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Volume 24, 2014
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Figure 1. Top Image, frame grab from Tree of Souls
sequence in Avatar. Dir. James Cameron, 2009.
©20th Century Fox, and bottom images, frame grabs
from Dewdrops Fairies, in Dance of the Sugar Plum
Fairies, Nutcracker Suite sequence, Fantasia. Dir.
Wilfred Jackson, 1940. ©Walt Disney Productions.
ANIMATING EPHEMERAL SURFACES: TRANSPARENCY, TRANSLUCENCY
AND DISNEY’S WORLD OF COLOR — KIRSTEN MOANA THOMPSON
AUGUST 6, 2014 BY ANGELAN
Abstract: Abstract: This paper examines the unusual theatrical and exhibition dimensions of Disney’s
World of
Color
, an outdoor night time entertainment spectacle which screens animated films on ephemeral
materials: the water spray and light produced by fountains, water, mist and fire. It considers how this
show innovates a new form of theatrical exhibition, combining older art forms from fireworks to
pyrodramas, with contemporary computer-controlled light and colour design and immersive effects. It
will suggest structural and aesthetic connections between this animated attraction and recent
technological innovations such as Google Glass
™
in which mobile computer interfaces combine
transparency and opacity as an essential part of their formal structure and tactile pleasure. Theorising
that the relationship between animation and the ephemeral is also situated in these tensions between
the transparent and opaque, I go on to suggest that Disney’s
World of Color
is a particular instantiation
of the ways in which “animation” can be understood not only as a specific technical process, but also as
a form of corporeal transformation in which movement, light and colour enlivens individual bodies and
screen spaces.
Disney’s
World of Color
is a night time entertainment
spectacle combining water, fire, projected light and
colour that takes up the delicate play of the transitory,
foregrounding the material and aesthetic relationship of
transparency and opacity. From fireworks to
hydraulically engineered musical fountains and
pyrodramas, the show’s innovations in theatrical
exhibition hybridise older entertainment forms with
digital-controlled light and colour design and immersive
effects, blending tourism, the amusement park and
cinematic projection.
World of Color
’s ephemeral media
literally materialise the affective fuzziness and softness
of our nostalgic memories and desire for that which is
past and lost—Disney films, our own childhood—
promising, if only for the duration of the show, that
these desires can be momentarily recaptured and relived. Theorising that the relationship between animation
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Refractory
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Volume 24, 2014
We are the Borg (in a good
way): Mapping The
Development Of New Kinds Of
Being And Knowing Through
Inter- and Trans-Mediality —
Anne Cranny Francis
‘God Hates Fangs’: Gay Rights
As Transmedia Story in True
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and the ephemeral is connected to the tensions between the transparent and opaque in classical cel
animation, together with their persistence in new media forms like digital animation or Google Glass, this
paper suggests we must expand our understanding of what it means to animate our real and virtual
environments today.
Part I: Cel Animation, Translucence and BubblesPart I: Cel Animation, Translucence and Bubbles
In classical cel animation the dialectical relationship between translucency, transparency and opacity was
key. Cel animation’s production was inherently palimpsestic, depending on light to shine through layers of
transparent nitrate or acetate cels, made partially opaque with painted characters, props or backgrounds, all
of which were layered together to create the illusion of depth. The use of cels was part of the Taylorisation of
the industry in the twenties to minimise time in a labour-intensive production process. Light joined with glass
when individual cels were photographed sequentially frame-by-frame under transparent sheets of glass that
were clamped down to keep dust from the cel. The greater the layers of cels, the less light penetrated through
to the deepest layer and the more blurry was the resultant composite image, with generally five cels as the
maximum number of layers possible (Furniss 2007, 74). In the contemporary era this problem has been
obviated by digital compositing’s capacity for greater integration of planar layers of data, without loss of
sharpness or light. If the clarity or translucency of the image in cel animation was shaped by its palimpsestic
structure, the choice of different materials from pastels to watercolours, oils or pencils also mediated the
degree to which light passed through the cels.
A translucent object allows light to pass through it, but depending on its materials, diffuses or scatters that
light, whereas a transparent object allows the direct transmission of light without scattering or diffusion.
Glass and clean water are optically transparent media through which most of the light passes directly. By
contrast, our own bodies are translucent, and depending on pigment and the right light conditions, we can
see the bones through our skin. Light permeates our bodies and enters our brain cells where it is converted
from light waves into electrical charges by the optic nerve. On the level of perception, our bodies literally
mediate light, to which “our eyes are drawn … which impels the reflex adjustments of our irises” (Powell
2007, 87). In other words, just like the transmission of light, the
perception
of light is always materially
embodied through relations of penetration, mediation and transformation.
