Film Dialogue

PRONOUN TROUBLES AND FACTUAL CONVERSATIONS: DIALOGUE IN ANIMATED FILMS

PAUL WELLS

THREE KINDS OF NATURALISM

It is clear that with so many different kinds of animation there is no one dominant approach to its creation. On the one hand, animated features and TV shows can directly echo the script development and construction of traditional live-action projects, while on the other, animated works can emerge from a whole plethora of original technical and aesthetic devising strategies (see Furniss 2008; Hardstaff and Wells 2008). Even here, though, for example, in the most orthodox aspects of TV script development, there are significant differences. As Jeffrey Scott points out, ‘a script describes the entire story, including a description of all the environments in which the scenes take place, all the action that happens in those environments, and all the dialogue spoken by the characters. In television animation, unlike live action, the cartoon script lays out every detail of the story’ (2003: 21). This level of detail is crucial in the next stage of pre-production, which is the creation of a storyboard and a shooting script, and is often not as imaginatively compromised by economy, since ‘in animation it costs the same to have a character jump out of bed or jump off the Titanic’ (Scott 2003: 14).

What remains fundamental to all animation processes, though, is the focus on visualisation as the core strategy of storytelling and expression, and the way this determines outcomes, particular to animation in its own right (see Wells 2007). The emphasis on the visual should not be mistaken for mere ‘showing not telling’, however, as when sound and, specifically, language is deployed in animated film. It is not to supplement or add, but to prompt further engagement with the visual signature and inscription of the work. Though all film soundtracks are products of sophisticated sound design strategies and applications, the animated film remains distinctive by virtue of the fact that an animation soundtrack is an entirely constructed phenomena, often made in advance of the narrative visualisation of the film, and which, therefore, actually becomes the determinant of its visual execution and timing.

In ‘live action’, the actors’ physical performances are still central to both the visual and aural construction of the film, but in animation only the vocal performance remains significant, because although it is sometimes the case that an animator might watch an actor’s performance during recording for gestural clues pertinent to creating the visual interpretation of the material, this is still ultimately suggested by the final vocal performances. As director, Pete Docter from Pixar Animation, has pointed out, however, that ‘In more cases than not we end up cutting performances together, so that what seems on the screen to be “one line” is actually the editors assembling the perfect take’; his colleague, Lee Unkrich adds: ‘It is a real luxury for our medium that you do not have in live action because you don’t have to “opt” for the performance you have. You can make choices, syllable by syllable sometimes, but if we have done it so seamlessly that the audience don’t notice, you end up with a really great performance.’1 The soundtrack effectively underpins the visualisation, but as well as servicing the typical and expected aspects of traditional character animation in providing a vocal performance, it can also be used in a variety of other ways. The animation itself can liberate sound from its literal context, or the person, object, or environment it seemingly represents or signifies. This approach defines the nature and purpose of the sound pertinent not merely to the expectations of a real situation or environment it suggests, but to the more open codes and conditions of the animated film itself, and the freedoms this affords in transfiguring or re-contextualising form and meaning.

The soundtrack, then, and particularly the nature of the dialogue, can work in several ways, but remain fundamentally related to what scriptwriter Rib Davis (2003) has identified as three core models: selective naturalism, heightened naturalism and non-naturalism.

‘Selective naturalism’ is the ‘bread and butter’ approach to most scriptwriting in that any writing that is based on real-world exchanges and idioms, ‘selects’ from the whole vocabulary of expression in everyday life in order to achieve a plausibly naturalistic model of verbal delivery, while nevertheless creating a highly particular and artificial (if sometimes extraordinarily realistic) dramatic scene. Simply, this kind of work should demonstrate an empathetic feel for a commonality of expression it shares with its audience. Such writing will underpin a conventional model of usually, domestically based, seemingly ordinary and unnoticeable conversation, and support figurative, actor-centred performance.

At another level, though, ‘heightened naturalism’ seeks to work in a more suggestive, rhetorical way, prompting more metaphorical or metaphysical effects, and leans towards codes of self-conscious performance by the protagonists, and more symbolic levels of expression. This may include the ways people actually do ‘perform’ to, and with each other, but relates predominantly to the ways in which ‘genre’ typology and/or ‘specialist’ professional, historical or cultural contexts and languages dictate particular approaches.

