Discovering Animation Manuals: Their Place and Role in the History of Animation

Abstract

This article explores the history of animation manuals in the United States from the 1940s to the present. It argues that this history can be divided into three major periods that correspond to changes in technique, profession and industry. From the post-War period until the 1980s, manuals reflected the hegemony of hand-drawn animation, closely bound to studio production and an apprenticeship training system. At the end of the 1970s, the rise of computer animation led to a new type of guidebook, addressing a growing convergence of computational training and new requirements introduced by the animation industry. Finally, since the turn of the century, manuals have sought to combine hand-drawn skills with digital tools, re-negotiating tradition and novelty in a diversified professional environment. Therefore, manuals are situated at a changing nexus of professional identity and training, techniques and technology, aesthetics and modes of production. In this article, the author argues that their integration within the history of animation will prove beneficial to researchers. Nevertheless, manuals are not innocent sources, but reflect discursive positions that shape the very history in which they take part.

From its opening in 1955 until 1966, visitors to the amusement park Disneyland in Anaheim, California, could stop at the ‘Art Corner’. According to its catalogue, this art shop was selling ‘a complete line of artists material for both professionals and beginners, as well as many special items designed by the artists at the Walt Disney Studio’ (Anonymous, 1956). Among these items was the ‘Walt Disney Animation Kit’, a box containing materials and instructions necessary to make an animated film: an animation board, character model guides, illustrated and blank flipbooks, a glossary of animation terms, animation paper, pencils and erasers, exposure sheets, a treatise on Disney animation methods and a 16-page booklet entitled Walt Disney’s Tips on Animation (Disneyland, 1956). This booklet, illustrated with Disney characters, presented a series of steps to follow, along with a brief description, pieces of advice, basic ‘rules’ of animation (pp. 8–11) as well as recommendations and tips for photographing the drawings. Almost half a century later, the Canadian–British animator Richard Williams published The Animator’s Survival Kit: A Manual of Methods, Principles and Formulas for Classical, Computer, Games, Stop Motion and Internet Animators (2001). Illustrated by original drawings, annotated charts and diagrams, the book is a collection of lessons on animation. Through anecdotes of his own and of famous animators from the 1930s and 1940s, Williams unfolds, as the Walt Disney booklet had done 50 years earlier, the basic rules of the craft, the different gestures of the hand-drawn technique and tips on how to successfully create motion.

Several generations separate the releases of Walt Disney’s Tips on Animation (Disneyland, 1956) and The Animator’s Survival Kit (Williams, 2001). When the Disney booklet was published, hand-drawn animation dominated studio production. Williams’ manual, on the other hand, came out at a time when the landscape of animation had significantly changed, as much in techniques (computer animation was already well established) as in production structures (the growing number and influence of independent companies and artists), distribution modes (festivals, internet) and aesthetics (the flourishing of digital 3D animation, among others). Yet, in spite of these changes in historical context, both manuals share several common features. They teach the making of animation with hand-drawn technique and introduce, sometimes in a strikingly analogous manner, similar concepts, designated as ‘principles’ and presented as fundamental for the technique of animation: ‘timing’, ‘anticipation’, ‘stretch and squash’. . . Moreover, they review the same methods and steps of creation (the ‘in-between method’, the making of the ‘exposure sheet’) and gestures (such as ‘flipping’ and ‘rolling’ to check the animation), exemplified with almost identical illustrations. In many aspects, both books look and read as if little change had taken place. How can we understand these continuities, given the inevitable differences in historical contexts, authorship and target audiences? What role do manuals play in the history of animation? How can we use them as historical sources?

In this article, I address these questions by investigating the history of animation manuals in the USA from the 1940s to the present. I argue that manuals are a rich source for exploring multiple facets of the history of animation: they shed light on the history of techniques and gestures insofar as they participated in transformations in teaching methods and professional practices, contributed to the establishment of aesthetic standards, and negotiated modes of production in both industry and popular culture. Yet, in order to make appropriate use of them, their historical specificities and discursive functions must be taken into account. Guidebooks are not innocent sources but have actively participated in shaping and defining identities of animation.

Manuals remain largely unexplored documents. They have occasionally been used to investigate specific aspects and episodes in the history of animation, but a comprehensive diachronic study of manuals is still missing. Several authors have based their work on the content of guidebooks. For example, in Le Dessin Animé (1948), Giuseppe Maria Lo Duca used them as witnesses of practice providing information on techniques and professions. ¹ More commonly, manuals have been exploited for their (auto)biographical information about practitioners in animation. For instance, the historian Andrew Johnston (2019: 131–153) explored the work of the artist Lillian Schwartz based on her Computer Artist’s Handbook (1992). Scholars have also considered the contribution of guidebooks to production modes, types of practice and cultural tendencies: Sébastien Denis (2007: 14) considered the role of manuals in amateur animation, while Maureen Furniss (2017) integrated guidebooks in a history of educational practices and cultural representations. ² Consequently, manuals were mostly used as direct historical testimonies of practices or as evidence of larger historical phenomena. Only a few studies considered their discursive dimension. A notable exception is Scott Curtis (2019: 36–39), who situated early manuals in a discursive network, consisting of, amongst others, publications and correspondence courses that aimed at establishing animation as a set of techniques and as an industry at the beginning of the 20th century.

Similarly, this article aims to shed light on the historical and cultural weight of the discourse of manuals in carving an image of animation and shaping new identities of both the medium and the profession. It reflects on how manuals can help to contemplate and better understand the history of animation, while considering the limits of using them as witnesses of practices or as historical evidence. It aims to be a first step in outlining a specific methodology for these sources and to give an overview of the historical dynamic of manuals since the 1940s. I will examine both hand-drawn and computer animation guidebooks. To keep a manageable scope, manuals on other techniques, such as stop-motion, are not discussed here.

