Hybrid Worlds - Where Animation and Live Action Meet

The employment of animation in live action film introduces a rupture of evident artifice to the screen. Film typically relies on a disseminated form of presentation, divulging the viewer as voyeur into an apparent reality through the perspectival boundaries of the camera lens and hidden editing of scenes. What is left for the viewer is an experience that makes invisible the creative process and crafted architecture of the work. By contrast, animation produces the opposite effect, displaying in its very appearance the constructed and imaginative character of the visual art.

The Surrealist Belgian painter, Rene Magritte, is perhaps the most famous for taking up the aesthetic thematic of the deceptive character of visual representations with his treachery of images (La trahison des images 1928-29)series. The paradigm example is the landmark painting, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (This Is Not a Pipe), which makes manifest the contradictory elements inherent in representative, visual art.



The tension engendered by juxtaposing elements of live action with animation parallels the antagonistic characteristics intrinsic to the creative capacities of the human spirit. Is there a more effective way to express the surrealism of dreams and hallucinations or the exaggerated qualities of cartoonish characters and cliched themes? How else might one exhibit a human being's ordain ability to inflict the world around us with fantastical myth or even sensible meaning? The hybrid world affirms without hesitation the artifice of art, the inherently deceptive character of visual representation that tend towards making invisible its own productive process. And the more adventurous among us might even generalize such an argument over to perception as a whole.

In the newly released music video for Kid Cudi's lonely stoner single "Day N' Nite", the director (who is it?) uses rotoscope to drape live footage over with costume-like illustration. The effect is one of herb induced hallucination partly forged by a healthy dose of city life paranoia. Broad plains of color divided into boldly outlined geometrical shapes act as transitions between each individual scene of illusion.



In another light example of this strategy, director Eric Wareheim produces a frenzied dance number for Flying Lotus' "Parisian Goldfish" off his acclaimed 2008 Los Angeles album on Warp Records. Innocent gyrating figures transform into over-sexualized cartoon porn stars on the backdrop of flashing disco lights tending towards vertigo spasms of love. Beware.




Perhaps one of the most famous instances of the hybrid world is Robert Zemeckis' direction of Who Framed Roger Rabbit in 1988. A fantastic dual world populates the film. Illustrated personages called "Toons" and their related ontological dimension coexist alongside the human world. The interplay of live action and animation displays the power dynamic between two conflicting ways of being (toon and human). And the phenomenal movement infused in tension, release, and synthesis of the toon / human dimension might encourage one to reflect on the capacity for the imagination, more specifically artistic creation, to take on its own life.



A year later in 1989, French auteur Alain Resnais critiqued the conventional distinction between low and high art in his controversial film, Je Veux Rentrer a la Maison (I Want to Go Home). Resnais exemplifies the beauty inherent in cartoon characters possessing a sublime quality equal to that found in great works of literature like Flaubert and Balzac. Cartoons are breathed into existence by the swiveling of simple lines, two-dimensional coloring, and geometry, gracing the silver screen with strangely agile figures that belie the laws of physics.

Ari Folman's critically acclaimed "Waltz with Bashir" exhibits the most radical use of animation informed by live footage. The imaginary war-torn hallucination of a soldier's search for his lost memory is abruptly made manifest in its ultra-sensitivity by a climactic clipping of live footage of the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon.

Hybrid worlds permit an unparalleled aesthetic strategy for drawing out antagonisms, conflicts, and imaginative artifice, guiding the viewer in a sensual experience without delusion of its means. Any other notable examples?