History of animation #5 : functions of animation

Throughout its existence, animation ,like many other media, serves multiple purpose. What comes to mind first is entertainment, obviously, as that is the form that most of us relate to the most . It is true that entertain could be consider the main pillar of animation, with other roots branching from it, but that is not to say it is the only one. Much like the radio, animation is communication , more importantly ,it is visual communication , which is the most powerful type, and hence it can serves and it can change the way we think in the world.

Breaking it down , one can view the purposes of animation like this :

• sell – increase sales, readership, membership or number of page hits
• persuade – get viewers to take action e.g. donate money, vote, join a protest (like the 'call to action' implicit in every advert)
• inform - tell visitors about an event, news item, new product, service or campaign
• educate – explain something complex e.g. a scientific, geological or technical process
• entertain – amuse or tell a story
• create a brand image – give the product or service a positive commercial identity
• raise awareness – publicise a charity campaign, political or ecological issue
• illustrate or decorate – provide 'eye-candy' for a page
• attract attention - to get the product or service noticed and talked about
• impress – to give the product a cutting- edge image as the latest must-have fashion or technology

This is what I've found to be a very appropriate and relatively sufficient list that you can equate the purposes of animation to. Within those, in my opinion , the most prominent are : to sell, to entertain , to inform and impress.

To sell should be an easy thing to imagine, as nothing in this current economy is not for sell, since we wouldn't have an industry if there is. However, one do have to look back to the past, were the first animations tools of profit? To that extent , I would say no , profit was like a bonus that came with the invention of animating tools, and if you were an inventor of said tools at that time, you obviously wouldn't just sell it off, the main objective was to attract attention and create fame for the inventor mostly. And how would you do that ? . You entertain them.

Moving on to the silent era, we began to see the rise of animation entertainment, most if not all forms of development to the art of animation were in one way or another to create a method to entertain the public, who if probably attracted would continue to donate and fund the development of more techniques and research. Animation started to diverged from just being a rotating wheel of images, to having music, a proper plot and characters, then drama, comedy ,horror etc. The target of entertainment has also diversified. Gone is the age of mass animation, you now have to think about specific age groups ( from kids to teens ) , Genre , culture and location ( Say anime and western cartoons is very different in the setting that they are played in ) to properly entertain audience form each area, even considering the quirky market like sex. We see this diversification of animation very clearly through out the decades, from the era of Disney Snow white and Aladdin musicals that tells a a happy-ending story and teaching kids morality to the dark themes of violence of anime to the meaningful anti-war and nature-loving characteristic of Miyazakis, animation as a tool of entertainment has reach a new level of complexity. Of course taking advantage of this popularity, advertising would take advantage of it as thing to sell their product, and so we have TV ads,  moving signs, billboards, all born from animation's ability to communicate and entertain visually. 

That is to say, advertisement is not the only thing that notice it. Political ideas can also be communicate through the form, such as propaganda or controversial matters. Take the work of Disney during WWII for example, using the beloved and popularized characters like Donald Duck to perform a satire comedy about the Nazi way of life, or just straight out criticised through exaggerated plots all serves to diminished the public's view of the Nazis and support the war. 

 

Shows like the Boondocks use satire comedy to criticise social issues which are deem controversial like racism, terrorism. Even looking back to the past , old animation are brought up as topics of political correctness as, at the time of its creation , society was vastly different , and not for the better and it reflects in the animation produced at the time : black being described as jet black short people with big lips , or women being over sexualised and always in position of distress , waiting to be rescue. The current animation industries certainly have taken not of this, seeing how we beginning to see more strong heroine characters starring in the currents big title animations.

  

And finally , to impress, which I think is the very definition CGI animation , particularly in video games. When you have a wide audience with vastly different taste in artistic aesthetic, you rely on what generally everyone enjoys in seeing CGI : realism. Game designers , Artist and Programs in the gaming industries, pushes to create the best graphics possible in order the current hard-pressed audience- the more they see , the harder to impress them and the harder the artists has to push. Animation coming from big studio , now not only relies on there stories, but their visual quality, either that is the impressive CGI of Pixar, or the beautiful spaces and colour of Your Name or Spirited Away, Impression matters, else you're not gonna attract audience no more. It is dangerous however, because some individual would take this into consideration too much that the core of the animation : ie the storytelling and the pot lacks behind, or animation and effects takes to much importance in a production , such as the hotly debated CGI vs Practical effects of the movie industries and movie like Transformer being destroyed by critics and fans, even though the animation is very impressive. So it is up to the animator to find the delicate balance between them,as well as the rest of the different purposes of animation , in order to create an animation that is effective. With that said, it is only getting harder to be an animator...