Not only is the dialectical relationship between opacity and transparency, or more accurately, the translucent,
crucial at a material level in animation, it is also frequently present at the level of representation to spotlight
luminosity, colour and delicacy of design, showing the oscillating starburst at the arrival of the blue fairy in
Pinocchio
(Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Luske, 1940) or the airbrushed translucency of her shimmering blue
gown. From the gleam of a Grinch’s heart as it grew “three sizes bigger” in
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
(Chuck Jones, 1966) to the effect of the Blue Fairy’s wand as she changes Pinocchio from a wooden puppet
into a boy, twinkling stars, sparkles, fairy dust and other scintillating or radiating gradients of luminosity are
traditional signifiers of transformation effected by alternating opaque or transparent cels with translucent
overlays of luminous objects like painted stars. More than merely
representing
transformation, what I call
starburst animation epistemologically embodies the nature of change through its intervallic alternations of
light and dark stimuli and durational manipulation of luminous intensities. As Norman McLaren reminds us:
“What happens between each frame is more important than what happens on each frame,”[1] which is to say,
this stuttering control of light interpenetrates diegetic and extra-diegetic bodies and objects alike. Like Times
Square advertising, some of which was designed by animators,[2] these sparkling starbursts (with their on-
off-on blinking process) are visual stimuli that organise our attention, affecting our bodies and our brains and
creating a sensual experience. In addition to scintillating light enabled by the alternation of opacity and
transparency, both classical and digital animation have repeatedly returned to the luminous as subject of
sensual fascination. Compare, for example the bioluminescent aquatic jellies in
Life of Pi
(Ang Lee, 2012) or
the seeds of the Tree of Souls on Pandora in
Avatar
(James Cameron, 2009)with the Dewdrop Fairies in the
Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy sequence in Disney’s
Fantasia
(Wilfred Jackson, 1940) (see Figure 1). Despite
the material differences in the production process (
Fantasia
’s effects were achieved through airbrushing and
light pencil and pastel shading as opposed to digital effects), commonalities in the treatment of colour,
luminosity and detail continue to link classical and digital animation.
Animation’s structural engagement with scintillation or luminosity also enables it to showcase the sensual
pleasures of colour. As I’ve argued in a previous paper, the representation of test tubes, pipettes, beakers,
flasks, bottles or other transparent or translucent glass objects that appear in laboratory or transformation
sequences like the Mickey Mouse cartoon
The Worm Turns
(Wilfred Jackson, 1937) allow for the segmentation
of colour into tubular, rectangular or spherical form, offering up Technicolor as a novelty production value,
which is also dazzlingly spectacularised (Thompson 2013, 6). As the cartoon opens, Mickey is in a laboratory
creating a potion that will turn underdogs into top dogs. Called the “Courage Builder,” it sets triumphant flies
against spiders and cats against dogs. Certainly colour and line in the laboratory scene illustrate Disney’s
pioneering innovations in the special effects department in the late thirties, as the animators who specialised
in drawing light, water, fire and other atmospheric effects were so named. It is they who use colour to
simulate a richly textured dimensional mise-en-scène, with chiaroscuro lighting effects of Mickey’s shadow
cast behind him, an unseen light source shining through meticulously detailed glassware and white paint
simulating light bouncing against the edges of the beakers and flasks, while highlights and light coloured
blue, green, purple and red bubbles indicate the volumetric mass of the liquid colour within. But the media of
the laboratory, the transparent glassware and translucent liquid, also offer the pure pleasure and novelty of
rich saturated hues, of colour as segmented forms. As Mickey mixes his ingredients, the colour bubbles,
splashes and pops. Accompanied by coughs, splutters and backfiring automobile sounds, the diegetic liquid
erupts from the test tube becoming pure spectacular excess. As Brian Price has suggested of abstract colour
sequences in the films of Claire Denis and Paul Thomas Anderson, “liquidity is but another way of describing
the bleeding of color across line” (2006, 85). And as Rosalind Krauss has suggested, when colour disrupts the
line, as it does in this Mickey cartoon, it has two principal effects: eroticising the surface, and enjoining a
perceptual multiplicity (cited in Price 2006, 85), that accentuates fluidity, process and transformation.
The relationship of the translucent and the opaque also come together in the frequent visual figure of the
iridescent bubble in animation. Like the eye, a bubble is a sphere with a reflective surface like a screen and
can be transparent or semi-transparent like a cel. The bubble is a liminal temporal and spatial figure—it is a
pellicle or thin diaphanous surface of colour with an iridescent sheen, suspended between atmospheric air,
and the air within it. As colour was for Goethe, the bubble is a boundary condition, of inside and outside
(2006, 16). Like the arrival of Glinda the Good Witch as a bubble of pure pink who becomes the pinky
‘goodness’ of whiteness in
The Wizard of Oz
(Victor Fleming, 1939), a bubble is also a colour skin, an example
of the second type of light condition that Goethe called the dioptrical in his
Theory of Colors
(2006, 33)
where colour is produced by passing though a light transmitting or transparent body such as atmospheric
haze, water, or glass. Sam Raimi’s
Oz: The Great and Powerful
(2013) also emphasises the mobile and fugitive
nature of the bubble in a mise-en scène in which luminosity and colour populate the crystalline surfaces of
Emerald City, with its jewel-like flowers and iridescent butterflies. Bubbles enable both the representational
and affective interplay of scale between large and small as well as our wondrous response to this scale, and
together with toys are a frequent visual figure in animation for the playfulness and joy of childhood. Part of
the fascination of the bubble is its structural and temporal evanescence—the iridescent surface, say of a soap
bubble is only possible for a brief period before it snaps or is popped, which produces in us an orientation of
wonder at its fragility, and suspense in anticipation of that inevitable pop. Benjamin reminds us in his essay,
“On Fantasy” that colour is transition, the passing away of the mortal symbolised in the green halo of rotting
meat or the iridescence of a blowfly (cited in Leslie 2004, 265). I’ll come back to the bubble when I turn to
Google Glass. But what I want to point out here is that the luminosity, colour and delicate transitory nature of
the bubble foreground what I’ve been illustrating in these prefatory remarks on classical cel animation: that
is, that animation’s formal and representational concerns with opacity, translucency and transparency are
the material embodiments of memory and desire and form centre stage in
World of Color,
to which I’ll now
turn.
