The Animation Studies Reader

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 The Animation Studies Reader

Edited by

Nichola Dobson, Annabelle Honess Roe, Amy Ratelle and Caroline Ruddell

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 [Imprint page]

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Nichola Dobson, Annabelle Honess Roe, Amy Ratelle and Caroline Ruddell

SECTION ONE: THEORY, PHILOSOPHY, CONCEPTS

1. Approaching Animation and Animation Studies

Caroline Ruddell & Lilly Husbands

2. The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde

Tom Gunning

3. Re-Animating Space

Aylish Wood

4. Realism and animation

Mihaela Mihailova

5. The Uncanny Valley

Lisa Bode

6. Animation and Performance

Annabelle Honess Roe

7. Animation and Memory

Victoria Grace Walden

8. Some Thoughts on Theory-Practice Relationships in Animation Studies

Paul Ward

SECTION TWO: FORMS AND GENRES

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9. Absence, Excess and Epistemological Expansion: Towards a Framework for the Study of

Animated Documentary

Annabelle Honess Roe

10. Experimental Animation

Paul Taberham

11. Features and Shorts

Christopher Holliday

12. Advertising and public service films

Malcolm Cook

13. Political animation and Propaganda

Eric Herhuth

14. TV Animation

Nichola Dobson

15. Animation and/as Children’s Entertainment

Amy Ratelle

16. Video Games and Animation

Chris Pallant

SECTION THREE: REPRESENTATION: FRAMES AND CONTEXTS

17. Race, Resistance and Violence in Cartoons

Nicholas Sammond

18. We’re Asian. More Expected of Us: The Model Minority and Whiteness in King of the

Hill

Alison Reiko Loader

19. Transformers Rescue Bots: Representation in Disguise

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 Nichola Dobson

20. Anime’s Bodies

Rayna Denison

21. Disney Films 1989-2005: The “Eisner” Era

Amy M. Davis

22. Taking an Appropriate Line: Exploring Representations of Disability within British

Mainstream Animation

Van Norris

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List of Figures

12.1 The original Pixar logo, which resembles the company’s computer hardware.

Screengrab from Luxo Jr. (dir. John Lasseter, 1986). Produced by Pixar.

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List of Contributors

Lisa Bode is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Queensland.

Her research focuses on intersections between digital animation and live action cinema,

photorealism in animation, screen performance, visual effects, posthumous stardom, and

cultural reception. She is the author of Making Believe: Screen Performance and Special

Effects in Popular Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2017) and she has published in

Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Cinema Journal, and various edited collections.

Malcolm Cook is a Lecturer in Film at the University of Southampton. He has published a

number of chapters and articles on animation, early cinema, and their intermedial

relationships. His book Early British Animation: From page and stage to cinema screens will

be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018. His forthcoming work includes research into

the use of music in Len Lye’s British films, the role of advertising in the formation of

Aardman Animations, and the place of singalong films in early cinema. He is currently

preparing (with Kirsten Thompson) an edited collection on the relationships between

animation and advertising.

Rayna Denison is a Senior Lecturer in Film, Television and Media Studies at the University

of East Anglia, where she teaches and does research into contemporary animation and film,

particularly Japanese animation and Asian film. She is the author of Anime: A Critical

Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2015), and is the editor of Princess Mononoke: Understanding

Studio Ghibli's Monster Princess (Bloomsbury, 2018). She is the co-editor for the Eisner

Award nominated Superheroes on World Screens (with Rachel Mizsei-Ward, University of

Mississippi Press, 2015).

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Amy M. Davis is a lecturer in Film & Animation Studies at the University of Hull, where she

teaches (amongst other things) modules on American Animation History and Disney Studies.

She is the author of Good Girls & Wicked Witches: Women in Disney’s Feature

Animation (John Libbey & Co., 2006) and Handsome Heroes & Vile Villains: Men in

Disney’s Feature Animation (John Libbey & Co., 2013), as well as various papers on Disney,

US animation, and horror.

Nichola Dobson is a teaching fellow in design and screen cultures at Edinburgh College of

Art. Founding editor of Animation Studies (2006 - 2011) and Animation Studies 2.0 (2012-

present), she has published on animation, television genre and fan fiction, including Norman

McLaren: Between the Frames (2018) for Bloomsbury and Historical Dictionary of

Animation and Cartoons (2009) for Scarecrow Press. She is currently working on a book on

TV animation with Paul Ward for Edinburgh University Press. She is currently President of

the Society for Animation Studies.

Tom Gunning is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor in the

Departments of Art History, Cinema and Media Studies, and the College at the University of

Chicago. He is the author of book including D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American

Narrative Film (University of Illinois Press) and The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of

Vision and Modernity (British Film Institute). He has published over one hundred and fifty

articles on early cinema, film history and theory, avant-garde film, film genre, and the

relation between cinema and modernism. With Andre Gaudreault he originated the influential

theory of the “Cinema of Attractions.” In 2009, he was the first film scholar to receive an

Andrew A. Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award, and in 2010, he was elected to the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Eric Herhuth is Assistant Professor of Communication at Tulane University. His research

areas include animation and film studies, aesthetics and politics, media and film theory, and

modernity and globalization. He has published in the Quarterly Review of Film and

Video, Cinema Journal, animation: an interdisciplinary journal, and Theory & Event, and he

is the author of Pixar and the Aesthetic Imagination: Animation, Storytelling, and Digital

Culture (University of California Press, 2017).

Christopher Holliday teaches Film Studies and Liberal Arts at King’s College London

specializing in film genre, international film history and contemporary digital media. He has

published several book chapters and articles on digital technology and computer animation,

including work in Animation Practice, Process & Production and animation: an

interdisciplinary journal. He is the author of The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style

and Genre (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), and co-editor of Fantasy/Animation:

Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres (Routledge, 2018) for Routledge’s AFI

Film Readers series that examines the historical, cultural and theoretical points of intersection

between fantasy and animation.

Annabelle Honess Roe is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Surrey. She is

the author of Animated Documentary (Palgrave 2013), which was the recipient of the Society

for Animation Studies’ 2015 McLaren-Lambart award for best book. She is co-editor of

Vocal Projections: Voices in Documentary (Bloomsbury, forthcoming) and editor of Beyond

Stop Motion Film: Production, Style and Representation in Aardman Animations. (I.B.

Tauris, forthcoming) and has published in journals including the Journal of British Cinema

and Television and Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

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Lilly Husbands has a PhD from Kings College, London and teaches contextual studies,

animation theory and digital cultures at Royal College of Art, University of Arts London and

Middlesex University. She has published articles and book chapters on experimental

animation. She is currently co-editing a book entitled Experimental Animation: From

Analogue to Digital, forthcoming from Routledge and is an Associate Editor for the Sage

journal animation: an interdisciplinary journal.

Alison Reiko Loader is a lapsed National Film Board of Canada animation director who

specializes in digital animation, old optical technology, and media installation. With

fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and other

agencies, her PhD in Communication Studies brings together her interests in feminist media

history, the moving image, and scientific visual culture. She has taught studio and graduate

seminars in Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal since 2001 and has helped mentor

3D Animation and CGI students down the street at Dawson College, as a part of their

teaching team since 2010.

Mihaela Mihailova is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Film Studies in the Department of English at

Michigan State University. Mihaela's research interests include animation, film and media

theory, early Soviet cinema, contemporary Eastern European cinema, video games, and

comics. She has published articles in animation: an interdisciplinary journal, Studies in

Russian and Soviet Cinema, Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities, and Kino

Kultura. She has also contributed chapters to Animating Film Theory (ed. Karen Beckman)

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(co-written with John MacKay) and Animated Landscapes: History, Form, and Function (ed.

Chris Pallant).

Van Norris has been a Senior Lecturer in Film, Media and Animation History and Theory

Studies at the School of Media and Performing Arts, University of Portsmouth since 2003,

where he has taught on Animation history and theory, Post-Classical Hollywood cinema,

British and American comedy forms and the graphic narrative form. Despite writing

extensively on science fiction television, US superhero movies, comedy cinema and cinema

soundtracks for various edited collections, his research has been dominated by discussions of

animation formally, industrially and culturally. This ranges from contributions

to the Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal and Animation Studies and a 2014 monograph

for Palgrave, British Television Animation 1997-2010: Drawing on Comic Tradition.

Chris Pallant, Senior Lecturer, Canterbury Christ Church University, is the author

of Demystifying Disney (2011), Storyboarding: A Critical History (2015) and editor

of Animated Landscapes: History, Form and Function (2015) and Animation: Collected

Published Writings (2018). He is also the founding series editor of Bloomsbury’s Animation:

Key Films/Filmmakers (launching 2018). Chris has published on a range of topics, including

the ‘cartoonism’ of Tarantino’s films, performance capture technology, the animated

landscape of New York, and the work of Rockstar Games. He currently serves as Vice-

President for the Society for Animation Studies and is Festival Director for Canterbury

Anifest.

Amy Ratelle is the Editor of Animation Studies, the online peer-reviewed journal of the

Society for Animation Studies. She received her PhD in Communication and Culture from

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Ryerson University, and holds degrees in Film Studies from Ryerson University (BFA), and

Carleton University (MA). Her monograph, Animality and Children’s Literature and

Film was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2015.

Caroline Ruddell is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at Brunel University London.

Before this, she taught film, television and popular culture at St. Mary’s University,

Strawberry Hill. She specialises in film theory, representation onscreen and animation,

and has published widely in these areas. Caroline is currently researching Lotte Reiniger’s

silhouette films and craft-based, handmade animation. She is Associate Editor for animation:

an interdisciplinary journal and sits on various Editorial Boards.

Nicholas Sammond is an Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of

Toronto. He is the author of Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the

American Child, 1930-1960 (Duke 2005), and edited and contributed to Steel Chair to the

Head: The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling (Duke 2005). Nic’s most recent

book is Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation

(Duke 2015). His next major project, on abjection and resistance, includes an edited

volume, The Abject Objection, and the monograph Fluid Resistance, which examines

abjection in Cold War vernacular media.

Paul Taberham is Senior Lecturer in Animation Studies at the Arts University

Bournemouth. He gained his PhD in 2013 from the University of Kent, and is the author of

Lessons in Perception: The Avant-Garde Filmmaker as Practical Psychologist (2018). In

addition, he is the co-editor of Cognitive Media Theory (2014) and The New Experimental

Animation: From Analogue to Digital (2018). Paul has appeared on radio, spoken

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internationally at conferences and has published articles for several edited collections and

journals. He also serves as a fellow for The Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving

Image.

Victoria Grace Walden is a full-time teaching fellow in media and film studies at the

University of Sussex. She has written extensively about Holocaust memory and animation,

and her main research interest is film philosophy. Her forthcoming book explores how the

gaps between images, media and bodies in intermedial projects about the Holocaust,

including animations, encourage the spectator to engage in the production of Holocaust

memory as they provoke affect and imagination during the screening.

Paul Ward is Professor of Animation Studies at the Arts University Bournemouth, UK. His

research interests include animated documentary, TV animation and the relationship between

animation theory, practice and pedagogy. He is the co-editor (with Dr Caroline Ruddell) of

the new book series Palgrave Animation. He has given invited and keynote presentations at

conferences and festivals in the UK, Switzerland, Denmark, South Korea and the

Netherlands, and has been a Visiting Professor at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. His work

has been translated into German, Czech, Korean, Farsi and Japanese. He was President of the

Society for Animation Studies for five years from 2010-2014.

Aylish Wood is Professor of Animation and Film Studies at the University of Kent. She has

published articles in Screen, New Review of Film and Video, Journal of Film and

Video, Games and Culture, Film Criticism and Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Her

books include Technoscience in Contemporary American Film (2002); Digital

Encounters (2007) a cross media study of digital technologies in cinema, games and

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installation art; and, Software, Animation and the Moving Image: What’s in the Box (2015), a

study of intersections between software and the production of moving images, encompassing

games, animations, visual effects cinema, and science visualizations.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to our contributors of new material: Lisa Bode, Malcolm Cook, Eric Herhuth,

Christopher Holliday, Lilly Husbands, Mihaela Mihailova, Chris Pallant, Paul Taberham and

Victoria Grace Walden who have provided us with such excellent chapters. Also, thanks to

the authors of our reprint chapters, Amy M. Davis, Rayna Denison, Tom Gunning, Alison

Reiko Loader, Nicholas Sammond, Paul Ward and Aylish Wood, for writing such seminal

work. We are privileged to include all of this scholarship in our new collection and are proud

to be in such fine company.

We would like to acknowledge Georgia Kennedy of Bloomsbury Press who patiently listened

to us set out our vision during the Society for Animation Studies Conference in Canterbury in

2015 and who encouraged us to push forward with our plans for this book. Thanks to the

team at Bloomsbury, Erin Duffy, Susan Krogulski and our Editor Katie Gallof who have

provided guidance and support. Thanks also to the Society for Animation Studies, to

members old and new for their friendship, scholarship and inspiration, and excellent annual

conferences; we would probably not have met without them.

Last but absolutely not least we are grateful for the support from all of our colleagues, friends

and particularly our families. We thank them and dedicate this book to them.

The editors are grateful to the following organisations and publications for their kind

permission to allow previously published material to be re-printed here. Chapter 2 (Tom

Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’) was

first published in Wide Angle 8(3-4), 1986. Chapter 3 (Aylish Wood, ‘Re-Animating Space’)

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was first published in Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 1(2), 2006. Chapter 8 (Paul

Ward, ‘Some Thoughts on Theory-Practice Relationships in Animation Studies’) was first

published in Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 1(2), 2006. Chapter 9 (Annabelle

Honess Roe, ‘Absence, Excess and Epistemological Expansion: Towards a Framework for

the Study of Animated Documentary’) was first published in Animation: An Interdisciplinary

Journal 6(3), 2011. Chapter 17 (Nicholas Sammond, ‘Race, Resistance and Violence in

Cartoons) is an abridged version of Chapter 4 (‘Race’) from Birth of an Industry: Blackface

Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation (Duke University Press, 2015). Chapter 18

(Alison Loader, ‘We’re Asian: More Expected of Us: Representation, The Model Minority &

Whiteness on King of the Hill’) was first published in Animation Studies 5 (2010). Chapter 20

(Rayna Denison, ‘Anime’s Bodies’) was first published in Anime: A Critical Introduction

(Bloomsbury, 2015). Chapter 21 (Amy M. Davis, ‘Disney Films 1989-2005: The “Eisner

Era”’) was first published in Good Girls and Wicked Witches: Changing Representations of

Women in Disney’s Feature Animation, 1937-2001 (Indiana University Press, 2007). Chapter

22 (Van Norris, ‘Taking an Appropriate Line: Exploring Representation of Disability within

British Mainstream Animation’) was first published in Animation Studies 3 (2008).

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Introduction

Nichola Dobson, Annabelle Honess Roe, Amy Ratelle and Caroline Ruddell

Animation studies has grown exponentially in the past three decades. In that time it has

evolved from a nascent sub-area of film studies that charted the history of the cartoon form,

and the studios and animators who produced it, via the ‘first tentative steps’ (Wells 1998: 8)

to a legitimate field of academic enquiry in its own right. Vibrant and diverse, contemporary

animation studies reflects the multiplicity and intermediality of animation. This book has

been conceived in recognition of that diversity and a desire to map out the key issues, topics

and debates in the field for those studying and researching animation today. Unlike those first

‘tentative steps’ in the 1990s, we no longer need to defend the validity of animation or

animation studies. The pejorative perception of animation as ‘just’ children’s entertainment

or funny cartoons, and therefore not worthy of intellectual enquiry, has, we hope, long been

surpassed. As animation has become increasingly ‘pervasive’ (Buchan 2013: 1), so too has

animation’s cultural value been raised. The challenge now for animation studies, as a

relatively young field, is to identify and articulate its key lines of enquiry.

Whereas early film studies coalesced around questions of ontology – or the material

nature of film and its relationship to reality – animation studies hasn’t experienced the same

trajectory of coherent theoretical debate. This is undoubtedly due to animation’s diversity of

form, technique and materiality. Animation is as varied as the number of things you can make

move incrementally in front of a real or virtual camera, from paint to pixel, and the different

techniques and technologies you can use to do so, from hand cut-out silhouettes to Flash. The

theoretical and conceptual questions raised by, for example, stop-motion puppet animation

might be very different to those posed by abstract digital animation. Because of this,

animation studies has never been drawn to the pursuit of a ‘grand’ theory. In addition,

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animation’s affinity with film – the dependence on the same basic apparatus of camera, film,

projector (or their digital variants) and the tripartite relationship between creator, text and

viewer – has meant that animation studies has sometimes struggled to find its own identity in

the shadow of film studies, its dominant older sibling. However, as this book demonstrates,

there are prevailing concepts and concerns that have emerged as fundamental to studying and

understanding animation. These, much like animation itself, are rich and varied and as such

are representative of the dynamic, ever evolving field that is animation studies.

This book is organised into three sections that approach different areas of animation

studies. The first, ‘Theory, Philosophy, Concepts’ explores the theoretical and conceptual

questions that underpin much of animation studies and that are concerned, variously, with the

ontology of animation, its relationship to reality, and the impact it has on audiences. Section

Two, ‘Forms and Genres’, looks at the different types of animation within the frameworks of

medium, genre and audience. The final section, ‘Representation’ includes chapters that

investigate issues of representation and identity in animation. All the sections include both

previously published, seminal writing on animation as well as new chapters specifically

written for this book. We hope that the book as a whole gives a comprehensive overview of

animation studies as it currently stands and will provide an essential resource to both

newcomer and expert. With its focus on animation studies, rather than the history of the

animated form or the work of specific animation studios or animators, this book is designed

to sit alongside the many excellent existing books on animation history by addressing the

concepts and ideas that underpin the study of animation.

References

Buchan, S. (2013), Pervasive Animation, London: Routledge.

Wells, P. (1998), Understanding Animation, London: Routledge

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SECTION ONE

THEORY, PHILOSOPHY, CONCEPTS

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Theory, Philosophy, Concepts

Introduction

While animation has never cohered around the pursuit of a single theoretical line of enquiry

or a ‘grand theory’, as Husbands and Ruddell explore in the opening chapter to this section,

there are nonetheless several theoretical concepts and questions that have emerged as central

to understanding animation. These include the fundamental ‘spectacle’ or appeal of

animation’s visuality (Gunning), its relationship with reality (Bode, Mihailova), and

explorations of animation’s various ‘unique’ capacities in comparison to live action, in

particular its construction of space (Wood) and its relationship with memory (Walden) and

performance (Honess Roe). In addition, animation theory has always enjoyed a particularly

close and mutually-informative relationship with animation practice, as articulated in Paul

Ward’s chapter.

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Approaching Animation and Animation Studies

Lilly Husbands and Caroline Ruddell

Animation encompasses an extraordinarily wide-ranging set of techniques and practices and

thus constitutes an equally diverse field of study. Because of this diversity, animation

presents particular challenges in terms of agreeing on a single definition, and similarly it

defies a unified theoretical approach to studying it. This chapter seeks to explore these issues

and to outline exactly why animation is difficult to define, and why interdisciplinary

theoretical approaches to studying it are necessary. We will outline some of the main ways

that we might think about animation, in terms of how (or even whether) it can be defined and

what some of its unique features and expressive capacities are. In doing so, this chapter offers

an introduction to some of the key theoretical building blocks of animation studies.

What is Animation?

What is useful when thinking about animation is to ask oneself, and to continue to ask

oneself, some fairly simple questions. For example, ‘what is animation?’, and ‘what can it

do?’ ‘How is it different or similar to live-action?’ On the surface these are simple enough

questions, but ones that also prove surprisingly elusive. Consider the first question – ‘what is

animation?’ One way to approach this is to consider different types of animation and we

could try to answer the question by listing many examples and techniques including scratch

film, lightning sketches, stop motion, 2D cel animation, 3D computer animation, motion and

performance capture. But simply listing different techniques of animation does not help us to

define its ontology, or its fundamental nature, beyond basic material terms – i.e. the process

and material of its construction.1 We might instead consider key studios, directors or

animators, all of whom have different styles and techniques, for example the stylised realism

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of Disney and Pixar, the scratch films of Len Lye, the silhouette cut outs of Lotte Reiniger

and the sand or ink on glass of Caroline Leaf. Again, however, simply listing those involved

in creating animation does not sufficiently provide an understanding of what animation is.

If listing techniques, animators or studios does not provide much in the way of

answers, then it might help to consider what makes animation different from live-action.

Firstly, animation is produced frame-by-frame or in computer-animated increments, whereas

live-action cinema is filmed in real time. Secondly, animation is entirely constructed whereas

live action has a ‘profilmic world’ that exists in front of the camera. These two key

differences between live-action and animation are at the heart of attempts to define

animation.

Philip Denslow, after acknowledging that there is no single definition of animation,

writes that ‘[t]he reason we are examining this issue is that no matter what definition you

choose, it faces challenges from new developments in the technology used to produce and

distribute animation’ (1997: 1). Denslow goes on to outline a number of instances where the

uses of various technologies problematise a single definition of animation; Denslow’s

examples, where he wonders whether virtual reality or ‘computer generated lifeform

simulation’ can be considered animation, are almost certainly accepted as examples of

animated texts today (ibid). Unlike Denslow, who is reluctant to settle on one definition of

animation, Brian Wells has argued that one definition should be possible and once outlined

should be adopted by all in the academic community. For Wells, a series of properties define

animation such as movement and ‘aliveness’ (2011), and he also prioritises its construction

frame-by-frame. Raz Greenberg is keen to differentiate animation from film, and insists they

must be defined separately, arguing that animation can be defined according to the presence

or absence of objects when he says ‘an initial definition for the animated text is “the process

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of movement or change, performed by an artificially-created text-specific object”’ (2011: 6).

The construction of movement is key for Greenberg.

Despite Greenberg’s and Wells’ separate attempts to ‘lock down’ a definition of

animation these have for the most part not been taken up. This is probably because (despite

Brian Wells’ frustration about such arguments) animation is extremely wide-ranging, exists

across different media and genres, and is produced with so many different and continually

changing technologies, that it is likely that few scholars see much value in having a one-size-

fits-all definition. Nichola Dobson takes this view in her Historical Dictionary of Animation

and Cartoons, suggesting that due to the very ‘fluid nature of the form’ single definitions are

problematic (2009: xxxvii-xxxviii). While such definitions have not taken hold, the notion

that animation is an entirely constructed form has become a central tenet of animation

studies.

If we cannot define animation in any one meaningful way, we can consider how we

recognise it visually, particularly alongside live-action. It is simple enough to distinguish

between the animated and live action components of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert

Zemeckis, 1988), for example, but sometimes difficult to identify the use of animation

techniques to ‘doctor’, alter or enhance live-action images, as is standard in contemporary

mainstream commercial Hollywood cinema. An interesting example is the film Gladiator

(Ridley Scott, 2000) where a CGI version of Oliver Reed had to be used to finish his scenes

as he died during filming. Here, such unprecedented events during filming led to the use of

animation to ‘fix’ the problem. In this context, the differences between animation and live-

action are often, and increasingly, difficult to discern. Even in 1997, Denslow noted the

‘problem’: that it is increasingly difficult to tell the difference between some examples of

animation and live-action, most notably with regard to compositing techniques (1997: 2). The

potential confusion between what might be animated and what might be live-action has

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grown exponentially in the decades since Denslow’s writing. Compositing techniques (the

combination of animated images and live-action images into one single image) in particular

complicate the recognition of animation. While Roger Rabbit is clearly animated and Eddie

Valiant (Bob Hoskins) is clearly live-action, in a special effects-heavy superhero/action film

such as Wonder Woman (Patty Jenkins, 2017), we may not always recognise what elements

of the images are traditionally shot on film, or what has been enhanced or altered through

animation techniques. Darley would call this a ‘hybrid medium,’ in a similar way to how

Mark Langer refers to a ‘collapse of […] boundary’ between live-action and animation

(quoted in Darley 2007: 69).

In contemporary cinema this ‘collapse of boundary’ is often apparent. A memorable

example is The Life of Pi (Ang Lee, 2012), which depicts a tiger in the same diegetic space –

a small lifeboat - as Pi; we know that a tiger was not in the same spatial field as Suraj Sharma

on filming, and we are aware that this is a case of compositing (whether we are familiar with

the term or not). Two things are likely to happen on such viewing: firstly that we might try to

understand how such images were achieved (or if we know the techniques involved we will

look for evidence of them), and secondly, this does not distract from our enjoyment of the

scene because a certain ‘realism’ is achieved (see Mihaelova in this volume). Where we may

be distracted is where, for example, animation, without live-action footage, is used to depict

the human; Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (Hironobu Sakaguchi & Motonori Sakakibara,

2001) and Beowulf’s (Robert Zemeckis, 2007) photorealistic depiction of its characters is

distracting. We are aware this it is animation but it is striving too hard to be

live-action/photo-realistic to the extent that it is unsettling to the viewer (see Sobchack 2006,

and Bode in this volume).

Given the lack of consensus on a definition of animation, and the fact that in

themselves definitions do not tend to be overly useful (something which most animation

8
scholars agree on), it might be more constructive to consider some of animation’s unique

qualities, particularly in relation to what it has the capacity to do visually. All animation

techniques share the capacity for plasticity and for depicting life and movement. Indeed, there

are two unique properties that have deeply informed the study of animation and could be

considered as distinctive qualities of animation: the illusion of life and metamorphosis.

Animation’s Unique Properties: The Illusion of Life and Metamorphosis

Esther Leslie argues that ‘[…] animation is understood to be the inputting of life, or the

inputting of the illusion of life, into that which is flat or inert or a model or an image’ (2014:

28). This ‘illusion of life’ is a feature that pervades animation studies and is often claimed as

central to what animation is.2 Animation’s illusion of life comes in part from the creation of

movement, because movement suggests life as opposed to the stillness of death. Movement in

animation, because it is created frame-by-frame, is an illusion, unlike in live action film

where it is captured in/on camera. Indeed, movement is stressed in several authors’

definitions of animation including Norman McLaren’s oft-quoted notion that ‘animation is

not the art of drawings that move but the art of movements that are drawn’ (quoted in Furniss

1998: 5). However, the creation of movement does not always entail the illusion of life.

While the illusion of life is readily apparent in animation that creates a character, such as

Mickey Mouse, who appears ‘alive’ by virtue of his movement, it would be less apparent in

abstract animated shapes that are animated to move in time to music, or an animated

company logo that may well depict movement without creating any sense of ‘life’. This

distinction indicates what is problematic about understanding the ‘illusion of life’ as a central

feature of animation: while it is applicable to a huge proportion of animated examples

(including all character animation), it is not a property of all animation.

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 Because animation is completely constructed and produced incrementally, it has the

capacity for depicting metamorphoses. Paul Wells defines this as ‘the ability for an image to

literally change into another completely different image, for example, through the evolution

of the line, the shift in formations of clay, or the manipulation of objects or environments’

and he notes that metamorphoses is ‘unique to the animated form’ (1998: 69). Aylish Wood’s

work on animated space (reprinted in this volume) provides a very useful example of how

thinking about metamorphosis can illuminate the study of animation (2006). Wood’s

arguments are about particular kinds of animation, such as sand and ink on glass, that

highlight the fluidity of animation particularly through the ways that space is imagined and

produced in the films she analyses. For Wood, because we can see ‘in between’ the frames,

and because we can see ‘the sustained metamorphoses of resolving transitions’, space

becomes an expressive element in its own right. (2006: 150).

Although Wood is discussing particular kinds of animation, metamorphosis is central

to how we might think about animation more generally. It captures the constructed nature of

animation in a very visible way; it forces us to think about frame by frame construction or

creation of incremental movement as we can see the sand/ink transforming between frames.

Metamorphosis also raises the question of how we might engage with such images and their

transition from one thing into another; for Wood, the movement of the sand/ink is a further

element of the text that the viewer might engage with.

Both metamorphoses and the illusion of life can be thought of in terms of movement,

but even this can be considered problematic if applied to all animation. Many examples of

animated texts tend to foreground their ‘animatedness’, or medium specificity, and to call

attention to themselves through unconventional techniques and uses of technology. For

instance, works by experimental animators such as Robert Breer or Jodie Mack that make use

of dissimilar images in consecutive frames offer radically different experiences that are not

10
based on the continuity of movement across frames (thus effectively disrupting habitual

expectations of animation’s presentation of the illusion of life). Karen Beckman, discussing

McLaren’s and Peter Kubelka’s writings on animation, observes that their thoughts reveal

that an illusion of movement ‘is not a given in animation’; only visual change between

frames is necessary (2014: 3).

Animation Aesthetics and Spectatorship

Considering how difficult it is to establish a single definition of animation or even to identify

its unique, yet universal, properties, other approaches to the study of animation instead shift

the emphasis from the animation itself to the audience by investigating the diverse ways we

perceive and experience it in its multifarious forms. Indeed, examining animation in

spectatorial terms opens up opportunities to explore not only what animation is but also what

it can do—what it can show us and enable us to feel.

One of the greatest philosophical conundrums of moving images in general, and

animation in particular, lies in the complex relation between its ontology (what it is in

material terms) and our phenomenological engagement with it (how we perceive and

experience it). Building on McLaren’s emphasis on the interstices between frames, Keith

Broadfoot and Rex Butler note in their contribution to Cholodenko’s The Illusion of Life that

‘[w]hat we see, but what cannot be seen, is two images and no image—the space between

images—at once’ (1991: 271). Animation, as we experience it, is in a constant state of

becoming, and when it is arrested for definition or analysis it ceases to be fully what it is

whilst in motion. Our access to animation’s illusionistic spectacle is necessarily filtered

through our sensorial experience of it. This perceptual paradox is one of the reasons that

animation spectatorship is an important aspect of animation studies. As an art form,

animation has the potential to produce and manipulate imagery in myriad graphical ways.

11
Thus, studying it often requires taking into consideration the particular ways in which it

presents itself, or its formal aesthetics (e.g. the interrelationship between its audio-visual

style, technique, medium, etc.). Aspects of spectatorial experience, accounted for by means of

aesthetic analysis, often inform broader historical, cultural or conceptual analyses and

interpretations of the art form.

Animation as a technical process offers artists extraordinary potential for formal

experimentation and expressive freedom. It has a remarkable capacity for imaginative

visualisation, and the diversity of experiences that can arise out of that creative potential is

part of what makes animation such a fascinating object of study. Throughout its history

animation’s capacity to visualise virtually anything has been put to many different uses.

Many scholars have remarked on its limitless artistic potential for the creation of fictional

worlds and characters, its ability to recreate events or evoke subjective ‘ideas, feelings and

sensibilities’ in documentary (Honess Roe 2011: 227), and its aptness for the visualisation of

data, concepts and supra-sensible natural phenomena in science and educational films, and

much more besides.

When considering the diverse and distinctive experiences that animations offer us, it

becomes quite clear that any one universalising theory or description of animation

spectatorship will not suffice. Suzanne Buchan writes in her introduction to Pervasive

Animation that ‘[a]n effective approach to this complexity is to use pluralist and

interdisciplinary methods […] and, to develop approaches that take into account the

differences between celluloid and digital film experience and the platforms these

technologies and techniques use’ (2013: 2).

Animation appeals to the body and the imagination in many ways that are quite

different to live-action cinema—even the most ‘invisible’ uses of computer animation, in the

form of visual effects discussed above, often offer visual experiences that would be

12
impossible to capture with a straightforward cinematographic process. Although animations

often make use of live action filmmaking conventions, they also present their own visual

languages that vary enormously across styles, techniques, production contexts, industries,

cultures and time periods. Buchan argues that animation often presents its own ‘world’ that

provides spectators with certain phenomenological, psychological and affective experiences

that are peculiar to it, demanding of spectators a combination of personal interpretation, real-

world understanding, and acceptance of the work’s own aesthetic logistics (2006: 25). She

writes:

[t]he animation film is utterly unique in its representation of graphic and

plastic universes and impossible spaces and in its ‘ability’ to transcend

physical laws which govern our experience. It is therefore crucial to our

understanding of animation spectatorship to develop and describe our

understanding of this particular set of conditions, which in turn can assist an

approach to individual films. (2006: 25)

Because spectatorial experience arises from encounters with the particularities of a specific

animation and its own ‘set of intricate complexities’ (Buchan 2006: 25), investigations of

animation spectatorship tend to focus closely on one work or a small number of works at a

time. This offers scholars an opportunity to account not only for the historical, cultural or

narrative elements of an animation but also for the different ways in which the particular

stylistic, technical and technological features of a given animation achieve their effects and

‘modes of appearing’ (Sobchack 2011: 195). Animations using different styles and

techniques will have very different ‘modes of appearing’, which in turn will affect the kinds

of experiences they invite. For instance, a scratch animation such as Norman McLaren’s

13
Blinkity Blank (1955) that depicts semi-abstract figures that move very rapidly on the shallow

surface of a black background in time to a musical soundtrack will elicit different responses

than the realist aesthetics of Walt Disney’s Bambi (1942), with its use of naturalistic two-

dimensional drawn characters moving in relation to detailed painted backgrounds that were

shot with a multi-plane camera. These sorts of aesthetic distinctions are equally important in

thinking about forms of animation that do not adhere to either short or feature length

narrative paradigms. For instance, a two-dimensional motion graphics based animation that

aims to convey information rather than a narrative will illicit mental and physiological

responses that differ to some degree from those evoked by the immersive spectacle of a live

action hybrid like Avatar (James Cameron, 2009).

Approaching animation spectatorship requires a careful consideration of the way that

spectators’ experiences of animation can be theorised. These approaches are often founded on

the premise that human beings’ perceptual faculties respond similarly to particular stimuli,

and thus certain experiences can be reasonably assumed to be similar amongst spectators of

an animated work. Phenomenological approaches to animation in particular attempt to

address this issue by describing both the objective and subjective aspects of engaging with a

moving image work. By rooting investigations of experience in close formal analyses of the

works themselves, they aim to ensure that their descriptions of experience are not overly

subjective but rather, as Vivian Sobchack notes, ‘sufficiently comprehensible and resonant to

others who might possibly inhabit [them]’ (2009: 438).

Animation scholars use numerous methodologies in their approaches to spectatorship.

Scholars including Buchan, Sobchack, Jennifer Barker, Tom Gunning, Aylish Wood and

Joanna Bouldin have discussed animation in experiential and/or phenomenological terms.

Other scholars such as Torben Grodal (2009) and Dan Torre (2017) have used cognitive

theory to interrogate the experiences of animation spectatorship. These and other scholars

14
have addressed the experiential perception of space and ‘spatial transformation’ (Wood 2006:

133), movement and metamorphosis that are unique to animated moving images. Their works

discuss a variety of different material and technological types of animation. Bouldin, for

instance, focuses on the relationship between spectators and animated bodies in cartoons,

noting that ‘animation extends the possibilities of the viewers’ embodied responses’ (2000:

63). Barker has argued for the tactile appeal of hyperreal computer animations like Toy Story

(John Lasseter, 1995) (2009: 46), and Sobchack describes the unusual sensations evoked by

viewing computer-generated morphs (2000: 132). Buchan, in her study of the Quay Brothers’

puppet animations, analyses the twofold status of object animation, concentrating on the way

that it ‘represents a different “world” for the spectator, something between “a world,” created

with the animation technique, and “the world” in its use of real objects and not

representational drawings’ (2006: 21).

Consideration of our embodied responses to movement is integral to this line of

enquiry. In his essay ‘Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality’,

Gunning works with the film theories of André Bazin and Christian Metz to shift focus away

from the photographic index as a marker of realism and onto cinematic motion as a primary

impetus for embodied engagement or identification (2007: 38). He thus introduces a theory of

cinematic realism that makes room within film studies for a consideration of animation’s

ability to offer an ‘impression of reality’ (2007: 45). Gunning stresses the important role that

movement plays in rendering animations and films ‘believable’ (2007: 45). He accounts for

the physiological appeal of many forms of animation (2007: 38) by examining how both

recorded and animated movement engages spectators’ bodies, evokes their ‘participation’ in

the seen movement and offers ‘a sense of perceptual richness or immediate involvement in

the image’ (2007: 42). These ideas help refine our understanding of what is happening, for

instance, when we become immersed in an animated spectacle. As he points out, this interest

15
in the physiological appeal of animated motion is not new but was present in the writings of

classical film theorists such as Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac and Sergei Eisenstein (2007:

37). For instance, Eisenstein’s writings on Disney in the 1940s demonstrate a fascination with

the animated art form’s ability to evoke certain synaesthetic, empathetic, and ecstatic

sensations through watching images move in time. He describes his well-known notion of

‘plasmaticness’—the temporal, metamorphosing elasticity of animated bodies, objects and

spaces—partly in terms of its profound effects on spectators’ bodies (1988: 27).

There has been a somewhat limiting tendency in animation studies to focus on

spectatorial experiences of representational forms of animation (e.g. cartoon animation,

narrative computer animation, and stop motion puppet animation). This is in part because we

are able to relate to figurative types of animation and animated characters because they

resemble aspects of the real world enough for us to ‘project our somatic knowledge of the

world’ onto them so that they ‘can make “sense” to us’ (Bouldin 2000: 60-61). However, this

theorisation of animation spectatorship does not apply as easily to forms of experimental

animation whose primary aims are not to represent or mimic aspects of reality (Buchan 2006:

21). For instance, abstract animation often denies easy sensory assimilation based on

recognizable bodies, spaces, or states of affairs and calls for a distinct kind of approach to

sensory and cognitive intelligibility (Husbands 2018). Other types of experimental animation

present different perceptual and conceptual challenges (see Taberham in this volume).

Thinking about what animation can do and the way it can make us feel requires

approaches that consider the radically different ways in which animations engage the

imagination and the body. They also highlight the fact that the diversity of animation is one

of its most prominent features and a variety of interdisciplinary approaches are therefore

needed in the field. The differing ways in which animation might engage us raises some

compelling questions about our preconceptions of what animation is, and how it has been

16
discussed or defined, requiring us to continue to find new ways of understanding it. As a

thoroughly wide-ranging set of techniques, forms, practices and aesthetics, animation

deserves the multitudinous approaches on which much of animation studies thrives.

17
References

Barker, J. M. (2009), The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience, Los Angeles:

University of California Press.

Bazin, A. (1967), What is Cinema? Volume 1, trans. H. Gray, Berkeley: University of

California Press.

Beckman, K. (2014), ‘Introduction’ in K. Beckman (ed), 1-22, Animating Film Theory,

Durham: Duke University Press.

