The House Next Door

By Hannah Frank

[A contribution to the Close-Up Blog-a-thon]

A dot. That is where I'll start. A dot:

That's from Chuck Jones's "The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics" (1965), a rejoinder—How low can you go? How little can you take?—to his own highly stylized "The Dover Boys at Pimento University or The Rivals of Roquefort Hall" (1942). Who needs a lascivious skunk or Bugs Bunny batting false eyelashes when there are squiggles to be had, a first dimension to be explored? "The Dot and the Line" is not without its cuteness, a cuteness with which Jones, between Sniffles the Mouse and Ralph Phillips, is not unfamiliar, but babies are cute too, and babyhood was a good enough beginning for each of us; let us ask then, if a dot is our subject, how does one zoom in on it?

If we got close enough, would we notice the dot's pockmarks?

If a line segment contains infinite points and a full-blown line contains just as many, if not more, would we find within a point heaving multitudes?—perhaps tens of thousands of concentric circles, to the zillionth power, with a googolplex zeroes, with a cherry on top, plus one? What comes after the germ on the bug on the feather on the wing on the bird?

Dot, I know a cream that will help you with those blackheads. And stop eating lemons and maybe that'll help soften your philtrum.

But the approach here is all wrong—not the zooming-in approach, I mean, but coming at our subject cold. After all, animation can be true or false however many times a second, and ink and flesh can intermingle on that fine silver screen, whether Max Fleischer and Koko or Alice and Julius or Gene Kelly and Jerry Mouse or Shia LaBeouf and Optimus Prime, and one could, I suppose, if one wanted to, inspect the fingerprints and smudges on the faces of Wallace or Gromit, but there are still extraordinary differences between live-action and animated films—too obvious, I'm sure, but nonetheless relevant to the subject at hand.

While the whole deal with even an unconventional dramatic film, its success or its failure, is pretty much bound up in whether it manages to create a sense of space, or a sense of the illusion of space—that if the object displayed doesn't exist in some corporeal form outside of its celluloid or digital reproduction then at least it could (Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera [1929] is a patchwork of false rooms, walls that are bound by edits instead of nails, and streets that share tape, not sidewalks or sky, but it works as the documentary it purports to be because even the seams that show seem inhabitable). This is not so with animation—kiddie, pornographic, experimental, limited, rotoscoped—because that's not and it's never going to be Whoopi Goldberg in a hyena outfit; it's a drawing, and the space is two-dimensional to begin with.

Again, disregarding CGI-heavy films, or stop-motion animation, or claymation, or Anthony Lane's perplexing final paragraph about We Own the Night (2007) in this week's New Yorker, animation confounds the whole notion of this blog-a-thon. There's just not anything to be close to.

And worse, when an animated film tries to get close, when it copies the patter of its live-action counterpart, it feels static and dull. Take this from the conclusion of the "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo" sequence from Cinderella (1950), in which Cinderella finally draws her Fairy Godmother's attention to the state of her dress:

This set-up is boring and also confusing; the blue background, standing in for the hazy night and perhaps Cinderella's self-loathing, could work in "Gerald McBoing-Boing" (1950) or The Huckleberry Hound Show, but seems here like laziness, not a question of style or budget. Viewing it in the context of the scene as a whole hardly helps. We know from its opening that the space is supposed to look like some combination of this and this:

Where is Cinderella in relation to that fountain or bench? Where is the Fairy Godmother in relation to Cinderella? The first problem is that Cinderella inhabits an uneasy and potentially unstable zone between live-action and animated, content with neither extreme and not occupying any space of its own. The second problem is that Cinderella looks like this:

She is as stylized as a smiley face and totally devoid of personality, but rotoscoped, on top of it all, as to make her at once foreign and familiar, recognizable as an ideal, not a cartoon. These, on the other hand, are definitely cartoons, even the last (also rotoscoped, but a villain):

The instability is simply not interesting. I don't want to watch Cinderella's blank face and the shenanigans of Gus-Gus et al. feel like the filler they are. Moreover, the choice to have both the opulent backgrounds and the synecdochic blue backgrounds above represent the same space is disorienting, but lacks any argument—either about the meaning of this film or about the medium of film in general. It is substance without style.

