There is no tradition of Australian moving image political satire per se - at least not in the shape or form that one would readily associate with the political cartooning tradition – and no broader historical context in which to locate the practice of those political cartoonists that have produced moving image works. I will therefore adopt a case-study framework to introduce the public figures who can be seen as pioneers of the brand of moving image political satire defined in this thesis. I will discuss their background, the nature of their work, the context in which they worked or continue to work, their graphic style and, in most cases – but not all - what factors contributed to their decision to discontinue their production of these images.
In examining the creative and technical environment in which these individuals operated, what motivated their engagement and the extent to which they could sustain it, I will position these case studies as precedents for a contemporary political cartooning practice. These case studies provide an overview of the current state of this hitherto neglected art and establish a point of reference for further discussion in later chapters about why moving image political satire of this nature can, and must, be brought into the broader political cartooning tradition.
The capacity for animation to draw on established forms of graphic visual satire, while offering new opportunities to explore devices that enhance the narrative, appeals to many political cartoonists. To date, five Australian newspaper cartoonists have produced publicly broadcast or disseminated political animations: Harry Julius, Bruce Petty, Peter Nicholson, Jon Kudelka and Rocco Fazzari. Julius died in 1938, and of those still living, only Fazzari currently sustains a regular publishing practice. The others tend to cite time and fiscal constraints as inhibiting factors in the production of animation, rather than any specific creative or technical demands placed on them as artists.
Political cartoons and animation enjoy something of a symbiotic relationship. As will be discussed in later chapters, the two forms are intrinsically visual narrative objects whose meaning is inferred from the interplay of satirical devices such as metaphor and caricature. There are clear distinctions between them, though these differences pertain more to temporality than to graphic style or function. While Kudelka alone insists that the time-based structure of animation makes it a “totally different beast”66 from the static cartoon, Petty describes animation as “just a technique… as natural as going from cross-hatching to another style”.67 Nicholson asserts that “a political animation is a cartoon, there’s no question about that”;68 while Fazzari happily admits “I’ll plunder any kind of visual form to get the message across”.69
Petty observes that political cartoonists are “driven by the great search for innovation”.70 The alacrity with which cartoonists have historically embraced technological advances in printing and publishing is given impetus by their pursuit of an audience. Their craft is concerned with the topicality and immediacy of visual responses to political and social events, and their capacity to reach and engage with the public is pivotal to their role as social and political commentators.
In this context it is unsurprising to observe that Australia’s first notable animation was a political one produced by a newspaper cartoonist.71 Harry Julius’ Cartoons of the Moment was a series of animations produced from 1912-1872 and shown in weekly public screenings of Australasian Gazette newsreels. The newsreels of the day were screened to cinema audiences in
66 Jon Kudelka, Interview by author. Tape recording. Canberra, Australia, 12 Sep 2011.
67 Bruce Petty, Interview by author. Tape recording. Sydney, Australia, 8 Dec 2009.
68 Peter Nicholson, Interview by author. Tape Recording. Melbourne, Australia. 25 Apr 2011.
69 Rocco Fazzari, Interview by author. Tape recording. 11 Jul 2011.
70 Petty, interview by author.
71 Eyley, John. (ed. Dick Ross). “The nature of industry and its relationship with training: the teachers’ perspective,” (a report of the international symposium, September, in Urbino, Italy (1992).
72 Ibid.; Lauren Williams (curator). Australian Screen website.
http://www.australianscreen.com.au/genre/animation (Accessed 15 Jan 2009).
Australia and New Zealand and provided the only alternative news source to print media. The animations began a tradition of Australian animation and at the same time established a tradition of animated political satire.
Julius was already an accomplished illustrator, cartoonist and caricaturist when he began producing his Cartoons of the Moment series. The animations used caricature and satire to comment primarily on WWI politics from the Allies’ point of view. They tended toward propaganda in that they supported the Gazette’s position on the war and its pro-conscription stance.
Occasionally, Julius’s animations drew inspiration from social as well as political issues. The Evolution of the Skirt (1916),73 for example, comments on the apparently ever-decreasing length of women’s skirts and in doing so, predicts the mini-skirt nearly fifty years before it came into fashion.
Filmed at 16 frames per second on orthochromatic film stock, the silent animations employed a stop-frame technique coupled with live-action footage. An early adopter of the new media technology of the day, Julius applied for a patent for his stop-frame animation technique of photographing an arrangement of cardboard or celluloid parts that are then rearranged or reconfigured for subsequent photographic plates. To counter the image contrast issues associated with this medium, Julius also made use of paper or celluloid cut-outs consisting largely of white figures on a dark background.
The typical format of these animations consists of three distinct technical processes that also provide something of a framework for a three-act narrative. First, the opening live-action sequence shows Julius perusing a newspaper, presumably for inspiration for the animated content to follow.
Next, a ‘lightning sketch’ live-action technique is employed to show the hand of Julius creating and adding detail to the images, sketching in and altering the outline as he lays out the graphic framework of the cartoon. The final act has Julius remove his hand, and the drawn elements seemingly
73 Australian Screen website, http://aso.gov.au/titles/newsreels/german-dove-of-peace/clip1/ (Accessed 15 April, 2013).
come to life via a stop-frame technique that advances the cartoon to its inevitable resolution, or pay-off.
The animations, which vary in duration from 43 seconds to over 11 minutes, employed many of the principal satirical devices commonly associated with political cartoons: caricature, the use of symbols, and puns. Descriptive, explanatory titles and captions were also used to help clarify the meaning of the visual content. The various devices Julius employed facilitated the multiple roles demanded of the animations in their newsreel context: to convey timely information, make a point without spoken commentary and entertain the audience. It is not known how exactly the audience responded to these clips, though the visual tricks employed by Julius in their production must have provided a spectacle in an era where film and animation was still very much a novelty.
It is not clear why Julius discontinued his weekly animations after 1918; one possibility is that the advent of films with sound made newsreel production more expensive, and animations came to be seen as an indulgence. Another possibility is that, with the end of the war, funds for propaganda material dried up along with its audience; satirising the enemy in wartime is easier to justify in terms of cost and audience appeal than the satirical probing of social and political mores during peacetime. Whatever the reason, it would appear that Julius’ animations became cost-prohibitive. Julius subsequently moved into the advertising field, and while he continued to produce animated short films, his Cartoons of the Moment series remain his only publicly broadcast political satirical works.
Around thirty years after Julius’ last animation was screened, and well before he began his career as a political cartoonist, Bruce Petty secured a job with The Owen Brothers animation studio. It was here, using a single-frame Aeroflex camera, that Petty learned the 12th of a second frame movement that was the cel-animation standard of the day. In recalling that period, Petty describes an exciting time of technical discovery and innovation, where film was wound back in the dark and achieving specific effects such as dissolves and fades involved a lot of trial and error (“we
were all inventing the wheel”). He was especially attracted to the mechanical apparatus employed in animation production – growing up fascinated by his father’s orchard machinery, it was more the mechanics than the aesthetics that appealed to him at that time.74
Petty has said that his interest in animation was a natural culmination of his passion for drawing and taste for film,75 though his engagement with the medium has largely been peripheral, in professional terms, to his main occupation of political cartoonist. His animations tend to be satirical commentaries on the social, economic and political characteristics that define our society. They contain a substantial amount of descriptive information and graphic content and as such they tend to be relatively lengthy. Leisure, the film for which he won an Academy Award in 1976, was over 13 minutes long; his latest film, Global Haywire, is 80 minutes long. The Human Contraptions series that Petty created for the ABC were all 4 minutes duration, a length that was determined by broadcast requirements.
