By Daniel Bickermann. This “Small History of the Animated Picture“ is going right into the thick of it: into the history of the world. But before there can be film, there has to be light first, so our story starts quite pseudo-religiously with the throwing of a switch – click: the show can begin. God as the primal film projectionist. What he gets to see (and what we get to see) is pure chaos first and foremost: droll cavemen clichés, silent movie slapstick and the Book of Genesis get thrown into the blender; and Plato's Allegory of the Cave, Mickey Mouse, some neurological processes between visual nerves and the brain as well as Georges Méliès get pushed through the meat mincing machine, too.

Learning about vision itself

The audience might try to rub the dazzle out of their eyes with amazement and maybe even vertigo: All those funny animation characters being summoned up to explain the history of vision, storytelling and fooling around in a kind of breakneck rollercoaster, they all flatten themselves down to two dimensions or blow each other up into 3D, they focus themselves from soft to sharp, they are distorted in perspective and animated from still photography, they are finally even digitized. But still there is something more going on than just ironic meanderings and jocose imagery: In fact the  viewer of Une petite histoire de l’image animée can learn something about the abstraction of real images to the iconic idea of a world; about optical illusions; about the digitization of perception; and most of all about vision and the visual world itself.

And so the increasingly breathless narrator and the charming pencil drawing animations (which Philippe Massonnet keeps shaky and simple, imitating the style of Don Hertzfeld) hurry through impressions of King Kong, Star Wars and Godzilla, to exemplify the evolution of trick imagery, the cavemen become first knights and then businessmen (without ever evolving from their naive nature), TicTacToe turns into the digital matrix of the modern, animated characters turn into superheroes, but still – and here again we're learning something – all this is actually completely besides the point when all that matters is a really good story. For example one that shows that people can change, no matter if it is clubs they’re swinging or swords or briefcases.

Producer Anne Jaffrennou, who is together with director Joris Clerté one of the main people behind Une petite histoire de l’image animée, has some experience with the history of everything: In 2006 she was initiator and co-director of a 160-minute-documentary feature produced by arte called CosmicConnection, which was simultaneously broadcast on earth and into space – to be more precise: exactly towards the binary star system of Errai some 45 light years away, which is being orbited by an exoplanet. A short history of ourselves for our alien friends.

Repeat viewing recommended

In contrast to those potential extraterrestrial viewers we earthlings at least understand most of the sight gags and allusions presented to us by Une petite histoire de l’image animÉe. They may be too fast and too numerous to pick them all up at first sight – let alone to process them and think them over: hidden homages to Pixar, Chuck Jones and Monty Python may be reserved for the initiated. Even the elaborate sound design doesn’t call attention to itself the first time around. But in retrospect and at repeat viewing, which is heartily recommended here, their effect is all the more powerful. The humans are a strange species, indeed.

Links

• A TALE ABOUT THE ANIMATED IMAGE (F 2007. Joris Clerté)
• It’s ideas that count – An interview with Joris Clerté
• Cinema’s Birthplace – Werner Busch about the French film market