7.4 — Animation, Documentary and Television

Three forms that were each dismissed as lesser versions of cinema and each turned out to do something cinema could not.

Animation

How much work is a hand-drawn animated film?

An amount that is hard to believe until you convert it into drawings.

At 24 frames a second, one minute of film is 1,440 frames. Traditional animation is usually drawn on twos — each drawing held for two frames — so a minute needs around 720 drawings of the main action, plus backgrounds, plus every element moving at a different rate.

A 90-minute feature is therefore in the region of 60,000 to 100,000 individual drawings for the characters alone, each of which must be drawn, cleaned up, checked against the ones on either side, inked and coloured. Disney's Snow White (1937) is estimated at around 250,000 drawings when every layer is counted, made by a staff of several hundred over three years.

The industry called it "Disney's Folly" during production and expected it to bankrupt the studio. It became the highest-grossing film released to that point.

What is the difference between animating on ones, twos and threes?

How many film frames each drawing is held for, and it is a deliberate artistic choice rather than only a budget one.

On ones — a new drawing every frame — gives the smoothest motion and is used for fast action where holding a drawing would strobe. On twos is the standard, and it is not merely cheaper: it gives animation a particular crispness that fully smooth motion loses.

Japanese television animation frequently works on threes, which is one reason anime has its distinctive rhythm: long held drawings with camera moves across them, punctuated by bursts of full animation on the moments that matter. It began as an economy imposed by television budgets and became a style with its own grammar.

Computer animation defaults to ones because there is no drawing cost per frame — which is why Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) was widely noticed for deliberately animating characters on twos, to make computer animation feel hand-made.

What did Pixar actually change?

Two things, and only one of them is technology.

The technical achievement was rendering: Toy Story (1995) was the first entirely computer-generated feature, and it chose toys as subjects specifically because plastic was within reach of what the technology could convincingly render. Skin, hair, cloth and water each took years more.

The more important change was structural. Pixar came out of a computer graphics group that Lucasfilm sold to Steve Jobs, and it was run by people from technology rather than from the studio system. It developed a practice — the "braintrust", a group of directors giving each other unsparing notes with no authority to force changes — that is now widely copied and widely misunderstood, since the part that makes it work is that the feedback is not binding.

Its central discovery about story is stated by its own people as: films are not written, they are rewritten, and the early versions of almost every Pixar film were structurally different and reportedly bad.

What is Studio Ghibli's distinction?

Hayao Miyazaki's studio makes animated films with no villains in the ordinary sense, with slow scenes where nothing happens, and with protagonists who are usually girls doing practical work.

The slow scenes are deliberate and have a name. Miyazaki calls the concept ma — a Japanese term for the empty interval — and has said in interviews that if you have tension all the time, the audience becomes numb. Western animation traditionally fills every moment; Ghibli films hold on a character eating, or on a landscape, and the emptiness is what makes the rest land.

Spirited Away won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2003 and was for a period the highest-grossing film in Japanese history.

Indian animation has a long history that is mostly invisible: the Films Division animation unit from the 1950s, and later a very large outsourcing industry doing production work for foreign studios. Original Indian feature animation remains rare, and Making of a Mahatma and Hanuman are the ones usually cited.

Documentary

What was the first documentary, and was it real?

Nanook of the North (1922), Robert Flaherty's film about an Inuit family in northern Quebec, is usually called the first feature documentary. It is also the first documentary controversy.

Substantial parts of it were staged. The hunting scenes used traditional methods the community had largely abandoned in favour of rifles. The igloo interior was a half-igloo built oversized and open to the sky, because a real one is too dark and too small to film in. The family shown was not Nanook's actual family. And the man's name was Allakariallak.

Flaherty's defence, which is still the standard defence, was that he was showing a truth about a way of life rather than a record of particular events. The argument has never been settled, and every documentary since has had to decide where it stands on it.

The word documentary itself was coined by John Grierson in a 1926 review of a later Flaherty film, and Grierson's own definition — "the creative treatment of actuality" — concedes the whole problem in four words.

What are the main documentary modes?

A useful classification, from the film theorist Bill Nichols, that makes most documentaries legible.

Expository: an authoritative narrator explains images. The classic wildlife or historical documentary. The voice is often called "voice of God" narration.

