6.Conclusion
In this paper, we have followed Ragan’s activities from graphics to animation. Besides pictorial statistics, Ragan’s focused his work on designing narrative diagrams and illustrations, which he structured in a narrative style with animation in mind. This direction was reinforced by animation through characteristic pictograms for the NFB.
Ceccarelli (2012, p.139), in his historical overview of ‘information animation’, summarises its characteristics as follows:
Once skilfully combined with clever exposition techniques and powered by storytelling, the realism of live action (from staged shots to crude library footage); the atmosphere of authenticity offered by clean scientific-like animation; the power of abstraction of graphical animation; the capacity of cartoons to engage the audience, represent as a whole a very powerful system.
While Ragan’s masterpiece One World or None can certainly be regarded as a pioneer of a complex and sophisticated pictogram animation that combines these multiple patterns, such development is significantly different from the Isotype animation, which was uniquely a form almost exclusively incorporated into documentary film.
As described above, Ragan’s work was a distinct outcome of the ‘dramatization of facts’, which integrated pictogram-based graphic techniques inspired by isotype, a product of the European Modernism, with the entertainment animation culture in North America. Historically, it can be regarded as a notable experiment involving the potential and limits of pictogram-based animation, which was developed amidst several socio-political events such as the New Deal, war propaganda, the scientists’ campaign to control the atomic bomb and the anti-communist propaganda of the Cold War.
Acknowledgments. This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP19K12660.
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This article was published in the following book:
Ihara, H. (2022). From Pictorial Statistics to Pictographic Animation: Philip Ragan’s Investigation of Pictographic Animation to Dramatize Facts (1934–1946). In: Bruyns, G., Wei, H. (eds) [ ] With Design: Reinventing Design Modes. IASDR 2021. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4472-7_185
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-19-4472-7_185