The Nude And Sexuality In Modern Animation
From the sculptures of ancient Greece to Expressionism and the Dada, the anthropomorphic nude has taken many shapes and forms to evoke a diversity of feelings and suggest various societal norms or changes. Since antiquity, the artistic subject of an idealised, symmetrical male figure was used as the exemplification of rigorousness and virtue, a stereotype to be continuously challenged in modern art of the late 19th and early 20th century which dismantled and reassembled the human figure aiming in a realism in feeling and emotion rather than figure.
The overwhelming strength and undeniable symmetry of the Greek warrior’s athletic figure, also reawakened in the Italian Renaissance and exemplified in Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (14th century BC), was associated with triumph, glory and even more excellence. The female nude makes a late (and shy) appearance around the time when Praxiteles constructs naked Aphrodite (4th Century BC). Still symmetrical and idealised the female body emerges in sculptures and the visual arts - always censored in fear of awakening obscenity. For the ancient Greek, nudity as a form of power and liberty only applied to portrayals of male bodies while female nudity was considered a taboo and was extremely frowned upon.
Tracing back into the ancient Greek nudes, and their basic contradictions, one soon realises how these early representations have influenced the ideals of beauty and shaped generations of unrealistic representations and expectations. The idealised self, with symmetrical proportions and fair hair and skin, almost deprived from its animalistic, sexual nature is throughout history associated with ideas of excellence and humbleness. An idea which disproves itself when representing the female figure, since considered (by the male artist) sexual by nature but portrayed with an overpowering voyeurism which steals its eroticism.
There came a time in Western art when creators turned around and pointed the finger to classicism and neoclassicism, and emerged themselves in deconstructing and reimagining the nude in movements such as Cubism, Expressionism, the Dada and artists such as Egon Schiele, Francis Bacon, Pablo Picaso and Lucian Freud. Artists who emphasise in the nude, its raw, lustful, sick, angry, twisted and sexual nature - an interpretation which regardless of the extravagance in technique, is in essence far closer to reality.
The Fairy of The Cabbages
Despite the emergence of cinema in a quite avant-garde time in history where the aforementioned artistic movements were flourishing in the visual arts, it did not bring with it the revolution the medium was (and is) capable of. There were female directors, such as the first ever director in history, Alice Guy Blanchet, who experimented with film and its narrative possibilities. Blanchet’s first film The Fairy Of The Cabbages (1986), which is arguably the first narrative film ever made, was actually concerned with the quite controversial subject of childbearing, drawing from an old French fairy tale which rumoured that babies were born out of cabbages and roses. From 1896 to 1906, Guy-Blaché was Gaumont's head of production and is generally considered to be the first filmmaker to systematically develop narrative filmmaking.
Mädchen in Uniform
Besides the natural curious cinematic awakenings that emerged with the beginnings of silent cinema at the end of the 19th century, a notorious example is any signs of non-heteronormative sexuality on screen were prohibited quite quickly (in 1934) with the implementation of the Motion Picture Production Code in Hollywood that enforced a religious and conservative representation of romance on screen, that of “the love of a man for a woman permitted by the law of God and man”. Just three years prior, Mädchen in Uniform (1931), a German feature film exploring themes of adolescence and lesbian desire, was making an impact at Berlin’s lesbian clubs of the time. With the emergence of the Production Code in Hollywood, all experiments of the kind were silenced, and naked bodies got quickly covered up in favour of family friendly audiences. Due to the costliness and complexity of filmmaking, sexualities were forced to fit the heteronormative norm, to fit the brief. Of course, there have been avant-garde filmmakers in modern cinematic history, Carolee Schneemann as a fine example that kept denouncing big studios’ control of one’s body and of one’s art.
In contrast to the limiting realism of photography and live-action film, animation, developing from (and along with) the visual arts opened up new avenues to the artist since its independent nature allowed for greater possibilities in imagining the nude. In this curatorial month, I am featuring modern animators who have used the pliability of their medium to pose alternatives to a classical representation of sexuality and reimagine the aesthetics of the body. Freed from the constraints of the realist camera lens, they envision characters with suggestive shapes and forms, often flirting with the grotesque or the surreal, intending in the subversion of the classical ideal of beauty, in less danger of offending the masses.
An exemplar of provocative work, Hong Kong born and raised animator Wong Ping invents an animated world which consists of flashing, colourful imagery reminiscent of a pop-art aesthetic, yet far more disturbing and aggravating in content. With this extravagance of colours Wong Ping criticises repressed sexuality, personal sentiments and political limitations using a visual language that sways between shocking and amusing.
Pussy/Cipka
International female animators have also dared to portray sex, self-pleasure and the naked body without the fear of censorship. Renata Gąsiorowska with her short film Pussy/Cipka (2019) visualises female masturbation in a playful and humorous way. Realising that self pleasure is an act rarely portrayed on screen she uses paint and water, pieces of paper under the camera and some hand-drawn animation (all combined in After Effects) to construct her orgasm sequence. Martha Colburn in Lift Off (1998) employs super 8mm and 16mm found footage superimposed film to animate a film set in outer space, habited by luscious female astronauts. Sky rockets turn into phalluses or vice versa in Martha’s surrealist sexual sci-fi vision. Polish animator Mariola Brillowska’s disquieting visual world pictures anthropomorphic aliens fucking each other as an act of war, rather than desire, in her Porno Karaoke International (2012). The feminist artist doesn’t shy away from provocation with her Vatican sequence imagery being one of the most disquieting and bold ones in the history of animation.
Lift Off
The artists mentioned, along with a plethora of others included in the references section of this piece, have portrayed the naked body and described sexuality, in shapes and forms unfrequently or never before imagined in a live action film. Either by flirting with the grotesque, or by adopting a more humorous, feminine or romantic approach, these filmmakers are interested in the body and are using the liberating power of animation to achieve sexual emancipation. By employing diverse animation techniques and experimenting with materials and visual styles, they introduce new narrative structures and challenge the status quo. The uncensored possibilities of animation as a genre are brilliantly employed to deconstruct and reshape the naked body and its expressions of sexuality.
By Maya Sfakianaki .
Maya Sfakianaki is taking over Good Wickedry for the whole month of May with her programme exploring nudity and sexuality in animation. One short film a week presented right here.
Female Animators and their films
Symbiosis - Nadja Andrasev (2019)
Big Toast - Sacha Beeley (2018)
Pussy - Renata Gasiorowska (2016)
Hi Stranger - Kirsten Lepore (2016)
Marcie Lacerte - Summer of Love (2017)
Maria Brillowska - Porno Karaoke International ( 2005)
Martha Colburn - Lift Off (1998)
Articles and Resources
https://www.another-screen.com/hands-tied-eating-the-other
