Advertising and Public Service Films
Malcolm Cook
Animation and advertising have been entwined from the earliest days of moving images, and every major animator and animation studio has contributed to films promoting goods, services and ideas. In the past animation studies has ignored or marginalized this central activity, seeing it as detracting from animation as an art form. The importance of animation to digital techniques and technologies, which are now pervasive in advertising and all moving pictures, demands a reassessment of this position, and is supported by a new attention within film studies to ‘useful cinema’, including ‘films that sell’ (Acland and Wasson 2011a; Florin, de Klerk and Vonderau 2016). By looking again at key examples of animated advertising, and consulting recent pioneering research in this area, we can recognize the way each field shaped the expansion of the other. Vital qualities of animation were recognized and developed for their suitability within advertising, including the animator’s control and manipulation of the image, the subsequent transformation and ‘plasmatic’ nature of those images, and the ability to bring to life and anthropomorphize inanimate objects. Animation would not exist in the form we understand today without advertising. Much of this history remains to be uncovered and many questions are still unanswered, indicating this as one of the most exciting avenues for future animation research.
Advertising and animation history
While animation is today characterized by a diversity of techniques, three methods have dominated animation history and define it for most audiences: drawn or cel animation, stop-motion animation and computer animation. In each case, the earliest developments of these techniques were bound up with advertising in a way that suggests animation was not simply a pre-existing tool adopted by advertisers, but rather its very definition and elaboration were predicated on its promotional potential. There are countless examples of this, but three formative moments, one for each technique, indicate this foundational relationship.
Advertising and selling underpin some of the very earliest steps towards drawn animation. James Stuart Blackton is often cited as ‘the father of animation’ (Beck 2004: 12–13) and in his first film in collaboration with the inventor and film pioneer Thomas Edison the promotional impulse is prominent. Blackton Sketches, No. 1 (1896), also known as Inventor Edison Sketched by World Artist, shows Blackton performing a lightning sketch on a large sheet of paper (Musser 1994: 120–121). As Charles Musser (2016: 86) observes, all the early Edison films should be considered a form of advertising because they promoted Edison’s moving picture technologies and the Edison name, qualities that are evident in this example. Furthermore, Blackton conspicuously displays his own name and that of his employer, the New York World newspaper, ensuring both were publicized by the film. This film is not animated in the sense we understand that term today, as it does not utilize intermittent frame-by-frame construction, but given the significance of the lightning sketch to animation history (See Crafton 1982; Cook 2013) this constitutes a nascent co-development of drawn animation and filmed advertising in the earliest days of moving images.
While Blackton was innovating early drawn animation techniques in conjunction with the promotion of his own and his employers’ names, British animator Arthur Melbourne-Cooper’s Matches Appeal (dated as early as 1899 by some sources) provides an embryonic demonstration of the use of stop-motion animated films to deliver a persuasive message (Vries and Mul 2009). The film depicts a puppet made of matchsticks that, through stop-motion animation, writes a message on the wall, encouraging viewers to donate one guinea to buy matches for soldiers serving overseas. This very short film serves a public service function of supporting troops and encouraging charitable donation. It also serves as a commercial stimulus: increasing the sponsor’s (Bryant & May Matches) sales and raising brand awareness and loyalty by connecting the company to social altruism. At that time, the stop-motion technique was a novelty that would have especially attracted the attention of the spectator and made them receptive to the message of the film, but it also allowed the product being promoted to come alive, a process that would be vital to later animated advertising.
While drawn and stop-motion animation emerged alongside the earliest moving pictures, the third dominant animation technique appeared much later. As Tom Sito (2013) has shown, computer graphics technology was developed within a number of contexts after the Second World War and the promotion of products, services and brands became an important component of that early computer animation, such as the relationship between John Whitney and IBM in the 1960s (Stamp 2013).
The early history of Pixar provides a vivid case study of this mutual relationship between computer animation and advertising, both because of the central role that company has played in defining and popularizing computer animation and because it demonstrates the value of thinking beyond the animated film itself and considering the production and exhibition contexts in which they appeared. It is well documented that Pixar produced a large number of television commercials after their spin-off from Lucasfilm in 1986, promoting household brands such as Tropicana, Listerine and Lifesavers. Most popular histories of the studio recognize the economic importance of this work in financially maintaining the studio and advancing skills and infrastructure prior to the production of Toy Story (1995) (Paik and Iwerks 2007: 64–68; Price 2008: 109–111). However, the studio has not given their commercials the same status as other short films, which have been included as DVD extras and released in standalone collections.1 This is typical of a prevailing deprecation of the role advertising has played in other famous studios, such as Aardman and Halas & Batchelor, where a simple art/commerce binary division has often been applied (Cook Forthcoming; Stewart 2016). The role of advertising in Pixar’s history is far more pervasive than such a division allows.
