Quotes on Realism:
Wells, P. (2006). The Fundamentals of Animation. Switzerland: AVA Publishing.
"Everyone is blessed with the ability to fantasise - to re-imagine the world on our own terms and conditions, fulfilling our inner most passions and desires. Most people realise their fantasies are often in stark contrast to the real world in which they live. This is very juxtaposition can be very fruitful for the artist, as acute observation of the patterns of the real world set against a free imagination unfettered by rules, regulation and convention, can produce interesting points of comparison. This can set off potent ideas for personal expression." - pg. 16
Wells, P. (1998). Understanding Animation. Oxon: Routledge.
"Even though Disney dealt with what was a predominately abstract, non-realist form, he insisted on verisimilitude in his characters, contexts and narratives. He wanted animated figures to move like real figures and be informed by plausable motivation." - pg. 23
"Disney's animators undertook programmes of training in the skills and techniques of fine art in the constant drive towards ever greater notions of realism." - pg. 23
"Any definition of 'reality' is necessarily subjective. Any definition of 'realism' as it operates within any image-making practice is also open to interpretation." - pg 24
"'Realism', it seems, is a relative thing, but the kind of film which seems to most accurately represent 'reality' is the kind of film which attempts to rid itself of obvious cinematic conventions in the prioritisation of recording the people, objects, environments and events which characterise the common understanding of lived experiences. - pg 24
"As Eco notes, apropos of Disney's theme parks, 'to speak of things that one wants to connote as real, these things must seem real. The "completely real" becomes identified with the "completely fake". Absolute unreality is offered as real presence'". - pg 25 (Eco, U. (1986) Travels in Hyper-Reality. London: Picador.)
"The relativity of 'realism' within the context of animation may prove to be a valid analytical tool because some films may be categorised as more 'realistic' than others, or may work in a style that connotes a greater degree of 'realism' than another style etc." - pg 25
"Former Disney Chief, Jeffrey Katzenberg says of Pochahontas (1995), the studio's most live-action oriented cartoon feature, that it is exaggerated reality, where the real possibility of Pocahontas diving 100 feet from a cliff into a pool of water may be made more spectacular is she were to appear to dive 300 feet, a feat enacted in entire safety, and with persuasive plausibility, in the animated form. At one and the same time 'the very conditions of rationality' have been challenged but made to comply to a different, yet convincing, realist rationale." - pg 26 (The Project on Disney (Karen Klugman, Jane Kuenz, Shelton Weldrep and Susan Willis), (1995) Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World. London & Durham: Duke University Press.)
"Reality in animation, therefore, can only be a comparative and relative form, half-dedicated to representational authenticity, half-dedicated to the narrational forms which heighten and exhibit the fluid conditions of the real world." - pg 28
Nochlin, L. (1990). Realism. England: Penguin Books.
“Realism, as an historical movement in the figurative arts and in literature, attained its most coherent and consistent formulation in France, with echoes, parallels and variants elsewhere on the Continent, in England and in the United States.” - pg 13
“The Dominant movement from about 1840 until 1970-80.” - pg 13
“Its aim was to give truthful, objective and impartial representation of the real world, based on meticulous observation of contemporary life.” - Pg 13
“A basic cause of the confusion bedevilling the notion of Realism is its ambiguous relationship to the highly problematical concept of reality.”
“In contradistinction to Realist doctrine, poetry itself was most real and was ‘only completely true in another world’ since the things of this world were merely a ‘hieroglyphic dictionary’. - pg 14
“The commonplace notion that Realism is a ‘styleless’ or transparent style, a mere simulacrum or mirror image of visual reality, is another barrier to its understanding as an historical and stylistic phenomenon.”
“This insistence on catching the present moment in art - whether the encounter of Courbet and his patron on the road to Séte in The Meeting, the corps de ballet making a révérence in a Degas or a chance effect of light or atmosphere in a monet landscape - is an essential aspect of the Realist conception of the nature of time. Realist motion is always motion captured as it is ‘now’, as it is perceived in a flash of vision.” - pg 28-9
“For Champfleury, the essential Realist formula was ‘sincerity in art’ - the artist’s duty to represent only what he had seen or experienced, without any alteration and without any conventional response or aesthetic affectation.” Pg 36
Malpas, J. (1997) Movements in Modern Art: Realism. London: Tate Gallery Publishing Ltd
“As a quality, realism is positive, denoting toughness, down to earth attitudes to life or death and a practical outlook on the way things should be managed. It also presupposes the need for management of, or at least of some measure of control by man over, the environment or his fellow human beings.” - pg 7
“In relation to art, realism has the great advantage of ubiquitous subject matter. Anything that actually happens or exists is seen as worth material. However, it is at the level of interpretation of those events and things that the interesting difficulties in defining realism appear.” - pg 7
“Realism in the twentieth century, then, exhibits a protean stylistic and ideological approach. It can range from the passionate and quirky individualism of a Stanley Spencer to, contemporaneously, the most demoralised institutionalism of an ‘apparatchik’ painter like Alexander Gerasimov in the Stalinist USSR, where it appears under the guise of ‘socialist realism’”. Pg 7-8
William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti: “Their realism consisted partly in their doctrine of painting every element in a picture meticulously from life. In doing this they sometimes achieved an illusionism which is almost hallucinatory.” - pg 13
“Another English realist style popular in the 1880s particularly, derived from topographical painting. Atkinson Grimshaw’s moody, atmospheric nocturnal scenes, with tonal subtleties and flickering chiaroscuro that seem to owe as much to photography as to painting are good representatives of this trend.” pg 14-15
Stremmel, K. (2004). Realism. Germany: Taschen
“The original semantic field covered by the term “realism” - as far as the visual arts were concerned - was more constrained: it denoted a 19th-century artistic style which was the first in the history of art to call itself realistic, and it did this with the express purpose of drawing a line between itself and its idealistic opposite numbers.” - pg 6
“The term is often used synonymously with Naturalism to refer to an attempt at true-to-life reproduction of external reality.” pg 7
“The confusion surrounding styles in the 20th century is increased still further by the fact that the same terms are applied to very different manifestations of Realism.” - pg 8
“Realism is not what real things are like, but what things are really like.” - pg 9 (Bertolt Brecht)
“Socialist Realism, understood as the highest form of artistic development, was to obey the definition coined by Friedrich Engels in respect of Honoré de Balzac: ‘In my opinion, Realism means, alongside fidelity to detail, the faithful reproduction of typical characters in typical circumstances.’ Important, then, is not true-to-life depiction of reality in all its details, but the representation of the ‘essentials’, the ‘truth’ about reality, whereby concrete reality must always be taken as the starting point.” - pg 11
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