Animating Film Theory

Animating
Film Theory
Karen Beckman, editor

Duke Universit y Press

Durham and London 2014
© 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-­
free paper ♾
Typeset in Chaparral Pro by Tseng Information
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Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Animating film theory / Karen Beckman, editor.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-­0-­8223-­5640-­0 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-­0-­8223-­5652-­3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Animated films—History and criticism.
2. Animated films—Social aspects.
3. Animation (Cinematography) I. Beckman,
Karen Redrobe
nc1765.a535 2014
791.43′34—dc23 2013026435

“Film as Experiment of Animation—Are Films

Experiments on Human Beings?” © Gertrud Koch.
In memory of Ruth Wright (1917–2012)
Contents

Acknowledgments  ·  ix

Animating Film Theory: An Introduction  ·  Kare n B e c kman  ·  1

Part I: Time and Space

1 : : Animation and History  ·  Esther Lesl i e  ·  25
2 : : Animating the Instant: The Secret Symmetry between Animation
and Photography  ·  Tom Gunning  ·  37
3 : : Polygraphic Photography and the Origins of 3-­D Animation  ·  
Al e x a nde r R . Gall oway  ·  54
4 : : “A Living, Developing Egg Is Present before You”: Animation,
Scientific Visualization, Modeling  ·  Oliver G ayc ke n  ·  68

Part II: Cinema and Animation

5 : : André Martin, Inventor of Animation Cinema: Prolegomena for a
History of Terms  ·  Hervé Joub ert-­L aure nc i n; tr an s l ate d
by Luc y S wanson  ·  85
6 : : “First Principles” of Animation  ·  Al an C hol ode n ko  ·  98
7 : : Animation, in Theory  ·  Suzanne Buch an  ·  111

Part III: The Experiment

8 : : Film as Experiment in Animation: Are Films Experiments on
Human Beings?  ·  Gertrud Ko ch; tran sl ate d by Dan i e l
He ndric ks on  ·  131
9 : : Frame Shot: Vertov’s Ideologies of Animation  ·  M i hae l a
Mi h a il ova and John MacKay  ·  145
10 : : Signatures of Motion: Len Lye’s Scratch Films and the Energy of
the Line  ·  A ndre w R . Johnston  ·  167
11 : : Animating Copies: Japanese Graphic Design, the Xerox Machine,
and Walter Benjamin  ·  Y uriko F uruhata  ·  181
12 : : Framing the Postmodern: The Rhetoric of Animated Form in
Experimental Identity-­Politics Documentary Video in the 1980s and
1990s  ·  Te ss Tak ahashi  ·  201

Part IV: Animation and the World

13 : : Cartoon Film Theory: Imamura Taihei on Animation,
Documentary, and Photography  ·  Thomas L a M arre  ·  221
14 : : African American Representation through the Combination of
Live Action and Animation  ·  C hristop he r P. L e h man  ·  252
15 : : Animating Uncommon Life: U.S. Military Malaria Films
(1942–1945) and the Pacific Theater  ·  B ish nupri ya G ho s h  ·  264
16 : : Realism in the Animation Media Environment: Animation Theory
from Japan  ·  Marc Steinb erg  ·  287
17 : : Some Observations Pertaining to Cartoon Physics; or, The
Cartoon Cat in the Machine  ·  Sco t t Buk atman  ·  301

Bibliography  ·  317 Contributors  ·  337 Index  ·  343

Acknowledgments

Over the last few years, many people have helped me to think more care-
fully about animation, and their ideas and suggestions have given energy
and life to this book. First, I am grateful to the volume’s wonderful con-
tributors. They have all been eager and inspired participants from the
very beginning, and I thank them for their intellectual vibrancy, good
humor, and grace. What a pleasure it has been to work with each one.
Thanks also to the volume’s three readers—they gave great advice and
enthusiastic support. Lacey Baradel helped me prepare the manuscript
with meticulous care and incredible efficiency, and I am most grateful to
her. In addition, I’ve had the good fortune to consider the topic of ani-
mation in a number of different venues and with a variety of interlocu-
tors. These include Dudley Andrew, Nancy Davenport, Erna Fiorentini,
Maureen Furniss, Vinzenz Hediger, Joshua Mosley, Susan Napier, Jayne
Pilling, Dana Polan, Jason Potts, Bella Honess Roe, Marc Siegel and his
students, Vivian Sobchack, Sheila Sofian, Dan Stout, Orkhan Telhan,
Rick Warner, Paul Wells, the members of the 2012–13 Penn Humanities
Forum, the participants of the Enchanted Drawing conferences (parts I
and II), and the members of the “Art of Animation” seminar. Duke Uni-
versity Press has been enthusiastic in its support of the project since
its inception, and I’m especially grateful to Ken Wissoker and Elizabeth
Ault. Penn’s Program in Cinema Studies and the Department of the His-
tory of Art have provided me with collegial and thought-­provoking envi-
ronments for almost a decade, and I appreciate all my colleagues’ friend-
ship and support. In Cinema Studies, I am especially fortunate to be able
to work with Tim Corrigan, Peter Decherney, Kathy DeMarco Van Cleve,
Meta Mazaj, and Nicola Gentili. Dean Rebecca Bushnell and Provost
Vincent Price could not have been more supportive during my time at
Penn, and I thank them for their constant encouragement. I also thank
Leo Charney and Brooke Sietinsons for their collaborative, energetic,
and innovative spirits. Robert, Merrilee, Mari, Eric, Dieter, Jane, Robin,
Lucy, Suzanne, Claire, Torben, Janek, Mikkel, Freya, and mum—thanks
for sharing your lives with me. Michael, Siduri, Lua, and Bruno—how
did I get to be so lucky to be animated each day by you?

x  • Acknowledgments
Animating Film Theory: An Introduction
K a re n B e c k ma n

Animating Film Theory begins from the premise that cinema and media
studies in the early twenty-­first century needs a better understanding of
the relationship between two of the field’s most unwieldy and unstable
organizing concepts: “animation” and “film theory.”1 As the increas-
ingly digital nature of cinema now forces animation to the forefront
of our conversations, it becomes ever clearer that for film theorists, it
has really never made sense to ignore animation. Tom Gunning has re-
cently described the marginalization of animation as “one of the great
scandals of film theory.”2 Marginalization, of course, is not the same
as total neglect; and in order to respond productively to this apparent
scandal, we need to consider both where and when this marginalization
has happened in the history of film theory, and where and when it hasn’t
­happened.
Flipping through the available film theory anthologies, one could
easily assume that film theorists have utterly neglected the topic of ani-
mation.3 Yet as both Suzanne Buchan and Oliver Gaycken point out in
their contributions to this volume, animation has been a sustained if
dispersed area of interest for a surprisingly substantial and prominent
list of authors. Part of the fragmentary nature of film theorists’ engage-
ment with the term may stem from the fact that animation signifies in
so many different ways. At different moments, it becomes synonymous
with a whole range of much more specific terms and concepts, includ-
ing movement, life itself, a quality of liveliness (that doesn’t necessarily
involve movement), spirit, nonwhiteness, frame-­by-­frame filmmaking pro-
cesses, variable frame filmmaking processes, and digital cinema, as well as
a range of mobilized media that appear within animated films, includ-
ing sculpture, drawing, collage, painting, and puppetry. These divergent
terms do not always sit easily with each other, and though the tensions
among them are important and interesting, they have not been ex-
plored as fully as they might, in part because our critical paradigms may
have foreclosed such lines of inquiry. Film theory and history both fre-
quently rely on a series of binary terms, including continuous versus non-
continuous, narrative versus experimental, indexical versus handmade, and
animated versus live action. Though these oppositions can be useful, they
can lead to inaccurate presumptions in that they do not always accu-
rately reflect the differences contained within any one of these terms,
such as experimental or narrative. This volume aims to unearth and think
through some of these inaccuracies, blind spots, and structural inhibi-
tors to clear some space, pose some questions, and set some priorities
for the future as well as the retroactive work of animating film theory.
It would be close to impossible to organize film theorists’ meandering
thoughts on this sprawling term into any kind of coherent category that
would work as well, for example, as realism, montage, spectatorship, ideol-
ogy, or sound seems to do on a film theory syllabus. Yet, as the examples
demonstrate, by seeking out those places where film theorists have
grappled with animation, we often stumble upon ideas that complicate
those concepts we think we can more easily corral into the straitjacket
of the textbook (this may help us to understand animation’s margin-
alization). No doubt, it would also be difficult to extract and antholo-
gize, for example, writing on animation from the body of work known
as classical film theory because of the way animation seems to wind in and
out of the theorization of other aspects of the experience and materi-
ality of cinema. Animation’s persistent yet elusive presence within film
theory’s key writings makes it both easy to overlook and essential to en-
gage.4 By briefly surveying some of animation’s cameo appearances in
the history of film theory, I hope to encourage readers to frame today’s
theoretical work on the digital’s relation to animation (a synonymous
relationship is too easily presumed) within a longer history of think-
ing about what cinema is and how it works. I also hope to reclaim and
reanimate some of the interesting but underdeveloped questions and
ideas to which earlier and overlooked musings on animation and its re-
lation to broader categories such as “film” or “cinema” gave rise. These
questions cannot be limited to the realm of animation studies as if they
were irrelevant to the broader study of moving images; as Edgar Morin,
one of the important bridge figures between earlier and later film theo-
ries, suggests: “It is obviously the cartoon that completes, expands, ex-
alts the animism implied in the cinema. . . . The cartoon only exaggerates
the normal ­phenomenon.”5

2  • Karen Beckman
Movement

Paul Wells suggests that abstract animated films always prioritize “ab-
stract forms in motion,” but a close look at experimental film theory
complicates this claim.6 For sure, Norman McLaren’s statement that
“animation is not the art of drawings-­that-­move, but rather the art
of movements-­that-­are-­drawn” seems to confirm that movement is
always the priority of frame-­by-­frame processes, but even for McLaren,
things are never that simple. In 1948 McLaren distinguishes between
techniques that lend themselves “more readily to creating visual change
rather than to action (side to side, and to and fro displacement of image
on the screen),” leading us to wonder what the relationship between
visual change and movement is.7 I don’t think that change and move-
ment are the same thing, but the tensions contained within the term
animation provide us with an opportunity to think about what these
two concepts share and how they differ, particularly within the context
of the visual image.8 Similarly, writing about the technical process of
making Blinkety Blank (1954), McLaren explains his need to alternate
between small clusters of discontinuous frames and continuous frames
that allowed for flow and motion. Here he makes clear that motion is
not a given in animation, and that discontinuous and continuous, as
well as single- and multiple-­frame, approaches often appear within the
same experimental film:
Sometimes . . . I would engrave two adjacent frames, or a frame-­cluster,
(that is, a group of 3, 4 or more frames); sometimes a frame-­cluster
would have related and continuous image within it and would thus
solidify some action and movement; at other times the frame-­cluster
would consist only of a swarm of disconnected, discontinuous images,
calculated to build up an overall visual “impression.” Here and there,
to provide much needed relief from the staccato action a single-­frame
images and frame-­clusters, I introduced longer sections of contiguous
frames with a flow of motion in the traditional manner.9