Most early Pixar films had very little prospect of directly generating revenue, but instead served to advertise and sell their other products and services. The ‘one-frame movie’ The Road to Point Reyes (1983), produced while the group was part of Lucasfilm, served to demonstrate to George Lucas that computer-generated images could be incorporated into feature films at high resolution and, as such, promoted the company’s internal Computer Division (Cook 2015). Early films The Adventures of André and Wally B. (1984) and Luxo Jr. (1986) were designed to showcase the group’s expertise to SIGGRAPH, the major computer graphics conference (Lasseter 2001). Equally, Luxo Jr. opens and closes with the original Pixar logo that closely resembled the fascia of the Pixar computer hardware, which was the company’s only commercial proposition at the time. This logo had a computer-generated grey square with bevelled edges and a central concave circle creating complex variations in computed shadows and highlights (see Figure 12.1). The logo not only acted as product placement, but was also an active demonstration of the lighting and shading techniques that the computer could achieve, as was the film as a whole. Later shorts, including Tin Toy (1988) and Knick Knack (1989), would similarly function as indirect advertisements for Pixar’s Renderman software. These films would also court Hollywood studios and advertisers, promoting the availability of Pixar’s talent for new projects. A purely film-based approach might simply interpret such films as commercial entertainment; however, the value of the questions raised by the study of ‘useful cinema’ is evident here. It is necessary to take into consideration how these films were commissioned, circulated and exhibited to understand their very different function, use and economic value, where the film is not an end product or principal profit generator (Elsaesser 2009: 23; Acland and Wasson 2011b: 1–7; Vonderau 2016: 4).
The centrality of advertising to Pixar is evident in their successful and celebrated feature films, in many of which television commercials become a prominent and recurrent narrative feature. Beyond this explicit citation of advertising vernacular, a number of scholars have noted the more persistent use of advertising strategies within Pixar’s aesthetic, suggesting a substantial reassessment of the studio and its output is necessary in this light (Gurevitch 2012; Herhuth 2017; Holliday 2017).
Advertising and the emergence of animation studies
Given this close relationship between animation and advertising, landmark works of animation studies necessarily acknowledged advertising to some degree. In his 1982 book Before Mickey Donald Crafton (228–237) devoted several pages to silent-era European advertising and instructional films, including relatively unknown figures who devoted their career to these fields, such as Julius Pinschewer in Germany and Robert Collard in France, also known as Lortac. However, this discussion was framed in terms of an art/commerce binary wherein advertising subsidized aesthetic experiments by the likes of Walter Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger (Crafton 1982: 235). Writing in 1998 Paul Wells noted that ‘animation is particularly appropriate to the needs of advertising’ (249n2) and described its capacity to bring products to life and create product identity. Yet it is revealing that this insight was relegated to an endnote, symptomatic of Wells’s primary goal of elevating animation to an independent art form worthy of study in its own right. This was equally apparent in his discussion of Len Lye’s A Colour Box (1935), a landmark animated advertisement for the British General Post Office. Wells dismissed the advertising message of this film as a ‘glib coda’, distancing the aesthetic value of the film from its funding and distribution contexts.
Maureen Furniss, also in 1998, explored the influence of advertising on animation history. Drawing on the work of Karl Cohen, she situated advertising’s influence as primarily an economic and technological one, with 1940s television commercials innovating the low-cost limited animation techniques that became typical for post-war television animation (Furniss 2007: 142–144; Cohen 1992). In 1993 Norman M. Klein likewise offered an ambivalent account of post-war animated ‘consumer graphics’, and he expressed amazement at Tex Avery’s comfort in the ‘ulcerous’ advertising world (206, 216). Klein adopted an elegiac tone as he saw the rise of this consumerist mode of animation contributing to the death of the seven-minute theatrical cartoon. In each case, these pioneering animation scholars recognized the significance of advertising within animation history, but saw this as negative or tangential to animation as an art form. Recent research has started to recognize that rather than being antagonistic, the mutual relationship between advertising and animation has deeply shaped and defined each field. Fundamental qualities ascribed to animation, including control, abstraction and figuration, transformation and anthropomorphism were not simply utilized by advertisers, rather their identification and growth was a direct product of their suitability for selling and promotion. Instead of being essential and universal, our very definition of animation and its qualities emerged historically because of their use in advertising.
