While India has recently become a hot spot for a lot of low-cost animation production, US production first moved to India almost 60 years ago. Disney staffer Clair Weeks—who was born in India to missionaries before animating on Snow White and a batch of other early Disney classics—created a studio in his home-country in 1956 as part of the “American Technical Co-Operation Mission”. It lasted only 18-months and was certainly an isolated incident in the history of Indian animation, but the studio managed to produce some beautiful artwork and a short called The Banyan Deer (1957).
There were other attempts to create animation studios overseas, but the high cost and delay of shipping made most out-of-house animation productions unfeasible. The first effective—and I use that word lightly—outsourced production was Jay Ward’s Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends.
I’ll back up a second.
In the 1950s television landscape, there was generally only one producer. Jay Ward’s partners—much to his chagrin—got General Miss to fund his show by promising a budget for a half-hour cartoon that was pretty much the going rate of a thirty-second commercial. It was clear to all of the producers that a budget so small wouldn’t even support limited American animation. They first agreed to ship production to Japan, but when it was clear that the studio that they had made a deal with did not exist, they turned to a small Mexican commercial studio called Val-Mar Productions. According to animation scholar and USC professor Tom Sito, production was divided “into two divisions: the perceived creative areas such as direction, storyboarding, animation, and art direction—‘labeled above the line’—and the more labor-intensive areas not perceived as creative tasks—assisting, inking, painting, backgrounds, checking, and camera—below the line” (Sito). Jay Ward was never happy with the sloppy production that the Mexican team did for him, but thanks to intensified training and education, the crew slowly improved (Scott).
Personally, I think that the show’s strong, stylized design and clever writing allowed for extremely limited animation and bizarre camera work. Below, you can take a look at a batch of animation from the show and compare it with Hanna Barbera’s Huckleberry Hound, the gold standard late-1950s animated television production.
Jay Ward’s frustration with the shoddy animation done in Mexico is recounted in a lot of animation books, but the story of the Mexican animators is less well-known. According to a former Val-Mar employee, the Mexican animators never received screen credit for their work. When they protested, the American producers inserted American names like “John Doe, Jane Doe, and a bunch of brothers.” Afterwards, Val-Mar changed its name to Gamma Productions and produced several other tv shows for General Mills. Then, the studio unceremoniously closed its doors and its animators were immediately laid off (Bendazzi)
In the animation industry, there’s an odd propensity to label aspects of production as “non-creative” but complain when the quality of the “non-creative” work is not artistically up to par. In the building of the pyramids, there were certainly architects who designed and supervised and slaves who laid the stone. However, in animation production, just about every worker artistically contributes to what is on screen. To be clear: animation outsourcing isn’t bad. It’s made a lot of seemingly un-fundable productions possible. Still, it raises concerns about the consensus’s view of animation as an art form and of the blind eye studios often turn to the conditions in outsourced studios.
For more info, take a look at:
Works Cited
Bendazzi, Giannalberto. Animation: A World History. Vol. 2. N.p.: Focal, 2015. Print.
Scott, Keith. The Moose That Roared: The Story of Jay Ward, Bill Scott, a Flying Squirrel, and a Talking Moose. New York: St. Martin's, 2000. Print.
Sito, Tom. Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson. Lexington: U of Kentucky, 2006. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment