Rango, Ethics and Animation

Sean Cubitt

ABSTRACT: The first task is to describe if not define ethics: in the film context a quality of the unique instance (where politics might instead be about the consequences for all or for a majority or a group). Documentary for example has a duty to the unique events and subjects it pictures. The question then might be phrased: what is unique in animation? This suggests some distinctions. Simulations based on large data sets do not address the unique and particular and therefore should be considered in this frame as political. Hand-drawn and handmade stop-motion animation might be read as unique expressions of gesture and require a distinct ethical approach. The more mediated forms of CGI animation do not so much sit between these poles as establish a third: how to distinguish ethical from political obligations of animation. No promise of a solution, but tactics for posing the question.

1. The Question

Of course the topic of animation ethics is too big. There is a respectably well-developed field of work on documentary ethics. Though representational theories and feminist, postcolonial and other political analysts point towards political dimensions of narrative and character, the ethical remains a rather marginal field in the field of fiction film (Ditte Friedman's (2012) doctoral dissertation on Eastwood's Unforgiven demonstrates how it might be done). On the positive side, this brings us into the domain of anecdotal evidence, which I will argue is the main methodological contribution of the humanities to the work of social sciences. Our typical response to the term is to dismiss it: an anecdote proves nothing. My uncle smokes till he is a hundred years old, but smoking still causes cancer. Or so we say. But the fact that my uncle survives does disprove the causal connection: in his unique instance the cause does not have the effect it is supposed to. In the prevailing view, he is a statistical anomaly. But to my uncle and his nearest and dearest he is much more than that.

I use the term 'anecdotal evidence' in order to concentrate on the unique instance – ethnographic, situational, experiential, textual – in which the large forces at work in social formations are made concrete. This is especially significant when we discuss ethics. Most of us are content to work according to professional codes of ethics, and to apply common sense rules of behaviour outside the workplace, rules we acquire from social interactions as norms. Given a difficult instance where we have the luxury of time to work out what we should do, we might try to think through more methodically, asking whether I would like to be judged or treated in the same way as I am judging and treating another; or churning through which path leads to the lesser evil. The anecdote as method goes contrary to such codes, norms and calculations. Arguing against both utilitarianism's greater good and Kant's insistence on the freedom of the rational will, Adorno (2000: 138) makes the case that not only is the promised compensation for the sacrifice of happiness never forthcoming, but that the sacrifice of or exclusion from happiness of even a single person is too great a price to pay. Ethics concerns not the general but the specific. Coming from a very different philosophical tradition, Derrida argues that 'If I know what is to be done . . . then there is no moment of decision, simply the application of a body of knowledge, or at the very least a rule or a norm. For there to be a decision, the decision must be heterogeneous to knowledge as such' (Derrida 2001: 231-2). If ethics is a matter of confrontation with demand, with difficulty, with challenge, then recourse to a rulebook is ethically inadequate. It stands between the partners in the encounter, rather than joining them. The ethics of fiction begins from Tolstoy's opening gambit in Anna Karenina: All unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. Though sociologically we can discern the forces operating, the experience of unhappiness is unique. Only in such anecdotes as Tolstoy's we can genuinely assess the universalist claims of the good things we seek like wealth, health, justice, equality and freedom, in their effects and through the ills that attend them.

Animation is difficult to pin down as practice, let alone as the object of a general ethics. Across pre-cinematic forms of puppetry and optical toys in a continuum with live-to-camera animations, stop-motion and cel cartoons and on to computer-generated imagery (CGI) and their multiple hybrids, animation techniques do not lend themselves to theses on medium specificity. The most ambitious of these, Lamarre's The Animation Machine, argues that the machine he takes as emblematic of animation, the animation stand, has at its heart 'a center of indetermination' Animators 'must learn to work with this center of indetermination . . . even when animators strive to become auteurs and stamp a singular vision or style onto their animations, they are making visible and palpable the force of the moving image as channeled and orientated via the animatic machine. They are working something out of anime by working within it. It is here that the specificity of animation truly matters' (Lamarre xxxiii). If there is a specificity to animation it lies in the void between frames. The perpetual renewal and reinvention of animation materials and techniques makes it hard to descry any medium-specific procedures. Precisely this quality makes animation especially productive of singular anecdotes. Animation practice can only be generalised in the most indefinite terms. If media mediate, animation animates – and we can presume the object that completes the expression as 'animation animates the inanimate'. Etymologically, we can imagine that drawings, which for centuries had been stilled, now moved; and that stop-motion did something similar for things. Early cinematic animation, like extra-cinematic puppetry, automata and theatrical magic, was fascinated with the uncanny nature of this border-crossing. The more recent history of computer animation in part and under different circumstances renews that unsettled response, in phenomena like the uncanny valley between compellingly realistic simulations of human beings and cartoonish emulations. The childishness of much animated cinema is perhaps a response to this, an attempt to disarm the threat of taxonomic collapse.

