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| Sarah Bennett'05 on an animation set in Moscow, where she is on a Fulbright award. |
“You must have a question,” the director told me. “You don’t need the answer, but if you don’t understand your question exactly, your film will not turn out.”
I’m sitting amid the clutter of glue, paints, cardboard, ashtrays, doodles, and woodworking tools at the Soyuzmultfilm animation studio in Moscow. Using dolls, we are making an animated film about a woman who unwittingly adopts a brainy bunny rabbit as her son, not an unusual topic for a studio that turned out 30 fairy tales a year at the peak of Soviet animation production.
Having first discovered the world-renowned talent of Russian animators in a film studies course at Beloit, I later encountered a lively animation culture while studying abroad in Moscow. Russian animators’ originality and enthusiasm impressed me, so I applied for a Fulbright Scholarship to study how animated film communicates, and whether it does so in the same way that language does.
As I listened to the director, I realized that the way animators and linguists think differs radically. Animators don’t parse their films into meaningful pieces in the same way that linguists distinguish between nouns and verbs; they think more in terms of communicative goals and visual problem-solving. For example, if they want their set to look realistically three-dimensional on film, they know that they have to use various visual tricks to imitate large expanses of atmosphere between major props like houses and trees.
There is a lot for me to learn here, but what hope is there that any of it will be useful to me? I’m here to study communication, not set design. Somehow I must synchronize animation thinking with linguistic theory.
Similar quandaries confronted me when I designed an interdisciplinary major at Beloit focusing on linguistics and structures of meaning. I often navigated the differing definitions of proof and methodology in social science and language studies in pursuit of answers, many times turning up irreconcilable explanations. Initially, I was drawn to interdisciplinary studies because the major let me freely follow my curiosity about language. I gradually learned that finding satisfying answers most often lay in thoroughly understanding and reworking my questions. This time, however, my project is more difficult because one of my disciplines is not analytical.
I chose to study animation because it is an unusually demanding visual medium. Animators are not tied down by the physical world like other filmmakers; they meticulously structure every detail themselves. The short duration of most animated films requires directors to condense large amounts of information into a few seconds of film. Such visual efficiency, I figured, would make language-like structures easier to spot. Instead, I’ve found that it unleashes visual creativity in such force that communicative strategies become infinite, and therefore unclassifiable from the point of view of traditional linguistics.
Does this mean that the way film communicates is nothing like language? Perhaps. But do humans possess two or more radically different modes of communication? It’s hard to tell. Maybe we really have two disciplines working in the same sphere, but with radically different vocabularies for describing that sphere.
Animators often talk about how they are giving life to their characters and worlds. Why do they use the metaphor of life to describe their work? Animation indeed dances with the context of life, just as language does, but linguists do not discuss vivacity. Linguists will write volumes about human understanding, however, which can be seen as engagement of context, essentially, participation in life. Aren’t animators and linguists talking about the same thing here?
There’s only one way to find out. I’ve got my question clearly in hand, as my director advised, and although I’m not making a film, similar preparation may also lead to success in interdisciplinary studies. Who knows, maybe I’ll bring a little animation to the field of linguistics.
Originally from Madison, Wis., Sarah Bennett graduated summa cum laude from Beloit in 2005 with a double major in interdisciplinary studies and Russian. She plans to pursue further studies and a career in linguistics. Soyuzmultfilm is one of the premier animation studios in Russia.
