterpiece. As George begins to paint, color and light appear before our eyes, changed and revised quickly as the artist completes his sketch.
The rapid pace possible in animation allows us to experience the physical universe as the painter does. Objects and characters appear suddenly, move, disappear, or even double. The artist moves a favorite tree to improve the composition, prompting complaints from his mother when she visits the park that the scenery has changed. When two soldiers court young women, one is played by a live actor while his silent companion is a projected image. Beautiful and bravura, animation became the show’s star, interacting with the actors, though never overshadowing them, and always seeming very Seurat, and not Disney.
Another recent play using animation was Macbeth, with Patrick Stewart, in London and New York, which projected videos on the back of the stage to reinforce a 1930s setting. The three witches appeared as creepy nurses evocative of the painter Richard Prince, and the backdrop flourished projections of fascist rallies. When Banquo’s ghost appeared, spectacular animation sent blood flowing around the stage.
Looking and feeling like a graphic comic brought to life onstage, The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island, which ran in New York’s Vineyard Theatre in early 2008, paid homage to the origins of theatrical computer animation in graphic novels, themselves a refinement of comic-book techniques. A quirky, tongue-in-cheek downtown musical, Ben Katchor’s Slug Bearers is the tale of a socialite who becomes a social activist. It uses brightly colored, elaborately drawn panels projected onto the stage and over scrims deployed in configurations one might see in a color graphic novel, like Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers.
Late 2008 saw at least two other fascinating theatrical variations using technology allied with animation: Waves, an experimental staging of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves that originated at Britain’s National Theatre and a new production of The Damnation of Faust, at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. In Waves, the actors busily and conspicuously composed settings, changed costumes, created sound effects, read the narration, and even switched roles from time to time, all the while filming each other or being filmed by static cameras connected to computers, with the images projected behind them on screens. The effect eerily suited Woolf’s novel, since the quotidian activities of the actors (setting a table, eating a meal, getting dressed), became distanced and stylized —reflecting distinctions Woolf makes in her novels and diaries between everyday life and “the essence of reality.” The production did not, strictly speaking, use animation. But its projected images highlighted and edited objects and actors’ bodies (showing now a bowl, now a hand grasping that bowl, now an actor eating) with the ease and freedom of animation.
At the Metropolitan Opera, Robert Lepage created similarly brilliant staging for Berlioz’s beautiful but static, oratoriolike opera. As in Waves, the images used were photographs, not animations. But they were brought to life by computer-animation technology that cued projectors to sung and orchestral music. In one scene, for example, the backdrop was a projected group of trees in full autumn colors. As Mephistopheles walked under each tree, it dropped its leaves and became reduced to blighted branches. Keyed to the notes that accompany each of the Devil’s steps, computer animation accomplished a “wow” that would be awkward or impossible otherwise. Similar techniques are reportedly planned for the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Wagner’s Ring cycle, part of which, if we are lucky, will eventually be available at live performances beamed to movie houses around the world as other Met productions have been in recent years.
All of the examples I have mentioned so far are wonderful explorations of what animation can do for the performing arts, and vice versa. But 2008’s biggest surprises in a way were in animation’s traditional domain: film. Both Disney’s WALL-E and Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir changed our sense of what animated films can do and even of their purpose.
As WALL-E begins, we see a small yellow robotic steam shovel —the eponymous character —and his sole companion, a resilient New York cockroach. Every day, WALL-E builds a skyline composed of stacks of garbage that echoes New York before its population, choked by its own refuse, abandoned the city. Then he goes home to a trash bin and inserts a VHS tape into a player he has managed to salvage and sings and dances along with the old-fashioned musical Hello Dolly! At the end of one production number, “It Only Takes a Moment,” when the movie’s characters join hands and kiss, WALL-E holds his own two shovels, eliciting one of the first, but certainly not the last, wistful “awwww"s from the audience.
It is, indeed, a beautiful and touching scene. By looking, listening, and imitating the video, WALL-E has taught himself to emulate human emotion, so that when he encounters another, more up-to-date robot named Eve and falls in love, he knows what to do: He shows her the video. But Eve, having captured the seed of a tree —a sign that earth is ready for rehabitation —is whisked away by the spaceship that brought her and becomes a political football in a contest pitting machines that want humans to remain dependent against people whose minds and bodies have atrophied during a long and pampered interval in space. Pursuing Eve and rescuing her, WALL-E teaches everyone what it means to be to be alive. “Eve!” WALL-E shouts after her; “WALL-E!” Eve replies, so he won’t lose sight. “Eve!” “WALL-E!” “Eve!” OK, I’ll stop, though WALL-E won’t —persistence being one of the lessons humanity needs to learn, along with a sense of stewardship toward the earth.
This enchanting film, far darker in content than a typical cartoon feature, expanded the reach of the animated film, producing a stark political parable, even if the ending is hopeful. It gave Disney new credibility among critics and Hollywood types who recognized WALL-E by nominating it for the Academy Award for best screenplay even though the dialogue in the film is limited. WALL-E was the first animated movie ever to win the Los Angeles Film Critics Award for best picture, and it topped the New York Times film critic A.O. Scott’s list of best films of 2008.
