(Un)Limited Animation
MICHAEL LEE
5 seconds. 30 frames. Every movement deliberate. Compassion, care, fear, anxiety, love. An intimate moment in a blossoming friendship.
Glance away and you would miss it, but in these 5 seconds of the first episode of the anime Wonder Egg Priority the full power of limited animation reveals itself. In this short scene, each frame works to tell the story of Ai and Koito, two outcast teenagers who resolve to be best friends. Koito flops onto Ai's bed—her mysterious, enigmatic aura filling Ai's bedroom with a kind of magic—Ai explains that she's seen as an oddball at school and if Koito is seen hanging out with her, she too will be ostracized. Koito doesn't care. She picks up on Ai's anxiety and gently reaches over to comfort her, making physical contact with an intimate touch.
The success of the scene hinges on a few key frames of animation that gives the scene an intense focus on the connection between Ai and Koito. In 5 seconds of screen time, we see only 30 frames. Far less than the standard 120 frames we would see if we were watching a traditionally shot live action film, which is set at 24 frames per second.
Limited animation is able to play with cinematic time, slowing down movement, or even going so far as to freeze time completely in order to heighten emotional response to a scene. Despite breaking up the fluidity of movement we are used to seeing in live action film, limited animation's deconstruction of movement breaks it down into essential frames, highlighting what a viewer should pay attention to. From here the essential frames are to be studied and reflected upon by the viewer. Doing more, by animating substantially less, gives limited animation its power.
The human eye and the processes that form, transmit, and analyze what we see can process 10-12 individual images per second, retained in our brain for one-fifteenth of a second each. If another image is received during that fifteenth of a second, the brain processes the multiple images as motion, creating a sensation of visual continuity. Our brain pieces the images together as fluidly as possible.
Anime, limited animation, and this scene in Wonder Egg Priority flirt with this 10-12 image boundary, but don't often cross it. In fact, Ai and Koito's intimate moment never reaches over 9 frames per second, with frames changing on the 2s and 3s, meaning at around one twelfth or one eighth of a second. Coming in below the visual continuity threshold. This allows our brains to process each individual key frame without the need to blur them together. We still understand the movement being performed, but it is protracted to allow it to impact us differently. The limited number of frames used to express Ai and Koito's bond imploring the viewer to take each image and treat it like a work of art to be studied.
Animation and the Movement of Bodies
Film critics and theorists the world over have often said that animation is seen as a secondary art form to cinema and the movement of corporeal bodies. It is a bias that places live-action cinema above animation for its perceived greater reality effect. This reductive argument, in search of a supposed "real" is much the same as proposing that a photograph of a person is more real than a portrait. Superficially, this cannot be refuted, as the photograph has captured light reflected in the scene in front of the camera, the wavelengths of that light rendered as color in an image, to present a stark, objective reality. But few would argue that the Mona Lisa does not also represent reality. Though that reality may be subjectively filtered through da Vinci's lens, it presents Lisa Gherardini in a moment of time, with carefully considered artistic details to be studied and reflected upon. It is a felt, experiential reality, creating an immediate relationship between art and the individual viewing it. Animation strives for the same.
Where animation aims to create this connection with the viewer is through its use of movement. To take from the work of University of Chicago professor Thomas Lamarre, animation is about the decoding and recoding of movement. Deconstructing a gesture into its base elements and reassembling that movement as a series of drawn images. When Koito reaches her hand out to touch Ai, what does each finger do? How does her elbow bend? Animators will often watch live-action footage, or perform an action themselves to understand the mechanics of movement, breaking it down before reassembling it into the animation we see.
Decoding and recoding movement is not merely an imitation of live action. It is not making claims to the objective reality of corporeal bodies, it instead breaks movement down so that new possibilities of expression can emerge when it is recoded as animation. And while this amalgamation of drawn lines splashed with digital color do not equate to a human body captured on film, these lines are filled with a vitality that captures the unpredicatability of life, something film critic Sergei Eisenstein called "plasmaticness". While Eisenstein was talking about Disney, and the very elastic animation of the 1930s and 40s, the idea that lines in animation have potential for such life is clear in anime, where movement is not constrained by the "reality" of physical bodies, and is manipulated just enough to trigger an emotional response.
Animation and the Real
Where animation shines, and ultimately strengthens its relationship to the real, is paradoxically in the space of the unreal. By not being bound to act as an imitation or simulacrum of reality, the physicality of animation can be exaggerated, slowed down, and broken down into specific elements engaging with the viewer in a constant conversation of visual language. This engagement of the viewer requires them to draw on their own reality as they consider the unreality of animation.