Part II: Disney’s Part II: Disney’s
World of ColorWorld of Color
World of Color world premiere at the Disney California Adventure theme park.
Reportedly constructed for $75 million with the aim of reviving Disney’s financially struggling California
Figure 2. World of Color view of Ferris wheel and
Paradise Park. ©Walt Disney Productions. This
promotional photo is licensed under Creative
CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Figure 3: World of Color Control Room. ©Walt Disney
Productions. This promotional photo is licensed
under the Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike
2.0 Generic license.
Adventure theme parks, the 28 minute
World of Color
show premiered on June 10, 2010 and has screened
nightly there and at Disneyworld since then (Barnes 2010) (See Figure 2). It projects sequences from many of
Disney’s best known classical and contemporary animated films on ephemeral materials: the bubbles, water
spray, fog and light produced by nearly 1200 variable fountains, each of which are illuminated a different
colour with an LED ring light and choreographed in time to music and alternating jets of fire. Its ephemerality
is of course nominal, as at the level of both production and exhibition the
World of Color
is an intensely
programmed repeatable event operated by an underground control room (see Figure 3). Five years in the
planning, the show was developed by Walt Disney Imagineering in association with its Animation and Pixar
companies and technical specialists in laser, projection and fountain design.[3] On 3.5 acres in Paradise Bay
Lagoon the show features eight different types of fountains that shoot up to 200 feet and 18,000 computer-
controlled elements of colour intensity, water angle and height, arranged on a huge football field size
platform which raises itself at the beginning of the show. What is interesting is the show’s unusual
combination of structurally fixed digital and hydraulic effects and ephemeral, insubstantial mist screens,
some 50 feet tall and 380 feet wide produced by 28 projectors, of which 14 are fully submersible (Disneyland
2010).
The mist screens are the appropriately aquatic surface
for a show which self-reflexively begins with Ariel
singing ‘Part of Your World’in
The Little Mermaid
(Ron
Clements and John Musker, 1989), followed by
Sebastian’s rendition of ‘Under the Sea’ (See Figure 4).
The show is a pastiche musical theatre bildungsroman,
where emotional yearning is born from spatial
disaffection. Animated sequences from
Aladdin
(Ron
Clements, 1992),
Up
(Peter Docter, 2009),
Toy Story
(John Lasseter, 1995)and
Wall-E
(Andrew Stanton,
2008) move from under the sea into sky and space, with
sequences using colour and vertical water movement
isomorphically to articulate upward spatial aspiration
and affective longing of the characters (and by extension, audience) such as when Ariel sings of her desire to
go up “out of the sea/ wish I could be/ part of that world.”Heightened by Mussorgsky’s ‘Night on Bald
Mountain’ score, the
World of Color’s
dramatic middle section features Chernobog’s massive devil from
Fantasia
(Wilfred Jackson, 1940), along with other emotionally intense Disney sequences, from
The Old Mill’s
storm (Wilfred Jackson, 1937) to the stampede in
The Lion King
(Rob Minkoff and Roger Allers, 1994) and the
ghost ship in
Pirates of the Caribbean
(Gore Verbinski, 2003). This dramatic climax is followed by quieter
musical sequences of paternal and maternal reassurance from
Bambi
(Dave Hand, 1942),
Dumbo
(Ben
Sharpsteen, 1941) and other features, concluding with a reprise of the title song ‘The World is a Carousel of
Color.’
Continuing a long Disney tradition of using water as a
key design aesthetic, the show’s innovative projection
onto differently textured two and three-dimensional
surfaces and spaces created by transparent sprays,
walls, columns and reflections of water, light and fire, is
a collage of shifting displays and painterly inscriptions,
and one whose blurriness, hybridity and dimensionality
marks out its difference from the source animation from
which it takes or simulates.[4] Over 100,000 animated
images make up the show including newly created
sequences in sand animation by artist Corrie Francis, as
well as 12 foot high paper cut-out characters created by
Megan Brain which were then animated (Sukovaty 2010).