This is taken a degree further into ‘non-naturalistic’ stylings, which are predicated on highly specific language structures, for example poetry, singing and joke-making. Animation remains unusual, in that any one animated film may indeed include all three of these registers, and shift between them in scenes and across a whole story – which is still uncommon in live-action narratives. This is principally facilitated by the ease with which animation can employ a variety of visual strategies, metamorphoses and aesthetic shifts (see Wells 1998: 68–126). While animation may already seem non-naturalistic, it can, therefore, still move between high degrees of selective naturalism, effectively a model of mimetic echo (most specifically, perhaps, in animated documentary and its related forms) and pure abstraction (where musical forms predominate in support of non-objective, non-linear expression), without breaking audience belief. It is important to reiterate the view, therefore, that the soundtrack, and particularly the dialogue, can legitimately shift between Davis’ categories, while the visuals they accompany may prompt, but equally, may not necessarily share, the same indexical context or perspective.

ANIMATED PERFORMANCE

A core consideration in the use of these three modes of naturalism remains, however, how they inform character identity and performance, and the impact of ‘star’ identity in their execution. In relation to shifts of indexical context and perspective, it is significant to remember that while Tom Hanks, an established Hollywood star, may ‘voice’ Woody, the pull-string cowboy in Pixar’s Toy Story (1995), Toy Story 2 (1999) and Toy Story 3 (2010), and the audience may sense how Hanks’ performance underscores the persona and value of Woody as a character, Woody soon takes on distinctive identity of his own, as the audience embraces his visual depiction and style (see Wells 2002: 151–71). This effectively negates the possible impact of Hanks’ star persona, and focuses on the vocal and performance idioms of the character. Woody can therefore move across registers, illustrating the ‘selective naturalism’ of being an ordinary ‘person’, speaking to his colleagues in the playroom; the ‘heightened naturalism’ of self-consciously performing as a ‘cowboy’, for example, when seeking to impress his fellow ‘Round-Up’ toys in the second film; and the ‘non-naturalism’ of ‘being a toy’, when he must necessarily enact the automata role his function as a toy dictates (and in moments of self-conscious ‘gag-making’). This is constantly reinforced, as in all aspects of animation, by the degree of control that may be exercised over the material in hand. Audiences must forget, in some respects that they are watching an animated character, or hearing Tom Hanks’ voice, to achieve the desired effect of believing in Woody as if he were speaking naturally, and if the film is to succeed in its approach to predominantly classical storytelling.

While ultimately, one might argue that all animated stories are in some way fantastical, the degree and intensity of their ‘naturalistic’ modality in relation to visualisation and performance ultimately dictates how dialogue is written, produced and used. The performances that serve to underpin these approaches also inevitably differ in some respects from their live-action counterparts. We have already noted the approach in a film like Beowulf, which seeks to let the actors work in a more conventional fashion (albeit in lycra suits and in a Jerzy Grotowski-style ‘poor theatre’ environment!) but this remains unusual, as single performances are preferred rather than duos or groups, in order to maintain the greatest control over the sound elements. This is sometimes not the case if key actors can be brought together to mutually enact already tightly-scripted scenes, or allowed to improvise with the scripts they are given. This occurred, for example, when Billy Crystal and John Goodman played Mike and Scully in Pixar’s Monsters Inc (2001).2 This template is fundamentally drawn from the Golden Age of the animated cartoon during the 1940s, in which leading voice talents like Mel Blanc and June Foray performed a dialogue script for a cartoon once the core storyboarding and shooting script was finalised, though sometimes this was reversed and performers had to time their delivery to already animated moving mouths (see Lawson and Persons 2004). It is worth noting, then, that master Warner Bros. animator, Chuck Jones, saw a close relationship between the quasi-theatrical performances of such voice actors and the creative processes of the animator. Jones notes that ‘animation is acting and an animator must respond to the same exacting disciplines as an actor does … Just as the actor demonstrates a part not by what he looks like but how he moves, so the animator takes simple graphics and brings them to life in the way they move and by the intricate timing necessary to achieve that life’ (1990: 181). Less stressed in this process, though, is that such timing is often dictated by the actor in speaking dialogue and suggesting an emotive move through the vocal performance, which might then be captured in the animation itself. It is this aspect I wish to initially track in Jones’ work.

