ANIMATION: Into the Uncanny Valley and Out Again

Back in the day, the paleolithic day to be exact, cavemen drew eight-legged bison in an effort to capture the reality of movement, whizz forward a few millenia and a client asks animators to hold back on the truth – the hyper-real humans are lookin’ too freaky. Tim Cumming explores the effects of super-fast-moving tech in animation and what this shifting term means today.

 Animation’s older than you may think. One of the earliest transatlantic box-office smashes, Georges Méliès’ 1902 classic A Trip to the Moon, is a wildly experimental and strangely still-modern mixture of hand-coloured superimposition, miniature sets and the world’s first film animation. Before Méliès, before film, there were magic-lantern shows, entertainments one might have glimpsed at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, that vast Georgian playground of pleasures and diversions the modern-day O2 Arena just cannot match. The late 18th-century supernatural shows of the Phantasmagoria even employed lanterns and gauze screens, so that phantoms seemed to float about in the air, like a proto-stereoscopic 3D.

But it’s actually much older than that. Archaeologists tell us that the very oldest animation techniques can be found on cave walls at Chauvet, France, where, some 32,000 years ago, animal figures were painted with many legs to simulate running and would have flickered in the darkness by the light of lamps burning animal fat. Since that first great creative explosion (Chauvet isn’t that far from Cannes after all) fat lamps and pitch black caverns have been replaced by powerful software and file-crunching hardware, but the same desire to animate a more vivid impression of our world remains.

We live in the digital age, and in animation, the digital age began in 1995 with Toy Story, the first fully-digital 3D animated feature. There are whole battalions of coders today, working in Hollywood to make their worlds so realistic it almost takes your breath away. Animation is box-office gold, and in advertising, too, it has moved centre stage, slipping out of the cul-de-sac of children’s ’toons to stake the heart of some of the biggest campaigns around.

The hare and bear necessities of animated life

Take the most recent John Lewis ad, The Bear and the Hare, from adam&eveDDB, probably the most talked-about Christmas campaign in the UK. “On the face of it,” says Steve Smith, founder of London animation production studio Beakus.

“It’s got this Disney thing, a beautifully lit backdrop and how it was actually done was using stop-motion 2D drawings on a 3D set with sculpted hills – very labour intensive, but part of the value of it is that it was done for real, so you go, ‘wow, look at the man hours in that’. There’s a kudos in it being for real. We’ve gone digital, we’ve got CG that’s almost perfectly real. So the hand of the artist, the painstaking effort and accuracy and the use of real objects has come back, which is a good thing.” Smith smiles ruefully. “But for a small company it’s incredibly expensive to do it that way.”

Having previously won a British Animation Award (for Fun Facts for Russian TV channel Bibigon) and a BAFTA (for Semara’s Story), Steve Smith’s studio has BAA nominations this year for Gergely Wootsch’s dark and brilliant short The Hungry Corpse [below], plus an equally dark promo for Marshal Dear by 2013 Mercury nominees Savages. Smith has also been asked to design the BAA’s gongs, to be handed out at their awards in March. He set up Beakus in 2010, after stints at Sherbet, Passion Pictures and Bermuda Shorts. The studio’s clients include Google, the BBC, for idents, titles and in-programme animation, and the National Maritime Museum, for whom they’ve created interactive animated infographics for films including Old Weather, Visions of the Universe and Longitude.

“Things have changed beyond recognition,” says Smith, who studied animation at the Royal College of Art at the end of the 1990s, with barely a computer on site. “I remember using one to animate bits and pieces with Premiere, but it was so clunky, just to move something across the screen.”

His first work at Sherbet was classified adverts, “all hand-drawn in pencil and handed to another team to colour in, using watercolour. Now the digital world has completely taken over.” These days, a flair for drawing needs to be matched by a talent for coding. “It’s imperative that you have knowledge of the computer as well as the software,” he says. “We have a lot of effects people here and over the past two years people have been using Expressions, which is a bit of coding that you put in to it. It’s a million miles from art and creativity – it’s more about mathematical patterns – but it saves a lot of time and makes things look great.” It’s something he feels needs to be taught more in the art colleges. “Our job is to keep up and push the software in interesting ways as far as it goes.”

Racing into hyper-drive with Grand Theft Auto

The dominance of digital, social media and interactive elements means that, today, animation is a central part of many campaigns, and work in the industry has ballooned over the past decade. “About ten years ago, the term ‘animation’ itself was seen as a bit redundant,” says Smith. “There was a vague definition for it, meaning frame by frame, but so many things were frame by frame – you alter things frame by frame even in a live-action piece. It doesn’t just apply to animation. Not that it’s going away, more that it’s part of everything else. It’s being subsumed into all these other modes of media.”

Chris O’Reilly, EP at Nexus, one of the UK’s leading animation studios, agrees. Nexus started in 1997, during what he describes as ‘the first big wave’ of digital. “Since then,” he says, “it’s changed massively. It’s incremental, and it’s ongoing in 2014. Every year the change gets faster.

When we started, the animation industry was like a cottage industry. A small number of studios, incredibly friendly, everyone knew each other. It wasn’t competitive. Over time it’s become incredibly competitive, there’s a lot companies, and there’s a lot more work. That’s natural, I think, and it’s not a bad thing. It’s part and parcel of the fact that animation has really been at the forefront of how visual language has developed since the late 90s.”

Dan O’Rourke, founder of Not To Scale, which has offices in Soho and New York, cut his teeth in animation at Nexus, learning the ropes of producing in 2D, 3D, mixed media and visual effects, following stints as a producer at M&C Saatchi and St Lukes. “At the time, animation was getting more and more popular, but there wasn’t a huge amount of competition in it,” he says. “There was really only the likes of Passion and Nexus.”

Changing his place at the table from producer to creative director, O’Rourke envisioned Not to Scale as a new breed of animation studio pitched between Nexus and Passion. As the company has grown over the past eight years, so has the breadth of work. Clients range from the BBC and BBH to Mother and Leo Burnett, the directors roster includes Simon Robson, Richard Hickey and Mathias Hoegg; it has its own post division; and via its Larger Than Life division, it encompasses tour visuals –Led Zep’s awesome O2 performance of Kashmir for instance – as well as live event films for Burberry, London Fashion Week, and Anya Hindmarch.

“Animation is a broad umbrella term,” says O’Rourke. “It means so many things to so many people. Say the word to anyone, a client or creative, and different things pop in their head for it. Seven years ago, animation meant, for most people, cartoons they watched as a kid,” he continues. “The paradigm has changed a bit, and that’s a trickle-down effect from Hollywood. Brand managers, creative directors, they’ll sit home watching Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs or Wall-E with their kids and think, this is great, this touches me as much as it touches children and my mother-in-law and teenage son. So people now are more trusting and understanding of what a great animation treatment can do for a brand.”

Since Toy Story, animated features have become a staple crop of the Hollywood machine, but growing alongside it – and now on the point of towering above it like some musclebound GM super-crop – is the world of gaming, and huge, genre-changing hits like Grand Theft Auto, which first appeared in 1997. Taking animated realism into hyper-drive, is gaming part of the animation roster? For O’Rourke, no, it remains a separate entity. “It doesn’t touch us, from a commercial point of view,” he says. “We don’t look to gaming and say, we’ve got to get our animation to that level. There’s often never the time or the funding to do it on a commercial budget. The same with something like Pixar.”

What he does point out, though, is the ‘uncanny valley’ effect, coined by Japanese robotics professor Masahiro Mori, to describe the disconcerting realism of high-end digital animation that can alienate viewers. “It’s interesting to see how photo-real gaming has got,” says O’Rourke. “It’s almost into the world of visual effects, and where it stops, I don’t know, but if you make animated humans too realistic, they start to become creepy and it turns you off.” Not to Scale took on a brief from a German client specifically to make a key character less realistically human. Evolutionarily, it seems, we just don’t buy it. “That motion capture thing is very hard to get right,” he agrees. “That’s why, in TinTin, they move very realistically but they still have silly noses and remain faithful to the cartoon characters because if they become too realistic, it just becomes really creepy.”

While O’Rourke agrees that the technology has changed the landscape utterly – and filled it with work – the downside is that “everyone wants everything now. Even in animation. That means there’s more and more of it, but you still need three minutes to boil an egg. If you do it in 30 seconds, it tastes disgusting.” Nevertheless, he applauds the central role animation has today. “When I sit down and watch the ad breaks, every other advert has animation in it. It’s more popular here than it is in the US, but people look to the UK to see what’s on trend, so I think we’re ahead of them on that curve. It’s a medium that speaks to everybody and brands and agencies are understanding that more.”

O’Reilly pushes the boundaries of animation’s influence even further. “It’s a technique used across a broad range of industries – gaming, VFX, features, tour visuals, fine art. At Nexus, we’re involved in lots of different areas, but what we’re excited by is how animation is an essential part of the modern visual language. It has this natural advantage of being intrinsically and naturally digital. It’s natively digital in a way that film never is.”

Where the UK does lag behind, says O’Rourke, is in training graduates to be industry-ready when they leave college. “Places like The Mill are packed with French, German and Swedish kids, out of college and ready to work at a professional level. My experience is that English graduates have to intern for a year to get their skills up. Everything has got faster, but does that mean the skills have had the ability and time to flourish, because it is a kind of craft? Perhaps not. People are learning on the job more than you would hope.”

On the other side of the world, Brazil’s leading animation studio Lobo, established in São Paolo in 1994, caters as much to global clients as it does to the domestic market. Co-founder Mateus de Paula Santos has directed major spots including Coke Bear Hug [above], O2 Memories [right], and Ford Futuristics, and stresses that “influences and references are being shared constantly, all across the world.

Brands and clients turn to animation when they realise how versatile the medium is and the potential it has to express any kind of message,” he adds, “from an ordinary exchange between two characters to completely abstract concepts.”

Not that clients necessarily remain open-minded. De Paula Santos reveals: “in Brazil there are still some agencies who ask for a ‘Pixar-like’ animation, and it’s part of our job to show them there are many other styles and techniques that could be a better fit for their message.” Like Steve Smith, de Paula Santos sees a fashion for going back to analog techniques: “There’s a newfound interest in storytelling, in graphic style,” he says, “and even in handicraft – that’s why there’s been a resurgence in handmade techniques like stop-motion and paper sculpting.” And while he doesn’t see any end to big-budget animated features being the calling card of animation as a serious art form, for him it’s the animated short that has the biggest future: “I think it will become more and more popular due to the way the internet and the proliferation of mobile devices is changing our viewing habits.”

When anything’s possible – who needs reality?

Back in London, Chris O’Reilly evokes “an incredibly varied diet of what people want to see – they can be interested in totally opposite things,” he says. “There’s no single trend in animation. All these things coexist. In terms of rendering, there’s a trend not so much for the photo-real but the alter-real – plausible worlds that are otherworld.” Alter-real – it almost sounds like the world of those animated animals painted deep in the caves of Chauvet, 32,000 years ago. “Worlds that are rendered in a plausible way,” he continues, “that are physically real. Rendered as the universe is.”

One of the rising stars at Nexus is young French animator Fx Goby, who studied for four years at France’s Supinfocom animation college, one of those European powerhouses highlighted by O’Rourke. An illustrator, award-winning short-film maker, animator and live-action director, he’s done spots for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, Coca Cola, and Vodafone, and his live-action debut, The Elaborate End of Robert Ebb, won him a prestigious Canal+ award. He’s currently working on two short films and writing two feature films, as well as a range of commercial jobs. He too, sees a shift away from the pursuit of flawless realism. “When I started, the big challenge was to create hyper-real details – the challenge to create water, to create fur, to create skin to be as realistic as possible, but in the past few years we’ve achieved that, and technically, the level is at such a height that we can almost do everything, so for me the big shift is that we are trying to create more unique visual content, we’re going for more radical approaches. That’s the massive change I’ve seen, and even in my own work I’m trying much more radical ideas than I used to. This is a time for exploration, basically because we can do everything we want.”