A Tale of Wobble

You have seen boiling, but maybe you were not aware of it. Boiling is what we call the inevitable wobble in any lines drawn by hand. The most exaggerated example would be if you tried to copy the same drawing over and over again then shot the resulting pile of drawings. The image would stay the same, but it would either shimmer or wobble badly depending on how carefully the copies were made.

Boiling was an inevitable side effect of hand drawn animation. As we will see, some people actually like the effect, but for many others, getting rid of boiling was an issue. There were three strategies for minimising the effect in traditional hand drawn animation:

First was simply to draw as carefully as possible to minimise the effect.
The second approach was to use holds whenever any part of a scene was not actually moving; so, a character that was talking might have a static body and face with just the lips changing. This is the typical look of “economical” animation.
Lastly, in fully animated films (Disney etc) the technique of animated holds was used. The idea was that even when a character was almost entirely static, there would either be a miniscule movement, (sometimes referred to as “breathing”), or the held position was carefully copied over and over. Generally, 4 or 5 copies would be made then cycled at random for the length of a hold. This way, all drawings had the same amount of boil.

There were and still are some animators not only not bothered with trying to hide unwanted boiling, but happy to make a virtue out of it and if anything deliberately exaggerating the effect.

One type of animation where very noticable boiling was inherent was that of drawing directly on to film stock, a technique associated with artist/animators Len Lye and Norman McLaren. A frame of 35mm film is tiny as a canvas so the difference between one frame and the next is always going to be extreme. An added problem was that this sort of work was usually done without any optical help; that is, each frame was done with only eye reference to the other frames. When this type of animation is seen on a cinema screen it is very lively and is perhaps the most extreme form of boiling.

Likewise, there have been many other animators who have embraced the effect of boiling. To name three: Bill Sewell’s “Lucy in the Sky...” sequence in the film “Yellow Submarine”. This was perhaps partly inspired by “Yellow Submarine” director George Dunning’s beautiful animation drawn on sheets of glass and called “The Flying Man”. And Bob Godfrey’s original “Rhoobarb” TV series was animated using felt pens on paper. That this series was so popular for so long shows that the public were not put off by animation that bubbled and boiled anarchically. Many other animators have embraced the boiling effect as something that gives extra life to their animation.

The very antithesis of the examples above is computer generated imagery. Although 3D cgi has become a principal form of animation, there are those who find the look a bit too sterile. Unsurprisingly, some cgi animators therefore deliberately introduce random fluctuations in line quality, ie. boiling, where 3D cgi must be composited together with traditional drawn animation so that the two line qualities do not clash. The 2D cgi program, Moho, allows you to introduce noise into your animation – noise being yet another word for boiling.

So why do some folk like their animation a bit wobbly? The world around us, perhaps fortunately, does not appear to be shimmering except in rare instances as when we see a mirage or the twinkling of stars – I say fortunately, because it would surely be exhausting for us if everything we saw in our waking hours bubbled away as in “Rhoobarb”. Yet there is a mechanism that explains why some sorts of randomness in movement can be found attractive. This is to do with the way in which we see. In fact, our eyes are never absolutely static. There is always a small amount of “jitter” movement even when we think we are looking at a static scene. It seems that many creatures can only see things that are moving and even we humans still carry a little of that inheritance – at the edge of each eye’s sight, we can only be aware of movement without knowing what it is that is moving. Even further, at the very edge of the human eye, the eye has an even more primitive function; we can’t actually see anything, not even movement, but the eye can tell the brain that it has an awareness of something moving and this makes us involuntarily turn to look. So, not only is the human eye/brain combination very sensitive to things that move, it would seem that this sensitivity may even be the primary function for the eye; this makes sense when you consider that our primitive ancestors were very much on the look out for predators.

It has been suggested that one reason why we find the “film look” more attractive than video generated imagery is because the real movie film process has an inherent mechanical weave that produces an effect somewhat like animation’s boil and an affinity to our way of seeing. I suspect that because we are now far more used to seeing absolutely steady imagery thanks to digital and video technology, we are being educated to accept a more static look; certainly, although noise is often introduced into clean video productions in order to emulate the effect of film grain, I am not aware of efforts to make the video images weave around a little bit. Perhaps the days of the slightly unsteady images of movie film are over and perhaps viewers will feel less tolerant of animation boil.

There is no moral or neat ending to this tale. Animation will surely always attract artists who will want to push the boundaries and probably the joys of wobbly line animation will be revived and re-discovered for many years to come.

"Pixels and Pegbars" contents             home