Author: Zhang Qizhong (Associate Professor, Master Supervisor, School of Animation and Digital Arts, Communication University of China)
In the 1830s, the Barbizon School, the predecessor of French Impressionist painting, advocated scene sketching and depicting real natural scenery. In the middle of the 19th century, the works of the Impressionists appeared in the works of trains, cafes, ships, parties and other scenes closely related to modern life, focusing on the performance and research of light and color, recording the vividness and beauty of social life and natural things, and recording the moments of light and shadow with delicate and gorgeous brushstrokes and colors.
Since the 1980s, French animation has gradually revived, and now it has become an animation power after the United States and Japan. The themes of French animation are diverse, including mythology, history and reality, exquisite pictures and exaggerated shapes, which have won it the praise of "the forest of world animation". Not only that, the art style of French animation is also emerging in an endless stream, including paper-cutting, oil painting, gouache, etc., forming a unique French style.
And between French animation and French Impressionist painting, there is an inextricable connection.
Van Gogh's "Fields and Cypresses" information picture
Renoir's Frog Pond profile picture
Information picture of Manet's "Piper Boy"
Stills and information images of "The Red Turtle"
The transfer of spatial depiction techniques
The French realist and impressionist painter Manet's Lunch on the Grass (1862-1863), Camille Corot's Memories of Montefontaine (1864), and Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Frog Pond depict layered depths of space in a silhouette, with a dim foreground, through the gradient of colors, becoming clearer and clearer as the back. Animation can't be as colorful as oil painting, but this style of painting adds a little poetry to the animation.
The French animation The Adventures of Twitter (1998) tells the story of an African baby who was born and jumped, and a witch who snatched all the men from the village. After receiving the immortal's revelation, the child plucked the stinger from the witch's back, allowing the witch who had lost her magic to return to her normal female appearance. Suddenly, the tall twitter falls in love with the witch and returns to the mountain village together. At the same time, people who were once rumored to have been killed by witches eventually returned to be reunited with their families.
In the film, there are scenes that are very similar to the composition of the above-mentioned Impressionist paintings. For example, when young children rescued their friends who were almost snatched away by witches, when they returned to the countryside happily, they encountered a verdant jungle on the road. The foreground of the picture is bleak, and the further back it goes, the more it appears green with different brightnesses, and the colors tend to be bright and soft. This layered and delicate shadow space hints at the thrilling atmosphere of the story.
In "The Frog's Prophecy" (2003), the sky rained for forty consecutive days, the barn on the hill of the little boy Tom's house became a Noah's Ark in a vast ocean, lions, wolves and other carnivores such as sheep and chickens coexisted in the same room, and there were turtles that were superficially kind and secretly attracted crocodiles, so the barn became a place of open strife and secret struggle, and you live and die. Eventually, the flood receded, and the animals that had been born of good thoughts returned to the mountains and forests. In order to portray the gloomy and ominous atmosphere, the film opens with a multitude of colors and tones of the river from the Impressionist painter Monet's Regatta (1867), using no panoramas from a level view, but a close-up from overhead. In this way, the opening film of "The Frog's Prophecy" is based on hydrological knowledge, using different colors, showing the undercurrent under the calm water, the colors are endlessly changing, and the slight uneasiness before the heavy rain crisis is portrayed with sliding brushstrokes.
The oil-painting style animated film "The Mystery of the Beloved Van Gogh Starry Sky" (2017) is a biopic of Van Gogh, and Van Gogh's oil paintings such as "Harvest Scene", "Garden Blossoms" and "Starry Sky" are "smart" in the film.
These French animations, inheriting the Impressionists' concept of taking the perception of visual experience as the starting point, portray the depth of space through the use of fine colors, which increases the beauty of the picture while also increasing the realism of the story.
Smudge of color
The Impressionists advocated painting outdoors, breaking the concept of inherent color in traditional painting and introducing environmental colors and light source colors. In this way, under the illumination of light, the various objects in the scene will inevitably reflect each other in color, rather than maintaining the original inherent color. In order to express such light and shadow, the Impressionists used small brushstrokes on the picture, and even used subtle brushstrokes that were too small to be distinguished individually, so that these colors would be reconciled in the viewer's vision, overprinted into some synthetic colors. In contrast to the direct grading of colors after mixing with pigments, the Impressionist way of grading results in a colorful and colorful effect. Even if it is a single-color object, there will be a flow of light and shadow. For example, in Edouard Manet's "Piper Boy", the pants of the teenager are dark red, but a layer of black with different shades and shades is absorbed, which enhances the sense of stability of the characters and highlights the intensity of the red.
Such translucent images abound in French animation. The French animation "Long North Wayfinding" (2015) tells the story of a young girl Sasha in Russia at the end of the 19th century who has been proud of her grandfather who died from an expedition to the Arctic. But at Grandpa's museum, she overheard other people's criticism of Grandpa. In a fit of rage, Sasha resolutely gave up the wedding arranged by her parents and retook the Arctic road for the sake of Kuang Zheng's grandfather's reputation. At the moment when hope is about to be shattered, through the vast white snow, Sasha unexpectedly sees her grandfather's frozen body and her grandfather's diary... Eventually, Sasha and the others finally found a ship that was frozen in ice.
