Linear Perspective in Animated Films
Have you ever wondered how animated films like Disney feel so real and look like the viewer is actually experiencing those moments, that's right, modern animators have been using Linear Perspective all along and you have just sat there not knowing what Linear perspective even is.
Well you are in luck as I will walk you through the emergence of this apparent “beast” called Linear Perspective and eventually show you how Disney has been using it to provide you with exceptional experiences. And don’t worry, as the name might suggest, there is actually no math involved in it. Or is IT? We shall soon find out.
So what is Linear Perspective?
Once upon a time in the renaissance era at around the year 1415, there was renowned painter and artist, called Filipo Brunelleschi who developed an ingenius way of connecting orthogonals to a horiozon line. These orthogonals would converge onto these points popularly known as vanishing points. Soon another Italian renaissance artist called Leon Battista Alberti thought that he should chime in on this glorious topic and wrote a book about it called On Painting in 1435. Now there are some essentials to understanding Linear Perspective. So why don’t we read a little bit about them before you go and re-watch your disney favorites, hunting for these tell-tale vanishing points.
The One-point Perspective:
Have you ever stood on a railway track (an abandoned one hopefully) and wondered why the rails seems to converge at the end of your horizon even when you know that those rails are parallel and parallel lines never MEET. Yes that is the essence of point perspective. In perspective drawings, parallel lines do meet and it is precisely why now your modern day animations look so real.
So the point where these parallel lines do meet is called the horizon line. In other words, it is the point where your line of vision extends up to. This is also called the eye level line.
As you can see from figure above, our line of sight extends somewhere in the middle a little above the middle of the figure. Now this is where the horizon line rests. The reason why the figure above is an example of one-point perspective is because all the lines emerging from the sides of this figure converge to one point and one point only. Hence the name, one-point perspective. Now let me take you a little back in time and show you how renaissance painters used this technique to hook the viewer in.
The figure above is known to be the first documented figure that incorporated one-point perspective. The lines in red are called orthogonals and we shall henceforth mention them to be as such.
Take a hard look at this photo and soon you will realise something…
From what appears, the vanishing point rests right on the face of Christ but there’s something more, notice the guy fetching something from the water on the far left, you will see that there is the same guy on the far right. And oh my lord, you see him once more in the middle of the figure. And yes, your attention didn’t go to the guy who appears three times in the same photo but it went to the guy in the middle who appears to be christ.
This is the power of perspective, it allows the maker to hook the your attention and only focus on the things he/she/they want you to see.
Now, assuming you’re still here, let us move on to two-point perspective.
What is Two-Point-Perspective?
Look at the question again and think about it for a second..
Yes you guessed it right, two point perspective is merely the same as one-point with a little modification, there is one more point the orthogonals converge to on the horizon line. Normally, the two vanishing points are chosen towards the left most and right most part of the painting but again it depends on what the artists wants to focus on.
This painting was done by a french artist known as Gustave Caillebotte in the year 1877. This was during a time when paintings in two-point perspective had gained popularity. It’s basically how a street view of paris looks like on a rainy day. Observe how the vanishing points are in the middle and left most parts of the painting which bring out the building in the background as the main highlight. And of course, the couple in the fore ground are not ignored but rather are positioned in a way that enables the eyes to navigate to the focus of the painting: the building in the background.
Now let us move on to the final aspect of Linear perspective called The Three point effect. Drumroll please.
What is the three-point perspective?
And as you may have guessed again, the three-point perspective involves three vanishing points and is the most difficult out of all the three which might be one of the reasons why olden painters chose not to trifle with this monster. But let us still have a look at what it looks like. I won’t ask you to draw anything so just bear with me and don’t mindlessly skip on to the nearest internet tab.
Looking at this picture, it is not a difficult task to figure out where the horizon line is. If you can’t then that means you haven’t been reading this blog post properly.
I am just kidding, the horizon line, although not drawn here but rests where the orthogonal lines on the left and the right converge to the two vanishing points.
And now that we have had a decent primer into the intricacies of Linear Perspective, let us move on to the fun part and see how modern animated movie studios specifically Disney use these techniques in their movies and how it captures your attention in unprecedented ways.
Animation in One-Point Perspective
Consider the scene above from one of everybody’s favorite disney films: Frozen 1. The protagonist in this scene is smack in the middle of the scene. We see here a little elsa as the center of all focus. This scene completely captures your attention and we can see on the sides where the servants are all lined up. The prevalent illusion is that elsa is an extremely privileged child who has servants lined up for her. If we are to look closely at the orthogonal lines, the servants are incident on all of them which gives off the idea that elsa does indeed have countless number of helpers.
Here we see the main protagonist from the movie Soul. This is one the first few scenes where we see him walking down a highway apparently ignoring the cars that are going by him in high speeds. What we see here again is that the vanishing point rests on the torso of the main character. The horizon line can be observed in blue. The vanishing point captures the undivided attention of the viewer towards the main character and all the other details are ignored i.e. the fast cars whooshing by. Just like how the character is ignorant of the cars going by him, the viewer too pays minimum attention to the details besides the vanishing point. Even I did not pay attention to the fast cars and only realised that they existed once I sketched these orthogonals on the picture.
Next, we move on to how and why Disney has been using the two-point perspective in their films.
Animation in Two Point Perspective
The two-point perspective is not regularly used in films and is largely used when Disney wants to portray a sense of large space and to show the main subject’s surroundings in a larger scope. Moreover, we can see that the vanishing points rest on the horizon line outside of the scene. This goes to show how this scene is trying to portray vast surroundings. Unlike the one-point perspective, the point is not to signify the importance of a certain character but rather to set the scope for the character to act in.
Now, you are in luck again as there aren’t alot of scene in disney movies that use the three point perspective (but you are welcome to search for some the next time you watch a disney movie). The reason for that perhaps is that they are already using the one and the two point perspectives to do everything they can: one point to emphasise the existence of the subject and two point to set the scene for the subject. That is all they need to immerse the viewer into the film.
Reflections
What inspired me for this blogpost is a recent passion in analysing cinematography with the lens of Linear Perspective. Having done some serious analysis of the films of directors like Wes Anderson, Christopher Nolan, and Stanley Kubrik, I was wondering if any animation studios had been using Linear perspective in their movies. And voila! as I was randomly watching a Disney movie, I could not help but notice the imaginary orthogonal lines and how they were essentially defining the experience.
So, I hope that this blog post gave you a sufficient insight into what Linear Perspective is (it turns out you don’t need any math) and brings your attention to how animation studios use them. Additionally, I hope that this form of analysis allows you to gain a deeper understanding of any given movie scene just like I was able to demonstrate in the analysis above. With that I bid you good bye and farewell!