Drawing is one of the many filters we use to control the excess of signifiers identified by Lévi-Strauss. The standardised line in 1930s Disney cartoons, or the treatment of groups of code as objects in C++ would be examples of such control. Temporal flux disturbs this control in any moving image, introducing a principle of incompletion to the still image, both by succession of frames and by scanning within the frame. Codecs that use blocks, keyframes and vector prediction are tools to dampen and erase the difference between frames. From Cohl's Allumettes Animées (1908) to Universal Everything's Walking City,winner of the 2014 Golden Nica for computer animation at Ars Electronica, a certain smoothness is a goal for a certain form of animation. At its margins, in works like Susan Collins' Seascape (2009) or Rosa Menckmann's Collapse of PAL (2011), the contingent contests the pre-eminence of smoothness: quantum effects in the camera's CMOS chip in Collins, the poetics of her physically glitched camera in Menckmann. At stake in animation ethics is then a question concerning the extent of control and autonomy involved in the act of animating, of giving life to the inanimate[1].

We can often place specific animations in existing moral codes without troubling their structures: Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (1943) is clearly ethically indefensible; and Der Fuehrer's Face (1943) sinks to stereotypingand dangerously uncritical patriotism. Applying existing codes to specific, often explicitly didactic or exploitative animations only tells us that the normal norms apply. The question I want to pose is whether there is anything that is more specific to animation as such, to the process of animating the inanimate. Should we, as makers or spectators, take responsibility for animated characters and worlds? Do we owe anything to the inanimate, to the resources we use in animating, as design ethics still considers truth to materials? That question is fundamentally ecological, addressing our connectivity with the whole universe. Against both the implicit human exclusivity of utilitarianism and the anthropocentric rationalist individualism of Kantian freedom, animation ethics speaks to what Simon Critchley (2007: 37) calls 'this moment of incomprehensibility in ethics . . . where the subject is faced with a demand that does not correspond to its autonomy'. It is precisely this moment that forms the core of the anecdote. If, as Critchley (2007: 91) also argues, the accelerating dislocatory power of capitalism does not lead to the emergence of a unique political subject, but rather to the multiplication of social actors', then the unique encounter with the inanimate is not experienced by a subject exclusively definable as individual, in the received sense of a coherent and bordered agent. This new subject is rather an uneasy constellation of fragmented sexuality, ethnicity, class, gender, indigeneity: oriented but still paced, intersectional but still segmented. Consideration of the unique individual as an instance confabulated from multiple forces demands an understanding of their common constructions in and by socio-cultural configurations. The unique encounter therefore concerns a uniquely mutual dependence, which however one of the parties at least is capable of rejecting. Nor are the agents in the ethical encounter any longer exclusively human. Ethics normally places us in relation to other people and occasionally animals, but in the Anthropocene, we are confronted with the limits of individual and species autonomy. Animation gives us a laboratory for conducting moral experiments in the relations of control, contingency and autonomy in the frame of universal connectivity proposed by ecology.

2. Rango

Gore Verbinski's Rango (2011) is an explicitly environmentalist film following a number of classic Hollywood films (among them Chinatown [1974] and The Grapes of Wrath [1940]) in dealing with the causes and effects of drought. It is also a fable about how to grow into the person you are capable of becoming. In the opening sequence, we see the chameleon, voiced by Johnny Depp, playing the part of a pretentious thespian. The clear implication is that from sheer loneliness in his terrarium, the chameleon has invented a theatre company out of a broken Barbie and a plastic wind-up fish. There is the possibility of reading the sequence as an allegory of the animator as creator-auteur, manipulating his faux friends as co-stars in a threadbare drama that only comes to life when there is an audience to participate: a satire on Svankmajer and the Quays perhaps. By producing that audience in the barroom scene that follows, Verbinski (with co-writers John Logan and James Ward Byrkit) gives the chameleon the place for drama, and allows him to seize a name for himself, even if that name is, in the actor-chameleon's imagination, not self-given but given to him ('they call me Rango'). Given the series of self-reflexive fictions Rango gives himself as backstory, the idea of the truth of his performance, especially as the Western hero he becomes, is both the obvious message and source of the comedy. Growing into the part you act is both ludicrous and heroic. To be shamed out of timorousness is courage. That articulation of fear and shame is the motivating structure of Rango's character.

