The experimental and animated film

While the motion picture developed rapidly as a medium predominantly based on recording actual events and creating narrative fictional stories, from its early decades there were artists and filmmakers interested in exploring the new technology’s potential outside or beyond the mainstream modes. Although extremely varied in form and subject matter, their endeavours have been grouped together under the terms experimental film or avant-garde film, as well as under the broader rubrics of alternative cinema or art cinema.

Experimental filmmaking took form in the 1920s primarily in France, with significant contributions from elsewhere in Europe and also in the United States, where the photographer Paul Strand and the photographer-painter Charles Sheeler made one of the first such works, Manhatta (1921), a meditation on images of New York skyscrapers.

In France, artists associated with the post-World War I avant-garde movements Dada and Surrealism, among them Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, René Clair, and Man Ray, also made abstract, nonnarrative, and animated films. It was also possible in French film culture of that era for experimental works to be made and exhibited commercially, by such filmmakers as Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, Marcel L’Herbier, Germaine Dulac, and Abel Gance, who went on to make the three-screen epic Napoléon (1927). The most famous avant-garde film of the era was Un Chien andalou (1929; An Andalusian Dog), a Surrealist work made in Paris by the Spaniards Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí.

A number of experimental films were made in the United States during the 1920s and ’30s, but the movement gained important new impetus with the emergence of Maya Deren, a former dancer who made her first film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), with Alexander Hammid. Deren’s films and writings influenced the development of post-World War II American avant-garde filmmaking with an emphasis on inner psychology, dream states, and exploration of the self. Stan Brakhage was another key figure of this movement, often called New American Cinema, the films of which could be made inexpensively through the wider availability of 16-mm and 8-mm cameras and film stock. The New American Cinema expanded during the 1960s to reflect the cultural transformations of the era, more explicitly taking on such themes as feminism, gay and Lesbian sexuality, and multicultural ethnicity. It reached its peak in the decade 1965–75, when the Pop artist Andy Warhol, among others, made experimental films that were exhibited commercially in theatres. In the 1970s one wing of the movement focused on the formal and structural aspects of film, while political concerns led others to shift more toward a hybrid style combining narrative fiction and documentary elements.

Animation has always played a significant role in experimental filmmaking. In the past, the process involved filming a series of still drawings or objects so that, when projected, an illusion of movement was created. With the development of computer technology, many animated films have been made from computer-generated images (CGI, also known simply as computer animation). Through the popularity of animated cartoons, the techniques of animation have typically played a larger part in commercial cinema than other aspects of avant-garde filmmaking.

Animation in fact developed in early cinema in a commercial context through the works of such animators as Émile Cohl in France, Winsor McCay in the United States, and Wladyslaw Aleksandrowicz Starewicz in Russia, the latter animating insect figures in narrative fiction tales. In Germany after World War I the artists Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling utilized the animation tables at the big UFA studio to make several of the first abstract animation films. While animation continued to interest experimental filmmakers over the following decades, the animated cartoon short became a fixture of exhibition programming, and cartoon characters Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Popeye the Sailor, Woody Woodpecker, and many more became legendary figures in popular culture. In the 1930s the Hollywood animation studios began to produce feature-length films, with Walt Disney leading the way with such classics as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).

Commercial motion-picture animation slumped in the 1960s as cartoons for children migrated to television, Hollywood studios cut back, and theatres no longer included cartoon shorts as part of their exhibition program. In the 1980s, however, the Walt Disney Company and other producers began to revive the animated feature. An early success, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), combined animation and live action and drew on nostalgia for Hollywood’s classic cartoons. Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991) became the first animated feature to be nominated for a best-picture Oscar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Lion King (1994), also from Disney, became one of the most popular films in motion-picture history in terms of all-time box-office receipts.

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In the 1990s CGI began to supplant traditional methods in commercial feature animation. Pixar Animation Studios produced the first feature-length completely computer-animated work, Toy Story (1995), distributed by Disney. According to the company, some 110,064 separate frames of computer animation were made, and 800,000 machine hours were needed overall, creating at a maximum rate of 3.5 minutes of screen time per week. The huge success of Toy Story resulted in several sequels and encouraged other studios to produce computer-animated films. Such later notable examples included the Shrek series, Frozen (2013), and Finding Dory (2016).

Japanese animation films, known as anime, which developed a worldwide audience in the 1990s on television, via the Internet, and through video and DVD releases, began to gain further attention through international theatrical distribution. More than his Hollywood counterparts, who utilized a realist style even in their animation fantasies, Japanese animator Miyazaki Hayao fused experimental and mainstream approaches with his dreamscape imagery in animated features Mononoke-hime (1997; Princess Mononoke), Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (2001; Spirited Away), and Hauru no ugoku shiro (2004; Howl’s Moving Castle).