Steven Davison, Disney’s vice president for parades and spectaculars, described a
Pocahontas
segment this
way: “[She] was animated in one spot. You had to paint her with a brand new CGI river and get her to come in
and out of it at 10 different points” (Slate 2010). New animation was needed because long takes of individual
characters could not always be found in the original source material of the feature films. Paradoxically,
Disney’s new animation recreates its classic films in the service of a show that addresses or manufactures our
nostalgia for these films. Not only is the novelty of the show’s ephemeral medium emphasised in its
marketing, so too is the Heraclitian flux of its aquatic medium both visual subject and musical theme. As
Figure 4. Aquatic self–reflexivity with Ariel from The
Little Mermaid. ©Walt Disney Productions. This file is
licensed under Creative CommonsAttribution-Share
Alike 2.0 Generic License
Figure 5: View of Fountains. ©Walt Disney
Productions. This file is licensed under the Creative
CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License
Pocahontas sings, “What I most love about rivers is you can’t step into the same river twice. The water’s
always changing, always flowing.” More than that, the water is affective extension, pure wish fulfilment, for
as Pocahontas continues, “People I guess, can’t live like that. We all must pay a price to be safe.” The
constant flux and unending transformation of the show’s aquatic medium embodies the impossibility of the
desire for a return to one’s childhood, even as it seems to offer paradoxical satiation through its symphonic
tour of the Disney canon.
Playing with appearance and disappearance, and
epitomised by an ever-dissolving Cheshire Cat, the
mutable layers and variable vertical heights of the
fountains are a moving sculpture, which prompt both
expectation and surprise. Bellagio-like, upthrusting
fountains juxtapose with a second layer of lazier and
slow arcing brushwork (see Figure 5). However, unlike
the famous fountains of Las Vegas’ Bellagio Resort, the
colour ring and lasers intensify the spectacular
dimensions of the choreography by offering a density to
the water, while the animated image is reflected and
refracted creating a three dimensional image. Davison
describes it as “painting with water” elaborating, “We wanted to take fountain technology—varied planes of
water, different textures of water—and use it to tell stories in a new way” (Barnes 2010).[5] The projection of
an animated image that is essentially softer than normal, because of its aquatic screen surface, is sidestepped
in company promotional videos, which emphasise the transparent sharpness and clarity of the coloured line
presented by columns of illuminated water. As Davison reiterated in an early preview of the show in 2009,
“the clarity of it is beautiful” (2009, part 1).[6] Indeed the latest incarnation of the show
World of Color-
Winter Dreams
, recently unveiled for the 2013 holiday season, promised an image four times sharper than
the original show with a new HD projection system (Disneyland 2013). This emphasis on crispness also
highlights the show’s marketing of nostalgia, in which the misty screens and ephemeral surfaces seem to
externalise and materialise the audience’s memories and desires for the Disney films of childhood.
Davison’s claims of technological innovation link the
show to a longstanding company tradition as an early
adopter of colour technologies, as the first company in
the film industry to use three strip Technicolor in its
pioneering Silly Symphonies (1932-1935), to its early
shift to colour television for NBC in September 1961.
Opening with Dick Wesson’s voice-over and an updated
version of the Sherman Bros’ famous song ‘The World is
a Carousel of Color’, the show is an homage to Disney’s
original television series
The Wonderful World of Color
(1961-1969). The spectral array of fountain and laser
columns that serve as the show’s spectacular leitmotifs
also recall Disney’s repeated recourse to the rainbow as
an iconic attraction in cartoons like
Funny Little Bunnies
(Wilfred Jackson, 1934).[7] As a recurring image, the
rainbow offers a central metaphor for the show’s nostalgic promise: proffered, yet never fulfilled, as tricks of
light and colour, the rainbow can never be reached.[8] The
World of Color
performs the prowess of the
company’s technological innovations with a nostalgia for its own corporate history and one that we have
always been invited to regard as an extension of our own personal history.
Of course the
World of Color
’s technological innovations rest on a longer history of Renaissance and Baroque
fountain design, themselves dependent on Greek, Roman and Persian engineering, and whose theatricality,
display and monumentality, in the work of Renaissance artists like Tommaso Francini’s fountain designs for
Henry IV of France could be considered antecedents of Disney’s aesthetics.[9] They borrow from the
discursive playfulness of water and music or
giochi d’acqua
(water tricks) such as the Villa d’Este’s Fountain
of the Dragons or the Pratolino’s Grotto of Cupid, which surprised visitors with water squirts. Baroque
fountains like those built for Louis XIV at Versailles sculpted water as emotional movement, also combining
fireworks and music (Attlee 2008, 51ff). The nineteenth century brought with it the mechanically illuminated
fountain, such as the American Bartholdi fountain of 1876 that first used coloured lights fuelled by gas,
adding a luminosity to water (Smithsonian Institution Research Information System). The invention of steam
pumps meant that fountains no longer depended on gravity for their propulsion, allowing water to become
ever more extravagantly decorative. This capacity enabled our own era’s large-scale performative fountains
which, in addition to the enormous heights of Las Vegas’ Bellagio and Geneva’s Jet d’eau, include the Dubai
fountains, those in Efteling Theme Park in the Netherlands, and King Fahd’s fountain in Saudi Arabia, the
tallest in the world at 312 metres (or 1023.62 feet). From Rimington’s colour organs to the
Son et Lumière
light shows,
World of Color
’s scale, playfulness and sculptural expressivity are situated within longer
intermedial traditions in which the control of light, colour and music awe, dazzle and emotionally manipulate.