The article focuses on three overlapping periods in the history of animation that roughly correspond to three types of manuals. From post-World War II to the 1980s, hand-drawn animation was the hegemonic mode of production and central topic of manuals. The manuals targeted amateurs willing to discover the technique of animation. From the end of the 1970s to the beginning of the 2000s, the rise of computer animation dovetailed with its own manuals that fundamentally differed from the previous type, not only for the different technique that they taught, but also because they primarily addressed an audience of students and professionals in the fields of computer graphics and engineering. Finally, since the 2000s, behind an apparent triumph of computer animation, the skills developed in hand-drawn animation resurface, finding ample expression in a third type of manual aimed at both amateurs and students of animation. As this article shows, manuals intervened in multiple ways in the history of animation during all three periods.

The hegemony of hand-drawn animation: 1940s–1980s

From the 1940s to the 1980s, hand-drawn animation was the main mode of production of animated films, in particular in major American studios, as well as the primary topic of manuals. Guidebooks were strongly anchored in a specific aesthetic style associated with cartoon animation. Many of the authors were animators in famous studios such as John Halas and Harold Whitaker (Halas and Batchelor), Shamus Culhane (Fleischer, Disney, Lantz) or Preston Blair (Disney, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Studios also produced their own manuals, as illustrated by the booklet Walt Disney’s Tips on Animation (Disneyland, 1956). This historical affiliation with the studio system helps to understand the strong association that manuals established between the global term ‘animation’ and a specific technique: as in Disney’s booklet, ‘animation’ meant hand-drawn animation. In later decades, this shorthand use continued, but could occasionally be more specific. For example, the preface to Timing for Animation underlined that the ‘book is primarily confined to hand drawn animation which up to this point in film history still comprises 90% of all output in the animation medium’ (Whitaker and Halas, 2006[1981]: 9). Throughout that period, manuals also referred to ‘cartoon’, a term that had already been in use since the 1910s, as exemplified by the textbook Animated Cartoons (Lutz, 1920). This label explicitly evokes aesthetic dimensions: it refers to a style, or even a genre (Denis, 2007: 117), of hand-drawn, character-centred animation, often humoristic, short-length and based on exaggeration.

The dominance of the cartoon style has left a mark on historical scholarship. For example, in Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation, Charles Solomon (1989: vii) wrote that ‘animation has been synonymous with drawn cartoons throughout most of its history’ (original emphasis). However, during the same period, other publications with instructional goals written by influential filmmakers moved away from this conception of animation. For instance, in a 1949 UNESCO newsletter for adult education, the Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren described the ‘art of making animated films without camera’ (McLaren, 1959: 1). ³ He explained the technique of camera-less animation, where the animator directly scratches or paints onto film. Because it addresses a technique on the margins of commercial use, this example constitutes a counterpoint to the manuals studied in this section. However, it appealed to a similar audience: McLaren specified that ‘the mode of filmmaking described above is the simplest and cheapest of all’ (p. 8, original emphasis). ⁴ Likewise, the guidebooks published during these years usually targeted a wide readership of novices and took into account the financial and technical possibilities of amateurs.

After the Golden Age

Before discussing further authorship, audience, form and content of the manuals, it is important to situate them within events and transformations that shaped the field of animation during these decades. In 1941, a strike profoundly shook Disney. Employees of the studio demanded a better recognition of their work, including higher salaries; several artists eventually departed. Among them, the animator Preston Blair found a new position at the animation department of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). A few years later, in 1949, his first guidebook Advanced Animation: Learn How to Draw Animated Cartoons (Blair, 1949) was published by Walter Foster Publishing, a company specializing in popular art instructional books. This manual was followed by many others, all of them reedited multiple times. These books were paradigmatic for the market of manuals from the 1950s to 1980s. They were illustrated with characters taken from, or inspired by, Disney and MGM films of the 1930s and 1940s, a period of hegemony of Hollywood studios later referred to as the ‘Golden Age’ of cartoon animation. ⁵ Animation had become an industry during the first decades of the 20th century. In the 1930s and 1940s, animators worked on strengthening, deepening and expanding their skills and developed new approaches. Studios started to offer evening classes of drawing and animation: inspired by the initiative of one of his animators, Art Babbit, who organized drawing sessions in 1932 at his home, Walt Disney hired a teacher of the Chouinard Art Institute ⁶ in Los Angeles, Donald Graham, ⁷ to develop a program for animators, based on lectures and practical courses given at the Disney studios (Furniss, 2017: 101). A specific conception of animation was starting to develop and to be transmitted.

After the Golden Age, animation underwent a number of transformations with regard to aesthetics, economy, technology, educational and professional practices, as noted by Furniss (2017: 201–237). Following World War II, the rise of TV animation generated new types of programs (notably shows for children), a reconfiguration of the production system (with relocations abroad) and a change in practices and aesthetics (such as the use of limited animation to produce more content in less time). The emergence of new studios, in particular United Productions of America (UPA), as well as larger aesthetic shifts in the field of art and design, led to the development of innovative and influential visuals. The growing accessibility of audiovisual technologies in the 1950s and 1960s also encouraged amateur practices and independent artistic experiments. Nevertheless, the technique of animation remained relatively stable. Not only was hand-drawn animation the dominant technique until the 1980s, but the conception of animation established in the 1930s and 1940s also became the norm of the art. Studio animators had assembled a set of principles and methods, a range of tricks and gestures, and manuals participated in putting them on paper. Consequently, they played an important role in documenting, inscribing and transmitting these skills, and contributed to defining and establishing the standards of the craft.