The Frame and the Shot

Taking a more extreme position in relation to the question of movement

in frame-­by-­frame processes, Peter Kubelka, in “The Theory of Metrical
Film,” asserts: “Cinema is not movement. This is the first thing. Cinema
is not movement. Cinema is a projection of stills—which means images

Animating Film Theory • 3

which do not move—in a very quick rhythm. And you can give the illu-
sion of movement, of course, but this is a special case.”10 Kubelka resists
the idea that cinema has to be equated with an illusion of movement
while simultaneously rejecting the assumption that the shot is neces-
sarily the dominant location of cinema’s articulation. Thus, he invites
us to think more precisely about the language we use to describe editing
and rhythm, particularly in relation to the grammar of animated and
experimental films. Kubelka demonstrates that it can at times be much
more important to attend to the individual frame and the relationship
between single frames than to the unit of the shot; yet as he shifts our
attention toward one definition of animation—a frame-­by-­frame process
of filmmaking—movement is never presumed as a desired outcome. The
point, rather, is to revise accepted understandings of experimental film
grammar, rhythm, and editing through a recasting of the frame as a pri-
mary unit of production:
It can be a collision, or it could be a very weak succession. There are many
many possibilities. It’s just that [Sergei] Eisenstein wanted to have a col-
lision—that’s what he liked. But what I wanted to say is: Where is, then,
the articulation of cinema? Eisenstein, for example, said it’s the colli-
sion of two shots. But it’s very strange that nobody ever said that it’s not
between shots but between frames.11 It’s between frames where cinema
speaks. And then, when you have a roll of very weak collisions between
frames—this is what I would call a shot, when one frame is very similar
to the next frame, and the next frame, and the next frame, and the next
frame, and the next frame—the result that you get when you have just
a natural scene and you film it. . . . This would be a shot. But, in reality,
you can work with every frame.12

Animism and Objectification

In The Art of the Moving Picture (1915), one of the earliest extended pieces
of writing about film, Vachel Lindsay introduces an observation about
film’s animistic power that persists in the writings of many of his con-
temporaries. In chapter 11, devoted to the topic of architecture in mo-
tion, Lindsay writes: “I have said that it is a quality, not a defect, of
the photoplays that while the actors tend to become types and hiero-
glyphics and dolls, on the other hand, dolls and hieroglyphs and mecha-
nisms tend to become human. By an extension of this principle, non-­
human tones, textures, lines, and spaces take on a vitality almost like

4  • Karen Beckman
that of flesh and blood.”13 With impressive economy of style, these two
sentences highlight cinema’s capacity to anthropomorphize inanimate
objects, including humanoid dolls as well as signs and machines; turn
actors (presumably human) into lifeless dolls or signs; and, in what is
perhaps the most conceptually challenging of these claims, imbue ab-
stract tones, lines, and spaces with a sense of life in addition to cor-
poreality.14 While Lindsay does not explicitly mention the term anima-
tion, he identifies early in the medium’s history a few preoccupations
that are pertinent to this volume’s interest in how the discourse of film
theory has engaged animation, and how that engagement could enrich
contemporary film theory. These preoccupations, which often take on a
mystical dimension, repeatedly return to cinema’s capacity to reframe
the relationship between humans and objects; to evoke, through anima-
tion, whether of letter, object, line, or space, attachments and emotional
responses to nonhuman things; to make us think carefully about what
movement is and where it is located—in the object, on the screen, or in
the mind-­body of the spectator; and to alter our perception of time and
space through framing, camera movement, and montage, all of which
have the capacity to endow supposedly still objects (animation some-
times makes us question whether true stillness in the world actually
exists) with a sense of liveliness and mobility, or at least potential mo-
bility, even when the object in question is not being animated in the tra-
ditional sense of this term.15
Prefiguring André Bazin’s sense of nature’s on-­screen agency, Jean
Epstein declared in 1926 that cinema’s greatest power lies precisely in
this quality of “animism”: “On screen, nature is never inanimate. Ob-
jects take on airs. Trees gesticulate. Mountains, just like Etna, convey
meaning. Every prop becomes a character.”16 Cinema, for him, is an “ani-
mistic” language that “attributes a semblance of life to the objects it de-
fines,” and this magical, animating force, along with its impact on the
conceptualization of realism, the role of the actor, and the difference be-
tween humans and objects or abstract lines and shapes on screen, are all
primary preoccupations for early film theorists.17
The German-­Hungarian theorist Béla Balázs is no exception. While
Epstein emphasizes the liveliness of objects, Balázs, like Lindsay, seems
at least as interested, and at times more interested, in how film turns
people into objects, and in the role of the cartoon in illuminating the dif-
ference between the film image and other types of images, particularly
where the image’s relationship to reality is concerned.18 Balázs’s most
significant discussion of animation occurs in a chapter titled “The Abso-

Animating Film Theory • 5

lute Film” in The Spirit of Film (1930), where he opens numerous sugges-
tive lines of inquiry. First, he writes of American slapstick comedy as if
the bodies on screen actually were cartoon bodies, and he argues that
slapstick discovers its tempo thanks to what Gaycken in this volume
describes as time-­lapse photography’s decomposition of time. Balázs
writes, “For it was the tempo of time-­lapse that determined the tempo
of the typical mad chases of the slapstick comedy. And similarly, their
non-­psychological, purely mechanical confusion and chaos expressed
the exuberance of a technology that can do with its creatures as it likes
because they possess no gravity of their own or any autonomous logic.”
(We might note here that for Stanley Cavell, writing in 1979, it is cartoon
characters’ “abrogation of gravity” that places them outside of the world
of “movies.”)19 For Balázs, slapstick comedians and not cartoon charac-
ters have no gravity, and it is in the context of slapstick, not cartoons,
that he discusses the absence of danger and death in cinema:
Events in slapstick seem unthreatening because they are, after all, no
more than mere images. . . . This complete absence of danger is what
makes these old-­style comic scenes the absolute products of the image.
For every (written) fairy tale, however comic, always contains the possi-
bility of someone losing his life or something being destroyed. But the
worst that can happen to images is that they can be erased or faded out
or painted over—they can never be killed off.20

Here again we find a direct contrast with Cavell, for whom the impossi-
bility of death is one of the hallmarks of cartoon characters in particu-
lar: “Their bodies are indestructible, one might almost say immortal.”21
Midway through this chapter, Balázs, in order to explain the “abso-
lute image” and the “absolute film,” compares a legend about a Chinese
painting to the world of cartoons created by Pat Sullivan. This extended
passage provides an important precedent to the “cartoon physics” that
Scott Bukatman discusses later in this volume. Balázs begins by illus-
trating the centrality of animation to film theory’s meditations on the
nature of film realism in comparison with realism in other art forms:
“There is an old Chinese legend that tells of an old Chinese painter who
has painted a landscape. A beautiful valley, with mountains in the dis-
tance. The old painter likes the valley so much that he walks into the
painting and disappears into the mountains, never to be seen again.”
Balázs then proceeds to contrast the Chinese painter with Felix the Cat
and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, arguing that with them, “the matter is
not so simple.”22

6  • Karen Beckman
 [Pat Sullivan’s] pictures do not create a natural reality into which the
artist might enter like the old Chinese painter. This world is popu-
lated only by beings sketched with a pencil. Yet their outlines are not
so much representations of the shapes of independent beings; the lines
themselves are those beings’ only substance. Unlike what happened to
the old Chinaman, there is no transformation here of appearance into
reality. . . . Art is not transformed into nature. Instead, there is abso-
lutely no distinction between appearance and reality. . . . There are no
miracles in this world. There are only lines that function in accordance
with the shape they assume.23

The Line and the Letter

The cartoon line, as the thing itself, has for Balázs as much utopian
possibility as it does in Eisenstein’s more frequently cited writing on
“plasmaticness,” a concept taken up in this volume by Esther Leslie and
Gertrud Koch in particular. Balázs suggests, “Lines are lines and where
lines can be drawn, everything is possible.”24 But Balázs also cautions
readers against abstract films in which these lines of possibility become
nothing but “ornaments in motion” without any further purpose or
meaning.25 If film theory has paid little attention to the interest that
Balázs expresses in cinema’s “first innovation” of bringing “movement
into drawn lines,” Andrew R. Johnston explores the possibilities of that
mobile line in this volume in his chapter.26 While Balázs rejected what
he considered to be the purely ornamental animations of the abstract
film, there are nevertheless effects derived from the abstract film that
promise to make possible “directly materialized meaning.”27 He sees this
potential particularly in the realm of animated letters and intertitles,
which are both explored further in this volume by Yuriko Furuhata and
Tess Takahashi, as well as by Mihaela Mihailova and John MacKay, who
expand the existing English-­language work on Dziga Vertov’s use of
and writing about animation within the 1920s Soviet context.28 Balázs
thinks about animated letters’ symbolic force and he compares the effect
of movement and directionality with the effect of changes in volume
levels in the context of sound: “Letters that hurl themselves at us, as-
saulting our eyes just as a scream assaults our ears?” He also explores the
affective quality of moving text and variable typefaces: “Living letters
are the graphic traces of an emotional movement. They are not abstract.
They are the direct reflections of an inner state.”29

Animating Film Theory • 7

Evolution and Utopia

Mihailova and MacKay argue that Aleksander Rodchenko’s spinning

intertitles have a revolutionary component; but this concern with
transformation is not only found within the Soviet context. Indeed, for
Epstein, cinema’s animated force is inextricably linked to change. For
him, when the moving image is animated “as much as its nature compels
it to be,” it shows “that everything is diversity and evolution.” Evolution-
ary and frame-­by-­frame, cellular paradigms ultimately lead Epstein to
the same conclusions about cinema: “Whether we think about the cine-
matographic space according to its discontinuity, from cell to cell, or
according to its continuous evolution, the visual data—which is, here,
the sole information—indicates that most forms do not remain equal
to themselves, neither in their transposition from one frame of discon-
tinuity to another, nor during their passage from one moment of conti-
nuity to another.”30
This association of the animated image with constant evolution pro-
vides the foundation for many utopian theorizations of animation, and
they are explored here in different ways by Bukatman, Koch, Esther
Leslie, and Mihailova and MacKay. For sure, cinema’s animistic force
disrupts conventions of time and space, but as Epstein points out in
a passage on variable-­speed cinematography, where the scientific ex-
periment plays a central role (as it does for several of the authors col-
lected here, including Alexander R. Galloway, Gaycken, Gunning, and
Koch), cinema’s disruption of the natural is to be found in all new ways
of thinking: “One may object that it is an artificial result. But is there an
experiment or even an advanced observation that does not employ a de-
vice and that does not more or less disrupt natural phenomenon while
at the same time communicating new appearances? And yet, we do not
consider those to be false.”31

Kinesthetic Thinking and Feeling

Germaine Dulac, in “Aesthetics, Obstacles, Integral Cinégraphie” (1926),

offers an extended meditation on how cinema’s engagement with move-
ment changes between the 1890s and the 1920s. This essay provides
rich terrain for engaging the phenomenon of movement in cinema as a
physiological experience, as well as a catalyst for both analytic thought
and emotion. She states that if cinema is only “an animated reflection”
of “the expressive forms of literature, or of music, sculpture, painting,

