Character and Context

Ani­mated char­ac­ters need worlds to live in, and prob­a­bly enjoy the widest vari­ety of set­tings found on film. But these places can be more than sim­ple “envi­ron­ment”. Cre­at­ing ani­mated worlds is not just art direc­tion, it begins in the con­cept stage for the project. Ear­lier I posted about man­ual labor vs. Office work. The idea was to con­sider the visual poten­tial of what con­text your char­ac­ters were work­ing in. Do they sit and stare at a screen, like ani­ma­tors do? Or are they mov­ing and build­ing things? Some sto­ries are all about dra­matic inter­ac­tion between char­ac­ters, but oth­ers are heav­ily influ­enced by where it begins.

I can iden­tify three basic kinds of worlds for ani­mated char­ac­ters to live in. Some might over­lap or fall in between these. I would be very happy to get feed­back on these, or sug­ges­tions for some­thing I haven’t considered.

1. The first could be called generic. Generic is a place that is the sim­ple envi­ron­ment. It could be a city, a vil­lage, a for­est. While that may sound dull, do not think such a con­text is auto­mat­i­cally weak. For instance, the Simp­sons live in the city of Spring­field. Spring­field is a par­ody of aver­age Amer­ica. The beauty of Spring­field is it can be adapted to prac­ti­cally any story the writ­ers want to tell. It’s flex­i­ble, and that is one rea­son for the longevity of the series. South Park is also a ran­dom place, but their sto­ries are mostly con­cerned with cur­rent events and par­ody of mod­ern cul­ture. Most super­hero sto­ries take place in generic worlds.  And, the generic envi­ron­ment is the home of fairy tales and myths. Such sto­ries are so grounded in human nature, they can eas­ily be adjusted to any loca­tion, and soci­ety, at any time in history.

2. The sec­ond con­text I am call­ing the “enhanc­ing” envi­ron­ment. These places tend to be more fan­tas­tic or extreme. The design is crafted to enhance the story. It is the most com­mon kind found in ani­mated films.  Blue Sky’s Robots comes to mind.  The art direc­tors cre­ated altered ver­sions of real­ity. It could also be nat­ural envi­ron­ments, but the envi­ron­ments play a sig­nif­i­cant part the story, so it’s more than generic. I am think­ing of A Bug’s Life, and Find­ing Nemo. I would put the Road Run­ner and Coy­ote in this cat­e­gory. In each episode, the desert land­scape is cus­tomized to suit the action.

3. The third type of con­text is the one I find most inter­est­ing. It is a world that IS a char­ac­ter. The world is not just designed for the story to hap­pen in, but is an influ­en­tial ele­ment in how the story starts and devel­ops. An easy exam­ple would be Wall-E. The con­di­tion of the earth is the rea­son for the lit­tle robots entire exis­tence. Another good one is Rango. The sit­u­a­tion in the town of Dirt pulls the char­ac­ter of Rango into their story. The screen­play for Rango bor­rows from the live action fea­ture “Chi­na­town”, which is a clas­sic exam­ple of a tightly plot­ted drama. The Usavich Rab­bits begin their series in a Soviet prison, where they live con­tained in their cels. The guards are lit­er­ally one with the cel door. Rather than the char­ac­ters feel­ing lay­ered on top of a back­ground like a cel ani­mated film, these char­ac­ters feel inte­grated with the world, and pos­si­bly in con­tention with the world itself.

But con­text goes fur­ther than place. The next layer to con­sider is the soci­ety. The word “milieu” can be used to describe a place, or the social set­ting of a story. In the way a phys­i­cal envi­ron­ment can be designed espe­cially for a story, so can the inhabitants.

In many early silent come­dies, all of soci­ety is car­i­ca­tured. Nearly every­one, except the star and maybe his or her love inter­est, is in a bad mood. There are con­trol­ling fathers, jeal­ous hus­bands, neigh­bor­hood thugs, bul­ly­ing wait­ers, baton wield­ing police­man, angry bosses, scold­ing wives, dis­ap­prov­ing church­men, dan­ger­ous ani­mals, and mis­be­hav­ing chil­dren. They are quite dra­matic, and cre­ate a world ten­sion for the come­dian to work in. If every­one were nice, it would be quite bor­ing. It helped if the char­ac­ters were already primed for a fight. These films were short and had to get the action quickly.
Phys­i­cal come­di­ans have always stood on the fringes of soci­ety, where they can mock the sta­tus quo. Char­lie Chap­lin grew up poor in class con­scious Eng­land, and his com­edy is all about class. It often takes place in poor neigh­bor­hoods or with him enter­ing places of wealth. The Marx Broth­ers also invaded high soci­ety, and brought chaos to their care­ful order.

The Lit­tle Ras­cals were poor, and mostly on their own.  Adult soci­ety had lit­tle inter­ven­tion.   They used cast­away objects to cre­ate worlds to play in. Their junk­yard play­grounds and hand built vehi­cles were a large part of their fun.

Jacques Tati movies are often com­men­taries about the mod­ern­iza­tion of France, and how charm­ing old Paris was being replaced by a cold mod­ern metrop­o­lis. Many of his gags are designed around archi­tec­ture, trans­porta­tion, homes and workplaces.

Many of Buster Keaton’s films were built around giant props. Props so large, he could live inside them. The Nav­i­ga­tor took place on an empty ocean liner. Steam­boat Bill Jr. Was built around a steam pow­ered river boat. The Gen­eral was the name of a loco­mo­tive. Buster liked large col­lec­tions of things that move. In Go West he worked a herd of cows. In Seven Chances it was a mob of hun­dreds of women dressed in wed­ding gowns. In the short film Cops he catches a bomb tossed by an anar­chist, while he is in the mid­dle of a parade of policemen.

Some come­di­ans and teams had an inter­est­ing abil­ity to plunk down in what­ever sit­u­a­tion the writ­ers wanted them to be in. The Three Stooges, for instance, could be tramp out­casts, mar­ried with decent homes, work­ing class shlubs, or prison inmates. Ren and Stimpy could be cast in any sit­u­a­tion John K found use­ful. They could be liv­ing on the street like an actual dog and cat, or be shar­ing a house like a cou­ple. And how many come­di­ans have sud­denly found them­selves “in the army?” The mil­i­tary ser­vices are sit­u­a­tions with their own rules that the stars have to cre­ate com­edy with.

The Star Trek TV shows, while being in space, were really about the unusual civ­i­liza­tions the Fed­er­a­tion astro­nauts encoun­tered. Pixar’s Cars is an exam­ple of a generic space, and generic, pos­si­bly cliche, char­ac­ters becom­ing fun when totally recast as vehi­cles. Stand by for “Planes” fol­low­ing the same formula.

I would love to get com­ments on these ideas, so I can con­tinue to develop them.