PRONOUN TROUBLES

As Jones notes, ‘Humorous dialogue, we discovered, is not what is said; it is where it is said, how it is said, who is doing the saying, and who are the characters involved and/or physically or verbally responsive to that dialogue … underlying all humour is the necessary logic, believability and ultimate sympathy (1990: 210). This character-centered, situation-based model of humour necessitates that the key figures are already defined in their core motivations, and that these aspects of the characters should create dramatic conflict, which in turn prompt the comic events. By casting the wise-ass Bugs Bunny responding to the naïve, yet singularly driven ingénue, Elmer Fudd, and the neurotic Daffy Duck, himself constantly poised between aspirant dignity and the descent into madness, Jones sets up a highly charged set of relationships in which the language each uses will be fundamental in determining their fate.

In this trio’s case, this occurs most famously, in Rabbit Seasoning (1952). In a typical scenario, Elmer is hunting, but he is deceived by Daffy into believing that this is ‘rabbit season’, and not ‘duck season’. Daffy leads Elmer directly to Bugs’ burrow. Elmer attempts to shoot Bugs down his hole, but in typical laconic fashion, Bugs has already made his exit and approaches Elmer to ask him if he has had any luck in catching a rabbit, to which he replies, ‘Well, no, as a matter of fact, I haven’t even seen a rabbit yet.’³ This incenses Daffy, who insists on pointing out to Elmer that Bugs is a rabbit, and catalysing the following exchange:

BUGS: It’s true, doc. I’m a rabbit alright. Would you like to shoot me now, or wait ‘til you get home?

DAFFY (screaming): Shoot him now! Shoot him now!

BUGS: You keep out of this – he doesn’t have to shoot you now.

DAFFY: He does so have to shoot me now. I command that you shoot me now. (Elmer shoots Daffy, who recovers and approaches Bugs)

DAFFY (to Bugs): Let’s just run through that again.

BUGS: OK. (deadpan) Would you like to shoot me now, or wait ‘til you get home?

DAFFY (deadpan): Shoot him now! Shoot him now!

BUGS (deadpan): You keep out of this – he doesn’t have to shoot you now.

DAFFY: That’s it! Hold it right there! Pronoun trouble. (pause) It’s not ‘He doesn’t have to shoot you now’, it’s ‘He doesn’t have to shoot me now’. Well, I say he does have to shoot me now!! (dashes to Elmer) So, shoot me now!! (after having been shot again, he rushes back to Bugs, once again)

BUGS: Yes?

DAFFY (shutting his own mouth before saying something unconsidered once more): Oh no you don’t, not again. (pause) Sorry. (approaches Elmer) This time we’ll try it from the other end. (to Elmer) Look, you’re a hunter, right?

ELMER: Right.

DAFFY: And this is rabbit season, right?

ELMER: Right.

BUGS: And if he was a rabbit, what would you do?

DAFFY: Yeah, you’re so smart. If I was a rabbit, what would you do?

ELMER: Well, I’d … (Elmer shoots him)

DAFFY: Not again.

This deceptively simple yet complex exchange is based wholly on the core principles of each character: Bugs’ inherent capability to resist the threat towards him, by standing back and cleverly exploiting the weaknesses of his adversaries; Daffy’s obsessive but ill-considered attempts to harm him; and Elmer’s inability to question any logic in which he is implicated – all are rewarded by the fact that Daffy and Elmer are inevitably self-defeating. In this instance, this self-defeat is engineered by the manipulation of language: the dialogue re-configuring the cartoon into a linguistic rather than action-led chase. Even when the cartoon finally launches into a literal chase, and also uses another of its standard visual comic devices in having Bugs appear in drag, Daffy exasperatedly points out to Elmer, ‘Surely, you’re not going to be taken in by that old gag?’, before finally exposing Bugs’ disguise. This, of course, leads to a dénouement which echoes the earlier exchange:

BUGS: He’s got me dead to rights, doc. Would you like to shoot him here, or wait until you get home?

DAFFY: Oh no you don’t. Not this time. (turns to Elmer) Wait until you get home.

ELMER: All wight.

They quietly return to Elmer’s cabin, and Elmer once again shoots Daffy. The final exchange sees Daffy confront Bugs with his standard summation of his own frustration, ‘You’re dethpicable!!’