Art Spiegelman’s graphic novels Maus I and Maus II (1986 and 1991, with sections published earlier) recognized that serious and even taboo material could be treated within comic-book conventions, so that, at a time when academic theory deemed the Holocaust impossible to represent, Maus told a story about Auschwitz and its survivors in which Nazis appeared as cats and Jews as mice. Several recent films, including 2007’s animated version of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis, an autobiography set against the backdrop of the 1979 Iranian revolution, have explored the use of animation to tell political tales. Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir pushes the boundaries of animation further into history and politics, earning a nomination for an Oscar and winning a Golden Globe in the category of best foreign-language film, and winning the Los Angeles Film Critics Award for best animation and the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Picture. It adapts animation techniques to what is, for all intents and purposes, a full-scale documentary about war.
In June 1982, the Israeli army invaded southern Lebanon with the goal of ending the bombardment of towns in Israel’s north. Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon, later prime minister, planned in secret to appoint a Christian ally, Bashir Gemayel, to head the government in Beirut and ordered Israeli troops to cooperate with forces led by the charismatic Gemayel. A young man doing his required military service at the time, Folman was near West Beirut when Gemayel was assassinated. He followed orders to light with illumination rounds the skies over refugee camps called Sabra and Shatila when forces loyal to Gemayel entered them, ostensibly to eliminate Palestinian combatants. As many as 3,500 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, including women, children, and old men, were killed during two days and three nights of gunfire illuminated by the Israeli flares.
Waltz With Bashir reveals most of this history eventually, but it is first and foremost a film about memory. Folman realizes one night, in conversation with a friend, that he cannot remember anything about his time in the army during the invasion. His friend dreams repeatedly about 26 vicious dogs; Folman begins to unpack a recurring ambiguous dream of his own, in which he wades ashore naked onto the beaches of Lebanon with a group of comrades, gun held aloft. Like images of illuminated skies, the dream images recur during the film as the director comes closer to retrieving the truth: They form patterns that give the film a poetic and aesthetic structure atypical of both animation and documentary, the genre Waltz With Bashir most closely resembles.
Like a television or film report, the movie is primarily structured around a series of interviews Folman conducted with friends and former comrades in the Israeli army who sometimes deny things he thought he remembered and sometimes suggest events that he no longer recalls. Although Folman planned to photograph the interviews and then transpose them into animated images —making possible fluid transitions between the past and present —some of the men withdrew permission, sometimes at the last minute, which required the redrawing and reanimation of some sections. The film exposed events that the soldiers preferred to forget, or to remember only in a coded series of images like “LSD dreams": 26 barking dogs; men wading naked from the sea.
Ultimately, images of the Holocaust that the men had known since childhood break down what the animated psychologist in the film calls cognitive dissonance. A journalist named Ron Ben-Yishai —recalled by Folman as walking fearlessly amid the bullets —tells the director about a call he made to Sharon warning him of the massacre in the Sabra and Shatila camps. The minister of defense curtly thanked him for “bringing it to my attention” but did nothing, Ben-Yishai says. He and Folman recall a line of Palestinian civilians marched into a stadium that evokes an iconic image of the Warsaw ghetto: a young boy, his face frightened, his hands held aloft as he marched before Nazi troops. Waltz flashes an image of that famous photograph, transposed into an animated frame.
When a flood of desperate Palestinian women overflows from the camps, pleading with the Israelis, the men discover what they have sensed to be true all along: Palestinian combatants did not need to be purged from Sabra and Shatila, because they were already gone. By day and by the nighttime light of the Israeli flares, Gemayel’s forces had, instead, murdered civilians. When the film switches at its very end to newsreel footage of the carnage, the audience, like Folman himself when he realized the truth, feels shattered. The effect was heightened because Waltz With Bashir opened in limited release on December 25, 2008, two days before Israeli bombs rained down on Gaza.
In Steamboat Willie (1928), Disney’s first sound cartoon, and Merian Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s King Kong (1933), filmed using stop-action (in which objects are moved ever so slightly and photographed each time), through generations of similar work, animation has been slow and painstaking, artistic and yet technical. Modern animation, which uses sophisticated computer programs, can be relatively fast or relatively slow. Television’s South Park prides itself on producing a half-hour episode in a week, allowing for up-to-date commentary. Folman’s Waltz With Bashir boasts that its animators typically produced just 37 frames (each lasting 1.5 seconds) during a nine-hour workday, and that production of the 87-minute film lasted four years, including a full year of research.
But whether its accent is on the timely or the timeless, animation has become far more than old-fashioned cartoons: stages illuminated and enhanced by graphic art; artistic effects that delight, thrill, inform, and even shatter; screen features with deep environmental and political import.
Steamboat Willie has traveled farther than he ever could have imagined.
