The Animated GIF [repost]

Another repost of a Webcomics Commentary post, because... I just happen to lack inspiration right now. In the mean time, I hope you'll enjoy this :)


After last week’s rather poor post about Homestuck, I wanted to talk about something more basic. In that post, I talked about how webcomics are “multi-media” by definition, but I completely skipped one aspect of this: the animated GIF. Animation in webcomics dates all the way back to Argon Zark in the early 90s, and back in the golden age of webcomics, some discussion existed about whether animation in general has any place in comics. Take this article from The New York Times, for example: "Indeed, [Gary] Groth argued, [Scott] McCloud was hankering after something more like animation or film … It’s a great use of the Web. But it verges on animation." This argument is rather dated, but I think it’s still worth examining. GIF images are way more popular in webcomics today than they were back in 2005, so let’s have a look. This will be an image-heavy post, btw ^_^

What I want to argue today is that a traditional animated GIF is an image. It is “animated” by nature, but referring to it as proper "animation" (or especially “film”) is counter-productive. Film has a structure: it can be used to deliver a narrative or to juxtapose different ideas by placing images in time. Mike Rugnetta of PBS Idea Channel described a GIF as a "self-contained moment … one complete action or one complete thought." I think this idea is particularly important when discussing GIFs in webcomics, as it might be more meaningful than the objective length of a GIF. Let’s see where this can take us.



The panel above might be the simplest example of this in practice. No time passes in this image; the animation is used to communicate a sensation of being drunk rather than a sensation of movement (is there a difference?). Homestuck does this kind of stuff all the time, being it to make something glow or to give a character a little more personality by allowing them to blink.



In theory, the order in which the frames are presented in the above examples isn’t even relevant. Describing these images as “video” seems silly: to me, this has become an image on the internet. I think it’s pretty incredible that drawings and photographs don’t need to be static anymore.

This kind of short “animation” can be found all over, like in this Brawl in the Family strip or this one on Tapastic. The order in which the frames are shown may be important to create a fluent animation (oh, we may have an issue), but the character is committing “one complete action” in these examples

Alright, great, but let’s go two seconds further.



We’re clearly reaching somekind of border to my hypothesis here. This animationis pretty complex and a lot is happening here. Surely, the image is a bit unusual for a GIF, and because of this complexity, the loop has to hang a few seconds on the last frame before it can loop back. There is a resolution to this event shown here. On the other hand, we are still witnessing “one complete action”: Jane fleeing the scene. The lengthy animation is used to communicate some fairly simplistic ideas, in particular how much effort she went through to get out of there while it all seeming rather natural for her to do. The image is showing a nice abscond by a desperate character.

And there are other forms of video that are about this length! Take, for example, this piece of video:

https://vine.co/v/iIuZgVXI092 (Vine linked due to Blogspot limitations)

In my experience, Vines tend to be short and are intended to loop. I’ve seen minute-long vines, but those generally just contain cats being pet or some lizard crawling on a wall. Can these really be compared to what we traditionally mean with "video"? These aren’t the kind of shorts you might find on television or as bonus material on a video: these too are depictions of one complete thought or, as may be, one complete joke. But of course, these are obviously video, right?

Maybe the whole idea of something being either an image or video is a simply a fallacy. Hmmm, let’s try to play around with that idea.

I’m honestly not even sure I based the above graphic on. It is interesting, though, because what I’m suggesting is that the World Wide Web has allowed us to explore the point where video meets static images in a completely new way. The language of the internet is interesting because it is all new. Animated GIFs could never have worked in the real-world. You can call the ancient piece of Japanese animation below a GIF, but it was never used as a GIF. It didn't loop, it wasn't presented on a web page, and it was entirely stand alone. (EDIT: Huh, I just read that it was intended to loop. Oops)



To relate all of what I have said back to webcomics (as I suppose I should do as a webcomics blog), what this results in is an opportunity that no other medium has. Webcartoonists can combine what we know as a static image and what we know as video in ways that have never been possible before. The distinction between the two becomes vague in some cases, and often turns completely meaningless. We can tell jokes through this form that was impossible before the World Wide Web came along, and we can reach senses that we could never reach before. Putting boundaries just so we can say "that’s not a comic!" isn’t useful, because in case you haven’t noticed, webcomics are way more than just "comics".

I guess the point of [Webcomics Commentary] is "look how amazing webcomics are" ^_^;