8  • Karen Beckman
architecture, and the dance,” then “it is not an art.” Dulac distinguishes
between cinema as “a mechanical invention created to capture life’s true
continuous movement” and as “the creator of synthetic movements.”
Furthermore, Dulac here maps an interesting, complex, and perhaps
surprising set of affinities among different types of movement, narra-
tive fiction, and documentary. Soon after the arrival of the Lumières’
train, she suggests, “sympathetic study of mechanical movement was
scorned” (it is worth noting here that it is the loss of the study, not
the recording, of mechanical movement that she bemoans).32 Dulac con-
tinues, “In the hope of attracting an audience, the spiritual movement
of human feelings through the mediation of characters was added.” Dis-
tancing itself from the “actual experience” of movement, cinema be-
comes subordinate to “bad literature,” as “one set about arranging ani-
mated photographs around a performance.” In the course of the essay,
Dulac explores what she considers to be the proper and improper role of
movement or animation by introducing several different forms of move-
ment: the novel’s movement of ideas and situation; theatrical movement
that allows for the “development of moods and events”; the movement
of human feelings; and the “concept of movement in its plain and me-
chanical visual continuity as an end in itself.” She critiques the focus on
characters as the “principal objects of concern when, perhaps, the evo-
lution and transformation of a form, or of a volume, or of a line would
have provided more delight. . . . The meaning of the word ‘movement’
was entirely lost sight of, and in the cinema it (movement) was made
subservient to succinctly recounted stories whose series of images, too
obviously animated, were used to illustrate the subject.”33 Dulac’s obser-
vation that the “composed” films in which movement is subordinate to
narrative offer none of the “psychical and visual sensation” of prenar-
rative cinema provides an interesting early precedent and useful start-
ing point for contemporary theorists exploring cinema’s corporeal and
affective dimensions. This kind of theoretical resonance is particularly
rich in Dulac’s inquiry into the spectator’s emotional response to non-
human and even nonorganic moving forms, as when she wonders: “Can
lines unwinding in profusion according to a rhythm dependent on a sen-
sation or an abstract idea affect one’s emotions by themselves, without
sets, solely through the activity of their development?”34
She extends this passage in a way that opens up interesting ques-
tions about the relationship between variable-­speed cinematography
and cinematic “truth,” and also about the relationship between motion
and what she calls “a purely visual emotion”:

Animating Film Theory • 9

 In the film about the birth of sea urchins, a schematic form, generated
by greater or lesser speeds of time-­lapse cinematography, describes a
graphic curve of varying degrees that elicits a feeling at odds with the
thought that it illustrates. The rhythm and the magnitude of movement
in the screen-­space become the only affective factors. In its embryonic
state, a purely visual emotion, physical and not cerebral, is the equal of
the emotion stimulated by an isolated sound.35

Classical film theory is often distinguished from later theories con-

cerned with questions of identity, subjectivity, affect, and ideology. But
here, through a mode of cinematic movement decoupled from both the
human and narrative, we find an opportunity for unexplored conti-
nuities between early and postclassical film theories and among Dulac’s
emotion-­ inducing line, Lindsay’s flesh-­ and-­blood lines and spaces,
Eisenstein’s plasmaticness, Walter Benjamin’s theorization of play and
innervation, contemporary interest in “thing theory” and object rela-
tions, and Judith Halberstam’s queer celebration of Pixar films as places
that enable the development of an “animated self” that disrupts the idea
of “a timeless and natural humanity.” These are sites for people “who be-
lieve that ‘things’ (toys, nonhuman animals, rocks, sponges) are as lively
as humans and who can glimpse other worlds underlying and overwrit-
ing this one.”36
Our ability to recognize these types of affinities owes much to the late
Miriam Hansen, whose pioneering work, like that of Esther Leslie, has
done so much to help us understand the way in which for Benjamin and
Theodor W. Adorno, “Disney films became emblematic of the juncture of
art, politics, and technology debated at the time.”37 These imbrications
are important because they enrich the context in which we might read
the chapters collected here, such as Koch’s discussion of animation in
relation to kinesthetic and emotional thinking, Takahashi’s exploration
of the intersection of video-­animation techniques and identity politics
in experimental documentaries of the 1980s and 1990s, and Johnston’s
exploration of the energy of Len Lye’s “wiggling” lines. But by drawing
out such continuities, these chapters also offer a counterdiscourse to the
influential model for thinking about animation’s relation to the world
that is proposed by Cavell in his 1979 addendum to The World Viewed.
Cavell describes a shared world that contrasts with the childish world of
cartoons. The inhabitants of the former are, apparently, quite certain of
“when or to what extent our laws and limits do and do not apply”; this is
a real world populated by people who are universally recognized as pos-

10  • Karen Beckman
sessing a soul and being vulnerable to death, a world in which all bodies
are “fed” and not “stoked.”38 For Halberstam, certain kinds of animation,
like Pixar, encourage not so much escapism from the so-­called real world
as critiques of the fictions of equality and permanence that undergird
the unchanging reality that Cavell describes. On this question, Hansen
is particularly helpful, for she highlights Mickey Mouse’s affinities with
a contemporary world that resists the clear division of human and non-
human on which Cavell relies:
Benjamin’s Mickey Mouse points toward the general imbrication of
physiological impulses with cybernetic structures that, no longer con-
fined to the domain of cyberfiction, has become standard practice in
science and medicine, architecture and design, and a host of other
areas. This cyborgian quality brings Mickey Mouse into the purview of
Benjamin’s reflections on the body: the problematic of the psychophysio-
logical boundaries supposed not only to contain the subject “within” but
also to distinguish the human species from the rest of creation.39

Worlds and Spaces

In her own exploration of “Micky-­Maus,” Hansen sees no need either

to assert a hierarchy between live action and animated cinema or to de-
termine whether animation belongs “inside of” or “under” cinema. But
many other participants in this conversation about the relationship be-
tween film theory’s proper object (cinema) and its freaky cousin (anima-
tion) have often been drawn to this type of spatial mapping. These geo-
graphic narratives tend either to insist on a total separation of realms, as
we see in Cavell’s distinction of “worlds,” or to map out areas of overlap
between cinema and animation in the context of paradigms where one
term is always dominant. In 2001 Lev Manovich, in The Language of New
Media, made this oft-­cited claim: “Born from animation, cinema pushed
animation to its periphery, only in the end to become one particular case
of animation.”40 Although Alan Cholodenko, as he points out in his con-
tribution to this volume, made a similar claim about all cinema being
a subset of animation more than a decade before Manovich, it is only
within the context of the rise of digital cinema, and the intense critical
focus on cinema’s changing role as what Koch describes as a “membrane”
that enables us to experience the world, that the radicality and inherent
interest of this claim has been properly taken up. However provocative
these spatial metaphors that draw on the language of geography and

Animating Film Theory • 11

Venn diagrams can be, they also run the risk of becoming defensive, of
“fixing” different types of cinema, of generating and enforcing laws in
order to maintain a particular idea of cinema instead of allowing the ex-
periment of cinema’s mediation of life to provoke our philosophical re-
flections through its evolution.
Dudley Andrew struggles valiantly to resist this temptation in his re-
cently articulated sense of “what cinema is.” Yet even as he emphasizes
cinema’s adaptation, he still pursues a more stable sense of cinema, one
that has gathered over time, noting that “identity accumulates.”41 He
positions what he calls Bazin’s “aesthetic of discovery” “at the antipodes
of a cinema of manipulation, including most animation and pure digital
creation,” and later celebrates Jia Zhangke for his ability to “deploy ani-
mation, but always in the service of cinema, not trying to exceed it.”42
At odds with the general spirit of his own book, Andrew’s mapping and
ranking end up linking “discovery” to a rather narrow sense of cinema,
and this volume pushes back against that narrowing, primarily because
it occludes important sites of discovery that help us better understand
our own moment.
We find another potent form of mapping in David Bordwell and
Kristin Thompson’s Film Art: An Introduction, which in many cinema and
media studies programs provides students with their foundational para-
digms and terminology for further study. The authors locate documen-
tary, experimental, and animated films in a shared space that functions
as an alternative to the fictional, apparently mainstream, and live-­action
fare that constitutes the primary focus of the book’s other chapters.43
There are multiple problems with this approach. First, it leaves unques-
tioned and unhistoricized certain assumptions, such as the one that
cinema usually refers to “live-­action film” unless otherwise specified,
an assumption that also undergirds large sections of Manovich’s argu-
ment about the disappearance and return of “manual construction” over
the course of twentieth-­century film history.44 For as Hervé Joubert-­
Laurencin (a scholar who has elsewhere underscored the importance of
animation for Bazin) demonstrates in his chapter on André Martin, the
division of cinema into live action and animation, and the assumption
that cinema means all films except animation films, occurs at a very par-
ticular moment, one almost coincident with the fall, and not the rise,
of the Hollywood studio system. Joubert-­Laurencin explores the con-
sequences of this in the pages ahead.45 Writing in France in the mid-­
1950s, Martin asked of those cinephiles who were resistant to animation
a question that should be reiterated for today’s cinephiles (who are often

12  • Karen Beckman
nostalgic for Martin’s era): “How can one love the Cinema so much, to
what end can it serve to see all films, if one is incapable of seeing and
following all Cinemas?”46
Like Joubert-­Laurencin, Mihailova and MacKay illuminate a further
terminological conundrum that threatens to trouble the boundary be-
tween live-­action and animation film by focusing our attention on the
writing of another important film theorist who has been ignored or
underrecognized within the English-­language context, Aleksandr Bush-
kin.47 Bushkin, they point out,
in particular, took issue with the odd application of the term multiplica-
tion to animated film (still today normally called mul’tiplikatsiia in Rus-
sian), noting that it was live-­action film that involved the shooting of
“multiple” frames with each turn of the camera’s handle, in contrast to
the frame-­by-­frame fixing of every constituent part of a movement typi-
cal of animation. In that sense, Bushkin argues, animation would more
precisely be termed “frame shooting” (kadro-­s’ëmka), where the basic
units of the film are taken to be frame-­sized modules, rather than shots
of unpredictable duration.

