Den rörliga skämtteckningen. Stil, transformation och kontext

Abstract

Abstract THE MOVING CARTOON Style, Transformation and Context

The main objective of this study is to identify a special type of film; the moving cartoon, which is a subgenre of drawn animation based on the visual humour developed in caricature and captionless cartoons. The basic tools of cartoon expression are pictorial incongruities where the humour arises from mismatches between elements within the image of a certain recognizable situation. Caricature and cartoon always manifest themselves as either satire or parody and reflect ways of thinking about the world in one particular society during one period of time. That is why the study also considers the connection between a moving cartoon and its socio-historical context and cultural reference points. The study is divided into two parts. The first part, chapters 1-4, provides an understanding of the study’s central concepts of film animation, caricature and cartoon, based on their elementary aspects. The second part of the study, chapters 5-13, suggests an evolutionary process of development of the form in which evolutionary stages are presented and defined in terms of artistic, industrial, social, historical, and cultural contexts. This part of the study is divided into three sections. It starts with an account of the development of the earliest caricatures up to the silent animated cartoons of Émile Cohl and argue that early US animation was heavily influenced by contemporary comics. Some animated series which had emerged by the early 1920s introduced visual humour founded on the cartoon characters self-reference to its drawn status. The section concerning early sound animation opens with an examination of Disney’s model of animation, and continues with analyses of the main alternatives to it within US animation: Fleischer’s adult-oriented films constructed with a freewheeling structure influenced by jazz, Tex Avery’s crazy parodies based on the rapid-paced gag and incogruous humour, and UPA’s minimalist cartoon style introduced during the 1940s. The last section deals with European animation starting with the Zagreb school from the late 1950s that mounted an allegorical critique of the Cold War division of the world, Fyodor Khitruk’s incisive satire on life in the Soviet Union in his films produced during the thaw, while British female animators have widened the scope for social criticism since the 1970s.

Keywords: Animation, film animation, single-frame shooting, humour, cartoon, caricature, microshot, micro-editing, metamorphoses, incongruity, parody, satire.