All right, so I’ve received an interesting question on whether I had some sort of hot take on character design, and what do you know? I do!
There is a concept that is often mentioned in acting, directing, and other performing arts, but that I’ve never heard mentioned regarding designing characters, and it is the concept of Esthetic Distance—a concept that I find extremely helpful.
Esthetic distance--as in having the right amount of it, or breaking it, or not breaking it—lives at every level of execution in an artistic performance. For instance it’s the choice to make a story like Silver a period piece, because its whimsical quality works best inside a lost world of adventure that is a little removed from our own. So the cover of time buys us the right esthetic distance.
For character design, I’d define esthetic distance as the amount of abstraction separating a drawing from the actual object it aims to signify or represent.
At one end of a continuum, you have Olive Oyl, who is the completely abstract representation of a woman. Closer to naturalism, you have a Disney Princess like Ariel or Elsa, whose shape-language and body-structure are much more naturalistic than Olive’s, but who still present an abstraction/sublimation of the female form. You could think of Elsa’s design as the representation of a woman as envisioned by a child. Then, at the far end, you would have an anatomy book, which has a highly accurate description of a natural body, free of any sense of poetic license. So you could say that Olive Oyl presents the female form with a quasi infinite amount of esthetic distance, while an anatomic book has none. Every step in between increases the amount of information and reduces the artistic distance for its own purposes.
Another way to express this is that abstract drawings are high in symbolic value and low in representational information, and naturalistic drawings are the opposite. In this context, breaking esthetic distance would be a design presentation that either has too little or too much information for the stakes of the story.
Here’s an example. Back in the 90’s, the Disney company used to take adds in Variety to pay its respect to recently deceased industry figures. Those were heartfelt and absolutely appropriate, except for the bottom corner of the page, which was adorned with a drawing of Mickey Mouse in a tux, making a sad face and with a big single tear streaking down his face. After a while, that drawing became known around town as “The Death Mickey”, and was soon retired, never to be seen again. The “Death Mickey,” if you ask me, was a prime example of a perfectly good drawing unfortunately placed in a context where it broke esthetic distance. In other words, the cartoony presentation just wasn’t appropriate for the occasion.
To stay with animation history, there is a very interesting example in The Illusion Of Life. Frank & Ollie show an early design of Snow White by Ham Luske, where she looks not only younger than she does in the film, but most importantly cartoony-er. It’s obvious looking at it that such a design wouldn’t have worked with the stakes of the story—the hunter about to stab her with a knife and cut out her heart. The level of abstraction in the design would have been incongruous. Disturbing. It would have broken esthetic distance.
By the way, that is entirely the joke in The Simpsons’ Itchy & Scratchy: cartoony characters being subjected to graphic violence. Here, esthetic distance is broken on purpose. That is also the “Comix” approach, from Rat Fink to Fritz the Cat. Putting high stakes (physical, sexual, emotional, existential) on designs who are in theory too abstract to support them always feel fetishistic, shocking and transgressive.
Meanwhile, you can also break esthetic distance by offering too much information! That’s what I call the “Lars and the Real Girl” effect. For instance we all remember early CG movies that had too much texture or too much anatomical details on cartoony characters, which always looks unsettling. It’s the uncanny valley. That’s why the old Disney guys understood pretty quickly that you don’t draw knees on Mickey Mouse.