Petty addressed the challenges of working with equipment that was not compatible with his preferred rapid and fluid animating style by engineering his own ‘animation machine’. The light required to illuminate his drawing surface produced excessive heat that made his paint dry too quickly and made him uncomfortably hot. To counter the heat emanating from the bulbs he instead focused a relatively small amount of light (500 watts) through the transparencies on which he painted and into the camera lens via a pair of strategically placed magnifying lenses. Petty also manufactured a mechanical solution that facilitated the placement and bringing into the drawing area of the transparencies. Petty claims that his solution at least halved the time needed to animate. He says that while the technique allowed for a very rapid production process, it inevitably invited errors and demanded improvisation.
74 Petty, interview by author
75 Ann Turner, In Their Image: Contemporary Australian Cartoonists, (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2000), 34.
Until 2000, Petty created his animations with a 16mm Bolex camera, using a stop-frame technique and drawn in the same free-flowing hand as his cartoons – though the morass of energetic line-work that is his trademark, is treated in a more economical fashion. The line work in Petty’s cartoons typically fills the entire panel whereas the complexity of line work is generally pared back in his animations. When complex and intricate detail is introduced to aid the narrative or for satirical impact, it tends to emerge over time, or in film terms, a number of frames. As will be described in greater detail in chapter 3, Petty cleverly uses space in his frames to build tension and advance the narrative, by introducing a space that is soon filled with visual elements.
Petty augments this quality in his animations through cinematic devices such as camera movement and rapid jump cuts. The images are constructed through a combination of hand-drawn and photographic elements, though Global Haywire marks an evolutionary milestone in Petty’s practice through its use of video footage.76 The evolution of Petty’s animation style owes much to his embrace and application of contemporary technology. Petty uses modern media methods to enhance his communication while maintaining his unique visual style. In the past 12 years Petty has embraced the digital software programme Flash as his animation tool of choice. The polished line work that Flash tends to produce does impact on Petty’s style to an extent, but he is comfortable sacrificing line accuracy for the benefits of digital production.
In various contexts Petty has described his natural drawing style as “very tenuous”, “improvised” and “borrowed from Thurber”.77 His chaotic visual style is derived from his use of line and his inclination to draw quickly.78 Self-deprecatingly he admits to be lacking in drawing skill; he considers his drawings “just a device, just a calligraphy”.79 He claims not to know what aesthetics is exactly, but observes:
…when you see something that’s got a level of information that’s got nothing to do with the content, cerebral stuff. I think it’s interesting that the two ideas of actually communicating a thought and actually thinking what’s going to look good, there’s some overlap there.80
Despite the fact that Petty has produced shorter animations of around 30 seconds to a minute long - a length more appropriate to publication in an online news context – he initially wasn’t able to convince his employers at Fairfax Media to provide incentives for him to produce them for the online edition of The Age.81 Petty admits that had he been persistent he probably could have persuaded the executive - and could persuade them still - to allocate a budget for animation production. His insouciance in this regard is attributable to his not being prepared to invest, at the expense of his many other creative activities, the substantial amount of time required to sustain a regular animation practice.
Peter Nicholson has enjoyed an illustrious career as a political cartoonist and can be considered another pioneer of Australian political animation. As a friend and mentor, Bruce Petty introduced Peter Nicholson to animating with the Bolex camera,82 a modified version of which was used to produce the animated satire Rubbery Figures. First produced in 1984 - coincidentally the same year that the very similar satirical puppet show Spitting Image first went to air on British TV - Rubbery Figures was designed to be “the equivalent of a political cartoon on television… funny, topical, quick, biting and informed”.83
The programmes were a combination of live-action footage of puppet figures and cut-out animation shot at 18 frames per second. Each 5-minute programme took a crew of around twenty people three or four days to
voiced by the talented Paul Jennings, who provided the voice caricatures for each character. Screened as a segment within a number of shows and also as a stand-alone programme, both on the ABC and on commercial television, Rubbery Figures survived until 1990, at which time budgets dried up and Nicholson turned his energy to other projects.