The choice of words and illustrations was instrumental in standardizing the practice of animation. Walt Disney’s Tips on Animation defined ‘principles’ as ‘rules of animation . . . based on natural laws’ (Disneyland, 1956: 10): standards were determined and legitimated by ‘scientific’ facts. They were also set through a framework of references. The description of the first step of animation instructed to ‘make your first drawing in a pose that will begin the action you have in mind’ (p. 2). A few lines later: ‘For example, if you have in mind a drawing of Donald Duck about to drive a nail with a hammer as shown on this illustration, you should select a pose that best displays this action’ (p. 2). The example imposed Disney’s narrative and aesthetic canons.

Admittedly, manuals, due to their format, cannot escape a certain amount of standardization. When a gesture is written down and illustrated, it becomes a model; the particular is generalized, the example turns into a standard. However, the tone of these manuals was often explicitly normative. For instance, when describing types of characters, Blair (1949: 13) provided the ‘formulae for goofy types’, which includes a ‘long skinny neck’, a ‘small head held forward’, ‘absolutely no chin’, a ‘bobbling Adam’s apple’ and ‘long droopy arms with big hands’. In another section, about the ‘line of action’, namely ‘an imaginary line extending through the main action of the figure’ (p. 5), he displayed two pairs of drawings for a situation, featuring the cat Tom, from Tom and Jerry, punching another cat. The first one, he stated, is ‘wrong’ because ‘the lines of action unfit’, while the second is ‘right’, since the ‘lines of action fit and are accentuated’ (p. 5). Blair’s normative model was based on the principles, methods and styles that were in use during his own career. Therefore, the imagination around animation, conveyed by films of the dominant production companies, was reinforced and co-produced by the book.

Consistency

Blair published a number of guidebooks from the end of the 1940s to the mid-1990s. ⁸ Although they cover more than four decades of animation history, they are remarkably consistent. This stability is due to several factors. First, the author drew on his own experience and taught the craft he had learned himself during the Golden Age. The techniques, gestures and methods that he transmitted were those established at the time. Second, his manuals mostly focused on drawing and animating. Although many other aspects of animation were subject to important transformations in the 1950s–1980s, ⁹ the work of the animators evolved within a relatively stable technical and technological frame.

Another aspect that helps to understand the homogeneity of these manuals lies in their target audience. Addressing amateurs, guidebooks often took into consideration their readers’ technical and financial possibilities. They excluded sophisticated and costly material, and provided ‘do-it-yourself’ solutions, to which the 1974 guidebook The Do-It-Yourself Film Animation Book (Godfrey and Jackson, 1974) attests. This transfer from professional to amateur practice, and from an industrial to an artisanal mode of production, ¹⁰ was already present in earlier books. For example, in How to Make Animated Cartoons, the author Nat Falk distinguished ‘how animated cartoons are made in the studios’ (Falk, 1941: 33) from ‘how to draw animated cartoons’ (p. 55). After describing the professional practices and the different jobs, he gave directions to individuals aspiring to the same results. When instructed to ‘make the “breakdown” drawing . . . and then fill in the “inbetween” drawings’ (p. 76), the reader was supposed to accomplish alone what was done by at least three different persons in a studio (head animator, assistant animator, in-betweener). The gestures and methods were adapted to another type of practice.

Manuals of the 1950s–1980s took advantage of the growing accessibility of audiovisual technology, notably 16 mm film, and appealed to the popularity of amateur cinema. This was particularly relevant for photographing, the essential step for transforming the succession of drawings into a motion picture. Guidebooks gave tips about how to minimize the costs, including those related to the exhibition of the finished film: Walt Disney’s Tips on Animation indicated that ‘16 mm is the most practical size as you will be most likely to find a home or school projector in this dimension’ (Disneyland, 1956: 13). Blair also provided solutions for lowering the production costs by avoiding expensive material. He presented guidelines on how to build an animation board and explained ‘how to eliminate the expensive compound mechanism’ or to work without a ‘costly stop-motion mechanism’ (Blair, 1994: 222). The manuals promised to open the professional world to amateurs by sharing the skills of expert animators.

Principles

The transfer to amateurism did not alter the basic concepts of animation. Manuals took care of presenting a core knowledge, essential to anyone willing to animate. This knowledge took the shape of general precepts related to the creation of images and motion, like ‘anticipation’, ‘staging’ or ‘timing’. Walt Disney’s Tips on Animation explained: ‘Timing is a somewhat technical subject, but it must be considered by even the beginner in animation’ (Disneyland, 1956: 5). The same topic was central to Timing for Animation: it stated that ‘timing is the part of animation which gives meaning to movement’ (Whitaker and Halas, 2006[1981]: 12, original emphasis). While these notions were progressively defined in the post-war period, they were raised to ‘principles’ and attributed to Disney in the book The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation (Thomas and Johnston, 1981). The authors, two of Disney’s main animators in the Golden Age, explained:

The animators continued to search for better methods of relating drawings to each other and had found a few ways that seemed to produce a predictable result . . . As each of these processes acquired a name, it was analyzed and perfected and talked about, and when new artists joined the staff they were taught these practices as if they were the rules of the trade . . . they became the fundamental principles of animation. (p. 47)

This book intended to document the art of animation such as practised at Disney. Its list of principles became frequently mentioned in later guidebooks. It is no coincidence that this volume was released at the beginning of the 1980s. At that time, the career of most animators of the Golden Age was over. Hand-drawn animation studios began to suffer serious competition. Digital technology was already well established in motion pictures, and computer animation progressively gained ground on the market. In studios, the use of computational tools started to spread and considerably transformed both production and aesthetics. For example, the Computer Animation Production System (CAPS), a 2D digital system for inking, painting and postproduction developed in the late 1980s by Disney and Pixar, automatized inking and painting, and opened new possibilities, notably in terms of camera movements, with visible consequences for the films. In this context, The Illusion of Life (Thomas and Johnston, 1981) can be read as a statement about the continuous relevance of traditional methods within an evolving professional landscape. Likewise, in the mid-1990s, Preston Blair published Cartoon Animation (1994), a compilation of his preceding manuals. The introduction demonstrates a paradigm shift. In addition to mentioning the development of ‘new techniques and methods of animation – including computer animation’ (p. 7), Blair states: ‘The pioneers of the art of animation learned many lessons, most through trial and error, and it is this body of knowledge that has established the fundamentals of animation. This book will teach you these fundamentals’ (1994: 6). The author reveals his awareness regarding the state of animation, in the midst of a crucial transformation. He promotes the same knowledge as in the four decades before; however, he introduces it as a production of the past. The emphasis on hand-drawn animation, at a time when a new form of animation was pushing it aside, can be read as a reaction to the transformation of the technological landscape. A year after the release of Blair’s compilation book, Toy Story (1995) became the first 3D feature-length animated movie fully made on computer. For many, it marked the beginning of a new era, dominated by computer animation.

This first section of this article has shed light on a vast period of animation history, from the 1940s to the 1980s. Although animation underwent a number of transformations during these decades, the technique itself seemed little impacted and remained associated with hand-drawn practices and the cartoon style. Manuals, by unfolding rules and methods of animation and making them available to a wide audience, contributed to the establishment of these rules as principles of animation.

The rise of computer animation: 1970s–2000s

In its early stage, between the 1960s and the mid-1980s, the development of computational practices in the field of animation occurred on two distinct tracks. On the one hand, universities, laboratories and other institutions with sufficient financial means worked on ‘exploring how computational technologies could be utilized to generate moving images and aesthetic effects sometimes specific to the new mechanisms’: a ‘new mode of animation’ (Johnston, 2019: 132) emerged that included an elaboration of techniques particular to the medium. On the other hand, computational tools and techniques started to pervade the studio production of animated films. While this resulted in a hybridity of computational and non-computational tools, the influence on aesthetics was at first hardly perceptible. These developments were essentially absent from hand-drawn animation manuals, even in the 1970s and 1980s. In contrast, the rise and evolution of computer animation was accompanied by the release of numerous guidebooks specifically dedicated to this new field and addressed to a different audience, mainly students of computer graphics and engineering. This section reflects on the historical status and role of these manuals and aims to show how they have contributed to shaping an artistic, technical and professional identity for computer animation, both rejecting and integrating practices from hand-drawn animation.

Typically, the authors of such guidebooks received their education in universities, in computer engineering, computer graphics, or, later on, computer animation. They were college professors or occupied technical positions in studios. Their authority stems from their degree, computational skills and teaching experience: in Principles of Three-Dimensional Computer Animation (O’Rourke, 1995), the author’s biographical information notes that he ‘is an artist and Associate Professor in the Computer Graphics Department at Pratt Institute in New York City’ and that he ‘formerly was a senior research staff artist and commercial animator at the New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Laboratory’. Similar mention of credentials can be found in computer animation textbooks of the 2000s and 2010s.

These textbooks were usually published by companies specializing in science and technology (such as Elsevier), or dedicated to the educational world, selling books for students, instructors and researchers (Wiley, McGraw Hill). The emphasis on teaching can partly be understood as a result of the growth of school and university programs dedicated to computer animation and computer graphics in the 1980s. The new generation of animators was trained in educational institutions and not, as used to be the case, in studios. Correspondingly, computer animation manuals address an expert audience: students, advanced amateurs and professionals of animation or computer graphics willing to learn new techniques of computer animation. The design corresponds to that of college textbooks or technical manuals, showing a highly hierarchical structure with numbered chapters and subsections. Although these guidebooks aim to be ‘accessible, even if you consider yourself nontechnical’ (O’Rourke, 1995: 11), since their inception, they have counted on the fact that ‘the reader has some experience at the keyboard of a microcomputer’ (Weinstock, 1986: xvi). The question of technology has been central. A manual detailed the material needed to make computer-generated animation and listed its costs during the year 2002 (which were much lower than any time before): between US$800 and US$3500 for a computer, US$200 for an operating system, up to US$1200 for a single software program, plus a long list of other more or less costly supplies (Subotnik, 2003: 54–61). The cost of the technology, the impossibility for the majority of amateurs to home-build it, and the necessity of previous knowledge of the topic, has narrowed the readership: children and non-specialized audiences have mostly been left out. However, the decreasing price of devices, the availability of free animation software (such as Blender in 2002), and the development of new teaching solutions, such as online tutorial videos, has progressively enabled authors to include amateurs in their readership. Already in guidebooks from the 1990s, such as Desktop Computer Animation: A Guide to Low-Cost Computer Animation (MacNicol, 1992), cheap and easy solutions were provided. Computational tools have even been linked to a democratization of the craft, the author asserting that ‘the advent of the personal computer, coupled with capable animation software, has signaled a new era in the world of animation – it’s storytelling technology for “the rest of us”’ (MacNicol, 1992: ix).

