This blog post is going to be broken up into 3 separate parts as I think it will make the most sense that way. This post will focus on why I believe animation is an art form, or that it is my favorite medium for consuming visual art.
For many kids like myself, the first time they come across art is in a school field trip to the art museum or in a comic book. Both are stagnant forms of drawing created to evoke emotions or thought, the goal of most art in my opinion. Where animation, from movies to tv shows, differs from these in that it is a complete moving picture. This was said many times at the invention of the tv (moving picture shows) but I believe that it holds much truer for animation. In animation each frame is created separately from the next and each frame has to be hand created by its creator. Whether it is stop motion, hand drawn, computer generated, or created using some form of arts and crafts like South Park, each frame is created independent of each other. However when they are combined they create a seamless transition of the artists creation to create the illusion of talking, walking, interacting or doing any combination of things. Each frame has to be created as if it is its own piece of art. The ability to draw the character and make the character evoke motion through visuals is the definition of art and each millisecond is created with an end goal in mind, there is no empty space.
Many could argue that this is true for any form of video as a medium, however I disagree. While you have to create the set from the real world, have actors in costume, and have visual effects all of these take place in the real world (or use some sort of animation in order to convey it). The actors, the set, the landscape, the setting, all are real things, animate objects. In animation one is able to take some form of inanimate art and give it the ability to move. Each frame of an animation has to be created from the ground up. There exists nothing before the animator begins his animation, and this is not true of other forms of video. In each frame of animation one can assume, without a shadow of a doubt that someone put an immense amount of time creating it for you to be able to witness a completely other worldly idea or simply an emotion in the form of an actual moving picture. This can be seen most obviously when looking at hand drawn animation. Every single frame is a complete drawing, a work of art, coming from someone else's creativity. Then when the frames come together they create something entirely different then what one frame alone conveys and works together to emphasize its meaning. This can be seen in a recent animated movie of Spiderman Into the Spider Verse.
While this is a comic book movie and utilizes comic book artwork, in a single frame it is able to convey emotions just through the photo. Comic books can do similar things however they suffer from the inability to be as seamless and put together as an animated movie, allowing it to push the medium farther. An animated film is distinctly different art from any other medium as it is a world completely created, thought of, and drawn by another. Not only this but it comes together to create a form of video that allows for dialogue, actions, and landscapes that transition you into the world of another's creation.
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