From 2002 until 2009 Nicholson produced short computer animations, published bi-weekly, and then later weekly, on The Australian’s online newspaper site. Nicholson assumed the role of lead animator, creating the key frames, with the in-between frames filled in by one or two assistant animators. Nicholson’s use of vector-based software Flash facilitates an intuitive production process that brings to his animations much of the spontaneity and immediacy inherent in his drawings. Drawn with a bright, vibrant palette and in the same distinct visual style as his cartoons, Nicholson combined clever scripts and dialogue - voiced once again by Paul Jennings – to reinforce the comic impact of the caricatures. The collaborative aspect of his work is significant in that it allowed him to generate an animation within the framework of a weekly media cycle - a degree of prolificacy difficult to achieve for the individual artist.84
The Australian gave Nicholson a budget that was designed for an output of one animation a fortnight; but he observed that when the animations were published once a week they started getting a lot more views, or hits. To accommodate a weekly as opposed to bi-weekly schedule, Nicholson made the animations shorter and more spontaneous. He accumulated a large subscription base, which he personally managed via emails, and his animations would typically attract around ten thousand unique visitors on the first day. That number would drop off after three days but viewer traffic would persist for another two or three weeks. In terms of unique views the animations were far more successful than the website’s news video clips, which were not unique to The Australian, and often published after people had seen them elsewhere. The success of the animations points to the capacity for political animations to attract a large online audience.
84 Nicholson, Interview by author.
Curiously, his employers were unable to extract any tangible, commercial benefit from Nicholson’s original and exclusive content.
In the end Nicholson found that doing animations at the same time as print cartoons was exhausting. When his cartooning colleague at The Australian, Bill Leak, suffered a serious injury that kept him away from work for an extended time, Nicholson picked up some of the slack and found himself working six days a week. As well as the actual drawing work being tiring, coming up with ideas was also draining. Despite maintaining his creative will to continue producing animations, Nicholson could not sustain his output in a professional context and, consequently, has had to put his animation practice on hold, indefinitely.
Nicholson professes to missing animation because he has invested so much time and energy into mastering the software. He observes, in rather self effacing terms, that up until that point his animations were “pretty conventional looking”.85 He is somewhat disappointed that, having worked out how to do it systematically, he was unable to persist in developing more visually interesting ideas. Had he been able to maintain his animation practice, Nicholson insists that his caricatures and narrative structures would have been treated in more radical and interesting ways.86
In looking to other projects, Nicholson is attracted to the idea of producing a different kind of moving image cartoon, one that he refers to as a ‘drawlk’.
This is a concept inspired by public talks Nicholson has done where he delivers a narrated cartooning performance. Reminiscent of the live illustration format popularised by Rolf Harris and the Mr Squiggle television show, Nicholson develops a drawing and explains it as he goes, making unexpected changes and additions along the way. Appearing spontaneous, the performances take a fair amount of rehearsing. The response he has enjoyed from audiences has been so positive that he intends to produce similar pre-recorded video versions for publication on The Australian’s website. If and when Nicholson engages this project, the works
85 Nicholson, interview by author.
86 Nicholson, interview by author.
will provide another facet to the diverse spectrum of moving image satire published online.
In 1996 Jon Kudelka went to Sydney to do an animation course, simply because, he “wanted to do a bit more drawing”.87 He also enrolled in life drawing classes, as he recognised it as the “basis of classical animation”. As a political cartoonist with The Mercury at that time, he was interested in applying his newfound animation skills to political satire.88 In observing the creative potential of presenting political satire in an animated context, Kudelka’s insight reflects a broader symbiosis that exists between drawing and animation.
In the fledgling days of the Internet, Kudelka’s initial aim was to have political animations broadcast on television rather than online – not simply
In the fledgling days of the Internet, Kudelka’s initial aim was to have political animations broadcast on television rather than online – not simply