There are a lot of classic cartoon characters in this movie (almost all animation stars appeared in the 1940s). Combined with the real story, the outstanding animators behind the scenes derived new animation technology through Who Framed Roger Rabbit: using new light and shadow technology to create more realistic animation and three-dimensional effects; Move a lot of lenses to reduce boring static environment images; Strive to make comics and real people combine perfectly in the real world. After that, more live-action cartoons came out one after another, including Garfield, which was just released.
Excellent technology alone can't make a movie successful. Behind the sweat of many excellent animation designers, an attractive storyline and excellent script design are indispensable links. The story is taken from the comic novel "Who Sentenced Roger Rabbit" written by Gary Wolf 198 1-it tells the dispute between an animated character and a real employer in an animation city in Hollywood in the 1940s. After careful carving by Jeffrey Price and others, "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" became a box office blockbuster that year with its wonderful story and new animation form combined with real comics. There are different opinions about the specific time when animation was born. Accurately speaking, the real animation should appear after the invention of the film. The embryonic form of animation can be traced back to before the birth of the film, but it is similar to folk juggling and exists in the streets, and does not have the characteristics and connotation of the real animation art.
The industrial revolution has made great progress in science and technology, and various new technologies and inventions have emerged in an endless stream, especially the invention of optical lenses and the emergence of photography, which have given movies technical and material conditions. The transition from still images of photography to moving images of movies is inspired by the principle of video residue of animation in addition to technical factors. So in a sense, animation has an irreplaceable influence on the birth and development of movies. On the other hand, the continuous development of film technology and film expression means, the establishment and maturity of film as an art, not only contributed to the fate of animation getting rid of street juggling, but also endowed animation with brand-new artistic significance and connotation.
Since mankind entered civilized society, it has been shown that there is a subconscious desire to express the action and time of objects through various forms of image recording. Many visual toys, such as unicycle, walking horse, movable mirror, stroboscope, etc. , appeared and became popular in19th century. The basic principle of these visual toys is very close to the basic principle of animation, that is, drawing a series of images on a rotatable movable video disc. When the video disc rotates, those dull and lifeless images also move, forming the early animation. In other words, before the invention of the movie camera, there was the embryonic form of animation.
Nowadays, it existed long before the film was born. After nearly a hundred years of development, animation, as an independent art style, gradually matured and developed with the birth and development of the film, and formed a unique artistic interest and expression style.
1, "movie animation" is developed on the basis of movies.
The development of animation is closely related to film technology. The development of animation can not be separated from the invention of film, and the development of film can not be separated from the invention of photography technology. Without the invention of photography technology, there would be no prosperity of movies and movie animation today. Before talking about movies and comics, we should also know something about movies and photography.
According to historical records, as early as 15 15, human beings discovered the principle of photography: Leonardo da Vinci's camera box was the earliest photography. 1822, humans took the first photo entitled "dining table", and the exposure time of the photo was as long as 14 hour. After continuous research, by 184 1, the exposure time was shortened to 3 minutes, and the shutter was invented, but only a single still photo could be taken. In the 1970s, horse races were often held in California. At that time, the governor and his two friends made a bet, the goal was whether all four legs left the ground at the same time when the horse was flying. The governor invited Edward Maybridge, a British photographer who moved to California, to shoot the galloping horse, which is the need of the rapid development of photography in real life. After several years of hard work, Maybellich made a device at 1877: on the side of Happy Valley Road, 12 cameras were arranged in turn. At the place where the horse passes, current contactors are placed to control the shutter of 12 camera respectively. As soon as the horse kicks on the current contactor, 12 cameras will take successive shots of Pegasus in turn, and the first focal plane of human beings will be produced. The developed photos confirmed that the horses' hooves really left the ground at the same time when they were galloping. Edward Maybridge, as the initiator of a great leap in the world film history, has been recorded in history.