Technology

The place granted in these guidebooks to the description and understanding of technology reveals how computer animation techniques and aesthetics have been elaborated in close interaction with the development and possibilities of computational tools (both analogue and digital, until digital technology became predominant, in the 1980s). Several guidebooks from the 1980s and 1990s left no doubt about the will to create a new animation technique, detached from what was made in hand-drawn animation. Computer Animation (Weinstock, 1986) explained that although

the structure and syntax of modern computer animation has [sic] been determined very much by what was once possible with mechanical devices alone . . . it will be up to a generation that grows up intimately acquainted with generating graphic animation on microcomputers to create images that demonstrate a full understanding of the technology they use and that truly stretch that technology. (Weinstock, 1986: xv, original emphases)

A decade later, the introduction of Principles of Three-Dimensional Computer Animation (O’Rourke, 1995) – which reclaims the notion of ‘principles’ to apply it to the new form – stated the accomplishment of this forecast:

Today, three-dimensional computer animation is no longer limited to mimicking the techniques of traditional cel animation. Exciting techniques have been developed that move far away from the keyframe/in-between frame concept of traditional animation, and many software packages include techniques that only the computer could have produced. (pp. 10–11)

Both authors present the potential of computational technologies for developing new aesthetics and claim their independence from traditional animation. While the promises of computer technology are a common trope in many of these books, some take a more nuanced stance, stating, for example, that it is ‘unlikely that a computer will ever be able to automatically produce original animations which possess the depth of character of the classics’ (Fox and Waite, 1984: 8).

In any case, the content of computer animation manuals strongly differs from that of their hand-drawn predecessors. The differences become apparent in the illustrations: while hand-drawn animation manuals taught through concrete, character-driven examples, lingering over nuances and changes in attitudes, computer animation textbooks show graphs, grids and screenshots displaying shapes, lines or unfinished figures like ‘skeletons’ of characters. This newer vein of instructional books has also included a specific nomenclature, new topics and problems: tables of contents display sections entitled ‘Interaction with Technology’, ‘Memory and Processing Speed’, ‘The Unexpected Input Bug’ (Weinstock, 1986: v–vii), ‘Polygonal Modeling’, ‘Rendering’ or ‘3D Texture Mapping’ (O’Rourke, 1995: 7–8).

These divergences are partly due to different processes of creation. Drawn animation involves sketching all images in order to create motion, and then only follow finessing, inking, colouring, and finally photographing. Manuals usually focused on the first part of the process. In contrast, the requirement of computer animation is to first model the character and add texture to it (surfaces, colours), before rigging, that is, adding functions (called control rigs) that enable the character to move: only then does animation begin. Rendering, the last step before postproduction, consists of integrating all the information to produce the final image. Since the final goal (synthetizing motion) happens relatively late in the process, manuals usually embrace, quite understandably, the totality of these steps, which, moreover, all use the same technology.

Although these steps are relatively consistent across the manuals, a diachronic study highlights significant technological transformations: the range and level of sophistication of available tools dramatically expanded, hardware became more efficient, and software appeared on the market, changed, or ceased to be used and sold. The handbook Electronic Imaging Techniques (Levitan, 1977) anticipated this dimension by qualifying computer animation as ‘an industry that because of its ever-changing technology will always remain in its infancy’ (p. 9). The authors of these manuals are conscious of this shortcoming, in contrast to the continuity claimed by hand-drawn animation manuals. The issue of rapid change persists throughout the decades. Sometimes, each new version of a software comes with the release of an updated guidebook to ‘cover all the exciting new animation tools and how to use them’ (Roy, 2014: 1). Some manuals from the 2000s and 2010s respond to that problem by offering ‘companion websites’ with updates. ¹¹ However, this solution demands a perpetual reconfiguration of the website content and does not answer the question of the obsolescence of knowledge constructed on the basis of outdated technologies.

The prominence of tools inevitably questions the place of creativity. Authors usually do not expand on this aspect but evoke it as a complex matter, for example Weinstock (1986: 2):

The programmer holds the key to creative CGI . . . In certain respects, the user’s imagination may take action only within the bounds of the programmer’s imagination. Similarly, the programmer’s imagination can work only within the bounds of the system designer . . . who in turn works within the bounds of the few sorts of systems for CGI thus far invented.

This interdependency between professions has actually been characteristic of computer animation since its beginnings. As Johnston (2019: 140) highlights, collaborations between computer engineers and animators were initially ‘in part a necessity because of the cost and size of mainframe computers’, but also to obtain ‘institutional support’. Today, these collaborations continue to shape the organization of computer animation studios.

At the turn of the 21st century, the transformations in the field of animation due to digital tools were obvious: computer animation had become ‘a dominant mode of production for the movie industry and beyond’ (Rehak, 2019: 154) and digital tools were almost systematically used at one step or the other of most productions, whether in independent or commercial animation. Studios of the pre-digital era closed their departments of hand-drawn animation, shifting to the increasingly competitive field of computer animation; 3D digital animation asserted itself as the commercially most successful type of animation with box-office hits like Shrek (2001), Monsters, Inc. (2002) and Ice Age (2002). The rise of this form went hand in hand with a transformation of the lexicon in manuals: just as the term ‘cartoon’ was used to designate hand-drawn animation, ‘3D’ has turned to being synonymous with ‘computer animation’. The technology has become associated with a particular use and a specific aesthetic standard.

This section has highlighted the main characteristics of computer animation manuals, and situated them in the technological, professional and educational context of the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. The analysis of guidebooks has demonstrated the strong interdependency of technique and technology, and has pointed to various tensions that result from this interdependency. However, the rise of computer animation in the industry has not led to an extinction of hand-drawn animation manuals. On the contrary, the latter have seen a resurgence in the 2000s and 2010s: a new type of guidebook, which seeks to reconcile digital and hand-drawn practices, has emerged.

