That Western obsession with WATCHING YOUR LIPS MOVE WHEN YOU TALK.

A random thought.

One big thing I’ve noticed while watching all this Japanese animation lately is how frequently they’ll cut away from a person who’s speaking. You’ll hear their voice continue over a close-up of some other part of the scene or an over-the-shoulder shot of the person they’re talking to. And part of this is possibly attributable to budget; lipsync is a lot of work and that costs money. But it also feels like it gives a very different feel to the storytelling, one that lets its attention wander around the characters and take in the world they live in instead of focusing tightly on the characters.

It’s akin to what McCloud describes as an “aspect-to-aspect” panel transition in comics, where a series of panels examines facets of a moment without very much “happening” in terms of plot. And it’s probably worth noting that this was something you almost never saw in American comics until the generation who grew up loving imported manga started making comics.

But I don’t think I’ve seen this in American cartoons made by people who grew up on a ton of anime. And as I look at what it can do for the mood of a show, and its world, I begin to feel like American cartoons have an unhealthy obsession with watching people talk.

This is probably another consequence of the Disney “Illusion of Life” tradition, where you make your character designs as simple as possible so that you can focus on animating the shit out of them as much as possible. Act with your pencil, really get into the particular way this character takes off their glasses and cleans them as we watch them gather their thoughts to respond to something another character just said. Or watch a completely voiceless character have thoughts crawl across their expression. This is what happens in the Great Early Masterworks that American animators are exposed to during their education, and it’s something that they can’t seem to stop trying to do, even when they don’t have anywhere near the budget to animate their simple designs like they want to – when’s the last time you saw the Simpsons cut to something else while a character spoke? When’s the last time you saw this in a Western animated feature? You get voiceovers now and then, but it’s usually in the form of someone narrating a flashback. I can’t think of any examples of the camera wandering around the scene in the middle of a conversation.

(I probably mean “Western animators” when I say “American animators”; it feels like a lot of the European stuff I’ve seen is just as prone to keeping the camera on the speaker as American stuff.)

Anyway. Yet another thing I may try to deliberately break out of if anyone is ever stupid enough to pay me to direct a cartoon, or I’m crazy enough to try and do one on my own.

(I should also probably watch Wes Anderson’s adaptation of Dahl’s “Fantastic Mr Fox” again and think about the many ways that struck me as coming from well outside the tradition of “what an animated feature Should Be”. Because that, too, was definitely not put together the same way a feature designed by people weaned on Disney features is constructed. Arguably it’s just put together like every other damn Wes Anderson film, and it happens to star a bunch of stop-motion puppets instead of people. But still.)