Jones’ evaluation points to the importance of context and expectation in the construction of any dialogue, and not merely in a comic scenario. This relates to the ways in which selective naturalism effectively works as the presiding convention for exchange, before its terms and conditions are potentially re-worked or undermined in numerous animated films. As Jonah Lehrer has pointed out in his discussion of the ways in which Gertrude Stein’s creative writing anticipates the critical work of Noam Chomsky, ‘the presence of linguistic structures is hard to reveal. They are designed to be invisible, the clandestine scaffolding of our sentences. Stein’s insight was that the reader was only aware of grammar when it was subverted’ (2008: 164). This sense of subversion in playing with language, in part, of course, becomes one of the fundamental aspects of animated joke-making. In this context, ‘Selected naturalism’ – the dominant form of writing for scripts – in itself works to resolve the apparent contradiction of removing the repetitions, sentence breakdowns, divergence of thought within sentences, mannerisms or localised phrases that characterise improvised everyday speech, and so on, without removing the sense that someone could actually be saying these words. Jones’ move towards ‘heightened naturalism’ or ‘non-naturalism’, then, works as a re-imposition of such chosen repetitions, divergences and so on, that subversively exposes the grammar as a tool in creating animated comic outcomes, condensing oral delivery, and visual action into a surreal dramatic conflict.

Bugs’ sense of linguistic play, and its physical and material consequences in the cartoon, is identified by Daffy as ‘pronoun trouble’. This works as a metaphorical shorthand by which the impact of animation itself might be measured in the creation and execution of dialogue, particularly in traditional cartoons. A pronoun, of course, is a linguistic device; something, which indicates without explicitly naming, and in many senses this operates as a functional definition for the ways in which dialogue (indeed, monologue and vocal performance, in general) works in animation, to offer up stimuli for visualisation, and suggest ‘difference’ in narrative exposition and emotional meaning. Once the implications of sound, and explicitly the dialogue in this case, are interpreted and constructed in animation, they effectively demonstrate how the language of animation legitimises a different and varied set of logics in verbal and textual language. This can prompt representations as clear as the visual/verbal pun, or the visual/verbal re-direction or reversal in ways indicated above, but also, in the visual/verbal re-interrogation and revision permitted through the language of heightened naturalism.

FACTUAL CONVERSATIONS

‘Heightened naturalism’ often seeks to use the language that has come to define certain established genres. Such genres are also adapted for film and TV animation. Though arguably a mix of genres, approaches, and techniques, Jeffrey Scott notes that these include ‘Action Adventure (Batman); Action-Comedy (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles); Anime (Dragonball Z); Comedy (Hey Arnold, Doug); Dramatic (Prince of Egypt); Educational (Dora the Explorer; The Magic School Bus); Musical (Little Mermaid; Beauty and the Beast); Preschool (Blues Clues; Dragon Tales); Sci-Fi (Starchaser: The Legend of Orin); Sit-Com (The PJs; King of the Hill); Squash and Stretch (Catdog; Ren & Stimpy)’ (2003: 14). More often than not, though, while much ‘live action’ cinema and television use dialogue as a mainstay of storytelling and the expositional revelation of generic motifs, animation tends to use dialogue to further facilitate what might be termed ‘vignettes’ or ‘riffs’ which prompt ‘abstract’ outcomes, i.e. the understanding of ‘a gag’ or the recognition of a ‘metaphor’. This might be readily evidenced in the opening scene from Dreamworks’ feature, Antz (1998). Z, an ant, introduces the story:

Z (o.s.) (over a dark screen): All my life, I’ve lived and worked in the big city... EXT. AN ANT MOUND – DAY

The camera swoops towards the entrance, then dives inside, past a couple of tough-looking soldier ants who stand at the gates of the ant colony like insect bouncers … into an access tunnel that snakes this way and that, past a row of ants plodding along and into the MAIN CHAMBER of the colony, a huge, teeming vista that seems to stretch away forever, filled with ants rushing here and there on their business. We see: a ‘traffic cop’ directing foot traffic, waving his arms like crazy so both sides move at once; a column of soldier ants marching along in formation; a chain of ants letting down a matchbox elevator filled with workers.

Z (v.o.): …which is kind of a problem, since I’ve always felt uncomfortable in crowds.

INT. MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELLOR’S OFFICE – DAY

We join Z, a worker ant with issues. He’s lying on a couch, recounting his woes.

