Ever since our mothers sat us down in front of them to shut us up, cartoons have been a form of escape. Whether it is the heady moral optimism of Disney, or the arbitrarily poetic child-scapes of Studio Ghibli, the feature-length animation provides us with a realm of unadulterated fantasy. For an hour and a half we can set our minds out to pasture in a world of impossibly lush landscapes, talking animals, enormous eyes and ridiculous waist-to-bust ratios. Unlike cinema, magic in cartoons is not just a ‘special effects’ aberration of the reality principle, it is the rule. Cause and Effect? Supply and Demand? Gravity? Fuck ’em. In cartoons we can put reality on hold and chill out all the way down to our inner child. However, animation now has a bastard child running amok, ruining its snug reputation as a kaleidoscopic escape. A twisted hybrid of animation and live action footage, the rotoscoped film dances all over the distinction between real and unreal, animated and acted. And if that’s not enough to fry your yams, rotoscoping is an art that can be practiced on your own computer using standard post-production software (if you have the time, patience, and requisite neurosis).
For those of you who lack a fetish for experimental animation, rotoscoping is the art of animating over the top of live-action footage, using frames of the photographed footage as reference points from which to trace the animation. The technique itself is nothing new. Disney has been using it since the 30s. In Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, footage of live actors was used to help create scenes (such as dances) that would otherwise be extremely tricky to animate from scratch. What’s exciting about the latest incarnations of rotoscoping (such as Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life) is the way in which the technique is being employed. Unlike in Disney film, where the rotoscoped scene is animated over so heavily it blends seamlessly into the purely fabricated cartoons that follow it, A Scanner Darkly never lets you forget that you are indeed watching a character who was a flesh and blood person before they were mashed through production companies’ circuit boards. However, there are some points in the film where characters’ expressions are clearly exaggerated by the hand of an animator, or when the characters interact with overtly fabricated cartoons. Is what you’re watching photographed or simulated? It becomes impossible to tell.
While the rotoscoped flick wears its simulated nature on its sleeve, we cannot dismiss it as the pure fantasm of animation; there’s always the creeping sense of something incarnate bubbling below the surface of the rotoscoped frames. Linklater could not have chosen a better medium for transporting his audience into the hallucinatory world of A Scanner Darkly’s neuro-nauts: a world where thought experiments and paranoid fantasies are frequently confused for ‘reality’ and vice versa.
But in situating the film so firmly in the frayed neural minefield of heavy drug use, Linklater actually robs A Scanner Darkly (and rotoscoping) of its subversive potential.
Phillip K Dick’s original novel was a portrait of a dystopia where drug induced, ego-splitting neural freak-outs were one’s only escape from the homogenised banality of daily consumer life. Dick paints a picture of a world where both landscape and one’s sphere of potential action have become completely dominated by the interests of bodies corporate (the triumph of monopoly capitalism). Life there is described as ‘a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed’, strolling down its streets like walking on ‘a circular strip that turned past you as you pretended to go somewhere; there was always the same McDonaldburger place over and over’. It was the crippling sameness and predictability of this world that forced Dick’s anti-hero, Bob Arctor, to forsake his comfortable family life and delve into the savagely poetic world of a junkie. Indeed, drug use seemed to be the only way for Arctor to even be able to think outside the neatly categorised and commoditised square. And a substantial chunk of Dick’s A Scanner Darkly is dedicated to tracing the bleak and sickeningly uncritical lives of the ‘straights’ (non-drug users) in a fearsome critique of the vapidity of consumer culture; a critique that seems to be largely ignored by Linklater in his filmic adaptation.
At almost every point in the text where Dick marshals an attack on our homogenised lifestyles, Linklater ignores it completely, plays it down, or cheerily dismisses it as one of the character’s fuddled, paranoid jokes. The only point in the film where Linklater does nod toward the triteness of ‘straight life’ is when Arctor illustrates the mechanistic tedium of his former life as a father. The result is that Arctor’s the characters’ descent into drug use can be easily dismissed as a midlife crisis or a juvenile avoidance of responsibility rather than a symptom of a society affected by a pathological concern for efficiency and production.
While Linklater presents us with a dazzling and harrowing tale of the dangers of drug use, rotoscoping would have been the perfect way to illustrate the soulless uniformity of Dick’s dystopia; its coloured cells could have sucked out all the subtlety and detail from the photographed frames, leaving behind only a clean, efficient, bear bones bland-scape. The ever present potential for animated chaos could not only have shown us the surreal mayhem of the drug user’s mind, but the frailty and contingency of that thin, quantifiable and predictable slice of the human condition we designate as ‘reality’. Instead, Linklater quarantines the unsettling and destabilising effects of rotoscoping by tying them solely to a narrative of drug use. ‘Don’t worry kid, all that weird shit’s just some junkie’s synapses misfiring. There’s only one real, and it’s still real. Stay off the drugs.’
The more cynical among us might wonder how subversive a rotoscoped film like A Scanner Darkly can ever be if it requires a multi-million dollar Warner Brothers budget to produce. If a major studio is involved, the answer is perhaps ‘not very’, but as RMIT student Thomas Kinsman has discovered, one doesn’t necessarily need a colossal budget in order to craft visual candy akin to A Scanner Darkly.
At first glance, producing something that looks like Linklater’s latest rototrip seems like an impossibly formidable task for the amateur film-maker. A Scanner Darkly was filmed on high-end HD cameras and rotoscoped using a commercially unavailable program nicknamed ‘Rotoshop’ that was specially designed for Linklater’s projects. It might not ever occur to the young film-maker that a similarly impressive job can be done in Final Cut, AfterEffects, Shake or Commotion, and that the quality of the footage rotoscoped does not drastically alter the end product. The standard post-production program Adobe AfterEffects has been Kinsman’s weapon of choice in rotoscoping his latest short film Alexander: The Not So Great … Pinecone Adventure, which was filmed on uber-cheap miniDV tape (with no great detriment to the quality of the animation).
While writing the script for his film, Kinsman wondered how he might actualise the fantastically absurd situations he had scripted on his non-existent student budget. He says,
I thought of turning it into an animation, only I didn’t want it to look like your regular low-budget student Flash animation. I then remembered seeing Waking Life a while back and how I’d loved how kooky and surreal it looked. Not long after, I did a few tests and figured out my own way of producing fully rotoscoped footage in AfterEffects. The results perfectly matched the films ultra-surreal content.
For the budding film-makers among us who want to give rotoscoping a shot, Kinsman recommends that you take some time to plough through the tutorials available with the post-production software, particularly those concerning masks:
Get to know AfterEffects and all the tools it has to offer. It’s an extremely versatile program and the creative possibilities are practically endless. However it can take a long time to produce something of worth, but if you’re keen enough to stick it out, you can often end up with something really nice.
For those of you interested in seeing what Kinsman has managed to create through his home-brew rotoscoping technique, visit www.alexanderthenotsogreat.com
So, whether you want to subvert (among other things) the distinction between the actual and the simulated, or simply find a low budget means of creating a film that stands its aesthetic ground next to higher budget productions, rotoscoping may just be your bag. On a purely practical level, the technique affords the director an enormous amount of freedom, allowing them access to the convincingly outrageous contortions of the animated character while retaining the subtle expression of the actor. Thus, in spite of Linklater’s Scanner slump, rotoscoping is shaping up to be a strong contender for the best thing since sliced celluloid.
Published In Voiceworks Magazine # 68
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