Bouldin, J. (2000), ‘Bodacious Bodies and the Voluptuous Gaze: A Phenomenology of

Animation Spectatorship’, Animation Journal (Spring): 56-67.

Broadfoot, K. & R. Butler (1991), ‘The Illusion of Illusion’, in A. Cholodenko (ed), The

Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation, 263-298, Sydney: Power Institute of Fine Arts.

Buchan, S. (2006), ‘The Animated Spectator: Watching the Quay Brothers’ ‘Worlds’’, in S.

Buchan (ed), Animated ‘Worlds’, 15-38, Eastleigh: John Libbey Publishing.

Buchan, S. (2013), ‘Introduction’, in S. Buchan (ed), Pervasive Animation, 1-22, London:

Routledge.

Cholodenko, A., ed (1991), The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation, Sydney: Power

Institute of Fine Arts.

Cholodenko, A., ed (2007), The Illusion of Life II: More Essays on Animation. Sydney:

Power Publications.

Darley, A. (2007), ‘Bones of Contention: Thoughts on the Study of Animation’, animation:

an interdisciplinary journal, 2(1) March: 63-76.

Denslow, P. K. (1997), ‘What is Animation and Who Needs to Know? An Essay on

Definitions’, in J. Pilling (ed), A Reader in Animation Studies, 1-4, Herts: John

Libbey Publishing Ltd.

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Dobson, N. (2009), Historical Dictionary of Animation and Cartoons, Lanham: Scarecrow

Press.

Eisenstein, Sergei. (1988), Eisenstein on Disney, ed. and trans. J. Leyda, London: Methuen.

Furniss, M. (1998), Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics, Eastleigh: John Libbey Publishing.

Greenburg, R. (2011), ‘The Animated Text: Definition’, Journal of Film and Video, 63 (2)

Summer: 3-10.

Grodal, T. (2009), Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film, Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

Gunning, T. (2007), Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality’,

Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 18(1): 29-52.

Honess Roe, A. (2011), ‘Absence, Excess, and Epistemological Expansion: Towards a

Framework for the Study of Animated Documentary’, animation: an interdisciplinary

journal, 6(3): 215-230.

Husbands, L. (2018), ‘Fantastical Empathy: Encountering Abstraction in Bret Battey’s Sinus

Aestum (2009)’, in C. Holliday and A. Sergeant (eds), Fantasy/Animation:

Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres. London: Routledge.

Johnston, O. and F. Thomas (1981), The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, New York:

Abbeville Press.

Leslie, E. (2014), ‘Animation and History’, in K. Beckman (ed), Animating Film Theory.

Durham: Duke University Press.

Sobchack, V. (2000), ‘“At the Still Point of the Turning World”: Meta-Morphing and Meta-

Stasis’, in. V. Sobchack (ed), Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture

of Quick Change, 131-158, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Sobchack, V. (2006), ‘Final Fantasy: Computer Graphic Animations of Humanity (or the

[Dis]Illusion of Life’, in S. Buchan (eds), Animated Worlds, 173-184, Eastleigh: John

Libbey Publishing.

Sobchack, V. (2009), ‘Phenomenology’, in P. Livingstone and C. Plantinga (eds), The

Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, 435-445, New York: Routledge.

Sobchack, V. (2011), ‘Fleshing Out the Image: Phenomenology, Pedagogy, and Derek

Jarman’s Blue’, in H. Carel and G. Tuck (eds), New Takes on Film-Philosophy, 191-

206, Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan.

Torre, D. (2017), Animation—Process, Cognition and Actuality, London: Bloomsbury.

Wells, B. (2011), ‘Frame of Reference: Toward a Definition of Animation’, Animation

Practice, Process and Production, 1 (1): 11–32.

Wells, P. (1998), Understanding Animation, London: Routledge.

Wood, A. (2006), ‘Re-Animating Space’, animation: an interdisciplinary journal, 1(2): 133-

152.

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2. The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectators and the Avant-Garde

Tom Gunning

Here Gunning’s discusses relates to early cinema in general which includes both live-action

and animation, and indeed they were not distinguished from each other in the early years of

cinema. Gunning’s notion of a ‘cinema of attractions’, which he proposed in this article that

was first published in 1986 in the journal Wide Angle, has been widely influential in film and

media studies and continues to be relevant to the study of animation in numerous ways: how

animation ‘presents’ itself to us; questions of novelty; the role of comedy, gags and chase

sequences; and the function and reception of technology.

[INSERT REPRINT OF ‘GUNNING.PDF’ HERE]

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3. Re-Animating Space

Aylish Wood

In an article that first appeared in Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal in 2006, Wood

argues that animation has the expressive capacity to construct space in ways that is not

possible using live-action techniques. Metamorphosis is inherent to this capacity, Wood

argues. Although many scholars note the importance of metamorphosis for understanding

animation, Wood here provides a sustained analysis of its significance and also helps rethink

the concept of cinematic space through animation’s capacity for spatial transformation.

[INSERT REPRINT OF ‘WOOD PDF’ HERE]

22
4. Realism and Animation

Mihaela Mihailova

The title of this chapter is not meant to be provocative. And yet, placing animation and

realism in the same sentence still tends to raise eyebrows. Perhaps this is due to animation’s

production process itself and its status as ‘“other” to the more dominant live-action cinema’

(Bukatman 2014: 309). After all, as Stephen Rowley (2005: 67) points out, ‘the inherent

artificiality of animation means that the slippery concept of realism becomes even more

suspect than in the live-action context’. And yet, questions of realism have been at the centre

of animation aesthetics and discourse since the earliest days of cinema. This chapter outlines

key concepts, historical developments, and debates on the subject of realism, from classical

Hollywood cel animation to contemporary augmented and virtual reality works.31

Realism and Classical Animation Techniques

Casey Riffel (2012: 4) has argued in favour of seeing animated realism ‘as a technological

achievement [and] a historically situated process, rather than merely as a monolithic style or

aesthetic’. Indeed, the early history of animated realism in America is intrinsically bound to

two technological inventions that fundamentally altered animation production: the rotoscope

and the multiplane camera. The rotoscope, patented by Max Fleischer in 1917, allows the

animator to trace over live-action footage of an actor, capturing human movement with more

fluidity and higher accuracy than previously possible in cartoons (Furniss 2007: 76). The

Fleischer Studios would go on to become synonymous with rotoscope animation, thanks in

part to its Out of the Inkwell series (1919-1927), which pioneered the use of this technique

23
through the character Koko the Clown, who was often shown interacting with Max Fleischer,

setting an early standard for combining live-action and cartoon imagery in the same frame.

The Disney studio quickly adopted and often relied on rotoscoping as well, particularly for

the titular female characters in its mid-twentieth century princess features, whose graceful

movements were achieved by animating over footage of female performers.

While Disney’s multiplane camera was not the first, it was the studio’s particular technical

design, used for its first feature-length film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), that

contributed to a fundamental shift in animation aesthetics that would have a lasting and

international impact on commercial animation. The multiplane camera introduced to drawn

animation a realistic sense of perspective and depth and a more convincing illusion of three-

dimensional space. This is achieved by painting different layers of the image on separate

movable planes of glass that are placed directly below each other. As the camera moves

vertically through this setup, all the separate elements of the frame remain in perspective

(Wells 1998: 23).

Since Disney’s adoption of the multiplane camera, the studio’s house style would be defined

by a balancing act between faithfully recreating the physical world and embellishing it for

stylistic and narrative purposes. Paul Wells (1998: 25) has dubbed this approach ‘hyper-

realism’ and defined its key conventions: ‘it approximates live-action film’s representation of

reality’, obeys the laws of the physical world, and features sound that ‘corresponds directly to

the context from which it emerges’. Similarly, Chris Pallant (2011: 35) argues that ‘Disney-

Formalism’ – his term for the aesthetic style forged in the earliest Disney features –

‘prioritized artistic sophistication, “realism” in characters and contexts, and, above all,

believability.’ However, as Casey Riffel (2012: 4) has aptly observed, Disney’s approach to

cel animation also revealed a gap between realism and the fantastic, exemplified by the

tension between ‘emotive anthropomorphism and accurate animal anatomy’ and between

24
‘romantic depictions of nature and the role of these romanticized backgrounds in

“naturalizing” the seemingly coherent space of the animated image’.

It is such negotiations that hold the key to Disney’s animated realism. As evident in

the following quote by veteran Disney animator Joseph Gilland (2009:156), this aesthetic

developed out of the belief that ‘what sets animation apart from other mediums [is] our

ability to exaggerate reality, to push it farther, into a more fantastic, and ultimately

entertaining version of reality.’ Or, as Ollie Johnston put it, ‘Good [Disney] animation is not

about ‘copying’ real life. Good animation is about caricaturing real life. It is Life-Plus.’ (Sito

2013: 202)

Even though Disney’s ‘life-plus’ approach quickly emerged as a globally dominant

one, the Golden Age of American animation (roughly defined as the period between the late

1920s and late 1960s) also gave rise to a parallel movement towards stylization, anti-

naturalism, and expressionistic use of colour as exemplified by United Productions of

America’s cartoon shorts. UPA, as the studio came to be known, was active for three decades

(early 1940s to 1970). Its notable works include Gerald McBoing Boing (Robert Cannon,

1950), Rooty Toot Toot (John Hubley, 1951) and several Mr. Magoo cartoons. Formed

shortly after the Disney animator’s strike of 1941, UPA responded to Disney’s animated

realism by developing a limited animation aesthetic (limited animation involves fewer

drawings between keyframes) influenced by modern and abstract art. In contrast to Disney’s

obsession with depth and simulating three-dimensional space, UPA’s flat, two-dimensional

cartoons are ‘unequivocally drawings, not meant to be mistaken for anything else’ (Abraham

2012: 87, emphasis in original).

UPA was not alone in embracing animation’s potential to break away from the

constraints of the physical world. Studios such as Warner Bros and Hanna-Barbera, which

shaped television animation in America during the Golden Age of cartoons, solidified the

25
principles and visual style of ‘cartoon physics’, a set of ‘physical laws [and] restrictions that

operate in the service of humor [and] propose an alternative set of means by which bodies

navigate space: momentum trumps inertia, gravity is a sometime thing, solid matter often

isn’t’ (Bukatman 2014: 303). As anyone who has seen Wile E. Coyote’s indestructible body

or the Flintstones’ logic-defying household appliances can attest, animated Hollywood has

toyed with the impossible as much as it has flirted with the real.

While cel animation has been instrumental in bringing questions of realism to the fore of

animation process and production, the theories outlined in relation to drawn imagery are not

necessarily applicable to animated media as a whole. Indeed, any attempt at a comprehensive

overview of animation and realism is further complicated by the wealth of existing animation

techniques and their distinct aesthetic concerns and characteristics. In particular, stop-

motion’s relationship to reality is much more immediate and direct because this type of

filmmaking relies on objects that exist in the world. For example, the films of the Quay

Brothers feature both puppets and organic materials which ‘as in live action, as materials, are

what they represent photo-indexically’ (Buchan 2011: xxiii). At the same time, the movement

created via stop-motion is often noticeably uneven since, as Maureen Furniss (2007: 161) has

noted, ‘footage created with frame-by-frame photography lacks the “motion blur” that occurs

naturally when a figure moving in real time performs before a live-action camera’.

Nevertheless, there are stop-motion productions, notably the feature films of studio Laika,

which strike a balance between caricaturing and emulating reality that is not unlike the classic

Disney approach. Still, there are other types of animation, such as the direct or drawn-on-film

experimental films of Len Lye and Stan Brakhage, which typically eschew or reject figural

representation altogether. In such abstract works, rhythm of movement and colour

composition are often prioritized over approximating the look of the physical world.

26
In fact, despite Disney’s impact on global animation, the studio’s vision of animated realism

as ‘life-plus’ is by no means a universally accepted approach. Non-Western national

animation traditions interpret animated media’s relationship to reality in a variety of distinct

ways, some of which reject imitation, or emulation-based, definitions of realism. For

example, some of Russia’s most celebrated animators remain sceptical about animation

approaches that prioritize the approximation of photographic accuracy in the drawn image.

According to Yuri Norstein (2014: 9), ‘realistic art should not be confused with simple

photographic imaging’. In his opinion, contemporary commercial animation – computer

animation in particular – depicts only exteriors without delving into the inner experiences of

characters and the depth of a situation, whereas it is this ability to go beyond the surface that

constitutes animation’s relationship to reality (Norstein 2014: 9-15). Andrei Khrzhanovsky’s

(2014) interpretation of animated realism focuses on animation’s capacity to create a specific

atmosphere or convey a believable relationship through carefully chosen details. Thus, he

argues that a film about two paper napkins in love can still be realistic because it is based on

a recognizable human relationship – a position which favours a narrative-driven approach to

realism. Examples of films that would be considered realistic according to this definition

include Jan Švankmajer’s 1989 stop-motion short Meat Love, featuring flirtatious chunks of

meat, and Garri Bardin’s 1988 Vykrutasy, a stylized short featuring characters and

environments constructed out of wire.

In Japan, achieving visual similarity to physical reality is not a necessary prerequisite for

animated realism, either. According to certain Japanese animation critics, realism is not a

question of resemblance to the real, but ‘first and foremost a set of conventions proper to

historically produced configuration of a given medium’. In this context, animation is

considered a medium that, instead of replicating realism, ‘provides the basis for “animation-

like” work within a different media form’ (Steinberg 2014: 289). While anime’s relationship

27
to reality is too broad and distinctive to adequately cover here, such definitions of realism and

its connection to animated media hint at the need to go beyond hegemonic Hollywood

approaches and explore these questions in a transnational context.

Animated Realism in the Digital Age

While some of the key approaches towards defining animated realism have been formulated

in relation to two-dimensional drawn animation, in the last two decades animation’s

relationship to reality has been most rigorously theorized in the context of digital imagery and

visual effects. The ubiquity of sophisticated computer-generated imagery in global media –

both live action and animated – has given new urgency to questions about animation’s

relationship with reality.

One of the most persistent interpretations of computer-generated realism defines it as

fundamentally based on imitating the representational strategies of live-action cinema and

photographic imagery. This reading is perhaps best exemplified by Lev Manovich and

Andrew Darley’s work. Despite disagreeing on the characteristics of the resulting realism and

its meaning vis-à-vis the evolution of digital-era filmmaking, both scholars propose that,

instead of engaging reality directly, computer animation emulates existing cinematic

representations of the world. Specifically, Manovich (2001: 200) argues that ‘what computer

graphics have (almost) achieved is not realism, but rather only photorealism – the ability to

fake not our perceptual and bodily experience of reality but only its photographic images.’

For his part, Darley (2000: 75) writes that computer imaging achieves a ‘second-order’

realism wherein classical cinematic conventions of realistic representation – such as three-

point lighting, depth of field, lens flare, and motion blur – are emulated by software. For

example, WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008) takes advantage of virtual camera software

28
designed to simulate both the perspective and the visual imperfections typical of the 1970s

classic science-fiction films that the Pixar feature nostalgically evokes (Herhuth 2014: 68).

A prominent alternative to theories describing animated realism as quintessentially derivative

of live action is the idea that animation’s relationship with reality hinges on going beyond the

photographic image and into an aesthetic territory accessible only to animation itself.

Scholars who have approached the issue form this angle include Vivian Sobchack and

Michele Pierson. In their writing on computer-generated imagery, both theorists explicitly

question the framing of photographic representation as an ideal that digital imagery aspires

to; instead, they suggest that computer-generated animation, unfettered as it is by any direct

links to the physical world, may in fact be working towards transcending the goal of

capturing reality and focusing on (re)creating it. To quote Pierson (2002:87), much of early-

1990s computer-generated imagery represented ‘a hyperreal electronic aesthetic that took the

cinematographic image as a possible point of departure.’ Meanwhile, Sobchack (2006: 173)

argues that, ‘perhaps insistent on its own discrete metaphysics, animation might desire not

“integral realism,” but “integral irrealism” – and thus be guided by an alternative ideal

founded on the ‘total’ creation (not re-creation) of the world in its own image’. Moreover, as

Sobchack’s analysis of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) illustrates, digital

animation’s obsession with photorealism, with its over-investment in replicating minute

visual detail, can lead to a distracting and ultimately unsatisfactory spectatorial experience, as

viewers who have been primed to expect an imitation of reality end up fixating on CGI’s

limitations instead.

As these various interpretations suggest, defining and theorizing digital animation’s

relationship with reality remains an epistemologically slippery endeavour. While some

scholars tend to undermine and underestimate animation’s uniqueness as a visual medium,

others run the risk of overdetermining its exceptionality. To avoid generalization, and account

29
for the ongoing evolution of digital animation techniques and their representational modes, it

is productive to study contemporary digital animated realism not as a monumental entity, but

as a phenomenon shaped by specific national, historical, industrial and political contexts.

Contemporary Hollywood Animation: A Case Study

While the tools available to today’s animators are much more sophisticated and versatile than

the multiplane camera, what they offer is an enhanced version of the same illusion of

movement within a cohesive deep space that classical animators established as essential to

cartoon realism. Relatedly, the tendency to bend – but rarely break – the rules of physics that

can be traced back to Disney’s pre-digital output (as discussed earlier in this chapter) remains

a key feature of Hollywood animation features. Indeed, American digital animation often

blends highly precise technologically-enabled fidelity to physical phenomena with elements

of stylized cartoon imagery. In other words, contemporary US animated media’s relationship

to reality is the product of a balance between the accurate reproduction of light, shading,

texture, perspective, and movement, and the distortion of these same parameters for aesthetic

or narrative reasons. For example, Sully’s fur in Monsters, Inc. (Pete Docter, 2001) is

designed to look naturalistic in texture, density, and movement without detracting from the

blue creature’s cartoonish and otherworldly appearance. Similarly, in the Dreamworks feature

How to Train Your Dragon (Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, 2010), the titular creature

Toothless is designed as an adorable catlike hybrid (but with amusingly doglike behaviour),

but his flight movements are meticulously modelled on actual birds and calibrated to convey

the appropriate sense of speed and weight.

Furthermore, contemporary Hollywood animation remains indebted to the rules of

classical Hollywood storytelling. Since its earliest features, the Disney studio has always

been careful to incorporate reasons for any anti-realist appearance or behaviour of its

30
characters into the films’ storylines, legitimizing aesthetic experimentation via conventional

narrative. For instance, Dumbo’s simultaneous defiance of the laws of gravity and the animal

kingdom is motivated by his enormous ears (Ajanović 2004: 46). This brand of animated

realism, which developed under the influence of live-action cinema, sets the tone for

contemporary animated features, which favour convincing appearance, movement, and

behaviour in combination with continuity editing. In recent Disney/Pixar features (Brave,

Frozen, The Incredibles), any escape from the basic laws of nature is attributed to magic or

superpowers. Even an event as unbelievable as an entire house taking flight in Up (Pete

Docter and Bob Peterson, 2009) is given an explanation: a mountain of balloons which could

conceivably overcome the house’s weight.

Historical continuity and the lasting influence of Disney have had a major impact on

contemporary digital realist aesthetics, but they are not the only factors worth considering.

For example, it is important to note Pixar’s early work in commercials and the essential role

that animated realism played in their success. As D. A. Price (2008: 110) explains, ‘Pixar’s

ability to create photorealistic versions of inanimate objects and turn them into expressive

characters was novel to television audiences’. Indeed, the widespread adoption of computer-

generated imagery capable of both emulating and creatively distorting reality can be

attributed to a combination of factors, including the needs of other industries – such as

advertising, the military, and video games – all of which have historically benefitted from

advances in sophisticated visual simulation.

From an ideological standpoint, digital animation’s relationship to reality is often presented

as synonymous with technological superiority. Computer-generated imagery’s capacity to

both create a highly precise impression of reality and use it as a baseline for formal

experimentation – resulting in what Ed Catmull, the current president of Pixar, has fittingly

dubbed ‘stylized realism’ – is often cited by members of the industry as one of the medium’s

31
defining artistic features (Pallant 2011: 133). What is more, it is seen as a criterion of quality

and sophistication, both technologically and aesthetically. For instance, Jodi Whitsel (2002),

Blue Sky’s Lighting Lead on Ice Age (Chris Wedge and Carlos Saldanha, 2002), boasts that

the company’s renderer is ‘so physically accurate that [the team] can place lights and do

things just like you would in the real world and it pretty much comes out right’. At the same

time, the freedom to diverge from the laws of nature for aesthetic reasons is often celebrated

as both a sign of technological progress and artistic superiority. Such technophilic accounts of

the digital animation process as a journey beyond the limitations of reality demonstrate that –

to quote filmmaker Jane Shadbolt (2012) – ‘the rhetoric of digital filmmaking is the promise

of the infinite’.

Digital Visual Effects

Digital visual effects produced for live-action cinema share many of the aesthetic features

and approaches described above, including the tendency to gently embellish reality through

‘careful cheats in the interest of style and tone’ (Prince 2012:70). However, they also pose

additional challenges to defining animated realism because they are meant to convincingly

coexist on screen with non-animated characters and landscapes. According to Stephen

Prince’s (2012: 32) theory of perceptual realism, this means that filmmakers need to convince

viewers that the creatures or worlds created via digital effects exist in the same perceptual

reality and follow the same laws of physics as the real world. Prince (2012: 32) posits that

digital effects achieve this by recreating ‘contextual cues designating a three-dimensional

world’, including ‘principles of motion and anatomy and the physics involved in dynamic

systems such as water, clouds, and fire’. This is especially relevant to live-action films

centred on interactions between actors and computer-generated creatures – such as Fantastic

Beasts and Where to Find Them (David Yates, 2016) and War of the Planet of the Apes (Matt

32
Reeves, 2017) – because the success of these productions is largely predicated on the digital

beasts functioning as believable characters occupying the same diegetic space as the humans.

In order to achieve this, many contemporary features rely on a technique called motion

capture which is used to achieve physically accurate and convincing motion in computer-

animated film and video game characters by using reference data collected from the digitized

footage of human actors wearing specialized suits with sensors. Visual effects artists rely on

this data as a starting point when animating the digital body, working with what Lisa Purse

(2013: 56) has described as ‘an abstraction of the actor’s movements’ in order to alter and

edit it in the service of realistic movement and gestures. Notable recent examples of live-

action features using motion and performance capture (a more sophisticated technique which

includes facial capture) include Star Wars: The Force Awakens (J.J. Abrams, 2015), Avatar

(James Cameron, 2009), and Beowulf (Robert Zemeckis, 2009). Certain video game

franchises have also featured motion-captured lookalikes of Hollywood actors, such as Kevin

Spacey (Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, 2014) and Sigourney Weaver (Alien: Isolation,

2014), largely in order to draw on the star power of these performers to enhance the game’s

marketability.

In addition to realism of movement, contemporary cinema is likewise concerned with

simulating realism of behaviour, particularly as it applies to animated crowds. Animated

multitudes appear more convincing if the individual behaviour of their members and their

behaviour as a group are integrated successfully and feature a certain number of variations.

For example, the MASSIVE software used in Lord of the Rings enabled animators to

introduce an element of spontaneity in large battle scenes, giving the actions of separate Orcs

and Uruk-hai a certain measure of randomized uniqueness (Whissel 2014: 79).

Contemporary superhero franchises are also preoccupied with showcasing computer

animation’s capacity to manipulate elements of the physical world. Both X-Men: Days of

33
Future Past (Bryan Singer, 2014) and X-Men: Apocalypse (Bryan Singer, 2016) feature

representative visual effects scenes involving the mutant Quicksilver, whose incredible speed

appears to make time literally stop flowing, allowing him to re-order the space around him

according to his needs. In both films, the mutant’s effortless mastery over his environment is

underscored through a series of random cheeky acts he performs in the middle of high-stakes

crisis situations. In the 2014 film, he pauses to steal a hat from someone’s head, while in the

2016 sequel he takes time to sip from a soda can, moonwalk, and fix a boy’s hair. While

ostensibly designed for comic relief, such gestures also serve to emphasize contemporary

visual effects’ capacity to transcend the natural flow of movement in time, thereby also

altering physical space in objectively impossible ways. If, at the turn of the twentieth-century,

film promised to capture and decode reality, now it dreams of re-ordering and

(computer-)programming it.

Emerging Media and Realism

The past decade has seen the rapid proliferation of emerging digital art forms whose

functions and visual design rely on redefining the relationship between computer-generated

imagery and physical space. Considering animated imagery’s relationship with reality will be

among the key factors in conceptualizing the development of such media. Virtual and

augmented reality, in particular, are already being shaped by realism debates. According to

some, the key to creating a convincing sense of reality in VR experiences is not visual

verisimilitude, but engaging the user’s proprioception (their sense of the position and

movement of their own limbs in space that is independent of vision) (Vanderbilt, 2016). This

is particularly relevant to current research into virtual reality projects that aim to create the

illusion of exploring immersive virtual spaces. Such projects benefit from a technique called

‘redirected walking’, which uses ‘subtle visual clues’ and misdirection to trick head-mounted

34
display users walking in a confined space into believing that they are moving through a large

area (Zhang, 2015).

Augmented reality applications rely on a more immediate relationship with the surrounding

world designed around the interplay between animated and physical realities. Take, for

example, Niantic’s 2016 cell phone game Pokémon Go. Unlike virtual reality applications,

which create the illusion of placing the user into digitally generated environments, Pokémon

Go involves navigating actual cities in order to discover – by making use of the phone’s built-

in camera – digital creatures which are virtually overlaid onto existing locations. Here,

animation’s relationship with reality is no longer representational; the cartoon dimension

merges with real space – and in real time – and adds a new layer of meaning to existing

landmarks.

Animation’s central role and expanding presence in emerging media raises questions about

the evolving definitions and attitudes towards animated realism in the digital age. How might

virtual and augmented reality’s emphasis on movement in space – both simulated and

physical – expand and reshape the aesthetic and industrial imperatives of digital realism?

What new forms of realism may arise out of the digital hybridization of physical

environments? Virtual and augmented reality technologies are still relatively new, and their

place within the larger twenty-first century media landscape remains to be defined. However,

it is clear that examining animation’s role in (re)ordering the world will be central to

understanding emerging global modes of negotiating physical reality and social landscapes.

35
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Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Ajanović, M. (2004), Animation and Realism, Hrvatski filmski savez/Croatioan Film Clubs’

Association, Zagreb.

Buchan, S. (2011), The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom, Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press.

Bukatman, S. (2014), ‘Some Observations Pertaining to Cartoon Physics; or, The Cartoon

Cat in the Machine’, in K. Beckman (ed), Animating Film Theory, 301-316, Durham,

NC: Duke University Press.

Darley, A. (2000), Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres,

New York: Routledge.

Furniss, M. (2007), Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics, revised edition, Eastleigh: John

Libbey Publishing.

Gilland, J. (2009), Elemental Magic: The Art of Special Effects Animation, Burlington, MA:

Focal Press.

Herhuth, E. (2014), ‘Life, Love, and Programming: The Culture and Politics of Wall-E and

Pixar Computer Animation’, Cinema Journal 53 (4): 53-75.

Khrzhanovsky, A. (2014), interview by author, October 20, recording.

Manovich, L. (2001), The Language of New Media, Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Norstein, Y. (2014), ‘Yuri Norstein: To be Responsive to Life’, interview by Kamila

Boháčková, Homo Felix: The International Journal of Animated Film 5 (1): 9-15.

Pallant, C. (2011), Demystifying Disney: A History of Disney Feature Animation, New York:

Continuum, 2011.

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Pierson, M. (2002), Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder, New York: Columbia

University Press.

Price, D.A. (2008), The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company, New York: Vintage.

Prince, S. (2012), Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality, New

Brunswick: The Rutgers University Press.

Purse L. (2013), Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University

Press.

Riffel, C. (2012), ‘Dissecting Bambi: Multiplanar Photography, the Cel Technique, and the

Flowering of Full Animation’, The Velvet Light Trap 69: 3-12.

Rowley, S. (2005), “Life Reproduced in Drawings: Preliminary Comments upon Realism in

Animation,” Animation Journal 13: 65-86.

Shadbolt, J. (2012), ‘Matter Meets Anti-Matter: An Excursion into Annihiliation Through

Hybrid Stop-Motion Animation’, The Anime Machine: 24th Annual Society for

Animation Studies Conference Proceedings, Melbourne, June 25-27, 2012.

Sobchack, V. (2006), ‘Final Fantasies: Computer Graphic Animation and the [Dis]Illusion of

Life’, in S. Buchan (ed), Animated ‘Worlds,’ 171-183, Eastleigh: John Libbey

Publishing.

Steinberg, M. (2014), ‘Realism in the Animation Media Environment: Animation Theory

from Japan’, in K. Beckman (ed), Animating Film Theory, 287-301, Durham: Duke

University Press.

Vanderbilt, T. (2016), ‘These Tricks Make Virtual Reality Feel Real’, Nautilus, 7 January.

Available online: http://nautil.us/issue/32/space/these-tricks-make-virtual-reality-feel-

real (accessed 1 August 2017).

Wells, P. (1998), Understanding Animation, London: Routledge.

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Whissel, K. (2014), Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI and Contemporary Cinema. Durham:

Duke University Press.

Whitsel, J. (2002), ‘The Making of Ice Age’, disc 2, Ice Age, Blu Ray, directed by Chris

Wedge, Greenwich, CT: Blue Sky.

Zhang, S. (2015), ‘You Can’t Walk in a Straight Line – and That’s Great for VR’, Wired, 21

August. Available online: https://www.wired.com/2015/08/cant-walk-straight-

lineand-thats-great-vr/ (accessed 1 August 2017).

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5. The Uncanny Valley

Lisa Bode

For many viewers of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), the digital face of Grand Moff

Tarkin seems sepulchral, and not quite human, his gaze even icier than the original played by

the late Peter Cushing in 1977 (McMillan 2016). A side-by-side comparison of Cushing and

his replica, however, reveals the two to be very nearly indistinguishable. It is difficult to pin

down why the digital face does not quite work: is there something a little blank and unseeing

about the eyes, or something diminished in the face’s micro-expressions? Or is the discomfort

entangled with the knowledge that it is a technological resurrection of a deceased actor?

Whatever the reason, viewer responses to the digital Tarkin are in line with those elicited by

earlier 3D digitally animated human faces – that are at one and the same time very realistic

but not quite realistic enough, or ‘uncanny’.

Myriad reviewers of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (Hironobu Sakaguchi, 2001)

have similarly described the characters as cold, soulless, and mechanical mannequins.

Writing on Robert Zemeckis’s screen adaptation of The Polar Express (2004), reviewer

Manohla Dargis claimed that the characters were ‘creepily unlifelike’ with an ‘eerie

listlessness’ (2004). Watching Zemeckis’s later film, Beowulf (2007), Peter Bradshaw felt

that the characters were ‘disconcertingly only almost human [...] There is something about

the way the eyes are drawn which makes them look distant or even blind’ (2007), while

Kevin Maher complained that the ‘synthespians look like rubber-faced automatons’ (2007).

Various explanations have been put forth for why animated figures that aim for lifelike

photorealism tend to strike us as vaguely unpleasant or not fully ‘alive’, and largely these are

tied to ‘the uncanny valley’ hypothesis. Here I examine some of these explanations in relation

to photorealistic animation of human and human-like figures, as well as uncanniness in

39
animation more generally, in order to deepen our understanding of spectatorial unease with

particular kinds of moving images.

The term ‘uncanny valley’ was coined by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970.

He wrote, ‘I have noticed that, in climbing toward the goal of making robots appear like a

human, our affinity for them increases until we come to a valley, which I call the uncanny

valley’ (2012: 98). Mori plotted a graph visualising what he saw as the correlation between

levels of viewer affinity and various kinds of human-like objects (puppets, robots, dolls), and

marked a tipping point where simulations of life, whether prosthetic limbs, androids, or

moving waxworks, become ‘too real’ or ‘too human-like’, and our affinity and warmth

towards them slides steeply down into aversion. The greater the proximity to human likeness

in appearance, he argued, the deeper the repulsion. Mori proposed that this aversion might be

due to evolutionary biology, connected to the explanations we have for other emotions such

as disgust: if the skin on a prosthetic limb looks unalive or unhealthy, or if a face looks only

semi-conscious, it may trigger something hardwired in our brains that leads us to avoid

sickness, death, or other things that may bring us physical harm. Whatever the underlying

causes, he concluded that robot designers should pull back from the pursuit of simulating

human likeness, and instead experiment with abstraction and stylization in their designs if

they wished to avoid the possibility of uncanniness being triggered in the viewer (2012: 99).

Despite Mori’s recommendations, in the 2000s further strides have been made in the

verisimilitude of android design and the 3D animation of photorealistic human figures for

movies and games. As a result, the uncanny valley has re-emerged as an important topic for

researchers in fields such as animation studies, film studies, robot-human interaction, and

cognitive science. Since 2005, various empirical studies have tested viewer responses to

replica human images of different kinds. Such studies have sought to ascertain what might

guarantee, amplify or decrease the uncanny effect, to determine whether or not it is a

40
universal experience, and to understand its underlying cognitive roots or evolutionary

purpose (MacDorman & Chattopadhyay 2015: 190-191). Research using adults, children,

infants, and other primates seems to support the reality of the phenomenon (MacDorman &

Chattopadhyay 2015: 190), however some studies support less a ‘valley’ than a ‘cliff,’

suggesting a much steeper aversion correlation with synthetic human likeness  one that may

not tilt upwards again towards affinity. The idea of an ‘uncanny cliff’ implies that the pursuit

of absolute human verisimilitude is a failed project: that it will never be possible to

circumvent the complexity of the ways our brains process faces and facial expressions. No

matter how lifelike and human synthespians become, we are hardwired to spot the fake.

Film theorist Stephen Prince (2012) disagrees, suggesting that under the right

economic and technological conditions, it is possible for animated digital humans to ‘cross’

the uncanny valley. He points out that while marker-based motion capture systems are great

for capturing body motion, they are inadequate for facial expressions, as these are produced

through surface deformation. Our faces contain fifty-three muscles in thin sheets, which are

not attached to bone but ‘from skin to skin’ (2012: 123). Marker-based systems produce

incomplete and crude character expressions that have required substantial, painstaking

supplemental animation based on video reference of the actors. Much rendering and

animation is needed not just for skin and facial muscles but everything to do with the eyes,

such as gaze direction, blinks, saccades, and minute expansions and contractions of the pupils

in response to light or emotional arousal. For these reasons, Prince concludes that ‘the

amount of labor from digital animators necessary to provide all the subtle expressions of

character that a live actor might contribute would be far too expensive to create. Thus

calculations of cost-efficiency contribute to the phenomenon of the uncanny valley’ (2012:

123).

41
 Films such as Beowulf and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within attempt to compensate

for diminished facial verisimilitude by instead attending to the tiny surface details of fabric

textures, skin and hair, such as age spots, veins, peach fuzz on a cheek catching the light, or

nostril hair. Prince reports that with Beowulf, ‘the visual effects supervisor felt that by adding

more detail, the actor’s performances would become more engaging’ (2012: 125). While

gorgeous to look at, the ‘hyperbole’ of this detail appears to have been counterproductive.

This is something Vivian Sobchack notes of Final Fantasy and the way the film lingers on

such visual details cuing a ‘heightened and hyperbolic form of judgemental attention’ (2006:

179). Because our attention is drawn away from the inner life of the characters ‘to the

character’s skin, their liver spots, their freckles and wrinkles […] the physics of clothing,

movement, and […] the way hair falls’, the experience, she argues, is ‘not so much uncanny

as it is unmoving’ (2006: 180). While our evaluative centres are in such a state of alert, we

are distanced from the characters, and any chance of an empathetic engagement with them is

dissolved. I would argue too that our heightened attention continues to be primed by

promotional paratexts discussing synthespians, photorealistic animated human figures, and

the uncanny valley phenomenon itself. In other words, there may be a neurological basis to

the uncanny valley effect, but it is likely amplified and sustained by the entertainment media

buzz around digital 3D humans, which invites us to test our perception by framing each new

synthespian as an illusion to be critiqued rather than a compelling screen character. 4

For some, the uncanny valley is seen as a problem to be solved, or investigated, in

order to better understand the complexities of spectatorship. Other animation scholars take

the uncanny valley as something to be avoided by animators, and engage with Mori’s

recommendation to pull back from absolute verisimilitude. They make a case for abstraction,

caricature, or the plasmatic qualities traditionally valued in animation and are wary of the

pursuit of digital photorealism, because, they argue, pushing animation to mimic live-action

42
conventions obscures the visual markers of animation labour and creativity. Matthew Butler

and Lucie Joshko have drawn on Mori’s work in order to compare viewer engagement with

the ‘burlesque’ caricatured animation style of Brad Birds’ The Incredibles (2004) against

what they see as viewer disconnection from Final Fantasy’s ‘frighteningly realistic’ 3D

characters. Through this comparison they argue that caricature, abstraction and distance from

verisimilitude in animation character design allows viewers to deploy their imaginations in

recognizing and projecting familiar characteristics from their own experience onto the

characters, and this projection leads to a deeper engagement and the kind of ‘affinity’ noted

by Mori. By contrast, ‘ultra-realistic (or photorealistic) animation offers no visual space for

viewers to engage their imagination in order to form a unique experience’ (2009).

While we might be able to pinpoint the specific qualities of animation that may cue an

uncanny experience, this is a different matter from understanding the underlying principles of

that experience. It is these principles that allow us to see the connections between the

uncanniness of photorealistic animation and other kinds of animation. German psychologist

Ernst Jentsch in his 1906 essay ‘The Psychology of The Uncanny,’ determined that

uncanniness was first and foremost a kind of ‘psychical uncertainty’: a sensation in which

what we perceive might be fleetingly at odds with our rational understanding about the way

things are (p.9). He provides a list of scenarios or phenomena that may arouse this feeling:

masked balls (what if the being behind the mask is not human? What if there is nothing

behind the mask?); illusions, conjuring tricks (is magic real?); a moving tree branch (the

wind, or?); before arguing that the uncanny was most regularly aroused by ‘doubt as to

whether an apparently living being is animate and conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless

object may be in fact inanimate’ (p.11). Listing corpses, waxworks and porcelain dolls among

objects likely to arouse the uncanny, he noted that ‘the life-size automata that perform

complicated tasks, blow trumpets, dance, and so forth, very easily give one a feeling of

43
unease’ (p.12). In an argument that pre-figures Mori, he said ‘the finer the mechanism, and

the truer to nature the formal reproduction, the more strongly will the special effect also make

its appearance’ (p.12). Sigmund Freud later took Jentsch’s argument further into discussions

of castration anxiety, but for our purposes here, he also usefully emphasized that the uncanny

is ‘a class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’

(1919/1955: 220). For Freud, the uncanny arises when the old buried fantastical fancies of

our childhood seem momentarily confirmed in the rational universes of our adult selves.

