Forced perspective in stop motion11/9/2022 ![]() ![]() The animators found new ways to make the drawn characters interact spatially with the backgrounds: Popeye climbs a staircase ( walking ‘between’ two balustrades built into the turntable) and Bluto convincingly enters a 3D cave. Setback shots in the color two-reeler Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor (1936) are more sophisticated some feature an additional foreground layer of sliding 3D scenery between camera and platen, with the nearer objects convincingly off-focus. Setback made its public debut during a fast and comical chase scene in the Popeye short For Better Or Worser (1935), but in Li’l Swee’ Pea (1936) the setback shots accompany such humdrum, utilitarian scenes (Popeye walking Popeye pushing stroller) that the overall effect is underwhelming. Yet the scenes in which the studio deployed setback shots seem chosen at random. ![]() FORCED PERSPECTIVE IN STOP MOTION FULLGetting the setback rig to work at all must have been a major technical feat - the lighting challenges alone seem headache-inducing - and it’s easy to imagine that 1930’s audiences, unaccustomed to full 3D motion in cartoons, were amazed by the onscreen results. The turntable is rotated incrementally behind the cels, creating the effect of a “tracking shot” - the 2D animated character, in a side-view walk cycle, traverses a realistically proportioned (but still recognizably Fleischeresque) 3D environment which moves perspectivally across the background. ![]() The setback rig consists of a forced-perspective, miniature set mounted on a turntable, serving as background to the cel art held in a vertical glass platen, and a horizontal animation camera. Both systems evolved somewhat contemporaneously, and both create the illusion of dimensional depth, but functionally they have little in common. The setback is often confused with Disney’s multiplane camera. The most technologically ornate item in Fleischer’s toolbox was the setback camera (sometimes erroneously called the ‘stereoptical process’), used in a number of shorts and in the feature film Hoppity Goes To Town (1941). Betty Boop and Popeye inhabit a profoundly rubbery world, in which the fourth wall is full of holes, distinctions between human, animal, vegetable and inanimate taxonomies are unstable, and the boundary between cartoonal and real space is up for grabs.įleischer deployed a number of techniques in the service of this anarchic cinematic vision, among them rotoscoping (patented by Max Fleischer in 1917) integrating live action shots and using still photographs as animation backgrounds to create the illusion of cartoon characters inhabiting a real-world space, as in the opening scene of the astounding Betty Boop short Ha! Ha! Ha! (1934). And while Disney, obsessed with realism, strove to create an environment in which rigidly contained characters behave according to strict visual, narrative, and social rules, the principles at work in Fleischer-space are the exact opposite. Foremost among Walt Disney’s gifts was his facility with storytelling, so it’s no surprise that to this day, millions accept as historical fact the studio’s own carefully constructed narrative about its role as engine of technological progress in animation.īut in the silent era and well into the 1930’s, animation’s technology leader was the Fleischer Studio other studios, including Disney, struggled to keep up with Fleischer’s visual and mechanical inventiveness. Ask an American “who invented animation” and the most likely response will be “Walt Disney.” Students of animation history know better, of course - but while Disney contributed significantly to the development of the form, his most permanent legacy may be the tireless self-promotion with which he stamped his own name on animated cinema. ![]()
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