Advertising and recent animation theory
Crafton (1979: 409–428; 1982: 11) has established the importance within animation history of the controlling influence of the animator, encapsulated in the pervasive recurring iconography of the ‘hand of the artist’. The intricate frame-by-frame construction typical of animation techniques offers unprecedented control over the moving image, and this was undoubtedly one of the reasons advertisers adopted animation. Michael Cowan has recently addressed this central idea in relation to animated advertising in Germany in the 1920s. The control afforded by animation was understood in practical terms of the novelty and plasticity of the image, which could attract viewers and maintain design principles from marketing material in other media or the product itself. However, Cowan (2016: 108) shows that control could also operate at a psychological level, with practitioners intending that ‘“applied animation” would serve to control spectatorship at every level by capturing and directing attention, provoking psychological reactions and stimulating acts of consumption through film’.
As Cowan demonstrates, the growth in advertising psychology expertise in Germany in this period was intimately connected with the parallel growth in abstract animation from Walter Ruttmann, Hans Richter, Lotte Reiniger and Oskar Fischinger, among other celebrated animators. Rather than being ‘compromises or opportunistic means of financing the artists’ more “serious” experimental projects’, there was an affinity and mutually beneficial influence between experimental animation and advertising psychology (Cowan 2013: 50–51). Both fields were looking to establish an essential or elemental form of visual control that could appeal and communicate with spectators in immediate and affecting ways. A central characteristic of animation, control through the hand of the artist, is here inextricably bound up with advertising, as are a number of celebrated animation artists.
Cowan’s work on Walter Ruttmann’s advertising films also associates them with another central area of animation theory, the balance between figuration and abstraction (Cowan 2013). This division is evident in many accounts of animation and its specificity, for example Furniss foregrounds a continuum between mimesis and abstraction, while Wells makes these central to his theory of animation (Wells 1998: 33–34, 36; Furniss 2007: 6). Through the close analysis of Ruttmann’s animated advertising films Cowan indicates how ‘the particular quality of these films lies in the way they seem to hover between absolute formalism and denotative referentiality’ (2013: 53). This tension is again not simply a product of aesthetic experimentation or choice, but is linked with the advertising psychology of the time and the wider political, social and cultural context of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s (Cowan 2013: 65).
The conflict between figuration and abstraction is also central to Vivian Sobchack’s (2008) discussion of the animated line. For Sobchack the line is sufficient to define a work as animation and distinguish it from photoreal cinema, because the line does not exist in the latter (2008: 252). The line is two things at once, a liminal entity that is always in a state of becoming, it is ‘both geometric base and figural superstructure’ (Sobchack 2008: 257). Sobchack chooses to illustrate this general principle with a series of television advertisements made by German animator Raimund Krumme for Hilton Hotels, transmitted originally in 2005–6. In these advertisements, a horizontal line on the screen dynamically assumes human shapes engaged with a range of imagery associated with travel: a hammock, a sand castle, a sunset. Initially Sobchack discounts these films’ status as advertising: the qualities of their lines are apparent ‘even if in the service of an advertising campaign’ (2008: 251). Yet her discussion of the promotional message contained in the films indicates that it is no mere coincidence that advertisements offer such an exemplary instance of a vital quality of animation. The commercials are not intended simply to offer a rational promotion of Hilton’s services, but to foster an emotional bond with the brand and ideals it hopes to encompass: ‘the Hilton ads momentarily relieve real-world existential conditions by offering up fantasies of painless travel … and by presenting the visibly unbroken (if irregular) flow of the line itself’ (Sobchack 2008: 260). The duality of the line communicates the duality of the promotional message. Like Cowan’s discussion of Ruttmann’s work, it would seem these animated qualities exist because of their advertising intentions, not despite them. Crucially it is not simply the line that is important to Sobchack, as this exists in many forms of print advertising, but the animated line and the quality of transformation or metamorphosis this entails, which are also commonly seen as defining animation.
Similar uses of transformation and metamorphosis can be seen in many other advertisements, and not necessarily those dependent upon the animated line. Numerous stop-motion advertisements by British studio Aardman Animations use clay or plasticine to enact metamorphoses from abstract, amorphous materials to figurative representations. In Fairground (1991), Balloon (1991) and Rollercoaster (1994) the chocolate of a Cadbury’s Crunchie bar transforms into a series of vibrant scenes, such as a dog chasing its tail or Tiller girls dancing, that communicate the unrestrained joy and freedom of the ‘Friday Feeling’ the confectionary hopes to sell. Transformation allows a shift from the rational benefits of a product to its emotional engagement. As with other examples discussed here qualities often seen as essential and defining of animation, in this case transformation or metamorphosis, become central to films’ advertising function.