[10]
World of Color
’s physical location within Disney amusement parks also historically situates it within what one
may call the second golden era of the amusement park, or more particularly the theme park marked as
beginning in the postwar era with Santa Claus Land in 1946, paradigmatically with Disneyland in 1955,
followed by Six Flags in 1961, and many others, from Universal Studios to Dollywood.[11] Lauren Rabinowitz’s
recent study of amusement parks tells us of the first wave of construction which resulted in 2000 parks built
between 1893 and 1915, and whose most famous exemplars were Coney Island’s Dreamland, Luna Park and
Steeplechase and Chicago’s Riverview Park (2012, 1-35). Her close study of the postcard photography of these
parks (in which crispness and clarity are also key) show scenes that could be taken today at Disney’s show,
with the Ferris wheel and jetting fountain dominant visual elements (96ff). These parks helped define a new
concept of urban modernism: the celebration of motion and speed, the beauty of industrial design, and the
experiential interaction of spectator and surrounding crowd (26). Their modernity lay not only in their
architecture but also in their sensorial address: a visual stimulation of electrified spectacle and sound and an
embodied kinesthesia of rides and dynamic crowds.
Like the amusement park in which it is situated and of which it is a spectacular extension,
World of Color
relies upon a similar bodily address, linking the technological construction of spectacular vision and motion
across different modes of entertainment (Rabinowitz 2012, 59). The huge wall of water advancing to the
spectator in the show’s dramatic middle section was calculated to “put you in the middle of the [Lion King’s]
stampede” (Davison 2009) just as the heat jets make you feel the fire of Chernobog’s inferno. The show has
genealogical affinities to the nineteenth century amusement park’s largest spectacle, the pyrodrama and the
disaster genres. The pyrodrama was an intermedial fusion of theatre and fireworks, ornately painted sets and
panoramas orchestrated by auteurs like James Pain, while the disaster genre blended theatre, circus,
panorama and magic tricks. Like the
World of Color
, audiences in their thousands gathered around lagoons,
which acted as both protective safety layer and reflective surface (Rabinowitz 2012, 52-59). Not unlike
Disney’s Fantasmic show and Epcot’s Fountains of Nations, precursors to
World of Color
that fused theatrical
performance along with fireworks and fountain displays, audiences at the nineteenth century disaster genre
would gather to watch large theatrical casts reenacting historical events, from the Fall of Pompeii to the Great
Fire of London to Civil War battles. Unlike the Fantasmic and its nineteenth century precursors,
World of
Color
offers no human actors, although Disney Imagineers refer to the fountains as ‘actors’, even naming a
small orange fountain ‘Little Squirt’ to memorialise the energy and spirit of the company’s founder. Davison
describes the fountains’ role this way, “They become the emotion and the energy and the drama” (2009, part
two).[12]
Despite the undeniable sentimentality of Disney’s musical theatre traditions, the show’s choreography of
sound, light and colour stimuli in elaborate rhythmic patterns of movement produces a transitory yet hypnotic
spectacle. Light and water effects combined transform the spectator’s sense of space through their
extensive
qualities or ability to shift, fill and colour space and their durational
intensity
, or metrical rise and fall in
space. The synaesthetic combinations of visual, auditory and haptic elements immerse the spectator in
constantly transforming, propulsive, surging worlds, or what child psychologist Daniel Stern has described as
“vitality effects,” whereby rising and falling movement exemplified by tunnelling, radiating or oscillating
light, in conjunction with three dimensional vertical and horizontal display and sensorial address produce an
affective charge of intense pleasure and wonder (1993, 54). Pulsating lights around the Ferris wheel are
accompanied by rapid horizontal sweeps of fountains in circular or oval patterns around the spectator’s field
of vision, which enhance a sense of the show’s immersive proximity. Water and its cooling spray or the heat
of fire jets fills the air with dynamic energy. Viewer responses to the show express ecstatic delight in the
show’s colour patterns and iconic characters, mixed with physical exhaustion at the culmination of a day’s
activities. For example, Amanda L. of San Diego posted on
Yelp
: “This show blew me away! With the water
pyrotechnics, the FIRE, and the projection of Disney classics on water mist. Breathtaking! Maybe I was
delusional because of the long day that I had just endured but I was so amazed! It was literally the perfect way
to end a long day at the park! And made me feel all sorts of warm and tingly nostalgia.”[13]
Part III: New Media and Google GlassPart III: New Media and Google Glass
Figure 6. Glow with the Show Ears. ©Walt Disney
Productions. Frame Grab from Promotional Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVe93Vhbpxk
With 2012’s introduction of ‘Glow with the Show’, or programmable translucent Mickey Mouse Ears worn by
spectators which change colours through infrared signals (see Figure 6), the immersive dimensions of the
World of Color
are intensified (Disneyland 2012). Extending and enfolding the 4000 spectators into the
exhibition space, the spectator’s body becomes an additional pulsing and affective modular unit in a light and
colour spectacle in which colour becomes ever more sculptural. Interestingly, YouTube video of the Mickey
ears in the show makes clear the audience’s embodied responses: with bobbing ears showing spectators
dancing in time to the songs, as well as frequent rotation as people turn around and look at their fellow
audience members and the changing colours of their ears (“Glow With the Show” 2012).