As we ponder the mathematics of specific animation practices, like the

variable-frame, live-­action process of Norman McLaren in Neighbours
(1952), it becomes clear that, at least from a mathematical point of view,
cinema has always been a bit more similar to an algebraic expression
with changing values than a knowable formula. This is why, when it
comes to thinking about film, we will never be posttheory. Film theo-
rization involves testing out those shifting values at the borders of a
cinema that evolves across time and space, and as this volume demon-
strates, animation, like theory, seems to provide a way of grappling with
these changes before they are properly understood.
A second problem with Bordwell and Thompson’s system of catego-
rization is that it constructs an intellectual paradigm in which students
and teachers are encouraged to ignore the differences and interactions
among experimental, documentary, and animated films, to think of
them only, or at least primarily, in comparison with the live-­action fic-
tion film. The organizational structure discourages readers from con-
sidering the experimental documentary, animated documentary, or
animated experiments, and one of the goals of this volume is to invite
more attention to these overlooked or marginalized spaces.48 Thomas
LaMarre’s chapter, for example, shines a spotlight on an important
film theorist, Imamura Taihei, who may not be well known to English-­

Animating Film Theory • 13

language readers. In doing so LaMarre foregrounds how, via the concept
of “the apparatus,” Imamura simultaneously thought about animation
and documentary, always emphasizing the (often overlooked) photo-
graphic dimension of cartoons.
Koch explores how animation, like the experiment and like theory
itself, becomes a way to think at the limit of understanding in an at-
tempt to get past that limit, a useful corrective to the notion that con-
temporary film theorists should stop trafficking in spaces of confusion.49
Drawing on the examples of Eisenstein’s writing on plasmaticness as
well as Siegfried Kracauer’s reflections on movement as “the alpha and
omega of the medium,” Koch explores the role of “motor-­sensory knowl-
edge” and “moods” as filters by which we understand the world and de-
velop a sense of both life and being alive. Yet even as she explores what
we can know of life and liveness through “the experiment of film,” Koch
distinguishes this from scientific experiments, with their demand for
“identical reproducibility,” by noting that the aesthetic experiment is
temporally open and interminable.
While Koch distinguishes the scientific from the aesthetic experi-
ment in a manner that is analogous to Bukatman’s distinction between
“cartoon physics” and the “physics of the real world,” other contribu-
tions make clear just how important a role animation has played in
scientific experimentation and visualization, and they explore where
modeling fits in relation to film theory’s discussions of time and space,
revelation and creation. Drawing primarily on the writing of Epstein,
Gaycken examines what scientific uses of cinema have in common with
“the traditional understanding of what constitutes animation.” “Here,”
he continues, “the scientist uses cinema in a process that is explicitly
opposed to recording or reproducing an already evident phenomenon.
These creations are acts of creation, thaumaturgic.” While Gaycken illu-
minates the overlooked ways in which three-­dimensional modeling has
a long history within the cinematic context, Galloway’s contribution
generates some productive tension within the volume by placing the
three-­dimensional model outside of, or even against, a cinematic nar-
rative. He states provocatively: “The goal then, to give away the ending
before barely having gotten under way, will be to reconstruct a geneal-
ogy not for the moving image but for the information model, not for
serial animation but for parallel animation, not for the linear but for the
multiplexed; in short, not for the cinema but for the computer.” Gallo-
way’s counternarrative focuses on François Willème’s experiments with
twenty-­four cameras mounted in a rotunda, with shutters opened simul-

14  • Karen Beckman
taneously with the ultimate goal of producing an object that Willème,
in 1860, would patent as photosculpture, an object relying on “discrete
photographic impressions” that are “segmented” not across time, as in
the chronophotographic processes that have received quite substan-
tial attention (particularly in the context of animation’s relation to the
comic strip and serial photography) but rather “in a spindle of space.”
This, Galloway argues, posits an “alternative history of photography
in which point of view has no meaning.” We are dealing here not with
camera movement or the illusory re-­creation of it in animated films,
but rather with the construction of a virtual point of view that, at least
for Galloway, constitutes “an anticinematic way of seeing,” a mapping of
space that preempts computer modeling and sidesteps cinema. Without
doubt, this is a contentious claim, but it is one that draws our attention
to the question of whether film theory’s language for describing cam-
era movement, editing, and cinematic space and time is adequate for
the task of describing recent image-­making practices that often (and
perhaps unhelpfully) come under the spacious umbrella of “animation.”
Furthermore, Galloway asks us to consider what other media histories,
in addition to film history, need to be included, or excluded, when ani-
mation is the object to be theorized.
Furuhata, Gunning, and Marc Steinberg all raise this same question
about how animation needs to be thought in relation to media beyond
film, even though these authors approach the question in quite distinct
ways. Furuhata explores how for experimental Japanese xerox artists in
the 1960s, graphic design’s material ephemerality was at once countered
by animation through the process of rephotography, a form of archiv-
ing, and translated into a temporal format—the image became newly
ephemeral, not because it was in danger of crumbling or fading away,
but because it was set into motion. Steinberg, drawing on the writing
of two of Japan’s main animation critics, Ōtsuka Eiji and Azuma Hiroki,
suggests that in order for film theorists to understand how realism
functions in anime, it has to be placed within a broader “media ecology”
that includes both manga and the culture of otaku (hard-­core fans) of
the intertwined media landscape that includes “books, comics, maga-
zines, and animation programs.” Steinberg pushes film theorists to ex-
pand “the canons of film and animation theory to include writers from
as yet underexplored critical milieus” because “it is in these milieus that
we may find the potential to overturn some of the most naturalized as-
sumptions in the canons of film and animation theory—such as the con-
tinued presumption that realism has to relate to the unmediated ‘real.’ ”

Animating Film Theory • 15

Ducks: Theory, Politics, History

By separating our thinking about animation from our thinking about

other crucial terms like realism, and also genre, framing, point of view,
editing, rhythm, continuity, and the photographic image, we lose the pos-
sibility of thinking about these perhaps overly familiar terms in a new
light. While Bordwell and Thompson discuss at length Chuck M. Jones’s
1953 masterpiece, Duck Amuck, within the context of their chapter on
documentary, experimental, and animated films, the analysis they offer
persistently delimits the film’s inventiveness to the realm of animation.
Remarking on the film’s reflexivity, they state: “It gradually becomes ap-
parent to us that the film is exploring various conventions and tech-
niques of animation.”50 By contrast, Richard Thompson’s superlative
1975 essay on Duck Amuck recognizes the extent to which the cartoon is
simultaneously “extremely conscious of itself” as “an act of cinema,” an
introductory film studies textbook (but more fun), and a theoretical re-
flection on what film is and how it works.51 He writes, “It is at once a laff
riot and an essay by demonstration on the nature and conditions of the
animated film and the mechanics of film in general. (Even a quick check
of film grammar is tossed in, via the ‘Gimme a closeup’ gag.)”52 Resisting
the urge to defend the borders between animated and live-­action film,
allowing them to be considered alongside each other while still mark-
ing the differences, Thompson notes a whole variety of features—about
camera movement, revelation, the frame line, off-­screen space, space
and time, intertextual reference, genre, and the relationship between
film actor and character—that make this essay an unusually rich start-
ing point for thinking about animation within, and as, film theory. In-
deed Thompson’s work becomes the foundation on which Dana B. Polan
builds another exemplary film theory essay that engages animation in a
discussion whose pertinence extends far beyond the realm of cartoons.
In “Brecht and the Politics of Self-­Reflexive Cinema” (1974), Polan’s
analysis of Duck Amuck plays a central role in his exploration of the dis-
tinction between political and purely formal uses of self-­reflexivity. Cru-
cially, Polan judges Duck Amuck to be an example of “nonpolitical art”
not because it is an animated film but rather because it remains within
the realm of fictive characters: “If duck amuck is a metaphor for the
confusions of life (as Thompson suggests), it is a disengaged metaphor
at best, for it fails to examine confusion through a politicized perspec-
tive. Indeed, the source of Daffy Duck’s angst reveals itself to be none

16  • Karen Beckman
of the agents of social domination in the real world, but merely Bugs
Bunny—another fictive character, whose power is tautological in ori-
gin. The film opens up a formal space and not a political one in viewer
consciousness.”53
Vachel Lindsay, writing of ducks on screen, associated the film ver-
sion of this particular animal with “the finality of Arcadian peace” and
insisted that “nothing very terrible can happen with a duck in the fore-
ground.”54 He obviously hadn’t met Donald. For Adorno and Max Hork-
heimer, this duck actively participated in the violent oppression of the
proletariat by the forces of capitalism: “Donald Duck in the cartoons and
the unfortunate victim in real life receive their beatings so that the spec-
tators can accustom themselves to theirs.”55 Ariel Dorfman and Armand
Mattelart agree, as they make clear in their Marxist publication Para leer
al Pato Donald (1971), which was translated into English and republished
as How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic in
1975 after it had been banned and burned in the wake of the Chilean coup
d’état of 1973. The book’s potent critique of the use of cartoon characters
for the purpose of colonization—a blurb from John Berger on the cover
describes the work as a “handbook of decolonization” and compares it
to the writings of Franz Fanon—highlights the importance of expand-
ing the purview of Third Cinema and ideological film theory’s concerns
to the realm of animation.56 A number of scholars have already done
important work on how animation has been used for propaganda pur-
poses, usually within a frame where the emphasis is more historical than
theoretical. Eric Smoodin’s Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons from
the Sound Era (1993) offers an exemplary model of this type of work, and
several chapters in this volume—particularly those of Christopher P.
Lehman and Bishnupriya Ghosh—continue to explore the ideological
operations of animation within a historical framework. These two chap-
ters also intersect with and are enlivened by more general theoretical
speculation about animation and film. Ghosh, for example, builds on the
pioneering work on scientific animation and microcinematography by
people such as Scott Curtis, Christopher Kelty, Hannah Landecker, and
Kirsten Ostherr by putting these scholars of the scientific image in con-
versation with theorists of global capital as she explores the interaction
between the individual unit of the cell and the extracellular environ-
ment in her close analysis of the U.S. military’s “malaria films” from 1942
to 1945. Like Ghosh, Lehman finds those moments when live action and
drawn animation combine on screen to be rich sites of ideological work.

Animating Film Theory • 17

He demonstrates the unusual frequency with which African Americans
appear on screen through this type of combination. His analysis of this
phenomenon expands in significant ways the existing work of Rey Chow
and Sianne Ngai on how the animated body gets subjected to power and
manipulated by external forces precisely because of the quality of plas-
maticness that Eisenstein, Benjamin, and others frame as a source of
utopian possibility. As Ngai states, “Although in the last instance Chow’s
pessimistic reading of the animated-­technologized body as a Taylorized
body seems more persuasive than Eisenstein’s optimistic one, the two
perspectives point to a crucial ambivalence embedded in the concept
of animation—ambivalence that takes on special weight in the case
of racialized subjects, for whom objectification, exaggerated corpore-
ality or physical pliancy, and the body-­made-­spectacle remain doubly
freighted issues.”57 Ghosh and Lehman both illustrate the importance of
film history and theory as inseparably intertwined enterprises; but their
chapters can also be read as two possible responses to Leslie’s questions
about whether animation has a history and how it registers the time of
its making.

Cinema without Photography?