Jentsch’s ideas imply that what is troubling about photorealistic animation is that it

tends to make us uncertain about the ontological status of what it is we are seeing. This

notion of uncertainty is borne out by Mark Langer who suggested that the problem with Final

Fantasy was the ‘liminality’ of its aesthetics which cued an uncertain wavering as to whether

he was watching living actors or the work of animation (2002: 5). In order to dispel that

uncertainty, we scour the image for clues, and if we can find ways to categorise it as a

facsimile, this allows us certainty.

Jentsch’s focus on uncertainty and doubt, specifically in relation to categories like

real/unreal, human/inhuman, living/dead, animate/inanimate has tremendous resonance for

thinking about the uncanniness of other kinds of animation, beyond just the kinds of

photorealistic characters examined so far. Maureen Furniss, Suzanne Buchan and Paul Wells

have all observed that stop motion, object or puppet animation, as it involves endowing

‘objects that we know to be inanimate’ with life, gives us a different order of viewing

experience from that provided by drawn animation, which as Furniss observes is ‘more

clearly marked as being fabricated, rather than something of the “real world”’ (Furniss 2007:

169). Buchan’s phenomenological work on the Quay Brothers’ 1986 film The Street of

Crocodiles expands on the particular qualities of puppet animation in this film, saying that it

creates something between ‘a world’ (the fictional world of animated dolls and other objects

44
such as screws) and ‘the world’, the material one in which we coexist with inanimate dolls

and other objects (Buchan, 2006: 15-38). The haunted strangeness of the Quay Brothers’

work can be in part attributed to this ‘between’ quality of inanimate material objects from our

world endowed with impossible movement.5

Paul Wells argues that, because the objects in object animation are part of our world,

their use in animation is ‘the re-animation of materiality’ (1998: 90). According to this view,

objects are never unalive just because they are inanimate, but instead have ‘secret inner

lives’. These ‘secret inner lives’ are essentially the invisible traces left from all the ways in

which objects have been made, held, used, and invested by us with life and ‘kinetic energy’,

or how, as silent and still presences in our lives, objects have absorbed our memories and

emotions (1998: 90). Through this perspective, object animation is uncanny in the Freudian

sense of resonating with our old childhood beliefs that our toys had feelings.

Human actors too can be rendered uncanny through animation techniques, as Laura

Ivins-Hulley has explored in relation to ‘human pixilation’ animation, such as we see in

Norman McLaren’s Neighbours (1952) and Jan Svankmajer’s Food (1992), in which stop-

motion techniques are used to animate living actors. As Jentsch argues, uncanniness can be

aroused when doubts emerge as to whether an ‘apparently living being’ is animate, and Ivins-

Hulley puts it well when she says Svankmajer ‘“object-ifies” the actors, paradoxically taking

away much of their human agency even as he so often grants agency to non-living objects

through stop motion’ (2013: 268). Here we see people become like mechanized puppets, their

still poses captured in increments and joined in the editing suite, moving at the will of the

animator. The result is both amusing and disquieting.

To further think through the implications for the way the concepts of animate and

inanimate relate to those of ‘living’ and ‘dead’, it is useful to turn to animation theorist Alan

Cholodenko. Cholodenko considers animation within a longstanding series of debates ‘from

45
classical times onward between the animists, who believed that the world was alive with

organic or spiritual substance, that all that moved was alive (even things that did not move

could be considered as alive), and the mechanists, who believed that the motion of matter was

obedient to physical laws and necessitated no presumption of organic or spiritual vivifying

agency’ (2007: 487). The term ‘to animate’ has a doubled definition: to endow with life, and

to endow with motion. But these two meanings are not always synonymous, for instance,

machines and zombies move, but we do not say they are ‘alive’, while the magic of animation

can bestow inanimate objects such as the Pixar lamp or Jan Svankmajer’s beefsteaks with an

illusion of living consciousness. A strong impression of living consciousness and agency may

be key to the dissolving of unintended uncanny effects in animation, as they dispel

uncertainty about what is driving the movement of a character. We can think, for example of

Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995), a film that playfully dramatises our lingering childhood

fantasies and uncertainties about the secret ‘life’ of material objects in its depiction of

vivified toys, their friendships and adventures, when humans are not around to observe. In

our games and ludic animation of our toys, we endow them with our own living agency. But

the uncanny is not present in the midst of such play. Rather, as Robyn Ferrell suggests, it is to

be found in ‘the sly turn of a doll’s head, the imperceptible flicker of a statue’s stone eyelids,

the animal whose expression is for a moment almost human’ (1991:132). Indeed, consider

those moments in Toy Story where a human enters the playroom, and the toys, a moment ago

so full of life and conversation, instantly fall silent, flinging themselves in haphazard

configurations on the floor, their eyes glassy and seemingly unseeing.

Toy Story provides more useful examples through which to understand the uncanny.

There is a moment where Buzz and Woody get into Sid’s bedroom. Sid, the bully who lives

next door, likes taking toys apart and putting them back together in mutant form. To Buzz

and Woody’s horror, these mutant toys come to very sinister life: a shaved baby doll’s head

46
with one blinking blue eye, atop a Meccano spider body; or human doll body parts hybridized

with machine toys such as skate boards and hooks, like little toy cyborg mutants. The way in

which they move — sliding and creeping in jerky fits and starts — is very different from the

comical and consistent motions of the ‘normal’ toys next door. But perhaps the biggest key to

their uncanniness is not just movement, it is that they do not speak, and so unlike Woody and

Buzz, they do not have legible interiority and intentions. Sid’s toys elicit, then, that troubling

uncertainty about whether they are ‘alive’ or ‘dead’, and about whether they move through

animistic or unthinking mechanical means. This moment in Toy Story is arguably inspired by

the Quay Bros, but, while using digital 3D instead of object animation, the sequence works

on a ‘meta’ level. Woody and Buzz’s untroubling liveliness is contrasted against the uncanny

undead qualities of Sid’s toys, setting in play the twin definitions of animation as ‘endowing

with life’ and animation as ‘endowing with motion.’

Let us take these twin definitions, and the uncertainty they engender, and return back

to where we began: to a consideration of the uncanny valley and the pursuit of verisimilitude

in animated humans and androids. At the Society for Animation Studies conference at the

University of Southern California in 2013, an android ‘portrait’ of the late science fiction

writer Philip K. Dick held court in the lobby, responding to questions from fascinated and

curious fans. Dick, whose stories have been the source of films such as Blade Runner (Ridley

Scott, 1982), Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990/ Len Wiseman, 2012), and A Scanner

Darkly (Richard Linklater, 2006) seemed an appropriate subject for such a portrait, as his

work has explored simulation, artificial intelligence, and the nature of human life and

consciousness. ‘He’ sat with his legs crossed, face set in a faintly benevolent dreamy

expression, lips slightly parted, his eyes blinking intermittently. Wires ran from the back of

his head to a laptop. An indistinct tinny voice issued barely audible phrases taken from novels

and interviews with the author, from somewhere inside. From a distance, if you didn’t see the

47
wires, you saw a slightly rumpled bearded man in a bad polyester shirt and trousers,

surrounded by people with their phones out, taking pictures or poking him and jumping back

with a nervous titter. Proximity, however, triggered unease, if you were close enough to see

or feel the pink rubbery skin on his hands and face and the limited range of expressions, or to

hear the muffled electronically mediated voice. But still, if you squinted, you could instead

re-imagine the figure as an aging man whose faculties had deteriorated as the result of too

many brain scrambling drugs, but who, at times, could give the impression that his

consciousness was on a higher plane. The unseeing gaze seemed, in that benevolent slowly

blinking face, to be seeing beyond. My point is: the uncanny effect was strongest if I focused

on the fact that the android’s motions had a purely technological cause. There was no

interiority: just a dead doll made to slightly move. However, the uncanny effect dissipated if I

projected recognisably human qualities and interiority onto the figure. Then, its slight

movements evoked signs of low-key life, rather than signs of mechanism.

The figure itself, like a 3D photorealistic digital actor, was liminal, and it was up to

me to create certainty out of uncertainty: to look for the clues for human-ness and aliveness

or look for the clues for technological artifice and un-aliveness, in the process thinking

through the ways in which living humans can seem machine-like at times, or lacking agency,

on automatic pilot, absent-minded. Similarly, watching the digital Moff Tarkin of Rogue One,

and noting the signs of slight inhumanity, these can be reframed in the viewer’s mind to

enhance an impression of the character’s calculating coldness. Tarkin, after all does not

require our empathetic engagement. He is meant to give us the creeps. Perhaps, then,

depending on the type of character, the uncanny valley does not have to be a ‘problem’.

We can see Jentsch’s ‘psychical uncertainty’ then as the key to understanding

uncanniness in animation of many kinds and how central stillness as well as movement is to

the generation of this uncertainty. The ways in which we experience the uncanniness of

48
photorealistic animation of human figures has points of connection with the uncanniness of

other forms of animation, such as object animation, human pixilation, and stop motion puppet

animation incorporated in live-action contexts, as well as animation that might be more

clearly fabricated but takes up themes of objecthood and agency. Each is tied in its way to

some kind of in-betweenness that may momentarily make us question our knowledge or

beliefs about the foundations or definition of reality, organic life, humanness, and agency.

Such ongoing fascinating questions are central, as Cholodenko recognizes, to the very

meaning of animation.

49
References

Bradshaw, P. (2007), ‘Beowulf’, Guardian, 16 November. Available online:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2007/nov/16/actionandadventure.animation (accessed

2 May 2017).

Buchan, S. (2006), ‘The Animated Spectator: Watching the Quay Brothers’ “Worlds’’’, in S.

Buchan (ed), Animated ‘Worlds’, 15-38, Eastleigh: John Libbey.

Butler, M. & L. Joshko (2009), ‘Final Fantasy or The Incredibles: Ultra-Realistic Animation,

Aesthetic Engagement and The Uncanny Valley’, Animation Studies, 4: 55-63.

Cholodenko, A. (2007), ‘Speculations on the Animatic Automaton’, in A. Cholodenko (ed),

The Illusion of Life II: More Essays on Animation, 486-529, Sydney: Power

Publications.

Dargis, M. (2004), ‘Do You Hear Sleigh Bells? Nah, Just Tom Hanks and Some Train’, New

York Times, 10 November. Available online:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/10/movies/do-you-hear-sleigh-bells-nah-just-tom-

hanks-and-some-train.html (accessed 2 May 2017).

Ferrell, R. (1991), ‘Life Threatening Life: Angela Carter and the Uncanny’, in A.

Cholodenko (ed), The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation, 131-44, Sydney: Power

Publications.

Freud, S. (1955), ‘The “Uncanny”’, in J. Strachey and A. Freud (eds), The Standard Edition

of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol XVII (1917-19), 219-52,

London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis.

Furniss, M. (2007), Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics, revised edition, Hertfordshire: John

Libbey.

50
Ivins-Hulley, L. (2013), ‘A Universe of Boundaries: Pixilated Performances in Jan

Svankmajer’s Food’, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 8(3): 267-82.

Jentsch, E. (1906/1995), ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’, Angelaki, 2 (1): 7-16.

Langer, M. (2002), ‘The End of Animation History’, Society for Animation Studies. Available

online: http://asifa.net/SAS/articles/langer1.htm (accessed 2 July 2003).

MacDorman, K. F. & D. Chattopadhyay (2016), ‘Reducing Consistency in Human Realism

Increases the Uncanny Valley Effect, Increasing Category Uncertainty Does Not’,

Cognition, 146: 190-205.

Maher, K. (2007), ‘Beowulf’, The Times, 17 November. Available online:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/film_reviews/

article2870848.ece (accessed 2 May 2017).

McMillan, G. (2016), ‘“Rogue One”: That Familiar Face isn’t Familiar Enough’, Hollywood

Reporter, 18 December. Available online: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-

vision/rogue-one-grand-moff-tarkins-familiar-face-isnt-familiar-957178 (accessed 30

October 2017).

Mori, M. (1970/2012), ‘The Uncanny Valley’, trans. K. F. MacDorman and N. Kageki, IEEE

Robotics & Automation Magazine, June: 98-100.

Power, P. (2009), ‘Animated Expressions: Expressive Style in 3D Computer Graphic

Narrative Animation’, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 4 (2): 107-129.

Prince, S. (2012), Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality, New

Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Sobchack, V. (2006), ‘Final Fantasies: Computer Graphic Animation and the [Dis]Ilusion of

Life’, in S. Buchan (ed), Animated ‘Worlds’, 171-182, Eastleigh: John Libbey.

Wells, P. (1998), Understanding Animation, London & New York: Routledge.

51
52
6. Animation and Performance

Annabelle Honess Roe

The concept of performance, imbued as it is with ideas of embodiment and the corporeal,

would initially seem to have little relevance to animation. After all, many animated characters

are virtual and intangible, unlike the physical, ‘real’ bodies that typically come to mind when

we think of something or someone ‘performing’. Animated figures, as Norman McLaren’s

definition of animation reminds us, only come to life by virtue of what happens in-between

the frames that we see on screen (see Furniss 1988: 5). This is true even of physical objects,

such as puppets, that are animated via stop-motion. Animated characters, unlike a human

actor, have no physical autonomy. They rely on the animator to move and, therefore, to come

alive.

Because animation is often defined in opposition to live action cinema – in terms of

what animation can do that live action cannot, and vice versa – and because the physical body

is inherent to live action cinema in a way that it is not to animation, the importance of

performance for animation has often been overshadowed by animation studies’ tendency to

focus on areas such as animation’s material and aesthetic properties. This chapter will

demonstrate, through an exploration of the history of performance in animation as well as the

idea of animating as a type of performance, that performance is in fact central to animation.

Early Animation and the Presence of the Performing Animator

Much early animation is characterised by the appearance of the animator in the frame. From

Emile Cohl’s very early animation Fantasmagorie (1908) to the Out of the Inkwell series

made by the Fleischer Brothers between 1918 and 1929, it was very common to see the

animator’s hand draw the characters and bring them to life on screen. Scott Bukatman (2012:

53
109) suggests that this tendency was because ‘animation was too new, and perhaps too

mysterious, to simply emerge fully formed onscreen’. Similarly, David Clark thinks of the

presence of the hand of the animator as a way for animators of the period to ‘come to terms

with the strangeness of this new medium’ (Clark 2005: 144). Thus, inserting the means of

creation – the hand and the pen of the animator – into this ‘strange and foreign parallel world’

(p.144) overcame the ontological challenges presented by early animation to audiences

unfamiliar with this new form. Also typical of this period is the presence of the animator as a

performer within the cartoon. In Betty Boop’s Rise to Fame (1934) the animated, coquettish,

Betty flirts with ‘Uncle Max’ Fleischer who appears with her on screen. Although Fleischer

is playing himself, this is nonetheless clearly a performance, one that also features his brother

Dave posing as a reporter doing a story on Betty, who herself is constructed as a

‘vaudevillian’ performer in the film (Crafton 2013: 27).

The appearance of the animator’s hand, or even their entire body, is a reminder of

animation’s close relationship to an earlier type of performance-based mass entertainment –

vaudeville. Several early animators had previously worked in this context as lightning sketch

artists – onstage performers who created virtuosic drawings live in front of an audience – and

many early animated films are, essentially, lightning sketch films, in which ‘the spectator is

never allowed to forget that he [sic] was observing a theatrical performance’ (Crafton 1993:

57). James Stuart Blackton’s performance in his 1907 Lightning Sketches, in a way that is

typical of animation of this period, has much in common with that of a magician, from the

presentation of the blank canvas at the outset of the film – similar to a magician ‘proving that

his hat and sleeves are empty’ – to the sartorial signifier of the conjuror’s formal evening

wear (ibid). Even in later animations that don’t include the act of lightning sketching, the

relationship between animation and vaudeville performance is still apparent, as exemplified

by Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur (1914). Prior to making animated films, McCay was

54
an accomplished and successful comic strip artist and lightning sketcher (see Bukatman 2012:

110-130). The original animated film of Gertie was used as part of McCay’s live act, in

which he ‘interacted’ with the animated dinosaur, the brontosaurus seeming to respond to the

commands McCay issued from the stage (see Crafton 1993: 110-13). In the subsequent

version of the film for release in cinemas, McCay’s from-stage commands are replaced by

intertitle cards, and McCay performs himself in the film’s live action bookend sequences in

which he enters into a wager with a group of fellow animators to bring a dinosaur to life. In

these examples, and countless others from the first decades of animation, we can see that the

animator often took on the role of onscreen performer.

Live Action Performance as a Basis for Animation

Later, after the onscreen presence of the animator fell out of cultural fashion, live action

performance once again became significant to animation, but in a different way – as part of

the production process. Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston (1981) recall the

important role filmed live action came to play in the animation process during the studio’s

first heyday in the 1930s and 40s. This first came about when ‘burlesque comedian’ Eddie

Collins was recruited to help with the animation of Dopey during the production of Snow

White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Dopey was suffering from a lack of personality, the

‘“leftover” dwarf’ as he was called by the animators working on the film (Thomas and

Johnson 1981: 320), so Collins was brought into the studio to perform ‘innovative

interpretations of Dopey’s reactions’ to help ‘breathe life into the little cartoon character’

(ibid). This strategy proved so successful that it became a standard tool used at Disney to help

animate other characters.

The Disney animators used this material in two key ways: as ‘resource material’ to

give ‘an overall idea of a character, with gestures, attitudes, an idea that could be caricatured’

55
(Thomas and Johnson 1981: 320-1) or as ‘a model for the figure in movement’ where it

‘could be studied frame by frame to reveal the intricacies of a living form’s actions’ (p. 321).

Initially live action filmed material was used for general reference in these two ways, but

later the studio began ‘shooting film for specific scenes or special actions’ (p. 323) for a

particular sequence they were trying to animate. For example, to help the animators create the

titular character in Snow White dancer Marjorie Belcher ‘was filmed as she acted out [her]

parts’ (Furniss 2017: 104).

When the animators at Disney used the actor as a frame-by-frame reference for how

an animated character moved this involved a modified version of the process called

rotoscoping, where live action performance is filmed and then traced frame by frame. 6 At

Disney in the 1930s, the studio’s processing lab devised a system by which frames of film

were individually printed out onto ‘photostats’ - sheets of paper that could fit onto the pegs of

an animation desk so the animator could ‘study the action by flipping “frames of film”

backward and forward just as he did his drawings’ (Thomas and Johnston 1981: 321). This

revealed the complexities of the human form in action as it performed. Rotoscoping has been

used more widely in animation, often to help create realistic movement in human characters

and it can be thought of as the ancestor of the contemporary process of motion or

performance capture, in which live action performance is used as the basis for creating

digital, computer generated animation.7 This will be discussed later in the chapter.

At Disney, the animators first traced over the live action images, which they then set

aside. They then worked only from the traced drawings to create the cartoon character,

‘choosing only those actions that relate to the point of [a] particular scene’ (Thomas and

Johnston 1981: 323). This was because, as Thomas and Johnston note, problems came about

with the use of live action performance as the basis for their animation if they tried to stay too

close to the filmed reference of movement: ‘The moves appeared real enough, but the figure

56
lost the illusion of life […] it was impossible to become emotionally involved with this eerie,

shadowy creature who was never a real inhabitant of our fantasy world.’ (Thomas and

Johnston 1981: 323) This is a common criticism of rotoscoped animation – that it somehow

deadens the animated character. This might be because too slavishly following a reference in

some way inhibits the animator’s own input into the creation of a character, and it implies

that the authenticity of an animated character’s ‘performance’, and how engaging or

empathy-inducing it is, is more than simply recreating realistic movement. Indeed, Brad Bird

(director of films including The Iron Giant [1999] and The Incredibles [2004]) asserts that

‘when you watch an animated film, the performance you’re seeing is the one the animator is

giving to you’ (quoted in Crafton 2013: 15). Before moving on to explore this idea of the

animator as a type of invisible performer, we first need to establish what ‘performance’

means.

Performance

‘Performance’ is a contested concept – not only do scholars working in the interdisciplinary

field of performance studies tend to not agree precisely on what the term ‘performance’

means, but, more importantly, its contested status is inherent in its meaning and

‘disagreement about [its] essence’ is “built into the concept” of performance itself (Carlson

2004a: 68). However, one undisputed idea is that performance entails bringing something

into being in the moment that the performance takes place. Most obviously, this might be an

actor performing a role in a play or a film. Less obvious is the notion that performance is a

part of everyday life, something we all do when we interact with other people. In fact, as

Richard Schechner (2002: 2) notes, performance is ‘any action that is framed, presented,

highlighted, or displayed’ and this will range from simple everyday interactions with our

fellow human (and non-human) beings, such as greetings, through to more complex

57
communications, social actions and rituals, as well as cultural performances such as plays and

performance art.8 The nature of performance means that to study it involves thinking more

about behaviours and actions than analysing texts or things in themselves. Furthermore,

treating ‘any object, work, or product “as” performance […] means to investigate what the

object does, how it interacts with other objects or beings, and how it relates to other objects

or beings. Performances exist only as actions, interactions, and relationships.’ (Schechner

2002: 24)

Two concepts that are frequently cited as inherent to performance will be particularly

significant as we go on to consider animation as a type of performance. One is the idea that

performance implies a process of ‘doubling’ and the second is the significance of ‘embodied

knowledge’ to understanding and interrogating performance. Marvin Carlson notes that ‘all

performance involves a consciousness of doubleness, through which the actual execution of

an action is placed in mental comparison with a potential, an ideal, or a remembered original

model of that action’ (2004a: 71). This idea of doubling goes hand-in-hand with the notion

mentioned above of performance bringing something into being. The ‘something’ that is

‘being brought in to being’ is the thing that is being doubled. This could be a character that an

actor is performing, in that the character pre-exists the performance either in prior

performances or simply as an idea written on the page or in its creator’s imagination.

Doubling is also part of the performance of everyday actions such greetings, in that we base

this ‘performance’ on our already existing knowledge of how such actions should be carried

out in the social situation we are in – knowledge that we begin to develop in childhood.

In all cases, the ‘performance’ involves some sort of comparison (either by ourselves

and/or an audience) to some other ‘elusive “other” that performance is not but which it

constantly struggles in vain to embody’ (Carlson 2004a: 71). Thus, we might think about how

the notion of authenticity is valued in performance, and how this entails a performer

58
effectively or convincingly embodying the thing they are doubling. We can see this idea at

play in the example of the Disney studio using live action performance as a reference for

creating animated characters discussed above; in particular, the way that ‘it became

increasingly important to choose just the right actor for this type of action, since it would

have such an influence on the development of a character’s personality’ (Thomas and

Johnston 1981: 327). Here Thomas and Johnston are pointing to the idea that certain actors

will be better able to enact, or bring into being, a character by embodying that role.

Embodiment is inherent in the process of performance. In performance studies,

scholars are interested in how actions are carried out by bodies and how particular knowledge

carried by those bodies, or embodied knowledge, might impact on, or influence, the

performance. At the most basic level, we might think that we are able to most authentically or

convincingly perform an action that we already have some physical experience of. This helps

explain why an actor who was already adept at burlesque, physical comedy worked so well to

help the animators bring life to the character of Dopey in Snow White.

Animation as a type of Performance

As suggested at the outset of this chapter, embodiment might seem initially to have little

relevance to animation that does not use live action in some way as a basis for creating

animated characters, or ‘regular animation’ as Thomas and Johnston (1981: 319) call it,

‘which develops entirely from an artist’s imagination’. After all, how could an animated,

completely imagined and virtual character that does not exist beyond the animation in which

it appears, have any embodied knowledge? However, reflecting on the importance of acting

to animation production can help reveal the significance of embodied knowledge for

animation. This is because even though the animator is usually no longer physically present

in the frame and their body remains invisible to audiences, it is the animator’s actions, be that

59
drawing with a pencil or moving a stop-motion puppet, that bring characters to life. Such

actions require a certain element of performance from the animator. This makes sense if we

think of performance as bringing something into being, as discussed above. The process of

animation also involves bringing something into being.

Richard Williams (2001) suggests that the pathos of animation comes from the

animator’s ability to instil a character with soul and emotion. We might think of this ability as

embodied knowledge. Williams gives an example from the feature film Who Framed Roger

Rabbit (1988) on which he worked as animation director. Williams had wanted a certain

animator, who was feeling particularly lonely at the time, to animate a ‘shot of Roger sitting

on a garbage can in a back alley crying about what he thought was his wife’s infidelity’

(Williams 2001: 318). Another animator, one who was experiencing a much happier personal

life, ended up animating the shot. As a result, Williams felt ‘we missed having another

dimension to the character which would have given a much stronger emotional pull with the

audience’ (ibid). This anecdote points to the idea that an animator will bring to bear on a

character their embodied knowledge of their personal and life experiences.

The suggestion made by Williams that the animator’s job is to ‘get inside the

character or characters’ and also ‘show clearly what they’re thinking’ (Williams 2001: 326) is

echoed by Wells and Moore (2016: 94) who suggest that ‘whether working through the

pencil, a puppet or pixels, the need to express thought, emotion and action is fundamental to

effective animated sequences’. However, this ability comes not just from an animator tapping

into her or his own experiences, as Williams’ example above might imply, but also through

developing the skills of a performer. The importance of learning these skills was

acknowledged at the Disney studio in the 1930s in their adoption of Stanislavsky-type

theories of method acting as part of the animation process (see Crafton 2013: 36-48).

60
 Thus, the similarities between acting and animation have often been observed (see

Wells 1998: 104-7) and are frequently emphasised in books oriented at people wanting to

learn how to animate (see, for example, Hooks 2017). The affinity between acting and

animation is similarly observed by animators reflecting on their own practice. For example,

stop-motion animator Richard Haynes likens his animation of the Aardman character Shaun

the Sheep to the performance of a silent comedy actor and suggests that the

anthropomorphism of characters such as Shaun ‘depends on animators successfully

translating something in their own physicality via the process of animation’ (Haynes

forthcoming). Haynes’ description of his animation work implicitly argues that doing

animation is in itself a type of physical performance where ‘the animator must essentially use

the techniques employed by the actor to project the specificities of character (Wells 1998:

104). Thus, we can think of the process of animation as a type of performance, the ultimate

aim of which is to turn ‘cartoon characters into embodied actors’ (Crafton 2013: 37).9

Motion Capture: The Animation of Performance

Motion and performance capture, as did their predecessor, the Rotoscope, use filmed live

action performance as the basis for animation. The green (or blue) screen performance of an

actor is recorded digitally using sensors that are attached to a suit the actor wears. In

performance capture, the addition of sensors to the actor’s face means that facial gesture and

expression can be captured as well as movement. The data collected from the sensors

provides a basis for the creation of a digitally animated character. Perhaps the best-known

example of such a character is Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy played by Andy Serkis

(Peter Jackson, 2001-3).

There has been a long running intellectual and industrial debate over whether or not

motion capture is animation (see Freedman 2012). This wrangling has led to a parallel debate

61
about who can claim ‘ownership’ of a motion or performance capture character. Much of the

press and publicity surrounding motion and performance capture promotes the idea that the

actor is exclusively responsible for the character. New Line’s push for Andy Serkis to receive

an Oscar nomination for the role of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Peter

Jackson, 2002) implied that ‘Serkis’s performance was the whole performance’ and elided

the role of the animation team who realised Gollum in the final film (Freedman 2012: 44).

‘Gollum, according to the studio, was not animation […] He was pure performance, and

motion capture was simply the means of recording this performance.’ (ibid) However, as

Mihaela Mihailova (2016) argues, this cultural discourse ignores the significant technical and

creative labour required by animators and visual effects artists to translate the digital data,

which usually does not ‘readily correspond to the desired end product’, into an empathetic

and believable onscreen animated performance by presenting ‘motion capture as a

technological miracle capable of directly translating an actor’s performance into a digital

creature, as if by magic’ (p.43). In other words, the popular understanding of motion and

performance capture typically downplays the process of animation as a type of performance

in favour of solely recognising and celebrating the actor’s original profilmic performance. As

such, motion and performance capture can be thought of as a site in which the two types of

performance and animation explored in this chapter come into conflict: performance in

animation and animation as a type of performance.

Conclusion

The discussion of performance could be taken even further if we consider the suggestions by

Scott Bukatman and Donald Crafton that we should be wary of deterministic approaches to

the animation process, and that in addition to considering the performance that brings

animation into being we should also think about the animated character itself as a

62
performer.10 Bukatman (2012: 133-4) argues that animated characters have a degree of

autonomy and that, especially in studio production with its factory-like division of labour, it

is hard to ascribe the enlivening of an animated character to ‘the’ animator because so many

people would have been involved in bringing one character ‘to life’. In addition, Crafton

points to the ‘responsive performances by the viewers’ (2013: 17) of animation and contends

that ‘performance isn’t a sender-receiver communication model, but rather a galaxy of

relationships, many of which remain unknowable’ (p.18). Here Crafton emphasises the

significance of the viewer in ‘creating’ animated performances that are autonomous from

their original animation, an autonomy that is enabled by animators’ creation (or performance)

of believable characters that entails less control ‘over how the characters would be

understood and used by the films’ audiences’ (Crafton 2013: 48). Crafton’s observations also

remind us of the importance of remembering that the reception of animated characters is

historical and culturally specific.11

In many ways, Crafton’s and Bukatman’s thoughts on the autonomy of the animated

character refigure, from a different (historical) perspective, the debate around motion capture,

and who can claim credit for an animated performance. Such debates caution against any

teleological presumption of a linear evolution of the intersection of animation and

performance, in which we are moving, historically, from the appearance of the performing

animator on screen towards some final point at which the performance of the animator

becomes entirely invisible or erased. Such a teleological perspective would potentially accept

‘performance as the exclusive domain of the actor (and, by extension, of live-action cinema)’

(Mihailova, 2016: 43). Instead, as this chapter has demonstrated, animation has always

utilised and implied ‘performance’ in a variety of rich and complex ways.12 Both animation

and performance entail a process of ‘coming into being’, something that Sergei Eisenstein,

that unlikely but ardent fan of Mickey Mouse, claimed as inherent to animation and

63
fundamental to our human desire for omnipotence (see O’Pray 1997). With this in mind, and

as demonstrated by this chapter, animation and performance have a close affinity, the

recognition of which can lead to a fuller understanding of what animation is.

64
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Furniss, M. (2017), Animation: The Global History, London: Thames and Hudson.

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Haynes, R. (forthcoming), ‘Shaun the Sheep: Silent Slapstick Comedy Reborn?’, in A.

Honess Roe (ed) Beyond Stop-Motion Film: Production, Style and Representation in

Aardman Animations, London: I.B. Tauris.

Hooks, E. (2017), Acting for Animation, 4th edn, London: Routledge.

Ivins-Hulley, L. (2008), ‘The Ontology of Performance in Stop Animation’, Animation

Studies Online Journal 3. Available online:

https://journal.animationstudies.org/category/volume-3/laura-ivins-hulley-the-

ontology-of-performance-in-stop-animation/ (accessed 21 February 2018).

Madison , D. S. and J. Hamera (2006), ‘Introduction: Performance Studies at the

Intersections’ in D. S. Madison and J. Hamera (eds), Sage Handbook of Performance

Studies, xi-xxv, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Mihailova, M. (2016), ‘Collaboration without Representation: Labor and Issues in Motion

and Performance Capture’, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 11 (1): 40-58.

O’Pray, M. (1997), ‘Eisenstein and Stokes on Disney: Film animation and omnipotence’ in J.

Pilling (ed), A Reader in Animation Studies, 195-202, London: John Libbey.

Schechner, R. (2002), Performance Studies: An Introduction, London: Routledge.

Thomas, F. and O. Johnston (1981), Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life. New York:

Abbeville Press.

Tomlinson, L. (2013), ‘Animation and Performance’, AnimationStudies2.0, 30 September.

Available online: https://blog.animationstudies.org/?p=555 (accessed 13 February

2018).

Wells, P. (1998), Understanding Animation, London: Routledge.

Wells, P. and S. Moore (2016), The Fundamentals of Animation, 2nd edn, London: Fairchild.

Williams, R. (2001), The Animator’s Survival Kit, London: Faber and Faber.

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7. Animation and Memory

Victoria Grace Walden

In Pixar’s Inside Out (Docter and Del Carmen, 2015), Joy and Sadness navigate around their

host Riley’s long-term memory where coloured orbs representing different events in her past

are stored on shelves. The film imagines memory as fixed content that can be recalled as

needed. However, developments in the interdisciplinary field of memory studies now

consider memory to be much more complex than this. Like the term realism (see Mihailova

in this volume), memory is a slippery thing – it is better understood as always in a state of

becoming, as related to the present as much as the past, and as a creative, networked process

rather than as a simple transmission of historical data. After introducing some of the broad

ideas related to contemporary studies of media and memory, this chapter focuses on the ways

in which we can remember the past through and with animation, and how the form can

represent memory, concentrating particularly on issues of trauma and witnessing, collective

memory and identity, and nostalgia.

Understanding Memory

Memory is a familiar term, yet it can be difficult to define without confusing it with the past –

events that have happened – and History – the telling of such events. If History (and I use the

capital H here purposely to refer to the practice of historians) is the construction of narratives

of the past following a cause and effect logic, often detailed with empirical data, then

memory refers to our experience of the past in the present. Memory highlights the

fragmentary nature of temporality, and refers to our bodily and sensual relations to events

that have previously happened. Memory is incomplete, inaccurate, messy and subjective. It is

not fixed, but rather it is fluid. Memory is a creation that is never complete and involves an

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assemblage or network of actors – human and non-human – contributing to its continuous

development (Garde-Hansen, Hoskins and Reading 2012: 7). Memory is something felt and

is often shared and developed with others. Although, when we colloquially use the word

‘memory’ we tend to mean the things we personally remember, the concept ‘memory’

encapsulates both personal, collective and collaborative experiences with the past, and how

these relate to each other. It is important to remember that ‘the past is not preserved but is

reconstructed on the basis of the present’ (Halbwachs 1992: 40). Thus, in studying memory,

we come to understand as much about the current situation as we do about the events being

remembered.

Media, such as animation, play an important role in the creation of memories today as

our engagement with the past is extensively mediated (Garde-Hansen 2011, van Dijck 2007).

Marshall McLuhan’s seminal book Understanding Media (1964) introduced the idea that

media might be able to extend human experience. Following such thinking in relation to

memory, Alison Landsberg (2004) argues that films can serve as prosthetics, encouraging us

to feel emotionally and bodily engaged with a past we neither witnessed nor know much

about. Landsberg here emphasises the assemblage nature of memory--that it involves the

interaction of organic and inorganic agents in its creation (Garde-Hansen, Hoskins and

Reading 2012: 11) as media can inspire the spectator to remember. Memory is not solely

situated within our minds; rather it emerges through social collaborations. Given that

animation often foregrounds the subjective–with its often handmade quality and ability to

resist photographic traditions of representation–the form can help encourage the types of

affective responses to historical events that we tend to define as memory.

Memory and Animation

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Animation can highlight issues related to memory in many ways. Firstly, the creativity and

imagination that inform memory are often highlighted in animated works, particularly when

their frame-by-frame production is emphasised, such as with stop-motion and pixilation

films, or when the physical imprint of the animators is materialised onscreen, such as in the

finger marks on the surfaces of clay figures. Film phenomenologist Jennifer M. Barker, in her

analysis of the Quay Brothers’ Street of Crocodiles (1986), argues that the foregrounding of

the creative process in stop-motion films is indicative of play (2009: 130-32). Pixar’s first

feature film Toy Story (Lasseter, 1996) also highlights animation’s relationship to play,

despite its use of digital animation rather than stop-motion, as we watch the adventures of

Andy’s toys when they come alive, and follow the narrative of Woody, an old toy, with

whom Andy no longer wants to play when he receives his new Buzz Lightyear figure. The

emphasis on play in Toy Story, as in many animations, is shrouded in nostalgia for childhood.

Nostalgia is a particular feeling about the past discussed in more detail later in this chapter.

Secondly, animation particularly foregrounds embodiment. Even if we do not see the

animator’s hands moving objects onscreen, we are aware of the human agency acting

between frames, which enables the creation of movement. Material, non-human forms in

animations can also provoke the spectator to feel bodily sensations in reaction to historical

events. For example, in the Estonian short Body Memory (Keha mälu, Pikkov, 2011) – about

the deportation of Estonians by Soviet officials – objects encourage deep visceral affect for

the audience. The film includes anthropomorphic figures, which are made of twine, placed

inside a model of a cattle car. The figures are seen being violently jerked around until they

are untangled and destroyed. Barker claims that when film draws attention to a sense of

corporal discontinuity, such as with stop-motion, this can evoke feelings of bodily

vulnerability within the spectator because it encourages them to recognise that the unity of

the film – its body – is actually constructed of fragile, individual elements and the failure of

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any of these could threaten the existence of the whole (Barker 2009: 21). In Body Memory,

such affect is not only suggested through the staccato temporality of the film, but also

through the unravelling and metamorphosis of the twine figures, which encourage us to

consider how our own body could be torn to pieces or changed by external forces. Such a

sensation can enable the tragic past of Soviet deportations to resonate deep within the

spectator’s body and thus it is through an embodied relationship with the animation that they

can become invested in remembering this past.

Thirdly, animation’s ability to emphasise subjective reality (Wells 1998: 27) enables

it to explore the sensual responses of people to historical events rather than to show them

photographically. Animation has long been interested in depicting things which are

impossible to represent in live action, and the embodied, fluid experience of memory is

certainly something that a photograph or live-action film cannot satisfactorily depict. This is

particularly significant when animations deal with events that are questionably real. For

example, Paul Vester’s Abductees (1994) uses animated drawings to accompany the vocal

testimony of individuals who describe their experiences of being abducted by aliens. The

artwork attempts to both illustrate the interviewees’ memories and to question the reliability

of subjective narratives of the past with interjections of iconic fantasy images, such as Bambi.

This approach is also particularly useful for confronting trauma.