The artefact that becomes a protagonist is also a classic trope in animations, Pinocchio (1940) being the classical statement of the theme. There is however a particular challenge for the sound animation which is especially tricky here: the voice track. Dickie Jones, who voiced Pinocchio, was an almost unknown child actor at the time. Johnny Depp, voicing Rango, was coming in from the three Pirates of the Caribbean films (2003, 2006, 2007), also directed by Verbinski, as a global star known for his comic combination of trepidation and derring-do, and for the camp quality of his performance that allies it easily with the theatrical satire of the opening scenes of Rango. If Depp's persona fits the role, it also raises the question of the wholeness of a character composed equally of inanimate visual and living vocal components. Since animation concerns the anima, the soul, and how an inanimate body finds a soul, Renoir's misgivings about post-synch dialogue illuminate something of the uncanny delight we discover in voiced animations:

I regard dubbing, that is to say, the addition of sound after the picture has been shot, as an outrage. If we were living in the twelfth century, a period of lofty civilization, the practitioners of dubbing would be burnt in the market-place for heresy. Dubbing is equivalent to a belief in the duality of the soul (Renoir 1974: 106).

Renoir's concern is for the reproduction of reality or, we might say, for the reality effect. The voice that comes from a body should be that body's voice, not that of another, which would be mere ventriloquism and therefore proximal to nefarious magical control over another's body. Dubbing as inverse animation deprives the already animate of its innate autonomy, and even if voiced by the same actor, the dubbed words no longer speak from the place of being or the living presence. The breathing, moving, acting depiction unanchored from its own voice is a Golem, a zombie.

What then of the voiced inanimate creature, the CGI chameleon? To an extent, Rango is only the conclusion of an existing trajectory of the movie star as ventriloquists' dummy, a feature caught in Sternberg's account of working with Dietrich:

No puppet in the history of the world has been submitted to as much manipulation as a leading lady of mine who, in seven films, not only had hinges and voice under a control other than her own but the expression of her eyes and the nature of her thoughts. (von Sternberg 1963, 102)

Taken to the extreme of Hitchcock's treatment of his actors, or generalised across the celebrity industry considered as a production of bodies designed to be inhabited by the desires of others, Depp-as-chameleon-as-Rango is typical rather than extreme. Yet without a voice, Rango would be unrecognisable. Unlike silent cartoon characters, who had recourse to writing as a medium of expression shared with silent live actors, CGI characters not only have the problem of moving but of interiority. To speak, despite the critique of logocentrism (Derrida 1976: 71), still works as a viable marker of subjectivity. Since Rango's verbal dexterity is so central a part of his characterisation, it is even more important that he be seen to speak on the spur of the moment, to react, to be fully in the encounter that propels his logorrheic inventions. At the same time, this ascription of the ability to originate speech effectively marks Rango as precisely as a dualistic entity, marked by the division between body and soul, that Renoir warned against, a confabulation which betrays the thesis of the whole, coherent and entire individual. This multiplicity already ushers in a new form of the ethical demand.

Such multiplication falls precisely in the domain that animation aims to control. In a period when star images are available as icons for re-animation in commercials, and as such reduced to their status as intellectual property, animation has led the way through the so-called Mickey Mouse Law, the US Copyright Term Extension Act introduced in 1998, which the Walt Disney Company lobbied for extensively in order to protect their rights in Mickey Mouse. The copyright – in the case of Mickey Mouse additionally expanded by registering the mouse as a trademark – are granted for seventy years after the death of the author or for 120 years in the case of corporate authorship. This corporate authorship is itself a legal fiction: indigenous tribes for example are not recognised as persons in intellectual property law. The ventriloquism of direction recalled by Sternberg and of the dubbed voice decried by Renoir also belong to an archaeology of intellectual property regimes in the talking cartoon. Property rights in the star image crystallised, in the wake of the commercialisation of Chaplin (which involved a number of comic strips and cartoons: Rundell 2014) and Felix the Cat (Canemaker 1991), with Disney's increasing marketisation of Mickey Mouse from his creation in 1928. Animated characters deprived of volition are only a limit case of an existing mode of celebrity employment. As the Mouse became Disney property, so Rango is potentially not the property of the performer who voices or the director or scriptwriters but of ILM, Industrial Light and Magic, who can lay claim to the code underlying his form and performance. On the positive side, corporate ownership recognises the multiplicity of creative talent involved in the production of this kind of CGI character. At the same time, it profoundly alters the mythic structure of animation. In the tale of Pygmalion, the sculptor whose stone nymph comes to life, it is a divine breathe that puffs life into the statue, an allegory of the artist at work, a statement about the dream of human creativity. Its obverse is the terror of representation as animation that appears as eidolon in Plato, and as golem, as Friar Bacon's brass servant, or as Shelley's Frankenstein. In cinema, after Shaw's (1941) tragi-comic variant on Pinocchio, where the puppet declares her freedom from the puppet-master, My Fair Lady (1964) rehearses the myth as class war, and as war of the sexes, the same tale as told by du Maurier in Trilby (2009). Shaw's Professor Higgins and du Maurier's Svengali reframe the myth for a knowing, even disillusioned modernity doomed to destroy the virginities it preys on. Disney's exploitation of Mickey, unlike theirs, protects his permanent innocence, his unending adolescence, his unfreedom.