Film Genres | Animation Films
The theoretical approach to animated film is this: a caricature is not a photograph, and animation is exactly what the name
implies - it makes a non-alive thing seem alive.
The cartoon is not a series of photographs of reality, it is a series of photographs of drawings.
A drawing has no real depth, only an appearance, and some drawings intentionally avoid even the appearance.
So we have flat surface upon which a totally unreal movement appears to take place.
In animated films the directors were always faced with the problem of coming up with their own alternative to physical reality.
The action in an animated cartoon is so completely under the director's control that it becomes a medium in which
the film-maker's imagination not only can run absolutely riot, but has to, if his/hers films are going to rise to the expectations of the art.
The animation director is granted a level of freedom that extends in all directions, in every dimension:
all the way from deciding what kinds of conflicts will be set up to determining the way the trees will be drawn.
The liberation is inherent in the medium, the control is up to the individual director.