During the taping of the annual Oscar Preview Show, in the midst of a rather heated

discussion with fellow critic Amy Nicholson about Anomalisa—which she loved and I
loathed—I described the film as rotoscoped, which was a misuse of technical animation
term.

That’s a drawback to working as a journalist: when you make a mistake, you make it in
public. It lies there, like a dropped ice cream cone on a sidewalk, where everyone can
see it. There’s a special sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach that comes when you
see a vending machine full of newspapers and realize that your article is in every copy
of every paper—and in every copy in vending machines all over the city—and that the
same misspelling is in every one.

I once left the second “T” off my friend Faith Hubley’s maiden name; in the first edition
of “Enchanted Drawings” I spelled “Van Beuren” wrong. And when I had to write a
memorial piece about Chuck Jones’ passing, I mixed up the day the article would run
and got the date of his death wrong. (I gave myself a partial pass on that one as I was
crying the whole time I wrote it.)

When you make a mistake like that, and your ice cream is melting into the gutter, you
can try to ignore it, you can bang your head against a wall or you can walk into the
nearest bar and order a double.

Or you can admit you blew it, which I did and do. That’s why the Oxford English
Dictionary added Homer Simpson’s “D’oh!’ so quickly: We need it.

The rotoscope is a device invented by Max Fleischer in 1915 to enable animators to

trace over live action footage: It can be used to turn live action into animation—the
Prince in Disney’s Snow White was heavily rotoscoped, which is why his movements
look so stiff--or to help animators match their drawings to live action, as they did in
many of the Fleischers’ “Out of the Inkwell” shorts.

Obviously, the Anomalisa animators didn’t trace from live action and I should have
known better than the misuse a technical term. But their work certainly looks like it was
based on live action, which is what I should have said. Ironically, when animation
cleaves live action too literally, it becomes earthbound and dull.

Animation is a medium of caricature that seeks to capture the essence of a movement

or an expression by manipulating images and time. Ward Kimball, one of the Nine Old
Men of Disney, talked about the importance of what you leave out a drawing. Norman
McLaren, the founder of the Animation Unit of the National Film Board of Canada,
argued that the what happened between individual drawings could be more important
than what was on the drawings because animation was ultimately not about drawings-
that-move but about movements-that-are-drawn.

All of which is not to say that animation can’t depict the subtle feelings and movements
of humans in emotionally intense situations. Two extreme examples come to mind, both
of which have sometimes been criticized as stories that could be told in live action: The
Simpsons and Isao Takahata’s feature Grave of the Fireflies.

A live action sitcom in which a father repeatedly strangled his son would be horrifying to
watch, but in animation it’s hilarious. Even if a sufficiently talented child actress could be
found, attempting to duplicate the effects of the malnutrition Setsuko suffers in war-
ravaged Japan in Fireflies would look ludicrous or cruel. In both cases, animation
provides a distance that allows the viewer to experience the emotions the filmmaker is
trying to communicate.

As animation is still too often dismissed as a medium for children’s entertainment in

America, I should probably be glad that Anomalisa reminded audiences that it can be
used to tell more adult stories. I would have preferred to have that lesson brought home
by a film that was less talky, less self-consciously profound and more interesting
visually.

But whatever its faults or virtues, Anomalisa wasn’t rotoscoped, I made a mistake when
I said it was, and I apologize to the filmmakers, fans of the film, and the listeners.

D’oh.

--Charles Solomon