Tehran Taboo, Rotoscoping, and the Marriage of Real and Unreal
Every work of cinema marries the real and unreal. Anything that can be captured by the camera must, in some way, exist. Yet cinema is never objective. Even at its most naturalistic, even in a documentary, the filmed image is shaped by framing, by composition, by editing. It is real, yet it is also artificial.
This dynamic is reasonably intuitive in the context of live-action cinema. But things get weird when we start to think about animation. The animated image, whether drawn by hand or rendered by computer, does not exist tangibly the way an actor or an object does. It is created, artificial. Yet to appear animate, it must be imbued with the qualities of life — motion, gesture, temporality, etc. It is artificial, yet it has the bearing of the real.
Things get weirder still when we consider the animation style known as rotoscoping, a technique in which animated images are created by tracing over live-action footage. It’s usually done by computers these days, but in the pre-digital age, artists would draw or paint on celluloid sheets, mounted over glass panels onto which filmed images were projected. An animated image generated from real life. Is it real? Is it unreal?
The technique was developed in 1917 by Max Fleischer, who found it allowed drawn figures a fluidity unattainable by conventional animation methods. First used in his series Out of the Inkwell, Fleischer went on to use rotoscoping to animate dance numbers by Popeye and Betty Boop. However, the most famous instance of early rotoscoping came with Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), which used the movement of performer Marge Champion as a model for the graceful dancing of its eponymous princess. Disney would use the technique in several of his subsequent classics, including Pinocchio, Alice in Wonderland, and Fantasia.
For animators, the pursuit of lifelike motion has remained the primary application and ambition of rotoscoping. Does it feel real? In the most successful instances, the answer must be, “yes, but not too real.” From Fleischer’s Superman to Ralph Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings to Don Bluth’s Anastasia, lifelike movement is balanced with intense stylization, or, to put it bluntly, cartooniness. This is by calculation as much as limitation. Indeed, too much verisimilitude in animation tends to feel eerie — creepy, even — creating an effect known as The Uncanny Valley, the sensation of unease at beholding the qualities of life in something unliving. The boundary of real and unreal is a line to be tread with care.
However, some filmmakers have leveraged rotoscoping’s potential for strangeness to artistic effect. In 2001, Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, which follows a series of philosophical dialogues taking place subconscious mind of its protagonist, used a digital technique called “interpolated rotoscoping” to evoke the passage between lucidity and dream. Linklater returned to the technique in 2006 with A Scanner Darkly. Adapted from the novel by Philip K. Dick (one of literature’s great reality skeptics), the jittery, surreal animation dovetailed with the story’s themes of drug-fueled restlessness and gnostic paranoia. More recently, Loving Vincent (2017) recruited a team of artists to paint over filmed images projected onto canvas, bringing Van Gogh’s works into motion and channeling the ecstasy and mania of the painter’s vision. Contemporary animators continue to utilize rotoscoping to ever more creative and radical effect.
But perhaps the most poetic use of rotoscoping that I’ve encountered comes in Iranian director Ali Soozandeh’s animated film for adults, Tehran Taboo. The film follows several characters living in contemporary Tehran, maneuvering between its religious law-inflected public sphere and its underbelly, where sex, drugs, dreams, and other prohibited impulses can be explored. There is Pari, who takes to sex work to support her son after being denied a divorce from her incarcerated husband; Babek, a musician who accidentally impregnates a woman in an underground dance club; and Sara, whose fundamentalist husband refuses to allow her to get a job. Yet the most prominent character may be Tehran itself — which makes it particularly notable that the production took place entirely in Vienna, Austria.
The project was not conceived as an animated film. Conveying Tehran’s unique feeling was a priority, yet given Iran’s censorship laws, Tehran Taboo’s frank treatment of sexuality meant that it could not be shot on location. Soozandeh declined to shoot the film in another locale. “Each city has its own look, its own perfume,” he told Cineuropa. “The buildings are different, the streets, the cars, the way people are dressed, it’s always unique for each city…For a realistic film like mine, dealing with realistic issues, it wouldn’t have been successful to use another city. So I chose animation.”
The animators worked from footage of actors filmed against a green screen, then used photographs and footage of Tehran to render the backdrops. The result is a gorgeous, hypnotic evocation of the city, by turns gritty and hallucinatory. Yet its consequence is more than just a vivid sense of place. The medium itself conjures the state of living between worlds: the visible world, outwardly apparent but artificial, staged for the sake of reputation, propriety, and self-preservation; and the invisible world of “what really happens,” disavowed, yet pulsating with the energy of life. Which one is real? Which one is unreal?
Tehran Taboo plays at Bryn Mawr Film Institute on Thursday, June 21. Visit our website to learn more and purchase tickets.
See you at the movies!