Leslie’s question is in part motivated by a recognition of the way live-­

action film “reflects its age into itself” through the photographic cap-
turing of “every detail, the fashions, the hairstyles, the makeup (even if
the film purports to be a historical one), the attitudes,” and so on. Ani-
mation reflects its age differently, although as Lehman’s discussions of
the use of rotoscoping make clear, not always that differently. Further-
more, as Gunning points out, there is a “secret symmetry” between ani-
mation and photography that we need to recuperate in order better to
understand how animation works. Although he recognizes that “val-
orizing animation as the ‘anti-­index’ played an essential role in shift-
ing theoretical focus from a narrow obsession with photography,” he
goes on to ask, “does opposing animation to photography really provide
our best understanding of its nature?” Gunning makes the crucial point
that “most film animation depends on photography”—and this includes
cameraless animation, which relies on photographic processes in order
to be transferred to the filmstrip. The fate of some of Harry Smith’s un-
photographed material makes clear what happens when this stage of
animation is bypassed. In 1965 Smith says of the film that Jonas Mekas
called The Magic Feature (#12):

18  • Karen Beckman
 There was also an enormous amount of material made for that picture.
None of the really good material that was constructed for that film was
ever photographed. . . . On that Oz film, that expensive one, of course,
I had quite a few people working; so that all kinds of special cut-­outs
were made that were never photographed. I mean really wonderful ones
were made! One cut-­out might take someone two months to make.
They were very elaborate stencils and so forth. All of my later films were
never quite complete. Most of the material was never shot, because the
film dragged on too long.58

No wonder, then, that Smith would ultimately decide: “I don’t think I’ll
make any more animated films. They’re too laborious and bad for the
health.”59
Although the photographic process is essential for the very survival of
certain kinds of ephemeral visual material, as both Smith and Furuhata
make clear, Gunning explains that animation’s symmetrical relationship
with photography goes beyond the recording function. Whether or not
the filmmaker pays attention to the limits of the frame on the strip when
producing the images, these images are, Gunning points out, inevitably
“translated into the discontinuous rhythm of the machine” in the mo-
ment of projection. Developing two distinct but complementary defini-
tions of animation, Gunning uses the difference between these mean-
ings to explore the shared terrain of animation and still photography,
which for him lies in their mutual fascination with the instant. In a key
sentence, he explains: “Animation reveals the dynamic nature of the in-
stant through motion, while photography reveals its potential through
stillness—but considered together these technological processes also
reveal that stillness and movement depend on and transform into each
other in the production of the instant.”
This volume’s call for the animation of film theory is not a question of
special pleading on behalf of marginalized practices or special-­interest
groups, although much writing on animation has this activist dimen-
sion to it (and understandably so). Rather, in this volume, the primary
goal is to explore the kinds of theoretical questions that have remained
underexplored because we have allowed ourselves to be constrained by
too narrow a sense of what cinema is. By not exploring our critical terms
within the richest possible context, our analytic language has become
impoverished and stuck. The consequences of this narrowing have be-
come increasingly visible within discussions of the digital turn, and this
is the fertile terrain out of which these chapters spring to life.

Animating Film Theory • 19

Notes

1. Suzanne Buchan points out in the opening to Animated “Worlds” that animation
is a term whose precise meaning often eludes us, possibly referring to a style, a
technique, a technology, or a way of experiencing the world (vii).
2. Gunning, “Moving Away from the Index,” 38.
3. I am obviously excluding anthologies that are dedicated to theorizing anima-
tion, such as Alan Cholodenko’s The Illusion of Life and The Illusion of Life 2.
4. Here I will not focus on the volumes dedicated exclusively to the topic of ani-
mation, many of which have emerged out of the context of animation studies,
and which tend to adopt an approach that is more oriented toward history and
practice than theory. There are now, however, a growing number of authors
whose work crosses over between the worlds of cinema studies and animation
studies. Several of them, including the contributors to this volume, as well as
Maureen Furniss, Chris Gehman, Judith Halberstam, Peter Hames, the late
Miriam Hansen, Norman M. Klein, Laura U. Marks, Gerald and Danny Peary,
Steve Reinke, Bella Honess Roe, Robert Russett, Eric Smoodin, Vivian Sob-
chack, Cecile Starr, Paul Ward, and Paul Wells, very actively engage the inter-
section of film theory and animation theory, practice, and history, and this vol-
ume builds on their pioneering work.
5. Morin, The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man, 68. Karl Schoonover offers a useful
summary of Morin’s place in the landscape of film theory in Schoonover, “The
Cinema, or The Imaginary Man and The Stars by Edgar Morin.”
6. Wells, Understanding Animation, 44.
7. Russett and Starr, Experimental Animation, 123; emphasis added.
8. Colin Williamson’s dissertation, “Watching Closely with Turn-­of-­the-­Century
Eyes,” engages this difference in an interesting way by thinking about anima-
tion and trickery in the histories of time lapse, the substitution splice, and cgi.
9. Russett and Starr, Experimental Animation, 127.
10. Kubelka, “The Theory of Metrical Film,” 140. Kubelka’s contribution to P. Adams
Sitney’s The Avant-­Garde Film is not a single essay but a compilation extracted
from recorded and transcribed lectures given at New York University in 1974–
75, combined with statements he made in preparation for a 1966 interview with
Jonas Mekas. The passages cited here are both taken from the 1966 statements.
11. Several years earlier, at the 1961 Vancouver Film Festival, Norman McLaren
uttered what is probably the most frequently cited statements about anima-
tion, which Kubelka both forgets and, through echoing, recalls: “What is the
essence of animation? It is what happens between each frame of film—this is
what is all-­important.” Quoted in “The Craft of Norman McLaren: Notes on
a Lecture Given at the 1961 Vancouver Film Festival,” Film Quarterly 16, no. 2
(Winter 1962–63): 17.
12. Kubelka, “The Theory of Metrical Film,” 141.
13. Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture, 133.
14. Linsday’s statement resonates in interesting ways with McLaren’s later experi-

20  • Karen Beckman
 ments with pixilation, which Maureen Furniss defines as “animation that is
created by moving a live human or animal figure incrementally.” Furniss, The
Animation Bible, 265. When shooting Neighbours, McLaren explains that he had
to use animators as the actors because “they knew exactly how to move them-
selves, for instead of making a series of drawings they made a series of pos-
tures.” Quoted in Furniss, The Animation Bible, 270.
15. Furniss writes the following about “stillness” in relation to realism within the
context of animation: “In real life, living beings are never completely still be-
cause bodily functions such as breathing and heartbeats cause at least minute
amounts of movement at all times. Seeing an animated figure that is com-
pletely still—that is, to see a single image that is photographed for more than,
say, half a second—might strike the viewer as being unrealistic. Most anima-
tion contains constant motion, even if only at the level of blinking eyes and
moving lips, or a camera movement across a still background. . . . Absolute still-
ness can work against one of the central attractions of animation, the illusion
that inanimate objects have been ‘endowed with life’; it could be said that, when
an image within an animated production becomes still, its lifelessness is readily
apparent.” Furniss, Art in Motion (2007), 79.
And Paul Wells, for example, opens his useful book Understanding Anima-
tion with the following working definition of animation in practice, even as he is
aware of the definition’s insufficiencies: “A film made by hand, frame-­by-­frame,
providing an illusion of movement which has not been directly recorded in the
photographic sense.” Wells, Understanding Animation, 10.
16. Epstein, “The Cinema Seen from Etna,” 289.
17. Epstein, “The Cinema Seen from Etna,” 295.
18. Alan Cholodenko’s work here and elsewhere explores the dialectical tension be-
tween film’s uncanny capacity to turn both the object and the live being into
“the living dead.” See, for example, Cholondenko, “The Crypt, the Haunted
House, of Cinema.” Will Schmenner’s dissertation in progress (University of
Pennsylvania) also addresses this issue in interesting ways, and I am grateful to
him for being a wonderful interlocutor.
19. Balázs, The Spirit of Film, 172; and Cavell, The World Viewed, 170.
20. Balázs, The Spirit of Film, 172.
21. Cavell, The World Viewed, 170.
22. Balázs, The Spirit of Film, 173.
23. Balázs, The Spirit of Film, 173–74.
24. Balázs, The Spirit of Film, 174.
25. Balázs, The Spirit of Film, 175.
26. Balázs, The Spirit of Film, 174.
27. Balázs, The Spirit of Film, 175.
28. “Drawings in motion. Blueprints in motion. Plans for the future. The theory
of relativity on the screen. WE greet the ordered fantasy of movement,” Dziga
Vertov declares in his 1922 text, “WE: Variant of a Manifesto.” Vertov, Kino-­
Eye, 9. For earlier discussions of Soviet animation in English, see, for example:

Animating Film Theory • 21

 Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands, esp. “Eisenstein Shakes Mickey’s Hand in Holly-
wood,” 219–50; Mjolsness, “Dziga Vertov’s Soviet Toys”; and Tsivian, “Turning
Objects, Toppled Pictures.”
29. Balázs, The Spirit of Film, 175.
30. Epstein, “The Cinema Seen from Etna,” 397, 398.
31. Epstein, “The Cinema Seen from Etna,” 401.
32. Dulac, “Aesthetics, Obstacles, Integral Cinégraphie,” 389–90. In 1928 Dulac re-
inforces the importance of the study of movement over the illusion of move-
ment when she writes of cinema’s “decomposition” of movement, which allows
for analytic vision. See Dulac, “From ‘Visual and Anti-­visual Films,’” 32.
33. Dulac, “Aesthetics, Obstacles, Integral Cinégraphie,” 390–91.
34. Dulac, “Aesthetics, Obstacles, Integral Cinégraphie,” 396.
35. Dulac, “Aesthetics, Obstacles, Integral Cinégraphie,” 396.
36. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 46, 27–28.
37. Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 163.
38. Cavell, The World Viewed, 170, 172.
39. Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 176.
40. Manovich, The Language of New Media, 302.
41. Andrew, What Cinema Is!, 140.
42. Andrew, What Cinema Is!, 42, 59.
43. Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art, 110.
44. Manovich, The Language of New Media, 307–8.
45. See Joubert-­Laurencin, La lettre volante.
46. Martin, “Films d’animation au festival de Cannes,” 39.
47. Bushkin was responsible for the production design of Vertov’s animated short
stories that appeared under the title Humoresques (1924). See Tsivian, “Vertov’s
Silent Films,” 407.
48. Bordwell and Thompson do dedicate one subsection of chapter 5 in Film Art to
“An Example of Experimental Animation: Fuji,” but my argument here is that
the overall organization of the book actively discourages thinking about these
three categories—experimental, animation, and documentary—as anything
other than various alternatives to the mainstream. Bordwell and Thompson,
Film Art, 149–51.
49. See Turvey, “Theory, Philosophy, and Film Studies,” esp. 119.
50. Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art, 148.
51. Thompson, “Duck Amuck,” 41; my emphasis.
52. Thompson, “Duck Amuck,” 41.
53. Polan, “Brecht and the Politics of Self-­Reflexive Cinema.”
54. Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture, 174.
55. Adorno and Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry,” 1023.
56. Dorfman and Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck.
57. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 101.
58. Sitney, “Harry Smith Interview,” 94–95.
59. Sitney, “Harry Smith Interview,” 102.