These examples from Aardman of transformation and metamorphosis also encompass the final recurring quality of animation addressed in this chapter, anthropomorphism. The attribution of human characteristics to animals or objects is common in animation, along with the inverse zoomorphism in which animal characteristics are attributed to humans. As Paul Wells suggests, it might be argued that anthropomorphism is an ‘essential component of the language of animation’ (2009: 2). Anthropomorphism has commonly been utilized by advertisers, and its association with animation is inextricably bound up with that relationship. The basic appeal of anthropomorphism for advertisers is readily apparent as it provides a way to give motion and life to an inanimate product (thereby giving it a personality) and associate it with less tangible values that will appeal to consumers at an emotional level. As such anthropomorphism provides an extension of the practice of creating brand mascots or spokespersons for products, in which the product itself is given a personality rather than simply represented by one (Dotz and Husain 2015).
Several scholars have commented on this basic practical function of anthropomorphism and noted its more complex political implications. Both Esther Leslie and Michael Cowan raise Karl Marx’s description of commodity fetishism and link it to animation and the anthropomorphism of inanimate objects (Leslie 2002: 6–9; Cowan 2016: 99). Marx’s theory suggests that within capitalism commodities seemingly take on an independent life of their own, while workers are alienated from their labour and dehumanized: ‘Humans become things; things become human’ (Leslie 2002: 7). Leslie and Cowan discuss advertisements from Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to illustrate this, but this tendency is evident in a wide range of examples, including the Melbourne-Cooper, Pixar and Aardman films already discussed. Another Aardman advertisement, Conveyor Belt (1995) for the Polo brand of confectionary, is especially apt in highlighting this quality. The advertisement is set in a factory and shows a long line of anthropomorphized Polo sweets hopping along a conveyor belt in a childlike manner. Importantly, in contrast to these ‘living’ Polos, there are no human workers seen in this factory, only automated machines that operate in a regimented and systematic fashion. In short, this advertisement shows the commodity has gained independent agency and human personality, while the work of production has been dehumanized. This exemplifies the widespread use of anthropomorphism within advertising to give a sense of life and personality to products and its encapsulation of the commodity fetish, but it might also be taken as a reflection on animation. Animation is itself a product in which inanimate objects take on movement, life and an apparent independent agency, while the labour involved in their production, often in factory-like settings, is increasingly hidden or automated.
Conclusion
Animation and advertising are inextricably linked historically and conceptually. The earliest developments of all the major techniques and technologies were bound up with the use of animation for advertising. This suggests that these techniques, and the very definitions of animation they produced, were shaped by being put to use for promotional ends. It is fitting, therefore, that the emerging scholarship on animated advertising to date should centre on qualities that have been considered central to animation: control, abstraction and figuration, transformation and anthropomorphism. Yet there remain many unresearched paths and many unanswered questions to this reciprocal relationship.
In his celebrated and often-cited account of animation’s specific qualities, Russian filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein puts forward the neologism ‘plasmatic’ to describe the appeal of animation as ‘a rejection of once-and-forever allotted form, freedom from ossification, the ability to dynamically assume any form’ (1986: 21). While commonly treated as simply a synonym for transformation, Eisenstein’s term encompasses more than the shape shifting of one form into another. Rather, it is a rejection of categorization and boundaries between things, and it describes anything that has a simultaneous duality or plurality. Transformation, anthropomorphism and the dualities of the drawn line are not synonyms of the plasmatic but are individual examples of this more encompassing quality of the plasmatic. Sobchack acknowledges this by citing Eisenstein when discussing the duality of the line as both graphic abstraction and figurative representation (2008: 253). Equally, Eisenstein discusses the role of anthropomorphism in his description of Mickey Mouse, who rarely transforms but is nevertheless plasmatic because ‘he is both human, and a mouse … this unity is not dynamic’ (1986: 96n59).
This serves as further evidence that the qualities of animation that advertisers have embraced are precisely those that have been seen as characteristic or essential to defining animation by many commentators. Beyond this, however, Eisenstein’s comments are especially important at this point because of the relationship he sees the plasmatic having with capitalism. He writes that Disney’s animation, as the exemplar of the plasmatic, ‘bestows precisely this upon his viewer, precisely obliviousness, an instant of complete and total release from everything connected with the suffering caused by the social conditions of the social order of the largest capitalist government’ (Eisenstein et al. 1986: 8). For Eisenstein the plasmatic qualities of animation offer a respite from the rationalizing and categorizing imperatives of capitalism. Yet in this brief overview we have seen those same qualities put to work for advertising, one of the engines of capitalism. Those plasmatic qualities were defined as central to animation because it expanded in conjunction with advertising. There remains a great deal more work to be done to unpick this contradiction, to reassess the role of advertising in the histories of well-known animators and studios, and to discover the parallel industry of animation advertising production that is currently afforded no place in canonical histories.
Note
1 Pixar’s advertisements are, however, easily accessible online.
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