[The sky above a stone circle darkens as an ancient wizard begins reciting a magical spell. With each word, the stone circle springs more and more into life.]
Beothaich an cearcall tha na clachan seo air cruthachadh.
Tha faid an oir ochd deug puing ochd coig meatair.
Tha am farsaingeachd fichead‘s a ochd puing dhà seachd meatair ceàrnagach.
That magical spell is in the Scots Gaelic language. It’s from an animated video of mine about measuring stone circles as part of a series called Learn with Will. I wrote the spell in English, two people translated it into Gaelic along with recording audio clips explaining how to pronounce it, and my friend Chris learned and performed it for the final video.
This whole endeavour raises one massive question.
Why?!
The answer to that lies at exactly 44 minutes and 8 seconds into the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, when the character Eddie hits his head on a light. Why did I put all that effort into my magical spell? Well, like Eddie – and by extension the animation crew on Roger Rabbit – I was bumping the lamp.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was released in 1988 and it was a ground-breaking film because it showed animated characters interacting with the real world. So animators (like the ones pictured above) would not only have had to draw 24 frames for every second of animation, but also do so to seamlessly match the live-action characters, props, and settings.
Now this was by no means the first time animation had entered the real world; one of the most famous examples is Mary Poppins from 1964. But if you compare the two films, you’ll see there’s one clear difference: the lighting. In Mary Poppins, there’s a clear disconnect between the animation and live-action; the characters don’t feel like they’re living in the same space. Whereas in Roger Rabbit, they made sure the animated characters followed the same rules of light and shadow as all the live-action stuff.
That would’ve been a lot of work, but nothing too daunting. So long as the light source didn’t change.
In Roger Rabbit, as soon as Eddie hits his head on the light, it starts flying all over the place, making the lighting change dramatically every second. This one clumsy act made the work of lighting and shading Roger instantly way more complicated. This wasn’t Bob Hoskins making a mistake though – this was in the script. It wasn’t some important plot point to further the story. They did it simply to show off how cool their realistic lighting would look.
They purposefully made the animation process way more complex just to push themselves. They bumped the lamp.
From that point on, Bumping the Lamp came to refer to animators going the extra mile, often at great expense, and often for things that could easily go unnoticed.
Another example of Bumping the Lamp comes from Pixar’s 2004 film The Incredibles. Now, you could argue that making that film at all in the mid-2000s was one big Bumping the Lamp, because it included all the stuff that computers were really bad at doing 20 years ago: humans, muscles, fire, water, hair, cloth etc. But it’s not all the fight scenes, or the explosions, or the running on water that’s impressive. It’s the moment that Mr Incredible finds out his super-suit is ripped.
In 3D digital animation, things like cloth and hair are rarely animated by hand. Everything else that interacts with it is animated, but the cloth and hair itself is simulated by an entirely separate studio department. Now, simulation is a whole other world of difficulty, so much so that one of the special features on The Incredibles DVD is an outtake reel of some of the times it went hilariously wrong.
That one moment where Mr Incredible puts his hand through a hole in his super suit, in a shot that lasts 2.6 seconds, took Pixar around three months to complete. They were having so much difficulty with it that they considered just cutting away to Mr Incredible reacting and suggesting the rip through sound instead. But they stuck at it and figured it out in the end. They bumped the lamp.
Funnily enough, this isn’t rare at all; there’re so many examples of Bumping the Lamp.
In the Pixar short Red’s Dream, a seemingly-simple 50% off sign took 5 days to animate by hand.
In Wallace and Gromit: The Wrong Trousers, as Feathers McGraw shoots his revolver, they even animated the gun’s cylinder turning round.
For Kubo and the Two Strings, animation supervisor Brad Schiff swam in a local pool wearing a kimono just to study how fabric moved underwater.
In Toy Story 2, when the toys first enter the airport, they animated a couple of kids in the background playing a game of patty-cake. You’d need a microscope to spot them – which might be for the best… the game ends up getting quite violent!
In Shark Tale, they animated an octopus pouring out some coffee. Of course, coffee dissipates in the water. But don’t worry, they also animated him being shocked to find his cup is empty.
For Soul, they filmed musician Jon Batiste with 35 GoPros to get reference footage for Joe’s piano playing, and even went so far as to animate the tendons moving in his hands.
In The Simpsons, when Homer starts slapping people with a glove to challenge them to a duel, he sings “glove slap, baby glove slap” to the tune of Love Shack by The B-52s. They then cut to a fully produced version and actually got The B-52s to sing it.
And the list goes on!
The funny thing is, because animation is such a time-consuming and detailed way of telling a story, Bumping the Lamp becomes kind of inevitable. This is partly because of one universal truth in the world of animation:
You Don’t Get Anything For Free.
Whether it’s stickers on a flute case, products in a cornershop, items on a noticeboard, or just stuff in any room whatsoever – it all had to be designed from scratch. Before you Bump the Lamp, you first have to Create the Lamp. As intimidating as that may be, it can be very enticing. As Curt Enderle, the Art Director of LAIKA’s BoxTrolls puts it: “How often do you get to create everything? That’s an incredible sense of power!”
It’s a power I myself love to wield in my own work too; as I mentioned above, I’m certainly no stranger to Bumping the Lamp.
But we return to that all important question… why?!
Why do animators like me bump the lamp? Why do we give ourselves extra work to do for the sake of little details that’ll probably go unnoticed?
Well every lamp bumper will have their own reasoning, but a quote from LAIKA’s CEO Travis Knight really resonates with me: “You animate because it’s like a part of you has to do it.” It might seem corny, but the magic of animation feels ingrained in my soul. I was born exactly 8 years to the day that The Simpsons was first shown. My earliest memory is of the cake I had for my 3rd birthday that had the character Noddy on it. One of my first ever maths teachers was the Mexican gerbil El Nombre. When I was 9, I distinctly remember my mum meeting us at the cinema straight after she’d done a 12-hour nursing shift just so the four of us could all watch The Incredibles on the day it came out. For my whole childhood, animation was there; it’s in my blood.
Above I showed you a photo of the animators on Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and took a guess at what they would’ve had to do on the film. Except I wasn’t guessing. Because in that photo, the floppy-haired, 20-something animator is Adrian.
Or as I call him, Uncle Adrian.
Not only is animation in my blood, but so is Bumping the Lamp.
Willow Marler (they/she) is an animator and designer based in Worcester, UK. They’ve animated for educational content creators like Tom Scott, Matt Parker, and Dr Hannah Fry, along with organisations like the BBC, Royal Institution, Cystic Fibrosis Trust, and BRIT Awards. They also produce their own series of animated videos called Learn with Will and regularly perform stand-up comedy.