Blending the projector and the body, the screen with the
spectator, Disney’s instrumentalisation of the body as
site of both exhibition and reception in
World of Color
is
shared with new wearable digital devices that combine
transparency and opacity as an essential part of their
tactile pleasure. Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft
are all currently working on mobile interfaces from
headsets to watches that connect screens on our wrists
or our eyes to smartphones, and that allow us to surf the
Internet, take photos or videos and post them online.[14]
Through augmented reality, wearable devices like Vuzix
M100 Smart Glasses (which work with Android phones)
animate our worlds by combining transparent headsets
with translucent commands or opaque data of specific interest to a particular location. Google Glass is a
wearable headset, which uses a transparent LCoS (Liquid Crystal on Silicon) display to put information in
front of our eyeballs, and according to its promotional material, uses the bones in our skull to conduct sound
“into your inner ear.”[15] It responds to commands prefaced with “OK Glass” to record a video, take a photo,
translate a word, or look up something, and can also be operated through taps on a touch sensitive bar on the
side of the eyeglass frame. The gestural economy of strokes, wipes and pinches that animate our movement
through our iPads and iPhones, Androids, Surfaces and other tablets has transformed our relationship with
new media devices, and with Google Glass can now be expanded to include new gestures, such as the wink
and the nod.[16]
In its mimicry of Apple’s clean white and titanium aesthetics, Google Glass’ graphic design exemplifies a
bubble
aesthetic, with its translucent circular menus that ‘pop’ up on the screen (with attendant bubble sound
effects) and then float upwards out of sight, which appeared in Google’s early concept videos in 2012. This
aesthetic choice does more than connote the playfulness and wonder of childhood, for Google’s 2013
promotional video even shows a child blowing a giant bubble, suggesting that wearing Glass means that the
evanescent can always be captured, always archived (“How It Feels”, 2013). Although the 2012 menu design
has now changed, 2014 Google videos retain the bubble’s light and playful associations with childhood, and
invite us to “live lighter.”
Glass’ augmented reality depends upon a palimpsestic construction of the world in which overlays of virtual
data, menus or icons are superimposed on our surrounding reality, such as Glass’ promotional video in which
the wearer activates a language translation from Mandarin to English, with “OK glass, Google ‘say half a
pound in Chinese’.”[17] Mike Cohan of VR Total Immersion has criticised Google’s claims of augmented
reality, recently arguing, “There [has been] very little understanding of what Augmented Reality really is and
what it requires. I would describe it as mixing real and virtual on a screen in real time. Just having a video
overlay like Google Glass is not Augmented Reality” (Smith 2013). If Cohan’s critique is correct and Glass is
merely a superficial overlay on our world, Google’s invocation of bubble aesthetics claims something else: that
being in the Google Bubble is a magical, indeed transformative mediation of the everyday.
Two last points about Google Glass before we return to Disney’s
World of Color
. Since Google launched its
initial advertisements in 2012 and with its recent announcement that it will be rolling out its first consumer
devices in 2014, the first Glass spoofs emerged (Zeevi 2012). In these parodies, two principal problems of the
device are circulating, with the first problem being opacity. Rather than the transparent, clean interface
promised in Google marketing, the visual proliferation of commands, symbols, screens and ads will so clutter
and impede our vision that the interface becomes a hazard—we will burn our hands while pouring coffee
because our depth perception is altered, and we will walk out into traffic or bump into people, all because we
have placed an interface between ourselves and the world. A related concern is the need for the eyes to
continually adjust focus between the translucent interface or commands and objects in the outer world in a
variety of different fields of vision. As commentator Adam Greenfield describes it, “there is a vaguely autistic
note to what they are talking about with Google Glass” (Martin 2013).
Dashburst
has sixteen Glass videos and
comic parodies, including # 11 “A New Way to Hurt Yourself” and # 13 “Project Dangerous Glasses” in which
simulated Glass POV videos show how web advertising will inevitably appropriate our visual real estate and
endanger our safety (Zeevi 2012). Indeed, so widespread have these parodies been that Google has felt the
need to respond, emphasising that the viewer’s field of vision is designed to be in the upper right part of the
headset, and that impeded vision will not be an issue (Solomon 2013).
