Animation’s Abandonment: The Centennial American Tradition of “Hyperteching” in Art
Written by Tiesa Green, Cornell University
When I was in fifth grade, my teacher chose two students at random, gave them a sheet of multiple-digit multiplication and long-division problems, and told them to solve them as quickly as possible. Here was the catch: one student had to solve the equations by hand, while the other was allowed to use a calculator. Of course, the second child won the competition, finishing the entire problem set before the first child could fully finish two of them. This was the idea of the Industrial Revolution, our teacher explained: just as a calculator allows us to compute mathematical equations at a significantly faster rate than doing so manually, the new technologies introduced during the Industrial Revolution gave way to production automation, fostering an unparalleled period of economic prosperity in America. It seemed that, if there was any lesson to glean from the Industrial Revolution, it was machine’s obvious superiority over humans in matters of speed, precision, and consistency.
However, I believe that what began as a pragmatic observation of the objective limitations of the human body and mind has since metamorphosed into a conflation of “technologically newer” with “superior quality.” This reductive conflation of progress and quantity of output has given rise to an unarticulated culture within the United States that I will dub “hyperteching,” in which an over-application of the themes of the Industrial Revolution has led to the compulsory and unnecessary replacement of human labor with increasingly modern iterations of technology. And, since the Industrial Revolution permanently dichotomized human labor and machine labor in the American zeitgeist, we measure the quality of a machine’s labor as a function of 1) how closely its output replicates a human’s (in matters of tangible objects, like a shoe made by a machine versus a cobbler) and 2) how similar a human deems its sensory output to the stimulus its mimicking (in matters of intangible objects, like how much an AI voice program sounds like the celebrity it’s emulating).
Arguably, the most observable form of hyperteching currently in our daily life has been the world of animated entertainment. Within the hypertech paradigm, the immediate distinguishability between the real world and animation’s representation of it is proof of the medium’s primitiveness and demonstrates the need for a new, tech-based animation form to close this gap. Today, CGI’s ability to convincingly render even non-real, fantasy elements in photo-realism, has transformed animation–once so stylistically distinct across creators that even child viewers could quickly identify a media from a stock character alone (search “art style challenge” in Google Images for more)–into little more than a relic. Walt Disney Pictures, the owner of some of the most notable cult classics in fiction, has adapted eighteen of its most popular animated intellectual properties into CGI-aided live-action retellings throughout the past decade and has eight more in development currently. For perspective, pre-2014 (in other words, in the time before technology could accommodate live-action fantasy), Disney had only adapted two animated properties into live-action during its entire 77-year-old run.
And so, the death of animation begins.
Beyond discouraging the production of future animation by quantifying the validity of an artistic style–a feat that should be impossible given art’s inherently subjective nature–as a function of its adherence to realism, hyperteching prevents proper preservation of already-published animation, tampering with the collective memory of earlier works’ aesthetic quality to cement its faux-legitimacy. While, logically, it makes the most sense to consume media through the technology that it was made to suit, America’s hyperteching sentiments promise that media is best consumed through the newest tech available.
One of the best illustrations of the falseness of this claim is retro games’ image quality on the cathode-ray tube (CRT) screens for which they were intended, versus the more recently established light-emitting diode (LED) screens. While there are many variations between these screen displays, the only one of importance in this context is how the screen pixels appear to the naked eye. Relative to LED screens, CRT screens overall provide a less crisp image, with fewer pixels, poorer resolution, and a lower contrast ratio. In America’s hypertech culture, LED is the clear winner because its high-resolution display better mimics the detail with which we see the real world. However, the soft edges of CRT screens were not a shortcoming, but rather a clever means to create the illusion of depth on a two-dimensional plane. LED screens’ sharpness butchers the original quality by insisting upon making clear visual boundaries between its pixels. The modern player, passing off their remembrance of better graphics on nostalgia, willingly embraces hyperteching, and lets technologically non-contemporary media fade away.
See these side-by-sides, courtesy of: https://wackoid.com/game/10-pictures-that-show-why-crt-tvs-are-better-for-gaming/
So, now onto the elephant in the room: what does any of this have to do with the Wharton Studio Museum, whose mission to preserve 20th-century silent films is entirely unrelated to animation’s status in the new 20s? In a strict sense, nothing at all. However, as this blog post’s title suggests, I believe that the very hyperteching that killed the silent film medium one-hundred years ago is committing the same violence to animation today.
I will be honest here: I have never been particularly interested in silent film. My name is Tiesa (pronounced tie-EE-suh), I’m a senior at Cornell University, and–most relevant to this blog post–I’m an early-2000s baby. As someone raised on Flash computer games, hijinks comedies, and–as stated–a plethora of highly stylized cartoons, the grayscale palette, lack of spoken dialogue, and practical effects of silent films were seemingly the antithesis to the loud, bright, fast-paced media with which I had been inundated. In fact, the only reason I am aware of the Wharton Studio Museum’s existence at all is because my Moral Psychology in Action class connected me with them as part of my on-field work. Foolishly, I had gone through my life with the unexamined belief that the unspoken dialogue format of silent films was nothing more than a forced placeholder until technology allowed for the synching of audio and video introduced in “talkies.” Due to this, I regarded silent film as an “unrefined draft” of sorts to modern movies–interesting in the same way a storyboard is interesting, but not a media style in itself.
This was, until I learned of the intentional “mis-”preservation of the medium of silent film.
With the rise of the talkie in the 1930s came the end of the silent film, with film studios discarding the film reels en masse for their perceived lack of cultural relevance and economic value. This, combined with the fragility and combustible nature of the nitrate film stock on which silent movies were recorded has resulted in the loss of up to 90 percent of silent films. Worsening these films’ preservation has been the industry’s improper showing of them post-1930s, with silent films gaining the reputation of being of low visual quality and having poor editing due to them being played at the incorrect speed and missing chunks of frames as a result of crude censorship. In fact, just as some believe modern film to be in decline today in the contemporary era of reboots, remakes, and sequels, film has been said to have suffered a sharp decline in the years immediately following the death of silent film in the 1930s by historians and the people who lived through the period alike.
Living through hypertech’s destruction of animation is, for the first time in my life, making me genuinely try to appreciate the destruction of silent film not as a “genre,” like comedy or action, but as a cultural entity. Hyperteching’s pursuit of realism through the syncing of sound to films killed the silent film industry, and its refusal to properly display the few surviving films has kept it dead. And now, hyperteching’s pursuit of realism through CGI is presently killing animation, and the refusal to properly display the animation we have left will ensure it stays dead after hyperteching’s final blow.
I am not someone who knows much about silent film, and, if you are around my age, I imagine that, for similar reasons to me, you do not either. Hyperteching perpetuates itself so easily because it has silently engrained itself into our very culture–nameless and unrelenting. Crucially, what hyperteching tries to hide from you is that tech advancement and an appreciation for the past can live in harmony alongside each other: hypertech takes shelter in the false dichotomy that says otherwise. This, readers, is my offer: I will be writing a handful of these blogs throughout the rest of the semester and will be comparing modern film conventions with those of silent film in my intention to honor the cyclical nature of time. The stakes are low for you–only a five to ten-minute read. Let’s bask together in the beauty of silent film that hyperteching has hidden from us.
Join me next week for my second blog post, “Camp in Silent Film Versus Kitsch in Today’s Blockbusters: Bastardization, Evolution, or Facsimile?”
