Fabia Ling-Yuan Lin: Textual Analysis

Fabia Ling-Yuan Lin in her chapter 'Cartoon's Hyperrealism' of her book Doubling the Duality (2014) explains the issue with realism within animation by means of a case study. Like the other texts, she explains at first the meaning of hyper-realism, using Lister's text as a secondary source. She emphasises that in order to understand the origins of hyper-realism, and how it became the norm in western animation, one must examine the creation process of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Lin, 2014).
This point in history was where Disney gave up 'plasmaticness' for 'hyper-realism', and 'introduced codes and ideologies of live-action cinema into this originally quite avant-garde inclined form' (Lin, 2014, p.66).
Contrary to the previous two texts,
She describes The Polar Express, another motion capture 'ultra-realistic' film to have similar effects on the audience. 'The Conductor's motion was described as puppet-like, and the audience was critical of a lack of human-likeness in his facial expression that did not match the emotive qualities of his speech. The character's expressions also appeared out of context with a given situation as he presented an angry expression and a cold personality when interacting with other children characters in the film' (Tinwell, 2014, p.68).
She adds an especially negative case study about Beowulf. The aim of the film had been to enhance actors' performances, by eliminating concerns such as lighting, make-up, costume, etc. Ultimately though, the film had failed to capture the subtleties of their performances, leaving the audience discontent, perceiving the film as soulless and its characters as wooden and impassive. In addition to the extreme realism that the audience was not accustomed to, this lack of emotional realism led to a sense of disorientation and confusion for the