Transmitting a tradition: 2000s–2010s

The preceding sections have described two distinct types of manuals, differing on the levels of authorship, audience, technique and discourse. In the 2000s and 2010s, hybrid manuals appeared. In this section, I explore how these guidebooks conceive the practice of animation. I show that they play an active part in reviving hand-drawn animation and in advocating its relevance for digital animation.

In an article published in Computer Graphics in 1987, Pixar animator John Lasseter ¹² suggested applying the ‘basic principles of traditional 2D hand drawn animation’ (Lasseter, 1987: 35) to computer animation. In his view, ‘understanding these principles . . . is essential to producing good computer animation.’ Lasseter was in a good position to argue the case, having a background in both modes of animation. He had studied in the first class of the Character Animation Program, supervised by Disney animators, at the School of Film/Video of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 1975. After graduating, he obtained a position as animator at Disney and, in 1984, he was hired as an interface designer at Lucasfilm’s Computer Division (later Pixar), one of the first companies that sought to develop ‘state-of-the-art computer technology for the film industry’. ¹³ The ‘guideline’ formulated by his article in 1987 foreshadows the main tendency of animation manuals in the 2000s and 2010s. Their authors revive hand-drawn animation from the Golden Age and consciously set it, through their discourse, as a tradition. Their project is not merely about remembering a past era and its technique with nostalgia, but they argue for the importance of the skills established in this context and for their relevance for contemporary animation. In this manner, they contribute to shaping a new identity for animation, one oscillating between tradition and new technology.

A considerable number of the manuals from the 2000s and 2010s continue to teach classical hand-drawn animation although the technique has virtually disappeared in the mainstream US animation industry. Part of the reason can be found in pedigrees of teaching and styles of learning. The authors tend to be animators who made their career with hand-drawn techniques. Although they were educated after the Golden Age, they both worked with and were taught by figures from that time. In this context, manuals have become a venue for perpetuating and transmitting the skills they have acquired thanks to these figures. For example, Drawn to Life: 20 Golden Years of Disney Master Classes (Hahn, 2009) is a compilation of in-studio lectures given by Walt Stanchfield, an animator of the Golden Age. The volumes are edited by Don Hahn, an animator who started his career at the end of the 1970s, attending Stanchfield’s lessons at Disney. In the foreword, Hahn explains:

Walt’s writing started in the 1970s, when veteran animators at the Disney Studio were at the end of their illustrious careers and new talent was pouring into the studio . . . Stanchfield focused on establishing a training for new animators with veteran animator and director Eric Larson . . . By the mid 1980s Walt started weekly gesture drawing classes for the entire studio . . . These weekly lecture notes along with his early writing for the animation training program are the basis for this first-time publication. (p. xv)

Again, the idea of transmission is central. The lessons were written by an animator of the Golden Age for the younger generation, and then made public by one of these young animators. Hahn evokes the 1970s and 1980s as a moment of transition, as the last years during which the knowledge of the Golden Age was still directly passed on to the next generation. In the following decades, this new generation continued the chain of perpetuation through manuals. The transition is also noticeable on an aesthetic level, as the book has a clear historical feel: archival materials are reproduced, such as some of the weekly ‘handouts’ from Stanchfield, providing both a sense of authenticity and a depiction of the past period. The skills of the Golden Age, as well as the entire system and customs surrounding them, which were presented as the norm in the manuals of the 1950s to 1980s, are now erected as a tradition through discursive and aesthetic choices.

Nostalgia, heritage, tradition

Although context and industrial practice have significantly changed, there are striking continuities between the manuals from the 1940s to those from the 2000s and 2010s. Principles, gestures and methods are reproduced and similarly displayed. In particular, the creation of motion is usually explained with identical strategies. The succeeding positions of the same figure – corresponding to the different frames – are assembled on the same image. The most common example is that of the ‘bouncing ball’: a ball is shown, coming down from the left side, hitting the ground and bouncing back up towards the right side. This particular example runs through a great number of manuals. For example, in Advanced Animation (Blair, 1949) and Animation: The Mechanics of Motion (Webster, 2005), the balls are numbered – each number corresponds to a frame – and the first bounce happens at the sixth frame. The captions of both books point out the importance of the spacing between the drawings. Blair (1949: 22) emphasizes: ‘as the ball falls, its speed increases, drawings are spaced further apart.’ Similarly, Webster (2005: 20) emphasizes: ‘The ball begins to speed up as it falls to the ground again and the distance between the subsequent drawings become greater.’ Both also use the bouncing ball to demonstrate the principle of ‘squash and stretch’. Blair (1949: 22) describes that the ‘ball stretches in falling + taking off’, ‘at highest point . . . resumes natural shape’ and ‘as ball hits [the ground] it . . . becomes squashed.’ Likewise, Webster (2005: 22) describes: ‘The ball squashes on impact with ground’, ‘regains its spherical shape as it approaches the top of the parabola’ and ‘stretches as it falls towards the ground and again as it climbs after the bounce’. Indeed, the bouncing ball is mentioned in The Illusion of Life (Thomas and Johnston: 1981: 51) as ‘the standard animation test for all beginning artists’ and is now part of the training for computer animation. ¹⁴ Not only is it a means of explaining animation principles, but it has become a canonical exercise for animators.

