Meeting the Spy: An Analysis, Part 3

INCOMING!!!!! Link to Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnuYi-nzE90

 “I definitely feel that we cannot do the fantastic things based on the real, unless we first know the real.” --Walt Disney.

This statement, to me, defines the relationship between realism and caricature, as I described in the previous post. It means that somebody couldn't make a table be able to walk like a dog without knowing both how a table is usually built, and how a dog walks. A person must be able to understand the world around them before they can truly make a new world, one that has different rules, different laws, or even the same rules.

The above quote from Disney appears in Chapter 4 of the book "The Illusion of Life." Part of this post will look into whether there is a contradiction between this quote and the ideas presented in Chapter 2, which I discussed in the last post.

I personally don't believe there is a contradiction. To be able to effectively exaggerate something without insulting it an animator would have to know what that something was actually like. To understand "the real" means to understand the world around us, to understand what is real. Once this is accomplished an animator can take any of the real objects or traits in the world and do whatever he wants with them, creating fantastic caricatures or even just effectively mimicking the real. Either way it's very important to comprehend what the world around us is like. This will give us the ability to create things based off that knowledge, and we can use traits from all sorts of parts of the real to create our world. A creature in the created world can have traits like a cat's walk, a bull's temper, a human's facial expressions, and so on. In short without understanding any of those ideas, how could an animator hope to work them into anything they ever made?

In that sense I don't believe there is anything to really reconcile. Disney's quote pretty much summarizes the idea that realism and caricature both work off of each other and that it takes extensive knowledge of how our world works to be able to accomplish either of them effectively.