22  • Karen Beckman
I : : Time and Space
1 : : Animation and History
E sth e r L e s li e

Animation’s Ahistory

Does animation have a history? Does it evolve as would any other

medium that is born and grows up, all the while refining and developing
its techniques? This appears to be how film developed. Film moved from
the front-­on static-­camera view to the dollying and swooping camera
eye; from black-­and-­white, through hand tinting, to color; from silent
to noisy; and from 2-­D to 3-­D, while developing editing techniques and
honing its acting styles. Then came the day, quite recently, when film
merged, through cgi, with animation. This thing that was called film,
and still is, evolves from simplicity to complexity, blaring out a narra-
tive of progress, at least in the commercial realm. Each new film is to be
bigger, better, more immersive, more expensive, more profitable, and
more “life-­like” (if not more realistic) than the last. The latest gambits
are 3-­D and hd, though they are also part of the increasing entwine-
ment of film and animation via the digital. In its quest to be ever more
real, film mobilizes the irreal arts of animation. Does animation proceed
through time and technique in the same progressive way, rarely look-
ing back? Can one tell for sure when any one animation was made? Can
one date a single animation by its technique, its ideas, its structure, the
quality of its coloration or film stock? Of course, it is possible to perceive
celluloid’s deterioration and posit oldness. Of course, the coloration or
absence of color may give a clue. The technical properties of the strip
along with the music and the ideas may well indicate the date when it
was made. But animation is not as clear-­cut as film, because in film the
passing fads of a world out there impress themselves upon the medium
more definitely through a technical and a social reaction. Every detail,
the fashions, the hairstyles, the makeup (even if the film purports to
be a historical one), the attitudes, the quality of color, the pace of the
editing, the rhythms of the soundtrack, the clarity of the image, the
shape of the bodily gestures, all this bears a date stamp. Film, in general,
bears a rigidly progressive relationship toward both social and techni-
cal developments (though now part of that technical development has
absorbed into itself the technical capacities of computer-­generated ani-
mation). Film reflects its age into itself. But animation does not, or not
quite so straightforwardly. It would be barely possible to place in any
chronological order, in some line of responsible historical development,
the myriad flimsy fragments that make up animation’s legacy, for these
fragments, by their very (different) nature, are so detached, reattached,
and misattached from and to the world outside of them that they pose
only questions, riddles, essays. Animation makes many starts. It makes
many false starts. Animation starts and stops, by nature. It combines
and cuts and undercuts, and reconstructs and constructs, tricks and
reveals the trick and perhaps all at once. Film may do this too, but it
tends to obscure the traces of the work upon it. In the mid-­1930s Walter
Benjamin described the output: “The equipment-­free aspect of reality
here has become the height of artifice.”1
Animation is too obviously manifold to set out upon a single line of
development. It begins with shadow play or with thumb cinemas, with
zoetropes or magic lanterns, with lightning sketches or cel animation,
with hidden wheels and pulleys or with stop-­motion photography. It
starts and stops in many places. It is at one and the same time a begin-
ning and a culmination. To accept a thought such as this could explain
the never-­flagging bounciness of Walter Ruttmann’s cavorting shapes
of the early 1920s. Or it could allow an understanding of why Disney’s
feature cartoons are reissued periodically, not as historical items but as
entities to occupy the present, even if nowadays morphed into 3-D. The
banal way to put this is stated by Alan Bergman, the president of the
Walt Disney Studios, in a press release: “Great stories and great charac-
ters are timeless, and at Disney we’re fortunate to have a treasure trove
of both.”2 In wayward terms, the sentiment taps into something of the
otherworldly character of animation, which makes it truly ahistorical in
relation to our world.
But this is not to say that animation always exchanges its relation to
its moment for an arrival in ours. Its moment of making marks itself on
the animation too, but perhaps more covertly than film’s historical mo-
ment does. What does Ruttmann’s outburst against Lotte Reiniger and
her silhouette animation suggest about animation’s particular hold on
its moment of making? Reiniger animated cutouts, black delicacies set
in flat fairy-­tale worlds of filigreed detail. Ruttmann was a collabora-

26  • Esther Leslie
tor on what is now labeled the oldest surviving feature-­length anima-
tion. Reiniger’s fairy tale, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, was released
in 1926. Ruttmann sat assembled with the other animators for the first
time to watch the marked copy and is reported to have exclaimed, “What
has this to do with 1923?”3 What did the dancing shadows, trapped in
a flat world of genies and demons, caught only with sidelong glances,
have to do with the spectacular collapse of the German economy in the
epoch of hyperinflation? This was a time when, as Benjamin notes, “for
this nation [Germany], a period of just seven years separates the intro-
duction of the calculation with half-­pfennigs (by the postal authorities
in 1916) from the validity of the ten thousand mark note as the smallest
currency unit in use (1923).”4 But Ruttmann was wrong to think that the
fairy-­tale film was simply at variance to the economic devastations of
the epoch and only a frivolous play of paper and light. In any case, paper
in those charged years of billion-­mark banknotes and financial ruin was
far from a frivolous topic. Perhaps indeed this animation had everything
to do with the crisis years, re-­presenting, in graphic form, a fading out
of all life’s color, a distancing from the graspable three-­dimensionality
of reality, the world or life as bare, a shadow of its former self.5 Per-
haps Reiniger’s animation steps toward satisfying the needs of a new
audience—composed of those who Georg Simmel had earlier termed
the “blasé” type of industrialized modernity, for whom overstimulation
promotes a withdrawal from the distinctions between things—in order
to favor that which is homogenous.6 Perhaps this withdrawal anticipates
what Herbert Marcuse would later call the “One Dimensional Man.”7
Arguably, Reiniger’s animation dramatizes a local, historical alienation
of life through mobilization of its shadow forms by unseen hands and
unseen technologies. Except, sometimes, the scissors make their ap-
pearance—and they reveal the whole confection to be a dance of light
and paper and agile hands. Snip snip: the film is made of cuts. The film
presents, through another nature, a sidelong reflection on ours.
Perhaps it is also true that the animation had nothing specifically to
do with 1923. Animation, the one by Reiniger, just like countless others,
always asks the viewer to take a leap out of now, out of physics, out
of time, out of this world, in short, a leap of faith, to don the seven-­
league boots of folklore and replace the substance with the silhouette,
the shadow. Animation is not a depiction of a recognizable world. The
mission of animation is often to tarry with the shadow side, the “night
side of nature,” that obscured realm in which all unexplained and magi-
cal, illogical events occur.8 Animation goes, in all its superficiality, deeply

Animation and History • 27

into the substance of being, the hidden realms, the crevices beneath
usual exposure, the constructions and reconstructions. Animation as
the visualization of the shadow side is also an allegory of filmic actu-
ality, albeit a truth that film most usually works to obscure. For film, the
secret must be maintained: film asks viewers to believe in those shad-
ows cavorting in two dimensions on the flat screen in the “kingdom of
shadows,” who all too often seem to live for us.9 Film is the unknowing
suspension of disbelief in stand-­ins, doppelgangers, avatars, things that
only pretend to be real, full-­blooded, breathing, but are in fact chemical
confections, celluloid compositions. Which is also to say, film is and has
always been just a subset of animation—in contrast to how critics pre-
sented the relation—if 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. Reiniger, intentionally or not, made an emblem
of this spectacularity, in a cine-­world that was also incidentally—with
the victories of the culture industry—flattening out into platitudes, fa-
çades, surfaces, and flimsiness. In giving the shadows delicate life, she
made a virtue of film’s flimsy flattening, decried its dull mimetics, and
opened it, through animation, onto fantastic speculation and the pos-
sibility of revelation.

Telling Fairy Tales

In “Better Castles in the Sky,” an essay from 1959 in The Utopian Function
of Art and Literature, Ernst Bloch wrote of how clouds are a “fairy tale
qualit[y] of nature.”10 They are, so think children, “distant mountains,”
entities in “a towering and wonderful foreign land above our heads,” a
Switzerland in the sky. The cloud is not only a “castle or ice-­mountain
to the fairy tale gaze.” It is also an “island in the sea of heaven or a ship,
and the blue skies on which it sails resemble the ocean.” In the child’s
mind, the fluffy clouds turn into solid mountains. The airy blue sky is
imagination’s watery sea. The heavens are like a mirror, reflecting the
Earth’s inversion. All this transformation is a fundamentally anima-
tional principle. And so, if down below on earth is the world of body and
action, then up there above is the world of mind, thought, imagination,
and other histories, including better ones. Clouds are the fuzzy matter of
utopian speculation for Bloch. They are moving screens onto which can
be projected a revolutionary “not yet,” the contents of an unbounded
“anticipatory consciousness.” This anticipatory consciousness as cloud is
the antithesis of the clouds that Leni Riefenstahl allows to frame Hitler

28  • Esther Leslie
in Triumph of the Will (1935). These filmic clouds are the backdrop for one
who is to be seen as a new god come down to earth from his airplane.
The nebulous clouds of blue-­sky thinking are also unlike the swastika-­
shaped clouds of Nutzi Land, projected by Disney in Der Fuehrer’s Face
(1942). But these Nutzi clouds, in their twisting of nature into politi-
cal form, do illustrate an astute recognition that even, or especially,
nature is not immune from the fascist colonizing impulse. The cloud-
scape, castles and mountains in the sky, the crystals of ice that make
up those clouds—these are the indistinct, magical, fuzzy places of wait-
ing and longing. For Bloch, the vague awareness of a liberated life that
blurrily takes shape in our daydreams is a stimulus for the real-­world
political action that seeks to fix the wishes. In his revolutionary escha-
tology, the clouds themselves are to be brought back down to earth. Our
new, improved selves, lives, and political arrangements will roll in from
the clouds and lodge on our ground—and not as Hitler’s airplane does,
as spectacle. Animation is the medium that allows for a dramatization
of a skirmish with nature. This skirmish is not the fascistic one of sub-
jugation. It is rather a wrestling with what is natural about nature, and
what is historical, which is to say, changeable, about it. In the cartoon
world, people, buildings, cars, and other inanimate objects swell sud-
denly, or run away, talk and leap, fly and fall without pain. Cartoons
and trick films produced to entertain the city hoards were experimen-
tal and crazy from the start, using cinematic tricks and visual gags that
defied logic. It was all these aspects of transformation, transmutation,
alogicality, antiphysics, and nonrealism that appealed to the many intel-
lectuals and artists—Dadaists and revolutionaries in Europe foremost
among them—who fell in love with cartoon product and the outputs of
American popular modernity in the first half of the twentieth century.
Early comic strips and young animation processes broke open the self-­
understanding of the image, fracturing it into absurdism. In the cartoon
world, all the laws of physics are defied or mocked. Even physics—the
science of physical experience in the world—is made provisional. In ani-
mated nature, technology and magic are one.
The animated world is one in which nature is remolded, made differ-
ent. Cartoons, modernized versions of folk and fairy tales, mobilize this
nature in their presentation of overlively objects, or cows that turn into
musical boxes, skirts that become parachutes when needed, or church
steeples that crunch themselves up so that the crazy plane can avoid
crashing into it with Mickey and Minnie Mouse on board. Animation
reminds us of the life in other things that is like and unlike the life in

Animation and History • 29

us. Taken as a document of utopian thinking, animation shows a nature
that is reformulated according to imagination and social prompts from
a world that could one day and in some form become ours. This ani-
mated nature may assume any form and usually does in its presenta-
tion of hybrids of human and animal, coagulations of machineries and
bodies, scenarios in which natural law is overturned or maliciously as-
serted. As the expressionist director Paul Wegener put it in 1916 in a lec-
ture attended by Reiniger, the aim for “absolute cinema,” an exploratory
cinema beyond the subtheatrical version that threatened to dominate,
was “a kind of cinema which would use nothing but moving surfaces,
against which there would impinge events that would still participate in
the natural world but transcend the lines and volumes of the natural.”11
Animation appeared to fulfill this cultured wish.
Animation depicts a nature that is hybridized: speaking animals,
flowers that blush, fruits that ripen in the blink of an eye, people who
shrink and twist and deform and swell. Animation’s nature does not
obey the laws of physics. Rain may fall upward. The sun may smile. But
sometimes it is also just nature—redrawn and conceptualized, but me-
diated, with just a heightened element of drama, a potential that bor-
ders on the animistic. A shorthand version of such a definition of ani-
mation claims that animation is, in the phrases coined by Benjamin to
describe the reproduced and constructed worlds of photography and
film, “eine andere Natur” (different nature), an other nature.12 Anima-
tion is “different nature” because its nature is of a different kind to the
one we inhabit, and yet it is not distinct from it. Animation presents a
parallel world. It presents a nature recognizable to us processed through
concept, imagination, and technology. It is our nature returned back to
us through mediations. Animated nature’s otherness is, by and large,
not one of absolute difference. Instead it is an alternativity. Animation’s
objects and images, drawn or modeled, are motile, flexible, open to pos-
sibility, and able to extend in any direction and undertake any action or
none. Animation does not depict antinature, but “other nature,” which
might indeed be the noninstrumentalized nature that we would com-
mune with, were we not so far along the route to ecological disaster.
Animation’s animistic approach to its objects awakens life and voice in
stilled and silenced objects. It reinvents not only nature but our rela-
tionship with nature. It is therapeutic and utterly necessary. In “Experi-
ence and Poverty,” from 1933, Benjamin indicates Mickey Mouse’s ability
to embody utopian aspiration for a technology-­ravaged, yet technology-­
dependent, populace.13 The existence of Mickey Mouse is labeled by