Traumatic Memory

‘A traumatic event is often understood as an aporia in subjective experience and also for the

possibilities of representation’ (Honess Roe 2013: 156), thus whilst photographic-based live-

action images might struggle to engage with trauma through traditional narratives, animation

can offer an aesthetic response (ibid). Following the psychoanalytical work of Sigmund

Freud, trauma theorist Cathy Caruth defines trauma as a ‘double wound’ (1996: 3). By this

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she means that it is a ‘breach in the mind’s experience of time, self and the world’ and that as

it reappears in flashbacks to the survivor, trauma is always ‘experienced too soon’ and ‘too

unexpectedly to be fully known’ (1996: 4). Therefore, trauma causes the survivor of a horrific

experience to be confronted with the past in fragments. Furthermore, as Shoshana Felman

and Dori Laub (1992), and Janet Walker (2005) argue, because trauma can never be fully

known, it is also shaped by fantasy and ‘disremembering’. Walker uses the term

‘disremembering’ to refer to the process through which fragments of the past allow us to

begin to work through trauma even when we cannot remember the original event.

Laub argues that survivors of horrific experiences cannot recognise their trauma until

they testify to the events (1992: 57). Whilst video (analogue and digital) is often used to

record such testimonies, it only presents the survivor telling their story – it cannot show

events as they happened or illustrate memories of them. Often, particularly in the case of

wars or genocides, there are few images evidencing horrendous crimes. If they do exist, they

are often shot by the perpetrators, thus do not present the victims’ point-of-view. This is

perhaps why there has been an increasing number of animated documentaries as well as

fictional interpretations of traumatic events such as the Holocaust told from a personal

perspective. Animation helps draw attention to an individual’s subjective response to events,

rather than claiming to represent official or purportedly objective accounts of an event. In the

case of horrific events it might also be a ‘means for overcoming the effacement of the past

blocked by traumatic experience’ (Honess Roe 2013: 155). This is illustrated in the feature

length animated documentary Waltz with Bashir (Folman, 2008) in which the filmmaker uses

animation to try to discover his missing memories of his time as a soldier in the Lebanon

War.

Another example, the short Canadian animation I was a Child of Holocaust Survivors

(Fleming, 2010), foregrounds the complexity of memory and the significance to it of

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imagination. Fleming’s animated film is a post-memory work (Hirsch 2012), which means it

explores the relationship that a member of the second generation (Bernice Eisenstein) has

with her parent’s traumatic past (the Holocaust) which she did not experience first-hand. At

one point in the film, Bernice tries to reconcile the image of her father as she knows him with

imagery of the concentration camps and imagines him as a sheriff (as if from a Western film)

fighting the Nazis. She cannot recall a past she did not experience, but she can feel affected

by it and still invest imaginatively in it – remembering it from a deferred position.

However, to think about animated films like I was a Child of Holocaust Survivors that

confront real experiences of trauma simply as an exchange between the testifier and the

viewer is to ignore the significance of both the animators and their imagery. What we see on

screen is not simply the testimony--unless the animation is also created by the person telling

their story–so whose memory is it? The animators are interpreting the interviewees’

narratives, thus bringing their own imagining of the past to the representations and drawing

attention to their presence as well as that of the person giving testimony (Honess Roe 2013:

87). Furthermore, with the ubiquity of computers in our everyday lives, our media

engagements are now mostly composed of a ‘convergence of matter (human memory [and

image]) with information (silicon memory)’ (Garde-Hansen, Hoskins, Reading 2012: 13). We

must not assume that digital media, including animation, offer a more complete record of the

past, such as the myth of the ‘total archive’ (Hoskins 2009)13, however, the blurring of the

human and machine, as well as the combination of first-hand witnesses and the post-memory

generations – those born after the event - in the production of animated documentaries about

traumatic pasts draw attention to the ways in which memory works as an assemblage of the

organic and non-organic, and of the past and the present for the future. We can see this in the

short animated documentary My Good Fortune in Auschwitz (Mijn Geluk in Auschwitz,

Dosky, 2012) which uses rotoscoped images of actors performing a survivors’ memories with

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live-action footage of the survivor telling his story, all of which were compiled by animators

who did not experience this past.

Although, trauma has often been defined as something that needs to be worked

through (Friedländer 1996, LaCapra 1998), the recent phenomenon of stop-motion Lego

‘brickfilms’ about the Holocaust on YouTube suggests that perhaps post-memory generations

need to play through traumatic pasts in order to feel bodily invested in them (Walden,

forthcoming). Whilst ‘working through’ necessitates a critical distance and is most

appropriate for first-hand witnesses, playing through enables those who did not experience

the past in question to get close to it through bodily engagement with objects. Post-war

generations’ playful engagement with the Holocaust can help them to materialise their

imagined memory of it (Young 2000: 42), as they take on the responsibility for remembering

a past they did not experience first-hand in bodily ways. This is not to suggest that their

experience of playing through affords them factual knowledge about real events from the

past, but that playing through helps them to connect to it. It is in such ways that events like

the Holocaust can become part of collective, rather than just individual, memory.

Collective Memory and National Identity

The term ‘collective memory’, popularised by sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, suggests we

do not remember the past as isolated individuals, but aggregate and recollect memories as

part of a society (1992: 38). Collective memory helps to formulate our ‘imagined

communities’ (Anderson 2916) – those groups to which we see ourselves belonging and from

which others are excluded. Each community might thus share a particular memory about a

historic event, which might conflict with the way another group remembers it. Thus, each

community remembers its own ‘version of the past’ (Neiger, Meyers and Zandberg 2011: 5).

Collective memory, then, is key to identity formation. Yet it does not suppress the importance

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of the individual, rather the notion of collective memory recognises that people share

memories and help each other to remember events from the past. How then might animations

speak to this discourse about collective memory?

It is possible to see how certain animations might appear to contribute to the

imagining of specific communities. For example, the cuddly bear-like figure Cheburashka

became an icon of Soviet animation and has since been the official mascot for the Russian

Olympic team in the respective summer and winter games of 2004, 2006, 2008 and 2010.

Japanese science-fiction anime’s Mecha characters often embody a renewed Japanese identity

after the nation’s American occupation. As Joon Yang Kim argues, AstroBoy (Osamu Tezuka

et al, 1963-66) became a ‘national icon for a dream of the reconstruction of Japan’ (2013:

179). He represented not only the other becoming accepted as equal to the human rulers, but

that the answer to Japan’s identity of the future would be technology (ibid.).

Yet, if we consider collective memory to be less fixed to a specific notion of identity

and more fluid, melding together the recollections and experiences of different individuals

and things, then we can understand animations as representing a plurality of relations to the

past. Although an icon of Soviet culture, Cheburashka was created by a number of Jewish

Holocaust survivors working for the state animation studio in the U.S.S.R. Acknowledging

the creators’ background enables one to identify small features of Cheburashka’s story that

challenge the idea that he represents a specific collective Soviet identity. His arrival in a crate

of Jaffa oranges and the suitcase that he carries point to the plight of Jewish refugees

suggesting that there are a number of levels on which this figure can be read (Katz 2016).

Whilst the anime Akira (Katsuhiro Ôtomo, 1988) is, as is typical of anime science

fiction, concerned with ideas of the post-human in the future, it is also a film that points to

group identity as something that is always in flux. Akira is set in a dystopic metropolis – a

symbol of capitalism as corruption brought to Japan by its American occupiers - yet it

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amalgamates this imagery and the greed of its protagonist with ideals about masculinity

which are deeply rooted in Shinto culture. Although set in the future, Akira explores the

entanglement of different layers of the past in forming contemporary notions of Japanese

identity. Indeed, the film’s finale sees technology and human body amalgamate into a

monstrous figure as Tetsuo is transformed, which questions the proposals made by other

works such as Astroboy about technology as Japan’s future. Technology is as much a

negative import of the occupying forces (consider for example the devastating impact of

Hiroshima and Nagasaka) as it is a part of Japan’s future in Akira, as the film ends with

Kaneda riding off in search of a new beginning with his high-spec motorbike. Both

Cheburashka and Akira present the boundaries of collective identity as neither clearly defined

nor stable, but feature an assemblage of references to different experiences of the past which

speak to various notions of identity in their own times. They present identity as something

constructed through the collaboration of various discourses about the past, rather than

precedented on a specific collective memory. In some respects, Akira draws attention to the

tension between a nostalgic longing for Japan’s Shinto traditions and the rapid changes of

modernisation.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia has been characterised as a rose-tinted, and thus unproductive, view of the past (Bal

1999: xi). The word ‘nostalgia’ takes its meaning from the Greek Nostos – return to the

native land and Algos – suffering of grief. Thus nostalgia combines both a longing for the

past and yet a mourning for a lost time that cannot return. Although the term was originally

used in the 1600s to diagnose the illness of mercenaries far from home, the cultural

definition, which we are more familiar with today, gained traction in the late nineteenth

century. The idea of nostalgia as a certain feeling towards the past emerged during the

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Enlightenment – a period of rapid modernisation, and thus many scholars have considered it

in the context of a crisis of temporality in which contemporary society is so future-focused

that we don’t have the chance to register the present or reflect on the past. Media

engagements with nostalgia ‘could indicate a twofold phenomenon: a reaction to fast

technologies, despite using them in desiring to slow down, and/or an escape from this crisis

into a state of wanderlust and a homesickness that could be cured through media

consumption’ (Niemeyer 2014: 2). As such, nostalgia should not simply be dismissed as

sentimentality towards the past.

Nostalgia suggests two sensations: firstly, that things are changing too rapidly,

therefore we long to return to a time that seemed slower or at least more constant than the

late-capitalist era with its obsessive drive towards the future. Secondly, that the present feels

much disconnected from the past that we remember, and a past that we see as fundamental to

shaping our personal and collective identity. Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann

(2009) argue that nostalgia might not only help us to ‘learn from the past but also to

recuperate real community’. Niemeyer (2014) suggests that media can play a role in offering

a nostalgic, albeit temporary, cure for a desire to return to a more familiar time. There is of

course a paradox here. It is often digital media, such as Pixar animations, that offer nostalgic

value – allowing us to feel comfortable in a past we seem to recognise. However, they are

also products of modern advancement and often depict post-human worlds, and their means

of production (computer generated animation) technologically threaten the existence of the

old media forms that characterised the eras to which we often longingly look back.

The narratives of Pixar’s films are usually informed by nostalgia, for example the

conflict between Woody and Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story alludes to the cultural shift from

the traditional American cowboy to the Space Age. In the recent Cars 3 (Brian Fee, 2017),

Lightning McQueen longs to return to the glory age of traditional racing. WALL-E (Andrew

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Stanton, 2008) shows a future world in which our sympathies are drawn to the ‘old

technology’ embodied by the titular mechanical robot, abandoned in the wastelands of Earth

whilst humans live on a space cruiser, reduced to obese passivity by the digital technology

that does everything for them.

Pixar’s nostalgic turn is not only rooted in its narratives, but also its films’ aesthetics.

As Murray and Huemann (2009) note, WALL-E takes influence from Charlie Chaplin films

and includes clips and music from Hello Dolly (Gene Kelly, 1963). In Cars 3 (Brian Fee,

2017), Lightning McQueen looks back at his former successes in newspaper clippings – a

pre-digital media form drawn in the film as digital images. Pixar films, then, often depict the

paradoxical nature of mediated nostalgia as they express longing for a past in which they

could not exist. Yet they create this past via digital technology, which threatens to replace the

formats, such as analogue films and newspapers, represented onscreen.

We have seen in this chapter how animation can help us to remember the past, how

they represent dimensions of memory such as trauma, post-memory and nostalgia, and how

we can look at the history of animation production to explore how the form contributes to the

construction of identities that inform national, collective memory. Animation is particularly

salient for exploring issues related to memory because it often foregrounds creativity,

embodiment and the subjective, which are fundamental to memory. As animations often

involve assemblages of objects and people in their creation and within their representations,

they also draw attention to the complex, collaborative dimensions of memory. We do not

simply remember on our own; rather our relationships with the past are shaped by our

encounters with people, things, places and ideas. We must remember, though, not to solely

look at the representational values of animation when thinking about memory, but interrogate

their technological, material and aesthetic dimensions as well, in order to examine what the

form can specifically contribute to our understanding about memory and the past.

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References

Anderson, B. (2016), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism, London and New York: Verso.

Bal, M. (1999), ‘Introduction’, in M. Bal, J. Crewe and L. Spitzer (eds) Acts of Memory:

Cultural Recall in the Present, vii-xvii, Hanover: University Press of New England.

Barker, J.M. (2009), The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience, California:

University of California.

Caruth, C. (1996), Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore and

London: The John Hopkins University Press.

Felman, S. and D. Laub (1992), Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,

Psychoanalysis, and History, Abingdon: Routledge.

Friedländer, S. (1996), ‘Trauma, Transference and “Working Through” in Writing the

History of the Shoah’, History and Memory 4 (1): 39-59.

Garde-Hansen, J. (2011), Media and Memory, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Garde-Hansen, J., A. Hoskins, and A. Reading (2012), ‘Introduction’, in Save As … Digital

Memories, 1-26, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Halbwachs, M. (1992), On Collective Memory, trans. L. A. Coser, Chicago and London: The

University of Chicago Press.

Hirsch, M. (2012) ,The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the

Holocaust, New York: Columbia University Press.

Honess Roe, A. (2013), Animated Documentary, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hoskins, A. (2009), ‘Digital Network Memory’, in A. Erll and A. Rigney (eds) Mediation,

Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, 91-108, Berlin: de Gruyter.

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Huyssen, A. (2003), Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Palo

Alto: Stanford University Press.

Katz, M.B. (2016), Drawing the Iron Curtain: Jews and the Golden Age of Soviet Animation,

New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Kim, J. Y. (2013), ‘The East Asian Post-Human Prometheus: Animated Mechanical

“Others”’, in S. Buchan (eds) Pervasive Animation, 172-94, New York: Routledge.

LaCapra, D. (1998), History and Memory after Auschwitz, New York: Cornell University.

Laub, D. (1992) ,‘Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening’, in S. Felman and D.

Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, 57-

74, Abingdon: Routledge.

Landsberg, A. (2004), Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in

the Age of Mass Culture, New York: Columbia University Press.

McLuhan, M. (1964), Understanding Media: Extensions of Man, New York: McGraw-Hill.

Murray, R. L. and J. K. Heumann (2009,) ‘WALL-E: From Environmental Adaptation to

Sentimental Nostalgia’, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 51. Available

online: http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc51.2009/WallE/text.html (accessed 22

February 2018)

Neiger, N., O. Meyers and E. Zandberg (2011), ‘Introduction’, in On Media Memory:

Collective Memory in a New Media Age, 1-26, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Niemeyer, K. (2014), ‘Introduction: Media and Nostalgia’, in Media and Nostalgia: Yearning

for the Past, Present and Future, 1-26, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Van Dijck, J. (2007), Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, Redwood City: Stanford

University Press.

Walden, V. G. (forthcoming), Cinematic Intermedialities and Contemporary Holocaust

Memory, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Walker, J. (2005), Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust, Berkeley:

University of California Press.

Wells, P. (1998), Understanding Animation, London and New York: Routledge.

Young, J. E. (2000), ‘David Levinthal’s Mein Kampf: History, Toys, and the Play of

Memory’, in At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art

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8. Some Thoughts on Theory-Practice Relationships in Animation Studies

Paul Ward

Perhaps even more so than film and media studies more broadly, animation studies has

always enjoyed a productive fluidity between theory and practice and much animation

scholarship is written by people who are also animators. Ward, in this article that was

originally published in Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal in 2006, provides an

important analysis of this relationship between theory and practice in animation studies that

focuses on ‘communities of practice’ and argues that animation studies is an

interdisciplinary field and must be understood as such.

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SECTION TWO

FORMS AND GENRES

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Forms and Genres

Introduction

Not only can animation take a variety of material forms, it also exists across a wide range of

formats and is distributed in various media. This section explores the significance of these

different forms and genres of animation. From TV (Dobson) to Video Games (Pallant), for

purposes including advertising (Cook) and Propaganda (Herhuth) and for audiences of

different ages (Ratelle). As animation is also commercially prevalent in short form and

feature length (Holliday), exists in a variety of modes including experimental (Taberham),

and non-fiction (Honess Roe), the chapters in this section aptly demonstrate the diversity and

ubiquity of animation.

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9. Absence, Excess and Epistemological Expansion: Towards a Framework for the

Study of Animated Documentary

Annabelle Honess Roe

This article was first published in Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal in 2011 and

outlined ideas that Honess Roe would go on to explore in more detail in her book Animated

Documentary (Palgrave 2013). Here she points out that animation and documentary, while

perhaps superficially antithetical, have a long history of hybridisation. She argues that

animation has a particular capacity to expand the range and depth of what documentary can

tells us about the real world through functioning in ways that make up for the shortcomings

of live action.

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10. Experimental Animation

Paul Taberhman

Experimental animation offers a distinct set of formal challenges to the spectator. Watching a

commercial animation, the viewer is typically compelled to speculate on how the conflicts

might be resolved, and they are also invited to reflect on the characters featured, and the

themes raised by the story. The viewing strategies required when engaging with experimental

animation are different, and so the aim of this chapter is to elucidate what it is the viewer

should keep in mind when they encounter this type of film.

One of the principal distinctins one may make between commercial and experimental

animation is the way in which imagery is used. In commercial animations, the visual details

are always subordinated to the story they serve, and they will not play as big a part of the

experience once they have been integrated into the larger, more ‘meaningful’ form of an

over-arching story. By contrast, the visceral dimension of experimental animations, the

colours, movements and visual textures more fully comprise the film’s aesthetic appeal. The

earliest explorations of this sensuous experience of animation took the form of visual music,

which may be understood as non-figurative animation that visually aspires to the dynamic

and nonobjective qualities of music. While not all experimental animations try to do this,

abstraction still warrants particular attention in this discussion, since it played a key part in

the development of experimental animation. In the early twentieth century, artists of the time

were concerned about what was considered a ‘misuse’ of cinema. Robert Russett explains

that they ‘envisioned motion pictures not as a form of popular entertainment, but rather as a

new and dynamic expression, one closely allied with the major art movements of the day’

(Russett 2009: 10).

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 Painter Wassily Kandinsky claimed in 1911 that visual art should aspire to the

achievements of music and he sought a visual equivalent to music in contemporary painting.

This led to abstract (non-figurative) art. In Concerning the Spiritual in Art, he argues,

A painter [...] in his longing to express his inner life cannot but envy the ease

with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end.

He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art. And from this

results that modern desire for rhythm in painting, mathematical, abstract

construction, for repeated notes of colour, for setting colour in motion.

(Kandinsky 2010: 32)

Contemporaries of Kandinsky such as František Kupka and Paul Klee posessed similar

creative aspirations, and by the 1920s, European abstract painters Walter Ruttmann, Viking

Eggeling, and Hans Richter extended their craft to animation, with the musical organization

of film time as their central concern. Concepts from musical composition such as

orchestration, symphony, instrument, fugue, counterpoint, and score were applied. For

example, Richter’s Rhythmus 21 (1921) strips visual information back to its core element –

motion in time. An assortment of squares and rectangles (sometimes white on black, other

times black on white) expand and contract on the screen at different speeds. Each visual

articulation, like a series of musical motifs, repeats and makes variations. Like music, the

movements are variously fast, slow, aggressive, smooth, graceful and abrasive. Just as two or

more musical melodies can move in counterpoint, so too can shapes in motion move

contrapuntally around one another.

Following these early pioneers who sought to visually express music, experimental

animation later assumed a variety of different forms. While no two experimental animations

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are the same, we can begin to think about some common tendencies that feature in these

types of films. The following list of features does not include essential characteristics but

rather tendencies.14

First, the context of distribution and production may be outlined in the following way:

 It may be created by a single person or a small collective

 The film will be self-financed or funded by a small grant from an arts institution,

without expectation to make a profit

 Instead of undergoing commercial distribution, experimental films are normally

distributed independently online, or through film co-operatives to be exhibited by film

societies, universities and galleries

Second, the aesthetics of experimental animation may be characterized thus:

 They evoke more than they tell. They don’t offer a clear, unambiguous ‘message’

 The materials of animation may be consciously employed in a way that calls attention

to the medium

 The personal style and preoccupations of the artist will be easily discernible

 Psychologically-defined characters with identifiable motivations and goals do not

feature

Maureen Furniss has discussed the difference between commercial and experimental

animation, and prudently makes the point that these two categories exist on a continuum. She

rightly comments that both represent extremes ‘to which few cultural products could adhere

completely; but, evaluating a particular text in terms of the various paradigms, it is possible

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to see a given work as generally being related to one mode of production or the other.’

(Furniss, 2008: 30) This is a productive way to think about about categories such as

commercial or experimental animation, since it is seldom a tidy distinction.

With an outline of the tendencies of experimental animation in place, we can now

consider some of these characteristics in closer detail.

The Artist and the Spectator

An experimental animation creates meaning in a different way to a narrative based animation

that tells a traditional story. In commercial, mainstream animation events are generally

depicted to be interpreted unambiguously. Stories follow a causal chain, with protagonists

typically overcoming an internal obstacle to achieve a goal with wide-reaching consequences

and ultimate resolution. For example, Simba in The Lion King (Allers and Minkoff, 1994)

overcomes internal doubt to challenge the tyranny of his wicked uncle Scar, and regain his

place as the rightful king. In How to Train Your Dragon (Sanders and DeBlois, 2010),

Hiccup, a timid and physically weak teenager, learns to use his intelligence and compassion

to reconcile his Viking community with a horde of dragons. In both instances, the theme of

the importance of self-belief is easily discernible. Experimental animation, by contrast, is

more likely to defy straightforward description; ideas are expressed in an indirect way, they

provoke rather than tell. In turn, the viewer is left to interpret the work according to their own

dispositions. There isn’t a hidden meaning set up by the artist which the viewer needs to

identify; rather, the viewer should respond to the experience imaginatively, as if the work was

a mirror reflecting back what the spectator sees and what they bring to the experience. If a

spectator is concerned that they don’t ‘understand’ a film, they may instead ask themselves

how it made them feel. A film might create a feeling of ambient entrancement, agitation,

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relaxation or disorientation, for instance. If the viewer chooses to focus on the feelings

generated by the film, this is an adequate response to the work. It may, thus, be experienced

as an enchantment, rather than a story.

As well as the experience of the spectator, one may also consider the creative process

of the artist. The creation of experimental animation may be more heavily conceived as a

process of discovery, rather than a film that is pre-planned and then subsequently executed.

The artist might reflect on a given subject and a series of images will come to mind. Using a

form of non-rational intuition, the meaning might be highly internalized and various

references won’t necessarily be apparent to the viewer. Even if the spectator does not know

what originally motivated the images, they may nonetheless understand that there was a

creative rationale behind them. In turn, understanding this and ceding to the artist’s guiding

light of intent informs their viewing experience. For example, consider Robert Breer’s Bang!

(1986): on the surface, this film, which combines animation with brief sequences of live

action, appears to feature a string of dissociated images, but there is a discernible theme to

those who look for it. Broadly speaking, the film deals with Breer’s own childhood and

adolescence (Camper 1997). Instead of telling a linear story, the film is more like a daydream

in which images ‘skip around the way thoughts do’ (Breer, quoted in Coté 1962/63: 16).

Bang! presents Breer’s own boyhood fascinations – outdoor activities (the forest,

rafting, a waterfall), sport (football and baseball), and Tarzan. Fighter pilots and the face of

Adolf Hitler also briefly appear, a figure who will have been been widely recognisable to all

Americans in the 1930s and 1940s. Images evoking pubescent, burgeoning sexuality are also

featured, such as drawings of a nude woman, a drooling man and sperm swimming. The

spectator is free to ruminate on themes raised in the film such as nostalgia, regret and conflict

(both in war and sport). Breer used his own childhood memories to generate images for his

film, but didn’t count on spectators to ‘decode’ each image shot-by-shot. Artists accept that

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they create works, send them into the world where viewers will make their own

interpretations. As with all experimental animation, there is no single ‘correct’ reaction to

Bang!. Even if the theme of childhood and autobiography passes unnoticed, the viewer may

still be engaged by Breer’s distinctive range of materials used to make the film such as felt-

tip pen, pencil, filmed television, photographs, and childhood drawings. In addition, his use

of a loose sketch style and flickering imagery is also enough to hold the viewer’s interest.

Some artists, such as those during the Gothic period did not consider their work to be

a form of personal expression; rather, they were channelling God’s will. Today, the creative

act is less commonly understood in these terms, but the notion of drawing from an exterior

force (divine or otherwise) still persists. One artist who did consider his work to draw

creatively from a sacred force is Jordan Belson, who produced experimental animation

between 1947 and 2005. He drew inspiration by practicing meditation and then recreating his

inner visions through film. In Allures (1961), the viewer’s attention is continually drawn back

to the center of the frame. We see intersecting dots, flicker effects, distant spirals and

revolving mandalas. A similarly mysterious soundtrack, featuring bells, a deep hum, distorted

gongs and electronic sounds, works with the imagery to create a unified experience of

entrancement. An abstract work such as this seems to defy interpretation altogether, so how

does one talk about it? In a sense, the images may be understood and appreciated in a pre-

conscious way; indeed, Belson encouraged this interpretation. He has commented that his

films ‘are not meant to be explained, analyzed, or understood. They are more experiential,

more like listening to music.’ (Belson, quoted in MacDonald 2009: 77)

Nonetheless, images can be imaginatively interpreted in a way that could enrich one’s

experience of Allures. For instance, one may say that the opening images, with swirling dots

that lead to the centre of the frame, create the impression that the spectator is being pulled

through a cosmic tunnel into the imaginative space of the film. Likewise, when the screen is

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awash with light, it may be interpreted as representing enlightment. Aimee Mollaghan has

suggested that the high-pitched electronic sounds accompanied by a lower beating rhythm

resembles the inner-bodily nervous and circulatory systems. In addition, the film’s ‘fields of

dots and dashes super-imposed over each other reflect the speed and activity of the neural

pathways as they enter even deeper into the state of meditation.’ (Mollaghan 2015: 89) As

such, by looking at the specifics of this wholly abstract film, it is possible to discern the

theme of inner-consciousness. Conversely, Gene Youngblood (1970: 160) has suggested that

the film depicts the birth of the cosmos. Suffice to say, both interpretations of this film – that

it expresses the small and large, the micro and macro - are accommodated in the work. The

spectator is free to see it both ways.

We may say, then, that experimental animation is poetic and suggestive instead of

concrete and specific in meaning.15 Artists use non-rational intuition to create images which

viewers can respond to imaginatively. There is no single correct reading of an experimental

animation, and the film may be designed to create a feeling which cannot be articulated

through spoken word, or a conventional story.

Creative Individuality

Ordinarily, mainstream animated films and TV shows are not marketed as the work of an

expressive individual. In part, this is because commercial animations are collaborative and

need a large working crew. Auteurs such as Hayao Miyazaki, Pendleton Ward and Genndy

Tartakovsky are an exception to this – directors who are associated with a particular visual

style and approach to storytelling. More broadly this is not the case, general audiences do not

tend to remember who directed the Disney feature animations Lady and the Tramp (1955),

Aladdin (1992) or Frozen (2013), to name a few examples.

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 When viewing an experimental animation, the artist’s creative presence can be more

vividly felt. Since they generally work alone and do not produce animations commissioned

by a studio with an expectation to make a profit, experimental animators will have the

freedom to express more personal visions than commercial directors. In experimental

animation, the artist is the creative force who ‘communicates’ (what is the film saying?) and

who ‘expresses’ themselves (what is the artist’s personal style?) rather than striving to

‘entertain’. Familiar viewers will watch films by an artist expecting certain themes and

techniques the director has used previously. The film, in turn, becomes understood as part of

a larger oeuvre.

While this chapter deals principally with broad, governing principles for engaging

with experimental animation, there are also more localised principles which apply to specific

artists. Robert Breer, for instance, uses a range of materials to create his films and images

loosely relate to each other in a manner similar to a daydream; Jordan Belson works with

abstract images that evoke impressions of inner-consciousness and also the larger universe.

Established artists tend not to aim for profundity when creating work, but rather

simply remain true to their creative instincts. They are sometimes drawn to depicting extreme

psychic states or madness. Jan Švankmajer has associated his own animations with the

surrealist art movement (Jackson 1997), in which the artist draws creatively from the the part

of the mind that remains untouched by rationality, social convention and the laws of nature,

that is most readily accessed through dream. Even if experimental animators tend to look

inwards and create something that feels internalised, they still try to create a work of art that

will offer a meaningful experience to viewers. Otherwise, there would be no reason to share it

with others.

Experimental animators may also express their creative individuality by questionning

premises that can otherwise go unquestioned in commercial animation. For instance, do

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stories need to make sense? Should animated movement be smooth? Is technical competence

necessary? Do images need to be visually appealing by conventional standards, or can

grotesque imagery also be compelling? Jan Švankmajer’s Dimensions of Dialogue (1982), for

example, includes crudely-rendered heads made from metal, paper, wood, meat, vegetables

and plastic. They eat, and vomit one another out in turn until both become bland copies of

each other. The effect is both compelling and disconcerting.

David Theobold’s authorial presence can be vividly felt in his films since they frame a

philosophical question in a distinctive way. He is known for producing high quality computer

generated animation, but featuring minimal onscreen movement. His films implicitly ask,

does a significant event need to happen in a film? Lilly Husbands explains:

although his works might resemble the visual aesthetic of […] commercial

studios, Theobald’s animations spend their entirety focusing on places and

objects that would appear in a Pixar animation only very briefly and most

likely somewhere in the background. The intensive labour that goes into

Theobald’s animations is perversely used to produce images of everyday

objects and scenarios that would normally be deemed unworthy of prolonged

attention. (Husbands 2015)

For example, Theobald’s 3min Kebab World (2014) features a single, static shot that looks

into a kebab takeaway window. Most of the frame remains motionless, though the kebab

slowly rotates and the neon lights of the shop sign blink. The soundtrack features an ongoing

radio, with intermittent police sirens. Red and blue flashing lights illuminate the contents of

the frame, although we never see any cars. The seemingly-mundane subject matter and

absence of a story can be interpreted as humorous to those who are attuned to Theobold’s

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creative concerns. The film asks: why would anyone create, or watch, a film as uneventful as

this? Why test your own patience when watching an animation? His other works such as

Jingle Bells (2013) and Night Light (2016) are similarly uneventful. Theobald’s creative

presence is readily discernible in these films because they make a philosophical statement in

an aesthetically provocative way. As Husbands explains, ‘Theobald’s refusal to cater to

conventional narrative expectations, denying spectators their attendant gratifications, serves

to remind them of the fact that everything is not always selfishly, anthropocentrically, for us.’

(ibid.)

The examples of films by Breer, Belson and Theobald illustrate that the creative force

behind experimental animation is more vividly present than it typically is in commercial

animation.

Exposing the medium

Commercial animation does not typically invite viewers to actively contemplate the materials

used to produce the film, such as cels, clay (for stop-motion) or CG models. Experimental

animation, by contrast, sometimes invites viewers to consider the way in which the medium

is being put to use. This tendency harks back to the early 20th century. Clement Greenberg

discusses the transition from realistic paintings to modernist art:

Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art;

Modernism used art to call attention to art. The limitations that constitute the

medium of painting—the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties

of the pigment—were treated by the old masters as negative factors that could

be acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly. Under Modernism these same

limitations came to be regarded as positive factors, and were acknowledged

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 openly. (Greenberg 1991: 112)

Modernist painters such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Piet Mondrian stressed the

flatness of their painting canvases rather than concealing it with illusions of visual depth, for

instance. Flatness was unique to pictorial art, and was in turn embraced.

Exposing the materials used to create an animated film can be done in a variety of

ways. When artists like Len Lye or Steven Woloshen scratch directly onto the film stock, for

example, their physical presence can be felt in the markings. Stop-motion animators like

Švankmajer can leave their fingerprints in the clay. Caleb Wood’s Plumb (2014) begins with

a hand drawing pictures on a wall with a marker pen. This is followed by a wide shot of the

various markings, and then each individual mark is shown in in rapid succession, creating an

animated sequence. The CG animated Black Lake (2010) by David O’Reilly pulls the viewer

through an uncanny, hallucinatory underwater landscape with rocks, fish, a house, and other

objects. After a minute and a half, the same items are seen again, but in wire-frame form,

exposing the way in which they were digitally generated.

The materiality of an animation may also be exposed by allowing the audience to

visually register the frame rate of the film. If consecutive frames are sufficiently different, a

flicker effect occurs which prevents the viewer from relaxing their eyes into the impression of

smooth motion. Instead, every frame (i.e. 24 per second) visually registers, creating a flicker

effect. Robert Breer’s Recreation (1956) applied this technique, as did Paul Sharits’

T:O:U:C:H:I:N:G (1968). The technique is still applied today with more recent films like

Thorsten Fleisch’s Energie! (2007) and Jonathan Gillie’s Separate States (2016).

The techniques used to create an animation are therefore something that may be

exposed and celebrated in a variety of ways, in opposition to commercial animation’s

tendency to make the techniques of production invisible.

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Additional topics

There are a range of other issues and questions, in addition to those focused on above, that

can be considered when exploring experimental animation. First of all, alternative methods of

exhibition may also have been explored such as multiple projection work, gallery-specific

animation or projecting onto the sides of buildings. Also, the recent adoption of .gif files

(brief, looped digital films) as found in the work of artists like Lilli Carré and Colin

MacFadyen could be considered, as well as David O’Reilly’s recent forays into videogame

production.

Secondly, the connections between experimental and commercial animation may also

be briefly considered. Just as the term avant-garde means ‘advance guard’, implying pioneers

who lead the way in their artistic field, experimental animators influence mainstream

aesthetics. This can occur in the realm of special effects, where artists like Michel Gagné can

produce abstract animations like Sensology (2010) and also use the same style for special

effects in Ratatouille (2007). Title sequences can also be influenced by experimental

animation such as the opening to Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World (2010) which is a homage to the

scratch films of Len Lye and Norman McLaren. Animator Gianluigi Toccafondo began his

career producing experimental animations like La Coda (1989) and La Pista (1991) and later

produced title sequences for films such as Robin Hood (2010) with an aesthetic adapted from

his earlier style. Finally, music videos have also been influenced by experimental animation.

Singer Robyn’s 2007 music video With Every Heartbeat features a homage to Oskar

Fichinger’s Composition in Blue (1935), and the music video to Where Are Ü Now (2015) by

Skrillex, Diplo and Justin Bieber draws directly from the sketchy, flicker aesthetic pioneered

by Robert Breer.

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Conclusion: Approaching Experimental Animation

The central aim of this chapter has been to elucidate the underlying viewing strategies needed

when engaging with experimental animation. Some of the central principals have been

detailed: the notion that these films evoke rather than tell, the discernible presence of the

creative force behind the films, and exposing the materials used to make the films. One may

ask then, when writing about experimental animation, what does one discuss? How does one

talk about a kind of film that tries to express the inexpressible? This four-step plan may offer

a helpful starting point:

 Vividly describe the artwork. This will show that you were sensitive to the details of

the film rather than just experienced them as a flurry of vague, generalized images

 Summarize existing material on your chosen artist case study. Outline what their

‘larger project’ or general approach is. This has happened briefly in this essay in

relation to Jordan Belson and David Theobald

 Articulate the creative aspirations of the artist by matching it with specific moments

of their film

 If you can discern one, offer your own interpretation of a film that has not been

expressed elsewhere

In experimental animation, images come from the quick-of-the-soul. An artist follows their

individual inspiration, and shares their vision with the outside world. As the viewer, your

principal duty is to keep an open mind, and let the film do its work. Sometimes a work of art

creates a vivid experience, while at other times it creates a persistent memory. Some offer

both, while others provide neither. A film might hold you captive for two hours, and then

promptly be forgotten. While experimental animation and commercial animation are no

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different in this respect, experimental animation can put a premium on the long-term

resonance over the immediate impact. You may be left with an itch, or a feeling that there

was something about a film that you haven’t yet fully grasped which needs to be revisited.

Even if a concrete meaning remains out of reach, one’s experience of a work of art can

change at different periods of your life.

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References

Camper, F. (1997). On Visible Strings. [online] Chicagoreader.com. Available at:

https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/on-visible-strings/Content?oid=893567

(Accessed 27 Oct. 2017).

Furniss, M. (2008), Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics, London: John Libbey.

Greenberg, C. (1991), ‘Modernist Painting’, in S. Everett (ed), Art Theory and Criticism: An

Anthology of Formalist Avant-Garde, Contextuaist And Post-Modernist Thought, 1st

edn, 112, London: McFarland.

Husbands, L. (2015), ‘Animated Alien Phenomenology in David Theobald’s Experimental

Animations’, Frames Cinema Journal. Available online:

http://framescinemajournal.com/article/animated-alien-phenomenology-in-david-

theobalds-experimental-animations/ (accessed 22 February 2018).

Jackson, W. (1997), ‘The Surrealist Conspirator: An Interview with Jan Švankmajer’,

Animation World Magazine, 2(3). Available online:

https://www.awn.com/mag/issue2.3/issue2.3pages/2.3jacksonsvankmajer.html

(accessed 22 February 2018).

Kandinsky, W. (2010), Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Whitefish, MT: Kessinger

Publishing.

MacDonald, S. (2009), A Critical Cinema 3: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers,

Berkeley: University of California Press.

Coté, G. (1962/63), ‘Interview with Robert Breer’, in Film Culture, Winter: 17-18.

Mollaghan, A. (2015), The Visual Music Film, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Rostron, E. (2017) ‘Re: Edge Of Frame Seminar Audio’, Email message to author.

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Russett, R. (2009), Hyperanimation, Londont: John Libbey.

Taberham, P. (2018), ‘Defining and Understanding Experimental Animation’, in M. Harris,

L. Husbands and P. Taberham (eds), The New Experimental Animation: From

Analogue to Digital, London: Routledge.

Wells, P. (1998), Understanding Animation, London: Routledge.

Youngblood, G. (1970), Expanded Cinema, London: Studio Vista.

Further reading

Buchan, S. (2011), The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom, Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press.

Dobson, T. (2007), The Film Work of Norman McLaren, London: John Libbey.

Hames, P. (2008), The cinema of Jan Švankmajer, London: Wallflower Press.

Horrocks, S. and R. Horrocks (2010), Art That Moves: The Work of Len Lye. Auckland:

Auckland University Press.