Furthermore, the decomposition of movement establishes animation and the representation of movement in a larger pictorial tradition. Several guidebooks explicitly refer to the chrono-photographic works of Eadweard Muybridge: a plate of Human and Animal Locomotion (Muybridge, 1979[1887]) is reproduced in The Animator’s Survival Kit and described as a ‘treasure trove of action information’ (Williams, 2001: 216). In the introduction, the author also describes several pre-cinematic pieces of art that sought to imitate motion: prehistoric cave paintings, Ancient Egyptian columns displaying figures of Isis ‘in a progressively changed position’, Ancient Greek pots ‘with figures in successive stages of action’, as well as pre-cinematic devices such as the Thaumatrope and the Phenakistiscope (pp. 12–13). The manual How to Make Animated Cartoons (Falk, 1941) evokes the same references as ‘early attempts to obtain motion in drawings’ (p. 9).

The tradition of hand-drawn animation is preserved not only through a common framework of references in the history of art, but also through a referential canon of guidebooks that mark a common legacy in a self-perpetuating cycle. Recent guidebooks draw on older hand-drawn manuals, like Animated Performance (Beiman, 2016), its author praising Animation from Script to Screen (Culhane, 1988) as ‘the best early animation textbook’ (Beiman, 2016: 9). Likewise, Richard Williams mentions How to Make Animated Cartoons (Falk, 1941) at the beginning of his book: he confesses to having discovered animation thanks to this manual and describes how it has contributed to his becoming a professional artist. Beyond its self-promotional value, Williams’s anecdote points to the changing position of manuals in the educational system. Since the rise of animation schools in the 1980s, manuals have increasingly been tailored for animation students. Many of the authors are professors, and teaching has become a potential career option for graduates. However, they promise to offer more than a simple textbook. Tony White, a British animator and teacher who started his career in the late 1960s, explains in Animation from Pencils to Pixels (White, 2006: xviii):

Once upon a time, there was a thriving apprenticeship system. But now it is gone. Today, education for the animators of the future needs to occur through schools, colleges, and textbooks like this one. If a continuity of knowledge is to remain, then this education, at the highest and most accomplished level, has to occur without further loss to traditional values.

The manual would constitute not merely a means for transmitting technical skills, but also and importantly a vector of ‘tradition’.

The Animator’s Survival Kit (Williams, 2001) is paradigmatic in this regard. It is as much a guidebook for learning animation as a homage to hand-drawn animation. It celebrates the animators of the Golden Age and recalls with nostalgic praise the bygone informal educational system based on learning by experience. In the introduction, Williams describes how he worked with and learned from experienced animators, referring to the ‘great Disney genius Milt Kahl’, the ‘marvellous legendary animator Art Babbitt’, and the ‘brilliant . . . Grim Natwick’, and emphasizes that his book ‘is full of their accumulated knowledge and craft’ (p. 6). In doing so, Williams carves himself a position in the ‘new’ era of animation as a broker of knowledge and genius. The manual consists of a succession of anecdotes, experienced by or transmitted to Williams. The anecdotes fulfill a double function. On the one hand, they serve to explain a skill, method, gesture or principle; on the other hand, they anchor pieces of knowledge in history, appealing to the authority of recognized artists. For example, a section entitled ‘The top and bottom pegs battle’ transmits the use of pegs ¹⁵ through a series of narratives from the ‘endless debate . . . among classical animators’ (pp. 80–83). Williams quotes from the controversy between Frank Thomas from Disney (where bottom pegs were the norm) and Ken Harris from Warner Bros. (where animators tended to use top pegs). He then describes a solution attributed to the layout artist and designer Roy Naisbitt: to tape a peg bar on a disc of Plexiglass, thus allowing for more freedom and making it possible to change the configuration of pegs. This discursive structure allows Williams to reach the reader on several levels. First, he presents an essential technology of hand-drawn animation (the animation board and the pegs), its variations (top or bottom pegs) and possible uses (the techniques of rolling and flipping to check the animation). Second, he provides historical inputs about the different practices of studios (rolling at Disney, flipping at Warner). The information takes the form of an oral history based on memories of discussions, declarations and observations. The choice of words (‘battle’, ‘debate’), the rhetoric strategy and the illustration (sketches of Ken Harris getting mad and explaining why top pegs are better) add drama and entertainment. At the end of this section, the author ironically addresses digital technologies and shows the limits of his own book: ‘Obviously, computer animators are free from all this tactile nonsense’ (p. 83). Yet, he gives an assurance in the introduction that ‘the old knowledge applies to any style or approach to the medium no matter what the advance in technology’ (p. 20). The ‘old knowledge’ is rendered as a set of essential skills, resistant to technical variations and technological transformations.

Merging hand-drawn and computer animation

Other recent guidebooks seek more actively to reconcile traditional techniques with digital practices. They follow Lasseter’s approach in arguing for the importance of hand-drawn animation in the digital era. Their titles already indicate the goal: Bridging the Gap between 2D and CG (Jones and Oliff, 2007) or Animation From Pencils to Pixels: Classical Techniques for Digital Animators (White, 2006). The basic proposition is to merge hand-drawn animation principles with digital tools. However, the approach leads to a certain ambiguity about the question of gesture. For decades, these principles had been associated with drawing. White first illustrates that drawn animation can still happen digitally, on a graphic tablet. Another section of the book focuses on 3D animation, where the act of drawing disappears. Yet, the author argues that the traditional principles and rules of animation are still valid, even if the concrete gestures have changed. From this perspective, technique is not connected to the technology, nor to a specific gesture, but to a series of ever-valid, transposable ‘meta-skills’. Therefore, according to this recent vein of guidebooks, the content of hand-drawn animation manuals of the 1940s – centred on these supposedly timeless skills – becomes, somewhat paradoxically, less obsolete in the 2000s and 2010s than the first computer animation manuals of the 1980s, despite the fact that most animation is nowadays made digitally.

Part of the persistence of hand-drawn animation manuals may be attributed to the very ephemerality of their digital counterparts. This is made explicit in the manual Timing for Animation (Whitaker and Halas, 2006[1981], 2009), first published in 1981 and reedited in 2009. The new version is more of an expansion than a revision: the principles remain, but additional content, specific to digital production, is provided. In the foreword to the second edition, John Lasseter points out ‘how essential principles like timing are for the art of animation’ and highlights their enduring suitability: ‘the principles of timing laid out in this book are more applicable than ever before’ (Whitaker and Halas, 2009: x). The issue of relevance is further developed in the preface, written by the American animator, teacher and historian Tom Sito: ¹⁶

Large books that have painstakingly explained software programs from the 1980s and 1990s are now considered quaint, but irrelevant . . . The strength of Timing for Animation is in its simplicity and directness to whatever purposes you put its principles . . . the precepts laid out between these covers are important to all who create a frame-by-frame performance, regardless of whether they use a stylus and digital tablet, clay, cut-outs, some form of live-actor performance capture, or a pencil and paper. (Whitaker and Halas, 2009: xii)

Sito highlights the rapid obsolescence of technology and the manuals based on it. According to him, the strength of this book is to be found in the basic and timeless ‘principles’ and ‘precepts’.

In the meantime, many computer animation manuals have caught up, taking advantage of the commercialization of proprietary software (Rehak, 2019: 154), notably Maya, launched in 1998. For the last two decades, they have integrated these principles. For example, How to Cheat with Maya 2014 (Roy, 2014: 3) refers to them as ‘guidelines for creating appealing animation’ and ‘seemingly simple concepts’ that ‘combine together to inform the most complex animation and performances on screen . . . though some translation of these principles must occur for animators to utilize these concepts in Maya’ (p. 3). While the principles do not erase the problem of the rapid evolution of software, they are promoted as a basis for understanding not only the tools, but also the art of animation in general. Initially related to hand-drawn animation, this knowledge has become a source for promoting computer animation as a profession. Another recent manual, Cartoon Character Animation with Maya (Osborn, 2015) states that ‘incorporating traditional animation techniques’ and ‘thinking in 2D’ makes the computer animator feel ‘more like an artist and less like a technician’ (p. 6). The recurrence of Maya is representative of the leading position of that software and contributes to the habituation of the users to its interface, which many younger animators learned to work with. Furthermore, the juxtaposition in the title of the guidebook is significant: hand-drawn principles as well as the aesthetic of the once dominant cartoon style are embraced. On technical and aesthetic levels, identities merge.

Animation schools’ programs demonstrate the fusion of practices at the educational level. Starting in the 1990s, the most prestigious universities and art schools have integrated digital to the teaching of animation, such as the bachelor ‘Animation and Digital Arts’ at the University of Southern California. The training of animators does not distinguish anymore between the two modes. For example, at the CalArts School of Film/Video, all character animation students follow the same track. Although some lectures and seminars are dedicated to specific techniques of animation, many core courses address topics and techniques applicable to any of those: the 2019–2020 course catalogue of the BFA in Character Animation establishes as a learning goal the ‘display [of] strong proficiency with 2D and CG animation, as well as skillful use of animation principles’. ¹⁷ From this perspective, the third type of manual serves the educational market well. At the same time, the guidebooks seek to sensitize to the relevance of skills developed in hand-drawn animation, outside of the schools and within a digital context.

On many levels – education, production, profession, aesthetics – hand-drawn and computer animation have mingled. The two different, almost purposefully remote, conceptions of animations have merged: on the one hand, one that promotes steady and universal principles and a long-standing tradition; on the other hand, one that puts technology to the fore to develop new aesthetics. Today, animation consists of a variety of practices and styles that draw on both digital and hand-drawn techniques and utilize their encounter to develop new techniques and aesthetics. Manuals both express and have shaped this new hybrid identity.

Conclusion

Exceeding their mere role of ‘how-to’ guides, animation manuals witness, express and contribute to historical transformations, and shed light on issues of education, profession, technique and aesthetics. Yet, when using them as historical sources, this article has argued, we have to be aware of their proper historical dynamics and discursive functions, and to take into account the professional and industrial conditions specific to their time. In this context, I have proposed distinguishing between three different types of manuals, each bound to a specific period in the history of the genre. From the 1940s to the 1980s, manuals popularized hand-drawn animation as practised and taught in US studios. They promoted a professional identity modelled on the animators of the Golden Age and depicted animation as a craft to be learned through personal transmission. From the 1970s to the 2000s, computer animation manuals contributed to the emergence of a new mode of animation and a new type of practitioner. They advanced the ideal of an autonomous technique and of an academically trained technical expert. In the 2000s and 2010s, a hybrid type of manuals has appeared that seeks to negotiate between hand-drawn principles and digital technologies. It attempts to forge a professional identity that finds stability in a new compromise between tradition and change.

The history of animation manuals allows us to nuance sharp distinctions between computer and hand-drawn animation techniques and to conceptualize the ‘digital turn’ in terms of a renegotiation of professional identities and a redefinition of the craft. It appears as part of a longer historical reconciliation of tradition and novelty. The analysis has also shown how some basics of the craft, such as the enduring principles, are consciously activated by the authors to adapt their status of practitioners to a new historical context. From this perspective, manuals should be considered both cultural manifestations of and actors in animation history.