The perfection of film projector equipment is gradually realized on the basis of repeated practice of "visual preservation theory"1In the middle of the 7th century, Newton first proposed the optical phenomenon that images reflected on human retina would not disappear immediately. From 65438 to 0824, Peter Mark Logit, the author of the famous British encyclopedia, published relevant papers, which marked the beginning of the formation of "visual retention theory". The "visual retention theory" puts forward that when people's eyes watch images in motion, after each image disappears, it will still stay on the retina for about one tenth of a second. If some individual and interrelated images move rapidly and continuously before people's eyes, the brain will combine these individual fragments into a continuous flow sequence due to the function of visual preservation. In the process of the formation of "visual retention theory", a photographic disc, a magic mirror, an intermittent light mirror and a stroboscopic observer have been successfully made. 1834, an Austrian general named von Vuchatis tried to combine the movable mirror with the slide to form the original form of the projector. 1889, Edison's staff member Dixon successfully made a projector called "peep show". This projector equipment is packed in a box, and so is the screen. The film is wound around a small pulley in the box, and a small motor drives the pulley to rotate, so that the film is projected on the screen. There is a hole in the box, which can only be seen by an audience with one eye. 1985, the Lumiere brothers in France improved Edison's "peep show" so that they could project the film on a long-distance screen for many people to watch. Lumiere also gave his invention a brand-new name-the movie machine. As balaz said, "Movies are the only art that can let us know the date of its birth". 1895, 18 On the evening of February 28th, Lumiere brothers officially released the first recorded film in the history of world movies in the basement of Indian Salon, a big coffee shop at Kapesin Road 14 in Paris. * * * There are four short films: the factory gate, the baby drinking soup, the train arriving at the station and the gardener watering.
From the first scene of its birth, the film showed strong realism, which made the audience involuntarily enter the passion of the film, so that when the train on the screen slowly moved forward, many viewers were dumbfounded and even fled. The success of the Lumiere brothers in Paris made the new art of film popular all over the world.
August 1896, 1 1, the year after the film was invented, the film was introduced to China.
A year later, on 1897, French optician and painter E. Reynolds drew the world's first relatively complete cartoon "A Delicious Beer" according to the principle of visual persistence. 10 years later, Americans made the world's first real animated film "Humorous Attitude of a Funny Face" around 1906, which showed the process of a painter drawing a funny face on the blackboard.
Animation, as one of the four categories of movies, takes painting or other plastic arts as the main expression means of character modeling and space environment modeling, and reflects people's ideals and aspirations in social life by means of fantasy, imagination and symbol, exaggeration, figuration and deformation. This is a highly hypothetical film art.
In the development of comics in 100, due to the differences of society, nationality and artists, many styles and schools have been formed around the world: the American Disney animation school with fast narrative rhythm and rich imagination; Canadian animation school with unique artistic conception and emphasis on personal style; Japanese animation genre with exquisite pictures and profound contents; China Animation School with profound artistic conception and unpretentious style. In addition, there are "Yugoslav School", "Soviet School" and so on.
2. The progress of science and technology provides the impetus for the development of animation art.
The so-called technological progress not only embodies the wisdom of human beings, but also reflects their endless pursuit and exploration of natural and objective laws, achieving two functions, namely, improving efficiency and reducing human labor intensity. These are exactly the two bottlenecks in the development of traditional animation. Traditional animation technology is very complicated, and the production process is time-consuming and laborious. It only takes ten minutes of animation, tens of millions of drawings and several years of production cycle, as well as production equipment that ordinary people can't catch up with. It often makes people flinch and retreat.
Two-dimensional animation and the era of celluloid: 19 14, American Ehud invented the transparent celluloid film, and finally made the animated film mass-produced. Celluloid film, also known as Ming film and animation base, is a transparent film with acetate fiber as raw material. When making, the moving object and background are drawn on different films, and then superimposed on a special shooting platform for shooting. In this way, multiple pictures can be used in the same background, and each picture only needs to redraw the moving characters, which can not only reduce the workload of drawing, but also achieve different effects such as transparency and depth of field. The animation made by this layered technology is called celluloid animation. Celluloid film can replace animation paper, so that artists don't have to draw every background repeatedly, which not only improves work efficiency and film quality, but also establishes a unique shooting method for cartoons. Especially with the application of computer technology in animation, animation has made unprecedented development. For animators, they are not only faced with the renewal of the concept of the new era, but also the challenge of technological change.
Celluloid animation technology also makes it possible to make animated feature films with the same length as live-action movies in human and financial resources. By the 1950s, celluloid animation technology had matured and had a complete production process: animation production basically followed the steps from script-storyboard-role and background design-drawing original painting-drawing lines one by one and coloring-shooting-post-production.
Three-dimensional animation and CG era: CG is the abbreviation of (computer graphics). In 1960s, 3D model was used for animation demonstration on workstation system used for aided design in architecture and manufacturing industry, which is the embryonic form of CG animation. 1892 The movie Battle of Electronic World used all-digital synthetic scenes for the first time. 1995 The first CG animated feature film Toy Story finally came out.