Some will say, "Well, animation is not just the illusion of movement. If a guy moving a puppet is animation, then a guy driving a car is animation.
By this definition, puppetry and live-action are not animation, since they are things and people that are actually moving, rather than pretending to move. In a narrow industrial sense, only illusions of movement are animation (like photographs of illustrations that are strung together on a reel).
As I type, I am animating my fingers and the keys beneath them. In a broad sense, anything that moves is animation. But real time rendering is really not too far off either. So, not fitting one definition of it does not preclude it from fitting others.Īnd just to throw some further confusion into it, what will 3D animation be called when it does work in real time with devices that allow for animators to interact with those objects if the term animation depends on working in slower than real time conditions? Portions of the jet bike chase scene were animated in real time with a joystick input device at ILM (or at least they were playing with it at last I heard), the rendering was of course done later. Therefore, puppetry as well as robotry, and bringing the dead back to life, would be considered animation, although again, not in the sense of the media classification of the word. One being, the act of animating something loosely meaning to bring life to something that previously did not have life. However, there are, as has been pointed out, a number of definitions to animation or the act of animating. ILM, for instance, at the peak of their stop motion days had built armatures with motors on them that would vibrate and give additional motion blur while filming a stop motion scene.īut, I agree, in the definition that you are asking about, as pertaining to animated films, puppetry is not animation. Before electronic computers came along, a computer was a person who calculated figures but, if I were to refer to a kid scribbling out his math homework as a "computer," it would just be confusing.Ī stop-motion or CGI puppet is never actually in motion, as a "muppet" is. and so onīefore the artforms of animation came along, "animation" meant a very different thing. We now have "snail mail" or "postal mail" to distinguish it from e-mail. For example, we now have "2D animation" or "traditional animation" to distinguish it from 3D animation. Sometimes the definitions of terms or the terms themselves need to change to make room for newer terms.
Calling puppetry "animation" makes it difficult to distinguish from "puppet animation," a form of stop-motion.Įven if it was once called "animation," it can't anymore in order to distinguish it from the "illusion of motion" industry. What you'd need to find are eras where people who used puppets were commonly called "animators" instead of "puppeteers." "Call in the animator to perform the Punch and Judy act!"Ģ.
#Definition of puppetry professional#
You're also going to find old texts that refer to any type of movement as "animation." Does that mean everyone in the world is a professional animator, since all work involves movement? However, we've already been down that road. There are a couple of problems with that notion.ġ. That's not old enough to predate cinema though. I found a book about puppetry from 1920 on Google's book search that uses the terms animated and animation. What would completely clinch it for me though, is if anyone can dig up an old enough reference to puppetry that describes the act of performing with puppets as animation.