Z: I feel … isolated. Different. I’ve got abandonment issues. My father flew away when I was just a larva. My mother didn’t have much time for me … when you have five million siblings, it’s difficult to get attention. (pause) I feel physically inadequate – I’ve never been able to lift more than ten times my own weight. Sometimes I think I’m just not cut out to be a worker. But I don’t have any other options. I was assigned to trade school when I was just a grub. The whole system just … makes me feel … insignificant.

MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELLOR (enthusiastic): Terrific! You should feel insignificant! For the first time, we see the ant MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELLOR. He’s a mixture of Tony Robbins and Ron Popiel, the hyperactive late-night TV huckster, and founder of ‘Ronco’).

Z: … I should?

MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELLOR (hopping around enthusiastically): YES!!! You know, people ask me, ‘Doctor, why are you always happy?’ And I tell them it’s mind over matter. I don’t mind that I don’t matter! Do you get it? Do you get it?

Z gives a fake smile.

MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELLOR (incredibly ‘up’): Z, we’re part of the fastest-growing species in the whole world!

The counsellor rolls down a chart from the wall. An arrow shows ant population going up, up, up.

MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELLOR: Ask me why we’re so successful.

Z: Why are we so successful?

MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELLOR: I’m glad you asked me that question!

The motivational counsellor opens some blinds … and we see a vista of the antfilled chamber below.

MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELLOR: What do you see out there?

Z: … Ants …

MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELLOR: Right! Ants! Millions of creatures, each with his assigned task, all pulling together!

Down below, we see a group of ants carrying a boulder up an incline. One worker ants slips, and the boulder rolls down, crushing his leg. The other ants rush over – it looks like they’re going to help their fallen comrade, but instead, they climb right over him, and pick up the boulder, continuing with their task. MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELLOR: You see? Being an ant is being able to say, ‘Hey, I’m meaningless, you’re meaningless’.

Z: But … but I’ve always felt life was about finding meaning … and then sharing it with someone special, someone you love.

The motivational counsellor puts his arm on Z’s shoulder. He seems to understand.

MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELLOR: Z … you need help. (looking at a clock) Whoops! We’re gonna have to stop there. Your minute is up!

The counsellor ushers Z out of his seat and towards the door.

MOTIVATIONAL COUNSELLOR: Now back to work! We’ve made real progress! Remember: let’s be the best superorganism we can be!

This opening scene establishes the conditions of the ant colony, but more particularly localises the dialogue within the ‘generic’ idioms of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, in which a counsellor and a patient discuss a particular problem and its possible resolution. Such ‘heightened naturalism’ uses dialogue to establish a professional exchange in which a counsellor seeks to identify an issue which is troubling his patient, stereotypically by seeking its source in the patient’s past, and in a spirit of resolving the difficulty. This structures the dialogue, but places it within the further filter of the incongruous re-contextualisation of discussing ‘individuality’ within an environment of mass ‘commonality’, the ant colony. This, of course, becomes the core theme of the film, in exploring how individual aspirations to personal satisfaction sit uneasily against the determining factors of conformity in the face of a common and seemingly imposed goal. At one level, then, a playful and amusing exchange about personal inadequacy; at another, the early hints of a metaphoric engagement with quasi-fascist principles, and the very meaning of existence itself.

Such a narrative uses animation’s natural proclivity to foreground its artifice and aesthetic illusionism as the terms and conditions by which characters and situations take on an iconic as well as literal force. The capacity for animation to promote various degrees of abstraction, even in its most figurative of forms, and yet to simultaneously accommodate shifting registers of naturalism enable it to impose different functions upon the dialogue. If Jones’ ‘pronoun trouble’ is a lingua franca of the way in which dialogue works in many animated cartoons, to promote suggestion and re-direction, then the imperative towards the ‘factual conversation’ is often the currency of many animated films seeking to vindicate, authenticate, or validate a more complex, thematically-engaged narrative. This serves to confirm further how dialogue is used to enervate and energise the pictorial discourse.