Keefer, C. and J. Guldemond (2013), Oskar Fischinger, 1900-1967: Experiments in

Cinematic Abstraction, London: Thames & Hudson.

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11. Features and Shorts

Christopher Holliday

Just as animation is a term that covers a diverse range of forms, modes, practices, image-

making materials and technologies, a glance at the many origins and pre-histories of the

medium reveals that it equally operates in a variety of lengths and screen durations. From

independently-funded shorts, fleeting web animations and commercial logos lasting only a

few seconds, to episodic television animation and theatrically-exhibited blockbuster features

normally the reserve of larger film studios, the continued proliferation of animation within a

number of multimedia contexts has created an art form that comes in all shapes and sizes.

Animation is itself a time-based media, and as multiple scholars have explained (Cholodenko

1991; Pilling 1997; Wells 1998), it evokes the illusion of life and creates unbroken movement

incrementally frame-by-frame, rather than through traditional photographic-based processes

of live-action film. Animation is therefore both a series of techniques, and their

comprehension or spectatorship, which may encompass proto-animated forms (magic

lanterns, flip books) and toys of the Victorian era (Thaumotrope [1826], Phénakisticope

[1833], Zoetrope [1834], Praxinoscope [1877]) as much as the contemporary digital

landscape of spectacular computer graphics.

Numerous animation scholars and historians have confronted the medium ‘at length’,

as it were, identifying its aesthetic and cultural importance through its versatility of duration

and multiplicity of forms. However, the relationship between short and longer animated

forms does not reflect a break within animation history between ‘then’ and ‘now’. Neither

does the shift from early animated shorts or visual effects to feature-length films imply a

teleology of inevitable maturation. Rather, the entwined connection between the two formats

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exemplifies how animation as a creative medium has undergone a series of significant and

fundamental changes that have struck at various moments throughout its history.

The Long and the Short of Animation

Although both longer and shorter live-action films coexisted with similar commercial success

throughout the formative days of silent film production, early animation was universally of a

shorter kind. Many of the medium’s early pioneers working in the first decade of the

nineteenth-century tested the capabilities of moving images and techniques of photography in

a range of exploratory animated shorts. Particularly significant within critical studies of

animation’s expansive history and multiple genealogies (Bendazzi 1994; Furniss 2016) are

the eminent names of Winsor McCay and J. Stuart Blackton (U.S), Raoul Barré (Canada),

Arthur Melbourne Cooper and Walter R. Booth (U.K.), and Émile Cohl, Émile Reynaud and

Georges Méliès (France), who all contributed to the development of early animated media in

a variety of national contexts.

The brevity of these early animated shorts can be traced back to the spectacle of stage

entertainment and nineteenth-century amusements. Paul Wells (1998) has argued that initial

experiments in proto-animation, such as those undertaken by Reynaud during the 1890s, were

almost immediately ‘incorporated into theatrical shows, often with simulated sounds to

accompany the illusion of narrative action’ (1998: 2). Predating the Lumière brothers’ public

screening of the cinématographe on December 26, 1895, Reynaud’s Théâtre Optique moving

picture performances in October 1892 in Paris offered spectacular shows of around 10

minutes. Other early filmmakers, such as Booth (an amateur magician) and Méliès (an

illusionist) are cited by those historians of animation who consistently situate ‘trick’

photography as central to the medium’s origin story (Wells 1998; Furniss 2016). Quickly

subsumed by the live-action realist tradition of the Lumières and, later, the rhythms of

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Classical Hollywood narration (Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson 1985), ‘trick’ films with

animated effects and fleeting durations illustrate the importance of the medium to the

temporality of Tom Gunning’s ‘cinema of attractions’ (1986) conceptualisation of early film.

Lasting anywhere between 90 seconds (as with Blackton’s The Enchanted Drawing

[1900] and Cohl’s Fantasmagorie [1908]) to the 12-minute short Gertie the Dinosaur

(McCay, 1914), the length of early animation was informed by the expenditure involved in

the production of animation that had not yet been shaped into an industrial art form. Leonard

Maltin (1987) documents the prohibitive cost of early animation techniques (including the

price of materials), and the subsequent impact of economics on animation’s mode of

exhibition. Maltin notes the pressures felt by early practitioners (particularly McCay) who

were overstretched ‘to make the cartoon the screen equivalent of the comic strip – and

produce it nearly as often’ (1987: 1). Charlie Keil and Daniel Goldmark’s more recent

account of early Hollywood animation recognises that ‘the labor-intensive nature of

animation dictated that it be restricted to the short format’ (2011: 6). 16 But even when

animation reached full institutional maturity within the system of Hollywood mass

production in the 1930s, a little over two decades after McCay’s Gertie, cartoons remained

shaped by ‘economically enforced limitation (that is, profoundly restricted budgets compared

to live-action features or shorts)’ (Keil and Goldmark 2011: 4). Relegated to ‘nonfeature

production’, American cartoons were quickly awarded a particular kind of narrative, assigned

a comedic function by necessity given that ‘the feature format was generally reserved for

more “weighty” material’ (ibid.: 4-6).

Many early animators not only raided the vocabulary of a comic strip form already

established in the American print media industries since the late-1890s, but also drew from

the lightning sketch cultural tradition (Cook 2013). Animation historian Donald Crafton

(1979; 1993) has been fundamental to the critical understanding of early animation and the

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cartoon’s ‘lightning sketch’ origins. Adopted by Crafton from the title of Booth’s 1906 short

of the same name, the ‘hand of the artist’ trope of audacious self-figuration showcased the

artist as the ‘mediator between the spectator and the drawings’ (Crafton 1979: 414). In

making a performance out of the act of drawing, the earliest animated shorts emphasised the

rapidity of the ‘lightning’ sketches within the spectacle of quick change. Blackton’s

Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) and Lightning Sketches (1907) both explored the

power of animation within a shortened and condensed duration, quick on the draw and replete

with fleeting ‘animated’ effects that fuelled the dreamlike excess and oneiric mystifications

of early screen media.

America’s Golden Age

American animator John Randolph Bray was the first to frame the short within industrial

parameters, and founded in 1914 his Bray Productions studio, which became the dominant

facility in America during the First World War (Wells 2002). In terms of storytelling, shorts

permitted a degree of seriality across narratives, and offered the pleasure of repeating

characters, many of whom became animated ‘stars’, a few minutes at a time. Pat Sullivan and

Otto Messmer’s Felix the Cat series (1919-36) contained approximately 200 animated shorts,

while Out of the Inkwell was a series of silent-era animated cartoons that premiered around

the same period. Produced by Max Fleischer between 1918 and 1929, and largely starring

Koko the Clown, these popular Out of the Inkwell cartoons were released through Paramount

(1919-1920), and later Goldwyn (1921), totalling over one hundred individual shorts.

Michael Barrier (1999) offers an exhaustive account of the thousands of Hollywood

studio cartoons produced between 1928 and 1966, a period bookended by the release of Walt

Disney’s first short Steamboat Willie (1928) and the progressive downturn in theatrical

animated shorts due to the arrival of ‘prime-time’ television animation in the late-1950s

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(Stabile and Harrison 2003). Barrier’s important work surveys the main studios and key

figures that supported the Golden Age of American animation, including the Leon

Schlesinger Studios; the team of Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising (creators of Bosko in 1928

and founders of Warner Brothers’ animation division); Metro-Goldwyn Meyer; United

Productions of America (UPA); the short-lived Ub Iwerks Studio that briefly ran in the 1930s

and created Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper; the creator of Woody the Woodpecker shorts

during the 1940s Walter Lantz; New York-based Terrytoons company; and the Hanna-

Barbera studio in Los Angeles, California, founded in 1957 by former MGM animation

directors William Hanna and Joseph Barbera.

As animation coalesced into an industry and a popular form of big-screen mass

entertainment, the animated cartoons by these major film production companies in

Hollywood during the early-sound era remained principally short, rather than feature-length,

subjects that made up part of a varied film bill that included animated shorts, newsreels and

feature films (Ward 2000). In fact, shorter cartoons came to dominate studio-era animation in

America as an industrial product, packaged alongside feature-length (typically live-action)

films, and screened as part of theatrical exhibition programmes well into the 1940s and 1950s

(Keil and Goldmark 2011). The waxing and waning of animated shorts attached to theatrical

exhibition has therefore been used to chart the broader rise and fall of the American

animation industry. Christopher Lehman notes that the major U.S. animation studios (Disney,

MGM and UPA) all ceased production of theatrical shorts by the late-1950s, only to return to

shorter cartoon production in 1961 as a topical response to the Vietnam War, with cartoons

that provided veiled ‘commentaries on the federal government, the armed forces, the draft,

peace negotiations, the counterculture and pacifism’ (2007: 4). The Golden Age era of the

American cartoon remains a major area of scholarly investigation (Peary and Peary 1980;

Maltin 1987; Smoodin 1993; Klein 1993; Sandler 1998; Goldmark 2005; Keil and Goldmark

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2011), and a focal point for understanding the ‘evolutionary change from lightning cartoonist

films to the true animated cartoon’ (Crafton 1990: 138).

The shift in animation’s priorities away from vaudeville elements of performance and

‘lightning sketch’ traditions to more character-based action has enabled the American cartoon

short to be understood through longstanding characters with distinctive personalities. The

Golden Age, in telling rudimentary tales in episodic form with familiar characters, developed

animation’s most enduring stars. The era of Bugs Bunny, Tweety Pie, and Daffy Duck also

provided a counterpoint to the abstract graphic animation produced across Europe. Often

understood through the rubric of modernism and the avant-garde (Holloway 1983; Hames

1995), the work of Viking Eggeling, Oskar Fischinger, Hans Richter and Walter Ruttman in

the 1920s, and later the Eastern European (Czechoslovakia, Poland) puppet and stop motion

traditions of Jan Švankmajer and Jiří Trnka, divided the animated short between the

narratives of mainstream U.S. cartoon production and more experimental, unorthodox styles.

Perhaps the most sustained consideration of the American cartoon’s repeated motifs,

character archetypes and structuring principles, has been provided by Norman Klein (1993).

Klein argued that the seven-minute U.S. cartoon could be specifically understood as

organised around the ‘blistering chase’ (1993: 99), a plot device that impressed ordered

economy onto the anarchy of the short. Many Tom & Jerry and Wile E. Coyote/Road Runner

shorts cut to the chase, establishing a narrative template that was repeated across Warner

Brothers’ output (including in the 48 Wile E. Coyote/Road Runner shorts produced between

1949 and 2003). For Klein, the treatment of the chase narrative structure implemented by Tex

Avery at the Warner Brothers’ studio resulted in the collision between the chaos of the early

sound cartoon, and the illusionist style of animation that would emerge at the Walt Disney

Studios across a multitude of shorter cartoons and, a few years later, in full-length colour

features.

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The Disney Effect

Disney was foundational in developing an extensive programme of shorts that became crucial

sites of formal experimentation, affording the studio opportunity to test out visual styles,

narrative structures (Merritt 2005) and ‘ecstatic’ manipulations of form (Eisenstein 1986). 17

The assessment of the Disney shorts by J.P. Telotte (2008) notes the studio’s desire to

harness the possibilities of cinema technology in formalizing certain stylistic principles.

Steamboat Willie was the second animated short to be produced using synchronised sound

(the first was Dinner Time [1928] made at the Van Beuren studios), while Flowers and Trees

(Burton Gillett, 1932) pioneered the virtuosity of three-strip Technicolor for which Disney

had negotiated an exclusive 3-year contract in the early 1930s. 18 Chris Pallant notes that

‘Disney’s increasing drive for ever more realistic animation led to a number of in-house

developments’ (2011: 27), and it was within the shorter film format that the studio honed its

influential full animation style. Disney’s 9-minute The Old Mill (Wilfred Jackson, 1937)

marked an early experiment in depth and dimension using the multi-plane camera, just as

subsequent shorts have been utilised by the studio as a testing ground for new techniques and

technologies. For example, hand-drawn techniques were combined with emergent computer

graphics in the Disney shorts Off His Rockers (Barry Cook 1992)—attached to the theatrical

exhibition of Honey, I Blew Up the Kid (Randal Kleiser, 1992)—and more recently

Paperman (John Kahrs, 2012), which accompanied Wreck-It Ralph (Rich Moore, 2012).

The solidification of animation as a viable economic industry in North America

during the late 1920s and early 1930s was, however, founded upon the increased

popularisation of the theatrical cartoon short (up until the 1960s), and the simultaneous

emergence of the feature-length animated film. U.S.-centric accounts, such as those by Maltin

(1987) and Barrier (1999), examine the drive to produce cartoons both longer in duration and

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more impressive in scope. Maltin in particular notes that in the case of Walt Disney,

‘expansion was the lifeblood of his business, and feature-film production was not only logical

but inevitable’ (1987: 43). At the same time, the ‘unknown’ of extended duration prompted

widespread industry scepticism over whether audiences ‘would want to see a feature-length

cartoon’ (ibid.: 53). Yet although many American audiences were unaware of them, feature-

length animated films had been produced outside the United States by the time the Disney

studio finished work on their landmark colour feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

(David Hand, 1937).

Coming almost a decade prior to Lotte Reiniger’s 65-minute silhouette animation The

Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) that was released on July 2, 1926 (and nearly twenty

years before Disney’s Snow White), The Apostle (1917) was a stop-motion cut-out feature

film produced by Italian-born Argentine Quirino Cristiani, a filmmaker since neglected by

film history. An animation pioneer and cartoonist who forged the early cut-out style of

animation, Cristiani went on to make Without a Trace (1918), and a few years later,

Peludópolis [1931]). In his history of animation film, Giannalberto Bendazzi (1994)

described Peludópolis as a biting political satire about the then-Argentine president, Hipolito

Yrigoyen, whose progressive social reforms were not enough to oust him from government a

year into Peludópolis’ production. Bendazzi’s exhaustive account of global animation history

places Cristiani as a key figure within the emergence of feature-length animation. Bendazzi

(1994: 49) argues that while there remains some contestation over whether The Apostle

(1917) ‘was actually a feature film’ (given that the film is now considered lost), it was thanks

to Cristiani and his collaborators Alfonso de Laferrère (a politician) and musician José

Vázquez Vigo that Argentina was able to lay claim to ushering animation from ‘one-minute

sketch’ films to more elaborate feature-length productions.

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 In the wake of Cristiani’s early features (which ran to around 60-minutes), many

countries in Europe and beyond developed indigenous animation industries whose own origin

stories have been the subject of much critical investigation. The history of early animation

pre-Mickey Mouse offered by Crafton (1993), for example, discusses the desire by many

European filmmakers to make ‘a monumental feature length animated film’ (1993: 258) as a

way of fully realising the potential of the art form. Richard Neupert’s (2011: 63) own interest

in the birth of French animation positions Le Roman de Renard (1930) as ‘the longest and

perhaps most successful film’ made by Ladislas Starevitch, and the first feature-length

animation to be produced in France. Other important milestones in feature animation include

The New Gulliver (Aleksandr Ptushko 1935), a 75-minute Soviet stop motion retelling of

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and the fairy-tale feature The Seven Ravens (Ferdinand

Diehl and Hermann Diehl, 1937) produced in Germany. Another version of Swift’s 18 th

Century novel, Gulliver’s Travels (1939), was made at the Fleischer Studios as their first

feature-length animated film, and was the second made by an American studio after Disney’s

Snow White. While it is clear that stop-motion predominated over early experiments in

feature-animation, the viability of cel-animation as a replacement for drawing was quickly

realised despite its expense (see Barrier 1999, who discusses how cels could be washed and

reused, unlike paper). Directed by Raoul Verdini and Umberto Spano, The Adventures of

Pinocchio (1936) was intended as the first Italian animated film and would have been the first

produced entirely through cel-animated techniques (predating Snow White); however, it was

never finished.

The Digital Renaissance

Nowhere has the reciprocal relationship between animated features and cartoon shorts been

more evident than in contemporary Hollywood. The economic renaissance of Disney feature

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animation (Pallant 2011) that unfolded during the 1990s, and the subsequent arrival of the

computer-animated feature film with Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995), reignited the

commercial and critical popularity of feature-length theatrical animation. But while the

success of Disney’s animated musicals—including The Little Mermaid (Ron Clements and

John Musker, 1989) and Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, 1991)—

alongside the animation/live-action hybrid Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis,

1988) and television series The Simpsons (Matt Groening, 1989-) combined to remind

audiences of animation’s drawing powers, the medium’s resurgence likewise cued a return to

short film production in a manner not seen since the seven-minute cartoon of the Golden Age.

Beginning with the short The Adventures of André and Wally B (Alvy Ray Smith,

1984), which was produced under The Graphics Group banner (a division of the Lucasfilm

company), Pixar Animation Studios reinvigorated the possibilities of the short film format in

the digital era. Daniel Goldmark argues that ‘Pixar had been producing shorts for years

before it attempted to tackle a feature-length film, thus following the precedent set by

Fleischer and Disney’ (2013: 219). The success of Pixar’s films Luxo Jr. (John Lasseter,

1986), Red’s Dream (John Lasseter, 1987), Tin Toy (John Lasseter, 1988) and Knick Knack

(John Lasseter, 1989) helped solidify Pixar ‘as a force in animation, following a similar path

to Disney’s some sixty years earlier)’ (ibid.). Pixar’s approach to the animated short has

much in common with that of the Disney studio; with the shorter film format running to only

a few minutes, it offers up an important creative space in which Pixar’s animators can

rigorously test the application of innovative digital techniques. Alongside their commercial

projects in the early 1990s, Pixar’s short film programme represented a particularly

significant place of research and development into early photorealist design, including the

behaviour of light and shadow (Luxo Jr. and Red’s Dream) and the simulation of surfaces and

textures such as metal (Tin Toy) and glass (Knick Knack), thereby presenting audiences with

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many experiments in the early visual possibilities of digital animation. It comes as little

surprise that, at the turn of the new millennium, scholars of computer-generated imagery and

new media technologies (e.g. Wells 1998; Darley 2000) used the Pixar shorts to examine the

visual possibilities of emerging computer graphics to represent a certain ‘realism’.

While the Pixar shorts have attracted ongoing scholarly attention in relation to film

sound (Wells 2009; Goldmark 2011; Whittington 2012) and characterisation (Neupert 2014),

one significant avenue through which the features and shorts relationship has been

understood is that of the domestic consumption of animated cinema. Critical accounts of

DVD and Blu-ray home video technology formats (Bennett and Brown 2008; Brereton 2012;

Tryon 2013) have discussed the role played by animation, from intricate animated menus to

the inclusion of bonus cartoon shorts as a supplement to the main feature. In addition to their

theatrical shorts programme that accompanies their feature films, Pixar have established the

‘Home Entertainment Shorts’ series, which are short ‘spin-off’ cartoons packaged exclusively

on DVD releases. Current Hollywood rivals to Pixar, including DreamWorks Animation,

Blue Sky Studios and Illumination Entertainment, have all followed a similar template,

producing DVD-specific shorts as part of a wider shift towards franchises, series and cycles.

The upsurge in shorts has even prompted Disney to combine feature film production with a

return to the theatrical short, with Get a Horse! (Lauren MacMullan, 2013) the first Mickey

Mouse theatrical animated short since Runaway Brain (Chris Bailey, 1995).

Conclusion

The global history of animation across a variety of contexts and institutions has been well

covered in stories of the medium’s most significant films and filmmakers, and its increasingly

pervasive place within wider moving image and visual cultures. However, the heterogeneous

category of ‘animation’ and its historical evolution has been supported by the perseverance

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and coexistence of short and feature film production. It is possible to read much of popular

animation’s screen history through the stakes of the feature/shorts relation, around which is

wrapped a series of questions concerning film history, industry, audiences, exhibition and

distribution practices, as well as formal elements of design, structure and coherency of

characterisation. The concise means of expression afforded by shorter animation makes them

the ideal place to explore narrative economy and technical experimentation, just as the

extended duration of feature-length animation requires a more detailed underlying

conceptualisation of plot, character and setting that enables stories to be told across a longer

running time. It is therefore in the continual interplay and repeated exchange between

animated feature films and shorter forms that traditions of innovation and shifts in the

medium’s creative possibilities are to be found.

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Bendazzi, G. (1994), Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation, London: John

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Bennett, J. and T. Brown, eds. (2008), Film and Television After DVD, New York:

Routledge.

Bordwell, D., J. Staiger and K. Thompson (1985), The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film

Style and Mode of Production to 1960, London: Routledge.

Brereton, P. (2012), Smart Cinema, DVD Add-Ons and New Audience Pleasures, New York:

Palgrave Macmillan.

Cholodenko, A. ed. (1991), The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation, Power Publications in

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Cook, M. (2013), ‘The lightning cartoon: Animation from music hall to cinema’, Early

Popular Visual Culture, 11 (3): 237-54.

Crafton, D. (1979), ‘Animation Iconography: The “Hand of the Artist”’, Quarterly Review of

Film Studies, 4 (Fall): 409-28.

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Crafton, D. (1993), Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898-1928, Chicago: The University

of Chicago Press.

Darley, A. (2000), Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres,

London: Routledge.

Eisenstein, S. (1986), Eisenstein on Disney, Trans. Jay Leyda, London: Methuen.

Furniss, M. (2016), Animation: The Global History, London: Thames and Hudson Ltd.

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Goldmark, D. (2005), Tunes for ‘toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon, Berkeley:

University of California Press.

Goldmark, D. (2013), ‘Pixar and the Animated Soundtrack’, in J. Richardson, C. Gorbman

and C. Vernallis (eds), The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, 213-26,

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Gunning, T. (1986), The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-

Garde’, Wide Angle, 8 (3): 63-70.

Hames, P. ed. (1995), Dark Alchemy: The Films of Jan Švankmajer, Connecticut: Greenwood

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Keil, C. and D. Goldmark, eds. (2011), Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Studio-

Era Hollywood, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Klein, N. (1993). Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Cartoon, London and

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Lehman, C. (2007), American Animated Cartoons of the Vietnam Era, North Carolina:

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Merritt, R. (2005), ‘Lost on Pleasure Islands: Storytelling in Disney’s Silly Symphonies’,

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English Language Films, 215-24, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company.

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Pilling, J., ed. (1997), A Reader in Animation Studies, London: John Libbey.

Sandler, K. S., ed. (1998), Reading the Rabbit: Explorations in Warner Bros. Animation,

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Stabile, C. and M. Harrison, eds. (2003), Prime Time Animation: Television Animation and

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Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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Wells, P. (2009), ‘To Sonicity and Beyond! Gary Rydstrom and Quilting the Pixar Sound’,

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Sound Studies, 367-86, New York: Oxford University Press.

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12. Advertising and Public Service Films

Malcolm Cook

Animation and advertising have been entwined from the earliest days of moving images, and

every major animator and animation studio has contributed to films promoting goods,

services, and ideas. In the past animation studies has ignored or marginalised this central

activity, seeing it as detracting from animation as an art form. The importance of animation to

digital techniques and technologies, which are now pervasive in advertising and all moving

pictures, demands a reassessment of this position, and is supported by a new attention within

Film Studies to ‘useful cinema’, including ‘films that sell’ (Acland and Wasson 2011b;

Florin, de Klerk and Vonderau 2016). By looking again at key examples of animated

advertising, and consulting recent pioneering research in this area, we can recognise the way

each field shaped the expansion of the other. Vital qualities of animation were recognised and

developed for their suitability within advertising, including the animator’s control and

manipulation of the image, the subsequent transformation and ‘plasmatic’ nature of those

images, and the ability to bring to life and anthropomorphise inanimate objects. Animation

would not exist in the form we understand today without advertising. Much of this history

remains to be uncovered and many questions are still unanswered, indicating this as one of

the most exciting avenues for future animation research.

Advertising and Animation History

While animation is today characterised by a diversity of techniques, three methods have

dominated animation history and define it for most audiences: drawn or cel animation, stop-

motion animation, and computer animation. In each case, the earliest developments of these

techniques were bound up with advertising in a way that suggests animation was not simply a

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pre-existing tool adopted by advertisers, but rather its very definition and elaboration were

predicated on its promotional potential. There are countless examples of this, but three

formative moments, one for each technique, indicate this foundational relationship.

Advertising and selling underpin some of the very earliest steps towards drawn

animation. James Stuart Blackton is often cited as ‘the father of animation’ (Beck 2004: 12-

13) and in his first film in collaboration with the inventor and film pioneer Thomas Edison

the promotional impulse is prominent. Blackton Sketches, No. 1 (1896), also known as

Inventor Edison Sketched by World Artist, shows Blackton performing a lightning sketch on a

large sheet of paper (Musser 1994: 120-121). As Charles Musser (2016: 86) observes, all the

early Edison films should be considered a form of advertising because they promoted

Edison’s moving picture technologies and the Edison name, qualities that are evident in this

example. Furthermore, Blackton conspicuously displays his own name and that of his

employer, the New York World newspaper, ensuring both were publicised by the film. This

film is not animated in the sense we understand that term today, as it does not utilise

intermittent frame-by-frame construction, but given the significance of the lightning sketch to

animation history (See Crafton 1982; Cook 2013) this constitutes a nascent co-development

of drawn animation and filmed advertising in the earliest days of moving images.

While Blackton was innovating early drawn animation techniques in conjunction with

the promotion of his own and his employers’ names, British animator Arthur Melbourne-

Cooper’s Matches Appeal (dated as early as 1899 by some sources) provides an embryonic

demonstration of the use of stop-motion animated films to deliver a persuasive message

(Vries and Mul 2009). The film depicts a puppet made of matchsticks that, through stop-

motion animation, writes a message on the wall, encouraging viewers to donate one guinea to

buy matches for soldiers serving overseas. This very short film serves a public service

function of supporting troops and encouraging charitable donation. It also serves as a

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commercial stimulus: increasing the sponsor’s (Bryant & May Matches) sales and raising

brand awareness and loyalty by connecting the company to social altruism. At that time, the

stop-motion technique was a novelty that would have especially attracted the attention of the

spectator and made them receptive to the message of the film, but it also allowed the product

being promoted to come alive, a process that would be vital to later animated advertising.

While drawn and stop-motion animation emerged alongside the earliest moving

pictures, the third dominant animation technique appeared much later. As Tom Sito (2013)

has shown, computer graphics technology was developed within a number of contexts after

the Second World War and the promotion of products, services and brands became an

important component of that early computer animation, such as the relationship between John

Whitney and IBM in the 1960s (Stamp 2013).

The early history of Pixar provides a vivid case study of this mutual relationship

between computer animation and advertising, both because of the central role that company

has played in defining and popularising computer animation, but also because it demonstrates

the value of thinking beyond the animated film itself and considering the production and

exhibition contexts in which they appeared. It is well documented that Pixar produced a large

number of television commercials after their spin-off from Lucasfilm in 1986, promoting

household brands such as Tropicana, Listerine, and Lifesavers. Most popular histories of the

studio recognise the economic importance of this work in financially maintaining the studio

and advancing skills and infrastructure prior to the production of Toy Story (1995) (Paik and

Iwerks 2007: 64-68; Price 2008: 109-111). However, the studio has not given their

commercials the same status as other short films, which have been included as DVD extras

and released in standalone collections.19 This is typical of a prevailing deprecation of the role

advertising has played in other famous studios, such as Aardman and Halas & Batchelor,

where a simple art/commerce binary division has often been applied (Cook Forthcoming;

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Stewart 2016). The role of advertising in Pixar’s history is far more pervasive than such a

division allows.

Most early Pixar films had very little prospect of directly generating revenue, but

instead served to advertise and sell their other products and services. The ‘one-frame movie’

The Road to Point Reyes (1983), produced while the group was part of Lucasfilm, served to

demonstrate to George Lucas that computer generated images could be incorporated into

feature films at high resolution and, as such, promoted the company’s internal Computer

Division (Cook 2015). Early films The Adventures of André and Wally B. (1984) and Luxo Jr.

(1986) were designed to showcase the group’s expertise to SIGGRAPH, the major computer

graphics conference (Lasseter 2001). Equally, Luxo Jr. opens and closes with the original

Pixar logo that closely resembled the fascia of the Pixar computer hardware, which was the

company’s only commercial proposition at the time. This logo had a computer-generated

grey square with bevelled edges and a central concave circle creating complex variations in

computed shadows and highlights (see figure 12.1). The logo not only acted as product

placement, but was also an active demonstration of the lighting and shading techniques that

the computer could achieve, as was the film as a whole. Later shorts, including Tin Toy

(1988) and Knick Knack (1989), would similarly function as indirect advertisements for

Pixar’s Renderman software. These films would also court Hollywood studios and

advertisers, promoting the availability of Pixar’s talent for new projects. A purely film-based

approach might simply interpret such films as commercial entertainment, however the value

of the questions raised by the study of ‘useful cinema’ is evident here. It is necessary to take

into consideration how these films were commissioned, circulated, and exhibited to

understand their very different function, use, and economic value, where the film is not an

end product or principle profit generator (Elsaesser 2009: 23; Acland and Wasson 2011a: 1-7

Vonderau 2016: 4).

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 [insert figure 12.1 here]

Figure 12.1: The original Pixar logo, which resembles the company’s

hardware

The centrality of advertising to Pixar is evident in their successful and celebrated

feature films, in many of which television commercials become a prominent and recurrent

narrative feature. Beyond this explicit citation of advertising vernacular, a number of scholars

have noted the more persistent use of advertising strategies within Pixar’s aesthetic,

suggesting a substantial reassessment of the studio and its output is necessary in this light

(Gurevitch 2012, Herhuth 2017, Holliday 2017).

Advertising and the Emergence of Animation Studies

Given this close relationship between animation and advertising, landmark works of

animation studies necessarily acknowledged advertising to some degree. In his 1982 book

Before Mickey Donald Crafton (1982: 228-237) devoted several pages to silent-era European

advertising and instructional films, including relatively unknown figures who devoted their

career to these fields, such as Julius Pinschewer in Germany and Robert Collard in France,

also known as Lortac. However, this discussion was framed in terms of an art/commerce

binary wherein advertising subsidized aesthetic experiments by the likes of Walter Ruttmann

and Oskar Fischinger (Crafton 1982: 235). Writing in 1998 Paul Wells noted that ‘animation

is particularly appropriate to the needs of advertising’ (249n2) and described its capacity to

bring products to life and create product identity. Yet it is revealing that this insight was

relegated to an endnote, symptomatic of Wells’ primary goal of elevating animation to an

independent art form worthy of study in its own right. This was equally apparent in his

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discussion of Len Lye’s A Colour Box (1935), a landmark animated advertisement for the

British General Post Office. Wells dismissed the advertising message of this film as a ‘glib

coda’, distancing the aesthetic value of the film from its funding and distribution contexts.

Maureen Furniss, also in 1998, explored the influence of advertising on animation

history. Drawing on the work of Karl Cohen, she situated advertising’s influence as primarily

an economic and technological one, with 1940s television commercials innovating the low-

cost limited animation techniques that became typical for post-war television animation

(Furniss 2007: 142-144; Cohen 1992). In 1993 Norman M. Klein likewise offered an

ambivalent account of post-war animated ‘consumer graphics’, and he expressed amazement

at Tex Avery’s comfort in the ‘ulcerous’ advertising world (206, 216). Klein adopted an

elegiac tone as he saw the rise of this consumerist mode of animation contributing to the

death of the seven-minute theatrical cartoon. In each case, these pioneering animation

scholars recognised the significance of advertising within animation history, but saw this as

negative or tangential to animation as an art form. Recent research has started to recognise

that rather than being antagonistic, the mutual relationship between advertising and animation

has deeply shaped and defined each field. Fundamental qualities ascribed to animation,

including control, abstraction and figuration, transformation, and anthropomorphism, were

not simply utilised by advertisers, rather their identification and growth was a direct product

of their suitability for selling and promotion. Instead of being essential and universal, our

very definition of animation and its qualities emerged historically because of their use in

advertising.

Advertising and Recent Animation Theory

Crafton (1982: 11; 1979: 409-428) has established the importance within animation history of

the controlling influence of the animator, encapsulated in the pervasive recurring iconography

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of the ‘hand of the artist’. The intricate frame-by-frame construction typical of animation

techniques offers unprecedented control over the moving image, and this was undoubtedly

one of the reasons advertisers adopted animation. Michael Cowan has recently addressed this

central idea in relation to animated advertising in Germany in the 1920s. The control afforded

by animation was understood in practical terms of the novelty and plasticity of the image,

which could attract viewers and maintain design principles from marketing material in other

media or the product itself. However, Cowan (2016: 108) shows that control could also

operate at a psychological level, with practitioners intending that ‘“applied animation’ would

serve to control spectatorship at every level by capturing and directing attention, provoking

psychological reactions and stimulating acts of consumption through film’.

As Cowan demonstrates, the growth in advertising psychology expertise in Germany

in this period was intimately connected with the parallel growth in abstract animation from

Walter Ruttmann, Hans Richter, Lotte Reiniger, and Oskar Fischinger, amongst other

celebrated animators. Rather than being ‘compromises or opportunistic means of financing

the artists’ more “serious” experimental projects’, there was an affinity and mutually

beneficial influence between experimental animation and advertising psychology (Cowan

2013: 50-51). Both fields were looking to establish an essential or elemental form of visual

control that could appeal and communicate with spectators in immediate and affecting ways.

A central characteristic of animation, control through the hand of the artist, is here

inextricably bound up with advertising, as are a number of celebrated animation artists.

Cowan’s work on Walter Ruttmann’s advertising films also associates them with

another central area of animation theory, the balance between figuration and abstraction

(Cowan 2013). This division is evident in many accounts of animation and its specificity, for

example Furniss foregrounds a continuum between mimesis and abstraction, while Wells

makes these central to his theory of animation (Furniss 2007: 6; Wells 1998: 33-34,36).

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Through close analysis of Ruttmann’s animated advertising films Cowan indicates how ‘the

particular quality of these films lies in the way they seem to hover between absolute

formalism and denotative referentiality’ (2013: 53). This tension is again not simply a

product of aesthetic experimentation or choice, but is linked with the advertising psychology

of the time and the wider political, social, and cultural context of Germany in the 1920s and

1930s (Cowan 2013: 65).

The conflict between figuration and abstraction is also central to Vivian Sobchack’s

(2008) discussion of the animated line. For Sobchack the line is sufficient to define a work as

animation and distinguish it from photoreal cinema, because the line does not exist in the

latter (2008: 252). The line is two things at once, a liminal entity that is always in a state of

becoming, it is ‘both geometric base and figural superstructure’ (Sobchack 2008: 257).

Sobchack chooses to illustrate this general principle with a series of television advertisements

made by German animator Raimund Krumme for Hilton Hotels, transmitted originally in

2005-2006. In these advertisements, a horizontal line on the screen dynamically assumes

human shapes engaged with a range of imagery associated with travel: a hammock, a sand

castle, a sunset. Initially Sobchack discounts these films’ status as advertising: the qualities of

their lines are apparent ‘even if in the service of an advertising campaign’ (2008: 251). Yet

her discussion of the promotional message contained in the films indicates that it is no mere

coincidence that advertisements offer such an exemplary instance of a vital quality of

animation. The commercials are not intended simply to offer a rational promotion of Hilton’s

services, but to foster an emotional bond with the brand and ideals it hopes to encompass:

‘the Hilton ads momentarily relieve real-world existential conditions by offering up fantasies

of painless travel…and by presenting the visibly unbroken (if irregular) flow of the line itself’

(Sobchack 2008: 260). The duality of the line communicates the duality of the promotional

message. Like Cowan’s discussion of Ruttmann’s work, it would seem these animated

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qualities exist because of their advertising intentions, not despite them. Crucially it is not

simply the line that is important to Sobchack, as this exists in many forms of print

advertising, but the animated line and the quality of transformation or metamorphosis this

entails, which are also commonly seen as defining animation.

Similar uses of transformation and metamorphosis can be seen in many other

advertisements, and not necessarily those dependent upon the animated line. Numerous stop-

motion advertisements by British studio Aardman Animations use clay or plasticine to enact

metamorphoses from abstract, amorphous materials to figurative representations. In

Fairground (1991), Balloon (1991), and Rollercoaster (1994) the chocolate of a Cadbury’s

Crunchie bar transforms into a series of vibrant scenes, such as a dog chasing its tail or Tiller

girls dancing, that communicate the unrestrained joy and freedom of the ‘Friday Feeling’ the

confectionary hopes to sell. Transformation allows a shift from the rational benefits of a

product to its emotional engagement. As with other examples discussed here qualities often

seen as essential and defining of animation, in this case transformation or metamorphosis,

become central to films’ advertising function.

These examples from Aardman of transformation and metamorphosis also encompass

the final recurring quality of animation addressed in this chapter, anthropomorphism. The

attribution of human characteristics to animals or objects is common in animation, along with

the inverse zoomorphism in which animal characteristics are attributed to humans. As Paul

Wells suggests, it might be argued that anthropomorphism is an ‘essential component of the

language of animation’ (2009: 2). Anthropomorphism has commonly been utilised by

advertisers, and its association with animation is inextricably bound up with that relationship.

The basic appeal of anthropomorphism for advertisers is readily apparent as it provides a way

to give motion and life to an inanimate product (thereby giving it a personality) and associate

it with less tangible values that will appeal to consumers at an emotional level. As such

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anthropomorphism provides an extension of the practice of creating brand mascots or

spokespersons for products, in which the product itself is given a personality rather than

simply represented by one (Dotz and Husain 2015).

Several scholars have commented on this basic practical function of

anthropomorphism and noted its more complex political implications. Both Esther Leslie and

Michael Cowan raise Karl Marx’s description of commodity fetishism and link it to

animation and the anthropomorphism of inanimate objects (Leslie 2002: 6-9; Cowan 2016:

99). Marx’s theory suggests that within capitalism commodities seemingly take on an

independent life of their own, while workers are alienated from their labour and

dehumanised: ‘humans become things; things become human’ (Leslie 2002: 7). Leslie and

Cowan discuss advertisements from Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to illustrate this, but

this tendency is evident in a wide range of examples, including the Melbourne-Cooper, Pixar,

and Aardman films already discussed. Another Aardman advertisement, Conveyor Belt

(1995) for the Polo brand of confectionary, is especially apt in highlighting this quality. The

advertisement is set in a factory and shows a long line of anthropomorphised Polo sweets

hopping along a conveyor belt in a childlike manner. Importantly, in contrast to these ‘living’

Polos, there are no human workers seen in this factory, only automated machines that operate

in a regimented and systematic fashion. In short, this advertisement shows the commodity has

gained independent agency and human personality, while the work of production has been

dehumanised. This exemplifies the widespread use of anthropomorphism within advertising

to give a sense of life and personality to products and its encapsulation of the commodity

fetish, but it might also be taken as a reflection on animation. Animation is itself a product in

which inanimate objects take on movement, life, and an apparent independent agency, while

the labour involved in their production, often in factory-like settings, is increasingly hidden

or automated.

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Conclusion

Animation and advertising are inextricably linked historically and conceptually. The earliest

developments of all the major techniques and technologies were bound up with the use of

animation for advertising. This suggests that these techniques, and the very definitions of

animation they produced, were shaped by being put to use for promotional ends. It is fitting,

therefore, that the emerging scholarship on animated advertising to date should centre on

qualities that have been considered central to animation: control, abstraction and figuration,

transformation, and anthropomorphism. Yet there remain many unresearched paths and many

unanswered questions to this reciprocal relationship.

In his celebrated and often cited account of animation’s specific qualities, Russian

filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein puts forward the neologism ‘plasmatic’ to describe

the appeal of animation as ‘a rejection of once-and-forever allotted form, freedom from

ossification, the ability to dynamically assume any form’ (1986: 21). While commonly

treated as simply a synonym for transformation, Eisenstein’s term encompasses more than the

shape shifting of one form into another. Rather, it is a rejection of categorisation and

boundaries between things, and it describes anything that has a simultaneous duality or

plurality. Transformation, anthropomorphism, and the dualities of the drawn line are not

synonyms of the plasmatic but are individual examples of this more encompassing quality of

the plasmatic. Sobchack acknowledges this by citing Eisenstein when discussing the duality

of the line as both graphic abstraction and figurative representation (2008: 253). Equally,

Eisenstein discusses the role of anthropomorphism in his description of Mickey Mouse, who

rarely transforms but is nevertheless plasmatic because ‘he is both human, and a mouse…this

unity is not dynamic’ (1986: 96n59).

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 This serves as further evidence that the qualities of animation that advertisers have

embraced are precisely those that have been seen as characteristic or essential to defining

animation by many commentators. Beyond this, however, Eisenstein’s comments are

especially important at this point because of the relationship he sees the plasmatic having

with capitalism. He writes that Disney’s animation, as the exemplar of the plasmatic,

‘bestows precisely this upon his viewer, precisely obliviousness, an instant of complete and

total release from everything connected with the suffering caused by the social conditions of

the social order of the largest capitalist government’ (Eisenstein et al. 1986: 8). For Eisenstein

the plasmatic qualities of animation offer a respite from the rationalising and categorising

imperatives of capitalism. Yet in this brief overview we have seen those same qualities put to

work for advertising, one of the engines of capitalism. Those plasmatic qualities were defined

as central to animation because it expanded in conjunction with advertising. There remains a

great deal more work to be done to unpick this contradiction, to reassess the role of

advertising in the histories of well-known animators and studios, and to discover the parallel

industry of animation advertising production that is currently afforded no place in canonical

histories.

128
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13. Political Animation and Propaganda

Eric Herhuth

Political activity arises from living with others. It has an aesthetic dimension that includes

appeals to the senses, to pleasure, and to the non-instrumental qualities found in art and

recreation. How this dimension is understood varies across historical and cultural contexts.

Classical Greek philosophy distinguished rhetoric, the art of persuasion, from philosophy, the

love of wisdom and pursuit of truth. This divide presented a fundamental dilemma for

political actors: should service to their community be realized through rhetoric or philosophy,

should it be grounded in persuasion or truth? In The Republic, Plato argues for philosophy but

this does not preclude his usage of poetic devices such as the allegory of the cave, which

famously aligns animation (shadow puppets at least) with illusion, ignorance, and captivity.

Likewise, Plato’s argument for basing politics in philosophy includes concern for the

capacity of poetry and music to disrupt social order and generate enthusiasm that can be

manipulated for political purposes.

Contemporary animation is no less political. Even though today’s arguments about

aesthetics and politics take place on different terrain, there remain concerns that aesthetic

experience, that taste and sensorial pleasure, is thoroughly organized by structures of power.

This implies that the experience of liking/disliking an animated film is social. It presupposes

the presence of others who may judge the film differently or similarly. Spectator experience

emerges through a complex intersection of identities (race, class, occupation, gender,

sexuality, etc.) each of which has specific meaning and value in a given social order. And

animation itself, whether created by independent artists, a state government or transnational

media company or some combination of these, likewise emerges through a matrix of

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intentions, practices, beliefs, and materials. Social order and political power organize these

complex fields.

To explore this complexity, this chapter follows two intersecting lines of inquiry: 1)

the animation of politics and 2) the politics of animation. The former refers to animated films,

media, and performances that do politics, that support a position or make an argument that

intervenes in a political debate or social crisis. The latter refers to the debates, issues,

ideological differences, and conflicts that exist within animation production, consumption

and spectatorship. For brevity, I will restrict my comments to animation that directly engages

politics and that remains prevalent today—namely, caricature, cartoons, satire, and

propaganda. This focus is distinctly modern in that it primarily considers nation-state politics,

industrial media, and cel animation, which means the long history of puppets and politics has

been omitted.20

The historical frame of this essay is a reminder of the situatedness of the animation

scholar. A key question for those studying animation is to ask how their political

commitments inform their analyses. Analysis takes place within historical contexts shaped by

political events and by the ideas and concepts in circulation. When organized into a structure

such concepts constitute a theory or critical framework that can guide research questions and

analysis. My approach draws upon the history of dialectical theory in that it considers the

animation of politics and the politics of animation. By dialectical I do not mean that these two

considerations lead to a synthesis, but that they facilitate shifting one’s view of a problem or

concept to expose different sets of inconsistencies and contradictions that are not necessarily

resolvable. These include animation’s contradictory aesthetic expressions, its relation to

discursive power (systems of symbols, the social imaginary), and its relation to institutional

power (the State/media companies) in production and reception.

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Caricature and Political Cartoons

Political animation has historical roots in many art forms, including theatre and literature, but

the graphic arts of caricature and cartooning provide an especially rich heritage. Caricature

can arguably be found in ancient cave drawings, but historians often trace the first political

cartoon back to 1360 B.C. in Egypt, and there is a long history across many cultures of using

zoomorphic images to marshal insults and discredit opponents in political disputes (Keane

2008). While ‘caricature’ is not medium specific, ‘cartoon’ refers to drawing on paper and is

the more recent term. In the modern era of political cartoons, early significant artists include

William Hogarth (1697–1764) in England, Francisco Goya (1746–1828) in Spain, Honoré

Daumier (1808–1879) in France, and Thomas Nast (1840-1902) in the United States. There is

also a strong correlation between the rise of democracy, with its commitment to free

expression, and the expansion of political cartoons (Keane 2008: 853-4). Such political and

artistic developments function in concert with the invention and development of printing

technology and contribute to the growth of political media, which begins to include animated

films around the turn of the Twentieth Century.

In nineteenth-century France, caricature was commonly used to critique bourgeois

society and political elites and featured prominently in illustrated magazines. By the

beginning of the Twentieth Century this custom had evolved in response to political and

technological changes. During this period the graphic artist Emile Cohl transitioned from

political caricaturist to comic strip artist and then to animated filmmaker (Crafton 1990).

Cohl’s case, recounted by Donald Crafton, demonstrates how political, technological, and

artistic developments intersect within a person and a historical period. Cohl’s evolution helps

explain how the oppositional politics of caricature remain part of the legacy of animated

cartoons that ridicule and parody everyday life.

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 In the US, the longest-running scripted primetime TV series, The Simpsons, is an

animated satire famous for irreverence and caricature aesthetics, including the occasional

celebrity guest. Prior to The Simpsons and the glut of adult, satirical animation programming

it inspired, the oppositional politics of caricature were evident in the work of the Warner

Bros. animators of the 1930s and 1940s. Many of these animators used caricature to criticize

Hollywood and its iconic star system and to expose the second-class status of animators

working within the entertainment industry. Caricature remained a tool for aggression and

criticism; it enabled animators to gain fictional control over their enemies by rendering them

as two-dimensional caricatures, at once highly recognizable and grossly disfigured (Crafton

1993: 227).

This association between caricature and anti-elitism can also be traced back to

nineteenth-century illustrated magazines in the US which employed ‘artist-reporters’ or

‘pictorial journalists’ who commonly combined art and politics in an effort to serve and

protect average citizens. This approach is famously represented by Thomas Nast’s editorial

caricatures. But caricature aesthetics are not restricted to anti-elitist, oppositional politics.

Even in Nast’s work caricatures of racial and ethnic minorities were commonplace and the

lasting impacts of these prove that caricature aesthetics can be incredibly harmful. This is

evident in the vestigial presence of blackface minstrelsy in contemporary American

commercial animation (see Sammond 2015, reprinted in this volume).

The caricature’s political capacity exists alongside its amusing incongruity in that it

simultaneously presents a person’s iconic traits and exaggerates them to such an extent that it

dissolves the sanctification of the representational image. The image remains representational

—it effectively refers to a person—but it breaks with the norms of representation. This makes

the image and its referent more available to critique, play, but also disrespect. As Freud

posited, the caricatured image of a person of high status degrades that status and renders that

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person more vulnerable to critique and ridicule (Freud 1905: 144). Caricatures of persons of

low status affirm or exacerbate their vulnerability. This degradation effect can be approached

through different questions. Are caricatures and cartoon aesthetics being used to render elites

vulnerable to critique, or are they used to marshal stereotypes and prejudices against

oppressed/marginalized groups? And how exactly do these biases, prejudices, and stereotypes

inform animation production and reception? Is there evidence of discrimination or political

activity within the studio? Is reception influenced by a longer history of artistic/entertainment

conventions?

Propaganda: The Intersection of Discursive and Institutional Power

Animated propaganda is a common source for caricatures, stereotypes, and political satire.

The twentieth century, the age of cinema, was rife with global conflicts between nation-states

and propaganda was crucial to mobilizing populations and promoting competing ideals and

values during times of war. Many well-known animators active during the first half of the

twentieth century produced propaganda using a variety of animation techniques. Albert E.

Smith and James Stuart Blackton, for instance, made some of the earliest propaganda films in

the United States during the Spanish-American War. Reportedly, The Battle of Manila Bay

(1898) was filmed in a bathtub and The Battle of Santiago Bay (1898) was filmed using

photographic cut-outs of battleships and cigarette smoke to simulate smoke from canon fire

(Dewey 2016: 60-1). Winsor McCay’s The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918) is an early

animated documentary and propaganda piece, intended to promote the US’s entry into World

War I, that demonstrates the dramatic capacity of cel animation. Propaganda utilizes all

media forms of course, but as many governments and artists learned, cel animation and

cartoon aesthetics were particularly effective at communicating factual, instructional content,

comedic and dramatic scenarios, and satirical, disparaging attacks. During World War II,

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many governments had established departments of propaganda that utilized animation or

maintained working relations with animation studios. The Soviet Union, for example,

established its Department of Agitation and Propaganda (agitprop) in the early 1920s.

Imperial Japan relied on its Propaganda Department for animated propaganda shortly before

and during World War II. And Nazi Germany developed its own German Animation

Company, although it produced fewer animated propaganda films than the USSR or United

States (Bendazzi 2015: 148). Animated propaganda in the US was produced commercially,

but government contracts with animation studios were common and these effectively kept the

Disney animation studio running during the war years. Likewise, British animation

companies were contracted by the British Ministry of Information (MOI) to make

propaganda.

As a media category, ‘propaganda’ is a challenging term because its meaning has

changed over time and vernacular usage is inconsistent. The term originates from the Latin

word propagare which means to propagate, and its institutional history began when the

Catholic Church created a Congregation for Propagating the Faith in 1622. The subsequent

modernization and secularization of the term has resulted in a series of pejorative

connotations around media designed to spread ideals and values by non-rational or emotional

means. Recent history has demonstrated that messages communicated through animated,

audiovisual media, and that employ culturally specific symbols, narratives, and artistic

conventions (discursive power), are likely to be compelling and fascinating despite a lack of

rationality. From the beginning of the twentieth century onwards, propaganda has become

more pervasive and intensive through the industrialization of media production under the

auspices of private capital/state funding (institutional power). It is clear from the growth of

advertising and public relations that creating media that embody and promote ideals and

values can be used to mobilize all kinds of groups, whether voters, consumers, employees, or

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students. The pejorative connotations of the term derive from this condition and they gesture

toward broad social problems. Large-scale propaganda campaigns diminish the amount of

media space for truth-oriented content and they place a burden on individuals to exercise

critical analysis. Propaganda’s primary function is to advance a political cause. Its

commitment to truth is negligible, which is why it often does not contribute to politics as

directly as it purports. Propaganda injects a dose of distortion into a media environment

which, even if helpful in the short term, can perpetuate confusion and harmful myths in the

long term.

In practice, there are at least two basic kinds of propaganda: supporting propaganda,

which embodies specific ideals and contributes to realizing them; and undermining

propaganda, which embodies specific ideals but does not contribute to realizing them

(Stanley 2015: 53). Distinguishing between supporting and undermining propaganda is often

a matter of analysis and argument. Analysing animated propaganda might begin by following

a series of inquiries. First, there is the sometimes difficult process of distinguishing

propaganda from media that happen to have propagandistic elements. Most studies of

propaganda begin by outlining parameters (based on region, historical period, medium,

political system, etc.) and by distinguishing between propaganda and media that have latent

ideological content. Advertising and news media, for instance, do promote values, but in

many cases this promotion is understood as secondary to the primary function of selling a

product or reporting facts. Second, there is the process of identifying the communities, ideals,

and values involved, and then determining if the propaganda really contributes to realizing

those values and ideals. This procedure may not be as straightforward as it sounds.

Consider, for example, the Oscar-winning Disney production Der Fuehrer’s Face

(1943). This cartoon is a famous example of American anti-Nazi propaganda created using

cel animation and composed in the Disney style. As was common to war propaganda, the

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short’s comedy and plasmatic possibility provided comedic relief to audiences suffering from

conditions of war (Sharm 2009: 76-7). But Der Fuehrer’s Face also presents a degradation

effect. The short consists of an extended dream sequence in which Donald Duck is subjected

to the horrors of a hyperbolic totalitarian society. By depicting the restrictions of living under

totalitarianism, the film supports American ideals of freedom. By caricaturing Nazis and

Hitler, it degrades the American enemy, giving confidence to American soldiers and

civilians. Granted, it is equally true that the cartoon trivializes the horrors of the Nazi regime

and creates a safe distance from that reality, and it does not provide many historical facts for

political deliberation. One might argue that it supports the defence of American democracy,

and therefore is an instance of supporting propaganda, but it is not in itself the most

democratic form of expression since it dismisses and disrespects the Nazi perspective. And

that seems entirely acceptable given the Nazi threat at the time and their crimes against

humanity.

The complication for democratic society is that freedom of expression protects

propaganda, but propaganda is rarely conducive to reasonable, respectful political debate

(Stanley 2015: 94). In this sense, propaganda tactics are not politically beneficial in

democratic processes in which one hopes to be treated reasonably by a political opponent and

may need to work with that opponent in the future. Der Fuehrer’s Face’s promotion of

American values to American audiences is not part of a democratic process but demonstrates

the one-sidedness and disinterest in other perspectives that is common to wartime

propaganda. It also highlights the intersection of commercial and political interests facilitated

by nationalism. Commercially produced animated propaganda can be both profitable and

political through its use of culturally specific techniques and aesthetics. This intersection was

common in American animation during World War II (Shull and Wilt 1987), and earlier

examples can be found in British animated films from World War I (Ward 2003 and 2005).

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 The historical and cultural specificity of animated propaganda provides opportunities

to investigate the symbols and associations that constitute the social imaginary that

propagandists and audiences draw upon.21 For example, World War II propaganda films

feature distinct aesthetic strategies that relied on cultural traditions and government-

coordinated media campaigns. Nazi propaganda tended to utilize live-action newsreel footage

more than staged or animated film, and this correlated with their totalitarian ideology which

sought to control reality (Kracauer 1942). Cel animation was common in American and

Japanese propaganda from World War II and both included instances of speciesism: when

racial/ethnic identities are translated into human and nonhuman animal relations. Speciesist

depictions are regularly used to dehumanize an opponent in order to justify military action.

Thomas LaMarre observes, however, that although Japanese and American World War II

animations give representation to the racialized imaginaries of both countries, these

imaginaries varied and led to different deployments. American wartime animation commonly

depicted Japanese characters as savage animals. Japanese wartime animation did not depict

Americans as animals, but as ‘failed human beings, as demons, ogres, or fiends’ (LaMarre

2008: 76). When Japanese animation did deploy speciesism, it translated the identities of

other Asian cultures into ‘cute, friendly, and accommodating’ animal characters (LaMarre

2008: 78 and 2010). These depictions were hardly innocent as they correlated with Imperial

Japan’s hierarchical vision of its colonies. The depictions suggest a significant difference

between Asian colony and American enemy in the Japanese imagination at the time. These

different usages of speciesist imagery indicate how racial/ethnic associations and zoomorphic

depictions have distinct patterns of circulation and meaning. It is precisely these patterns and

traditional associations that propaganda seeks to invoke and possibly redeploy.

LaMarre, like many media scholars, bolsters his analysis of aesthetic and symbolic

elements with an analysis of political economy, which considers the economic and political

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institutions and relations involved in the production of media. This creates a fuller picture of

an animation’s ideals, values, and political dynamics. Consider, for instance, the first British

animated feature film Animal Farm (Halas and Batchelor, 1954), an adaptation of George

Orwell’s novella published in 1945 which critiques the rise of Stalinism in the Soviet Union

through an allegory in which animals on a farm overthrow their human master only to be later

subjugated by the farm’s pigs. The film was covertly funded by the American Central

Intelligence Agency (CIA) through American producer Louis de Rochemont. Although

removed by several layers, the CIA monitored the production and insisted on changes when

they thought it necessary (Leab 2005: 238-41). The film’s production speaks to the

ideological alliance between the US and Britain and it demonstrates how state power can

operate through commercial channels.

In general, state-produced propaganda, such as Soviet agitprop, differs from

commercially-produced propaganda, such as that in the US, at the level of animator

autonomy. The simple formulation is that in a liberal democratic society non-governmental

entities are free to produce whatever they want. Despite the chaos of this freedom, ideology,

or a shared system of ideas, is reproduced and gains an organic appearance because there are,

in theory, no top-down, restrictions over media production (hence, the significance of Animal

Farm as a counter example). In modern democracy, media power is often described as a

means for engineering or manufacturing consent because it is through media that ideas are

voluntarily shared and affirmed. In an authoritarian state in which the government controls

media production, there is a straightforward acknowledgment of top-down ideological

programmes. In these cases, it is usually more interesting to analyse the continued creation of

subversive media and subversive interpretations of media. The general point here is that

closer examinations often reveal case-specific negotiations between state power and

commercial power and between individual actors and the systems within which they operate.

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Conclusion: Modernism and Critical Theory

The early twentieth century was a formative period for animated propaganda, but at the same

time, animation more broadly defined attracted many modernist artists, especially for its

capacity to resist and trouble representation. Like the degrading effect of caricature, the

animated line can disrupt and resist representational and realistic aesthetics. In the early

twentieth century, these aesthetics were maligned for concealing class conflicts, inequality,

and the reality of political, social, and technological changes—not unlike commodities that

do not disclose how they are made or which groups benefit the most from their production.

Individual artists and movements (e.g. Dadaism, Futurism, Soviet constructivism, and

Surrealism among others) turned to animation techniques for different reasons. But for many

of these artists, animation techniques had a politics to them, whether it was challenging

conventions of representational, perspectival painting or experimenting with the possible

combinations of photography and motion or using cartoons to parody or critique ideological

positions (Leslie 2004). These techniques facilitated aesthetic responses to modernity,

specifically the shocks, fragmentation, and alienation associated with the industrialization of

labour, the rationalization of time, increasing urbanization, the growth of capitalism, and

technological changes in media and transportation. This legacy persists in animation forms

that align the subversion of representational/perceptual norms with the subversion of social

and political norms. This legacy counters the valuation of accurate iconic representation—

that the image resembles the person or thing to which it refers. As many animation theorists

point out, the further removed from recognizable reality a cartoon becomes, the less likely it

is to be judged seriously (Wells 2002: 108). This can be useful for artists seeking to evade

censorship and/or deliver biting criticism.

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 In dialogue with the critical work of artists, theorists studying the political

consequences of cinema and mass media developed new methodologies during the twentieth

century. Scholarship produced during the 1930s by theorists associated with the Institute for

Social Research at the Goethe University Frankfurt (also known as the Frankfurt School)

analysed popular culture for the purposes of understanding deep political problems within

societies. In a well-known argument, Walter Benjamin, writing in the 1930s, suggested that

cartoons such as Mickey Mouse facilitated collective laughter and fantasy as a kind of

therapy or expression of playful possibility that answered the conditions of modernity.

Theodor Adorno countered that Disney cartoons merely present the violence and mutilation

of modern life in a humorous, seemingly benign form (Hansen 1993, 2012). The shadow of

these oppositional claims persists today in that cartoons still tend to express possibility and

metaphysical relief, but also violence, futility, and industrial rationalization. Such dialectical

readings of cartoons and animation find their fullest articulation in Sergei Eisenstein’s

writings from the 1940s, but they remain common and typically highlight competing

expressions of life and death, movement and stasis, and freedom and constraint. Such

expressions have purchase on a host of political issues ranging from hierarchical valuations

of life (Chen 2012) to the alienation of labour (Leslie 2013).

Animation labour has been a consistent topic for critical study given political

concerns over exploitation and discrimination and the capacity for cartoon aesthetics to

conceal the conditions of their production. Concerns range historically from the industrial era

to today’s global, digital production environment, and they range from studies of gender-

based discrimination to studies of the precarious conditions of international workers.

Although labour issues are beyond the scope of this chapter, they are central to understanding

the history of media conglomerates, globalization, and digital infrastructure. Within the last

twenty-five years, digital media practices have blurred the lines between consumer, viewer,

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user, and producer, and raised new questions about animation labour and politics. This

includes the categorization of fan activity and how it serves/complicates the interests of

powerful media companies. The pervasiveness of animation in today’s media environment

has shaped politics quite broadly through the continued use of caricature, cartoons, satire, and

propaganda, and in quotidian ways through the expansion of digital tools and the use of

animated computer graphics to enhance just about everything—from local news to the

websites of political organizations. Understanding these developments and intervening in

them requires critical inquiry into the discursive and institutional power of animation.

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References

Bendazzi, G. (2016), Animation: A World History, Vol. 1, Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis.

Crafton, D. (1990), Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press.

Crafton, D. (1993), ‘The View from Termite Terrace: Caricature and Parody in Warner Bros

Animation’, Film History 5 (2): 204–230.

Dewey, D. (2016), Buccaneer: James Stuart Blackton and the Birth of American Movies,

Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.

Eisenstein, S. (2011), Sergei Eisenstein: Disney, O. Bulgakowa and D. Hochmuth, eds.

Trans. D. Condren, Berlin: Potemkin Press.

Freud, S. (1905), Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, SigmundFreud.net.

https://docs.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=http://www.sigmundfreud.net/jokes-

and-their-relation-to-the-unconscious.pdf (accessed 21 February 2018).

Hansen, M.B. (1993), ‘Of Mice and Ducks: Benjamin and Adorno on Disney’, The South

Atlantic Quarterly, 92(1): 27-61.

Hansen, M.B. (2012), Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and

Theodor W. Adorno, Berkley: University of California Press.

Herhuth, E. (2015), ‘The Politics of Animation and the Animation of Politics’, Animation: an

interdisciplinary journal, 11(1): 4-22.

Keane, D. (2008), ‘Cartoon Violence and Freedom of Expression’, Human Rights Quarterly,

30(4): 845-875.

Kracauer, S. (1942), Propaganda and the Nazi War Film, Ann Arbor, MI: Edwards Brothers,

Inc.

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Lash, S. and C. Lury (2007), Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things, Cambridge:

Polity Press.

LaMarre, T. (2008), ‘Speciesism, Part I: Translating Races into Animals in Wartime

Animation’, Mechademia, (3): 75-95.

LaMarre, T. (2010), ‘Speciesism, Part II: Tezuka Osamu and the Multispecies Ideal’,

Mechademia, (5): 51-85.

Leab, D.J. (2005), ‘Animators and Animals: John Halas, Joy Batchelor, and George Orwell’s

Animal Farm’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 25(2): 231-149.

Leslie, E. (2004), Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde,

New York: Verso.

Leslie, E. (2013), ‘Animation’s Petrified Unrest’, in S. Buchan (ed.), Pervasive Animation,

New York: Routledge.

Sammond, N. (2015), Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American

Animation, Durham: Duke University Press.

Sharm, R. (2009), ‘Drawn-Out Battles: Exploring War-Related Messages in Animated

Cartoons’, in P.M. Haridakis, B.S. Hugenberg, and S.T. Wearden (eds.), War and the

Media: Essays on News Reporting, Propaganda and Popular Culture, 75-89,

Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc.

Shull, M.S. and D.E. Wilt (1987), Doing Their Bit: Wartime American Animated Short Films,

1939-1945, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc.

Stanley, J. (2015), How Propaganda Works, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Ward, P. (2003), ‘British Animated Propaganda Cartoons of the First World War: Issues of

Topicality’, Animation Journal, (11): 65-83.

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Ward, P. (2005), ‘Distribution and Trade Press Strategies for British Animated Propaganda

Cartoons of the First World War Era’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and

Television, 25(2): 289-201.

Wells, P. (2002), Animation and America, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

148
TV Animation & Genre

Nichola Dobson

‘[G]eneral audiences have only been exposed to one type of animation, that of popular, funny

and usually American, cartoons, as if there were only “pop” music and no other kind.’ (Halas

in Langer 1997: 149)

As the section of this book in which this chapter appears indicates, animation can refer to a

variety of forms, practices and formats. This multifariousness of animation extends also to

content and subject matter. The quote from animator John Halas above implies, however, that

the US cartoon format has come to dominate the perception of animation. This is problematic

not only for those who want to produce and market animation that falls outside of this

category, but also presents challenges for theorising animation genre. By exploring the extent

to which the cartoon continues to dominate the Western TV landscape, this chapter suggests

that there is, in fact, a much wider variety of animation television genres than Halas’ quote,

and, arguably, popular perception, would first suggest.

Animated TV

Steve Neale (2001: 3) argues that genre has a ‘multi-dimensional’ function, in that it can

categorise and group similar work for creation and marketing and also for analysis. This

categorisation can come from the institutions which created the work, the theorists who

analyse the work, and from the systems of understanding which audiences use to differentiate

the work from other genres and from texts within the same genre. Each genre has a set of

recognisable characteristics that enable categorisation; these are repeated and reinforced

through what Altman (1999) refers to as ‘cycles’ and can be seen in patterns in TV history.

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Cycles are not static or temporally discrete and new elements can change the genre to create

new ones, or old ones can come back into favour (Altman uses the example of adding music

to comedy to create the musical comedy).

As Halas suggests in the above quote, the Hollywood cartoon dominated the creation,

and thus the industrial development, of the animation TV series and thus came to shape the

audience’s ‘system of expectations’ that they bring to each animated ‘text’ (Neale 1990: 46).

The history of animation, and in particular animation on American television, reinforces

rather than challenges any expectations and the mainstream continues to present animation

which is broadly categorised and thus understood as ‘cartoon.’ The aesthetic of the cartoon,

derived from the comic strip, remains commonplace and adds to assumptions of generic

uniformity. Though the range of genres available within the animated form is as vast as that

in live action (TV and cinema), television is dominated by animated comedy, though within

comedy this can take the structural form of the short gag sketch and serialised, sitcom

formats. While each of these forms have different characteristics within them, they all fall

under the generic dominant of comedy; they are funny and are intended to make audiences

laugh (Neale 1990). This dominance is why it is easy to think of all of animated TV as

comedy without perhaps considering that there might be variation within the genre, even

while animation is used, for example, to satirise or comment on other aspects of genre. Paul

Wells argues that ‘the animated form inherently embraced the self-figurative, self-reflexive,

self-enunciating characteristics’ (2002: 110) seen in so-called postmodern texts. This self-

reflexivity is evident in many animated TV series particularly from the early 2000s, such as

Family Guy (1999-).22

Comedy’s dominance of TV animation can be traced through the birth of TV in the

US which saw a need to fill the schedule with material for younger viewers, as well as a

family audience, gathered around one focal point.23 This was initially the re-packaged work

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from the major studios of animation’s Golden Age such as MGM and Warner Bros., as well

as Walt Disney. Many of these short films had their origins in the comic strip, and the

comedic visual gags became a mainstay for the fledgling medium, and with it, the generic

dominance of animated comedy on television.

As the technology of television broadcasting improved and the market expanded,

more content was required and networks turned to production companies which were already

well-versed in comedy, such as the newly formed Hanna-Barbera. The studio grew out of

William Hanna and Joseph Barbera’s work together at MGM, notably the Tom and Jerry

series (1940-58). They began creating more narrative comedy in a serialised form, which was

structured around the requirements of advertising sponsors on television. This along with the

new form of the sitcom in live action saw the creation of the animated sitcom, or anicom

(Dobson 2003, 2009), in 1960. This genre of animation would dictate the course of TV

animation for decades to come.

The anicom adopts the narrative strategies of the live action television sitcom

(originally based on radio comedies) conforming to narrative space, structure and character

groupings, but capitalises on the particularities of the language of animation to produce

something distinct. If the animated form highlights what Wells (1998, 2002) refers to as its

‘animatedness’ by defying physical laws and using narrative strategies such as

metamorphosis,24 we note their difference from live action, even in something as simple as

series featuring characters who never age, such as Bart, Lisa and Maggie in The Simpsons.

The first anicom, Hanna-Barbera’s The Flintstones (1960-66) was consciously

modelled on live action counterparts, such as The Honeymooners (1955-56), in order to

appeal to the same audience. The series was a comedic portrayal of 1950s married life, but in

a Stone Age setting complete with jokes on gender roles and relationships. The show thus

fulfilled what Neale (1990) and Todorov (1981) describe as genre’s ‘verisimilitude’; that is,

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the way it conforms to audience expectations of a particular genre, which in this case is a

sitcom about working class family life. This successful series set a precedent for the

development of the anicom genre which flourished in the 1960s, declined in the 1970s and

1980s, but by the 1990s cycled back to immense success with The Simpsons, which is

currently airing its 29th season.

The Hanna-Barbera anicoms were made with an adult audience in mind, in terms of

themes, and this was signalled to the audience by its prime time (early evening) scheduling.

Their later shows such as The Jetsons (1962-63), would also follow this pattern, but as the

television landscape altered and children were being increasingly catered to as a separate

audience group, their subsequent shows moved away from adult comedy - comedy that dealt

with socio-cultural or political themes - and were no longer scheduled in prime time. The

only exception to this was in their last anicom, Wait ‘til your Father Gets Home (1972-74),

which featured storylines about communism and increasing paranoia in the US as well as one

on pregnancy in later life (which hinted at abortion), whereas their series aimed for children

such as The Magilla Gorilla Show (1964-6) and The Atom Ant/Secret Squirrel Show (1965-

6) included more slapstick humour, anthropomorphism and less socio-political commentary.

Animation on television was increasingly seen throughout the 1960s and 1970s as

something for children and scheduled accordingly with the ratings for the primetime anicom

reducing and the market for children’s television increasing. In fact there were no primetime

anicoms on US TV between 1974 and 1989. While the animation that was broadcast was

industrially categorised for children and broadly fell within the catchall TV cartoon genre,

there was much diversity. In Hanna-Barbera’s output alone, there was still an echo of the live

action sitcom genre, albeit in a comedic, and curiously satirical fashion with the development

of the detective action series seen in Josie and The Pussycats (1970), Scooby Doo Where are

You? (1969-70), Captain Caveman (1977-80) (often with musical interludes), the boys’

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adventure series in Jonny Quest (1964-65) and sci-fi adventures with Birdman and the

Galaxy Trio (1967-69) and Space Ghost (1966-68). This diversity was replicated by other

studios, notably Filmation, with sci-fi and adventure shows such as Rod Rocket (1963), The

New Adventures of Superman (1966-70), Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1967-69) and

musical comedy in The Archies (1968-69). These shows reflected the popular genres in live

action of comedy, sci-fi and musical comedy, such as The Partridge Family (1970-4), in TV

and cinema as well as broader popular culture such as comic books and pop music. The

variation within TV animation has not readily been acknowledged by animation scholarship,

arguably because it was aimed at children and therefore deemed less worthy of attention.

Television animation remained primarily considered ‘just for kids’ until the late 1980s

when both television and cinematic feature animation began to target more adult audiences

with Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1987) in the cinema and The Simpsons (1989-) on

television. This also coincided with the launch of MTV in 1981 (and Channel 4 in the UK,

see Kitson 2008) which provided a platform for short experimental animation in different

forms beyond the traditional 2D cel animated work commonly seen on TV. Many of these

animators, like Bill Plympton and Mike Judge, had been brought up with Saturday morning

TV animation and were now starting to work in a newly revitalised industry with new

opportunities for interesting and subversive work on cable and the new FOX network, all

open to new content. This also led to a new genre cycle of anicom oriented at both the

primetime family and adult audience and scheduled in early and late evening time slots,

including King of the Hill (1997-2010), Family Guy (1999-), South Park (1997-) and

Futurama (1999-2013).

Despite this development in the animation offering on television, the industrial

categorisation of animation for children persisted and occasionally became problematic. A

notable, and well documented example from 1992 is the Nickelodeon series Ren and Stimpy

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created by John Kricfalusi, an animator highly influenced by Bob Clampet and others of the

1940s and 1950s (Langer 1997). Kricfalusi’s approach to comedy presented a retro style

with an element of satire and subversion, which Langer refers to as ‘animatophilia’ (1997:

143) and was very popular critically. However, the network presented this as a children’s

show - it was rated as TV-Y7, suitable for children age 7 or older, and promoted via a Mattell

toy company merchandising deal - and thus the industrial genre signalled it as comedy

suitable for children in what Nickelodeon considered the classic Warner Bros. Looney Tunes

model. As Langer points out, the initial pitch of a multi layer/multi audience show (a strategy

seen in earlier family animated TV series such as The Flintstones) suited Nickelodeon’s

corporate strategy (though puzzlingly they also aired a late night screening on MTV which

demonstrated its success with an adult audience). However, it was when Kricfalusi began to

deliver shows which needed editing by the network in order to be suitable for the show’s

designated family audience or, as they claimed, failed to deliver on budgets and deadlines,

that they fired him. Kricfalusi refused to compromise his ideas and alter the tone of the show

to be more family-friendly and Nickelodeon went on to produce a more sanitised version of

the series. Kricfalusi later presented a new version, Ren & Stimpy ‘Adult Party Cartoon’ on

the TNT network in 2003. It was full of the scatological humour which had been an early

hallmark of the show but fans were not as receptive this time round and the series was

cancelled before a second season aired.

This example could be described as a case of creative differences (and is written as

such, see Langer 1997), but I would argue that the more fundamental issue is that the

industrial genre was wrongly assigned due to a lack of understanding of what the series

actually was, beyond the appeal of its visual style. ‘Nickelodeon sought to find styles and

characters that would create a distinctive product identity…Ren & Stimpy was to become a

mass-marketable form of cultural capital for Nickelodeon’ (Langer 1997: 150). They liked the

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style of the 1940s animation which Kricfalusi produced, but his interest went beyond this to

subvert the content and ‘deliberately violated the norms of good taste’ (p. 151). Langer

outlines the use of the MTV network by Nickelodeon’s parent company Viacom to increase

the popularity and reach of the show to an adolescent audience, but ‘this was done in order to

get the MTV audience and bring it to Nickelodeon for Sunday morning Ren & Stimpy

cablecasts’ (p. 155). By airing the series in a child friendly time slot, the system of

expectation set up for the audience by the network was for a show suitable for young

children. However, this expectation was erroneous and the ‘cartoon’ aesthetic was arguably

the only element taken into account when promoting, scheduling and commissioning the

series. The bottom line for the company was connected to their deal with Mattel ‘to licence

Ren & Stimpy products to children…Positioning Ren & Stimpy outside of a juvenile taste

group might have jeopardised the popularity of the series among potential Mattel toy

purchasers’ (p. 157). Kricfalusi had little intention of changing his own personal animatophile

tastes to cater to the younger Nickelodeon audience and as a result they saw increasing

interference from the network in script editing, and eventually parted ways.

The Ren and Stimpy example shows how merchandising can lead to confusion

regarding the generic classification of popular mainstream animated shows. Due to the

‘cartoon’ style of many of these shows, the merchandise often has a ‘cute’ or child friendly

style, despite the show itself often being inappropriate for a children’s audience. Another

example of this is in the soft toy products sold to promote the animated sitcom South Park

during the 1990s. The series is scheduled in a late night slot, and the opening title card

explains that the show is offensive, deliberately so, however the merchandise has an appeal to

children who may not be aware of the true content of the show. This becomes a problem

when adults, unfamiliar with the content, make assumptions based solely on the animated

form and ignore the aspects of the industrial genre, the scheduling, in favour of the other

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industrial codes, the marketing. In the UK in 1999, a parent launched an awareness campaign

about South Park, at her local school to tell parents how ‘the merchandise seems to be

specifically aimed at youngsters’ and ‘A lot of parents don’t realise what their kids are

watching.’ (‘South Park is not suitable for youngsters says Mum’ 1999)25 Many of these

misconceptions can be traced back to the assumptions made by the mainstream audience as

outlined at the start of the chapter, ones that are also largely reinforced by the industrial

categorisation of TV animation as one entity.

While the generic dominance of comedy has persisted throughout the history of TV

animation, in mainstream US television the most prevalent generic alternative to comedy has

been in sci-fi and fantasy, largely developed from imported Japanese anime. More recently

these have tended to be scheduled in late night slots and therefore not aimed at a mainstream

audience.26 However, in the mid 1960s and 1970s, US television schedules were filled with

sci-fi adventure series, including Birdman and the Galaxy Trio and Space Ghost. The first

Japanese television series Astro Boy (1963-6) was highly successful and established the

market for television animation in Japan and abroad and led to the creation of Battle for the

Planets (1978-80), a westernised version of the Japanese series Science Ninja Team

Gatchaman (1972-4). In the UK, television producer Gerry Anderson released the highly

successful Stingray (1964), Thunderbirds (1965) and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons

(1967) using his unique puppet animation. As previously noted, in the US Hanna-Barbera

ventured into sci-fi by combining it with the domestic sitcom in The Jetsons. Matt Groening

later emulated this approach with the production of his second anicom, Futurama (1999-

2013), which combines the narrative of the workplace sitcom with the tropes of the sci-fi

genre, creating a hybrid.

The transnational exchange of series between East and West, which started with Astro

Boy, has seen an increased audience for alternatives to the anicom, such as sci-fi and fantasy

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with different forms and styles of animation and for different age groups. The growth in

animated television generally, and the increase in platforms for viewing on cable and

streaming TV as well as Internet channels, has seen a rise in innovative TV animation, for

both children and adults. Shows which challenge ideas of genre (mixing sci-fi with fantasy

and absurdist comedy) as well as shows which challenge dominant norms of gender and

sexuality, such as Adventure Time (2007-10) and Steven Universe (2013-), or that deal with

issues of mental health such as Rick and Morty (2013-), are very far removed from the

slapstick of the Looney Tunes or the aforementioned musical detective shows of the 1960s. It

is interesting that these shows are all shown on the cable channel Cartoon Network, which

since the early 1990s has pioneered and celebrated diverse animation in terms of content and

style. We might argue that by classifying and containing all of these shows in one place as

‘cartoon’ they limit the perception of animation genre, but instead they have in fact provided

audiences with a site for the development of new genres and sub genres, as well as for

exposure to content outside of the mainstream.

Other recent examples of this type of subversion that challenge dominant generic

expectations can be seen in late night television sketch shows in the UK, such as Modern

Toss, 2DTV (2001-2004) and Monkey Dust (2003-05) (see Norris 2014). In the US the late

night offering ranges from South Park (1997-), the output from the Adult Swim project

(2001-) including Venture Bros., Robot Chicken and Rick and Morty, to the even more adult

and absurd Bojack Horseman (2014-) on the streaming service Netflix. Though these again

all fall under the generic dominant of comedy, they use their animatedness to extend sub

genres of comedy and, in the case of Bojack, the nature of television itself. A notable

example of this in Bojack can be seen in season 4, episode 6 entitled ‘Stupid Piece of Shit’

which uses different styles of animation to reveal Bojack’s thought processes and his

confused mental state. Bojack’s role as a ‘washed-up’ TV sitcom star in itself refers to the

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formulaic nature of TV genre and in numerous episodes critiques the problem of child stars,

Hollywood and celebrity. Dramatic genres which deal with serious aspects of real life rarely

occur in TV animation, and I would suggest are harder to produce (to fund or commission)

due to the success and dominance of comedy in contemporary TV animation. That said,

Bojack Horseman could arguably be categorised as a bleak black comedy, which deals with

very dramatic, and very adult themes such as drug and alcohol addiction, casual sex and

depression. However, it is not broadcast on a mainstream network, but instead on a streaming

service which has greater liberty to offer edgier content.

The post-network era, described in detail by Amanda Lotz (2014), demonstrates that a

diverse audience exists which is not always catered for by standard industrial genres and that

therefore do not need to be directed towards certain genres in the same way. For these

audiences, scheduling is less important and marketing is often done by word of mouth on

social media. The discourse surrounding series such as Bojack enables prospective audiences

to discover television animation which suits a variety of tastes at a time convenient to them.

The audience is no longer content to be confined to network schedules and traditional ‘flow’

of the TV medium (see Williams 1975). That many of these shows have found an increased

‘grown up’ audience speaks of several factors. Like the generation before them, the audience

has been raised on multiple forms of animation thanks to the success and visibility of shows

like The Simpsons and the pervasiveness of animation more generally; the diversity of

platforms allows for and presents a variety of content, and as such traditional systems of

generic expectations are arguably less important to a show’s continued success.

Although the generic categories of TV animation are not always as clearly defined by

industrial practices in marketing and scheduling as their live action counterparts, this chapter

has shown that there is generic diversity within the catch all term ‘TV animation’. That this is

relatively recent, and most likely enabled by the diversification of viewing platforms, perhaps

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suggests that the dominance of comedy persists. However as new transnational, increasingly

experimental TV animation emerges and finds an audience, this generic catchall

categorisation of ‘TV animation’ will most likely change further. Williams argues ‘As genres

change over time, […] their audiences become more and more self-conscious’ (Williams in

Neale 1990: 59). This self-conscious audience may become more open to difference and

development within the genre and new genres of TV animation may well emerge.

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Cholodenko A. (1991), The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation, Sydney: Power Institute of

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aesthetics, the social’, Screen 34 (3): 223-242.

Burke, K & T. Burke (1998), Saturday Morning Fever: Growing up with Cartoon

Culture, New York: St Martin’s Press.

Denslow, P. (1997), ‘What is animation and who needs to know’ in Pilling, J. (Ed)

(1997) A Reader in Animation Studies,1-4, Sydney: John Libbey.

Dobson, N. (2003), ‘Nitpicking the Simpsons: Critique and continuity in constructed

Realities’, Animation Journal (2003): 84-93.

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162
Animation and/as Children’s Entertainment

Amy Ratelle

On a broad scale, animation has been historically devalued and dismissed as ‘kids’ stuff’ –

loud, often obnoxious, poorly written, and frivolous (Wells 2002: 61). Yet, animated

programming forms a substantial portion of broadcasting for children in general and has been

both incredibly lucrative for advertisers and a battleground on which culture wars have been

fought in the name of educational content and the protection of ‘childhood innocence’.

However, animation studies has, paradoxically, continued to marginalize the study of

animation for children. This chapter will address the oversight of children’s animation by

situating it in the larger historical, cultural and theoretical framework of children’s media,

and will explore the history of audience formation, the role of parents, educators, and

advertisers, and the effects of consumer culture on the form.

Children’s animation is a global multi-million-dollar industry and has become as

synonymous with childhood experiences as the nursery rhyme. Yet, scholarly attention to

date has largely been characterized by nostalgia for the early television animation of the

1960s (Wells 2002; Mittell 2003), or focuses on the effects of cartoon violence on young

viewers (Kirsch 2006; Blumberg et al 2008). Yet, as Stephen Kline has noted, ‘what might be

taken for children’s culture has always been primarily a matter of culture produced for and

urged upon children’ (1998: 95). This top-down approach, so to speak, can reinforce

perceptions of children as passive consumers of media in need of protection and education,

and works to conceal the role that films and television play in enculturing children to become

(adult) humans in culturally-specific ways. By examining American animation in the

historical context of childhood as a particularly Western and middle-class concept, this

chapter contends that animation as a medium for children has become prey to the

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oppositional discourses of education and entertainment on the battleground of consumer

culture, and that these discourses have contributed to its marginalization as a medium and as

a scholarly topic.

A Tale of Two Audiences

Our current conception of childhood as a unique state of innocence to be continually

safeguarded, as separate and different from adulthood, is rooted in the Romantic period’s

idealization of nature and the emergence of a distinct middle class invested in education and

self-improvement (O’Malley 2003).27 During this time period, children were cultivated as a

separate audience, to whom literature could be marketed. While religious texts and reading

primers had, since the Middle Ages, been written for the education of children, it was not

until the mid-eighteenth century that literature generated specifically for this burgeoning

middle-class audience became a ‘clear but subordinate branch of English literature’ (Darton

1982: 1). How then, did children become a separate audience?

The answer lies largely in the enduring popularity of Enlightenment philosopher John

Locke (1632-1704). Locke famously posited that children are predisposed to need

educational instruction, as they were a ‘yet Empty Cabinet’ (1690: 23), or ‘white paper, or

wax, to be moulded and fashioned as one pleases’ (1693: 179). The role of education was

perceived as crucial because children could not be relied upon to process their own

experiences and sensations to acquire the proper moral character (Ratelle 2015). The middle

class, with its emphasis on productivity, pedagogy and purchasing, positioned itself against

the privileged entitlement and perceived vices of the upper and aristocratic classes as well as

against the poverty and grinding day-to-day existence of the lower classes. As Henry Jenkins

argues, the ‘bourgeois classes placed particular importance on the education and rearing of

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their sons as preparation for participation in the market economy. Out of the future-

orientation of capitalism came a new focus on child-rearing and pedagogy’ (1998: 16).

In this lucrative economic climate, John Newbery (after whom the prestigious

American children’s literature award is named) began in 1744 to publish illustrated books

that not only provided a roadmap to a life of virtue and financial success, but were also

entertaining to read. Newbery changed the face of publishing and solidified children as an

audience separate from adult readers by capitalizing on their middle-class parent’s disposable

income, ‘which they were more than willing to invest in shaping and securing their children’s

future’ (Ratelle 2015: 6). Although the origins of capitalism date back to the Middle Ages,

the eighteenth-century emergence of children’s literature as a vehicle for cultural values tied

household economic advancement to Locke’s ideals of social advancement though education.

Moral instruction adhering to these ideals was made palatable to the child audience with

entertaining storylines, popular characters and anthropomorphized animals. This delicate

balance between education and entertainment that made its appearance in early forms of

children’s literature still underpins much of children’s media, including animation, to the

present day.

From Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) to the Saturday Morning Cartoon

While Disney – the man and the company – can be considered problematic in many respects

(see Schickel 1968; Giroux 1991; Eliot 1994; Davis 2006), he was among the first to

prioritize animation as a prestige medium, focusing on ‘believable characters who behaved in

believable ways in believable manners in believable environments’ (Stabile & Harrison 2003:

5). He also prioritized animation as a medium primarily for children. In contrast, animation

by other studios during the Golden Age, such as Warner Brothers, was targeted more at

adults.

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 Prior to Disney’s dominance, the animation in the early 1920s made by smaller

studios and animators had also been aimed at a broad audience. Cartoons such as Pat Sullivan

and Otto Messmer’s Felix the Cat (1919-28), the Fleischer’s Out of the Inkwell series (1918-

929) and the work of animators including Walter Lantz, who would later go on to create

Woody Woodpecker in 1940, often featured characters engaged in adult activities such as

visiting jazz clubs, consuming alcohol and flirting with women. Felix the Cat was notorious

for such behaviour, which made him enormously popular with adult audiences (Furniss 2016:

52-55). As Karl Cohen (1997: 5) points out, however, there was also extensive insistence

from ‘pressure groups’ that such conduct from animated characters was not acceptable to the

moral majority, on the grounds of protecting children in the general audience from

inappropriate material in which characters acted without moral consequence. As such,

characters like Felix were considered poor role models for impressionable young viewers. In

1934 regulations were enacted to curb the depictions of such risqué on-screen behaviour until

their repeal in 1968, when they were replaced with a more detailed rating system based on the

content of the film (ibid).

While the late 1920s to mid-1940s can be considered a Golden Age of cinematic

animation (Wells 2002: 62), by the late 1950s and early 1960s, the animated cartoon

underwent a drastic transformation that had lasting effects on the medium (Mittell 2003: 33).

Animated shorts had been an integral part of the studio system, in that their exhibition was

guaranteed as part of the practice of ‘block-booking’. In this system, animated shorts were

packaged along with features and other shorts as part of a programme of films shown in

cinemas (Mittell 2003: 38). Block-booking, however, was declining as a practice, and was

brought to an end by the 1948 Paramount anti-trust case, which destroyed the vertical

integration stranglehold that major studios had over production, distribution and exhibition.

Following the Paramount decree many of the smaller animation studios found themselves in

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decline and the theatrical short cartoon ultimately ceased production altogether (see Holliday

in this volume). The decline of the cinematic short, however, coincided with the rise in

popularity of a new household appliance – the television. Mothers in particular found

television to be an ideal child-minder while they completed their daily household tasks

without interruption (Seiter 1993: 15), positioning children as a significant audience for

television programming, which became increasingly centred around animation.

One of the few remaining avenues of profit for animation studios, such as MGM,

UPA, Harveytoons, and even Warner Bros., was through selling back-catalogue former

theatrical release cartoons to broadcasters, simultaneously generating revenue for the studios

and solving broadcasters’ dilemma of getting programming quickly and cheaply on the air.28

The television programme Disneyland (1954-61), for example, incorporated the studio’s own

animated back catalogue of cinematic shorts introduced by a live-action host. Other studios

followed suit, and by the mid-1950s, cheaper back-catalogue cartoons from various studios

were thus scattered throughout the daily viewing schedule. However, as I argue above, other

than Disney, these cartoons had been produced for a general audience and prioritized

entertainment over moral instruction. Two streams of television animation were thus

emerging at this time – one comprised of child-friendly material from Disney that was largely

in alignment with Locke’s principles of proper moral instruction; the other as a form of mass

amusement.

Despite the popularity of the repackaged programmes such as Disneyland, the desire

for original animated programming remained, as there were only so many ways to reformat

the pre-existing material. Studios began experimenting with a new technique called ‘limited

animation’, which minimized and/or repeated the same character action, significantly

reducing the number of required drawings, and drastically reducing production costs. This

technique at its most extreme reduced movements down to an average of one movement per

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four seconds of animation, and could be produced for as little as $2500 per episode (Kanfer

1997: 180-81). Networks such as CBS began to capitalize on the potential of limited

animation, and in 1956 contracted UPA to produce The Boing-Boing Show (1956-7). Hanna-

Barbera subsequently produced Ruff and Reddy (1957-64) for NBC, exemplifying ‘a shift in

the animated form that would become typical for television productions: minimal visual

variety, emphasis on dialogue and verbal humor, and repetitive situations and narratives’

(Mittell 2003: 38).

Hanna-Barbera went on to change the landscape of television animation with such

classic characters as Yogi Bear, Scooby Doo, and Fred Flintstone by reducing the amount of

animation to save on labour costs while emphasising the dialogue to enhance the comedy.

The Flintstones (1960-6) in particular was a runaway hit with the primetime family audience

as a satirical take on the sitcom format, and the studio followed this success with The Jetsons

(1962-3) (see Dobson on genre, this volume). A boom in animation followed, but came to an

end when the market was glutted with Flintstones imitations seeking the prime-time

adult/child crossover audience (see Wells 2002). After reaching market saturation, the

‘anicom’ (Dobson 2003, 2009) format was abandoned, leaving largely gimmicky offerings

such as The Secret Squirrel Show (1965-8) and The Space Kidettes (1966-7).

While the original programming of the late 1950s and 60s was initially intended for a

prime-time audience which included both adults and children (see Dobson on TV animation,

this volume), animation in general was gradually becoming targeted to the child audience,

increasingly focused on mass entertainment, and broadcast on networks that were

increasingly in need of advertising revenue to cover their production costs. Although the new

medium of television was still broadly subject to the same kinds of regulations that had

constrained the antics of Felix the Cat and his peers, there were no formal regulations in place

to specifically govern children’s programming, particularly in terms of how much advertising

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children could be exposed to. As a result of this lack of oversight, children’s animation

throughout the late 1950s and early 60s continued to move away from the broader framework

of education, virtue, and self-improvement that prevailed in other forms of children’s media,

such as literature or radio, and was subsumed into a rapidly expanding consumer culture.

This rise in consumer culture also saw a considerable expansion in the toy market, a

market that was increasingly tied to television and advertising. Disney’s The Mickey Mouse

Club (1955-9) was at the forefront of programmes marketing directly to children with a

recognizable brand, seeing no conflict between providing child-friendly programming and

advertising aimed at children (Kapur 1999: 126). Following in Disney’s footsteps other

companies, such as Topper Toys, Amsco, and the newly formed Mattel, began to sponsor

children’s programmes in the hope of becoming household names (Seiter 1993: 78-80). In

this period food companies also sought to generate brand loyalty by capitalising on

animation’s reach to children with, for example, Kellogs forming a long-lasting relationship

with Hanna-Barbera which would see characters featured on cereal boxes and Kellogg’s

advertising between shows.29

Consumer culture and broadcast regulations

By the late 1960s, television animation had lost any cachet it might once have had, through

its subsequent association with the child audience, who were perceived to be ‘uncritical’ and

accepting of any programmes, regardless of quality (Mittell 1998: 48). At this time,

advertisers began to more aggressively market to children via television animation, with the

crucial difference being that instead of creating toys based on pre-existing characters, the

show was created to market pre-existing toys.

This shift in marketing strategy reached its heyday in the mid-1980s (see Engelhardt

1987) and was catalyzed by the animated television special Strawberry Shortcake (1980),

169
which featured a sweetly-scented doll with an oversized head living in idyllic

‘Strawberryland’ with her ‘berry friends’. The massive financial success of this one-off

program turned previous toy-marketing strategies on their heads. The new strategy of toy

preceding programme was heavily reliant on corporate market research designed to synergize

all levels of marketing, including the initial doll or figure, and the animated programme as

well as other sources of revenue such as additional themed licensed products (e.g.,

lunchboxes, t-shirts, etc.), the live appearances of costumed characters in shopping malls and

other performances, such as ice shows or musical concerts. The widespread presence of the

characters in a wider marketing ecosystem generated a ‘sense of ubiquitous stardom and

desirability’ for the young audience (Englehardt 1987: 73).

Reverse-engineered programmes of this nature were seen by concerned parents and

educators as exemplary of particularly cynical and predatory marketing (Seiter 1993; Minow

and Lemay 1995). In an overall climate of increasing concern for children and their

exploitation by advertisers, Newton Minow, Chair of the Federal Communications

Commission (FCC) from 1961 to 1963, famously characterized television as a ‘vast

wasteland’ (Minow and Lamay 1995: 3). Minow’s evocative declaration became a catalyst

for parents, social reformers, and other media scholars and critics to galvanize their efforts in

order to regulate children’s broadcasting and protect children from advertisers. During

Minow’s tenure as Chair of the FCC, his reform plans centred around an increase in

educational programming for children, hearkening back to the ideals of moral guidance and

instruction that had been discarded when children’s animation became increasingly treated as

a vehicle to deliver advertising to children under the guise of mere entertainment.

As Minow notes, the 1970s were ‘the first decade in which special note was taken of

children and television’ (ibid: 99), as part of an overall shift to return to the educational roots

of children’s media. Broadcaster Joan Ganz Cooney played a significant role in this shift and

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in 1968 she approached Minow and other non-profits and lobbyists to fund Sesame Street

(1969-present) for network National Educational Television (NET) that would ‘help and

nurture all children’ (Minow 1993: 10). Ganz Cooney adapted the language of advertising to

create a series of ‘commercials’ for letters and numbers animated by both established and

emerging artists (Gikow 2009: 238-9). Many of these short films became iconic, such as The

Ladybugs’ Picnic (Bud Luckley, 1975), Pinball Number Count (Jeff Hale, 1976), and I Want

to Be Me (Christopher Cerf, 1989). By merging education with entertainment in much the

same fashion as Newbery had 200 years before, Sesame Street opened the doors for

additional innovative and educational children’s animation from America’s Public

Broadcasting System (PBS).

Concurrent with the emergence of Sesame Street as a cultural force in children’s

media, PBS launched an initiative to resituate general programming in the public interest by

fostering innovative and educational animation for the child audience, for example The

Magic School Bus (1994-1997) – one of the highest-rated PBS shows for school-age children

(Green 1997: 48). Nickelodeon, who launched the first television channel specifically for

children’s programming in 1979, similarly capitalized on the demand for pedagogically-

sound animation, with Blue’s Clues (1996-2002), which mixed live-action and simple

animation, and Dora the Explorer (2000-2014), which remains particularly notable for its

representation of a female character of Latina heritage.

Based in large part on the success of Sesame Street and PBS’s overall efforts to

foreground the need for educational and instructional television (Minow and Lemay 1995:

10), the Center for Media Education, an American non-profit organisation dedicated to media

literacy and broadcast standards, effectively lobbied US Congress into passing the Children’s

Television Act (CTA) in 1990. This act legislated children as a separate audience with special

considerations, restored time limits to commercials aired during children’s programs, and

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required broadcasters to air at least some educational and informative children’s

programming (ibid: 21-22).

However well-intentioned the Act was, savvy marketers were still able to work within

the letter of the CTA, if not necessarily its spirit, with prosocial messages added in to the

programme to demonstrate a nominal compliance with the new legislation. One of the most

infamous of these ‘tacked-on’ additions to pre-existing programmes was the animated series

GI Joe (1985; 1990-1; 1995-7; 2008; 2010), which was based on Hasbro’s line of action

figures. At the end of each 20-minute episode, the characters reappear in a short sequence in

which they assist a child grappling with some kind of problem, such as bullying. After the

issue has been resolved, the sequence ends with the catchphrase, ‘Now you know! And

knowing is half the battle.’ Other prosocial programming was less action-oriented, focusing

instead on the realm of human emotions and social engagement. Series such as The Care

Bears (1983; 1984; 1986-7; 1991; 2002; 2007; 2008; 2015-16) emphasize sharing, caring,

cooperation, and communication. However, such programmes often reduce each character to

limited personality traits and conflate emotional states with marketable products.

Complicating the complex negotiations between moral and educational instruction,

entertainment and marketing is the reliance of programmes such as Sesame Street on their

own toy licensing to subsidize their production costs. Sesame Street is able to mitigate some

of the conflict that parents may experience, however, by foregrounding their child-centric

reputation. Muddling education and marketing in this fashion does serve to undermine

straightforward arguments that marketing-based programming is always bad and educational

programming is always good. In this instance, Sesame Street relied on income from

commercial activities to maintain their mandate of nurturing and protecting the child

audience.

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 Recent animated programmes have also been able to find a middle ground between

education and commercialism. For example, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (2010-

present), a reboot of the original My Little Pony ‘n Friends (1986-7) based on Hasbro’s line

of toy horses marked on the flank with a glyph representing their dominant character trait,

takes a more nuanced approach to emotional development and interpersonal relationships

than its predecessor. While the original series has been dismissed by critics such as

Englehardt as trite and unimaginative with passive characters, the new programme favours

complex storylines that blend adventure and magic into a problem-solving framework

(Kirkland 2017: 99-100). By working to flesh out the stereotyping common to children’s

programming, and of which Englehardt is so critical (see Dobson on representation in this

volume), MLP: Friendship is Magic negotiates the competing expectations to be both

entertaining and instructional, as well as remaining marketable in terms of toy sales.

Other rebooted programmes, including Teen Titans Go! (2013-present), a comedic

take on DC Comics’ fictional superhero team, ironically reference the overt prosocial

messages of both marketing-based animated programmes and the more pedagogically-

oriented ones from public broadcasters, while simultaneously providing actual instructional

value. In both ‘Pyramid Scheme’ (2015) and ‘And Finally a Lesson’ (2016), for example, the

team learns about the value of money, and how to build home equity. Similarly, in ‘Think

About Your Future’ (2016), the team is visited by their future selves, who travel back in time

to impart valuable lessons on the impact of their poor eating and spending habits.

Entertainment and education are thus reconfigured for a contemporary audience of the

children of parents well-versed in the animation tropes of their own childhood, yet who still

might want to engender good viewing habits in their own children.

Conclusion

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As this chapter has demonstrated, attitudes towards children’s animation are often deeply

ambivalent. On the one hand, it bears the significant burden of striking a balance between

entertainment and education. On the other, it has been devalued in the US in particular for its

association with consumer culture. As Donald Crafton notes, ‘“fun” is not ideologically

neutral turf’ (1998: 101), nor is the business of children’s media. Shifts in thinking about

children’s animation reflect larger cultural tensions around children in terms of pedagogical

value, emotional development and entertainment, as situated in capitalist culture. An

unchecked marketing-led approach to children’s animation in America resulted in the

enactment of legislation to protect the child audience from the excesses of consumerism as

the form drifted further away from the pedagogical-focus of earlier children’s literature. And

yet, even programs such as Sesame Street are reliant on toy and product licensing in order to

fund additional seasons, presenting a challenge in balancing the programme’s needs against

its mandate for nurturing and protecting the child audience. As their success indicates, it is

indeed possible to negotiate this slippery terrain, combining education and prosocial

messaging with innovative, entertaining, and oftentimes experimental animation within a US

media landscape largely occupied by networks and marketers.

Demand for and consumption of animated programming resulted in a major

expansion of the children’s animation universe in the US, from the three major networks in

the 1960s (ABC, CBS, NBC) to four separate commercial cable networks for children –

Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, The Disney Channel, and PBS Kids. This universe is one in

which quality educational programmes exist alongside toy-based programmes, which coexist

with the same back-catalogue cartoons that were mainstays of the original Saturday morning

timeslot. Recent additions to the viewing landscape include on-demand streaming services

such as Netflix and Hulu, who license existing programmes in addition to their own original

productions.

174
 The ubiquity of children’s animation across multiple viewing formats requires ever-

more productions, bringing with them ever-more licensing opportunities. In this sense,

discourse around children’s animation would benefit from a more overt acknowledgement

that what we think we should do (e.g. educate and nurture children) is not always in

alignment with what actually happens; despite what might be best intentions, programmes

and broadcasters still exist in a capitalist framework and are thus reliant on product tie-ins. In

this sense, we can read children’s animation as a site of conflict, subject to a series of

ongoing negotiations between competing interests that – however well-intentioned – are

nevertheless situated in a capitalist context from which it is nearly impossible to be

extricated.

175
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179
16. Video Games and Animation

Chris Pallant

At the time of writing (summer 2017), there is considerable excitement in animation and

video game circles about the upcoming release of Cuphead (2017).30 After debuting on

YouTube in October 2013 and launching at E3 (the Entertainment Software Association’s

annual Electronic Entertainment Expo) in 2014, Cuphead has endured a protracted

development, yet enthusiasm for the title has remained high. A quick review of Twitter posts

between 1 January 2014 – 1 January 2016 containing the hashtag #Cuphead reveals a

common interest in the game’s ‘unique aesthetic’ inspired by ‘vintage cartoons’. Video game

and animation journalists have been equally enthusiastic about the numerous trailers and

gameplay demos that have preceded the game’s launch, with CartoonBrew’s Amid Amidi

noting how the developer had ‘the classic animation look pegged, from lush watercolor

backgrounds to authentic pie-cut eyed, rubbery characters who look straight out of a

Fleischer/Iwerks short’ (2013), while Chris Kohler writes as part of a feature for Wired

previewing the most anticipated games of 2016 (the year in which many expected the game

to debut): ‘I've spent a lot of time playing Cuphead at various game expos last year, and the

way it so faithfully replicates the look and feel of classic early-20th-century animation is

absolutely jaw-dropping. Couple that with difficult (but fair) action gameplay reminiscent of

Gunstar Heroes and you have a game we’re just dying to play’ (2016). These responses

indicate the interest generated by the combination of animation aesthetics and the video game

platform.

Fundamentally, all video games are animated texts. However, the way that

interactivity serves as the key identifying marker of the video game, results in the (always)

animated nature of video games being frequently ignored. This could be explained by the

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relative infancy of video games, video game culture, and the scholarly field of (Video) Game

Studies. To establish the video game as an art form in its own right, the games industry, as

well as games commentators, have promoted interactivity above all else as the form’s

distinguishing feature, thereby setting it apart from live-action cinema, with which games

often share common elements, such as visual language, narrative and animated materiality. 31

Given the hesitancy that characterises the extant scholarly engagement with the intersection

of animation and video games, this chapter will seek to establish some of the key debates

from Game Studies that might best guide readers wishing to consider the relationship

between animation and video games. To that end, this chapter moves beyond the subject of

interactivity, to consider more broadly how animation underpins and intervenes into three key

issues in games studies: ludology, narrative and representation.32

The Ludology Perspective

The first two sections of this chapter focus on ludology and narrative, two themes that

defined the early course of Game Studies. In the spirit of seeking to establish Game Studies

on its own terms, scholars such as Espen Aarseth (1997, 2004), Gonzalo Frasca (1999, 2003),

Markku Eskelinen (2001, 2004), Jesper Juul (2001, 2005), and Ian Bogost (2010, 2015)

argued that the study of games should be centred around considerations of play, rules, and

experience. Furthermore, the likes of Juul, Aarseth, Frasca, Eskelinen and Bogost

intentionally promoted this focus on ludological qualities as a means of critiquing what they

perceived to be the incompatibility of narrative methods of interpretation of video games. At

the core of this rejection of narratological approaches was a frustration regarding the

seemingly straightforward mapping of an interpretational framework developed around less

interactive and more linear texts (such as those found within the arts of sculpture, theatre,

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literature, and cinema) on to the study of games. As Eskelinen notes in the first issue of the

journal Game Studies:

Outside academic theory people are usually excellent at making distinctions

between narrative, drama and games. If I throw a ball at you I don’t expect

you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories. On the other hand, if and

when games and especially computer games are studied and theorized they are

almost without exception colonised from the fields of literary, theatre, drama

and film studies. (2001)

Consequently, for ludologists notions such as the ‘magic circle’ (Huizinga, 1949) and ‘flow’

(Csíkszentmihályi, 1975), which are explored in more detail below, held great appeal due to

their non-narrative emphasis. Another important characteristic that notions of the ‘magic

circle’ and ‘flow’ both share is animation.

Writing broadly about play and ritual in his book Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga

argues:

All play moves and has its being within a playground marked off beforehand

either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there

is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the ‘consecrated spot’

cannot be formally distinguished from the play-ground. The arena, the card-

table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the

court of justice, etc., are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden

spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All

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 are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance

of an act apart. (1949: 10)

In many ways, Huizinga’s words – penned several decades before the advent of video games

– offer an early sense of how deeply entwined the worlds of animation and video games are.

The opening sentence could just as easily describe the process of animation: all animation

moves and has its being within a frame defined beforehand either materially or ideally, pose-

to-pose or straight ahead. This is wordplay, of course, but nonetheless it highlights an

important tension between the potential freedoms afforded by play/animation and the

regulation imposed by the playground/frame (perhaps a narrative framework, or principles of

verisimilitude, or the physical limits of space itself if projection mapping is the type of

animation employed). This tension remains at the heart of the video game experience, with

animation being crucial to the player’s negotiation of it. From entry into the game via home

and submenu screens, through to the playable world itself, animation provides a perfectly

malleable – or, to favour the language of Animation Studies, metamorphic – material with

which to construct the ‘temporary world’ into which the player willingly enters.33

The bringing to life of the inanimate, digitally coded virtual world, relies upon the

metamorphic power of the animated form to transport the gamer from the disengaged self-

awareness experienced during (often lengthy) game loading screens to the deeply immersed

psychological state enjoyed during gameplay. Although not always achievable, perhaps due

to real world interruptions or limited proficiency with the game’s mechanics, when achieved,

the complete involvement of the video gamer during play resembles what Mihály

Csíkszentmihályi has termed ‘flow’. For Csíkszentmihályi, games are good examples of flow

activity, ‘and play is the flow experience par excellence’ (1975: 36-37). He writes:

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 In the flow state, action follows upon action according to an internal logic that

seems to need no conscious intervention by the actor. He experiences it as a

unified flowing from one moment to the next, in which he is in control of his

actions, and in which there is little distinction between self and environment,

between stimulus and response, or between past, present, and future. (1975:

36)

However, without animation there could be no flow state within the video game realm. Our

sense of immersion, as video gamers, is established as we are gradually enveloped in the

animated structures of the video game: from menu screens, to the avatar, to the graphical user

interface (containing, for example, health bars, targeting cursors, and location maps) and the

scaleable, scrollable, synthetic landscape of the level itself.

Games such as Tetris (1984), Minesweeper (1990), and the aptly named flOw (2006),

which reject narrative entirely and feature game worlds not orientated around storytelling,

highlight the appeal of attaining a state of flow – the feeling of complete immersion – above

all else. However, games which foreground story also appeal due to their cultivation of the

flow state. Consider, for example, how much of the longevity and commercial success of the

Tomb Raider franchise is rooted in the Lara Croft narrative, and how much of that success

stems from the grippingly immersive challenge of manoeuvring the twitchy Croft avatar

across unforgiving cliff edges, high ravines, and monumental ziggurats – every wrong move

resulting in certain death and a painful reload from some now distant location. Having played

several instalments of the franchise, it was the gameplay more than the narrative that

prompted my return. Without doubt, a crucial appeal of the video game is player immersion

within the interactive world, a feature made possible by procedurally generated animation

(whereby the underlying code enables computer animation to be generated in real-time). Yet,

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regardless of the obvious importance of these ludological characteristics to the video game

experience, and despite what the ludologists claimed, narrative – and the narratological

perspective – remains of similar importance.

The Narratology Perspective

The debate within Game Studies over the competing merits of ludological versus

narratological interpretational frameworks has largely subsided now, and there is a broad

recognition that both frameworks are valuable and can be used in combination. This section

will consider how animation has proven instrumental in supporting a range of narrative

ambitions within video gaming.

The clearest way that video games diverge from earlier storytelling forms, such as

theatre, literature, radio, cinema, and television, is through their ability to provide the

experience of exploring an individualised, non-linear story world. Of course, video games do

not allow players complete freedom; all inputs made by the player result in either

intended/anticipated pre-coded actions/animations or glitches (whereby something beyond

the scope of the planned game world, or something ‘transgressive’, occurs). This highlights

the digital cage in which all gamers operate – albeit a cage that often feels more like an open

world. This is all made possible by the animated/animating nature of the code, which

perpetually provides the gamer with choices: jump/double jump/don’t jump; talk/don’t talk;

shoot/don’t shoot/change weapon; beg/bribe/borrow/steal. These coded choices animate the

gamer, and in return the gamer animates the game through their actions.34

To date, game development has sought to maximise these aspects of the video game

experience, resulting in narrative frameworks that can be characterised as either ‘branching’

or ‘foldback’, which rely upon ‘embedded’ and ‘emergent’ narrative experiences (Adams,

2013: 227-28). In simple terms, a branching game narrative will see all players start the game

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in broadly the same way (with some potential variance in avatar choice, difficulty setting, and

user interface configuration), and then progress down increasingly divergent narrative paths

as a consequence of the choices made during a moment of narrative division. An example of

a game that employs this embedded narrative framework is Heavy Rain (2010), which,

according to Guillaume de Fondaumière, co-CEO of the game’s developer Quantic Dream,

featured more than twenty different endings (Johnson, 2009). Each playthrough of Heavy

Rain yields just one of these many endings, and it is up to the player to plot their own course

through the many available narrative paths. In comparison, Red Dead Redemption (2010) also

relies on embedded narrative, but offers enormous scope for players to blaze their own trail,

yet only in-between key narrative checkpoints. Once such a checkpoint is triggered, the

player, who might have been fully immersed in several side-missions at that point, is folded

back into the core narrative experience.

In both Heavy Rain and Red Dead Redemption the game engine is harnessed to

procedurally generate those embedded sequences that stitch the core narrative experience

together. Historically, pre-rendered approaches were necessary to deliver embedded

sequences, given the lower computational power of earlier PCs and consoles. Perhaps the

most popular – if not infamous – approach taken was to rely on ‘FMV’ sequences, or ‘full

motion video’, whereby filmed footage of actors portraying in-game characters temporarily

invaded the game world, as seen throughout the Command and Conquer franchise (1995 -

2013), for example. A more time-consuming, but aesthetically complimentary approach was

favoured by Square Enix for their Final Fantasy franchise (1987 - present), whereby pre-

rendered computer generated animation was used to convey important narrative information.

Contrastingly, the experience of emergent narrative is unique to each gamer, and is

rooted in the combination of play, experimentation, action and animation. For example,

Bogost’s satirical Cow Clicker (2010), which was intended as a critique of the exploitative

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micropayment mechanics of many of the most popular Facebook games at that time (such as

FarmVille [2009-present], Mafia Wars [2011-16], and ChefVille [2012-15]), inadvertently

ended up becoming a popular browser game in its own right. The popularity of Cow Clicker

owed much to the social narratives of collaborative play that were constructed around the

game by the players, rather than by the game for the players. In a game such as Cow Clicker –

or FarmVille, Mafia Wars and ChefVille for that matter – while animation self-evidently

provides the textual interface, there is a danger of overstating the significance of this

animated materiality in claiming that it is central to the experience of emergent narrative.

Simply put, in terms of the ambition and delivery of narrative, animation can be more

significant in some games than others. Yet, on a fundamental level, all game narratives are

essentially facilitated by animation.

Representation

Both narratological and ludological perspectives yield useful insights when

considering the relationship between video games and animation; however, as Yussef Cole’s

2017 article, ‘Cuphead and the Racist Spectre of Fleischer Animation’ highlights, all games

rely on animated characters, and with this characterisation comes the politics of animated

representation. When asked about the implications of paying aesthetic homage to the 1930s

animation of the Fleischer Studio, made in an era where racial stereotypes prevailed in US

animation, Cuphead Lead Inking Artist and Producer Maja Moldenhauer noted: ‘It’s visuals

and that’s about it . . . . Anything else happening in that era we’re not versed in it. Blame it on

being Canadian’ (Kleinman, 2017). While Moldenhauer’s sentiment might come from a

position of naivety, it is also emblematic of a wider unwillingness on the part of the games

industry to engage with the politics of representation in any meaningful way. The subject of

representation takes on even greater significance given the unbounded scope of animation to

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represent whatever the mind can imagine. It is therefore disappointing to recognise, for

example, an unhealthily one-dimensional approach to female character design, with

heteronormative sexual appeal being the guiding principle that still shapes many video

games. While male game protagonists are similarly straightjacketed in terms of sexuality, the

physical representation of male characters draws upon a much wider spectrum of possibility

than can be said of female characters. For example, whereas female characters are often

small-waisted, big-busted and dressed in impractical clothes, there is more diversity in the

physicality and appearance of male characters. Compare, for example, the rotund Mario, the

ageing and partially-sighted Solid Snake featured in Metal Gear Solid V (2015), the visually

malleable CJ from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004), and the world-weary everyman

Joel from The Last of Us (2013), with the uniformly limited physical characterisation of Lara

Croft, Princess Peach, Jill Valentine, Rayne, Mai Shiranui, or any of the female characters

from the Virtua Fighter (1993 – 2012), Tekken (1994 - present), and Dead or Alive (1996 -

2016) franchises.

