Animators Cite Storytelling as a Basic Need

“To the short list of basic human needs--food, shelter and sex--we can add the desire to tell stories. Storytelling is an essential part of the human experience, and animation, the most significant art form devised in this century, offers new approaches to that ancient activity.”

That’s how guest curator John Canemaker set the tone for the second annual Walter Lantz Conference on Animation when he began his keynote speech.

Sponsored by Lantz through the American Film Institute, the yearly conference provides the only major forum in this country for serious discussions of the art and craft of animation.

The theme of Saturday’s conference was storytelling, and more than 200 artists, writers, scholars and fans attended panels and screenings in the Hitchcock Theater at Universal Studios devoted to the special possibilities and problems that animation offers. The atmosphere was relaxed and informal, as most of the speakers approached their topics with a mixture of concern and humor.

The “Studio Approaches to Story” panel offered the most interesting discussions of the day. Veteran Disney story man Bill Peet (“Song of the South,” “101 Dalmatians”), Joe Ranft (co-writer of “The Brave Little Toaster”), Jerry Rees (co-writer and director of “Toaster”) and Peter Schneider, vice president for feature animation at Walt Disney Pictures, discussed the relative importance of plot and characters in animated features. Peet drew one of the biggest hands of the day when he stated that larger-than-life characters constitute the principal appeal of animated films, rather than flashy special effects.

The carefully structured clips from “Song of the South” and “Toaster” contrasted sharply with the haphazard plots of two old shorts, “Peter Panhandled” with Dinky Doodle (1925) and “Love Krazy” with Krazy Kat (1931).

Lantz--whose career in animation stretches back 71 years--amazed the audience when he described the casual way that cartoons used to be made. No one bothered with scripts, he said, and one animator would simply pick up the action where the previous artist had left off, adding whatever gags he came up with along the way.

Instead of offering the hard-sell hype that usually characterizes discussions of computer animation, Jim Lindner of the New York studio, the Fantastic Animation Machine, described the factors that have limited the development of the medium as a vehicle for storytelling. As long as advertising remains the only economically viable market for computer animation, he explained, audiences will continue to see flying logos--and little else.