Lenticular Miscellanea
01.27.07By Collin DavidLenticular items, or ‘you know, those plastic things that look like one thing when you look at them one way and another when you turn them, what are they called?’, can usually be found, well, wedged in with other more noticeable things. They’re sidekicks, mere extras making cameo appearances in the shadow of more glorious, scene-stealing items. Small slips of cardboard and plastic in the bottom of a bag of delicious potato chips, or as a useless accessory next to a neato action figure, or an extra-showy slipcover to a new DVD.
Creating the illusion of motion where none is actually present is one of my favorite kinds of optical illusions - that which changes within your perception but makes no physical change whatsoever, tearing small rifts in everything you think you know about reality and time and where you left your car keys. These little perceptual glitches open up understandings about how the brain and eyes work, and they fascinate me. If you’re still not sure what I’m talking about, take a look at the cover to the Transamerica DVD, in which Felicity Huffman transforms from a man to a woman with a slight turn of the case, or the cover to the Napoleon Dynamite DVD that has him dancing all over the place with a slight shift of perspective. Please keep in mind that these things do not respond well to photography, as they’re designed to be perceived by the human eye alone and not a camera lens, otherwise I’d be showing you all kinds of clear examples from my awkward collection.
Essentially, what these lenticular items do is create a short animation using a series of frames that are broken up into narrow strips and interlaced together, creating a single image. A clear, ridged grating is laid over this image, and as it is viewed, light is refracted back to the eye at different angles because of the ridging of the plastic grate. Certain parts of the image are revealed and others obscured. Shifting the angle reveals (and obscures) another perspective and other areas of the image. This can reveal an instantaneous change between two images, or the animation can hold up to a full second of ‘video’ animation. A second’s worth of information might not seem like much, but keep in mind that all of this glorious information is stored in a non-electrical, static object. Instead of storing the video information of the entire World Series on one, you could definitely store video of the winning touchdown. Or whatever it is those guys do. I prefer Dungeons and Dragons and crying alone in my room.
And thusly, like I am a sucker for so many things (Batman, cephalopods, Slim Jims, Legos, girls with glasses, and so on), I am a sucker for lenticular images. They’re gimmicky and entrancing enough to be suitably hypnotic for use as promotional devices and are often just given away, all willy-nilly, to promote new films or action figure lines or toothbrushes. A Spider-Man that turns his head and spins a web, or a C-3PO that inexplicably transforms into an Ewok.
In the mid-80s, Marvel and Mattel’s Secret Wars line of toys (which is a story unto itself, defining the very word ‘toyetic’) each came with a ‘shield’ which bore that character’s portrait. Turn it slightly and it would reveal his alter ego, or a slightly different image. While I could never grasp the practicality of defending oneself with a giant banner that revealed to your attacker which of your friends and family to kill to REALLY get at you, it seemed to work for Iron Man. Mattel would use this lenticular gimmick a whole bunch, most recently repeating it in their JLU Mission Vision line. BanDai includes small lenticular discs in their Ben Ten line of toys which animate a three-frame transformation between Ben Tennyson and the character that he’s becoming. Of course, this (and smart character designs) was enough to sway me into picking up the line. DEVO used to sell ‘wiggle discs’ as part of their merchandise, printed on their record sleeve catalogues.
Marvel had also put out a small (and relatively unpopular) line of trading cards under the name ‘Marvel Motion’, which were entirely lenticular and featured such things as Beast swinging through the treetops or Danny Ketch morphing into Ghost Rider. So enamored with these I am that I’ve even looked into making some myself, and there are companies out there who will produce your mini-animations for you (and send you free samples). As someone who’d madly in love with animation, lenticular items seem like a perfect way to both collect small animations and create your own without a team of artists and photographers hovering around.
So please, spread the word. These things have a proper name. My mission will be complete if I never hear the phrase ‘really, is that what they’re called? I didn’t know that!’ ever again.