This kind of engagement really shines when time is manipulated in animation. When considering how to show movement in the limited animation style employed by anime, a director can highlight precise moments within a movement that may otherwise appear as fluid motion when performed in a live action film, focusing on the key frames of a movement and allowing those to linger on screen.
In the clip of Wonder Egg Priority, Koito reaches out and gently holds Ai's foot, with the final frame static for nearly 2 seconds with nothing to distract the eye or draw attention away. It begs the viewer to analyze the movement that has been drawn, consider the context from which it arose, and perhaps reflexively think about that movement as if it were a human body performing it. University of London professor Esther Leslie says that animation encourages viewers "to be at least minimally alert to the ways of the image world unrolling before them, especially as it compares to the world in which they sit... propelling the viewer from image to thought, percept to concept."
It is such an oddly intimate thing to do, gently cradle someone's foot while lying in their bed, someone with whom you've only recently become friends with. The limited animation of the scene forces the viewer to try to understand the moment presented, to reflect on reality and how a scene like that would play out with real, physical bodies. Why didn't Koito simply reach out and hold Ai's hand, a much more socially acceptable way to connect with a person we are not intimately familiar with. Ai also pulls back slightly, something we take notice of as Koito reaches out to her. 3 frames are used to highlight this movement, so that the viewer is made aware of Ai's hesitance, it further charges the scene with emotion, introducing anxiety, or perhaps fear of the unknown, into the mix.
That a moment like this can flood the mind with ideas of significance and meaning is what Eisenstein was getting at when he described animation as an ecstatic form. It induces outright ecstasy in viewers, causing viewers to be beside themselves, with the artist—through the construction of pathos—creating the conditions for a spectator to be displaced into a state of restlessness. The pathos created by Ai and Koito's intimate moment, and the plasmaticness of the animated form moves the viewer into a restless state, and to mitigate that restlessness, viewers have to engage with the animation before them.
The Economy of Motion
Postmodern thinker Jean-Francois Lyotard sees traditional cinema as an 'economy of motion' that casts an oppressive air over the whole operation. Thriving on a repetition and propagation of sameness in order to function, traditional cinema is literally 'going through the motions.' Lyotard proposes a counter to that by using immobility or excessive movement to act as a disrupting force against this 'normalized sense of motion'. Doing so, he believes, "produces true, that is, vain, simulacrums and blissful intensities." By playing with time, the result is instead something that is a more real, more sublimely intense representation than can be produced by the mundane economy of motion that traditional cinema peddles in.
Anime is full of moments like this, where very few frames are used to express big emotions. Viewers are drawn in to the pathos of a scene by the static, jerky nature of limited animation. Reducing the number of frames used allows the emotion of a scene to be extended over a longer period of time, highlighted by key frames that do the heavy lifting to build pathos.
How can you not consider Lyotard's point here when watching the volleyball anime Haikyuu as it reaches the end of a hard fought match at the end of its second season. The Karasuno High School team face their rivals from Aoba Johsai, and after struggling to reach match point, deliver a stunning final point, and win the match.
The overwhelming emotion of the moment hits the team as they all scream in excitement, over the roar of the crowd. That scream, one frame of animation, holds for 3 seconds, allowing the viewer to read each of the players' faces, fully soaking in Lyotard's "blissful intensity" of that precise moment. Using immobility, confronting the economy of motion, this scene from Haikyuu allows the viewer time to reflect, for the pathos to build and resonate. It doesn't get lost in the blur of motion, much in the same way as watching Koito reach out and touch Ai for the first time is so powerful in Wonder Egg Priority. A static screen of Koito gently cradling Ai's foot is all the viewer sees for two seconds, with no movement to drive attention away, the viewer watches, and the longer Koito holds, the more emotionally charged the scene becomes.
(Un)Real, (Un)Limited Animation
There is a reason why anime fans often talk about getting "hit in the feels" watching their favorite show. It's because animation, and particularly the limited animation in anime, plays with movement, motion, and time to emphasize emotional elements. Maximizing their impact by holding on shots longer, using key frames to highlight movement, and asking the viewer to not passively watch, but to use their own reality to conceptualize what a scene would look and feel like in "the real world". The feeling can be overwhelming, ecstatic even, and one that often catches viewers off guard in the best possible way.
Michael Lee is the Editor of KOSATEN, and is currently pursuing research on Japanese fandom, with a particular focus on doujinshi and other fan-created media.
