Animation as a Communicative Tool

The word “creativity” seems to imply total creation of all elements of the product. Is this truly the case? Musicians seldom invent new notes. Authors seldom create new languages. Photographers are seldom able to completely shape the world that they wish to capture. They must all go through a communicative middle man to be able to effect the audience. If a musician did create a new note, perhaps by finding an out of tune frequency and playing it as if it were correct, it would have to be amongst known notes and rhythms to be effective as music. If an author creates a new language, such as Klingon or Tolkien’s Elvish, they must include translations in order to effectively communicate. A photographer would have a hard time creating a landscape that was fully created and not merely representational, unless they began to make scale models, unfortunately camera focus and water flow do not scale well, so this could cause problems with communication of the mind’s ideal landscape.

Drawing (which I will use to include any method of laborious fabrication of a single image, including painting, photo manipulation, and sculpture), though it uses tools, is essentially raw visual data that can create things that are completely non-representational. This, of course, has its downsides, as drawing creates a single moment without dimension or sound, it represents only that single moment of pure creation, satisfying our sense of sight. Animation allows for drawings to also tap into our sense of time in a nonrepresentational sense, and our sense of hearing in a pseudo-representational sense (that is to say, the sounds are made from existing sounds, but the signifier does not always match the signified, such as a human voice sound representing a cat’s meow). It’s fair to say that animation is the only medium that allows for this incredible range of nonrepresentational development. Film, without animation’s assistance, could not, for example, create any large, non-real monster, without either animation or puppetry, and unfortunately, Dragon-sized puppets come at a hefty cost.