30  • Esther Leslie
Benjamin a dream for today’s people. Mickey Mouse’s existence is full
of miracles, and these miracles outdo technical wonders, and satirize
them too. In Benjamin’s view, Mickey Mouse enacts the wish for a har-
monious reconciliation of technology and nature. The wish is born of an
age in which technological change threatens to destabilize the existence
of nature, including humans, and destroy all in spectacular acts of anni-
hilation. But the compassionate union of technology and nature must
be banished to the dreamtime world of comics and cinema, where ma-
chinery entertains and consoles humans, just as it dissects and recom-
poses images of humans, and the rest of the object and natural world. In
the noncinematic world of industrial capitalism, technology and nature
(in other words, machinery and humans) pursue different ends, are vec-
tors of abuse and exploitation.
Sergei Eisenstein devised a category of “plasmaticness” that he
evoked in order to stress the originary shape-­shifting potential of the
animated, the way in which an object or image, drawn or modeled,
strains beyond itself, and can potentially adopt any form, thereby pro-
posing an expansion beyond current constraints.14 Where Benjamin ob-
served the antiphysical, antinaturalist aspects of animation, Eisenstein
focused on its renditions of the physical world. For Eisenstein, it was
animated fire, which, he observes, “is capable of most fully conveying
the dream of a flowing diversity of forms.”15 For Eisenstein, fire is form-
less. Fire is pure transformation. Fire is restless. It was the fire behind
the mirror’s mask in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
that evoked these thoughts. Eisenstein’s name for this mutability, echo-
ing but altering Walter Benjamin’s, is “non-­indifferent nature.”16 Ani-
mation is for Eisenstein an ecstatic form. Its objects are ecstatic (which
is to say, displaced or unstable), and it induces ecstasy in its viewers. It
makes the viewers be besides themselves. Animation forces transition, a
difference in quality. As Eisenstein puts it in Non-­indifferent Nature: Film
and the Structure of Things (1945): “To be beside oneself is unavoidably
also a transition to something else, to something different in quality[,]
. . . to be out of the usual balance and state, to move to a new state.”17
Such movement to a new state is made analogous to a physical process.
If fire is a transformation, formless form, so too is water. Water may
be steam, ice, liquid, and water is always passing between any of these
states, when subjected to processes of heating, cooling, agitation, pres-
sure, and so on. In Non-­indifferent Nature Eisenstein states that “if water,
steam, ice, and steel could psychologically register their own feelings at
these critical moments—moments of achieving the leap, they would say

Animation and History • 31

they are speaking with pathos, that they are in ecstasy.”18 Animation is
compelling because it is the “if” of water, steam, ice, and steel register-
ing their own feelings at critical moments. The artist, at the same time,
notes Eisenstein, creates “the necessary conditions”—specifically the
construction of pathos—for the transformation of the spectator into
an ecstatic state. It makes the viewer restless. This thought came from a
man who had proposed “Kino-­Fist,” an assault on the viewer, as the ap-
propriate mode of a new political cinema.
Animated nature appeals to us pathetically, by inviting us into its
particular world. Animated nature’s appeal is mediated via technology
and is a shuttle between the image world of a new or second nature and
us, who may be addressed as nature or as nature’s other. We are invited
in for the duration of the show and the rattled and super-­lively objects
are to make us rattled and super-­lively in turn. Animation’s small worlds
propose certain stances on the part of viewers, encouraging them to be
at least minimally alert to the ways of the image world unrolling before
them, especially as it compares to the world in which they sit. They are
aware too, on some, if only subliminal, level, of the differences within
the image world, that is to say, the gaps between the cels or poses. These
gaps, key to animation’s structure, enable the excessive or implausible
movements that characterize animation and mark it as seemingly un-
limited and full of infinite potential. The animated form presents a
dynamic image world in which, in much the same way as Eisenstein
describes the dialectical cinema that he hoped to develop as his contri-
bution to postrevolutionary culture, there is manifested a condensation
of tensions that appeals, or may appeal, in a particular and cognitive
way to its viewers. This is because, in propelling the viewer from image
to thought, from percept to concept, the animated form models the mo-
tion of thinking itself—such that viewers are invited to complete the
film through an act of appropriation of its new, and subverted, nature.

Animation and Capital

But it is not all mountains, clouds, flickering fires, and fairy tales. Ani-
mation—as Reiniger’s work intimated with its flat, dark figures—has its
negative face. In fact, this account would all be fairy tale were there not
something else that animation as form could absorb. Animation may
not readily expose its links in a progressive history of unfolding forms,
but it can absorb and retransmit the motive energies of its moment.
Indeed, along with the trick in film, or special effects (e.g., montage,

32  • Esther Leslie
superimposition, and negative printing), which is always in some way
or another an introduction of animating principle into film, animation
was the realm in which all sorts of experimenting artists found that they
could develop a film language that communicated with and took hold
of modernity. Through photographic media’s barrage of special effects,
Reiniger and Ruttmann alike developed an animated language that
spoke to modernity, to its objectifications, its abstractions, and its flat-
tening out of everything to fit into the industrial template. In this they
mapped out the parameters of a system that was experienced as abstract
and rationalized. They also made the system dance and overturn itself.
They stretched out its time and probed its space and logic. But this work
was not limited to the art experimenters—and this is another appeal of
the animated. Value is less of a paranoid concern for it. It is animation. Or
it is cartoon. Or it is eye music, “living pictures,” “kinetische Lyrik,” “opti-
cal poetry,” or cinematic lyricism. At a premiere of Oskar Fischinger’s
Study No. 12 in Berlin, the critic Bernhard Diebold gave a speech titled
“The Future of Mickey Mouse.” If cinema was to be an art form, he ar-
gued, it needed animation, because that made possible a cinema that
had broken free of a naturalistic template and conventional storylines.
Animated film defied the inherited artistic genres. Animation was pro-
posed as the medium to translate into movement Wassily Kandinsky’s
restful points and dynamic lines in tension. Animation is—or was—
always outside the frame of bourgeoisified art, though oftentimes spe-
cial pleading is made for it to be let in. And yet early critics and makers
certainly sensed that more united than divided were the popular works
of Disney or Max Fleischer and the absolute films, or artworks, of Hans
Richter or Lotte Reiniger or Walter Ruttman or Oskar Fischinger, or in-
deed the many advertisements they all made.
Winsor McCay, from 1911 onward, tried his hand at animation. His
comic strip Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland had thematically set
the city in motion. His first animation transferred Little Nemo to the
screen, tentatively. First we see live action, and we see the animators
and the backers of the industry in its moment of formation inside the
new structures of the supercity. Inside the boxes of offices in New York,
men conspire to give flat shapes life and color. There is little narrative in
this animation, which consists of an unmotivated, illogical squashing
and stretching, enacting the very principle of cartooning. This anima-
tion could be described as an example of the optical illusion of move-
ment, though it is honest about its source and does not seek to deceive.
It might better be described as a rumination on the passage between

Animation and History • 33

living and drawing, between lifelessness and life, identity and noniden-
tity. This animation is an image of the origin of animation itself. It is
not the illusion of movement but, rather, presents movement itself, as
a feat, rushing through the projector, the result here, as the film makes
clear, of thousands of drawings and gallons of ink.
The motion generated in these first studio offices of mass cultural pro-
duction could also be seen as a modeling of the dynamic, ever-­changing
forms of modernity, translated here into as lithe and as wild a form as
the innovations of the prized treasures of high modernism. More spe-
cifically, the motion is a modeling of modern capital’s motive force, the
commodity economy, whose endless replications and innovations and
commodity fetishism are analogously evident in the animated objects’
push beyond their own static objectivity. Every week a new comic strip.
Every month a new cartoon. The capitalist machine needs its supplies.
Animation’s animatedness can be seen as a rendition of the appar-
ent liveliness of commodity-­fetishized objects. This is why advertisers
loved cartoons from the start—that illusory hyperliveliness of objects,
a topsy-­turvy negation of the value that stems from labor. What is ani-
mation but objects coming seemingly to life, without human interven-
tion, so it appears (but only appears—just as in commodity fetishism,
the real source of value is obscured from usual view and knowledge). In
the same way that commodities are correlated to exchange values, so too
are those who make the commodities. Their energy, all that makes them
alive, is directed toward making useful things, but it is also calibrated
as abstract labor, as quantities of labor—x amount of labor hours at y
amount of cost carried out by z. Indeed it is significant that, stuck on his
lonely desert island, Robinson Crusoe is much concerned with saving a
ledger, a pen and ink, and a watch. To be the perfect capitalist he must
keep a stock book of items, a record of their mode of manufacture, and,
crucially, a note of “the labour-­time that definite quantities of those ob-
jects have, on an average, cost him.”19 But think what an animator does
with the same equipment. Animation can be the realm in which such
graphic rendition might make social forms available to knowledge, by
redrawing or reshaping the rules, erasing the lines, twitching that which
has become static, reconstructing or just constructing the movement, as
a conscious afterimage of what we do and what the world does and what
nature does daily and forever. Animation absorbs, digests, and reconfig-
ures something of its moment of making.

34  • Esther Leslie
Cartoon Manifesto

Animation is subversive of nature, which has so often been mobilized as

ideology. Animation is subversive of order, of logic, of stasis, of every-
thing that would insist that things are so and must be so—the reaction-
ary mode that has more latterly been labeled by politicians as neorealism
and is partnered with neoliberalism. Animation is an art of metamor-
phosis, of transformation, and it is as if the ways in which the animated
form shifts from one state to another proffers an inkling of a transfor-
mation that could be undergone by all—politically, socially. Therein lies
the utopian axis of animation—motility and mobility is its propulsive
force, its opening onto an infinite, antigravitational other-­space. Ani-
mation is subversive of progress as understood in its ahuman, limited
sense—as in the idea of endless perfectability in techniques and tech-
nologies. Animation does not necessarily eschew the low-­tech. Anima-
tion is subversive of tastefulness—though it must be said that it has
truly wormed its way into art galleries these days. Animation is subver-
sive of itself—ever changing, ever shifting. Animation is subversive of
separation. It is made and seen collectively. It unites the artisanal, the
artistic, and the mechanical.
Animation has a history, naturally. Everything has a history, but, un-
like film, animation, with its multiple forms (stop frame, puppet, drawn,
cgi), with its low-­tech and commercial practices, and with its multiple
origins in zoetropes, zoopraxiscopes, shadow theater, flip-­books, and
the like, evokes a history that is as crowded and indistinct as a phantas-
magoria. Animation does to history what it does to nature. Animation
evokes history, plays with it, undermines it, subverts it, but it does not
have it, just as it does not have nature. It has second nature. Or different
nature. It has different history. It models the possibility of possibility.

