The Animator as Semiotician

I still remember my first semester of design school when my professor, Gloria Lee, approached the blackboard and drew a tree, chalk dust and squeaks sputtering from her hand. Above the drawing, she wrote “TREE,” in large, uppercase letters. What followed was a basic explanation of semiotics — the study of signs, symbols and their meanings. The example was derived from Saussure, a linguist who determined that the word “tree” is the signifier, while the concept of the tree is the signified. Saussure argued that the signifier and signified must always be taken together, even though this relationship is arbitrary; the only reason the word “tree” represents a tree is because society makes it so. Understandably, semiotics and graphic design made for perfect bedfellows — designers hunch over their graphic work, preoccupied with the meaning conveyed by each symbol they create. From those early days of my design eduction, I was under the impression that design had full ownership of the field of semiotics. But years later, while sitting through three hours of slides in a mandatory art history class, I realized that other disciplines had staked their claim on the study of semiotics. I had only begun to fathom the tangled web of academia.

As I wandered along the scholastic path of an excessively large university, one where The Languages of Tolkien counted as a linguistics credit, I struggled to keep up with what discipline claimed whom. Film had Derrida, but so did literature; philosophy had Benjamin, but so did architecture and art. By senior year, I assumed that all philosophies came with a one-size-fits-all label.

But amidst all the fields that greedily claimed philosophies as their own, I noticed that a personal favorite of mine, animation, remained quiet. Perhaps a combination of its (relatively) young age in academia and its struggle for legitimacy as a medium (not a genre, folks), animation has not become synonymous with any single philosophy in the manner of so many other disciplines. Yet if design can so easily embrace semiotics, why can’t animation?

Though the same argument can be posited for graphic designers, there is perhaps no greater practitioner of semiotics than the animator. In a matter of mere seconds (or frames), the animator must convey the notion of an object. Whether its the vague outline of a living room or the wall clock hanging in the background of a kitchen scene, the animator must reduce complex symbols down to their most basic form, using just enough detail to convey meaning to the audience. Even in the cheapest of cartoons — namely, anything produced by Hanna-Barbera — the looped cycle of objects that scroll by in the background as Fred and Barney walk to the bowling alley and complain about their wives is a set of reductive symbols that quickly convey an entire environment and feeling to the audience.

As a child, my whole understanding of how a framed picture should be drawn was defined by the last five seconds of The Simpsons intro, when the family gathers on the couch in their living room. Behind them hangs a simply framed picture of a sailboat — a square within a square, hung by a triangle. After years of watching Droopy cartoons, I was extremely disappointed when my mom withdrew money from the bank and received a stack of crisp bills instead of a small, cinched sack branded with a dollar sign. And to this day, whenever I draw a refrigerator, it always looks like the 1940s model seen in a Tom & Jerry cartoon, though I’ve heard there have been advancements in refrigeration technology since then. Animators continue to perpetuate these symbols to this day, enforcing the idea that a dollar sign emblazoned sack signifies money, even though such an object doesn’t truly exist in our daily lives.

In the 1960s, Roland Barthes added his two cents to semiotics. In addition to the signifier-signified system, Barthes introduced the idea of the secondary-signifier — the production of myth. His simple example is that of a perfume bottle shaped like a star; the shape of the star is the signifier and the concept “star” is the signified. However, the myth of the star is its cultural association with Hollywood and fame. Barthes brought popular culture into semiology, making it even more accessible to be appropriated by several disciplines.

With Barthes’s addition of myth, I am brought to my most favorite of signifier-signified relationships fostered by animators — the American home. With the blossoming of animated sitcoms in the 1960s, an exterior shot of a house became the staple anchor point of many cartoons, even though it flashed on screen for a mere two seconds. It is the house at its most simple form: one door, a few windows and a roof. Yet it conveys the myth of suburbia, familial expectations and the American dream.

So to animation, I say join the rest of us and stake a claim.