The opening film of "The Long North Finder" is a aerial shot of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences on the banks of the Neva River, which is very similar to the composition and color of Renoir's oil painting Pont des Arts (1867). The animation of the picture, from right to left, are yellow and green roofs, mottled streets, white river water, the whole picture is rich in color, full of bright rhythm.
In The Frog's Prophecy in the children's picture book style, the colors create a multi-layered effect. The little girl Lily wears a light green blouse with a light yellow top, dark brown shorts, and a high upturned hair braid with ochre and light yellow to outline a bright girl image. Similarly, when Grandpa drove a large tractor and took Tom to the zoo, he passed through an undulating hill, the nearby was a mixture of white and yellow, and the distant hill was a mixture of blue and dark yellow, these two colors appeared transparent to each other, and with the inadvertent change of light and shadow, it emphasized both the child's perspective and the "improvisation" of color. The same techniques are used in the waves of The Red Turtle (2016) and in The Mountains and Forests in The Miamigo (2008).
The two colors are superimposed on each other, forming a visually prominent and receding movement of the color, and forming a clear and hazy blending effect, with the change of light and shadow at different times, the color of the object continues to change, and echoes with the surrounding characters and scenes.
Unrealistic colors
Through sketching observations, Impressionists found that under different conditions of time, environment, climate and other conditions, the same object was dominated by different lights and had different colors, so they discovered color phenomena that had not been noticed for a long time. Impressionist oil paintings use unrealistic colors when depicting some realistic scenes, full of magnificent imagination.
For example, the sky in reality can be blue sky and white clouds, or the sky is full of light, or the clouds are dense, or the yellow sand is long. However, the sky is purple in Renoir's Pont des Arts (1867), Monet's The Beach of Saint-Adéles (1867), and Pissarro's Monte D'Alyssa in Pontoise, where the sky resembles the aurora of the Arctic. What is even more amazing is that between 1899 and 1905, Monet created at least 19 paintings on the theme of the British Parliament Building. After the painting was exhibited in London, the British who had always thought that the fog in London was white and gray were surprised to find that the original fog in London was colored, and Monet used his paintings to change people's understanding and concepts formed over the years.
In addition to this, the shadows of some objects also have some novel colors. In Aman Gijoman's Snow Trail, the sky behind the snow takes on a dusky hue, with a sunken path under the snow-covered hillside, and the backlit surface of the hillside and the sparse patches between the slopes and the trails are dotted with patches of blue. This imaginative color not only adds vitality to the picture, but also hints at the psychology of the person walking with his back to the viewer and walking into the distance.
The spectacle of color is one of the qualities of animation. In Mad Dating Mirador (2003), Chabin, an orphan who lost both of his parents at an early age, lives with Susha's mother-in-law every day. By chance, the mother-in-law saw Chabin's talent for cycling, so she did her best to train Chabin to become a participant in the Tour de France. Unexpectedly, however, because the mafia wants to control the outcome of the game, Chabin and two other players are held hostage by gangsters to Mirador. The mother-in-law desperately took her puppy Bruno to the rescue in a bumpy boat. On the streets of his hometown, the mother-in-law met the three beautiful sisters, who together saved little Chabin.
The loneliness and bitterness of orphans are the main emotions of the opening film of "Crazy Dating Beautiful City". In a overhead shot, next to the grandmother who knitted a sweater, the little grandson rides a baby carriage. This is followed by a high-vantage-up autumn house, and as the camera pulls away, the color of the house changes, the earth-yellow houses are gradually painted warm red, and eventually the fields become dark green under the snow cover, while the roofs of the countryside after the snow are stained with light red dots. In this scene, mottled dark greens and crimson are dyed on a white background, making the audience feel surprised by the color and the emotions are also infected.
In the second half of "The Long Way North", Sasha ascends to the ice surface of the North Pole, and when she looks around, the ice surface is not silver, but gray and a little gray blue, the backlit side of the icicle is blue, and the crack in the ice sheet at Sasha's feet is dark blue. The colors in the scene use a mixture of two colors, and the light receiving and backlit surfaces of different objects are staggered. If you do not watch frame by frame, the audience cannot notice that it is also blue, with fine changes in different brightness and sharpness; however, the frame of the cartoon with linear time makes the color between the different frames produce a sense of visual persistence after the visual persistence.
The bright yellow sky in the Arctic scene of "The Long North Wayfinding" and the crimson sky in "Twitter and the Witch" all surprise the creator's extraordinary imagination.
It can be seen that Impressionist painting has had a great influence on French animation and has formed a unique and stylistic color language of French animation. Impressionist-style French animation, ostensibly a casual momentary scene, is actually the result of the creator's ingenious conception.
Guangming Daily ( 05/10/2021)
Source: Guangming Network - Guangming Daily