The ‘factual conversations’ operating in these films are essentially models of ‘heightened naturalism’, but work as a re-configuration of ‘selective naturalism’ (authentic aspects of improvised or spontaneous speaking, by real people talking), where ‘characters’ have their stories, statements and actions subjected to different levels of visual interpretation not necessarily moored to indexically conceived notions of the material reality. Aardman Animation in the UK have a long history of using vocal tracks created from the views and opinions of real members of the public, and animating scenarios to them. This technique was introduced to Peter Lord and Dave Sproxton, the founders of Aardman, by Bill Mather. Mather was Head of Graphics at the BBC, and the creator of ‘Digger’, the stop-motion man-with-a-shovel, featured on the children’s art-focused series, Vision On (broadcast 1964–76). He produced a pilot film called Audition (1977), using his son’s audition piece for a church choir, and commissioned Lord and Sproxton to make more ‘Animated Conversations’, with a social awareness: Down and Out (1978), set in a Salvation Army hostel, and Confessions of a Foyer Girl (1978), set in a cinema. The object of such pieces was to foreground significant social and cultural practices and issues, which had in a sense been taken for granted, and ignored. The animation, in effect, refreshed the issues in the public imagination, and foregrounded a social conscience. Impressed by Aardman’s work, the new head of Channel Four television, Jeremy Isaacs, commissioned five ‘Lip-Sync’ films, which included Going Equipped (1987), the confessions of an imprisoned, serial thief; War Story (1989), Bill Perry’s recollections of his war-time experiences; and Nick Park’s celebrated Creature Comforts (1989), integrating people’s opinions of zoos and evaluations of their own habitats. The ‘dialogue’ here is a constructed one, with an implied interviewee, though the conversational response itself, of course, was produced through a real interview exchange.

Producer of the contemporary television series of Creature Comforts (2006), Gareth Owen, notes:

We found that interviewing people in situ – either doing their jobs or hobbies, catching people unawares on the street etc, got us some great material. The interviewees generally forgot they were being recorded and were completely relaxed. This also meant that they were talking about something they felt passionately about. We told our interviewers to leave a lot of gaps before jumping in with their next question – an uncomfortable silence would more often than not be filled in with the ramblings of the interviewee and produced some of the best material we got. In fact we found that the onus of getting good material quite often lay with having a good interview technique.4

In this sense, then, the ‘dialogue’ is prompted by seeking to secure answers around a thematic need, and using the particularity of the responses to catalyse the design for, and execution of, the animation. Selected interviewees were invited to participate in more extended discussions of up to three hours around a range of topics, and once all the material was recorded, writers sought out pertinent material for characters, exchanges and developing scenarios. In seeing the relationships to the themes through the dialogues the writers found the implicit structure and meaning to the material, which was then made explicit by the interpretation in the animation. Even though the characters were animals, the tension between their status as animals and the words spoken by the participants added another level to the discourse (see Wells 2009: 165–7). This was essentially to point up how people somehow succeed in communicating what they mean, even when the means by which they express themselves is highly flawed, ambiguous and open-ended. Again, this merely reinforces the view that the specificity of what is being said, and how it is chosen, actually guides the animation in the revelation of its theme. Ultimately, this is to expose the high degree of ignorance, foible and limitation in human communication. This degree of self-consciousness, both in the soundtrack material itself and the construction of the visual interpretation, becomes the subject of the piece. The ‘heightened naturalism’ here is used playfully; the animation drawing attention to the dialogue, not in a critical way, but in a spirit of a common ‘lack’ we all might share, and pointing up how, in effect, ‘humour’ becomes the filter and safety valve by which the views and opinions, of British people in particular, might be successfully mediated and understood.

This process and its outcomes are perhaps best illustrated by more implicitly analytical or polemic pieces, however, as the final intention of the Aardman pieces is still to amuse. ‘Factual conversations’ can be used to yet more powerful ends. Australian filmmakers, Alexandra and David Beesley’s piece, Revolving Door (2006), explores the street life of a working prostitute, Gillian, on the streets of St Kilda, Melbourne, animating over vérité-style ‘live action’ footage. This has the function of once more showing real human beings in complex and challenging situations, while re-configuring human participants as iconic and symbolic ciphers for the issues at stake. A client, made anonymous by the animated drawing over his face, is no longer someone who might be stigmatised or criticised as an individual, but someone whose position comes to delineate and exemplify the reality of the motives and needs of a man seeking out a prostitute. Cruising the streets in his car, speaking to his interlocutor, he says:

I’ve got this really healthy interest in sex … I always have, but my wife … she doesn’t like to do certain things … like oral sex. She’s great, I really love her, but it gets really frustrating, so I find myself every fortnight, I go to St. Kilda and cruise around … and it’s cheaper than going to the brothels.

