The Velvet Light Trap

Movement and form grow more fantastic the more strictly they are calculated. Watch any Disney film and you will see that these are justifiable deformations of animals and humans. The characters Pluto and Donald become the morphology of dogs and ducks and analyses of movement. Every object, because it must be in motion, is once broken down into parts and then reconstructed.

—Imamura Taihei, "A Theory of the Animated Sound Film" (1936)

In the nascent decades of American animation, a series of technological and industrial advancements helped transform the burgeoning medium from moving lines against a monochromatic background into a spatially illusionistic and fully Technicolor cinematic experience. The plastic and anarchic potential of the line, apparent in early animations such as Emile Cohl's seminal Fantasmagorie (1908) and later cartoons such as Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer's Felix animation Pedigreedy (1927), disappears under the full flowering of cel animation. The cel process, which used transparent sheets of nitrate to allow drawings to be superimposed on top of a painted background, provided the standardization and sophistication necessary for the creation of spatially believable worlds and emotionally resonant characters. This spatial "realism," coupled with animation's embrace of the formal and narrative conventions of film, helped establish the hegemony of "full animation," a term used in animation studies to refer to the aesthetic and industrial aspects on display in canonical Disney features such as Bambi (1942)—a film advertised by theatrical posters as being presented "in multiplane Technicolor."¹ The cel technique, when combined with the development of the multiplane camera, was heavily responsible for the institutionalization and canonization of a style of animation that relies on a decomposition of animated space through the fragmentation of the image into multiple, independent layers. The subsequent reconstitution of the image through multiplanar photography results in an image that dissembles to a spatial realism that is at odds with its anthropomorphism and impressionistic use of nature and landscape.²

I argue that this process of reconstitution is never complete, instead creating a spatial gap between foreground and background that allows us to pry apart the ideology of naturalism and realism at work in cel animation. I concentrate on the Disney feature Bambi as the paragon of this particular technique, a film that directly negotiates the semantic and spatial gap inherent to this form of animation. Following Jennifer Fay, I argue that we can analyze the combination of heterogeneous objects and spaces within a single frame in order to tease apart the conflation of human and nature. This version of realism can be read against the grain to "reveal the details of animate and inanimate life that are lost to anthropocentric attention and history" (Fay 42). Against this background, Disney's realism complicates traditional cinematic realism and suggests the contours of what Stanley Cavell calls an "ontological restlessness" that is just as germane to animation as graphic flatness (17).

This article explores cel animation as a system of gaps: between the foreground and the background, between photography and painting, and between "nature" and "artifice." Thus cel animation relies on problems of rupture, disjuncture, and discontinuity—or, more accurately, the tenuous negotiation and erasure of these gaps by technological and aesthetic strategies. In the specific case of Bambi, two fundamental gaps present themselves: first, a spatial gap between the celluloid layers, which occurs on the levels of technology, aesthetics, and industrial practice in order to fundamentally separate the foreground from the background; and second, the gap between "realism" and the fantastic. [End Page 3] This second gap occurs in both the foreground—in the tension between Disney's conflicting desires for emotive anthropomorphism and accurate animal anatomy—and in the background—between romantic depictions of nature and the role of these romanticized backgrounds in "naturalizing" the seemingly coherent space of the animated image. A focus on the ways a film like Bambi, as well as the majority of mainstream cel animations responding to its legacy, navigates these discontinuities will allow us both to explain the appeal of Disney's films and to suggest the contours of how spatial realism can...