Observational: no narration, no interviews, the camera simply present. Called direct cinema in America and associated with the Maysles brothers and Frederick Wiseman, who has spent sixty years filming institutions — a hospital, a high school, a welfare office — with no commentary at all.

Participatory: the film-maker is in the film, interviewing and provoking. Cinéma vérité in France, and the tradition Michael Moore works in.

Reflexive: the film draws attention to its own construction and to the fact that a documentary is made.

Performative: the film-maker's own experience is the subject.

Knowing these is useful because the mode a documentary chooses is an argument about how much to trust it, and a viewer who notices the mode is much harder to manipulate.

Why should you be sceptical of nature documentaries?

Because the constraints of the form force construction, and audiences generally do not know how much.

Sound is almost always added afterwards. Long lenses cannot record usable audio, so footsteps, wingbeats, snow crunching and animal noises are recorded separately and laid in — sometimes from a different species entirely.

Sequences are frequently assembled from different animals, times and places into what appears to be one continuous event. This is standard and is not usually disclosed.

Some scenes are filmed in controlled conditions. The BBC acknowledged in 2011 that a polar bear birth in Frozen Planet was filmed in a zoo, cut into an Arctic sequence. A 2018 Human Planet episode was found to have staged a tribal treehouse.

None of that makes the films worthless — the biology shown is generally accurate and the alternative is often no footage at all. The correct posture is to treat a nature documentary as an illustrated argument rather than as evidence.

Television

Why did television look so much worse than film for so long?

Because it was designed under a hard bandwidth limit and had to be broadcast live.

Early television had no recording medium at all. Programmes went out live, and the only way to keep a copy was to point a film camera at a monitor — a kinescope — which looked terrible. This is why enormous amounts of early television simply do not exist: the BBC and others recorded over their videotape when it became available, because tape was expensive and nobody imagined anyone would want the programmes again. Large numbers of Doctor Who episodes and almost all early live drama are lost.

Resolution was set by the available broadcast bandwidth: 405 lines in early Britain, 525 in America, 625 in most of Europe and India. Interlacing — drawing the odd lines then the even lines — was a trick to halve the bandwidth needed while keeping the flicker rate acceptable, and it is why old video has that distinctive comb-like artefact on movement.

Why is American television 30 frames and European 25?

Because each locked to its own mains electricity frequency.

Early television could not maintain a stable frame rate independently, so it synchronised to the alternating current in the wall — 60 Hz in America, 50 Hz in Europe and most of the world. That gave 30 and 25 frames per second respectively, each interlaced into 60 and 50 fields.

This is why a 24 fps film shown on European television runs about four per cent fast — the standard method was simply to play it at 25, which shortens the running time by a few minutes and raises the pitch of every voice and every piece of music by nearly a semitone. A generation of British viewers heard films in the wrong key without knowing it.

American conversion used a different trick, 3:2 pulldown, spreading four film frames across five video frames unevenly, which keeps the speed correct and introduces a visible judder on camera pans.

There is a further oddity: American colour television runs at 29.97 frames per second, not 30. The colour subcarrier had to be squeezed into the existing black-and-white signal without interfering with the sound, and the arithmetic required shifting the frame rate down by a factor of 1000/1001. That fraction has caused timing problems in broadcast engineering ever since.

What changed television into something people take seriously?

Economics, twice.

The first change was cable subscription. A network funded by advertising needs the largest possible audience and cannot afford to alienate any part of it. A channel funded by subscription needs people to actively pay, which rewards distinctiveness over inoffensiveness. HBO's run from the late 1990s — The Sopranos, The Wire — is the standard example, and its slogan at the time, "It's not TV", was an accurate description of a different business model.

The second was streaming, which removed the schedule. A series no longer had to work as separate weekly episodes that a viewer might join at any point, so serialised storytelling with long arcs became viable, and episode lengths stopped being fixed.

The cost has been discoverability and permanence. Shows are cancelled after one season on viewing data nobody outside the company sees, and programmes are removed from platforms entirely for tax reasons, sometimes before any physical release exists.

What comes next

The next page is about how all of this gets judged — the awards, what they actually measure, and why the most famous one is decided by about ten thousand people voting on films many of them have not seen.