If one problem is that Google’s interface is dangerously opaque, a second set of parodies suggest that Glass is
dangerously transparent, or both invisible and hypervisible. Invisible, because Google Glass’ archiving
capacity to record, photograph and post to the internet can be activated, not only through voice commands
but nominally through socially invisible hand gestures, head nods or winks. But as
Saturday Night Live
’s
‘Google Glass Sketch’ suggests, and as the exaggerated head jerks and other tic-like motions of Fred Armisen
as fictional tech blogger ‘Randall Meeks’ show, the user interface can be hypervisible too (Seifert 2013). In
Saturday Night Live
’s parody, the hyperbolic depiction of technical bugs and the awkward physical
interactions between Google user and social observer resituates the problem of Google Glass’ threat to privacy
as safely within the socially visible realm (at least for the time being), yet of course also marks a future where
the headset becomes as ubiquitous as our smart phones are now, and where we can, and always will be
recorded without our knowledge. As Edward Soja has put it, where the illusion of opacity inflates space to a
universal ‘given,’ the illusion of transparency reduces it to a subjective condition. While the former illusion
tends to reify space, the latter tends to dematerialise it (Soja 1989, 124-127).
So far, in my examination of Google and
World of Color
I have been playing with two meanings of the word
transparent. The first, meaning ‘conducive to the uninterrupted passage of light’ and suggested by the
wearer’s Glass interface is one in which space is first dematerialised, only to be re-enlivened through
instantaneous archiving. It is one which Google wants us to see as a ‘reanimation,’ indeed spectacularisation
of the everyday, and that collapses the temporal and spatial relationships between experiencing and
recording, between seeing and wearing. The second meaning of transparency, as ‘easy to see or recognise’ is
not only the social problem of that collapse, but also of the invisible structures such as data mining and
algorithmic marketing, which are produced by a corporation like Google deeply invested in maintaining the
invisibility of its internal operations. For Disney’s
World of Color
, the night time spectacle dematerialises
exhibition space as well as screen surface, only to re-project and re-animate it as an immersive, tactile
experience, where our field of vision is filled with light, just as our bodies become modular light elements in
the show. Where Google Glass wants to draw the world into us, transforming it into depthless 2D,
World of
Color
wants to extend the display outwards to us as curving multiplanar layers. Where Google Glass’s
boundaries are indeterminate with our own bodies, collapsing inside and outside, so too does
World of Color
challenge perceptual boundaries with its colour baths, reflected light, water spray and heat effects, and, in
the case of “Glow with the Show” collapsing reception with exhibition.
The structural persistence of material, conceptual, and aesthetic relationships between transparency,
translucency and opacity in new media forms like digital animation or Google Glass exemplify what Richard
Grusin has recently named as atavistic cinema. That is, “outmoded cinematic traits that appear to have gone
extinct” yet which reappear in the era of new media (2013, 2). By remediating older attractions such as the
pyrodrama and disaster genre, the mechanical musical fountain and the light show with projected classical
and digital animation,
World of Color
shows how the structural relationships between transparency and
opacity persist, indeed
especially
at that historical moment in which computer animation has replaced cel
animation and when celluloid cinema’s death knell has sounded. Building on older theatrical traditions of
spectacular design
World of Color
showcases transitory yet atavistic pleasures in their elemental forms: air,
fire, light, water. By incorporating us into the show, Disney’s
World of Color
suggests that ‘animation’ can be
understood not only as specific technical and material processes, but also as a perceptual and corporeal
transformation in which movement, light and colour enlivens, indeed ‘animates’ individual bodies even as it
reifies us as part of the spectacle. Paradoxically, through its projection effects and misty surfaces it reminds
us again of cel animation’s materiality, glimpsed in and alongside its digital replacement. Yet most of all,
World of Color
wants us to believe with our very bodies that the iconicity of Disney’s characters lives in, but
always transcends the transparent, the (cel)luloid and the ephemeral.
AcknowledgementsAcknowledgements
This paper is a revised version of a keynote address delivered May 31, 2013, at the ‘Intermediations’
Symposium, Otago University, New Zealand. Its examination of issues that bridge classical cel animation
and the contemporary digital era forms an epilogue tomy current research project Color and Classical Cel
Animation. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of this paper, which
helped me draw out certain nascent issues.
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NotesNotes
[1] As both Suzanne Buchan and Maureen Furniss (2013) have noted the provenance for this varies. It has
variously been reported as delivered by McLaren in a Lecture in 1961. See Ernest Callenbach (1962-1963).
Maureen Furniss reports a letter exchange between Georges Sifianos and Norman McLaren in 1986 in which
the meaning of this statement is discussed (1998, 12, n. 8). McLaren’s statement is also published in André
Martin (n.d.) and in
Cinema
(1957). Both McLaren and Len Lye used
direct animation
, or scratching or
painting directly onto the filmstrip, in which relationships of light, transparency and opacity are central.
[2] For example Otto Messmer’s Epok advertising of the forties. See Moana Thompson (2014), Tell (2007) and
Canemaker (1996).
