Surrealism

One evening I was teach­ing a class at the Acad­emy of Art.  A stu­dent, Aaron Kores­sel I think it was, pre­sented his lat­est ani­ma­tion.  It included a boy char­ac­ter and a goat.  The boy was stand­ing in a hole, hold­ing a box, and he was eye to eye with the goat.  That evening I hap­pened to have a guest in the class, Phil Cap­tain 3D McNally, now work­ing as global stereo­scopic super­vi­sor at Dream­works.  Phil pointed out how when the image of the boy and goat first came up, it caused him to stop and ask him­self “what’s going on here?”  It’s strange scene, in a good way.  It caught his atten­tion.  You have accom­plished some­thing when just the set up of the shot already has the viewer inter­ested.  That in itself is a lesson.

I didn’t think of it at the time, but what Aaron had done was cre­ate a “sur­real” image.  If ani­ma­tors should know one art move­ment, it should be sur­re­al­ism.   Founded in the 1920’s, it encom­passed visual art, writ­ing, music and film.   It was influ­enced by Freud’s study of the sub­con­scious, using free asso­ci­a­tion and dream analy­sis.  I would define sur­re­al­ist visual art as “the jux­ta­po­si­tion of unex­pected objects, result­ing in a dream­like image.”   Sur­re­al­ists felt that art could be free of aes­thetic and moral pre­oc­cu­pa­tions.   In other words, it doesn’t have to “mean” some­thing.  Like unfo­cused thought, it can just “play”.

Often, sur­re­al­ist art can be just plain funny. I imag­ine that the artists them­selves under­stood this.  When­ever Sal­vador Dali posed for a photo, he often struck the same crazy wide eyed face.  This was not a man who took him­self ter­ri­bly seri­ously.   There is even a branch of sur­re­al­ism called sur­real humor.  Such humor includes absurd sit­u­a­tions, and non­sense.   Also, non-sequitur, where state­ments can be made that have no log­i­cal con­nec­tion to what comes before or after.   Lit­er­ary exam­ples of this pre-date the sur­re­al­ist move­ment, for instance Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Won­der­land, or Edward Lear’s “Book of Non­sense.”   One might use the word, silly.

With words like “non­sense” “absurd” and “silly” it should start to become appar­ent why sur­re­al­ism has a place in the dis­cus­sion of ani­ma­tion.   When artists are freed from the expec­ta­tion of being log­i­cal, or sen­si­ble, it is fer­tile ground for imagination.