He adds:

I love this circuit … Grey Street to Blessington, Grieve, Fitzroy Street … Here’s Fitzroy Street, bit empty at the moment. Fitzroy, Inkerman Street. I love this place – it’s like window shopping.

and admits:

So the girls I look out for are the ones who are really out of it … They are more fun. You can haggle with them, you can always cut the price down – sometimes, if you’re lucky, they’ll even suck you off without a condom and that’s good.

In presenting the client in this way, and similarly, Gillian herself, the documentary insists upon directing the issues away from the literal and personal, into the abstract and social. Below is another dialogue following Gillian’s arrest by the police. The animation once more renders this as an exchange which is more than an everyday arrest, essentially making it a dialogue between ‘the police’ and ‘prostitutes’, but by extension, a discourse about ethical behaviour and social inequality, implicating government and the legal system.

FEMALE POLICE OFFICER: And turn right here. Just take a seat over there, please.

MALE POLICE OFFICER: You calmed down a bit now?

GILLIAN: Yep.

MALE POLICE OFFICER: That’s good … um, we have to go through a few more details, alright?

GILLIAN: OK

MALE POLICE OFFICER: What’s your name please?

GILLIAN: Gillian Colby.

MALE POLICE OFFICER: Date of birth again please, Gillian.

GILLIAN: 26th of the fourth.

MALE POLICE OFFICER: What’s your address please? (no answer) I’ll ask you again, what were you doing on Grey Street – there’s not a lot of point in lying about it, really.

GILLIAN: I was just down the street visiting friends.

MALE POLICE OFFICER: Well, I put it to you that you were down in Grey Street prostituting yourself. You were seen on two occasions, and one of these occasions you were speaking to a male driver in a bronze-coloured Corolla.

GILLIAN: OK, so I was working down the street. Yeah, get it over and done with … I was working down the street – I just got, just arrived down Grey Street, I hadn’t even done a client yet.

MALE POLICE OFFICER: Why did you say you weren’t working down in Grey Street?

GILLIAN: I didn’t think I would get all this hassle.

MALE POLICE OFFICER: OK, why did you come down to Grey Street?

GILLAIN: To work.

MALE POLICE OFFICER: OK, what is your reason for loitering for prostitution in Grey Street?

GILLIAN: Poverty.

MALE POLICE OFFICER: Poverty? … What we’ll do now is complete the paperwork, and there is no reason if we can establish who you are and your address that you can get bailed, alright, on your own undertaking.

GILLIAN: OK

This kind of animated documentary, like, for example, Learned by Heart (2007), Chainsaw (2007), Persepolis (2008), or Waltz with Bashir (2008), all employ animation to foreground ‘factual conversations’ as a recognition of the ‘naïve histories’ embodied in everyday exchanges, and which, by virtue of their representation in animation, challenge the orthodoxy of ‘grand narratives’, and the ideological assumptions of each social context. When Gillian enters the police station in Revolving Door, she is a woman at the mercy of social abandonment, a victim of the legal system, and the subject of cultural disdain, but it is the animation which, in effect, makes these political issues and not merely the easily dismissible condition of one person.

Though the audience may bring its own prejudices and judgements to these issues, the documentary itself is dedicated to using the dialogue to articulate the imperatives and actions involved, and not to personalise an issue in ways that distract from the social and cultural agenda being addressed. The capacity with which animation can add a metaphoric intensity to the dialogue, creates what might be termed a ‘visibility of speech’, which whether used as a comic vehicle or a social statement, insists upon a conscious re-engagement with, and a fresh understanding of what we have come to accept as embodied in the three modes of ‘naturalism’ considered here. Clearly, therefore, animation amplifies the dialogue in all contexts, so that it finally might be listened to and not merely heard.

notes

1 Interview with the author, November 2001.

2 Interview with the author, November 2001. It should be noted, though, that Sony Pictureworks’ Surfs Up (2007) took this conventional idea of vocal production further by recording actors improvising around a basic script or theme, so that the film could achieve the highest degree of authenticity in the conversational exchanges to support the film’s fictional conceit of being a Bruce Brown-style surf documentary film.

3 All dialogue citations are from my transcriptions of the film, unless otherwise noted.

4 Interview with the author, January 2007.

bibliography

Davis, R. (2003) Writing Dialogue for Scripts. London: A&C Black.

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