[3] The Fountain People developed eight different fountains for Disney, which included grid, chaser, single
water whips, dual water whips, flower spouts, dancers, butterflies and geysers. See Anon, “Fanciful Fountains
Take Center Stage in Spectacular
World of Color
Show at DCA,” at
Mouseinfo.com
at
http://www.mouseinfo.com/forums/dlr-news-info/91956-fanciful-fountains-take-center-stage-
spectacular-world-colora-show-dca.html for detailed descriptions of these fountains. According to Libby Slate
the specifications included the following, “The fountain control system was devised via a partnership between
Disney, MA Lighting, and Fisher Technical Services, Inc. (FTSI), using inputs from grandMA 2 consoles using
th
MA-Net protocol and outputs EtherCAT industrial machine protocol to the fountain systems. The system was
conceived by technical producer Chuck Davis and fountain programmer and designer Jason Badger. The
entire operator interface comprises four grandMA 2 consoles, seven NPUs, and a replay unit. Special LED
lights were developed for each fountain, and laser effects were designed by Claude Lifante, with 4 Phaenon
15500 RGB diode-pumped lasers that mix for 13W of light” (2010).
[4] As Robin Allan (1996) has noted, water has been a frequent subject in Disney animated films and a key
design element in Disneyland.
[5] The Bellagio fountains were designed by WET or Water Entertainment Technologies. Co-founded in 1983
by Disney Imagineers Mark Fuller, Melanie Simon and Alan Robinson (who were involved in fountain design
for Walt Disney World and the Fountain of Nations for Epcot), it illustrates the interconnections between
Disney and the wider world of innovative water design.
[6] The team described the technology necessary to produce the high definition projection of the images with
“twenty-eight Christie Roadster S+20K projectors served by 12 Green Hippo Hippotizers routed via a Vista
Spyder to blend and setup the large multi-projector screens” (Slate 2010).
[7] For more on Disney’s innovations in colour cinematography, see Telotte (2008) and Neupert (1985, 1990,
1999). For further reading on Disney colour and its relationship to space, see Telotte (2010, 76-77).
[8] I thank my anonymous reviewer for these and other connections.
[9] For further reading on the technology, engineering and aesthetics of fountain design, see Adams (1979),
Attlee (2008) and Symmes (1998).
[10] For more on Rimington’s colour organs, see Yumibe (2009, 2012, 33-36, 39). For
Son et Lumiere
see
entry at
Encyclopedia Britannica
, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/554172/son-et-lumiere.
[11] For more information on Santa Claus Land see
RoadsideAmerica.com
(n.d.) and Adams (1991).
[12]
Mouseinfo.com
describes the
World of Color’s
eight types of fountains as the show’s ‘breakthrough
stars’: “These eight versatile performers made their debut June 11. While they are apt to respond to applause
with grateful encores, no autographs, please” (2011). See also Davison (2010).
[13] Yvonne L. of La Jolla posted on
Yelp
, “Fifteen minutes in and I’m weeping at the beauty of the show and
the passing of my childhood and all the emotions I didn’t know I could feel. I’ve seen it three times and I am
more amazed each time” (August 31, 2013). Accessed November 18, 2013.
http://www.yelp.co.nz/biz/disneys-world-of-color-anaheim.
[14] See Solomon (2013), Rougeau (2013a, 2013b). L. Frank Baum, author of
The Wizard of Oz
series, wrote a
short story for boys called “The Master Key” that premediated a number of futuristic inventions in its
narrative of a boy who inadvertently summons a Demon of Electricity. Along with the taser, a wireless phone
and a number of other gifts, the boy is given a pair of electrical spectacles called the Character Marker.
Handily, the spectacles superimpose letters on the people around him, whether G for ‘good’, F for ‘foolish’, E
for ‘evil’ etc., and are a proto form of augmented reality. Available at
Project Gutenberg
.
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/436/pg436.txt.
[15] Google Glass.com, http://www.google.com/glass/start/.
[16] The Apple iPhone’s famous incorporation of Corning’s Gorilla Glass was motivated by the aesthetic
superiority and tactile pleasure of glass as an interactive surface (Walter Isaacson 2011, 471-72). After privacy
concerns about Mike Giovanni’s app ‘Winky’ were raised, Google removed this app and also stated that Glass
will not use facial recognition software. It has attempted to reassure the public that operation of Google Glass
will be socially visible, “We have built explicit signals in Glass to make others aware of what’s happening …
In each case, the illuminated screen, voice command or gesture all make it clear to those around the device
what the user is doing” (Solomon 2013).
[17] I use the term palimpsestic, not only because of its historical significance in cel animation, but also
because the trace left by Google Glass is in the form of the archived audio or video recording.
Bio: Bio: Kirsten Moana Thompson is Professor of Film Studies and Director of the Film Programme at Victoria
University, in Wellington, New Zealand, and previously Associate Professor and Director of the Film Program
at Wayne State University in Detroit. She teaches and writes on animation and colour studies, as well as
classical Hollywood cinema, German, New Zealand and Pacific studies. She is the author of
Apocalyptic
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Dread: American Cinema at the Turn of the Millennium
(SUNY Press, 2007);
Crime Films: Investigating the
Scene
(Wallflower: 2007), and is currently working on a new book on Colour, Visual Culture and Animation.
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