I go back to the dot, because the dot is there in the imprint on the button on Lucifer's nose, and the dot is there shimmering on Cinderella's headband. Dots put thing in perspective, and not just the vanishing point, either. I mean, if you got far away enough, this could be a dot:

As could this:

And, yes, this:

Well, that one kind of looks like it's giving us the middle finger.

These are all from Robert Breer's "Swiss Army Knife with Rats and Pigeons" (1980). Not a Disney picture at all; nor a Chuck Jones short—and Jones is a more interesting counterpoint, if just because his post-"Dover Boys" films, with the added emphasis of his two memoirs, Chuck Amuck (1989) and Chuck Reducks (1996), do carve out a space for animated films that is unstable in a worthwhile way. Still, even with a Jones—his Roadrunner shorts, for instance—there is a law of gravity, if not The Law. The point of the revered "Duck Amuck" (1951), in which Daffy is tormented by an unseen animator later revealed to be Bugs Bunny, is not the short's clever self-reflexivity but how Daffy is always Daffy, whether billed or flower-headed or erased. In a Breer, however, whatever Wile E. might lurk in the frame will only mutate into another creature or thing in the next. What is of interest to Breer is that each split-second be in dialogue or dispute with the next, so that, indeed, as soon as we could be close enough the thing is lost altogether; it's like Heisenberg said, or Hall & Oates.

Jones's dot, the one at the start, is a dot with a face that is a face, and is one that can be seen in medium close-up and extreme long shot.

I like Dot more than I like vapid Cinderella, that's for certain. It doesn't matter that there exists in the flesh no actor in a circular costume, for with his mathematical romance Jones succeeds in creating a space that is believable on its own terms, no external referent necessary.

Breer's, though, his dots, they are another matter. They are awesome, or Awesome, Awful. I want to get to know them and then they are gone. If only my eyes worked faster so that I might savor that frame forever. No, those dots are fleeting and yet in their own way infinite, if by that we mean that they operate at the remove of a godhead, neither amenable to our beseeching nor sorry about our hasty retreat: I am that I am!

Consequently, Breer's work—the way it shifts from frame to frame, its catchphraseless rectangles, its rotoscoped images that have nothing in common with the uncanny folks in Ralph Bakshi's American Pop (1981) or Cab Calloway's ghost walrus in "Minnie the Moocher" (1932)—implicitly comments on and even critiques the films by directors like Jones and certainly by the Walt Disney Company, presenting, as Fred Camper has written, "a true alternative to the dominant ethos: rather than fetishizing objects or particular notions of human identity, it argues for an active reenvisioning of the seen world, with all its parts equally capable of inspiring wonder." I take issue, however, with the pejorative resonance of "fetishizing," and might rewrite it as "privileging." Breer's dots, while alien, are hardly hostile and instead complementary, such that I don't think Jones and Breer (respectively, a man Space Jam is indebted to and an avant-garde artist who owes some to Mondrian) are opposed, or that putting them in conversation will necessarily lead to shouts.

Forgive my prescriptivism or don’t, for I am unforgiving, but I don't think Cinderella, or at least the "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo" sequence analyzed above, can properly be called "animated." It is an aping, a mockery. Jones and Breer work toward something else, not mere parody of the real world nor parody of parody of the real world, and when put side by side they come very near to that something, as if it is not the dot that should be in close up, but an entire medium. Camper may be right when he calls Breer's style "egalitarian," citing how in his films "a tiny dot can be as important as a landscape." A Breer without a Jones is a film consisting of mostly lonely long shots, or solely close-ups.

Or, okay, a Breer without a Jones is a dot that, if turned into a comma, could be only one of Pocahontas's nostrils—style without substance.

Jones gives Breer meaning. Breer gives Jones oomph. Mostly, it should be said, I don't want to look at Pocahontas or Cinderella. I want to look at the following images, because they tell me more about themselves and the film they're in than any "Colors of the Wind."

I am close enough, and this is where I'll end. With a dot. Period. Oh, and some concentric circles.


_________________________________________
Hannah Frank is a writer and filmmaker from Hoboken, NJ.