Numerous scholars have sought to unpack this representational imbalance (see

Kennedy 2002; Guins 2004; Nooney 2013), with Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins making

an important early contribution with their edited collection From Barbie to Mortal Kombat:

Gender and Computer Games (1998). This book brings together a range of perspectives, with

the intention of jumpstarting a more nuanced and progressive conversation about gender and

computer games. While much attention has been paid to issues of representation by Game

Studies, there has been little change in the games themselves, which can be seen to stem

partly from the overwhelmingly male composition of the industry itself, as well as the narrow

popular discourse surrounding it.35 Cassell and Jenkins, writing in 2011, recall how responses

to their 1998 book ranged from total rejection by the closed ranks of men who populated the

games industry, reviews in popular publications (such as Ms. and Playboy) that sought to

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ridicule, and fan commentary that prioritised factual detail over the larger arguments about

gender inequality (Cassell and Jenkins 2011: 10-11). Cassell and Jenkins write: ‘So many of

the young males who responded to the book seemed worried that some maternal presence

might force them to tuck in their shirttails or that the companies would stop making games to

their tastes once women became gamers’ (Cassell and Jenkins 2011: 10-11). These are not

simply observations about how imbalanced representations of gender are received by gamers,

games journalists and games scholars, but this is also a commentary about how video game

production remains wedded, in many quarters, to an uneven vision of gender politics.36

As Cassell and Jenkins observe, ‘designers and critics alike have continued to find it

difficult to avoid essentialising gender as designers seek to identify what types of games girls

want to play and reformers seek to promote the kinds of games they think girls should be

playing’ (2011: 10). Furthermore, they assert that ‘both sides have lost track of the fact that

gender is a continuum rather than a set of binary oppositions: one is never going to design

games that adequately reflect the tastes, interests, and needs of all girls’ (2011: 10).

In her blog Feminist Frequency, Anita Sarkeesian tackles this subject through a series

of posts called ‘Tropes vs Women in Video Games’, noting that when ‘fictional female

characters in games are dressed in impractical armor or clothing, it encourages players to

view them as sex objects, and reinforces the already pervasive and harmful notion in our

culture that sexualization is the most viable or only real route to power for women’ (2016a).

It is especially depressing to see this tactic of hypersexualisation repeated given the

unbounded representational potential of the animated form. Sarkeesian comments:

Out of all the arguments that are tossed out to defend the impractical and

objectifying clothing that women are made to wear in games, there is one in

particular that I hear the most often and that is perhaps the most pernicious.

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 That argument is: “Maybe that’s what she wants to wear!” Which is

ridiculous. These women are fictional constructs. That means that they don’t

dress themselves or pick out their own clothing. [. . .] All these visual designs

are deliberate choices made by the developers, and they serve a specific

purpose: they communicate to straight male players that these characters exist

primarily as sex objects to be consumed. In doing so, they also reinforce the

larger notion in our culture that the value of real human women is determined

largely by their sexual desirability to men. (2016a)

Beyond this demarcation of the female form as sexual site, Sarkeesian also turns her attention

to the representational politics enacted in the workplace; in doing, Sarkeesian picks up, nearly

two decades later, the mantle of Cassell and Jenkins, who in their 1998 edited collection

placed a significant emphasis on providing a space for female voices from industry to be

heard.

Sarkeesian also captured the fallout of the #womenaretoohardtoanimate hashtag that

emerged following Ubisoft’s 2014 E3 debut of Assassin’s Creed Unity, at which Alexander

Amancio (Creative Director) said that ‘although there were originally plans to allow for

female assassins, the development team couldn’t add them because it would require “double

the animations, double the voices, and double the visual assets”’ (Sarkeesian 2016b). Here, it

is the act of animation itself that is offered up as a gender-biased process, with the claim that

one gender is easier to animate than another serving as a smokescreen for the wider failures

of the industry and Ubisoft as a studio. This claim was roundly dismissed, with Jonathan

Cooper, who had worked as an animator on Assassin’s Creed III (2012) tweeting ‘In my

educated opinion, I would estimate this to be a day or two's work’ (Cooper, 2014), while

Manveer Heir in characteristically provocative fashion paraphrased Amancio’s sentiment as

190
‘We don’t really care to put the effort in to make a woman assassin’ (Heir, 2014). This is not

an isolated example: Sarkeesian rightly highlights in her article ‘Are Women Too Hard To

Animate? Female Combatants’ that it took EA twenty years to introduce female footballers in

their hugely lucrative FIFA franchise, and it took Activision ten years to introduce female

playable characters in their Call of Duty series. Clearly, significant work remains to be done,

especially given the representational scope of the animated form.

Conclusion

Throughout this chapter we have considered how the study of animation provides new ways

of intervening into the key issues of games studies. As a final remark, I would like to return

to Cuphead, which at the time of writing feels like a genuinely significant moment in the

shared history of animation and video games. Arguably, there is equal pleasure to be gained

from experiencing Cuphead ludologically, as a gamer, as there is narratively, as a viewer.

From a production perspective, Cuphead also serves as a reminder of the need to remain

vigilant to the – intended/unintended – representational power of video game texts.

Ultimately, by overtly calling attention to its animated surface Cuphead reminds gamers and

viewers alike that without animation there could be no video game.

191
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SECTION THREE

REPRESENTATION: FRAMES AND CONTEXTS

197
Representation: Frames and Contexts

Introduction

As with all forms of visual media, animation raises questions of representation. Who is being

represented, how and by whom? Animation’s history is marked by problematically and

pejoratively stereotypical representations along familiar lines including race, gender and

sexuality. The questions raised about animation’s (in)ability to represent diverse identities is

explored in the chapters in this section across a range of historical, geographic and generic

contexts including race in early animation (Sammond) and contemporary TV animation

(Loader), gender and sexuality (Dobson, Denison and Davis) and disability (Norris).

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17. Race, Resistance and Violence in Cartoons

Nicholas Sammond

This is an abridge excerpt from a chapter of Sammond’s book, Birth of an Industry:

Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation (Duke University Press 2015).

The original chapter also covers additional key concepts and historical processes such as

how a chattel slave (the imagined basis for blackface minstrels) has been considered an

object, not a subject with agency. Another is the dynamic interplay between minstrel

performers and their audiences, and how that dynamic carried into vaudeville and then early

American animation. In minstrelsy, vaudeville, and animation, audience members share a

common experience of the performance instead of identifying with the star onscreen. This

contributes to a sense of the cartoon character as both living and made, occupying a

boundary between object and subject.

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18. We’re Asian. More Expected of Us: The Model Minority and Whiteness in King of

the Hill

Alison Reiko Loader

Focusing on the TV animated series King of the Hill, Loader considers how the show

represents Asian American identities as well as whiteness and masculinity in an article first

published in 2006. Arguing that the series both reifies and challenges stereotypes, Loader

here also considers the function of comedy and satire, ultimately arguing that animation can

offer unique ways of representing difference.

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19. Transformers: Rescue Bots: Representation in Disguise

Nichola Dobson

TV animation series aimed at children and teens often feature subtle (and not so subtle)

content aimed at an adult audience. There are multiple layers of meaning which can be in the

form of subversion for political purposes, simple pop culture references and/or more

sophisticated humour to placate the adult viewing along with the child. According to Wells

(2002), animation has a long tradition of multi layered and self reflexive approaches,

particularly seen in comedy from the Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes (1930-1969) series to Matt

Groening’s The Simpsons (1990 -). These animations thus appeal to a mixed range of

audience members and can cater to different ages within one text. Over the last ten years,

there has been a rise in TV animation created for children and pre-teen audiences with

increasingly progressive political themes, appealing to adult fans and educating younger

ones.

Recent programmes such as Steven Universe (2013-), Adventure Time (2010-2018)

and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (2010-) include positive representations of a wide

diversity of race and sexuality.37 This tendency is also seen in the preschool variation of the

Transformers series, Rescue Bots (Hasbro, 2011-16). The series’ main themes are of co-

operation, teamwork and acceptance of difference and these are presented via smartly-written

self-reflexive, often intertextual, comedy. There is a great deal for adults to enjoy along with

the children with parodies and spoofs of films and TV, as well as of their own franchise and

toy sales. This chapter considers the extent to which Rescue Bots can be seen as a model of

progressive representation of gender and sexuality, and whether an increasingly diverse voice

cast gets reflected in terms of the way the characters are drawn in the show, both literally and

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metaphorically. However, it will also examine whether in an attempt to challenge stereotypes,

Rescue Bots reinforces them.

The chapter will adopt a production studies approach using interview material,

combined with textual analysis, to develop a discussion of the casting within the series and to

consider how diversity is represented through the characters and cast. With a plethora of toy

tie-in series available in a multi-channel, multi-platform televisual landscape, Rescue Bots

stands out as an indicative example of children’s television animation that struggles to

negotiate the use of stereotypes whilst at the same time attempting a degree of diversity and

inclusivity.

‘Optimus Prime gave them this mission…’38

Transformers: Rescue Bots, produced by Hasbro and animated by several studios over its

four-year-run, is a Daytime Emmy award-winning show. The franchise has been incredibly

popular with several elements, including books, live action movies, video games, different

animated series, and the toys. While Rescue Bots is not overtly tasked with presenting

progressive diversity or educating its audience it diverges from simply being a toy

commercial,39 and interviews I conducted with personnel involved in the show’s production

revealed that the writers were keen to develop the narratives with a well rounded,

contemporary and thoughtful approach to help young children learn about the world. They

did this by featuring a cast and character grouping which, as writer Brian Hohlfeld explained,

would present ‘a group of characters “that looked like America,” as they say, so that any kid

watching could have someone they recognize…’ (2017). That said, the series still leans on

stereotypes of gendered identities and sexualities that potentially disrupt an overtly

progressive reading of the series.

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 Transformers: Rescue Bots takes a different approach to the battle between good and

evil (and consumerism) seen in the other Transformers series, instead featuring a side mission

for four lost Autobots. They have ended up on Earth, in the small, fictitious island community

of Griffin Rock, Maine, and instead of fighting their enemies, the Decepticons, they are

charged with helping the humans in rescue work, while disguising their true forms. The four

bots, in different vehicle guises of police car, fire engine, helicopter and bulldozer, are

teamed with the Burns family – Griffin Rock’s rescue team (human counterparts: police

chief, fire fighter, EMT and civil engineer). The youngest Burns son, Cody, helps guide the

bots as they learn about their new home planet and provides cover for the bots ‘robot’

identities from the town.

The show’s overall message of helping, cooperation and teamwork, is appropriately

pitched at a younger fan base in the preschool years, and the toys on which the series is based

are also designed for smaller hands. As with many of the most successful pre-school series

produced in the 2010s (such as Go Jetters [2015-] and the Octonauts [2010-]) the series uses

diverse character types and voices to demonstrate acceptance of difference. 40 For Rescue

Bots, as this chapter will argue, this acceptance comes late in the series, in its fourth season.

As previously suggested, it was important for the writers to include what Hohlfeld

described as, ‘a variety of diverse characters (in age, profession, ethnicity, philosophy,

gender, etc.) [which] makes for better storytelling.’ This was also important to the overall

plot and the Rescue Bots’ mission on Earth,

Since the Bots’ mission from Optimus was to learn the ways of humans, the

more diverse humans there were, the more realistic and relatable the Bots’

mission would be. So it wouldn’t just be learning to fight bad guys or make

rescues, it would also be them tacitly accepting a society that encompasses lots

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 of different-looking people (as we hope our audience would be doing at the

same time). (Hohlfeld 2017)

As such, both the characters and the actors who voice them were diverse in terms of race and

gender, although with more male than female characters, but what is of particular interest in

this chapter is how gender was represented.

‘Learn from the Humans, serve and protect…’

The representation of female characters in the show has varied since its first year of airing;

they were less visible in the early episodes with fewer female characters on screen and this

was in part due to the presumed male demographic, despite the fact that there was already a

keen female fanbase.41 The show lacks significant female parental roles and both Cody and

his best friend Francine (Frankie) Green are raised by very capable single fathers; as Hohlfeld

admits, having no mother in the series is a well-used narrative trope. The two key female

characters in the series, Dani Burns (Cody’s older sister) and Frankie Green are very

accomplished. As such they provide good role models for the audience while also reinforcing

that females play equally strong roles to the male characters (interestingly both with the

‘masculine’ version of their names). However, the other female characters in the early

episodes had few if any speaking roles and reinforced the notion of the smiling, pretty damsel

in distress (Hayley in episode 14 ‘Small Blessings’), the cranky old cat woman (Mrs

Neederlander, episode 5 ‘Alien Invasion of Griffin Rock’), or the silent trophy wife (Mrs

Luskey, married to the Mayor). The range of speaking female characters increased over the

years - and female bot Quickshadow was introduced in season 4 - arguably in response to

fans’ demand for female bots and reflecting the increasingly mixed gender production and

writing team (as well as a female Network lead). This exemplifies David Gauntlett’s

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observation that the inclusion of women in key creative production roles positively influences

the number of women in television shows (2002: 64-65).

One of the key elements of interest in the show is its range of characters of different

gender (albeit weighted towards the male in the early series), age and race to represent a

diverse society, or ‘all of America’ in Hohlfeld’s terms. This includes a range of stereotypical

masculinities, from strong and muscular, non emotive and boorish, to what might be termed

as a sensitive ‘new man’,42 which fulfil different functions for the audience. The stereotypes

presented within the main character grouping demonstrates different possible masculinities

but also challenges them by questioning their function within society via the bots’ attempts to

understand humanity. This allows for an interesting and arguably progressive discourse

around masculinity for a children’s TV show, and develops the range of comedy within the

series.43

Clatterbaugh (2004) suggests that many of the terms and meanings in the discussion

of ‘masculinities’ are problematic, in that they either conflate masculinity with men, and thus

adulthood, or confuse biological behaviours with socially constructed traits which are

accepted as norms. He argues that there is a confusion in some respects between gender roles,

roles we assume, and perceptions of gender, how we view these roles, and that this perception

problematizes the very notion of what masculinity is. We could of course apply this to

femininity as well or any discussion of gender or broader stereotypes but as the main

characters in the series are coded as male, it is appropriate to consider these traits in the way

that they are used as ‘differentiating characteristics’ (Clatterbaugh 2004: 204).

The pairing of bot and human counterpart becomes a way for the show to question

certain notions of masculinity. For example, Police bot Chase is partnered with Police Chief

Charlie Burns. Chase is strong, patient and considerate, but always follows the letter of the

law and is fascinated by earth regulations. His extreme and unquestioning zeal for law

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enforcement can be problematic as he lacks understanding of human social cues and the

subtleties of grey areas such as white lies and protecting people’s feelings. This is balanced

by Charlie, perhaps the ultimate ‘new man’, who is thoughtful, patient, kind and a responsible

father. He is also tough when needed but guides Chase (and the rest of the bots and his

family) through the challenges of living in a modern society. Physically he is designed as a

traditional ‘masculine’ body type with broad shoulders and a strong physique, and a very

prominent, bushy moustache. Brownlee highlights the alignment of moustaches with

masculinity in her discussion of Spongebob Squarepants, ‘“Patrick, you see I’m growing a

moustache/ and though I know I must ask you/ does it really make me look like a man?”

Faintly ludicrous and smacking of uncertainty, these lines typify how the film characterizes a

kid’s (or boy’s?) preoccupation with manhood.’ (2011)

A fascination with what ‘adult manhood’ might entail, particularly in relation to body

image, can be seen in ‘One for the Ages’ in season 2 when Cody is transformed into a grown

up (in a Vice Versa [1988]/Big [1988] parody) complete with bushy moustache and again in

season 3’s ‘Rescue Bots Academy’ when Blur enquires about the different ‘types’ (sexes) of

the humans:

Salvage: but only the males can have the thing above their lip?

Chase: Ah yes, the moustache, it appears to be a point of pride with some

people…

Blades: We don’t know how it works but somehow it makes him more

huggable…

The notion of facial hair equalling male adulthood seen in ‘One for the Ages’, as previously

mentioned, is a well-used trope. Brownlee again on Spongebob’s yearning to be an adult,

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cites Hendershot, ‘[t]he icing on the maturity cake…[is] sideburns’ (ibid). So, this discussion

of facial hair is reasonably commonplace in notions of adult maleness and how children may

view this. Arguably this then also reinforces how Charlie is designed to be viewed – as a

proud, strong man – but as Blades suggests, still sensitive enough to be hugged. Charlie is the

most fully rounded of all of the adult characters and is described by Hohlfeld as having,

‘sensitivity and empathy, yet […] still “masculine” in [… ] physical capabilities, sense of

honor, and gallantry…modeling emotional intelligence paired with traditional male traits was

very important for our audience.’ (2017)

Modelling emotional intelligence in this way through Charlie and main protagonist

Cody shows that the writers were mindful of the potential role models they were creating for

a young audience (albeit with a very traditional male body type in Charlie, his broad

shoulders alone, suggesting a dependable strength). The show tries to mitigate stereotypes

with a balance of traits, what Hohlfield referred to as a,

continuum of “masculinity” that our characters fall on…all our characters, like

real people, contain both masculine and feminine traits (in traditional societal

and Freudian terms). Even Kade, who sees himself as a real “he-man,” (and

he-men are usually the only ones who see themselves that way), also exhibits

sensitivity and empathy. (2017)

We see this in the other pairings where there is a stereotype which is often reinforced in the

storyline but then challenged either by the bot or resolved in the plot. In the case of Fire bot

Heatwave, he is presented as the very gruff and reluctant leader of the Rescue Bots; reluctant

in that he is unhappy with the mission to hide their true identity – he feels that his skills

would be better suited in the fight against a greater foe - but follows Optimus Prime’s

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directive loyally. His friendship with the Burns family and respect for the town develops over

the four seasons. He is fairly reactionary and although the show does not include any violence

as such, he is quick to temper and could be termed as the most aggressive of the bots (or

perhaps the most ‘traditionally masculine’ and an authority figure). He is partnered with the

eldest Burns son, Kade – an arrogant, oafish, self styled ‘he-man’ with an ego the size of his

appetite. However, he puts the job as rescuer first and is also fiercely loyal to his team/family.

Kade and Heatwave share personality traits and gradually see this as a positive strength and

work together. They challenge each other’s authority, each wishing to be the alpha male or

bot, but they always need each other to successfully and safely complete their mission. This

teaches the importance of co-operation as well as showing that physical strength or a bad

temper isn’t the way to overcome adversity. Over the years of the series, this has further

developed into a respectful friendship.

Another friendship, and one which is forged very quickly, is between the Bulldozer

bot, Boulder, and his partner Graham. They are both engineers and scientists. Bulldozer is

passionate about nature and is fascinated to learn about Earth. He is thoughtful, patient and

very strong. These traits are complimented, rather than challenged, by Graham. He is a high

achieving academic but their combined force of brains and brawn (through Boulder’s

physicality) often resolves the crisis. Together these characters demonstrate that it is ok to be

male and be clever and interested in learning, something Bulldozer reinforces as a stronger

and more confident version of Graham. In season 3, episode 7 ‘Bugs in the System’ Graham

develops a special cologne to gain confidence to speak to a girl he likes but after things go

wrong it is revealed that he always had confidence. This is a well used trope in film and TV

and here tries to teach the young audience that you have to believe in your own ability. Each

of these pairings demonstrate different masculinities, sometimes challenging the stereotypes

of traditional masculinity and occasionally reinforcing them (often for comedic effect).

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However, if we consider the fourth Bot, Blades, we see yet another challenge to stereotypical

gender norms.

Blades was a ‘ground based EMT’ in his previous Cybertronian life, but as the last to

choose his bot mode, is left with no choice than to be a helicopter, despite a fear of heights.

He is opposite to Heatwave in terms of masculinity; both care about the mission but where

Heatwave is gruff, serious and ‘masculine’, Blades is often perceived as cowardly, silly and

could be read as effeminate. There is a suggestion on one of the many Transformers wikis

that Blades is a ‘young’ robot and as such we could surmise that his fear and curiosity about

the human condition, as well as his love of pop culture, is a childish naivety, or represents the

curious voice of the audience.44 There is also something interesting in his pairing with the

only female Burns sibling, Dani, as his ‘gal pal’ with whom he gossips and consumes all

forms of pop culture, especially musicals.45 All of these camp stereotypes are heightened in

an early episode when he asks, ‘does this make my hips look big?’ after the addition of a new

scoop claw attachment to aid in a rescue changes his physical appearance.

This combination of traits could encourage a queer reading of Blades, which would be

an interesting addition to the types of masculinity in the series, however it is a rather broadly

stereotypical representation of homosexuality and the opposition of his so called cowardly, or

less masculine traits, to those of Kade or Heatwave could be seen as problematic, giving

negative connotations to his queerness. Alternatively, we could read this as an opportunity for

the children watching to understand that there are different ways to be, especially as

ultimately the bots all form an effective team (and Blades is often heroic).

This is further complicated by the fact that Blades is voiced by Parvesh Cheena, an

openly gay actor who brought to the character his ‘own ebullient personality’ (Hohlfeld

2017). Cheena also willingly performs the character in a way that plays on existing vocal

stereotypes of gayness, such as pitch and speech pattern (see Davis 2009). For example,

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Cheena’s voice is higher in the show than in interviews or other acting performances. Later

the writers used his performance to influence the script and character development, and

Hohlfeld (2017) acknowledges that they embraced Cheena’s vocal ‘qualities that might be

stereotyped as “gay”—his flamboyant side and his diva-like qualities’. However, Hohlfeld

attests that:

I know that as a child, I would have just thought Blades is silly and funny and

nice. I’d like to think that straight kids watching our show will grow up and

meet gay people and be accepting of them. If it’s because they happen to

recognize them as someone they know and like from TV, then we’ve done a

good thing. And I’d also like to think that kids who are struggling with their

sexuality will recognize themselves in Blades and see that the character is

accepted and loved for who he is. (Hohlfeld 2017)

As the series progressed, the creators continued to emphasise Blade’s camp traits, but they

also challenged the earlier characterisation of Blades as a young and inexperienced bot by

allowing him to demonstrate his pop culture credentials, and giving him the role of wise

conduit between the humans and the bots. This means that the later version of Blades can be

simultaneously read as fun and funny as well as camp and reassuringly positive.

Blades’ pairing with the only Burns female, Dani might be read as reinforcing his

difference from the other bots and thus his queerness. However, while he could be seen as

feminized via this pairing, Dani is not presented as ‘girly’ or soft, but strong, accomplished,

with what may be termed as traditional masculine qualities (including being a terrible cook –

a simplistic challenge to male and female stereotypes). Dani is an accomplished woman who

is driven by career goals and cares for her family, but not to the extent that she is a surrogate

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mother for younger brother Cody and she displays few stereotypical female traits, besides the

aforementioned gossiping. Her friendship with Blades develops over the series and although

initially she has to adopt a maternal role in encouraging him to fly, their relationship is more

of siblings as the series goes on. What this pairing does then is to present another type of

masculinity and also show the similarities between the genders in what Hohlfeld previously

refered to as a ‘continuum’ in which all characters display male and female characteristics.

The notion of the bots being ‘in disguise’ and, in particular, the revelation of the bots’

true ‘alien’ selves in series 4, offers a potential queer reading of the series overall. There is

much made in the first few episodes of the sense of panic and fear which the townspeople

may have if the bots ‘come out’ to them and of fearing that which is different or we don’t

understand. The bots reveal their true selves and the town decides to accept them and allow

them to live as bots without their disguises on the Island. The message of acceptance of

difference is again reinforced and the initial worry is unfounded, with only a couple of

exceptions (who are mocked and made out to be ‘cranks’), the townsfolk are accepting of

their true nature.

This brief overview of the main characters of the show demonstrates that the show

uses stereotypes throughout in an attempt to create humour by challenging and addressing

them, not always successfully. The bots are used to question the absurdity of life and human

society through their lack of prior knowledge and attempt to fit in to their adopted home. By

asking about the differences between male and female for example, the show addresses, and

implicitly challenges, current gender norms. The show also tries to educate the young

audience on issues such as lying to protect your family, team work, trusting friends, and

accepting difference. Overall the series features a white, male protaganist with a largely male

support network, however by representing different ways to be ‘male’ and ‘female’ as well as

different races and sexualities, all voiced authentically by the cast (who at least in the case of

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the humans, look like their characters),46 the series attempts to promote progressive diversity.

By learning from the humans, the bots can complete their mission and by challenging some

of the rules of society, they no longer need to remain ‘robots in disguise.’

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References

Abel, S. (1995), ‘The Rabbit in Drag: Camp and Gender Construction in the American

Animated Cartoon’, The Journal of Popular Culture, 29: 183–202.

Battles, K & W. Hilton-Morrow (2002), ‘Gay Characters in conventional spaces: Will

and Grace and the situation comedy genre’, Critical Studies in Media

Communication, 19 (1): 87-105.

Brownlee, S. (2011), ‘Masculinity between Animation and Live Action, or SpongeBob v.

Hasselhoff’, Animation Studies, 6. Available online:

https://journal.animationstudies.org/shannon-brownlee-masculinity-between-

animation-and-live-action-or-spongebob-v-hasselhoff/ (accessed 21 February 2018).

Burdfield, C. (2014), ’Effeminate Ponies’, Animation Studies 2.0. Available online:

https://blog.animationstudies.org/?p=851 (accessed 21 February 2018).

Burke, K. & T. Burke (1998), Saturday Morning Fever: Growing up with Cartoon

Culture, New York: St Martin’s Press.

Clatterbaugh, K. (2004), ‘What is Problematic about Masculinities?; in P. Murphy (ed)

Feminism and Masculinities, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Davis, G. & G. Needham (2009), Queer TV: Theories, Histories, Politics, London:

Routledge.

Dennis, J. (2003), Perspectives: ‘“The Same Thing We Do Every Night”: Signifying Same

Sex Desire in Television Cartoons’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 31 (3):

132-140.

Gauntlett, D. (2008) Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction, 2nd edn, London:

Routledge.

213
Maier. K. (2015) ‘The Adult Appeal of “Steven Universe”’, Animation Studies 2.0. Available

online: https://blog.animationstudies.org/?p=1325 (accessed 21 February 2018).

Mulvey, L. (1975), ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16 (3): 6-18.

Neale, S. (1983), ‘Masculinity as Spectacle’, Screen 24 (6): 2-17.

Patterson, G. & L. Spencer (2017), ‘What’s so funny about a snowman in a tiara? Exploring

gender identity and nonconformity in children’s animated films’, Queer Studies in

Media and Popular Culture, 2:1, 73-93

Ralay, A & J. Lucas (2006), ‘Stereotype or Success?’ Journal of Homosexuality, 51 (2): 19-

38.

Sweeney, G. (2012) ‘What do you want me to do? Dress in Drag and do the Hula?

Timon and Pumbaa’s Alternative Lifestyle Dilemma in The Lion King’, in J. Cheu

(ed), Diversity in Disney Films: Critical Essays on Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Sexuality

and Disibility, Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Truitt, B (2015), ‘Female ‘Transformers’come to the fore’, USA Today 2 April. Available

online: https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2015/04/23/transformers-female-

characters/26236633/ (accessed 21 February 2018).

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20. Anime’s Bodies

Rayna Denison

In this chapter from her book Anime: A Critical Introduction (Bloomsbury 2015), Denison

contextualises how women’s bodies in anime are read and understood by both Japanese and

Western audiences. She examines their mutable and transformative properties, arguing that

these properties are crucial to understanding the genres in which they appear, from horror,

to science fiction, and even hentai (pornography).

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21. Disney Films 1989-2005: The “Eisner” Era

Amy M. Davis

Davis’ chapter from her book Good Girls and Wicked Witches: Women in Disney’s Feature

Animation (Indiana University Press 2007) considers Disney films between the years 1989 to

2005. By exploring changes in the industry, such as an increase in female personnel at

Disney, Davis argues that this period evidences a change in Disney’s thematic

preoccupations and the representation of female characters; the films produced at this time

are concerned with issues of equality and difference as well as featuring more active female

characters.

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22. Taking an Appropriate Line: Exploring Representations of Disability within British

Mainstream Animation

Van Norris

Norris’ discussion of British animated series Creature Discomforts (2007-8), in an article

first published in 2008, examines the representation of disability in animation, an otherwise

relatively neglected, but important, topic. He argues that Aardman’s use of comedy allows

for a particularly nuanced representation of disability. Using the concept of comic

incongruity, Norris suggests that the comedy functions in a number of ways, but notably to

challenge prevailing stereotyping and ignorance around disability.

[INSERT REPRINT FILE ‘NORRIS’ HERE]

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1
Whereas much of film theory’s early enquiry coalesced around issues of ontology, and in particular

the unique relationship between film and reality (see for example, Bazin 1967), Animation Studies has

lacked such a singular theoretical enquiry. This is probably due to the fact that animation is not

‘indexical’ in the way that film is (i.e. it lacks the direct causal relationship between reality and image).
2
To the extent that this term has given title to Johnston and Thomas’ 1981 behind the scenes book

about Disney animation as well as two books on animation theory edited by Alan Cholodenko (1991

and 2007).
3
Questions of animated realism are especially relevant to – and productively illuminated by – animated

documentary filmmaking, which is examined in detail in a separate chapter of this volume.

4
It is also apparent that when the proportions of character faces are not aiming for human likeness,

highly detailed surface rendering in digital animation can be a sensual, haptic invitation into the story

world, rather than a distraction. Pat Power discusses ‘low and high modality cues’ for human-ness in

3D animation, noting that when it comes to animation of the human form, ‘due to our cognitive

sensitivity […] lower modality stylized cues can be more effective or expressive, and are less likely to

cue dissonance, as in, for example, the uncanny valley effect’ (2009: 113). In other words, despite the

attention lavished on the surface details of skin, hair, and eyes of characters like Gollum in Peter

Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (2001, 2002, 2003) or Neytiri in Avatar (James Cameron, 2009), neither

character evokes the uncanny valley because their facial design proportions follow low human

modality principles.
5
This also explains why the benign plasticine universes produced by Aardman avoid uncanniness.

Because they are fashioned from plasticine and follow principles of caricature and stylisation,

Aardman’s characters clearly occupy their own fictional world, separate from the one in which we live.
6
The Rotoscope was invented by the Fleischer Brothers and patented by Max Fleischer in 1915. Dave

later took on the role of Koko the Clown, his rotoscoped performance forming the basis for the popular
animated character.
7
Bob Sabiston’s Rotoshop process, used in Waking Life (Richard Linklater 2001) and A Scanner

Darkly (Richard Linklater 2006) and many short films directed by Sabiston, is another digital

descendent of the Rotoscope.

8
And, indeed, gender identity (see Butler 2003).
9
The same can be argued of abstract and non-character animation. See Dobson (2015) for a discussion

of performance in Norman McLaren’s work.

10
When thinking about the performance of the animated character, Crafton distinguishes between

‘embodied’ and ‘figurative’ acting. For Crafton, this distinction is also partly a historical one, with

embodied characters coming about with the alignment of acting and animation at the Disney studio in

the 1930s, at which point the animated character begins to become an avatar for the animator, replacing

the hand of the animator seen on screen in early animation. Although, as Crafton notes, much

animation combines both figurative and embodied approaches. See Crafton (2013: 15-57)
11
Laura Ivins-Hulley (2008), in a discussion of puppet animation, similarly points out the importance

of taking ‘the audience into consideration to determine how performance is constituted’.

12
For example, real time animation and the use of animation in live performance. See Tomlinson

(2013)
13
The ‘total archive’ refers to the idea that digital technologies could one day completely replace

human memory because of our use of them to record everything in our lives.
14
This list was first published in: Taberham, P. (2018). It is adapted from Paul Wells (1998: 36) and

Maureen Furniss’ (2008: 30) discussions of experimental animation.

15
This is not to imply that narrative filmmaking cannot also be ambiguous, or open to thematic

interpretation. Nonetheless, in the absence of narrative-dramatic scenarios, experimental animation can

be notably elusive.
16
The labour of animation has often been co-opted into the subject matter of a number of animated

films, forming the bedrock of what Wells (2002) has labelled ‘deconstructive’ cartoons that reflexively

fall back on the contexts of their very creation to stress the visible process of moving image production.

From early British series Jerry the Tyke (Sid Griffiths, 1925-27) through to the irreverent Chuck Jones

cartoon Duck Amuck (1953), numerous shorts have disclosed the mechanics and unravelled the

constituent parts of animated production (page, paint, ink, brush and even film strip) all laid bare in a

comic feat of anti-illusionism.

17
These included the Alice Comedies (1923-27), which mixed live-action with cel-animation; the

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (1927-28) series (before the character migrated to Winkler Productions and

Universal, only returning to Disney in 2010); and the Silly Symphonies, a series of 75 theatrical shorts

produced between 1929 and 1939, which were parodied by Warner Brothers for their subsequent

Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series.

18
This perhaps explains why Disney’s shorts ‘were about twice as expensive as those of most other

studios, typically costing in excess of fifty thousand dollars each’ (Barrier 1999: 393).
19
Pixar’s advertisements are, however, easily accessible online
20
For my view of how puppets and animated cartoons engage modern philosophy and political theory,

see Herhuth (2015).

21
Scott Lash and Celia Lury use the term ‘social imaginary’ to refer to the collective memory and

imagination of media users and audiences (2007: 182).

22
Each of these series, over their run, have included episodes which are about television, with Family

Guy including several, with one episode centred around ‘that episode of Who’s the Boss…’ the 1980s

US live action sitcom (‘Love Thy Trophy’, season 2 episode 5, 2000).

23
See Sandler (2002), Burke & Burke (1998) and Mittell (2004) and Ratelle (in this volume) for further

discussion of the history of animation for children on TV.

24
See Paul Wells on the narrative devices and strategies used which are particular to animation,

including metamorphosis, in Understanding Animation (1998) chapter 3.

25
The parent admitted that the show was scheduled post watershed but claimed that young children

would still be watching then. See ‘South Park is not suitable for youngsters says Mum’ (1999)
26
Cartoon Network’s ‘Adult Swim’ late night animation block which was set up in the late 1990s to

broadcast adult only animation began a dedicated anime slot ‘Toonami’ in 1999. This was generally

scheduled at midnight though later often included popular anime within the Cartoon Network’s

daytime schedule.
27
Although the Romantic period reached its peak from 1800-1850, its roots stretch back to the 1700s.

This period is largely characterized by “feeling and imagination”, as a reaction to Enlightenment’s

emphasis on reason (Morrow 2011: 39).

28
Creating original cel animation for television at this point was prohibitively laborious, slow and

expensive, as an average seven-minute MGM short, for example, cost between $40,000 and $60,000 to

produce (Mittell 2003: 38). This cost was not feasible for networks, particularly given the amount of

new short films they would need to fill the broadcasting schedule.
29
For more discussion on the connection between Hanna-Barbera and Kellogg’s see Cartoon Research.

Available online: http://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/a-kelloggs-cereal-cartoon-concert/

30
The historic distinction that has been made between video games (typically console based) and

computer games (typically PC based) is becoming increasingly redundant, given the proliferation of

electronic gaming platforms and the newfound multifunctionality of once dedicated devices (consoles

such as the PS4 and Xbox One offer much more than just gaming). With this in mind, the more popular

term ‘video game’ will be used as the shorthand to refer to both types of electronic games throughout

this chapter.
31
For more on the subject of interactivity and distinctions between ‘old’/analogue and ‘new’/digital

media see Manovich (2001 and 2013). For a discussion of the intersection of interactivity and mimesis
within animated environments see Pallant (2015).
32
There is not the space to consider other salient subjects such as glitching, machinima, or recent

alternate and virtual reality gaming developments, but hopefully this chapter will provide some solid

foundations so that curious readers can continue to explore this topic. For more on glitching see

Meades (2015), and for more on machinima see Ng (2013).

33
For an extensive discussion of the representational capabilities of animation see Wells (1998)
34
For a collection of perspectives on player agency within video games see: Wysocki (2013).
35
A recent survey (Campbell 2016) of the US Games Industry revealed 75% of respondents identified

as male, while a similar survey of the UK Games Industry (Ramanan 2017) states that only 14% of

respondents identified as female.

36
There is not space in this chapter to fully retrace the #GamerGate outpouring, which dominated

online discussion forums for over a year following a misogynistic blog post by Eron Gjoni about his

game developer ex-girlfriend Zoë Quinn. For a more detailed account of this saga see: Golding and van

Deventer (2016) and Quinn (2017).

37
See Claire Burdfield (2014) and Kodi Maier (2015) which deal with masculinity in My Little Pony

and Steven Universe respectively.

38
The show’s opening song has very specific lyrics which explain the premise of the series and the

mission for the bots: ‘Learn from the humans, Serve and protect, Live in their world, earn their respect.

A family of heroes will be your allies, To others remain robots in disguise’ this signals to the audience

that the bots and the Burns family are important but they need to remain ‘in disguise’.
39
See Burke & Burke (1998) and Ratelle (this volume) on the increase in TV animation designed to

sell toys to children in the 1980s.

40
In The Octonauts, the characters are all voiced with different regional UK accents to diversify from

the traditional received pronunciation commonly used in early British television. That the characters
are all different types of anthropomorphised ocean creatures also helps to show diverse forms and

appearance and foster an understanding of what we may not be familiar with.

41
In an interview with USA Today on the introduction of new female bots in the Transformers universe,

Rescue Bots writer, Nicole Dubuc discussed the addition of female characters in the preschool version,

‘That comes from little girls coming up to me saying, “I’m a Rescue Bot, I’d like to be on the team”.’

(Truitt, 2015)
42
The term ‘new man’ was said to emerge in the 1980s and described men who were ‘generally

characterised as sensitive, emotionally aware, respectful of women and egalitarian in outlook’ (Gill

2003: 37)
43
This area has received little study in animation but in cinema has seen an increasing amount of work

since Steve Neale in 1983. His main thesis was about the way men’s bodies are presented on screen

and how we relate to this as spectators, building on Mulvey’s (1975) seminal work on the ‘male gaze’

in cinema. This was argued to be centered around ‘narcissistic identitfication’ of the male as the ‘image

of authority’ (Neale 1983: 7-8) which is arguably still prevalent on contemporary screens.
44
One of the most comprehensive is Transformers Wiki available online at

http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Transformers:_Rescue_Bots_(cartoon) (accessed 21 February 2018).

45
Like many live action shows, Rescue Bots had its own ‘musical’ episode, ‘I Have Heard the Robots

Singing’, Season 3, episode 26.

46
The series uses black actors to portray black characters, unlike in the past (see Sammond in this

volume), or even in some contemporary animation series such as The Simpsons. In the long running

series, the Asian character (and other ethnic minorities) Apu Nahasapeemapetilon is voiced by a white

actor and has been the subject of a recent documentary, The Problem with Apu (Michael Melamedoff,

2017).