by Diana Black
Disney animated films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and Bambi were among the breakthroughs in early animation – using a multi-plane camera that required several individual layers of hand-inked/painted backdrops to be moved past the camera at varying depths and speed to produce a three-dimensional effect. Thousands of hours requiring painstaking attention to detail went into producing the beautiful imagery that would later surround and interact with the characters. Maurice Day – one of Disney’s most celebrated animation artists, would spend weeks in the forest just to get the right ‘feel’ for the ‘on-screen’ environment he wanted to create. As children we recoiled in fear of the twisted, nightmarish trees tearing at Snow White or the fire consuming Bambi’s forest home. The notion of ‘environment as character’ will be revisited in another Disney film, Into the Woods but malevolent forests are not the only environments capable of threatening the protagonist. The vacuum called ‘space’, a mere 62 miles (100 km) above the Earth’s surface is terrifyingly lethal, as seen in awesome films like Gravity and Interstellar.
Are the environments created for TV land perceived just as viscerally? As emerging television writers creating the ‘Bible’ for our episodic masterpiece, it’s a given that our heroes and villains be immersed in a high-stakes situation but thinking back to that latest project, did the environment actively support or hinder the characters in their momentous struggle? Was [it] simply ‘there’ with the decision left up to the Director as to how much it informed the narrative and the impact it would have (or not) on the characters?
Perhaps clarification of what is meant by the term ‘environment’ is needed here. In addition to the aforementioned physical variety, there’s the gritty, urban jungles prominent within crime dramas – Sons of Anarchy and True Detective; the squalor of a post-apocalyptic world – The Walking Dead and then there’s the ‘environment of the mind’ – the psychological state of being; for example, when our protagonist ‘goes over to the dark side’ – Breaking Bad. What about a suppressive environment such as portrayed within Orange is the New Black? Here a further distinction is possible – the claustrophobic, brick-n-mortar jail cell working in collaboration with the penal system to grind the psyche of the inmates to pulp.