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Movement and form grow more fantastic the more strictly they are calculated. Watch any Disney film and you will see that these are justifiable deformations of animals and humans. The characters Pluto and Donald become the morphology of dogs and ducks and analyses of movement. Every object, because it must be in motion, is once broken down into parts and then reconstructed.
-Imamura Taihei, "A Theory of the Animated Sound Film" (1936)
In the nascent decades of American animation, a series of technological and industrial advancements helped transform the burgeoning medium from moving lines against a monochromatic background into a spatially illusionistic and fully Technicolor cinematic experience. The plastic and anarchic potential of the line, apparent in early animations such as Emile Cohl's seminal Fantasmagorie (1908) and later cartoons such as Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer's Felix animation Pedigreedy (1927), disappears under the full flowering of cel animation. The cel process, which used transparent sheets of nitrate to allow drawings to be superimposed on top of a painted background, provided the standardization and sophistication necessary for the creation of spatially believable worlds and emotionally resonant characters. This spatial "realism," coupled with animation's embrace of the formal and narrative conventions of film, helped establish the hegemony of "full animation," a term used in animation studies to refer to the aesthetic and industrial aspects on display in canonical Disney features such as Bambi (1942)-a film advertised by theatrical posters as being presented "in multiplane Technicolor."1 The cel technique, when combined with the development of the multiplane camera, was heavily responsible for the institutionalization and canonization of a style of animation that relies on a decomposition of animated space through the fragmentation of the image into multiple, independent layers. The subsequent reconstitution of the image through multiplanar photography results in an image that dissembles to a spatial realism that is at odds with its anthropomorphism and impressionistic use of nature and landscape.2
I argue that this process of reconstitution is never complete, instead creating a spatial gap between foreground and background that allows us to pry apart the ideology of naturalism and realism at work in cel animation. I concentrate on the Disney feature Bambi as the paragon of this particular technique, a film that directly negotiates...