Notes

1. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other
Writings on Media, 35.
2. “Disney Re-­releasing Films in 3D: ‘Beauty & The Beast,’ ‘The Little Mermaid,’
Others Coming Back,” Huffington Post, October 4, 2011, accessed July 1, 2013,
www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/04/disney-­r e-­r eleasing-­f ilms- ­3 d _ n
_994701.html.
3. Ruttmann quoted by Reiniger in Bendazzi, Cartoons, 33.
4. Benjamin, from a draft of “Imperial Panorama,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol.
IV.2, 934.

Animation and History • 35

5. Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” 14.
6. Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” 14.
7. Marcuse, One-­Dimensional Man (1964).
8. For example, see the nineteenth-­century Romantic scientist Gotthilf Heinrich
von Schubert’s Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (Views on the
Night-­Side of Natural Science) (Dresden: Arnold, 1808).
9. This is Maxim Gorky’s description upon experiencing the Lumière Cinemato-
graphe in July 1896. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds., The Film Factory: Rus-
sian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896–1939 (London: Routledge, 1994),
25–26.
10. Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, 175.
11. Paul Wegener, from a lecture given on April 24, 1916, at an Easter Monday con-
ference, and printed in Kai Möller, Paul Wegener (Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag,
1954). Quoted in Eisner, The Haunted Screen, 33.
12. Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Selected Writings, Volume 2, 510,
512.
13. Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” in Selected Writings, Volume 2, 734–35.
14. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney (1988), 11.
15. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney (1988), 24.
16. The phrase non-­indifferent nature is to be found where Eisenstein found it: in
Hegel, in his discussion of chemism in the Science of Logic, where it is crucial to a
discussion of motion, transformation, and affinity in natural processes. G. W. F.
Hegel, Science of Logic (Blackmask Online, 2001), 120–24.
17. Eisenstein, Non-­indifferent Nature, 27.
18. Eisenstein, Non-­indifferent Nature, 35–36.
19. See Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” in Capital
(Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin and New Left Review, 1976), 164–65.

36  • Esther Leslie
2 : : Animating the Instant: The Secret Symmetry
between Animation and Photography
T om Gunni ng

The Discontinuous Photography of Continuous Animation

After being marginalized—or outright ignored—animation moved

to the center of a new theorization of the moving image brought on
by the rise of new media. Pioneers of new media theory such as Lev
Manovich promoted animation in opposition to the focus on cinema’s
links to photography, which was so central to the great film theorists’
work that emerged after the silent era: André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer,
Stanley Cavell, and even, in a sense, Walter Benjamin. For Manovich,
digital media, with its control over pixels, reveals cinema “as a subgenre
of painting,” exhibiting a freedom of image creation rather than the sup-
posed indexical enthrallment to reality that photography entails.1 Val-
orizing animation as the anti-­index played an essential role in shifting
theoretical focus from a narrow obsession with photography and opened
a new exploration of animation as a form, but does placing animation
in opposition to photography really provide our best understanding of
its nature?
Most film animation actually depends on photography, at least tech-
nically, even when photography does not supply animation’s imagery.
Keeping animation and photography separate seems nearly impossible.
The animation theorist Alan Cholodenko claims that “every encounter
with film is an encounter with animation—cinema, that is, live action
film, included.”2 This is first of all a technical fact. As David Rodowick
has stressed (or any technical description of cinematic animation points
out), animating drawings in classical animation involves photographing
them onto a filmstrip: “We are mistaken if we use the concept of anima-
tion to refer to the hand drawing of sequential images; it refers, rather,
to photographing such images frame by frame and producing the illu-
sion of motion by projecting them at a constant rate of movement.”3
Rodowick may slightly overstate the case if we consider such devices as
flip-­books or zoetropes, but cinematic animation always involves at least
a projector and usually a camera. Even animation that employs drawing
and painting directly on the filmstrip, often called cameraless animation
(which has yielded so many extraordinary works by Len Lye, Norman
McLaren, Stan Brakhage, Harry Smith, and recently Jodie Mack), com-
monly involves the making of a projection print through photographic
processes. Thus, at the minimum, most animation requires photography
as a means of mechanical reproduction. Therefore, animation’s relation
to the manual (and auratic) aspects of painting (valorized by Manovich)
becomes technically mediated. While seemingly only a technical process,
this transformation from manual drawing to mechanically produced
filmstrip represents a fundamental transformation. By photograph-
ing onto the filmstrip, the continuous gestures of the hand employed in
drawing or other manual processes are translated into the discontinu-
ous rhythm of the machine.
The technical nature of cinema—producing continuous motion from
discontinuous instants (frames)—reveals the common grounding of
photography and animation in their control of time, which is what I will
call the manufacture of the instant. Rather than maintaining the differ-
ence between animation and so-­called live-­action cinema, based in the
manual or photographic origins of their images and consequent rela-
tion to the indexical, I want to point out not only their common quality
as moving images but also their common transformation of time: their
creation of the pulse of an instant through the discontinuity of the ma-
chine.
Cameraless animation highlights this dialectic relation of the con-
tinuous synthesis of movement and the discontinuous parsing of time
at the heart of cinematic animation, even in its most “direct” form. In
the 1920s the constructivist artist Hans Richter learned that his ab-
stract scroll paintings (which were inspired by the temporal unrolling
of the filmstrip—as well as Chinese scroll paintings and musical scores)
could not be simply transferred to a filmstrip but had to be subjected
to frame-­by-­frame photography in order to become a projectable film.
Filmmakers may ignore or pay close attention to the way the appara-
tus (at the minimum the filmstrip and the projector, even if a camera
is not used in making a print) will process their drawings, paintings,
scratchings, or other markings on the actual surface of filmstrips into
individual pulses, but they cannot avoid it. The animator Jodie Mack
wrote me in response to my question to her about this:

38  • Tom Gunning
 Cameraless animation, free from the constraints of the camera’s shutter,
can either ignore or embrace the frame-­by-­frame divisions of the film-
strip imposed by the sprockets. In frame-­less animation legato-­drawn
gestures, sections of pattern, or blades of grass can cover long sections
of film producing animation, perhaps unexpectedly, when projected.
Frame-­by-­frame (staccato?), cameraless animations borrow from the
mechanics of cinema to achieve motion through purposeful sequencing
of multiple images. A filmmaker could treat one foot of 16mm film as
one long canvas or forty tiny individual canvases.4

Mack sets up the issue beautifully: the filmstrip viewed as succession of

frames yields a staccato rhythm of passing individual instants, which the
direct animators can either ignore in their processes, or use to structure
their markings on the film. In either case, however, the process of projec-
tion (the intermittent frame-­by-­frame movement and projection through
a shutter that are essential to all cinema) will endow the images with a
continuity of movement borne of the discontinuity of individual frames
(or, at the minimum, the rhythm of the projector shutter). This dialectic
of continuous perceptual synthesis of what are technically discontinuous
individual frames describes the process of motion in all cinema. Anima-
tion arguably makes this production of motion more ­evident.

Animation1 and Animation2:

Cinematic Motion at Work and Play

This fusion of discontinuous instants, which defines film movement

technically, plays a backstage role in our reception of cinema, whose
dominant phenomenological effect is the perception of the flow of mo-
tion. The perceptual conditions of cinema rest on the fact that we do
not, in standard projection, perceive the individual frames. The frame
rate of the cinema surpasses a threshold of human perception in order
to produce motion and efface our awareness of individual frames. (Some
theorists call this the illusion of motion, but I feel that this begs a ques-
tion. We are not tricked into seeing motion; we perceive it through an
encounter between a specially designed machine and the processes of
human vision.) But if the still frames become invisible, animated films,
from cartoons to experimental work, constantly visualize and act out
the process of producing motion. Cartoons from animators like Emil
Cohl to Hayao Miyazaki show objects coming to life.5 Indeed, the art his-
torian Erwin Panofsky saw this as cartoons’ essence: “The very virtue of

Animating the Instant • 39

the animated cartoon is to animate, that is to say, endow lifeless things
with life or living things with a different kind of life. It effects a meta-
morphosis.”6 Further, animated films frequently display their own pro-
cesses by the baring of their devices. From Cohl to Winsor McCay to
the Fleischer brothers, animators frequently portray on screen their
creation of images and motion, which is a gesture that the historian
of animation Don Crafton calls “self-­figuration” and claims as emblem-
atic of the animated film (e.g., Fantasmagorie [1908], Little Nemo [1911],
and Out of the Inkwell [1918–29]).7 In these caprices, animation displays
cinema’s otherwise invisible discontinuous frames.
It might be useful to bisect our term animation into two related but
separable meanings. The first I call animation1; it refers to the techni-
cal production of motion from the rapid succession of discontinuous
frames, shared by all cinematic moving images. I define animation2
more narrowly, referring to the genre of animation as commonly under-
stood: moving images that have been artificially made to move, rather
than movement automatically captured through continuous-­motion
picture photography. Nonphotographic images are most common in
animation2, but still photographs can also be animated, as in Norman
McLaren’s Neighbours (1952) or the collage films of Stan Vanderbeek in
the 1950s and 1960s. I would describe animation2 as not only displaying
but also playing with the production of motion of animation1. I mean by
this to invoke the ludic attitude that animation nearly always embraces.
But I also reference the more technical meaning of play often applied
to the muscles of the body or the parts of a machine or device, given in
the Oxford English Dictionary as “freedom or room for movement; the
space in or through which a thing can or does move.”8 One could state
tautologically that all moving images move, but that animation2 also
plays with movement; it directs our attention to the effect of movement
and explores its limits, its “room for play,” the freedom of its move-
ment.9 Animation2 plays with movement with an affect of wonder and
draws attention to its own process. Animation2 arouses some curiosity
about how it is done, though this does not require a thorough technical
­understanding. Animation2 restores to the moving image the sense of
wonder at movement that the first projections of moving images occa-
sioned.10
By foregrounding the process of producing motion, animation2 bares
the device of the motion-­picture camera and projector and returns the
vanished discontinuous frames to consciousness. This might be dis-
puted, since our experience of animation2 most often sweeps us up in a

40  • Tom Gunning
world of movement, rather than making us speculate on its technology.
I argue that the wonder triggered by animation2 comes from its pivot
from stillness to motion, not simply conceived of as a technical process
but experienced as a fundamental manipulation of time, which I call the
production of the instant. Animation reveals the single frame, the brief in-
cremental of time, through the possibility of motion, animation’s ability
to transform from static image to moving moment, from inanimate pic-
ture to animated image. Our core experience of animation2 corresponds
to the old fantasy of drawings brought to life. We wonder at the motion
more than we posit the animation stand, camera, or filmstrip. However,
erasing the camera from our understanding of the process not only dis-
torts our technical understanding but also eclipses a full exploration of
the wonder we experience at this genesis of motion. Probing animation
in relation to the processes of photography actually allows us to more
fully grasp the adventure in time and movement that all cinema invites
us, as viewers, to join: the technological manipulation of time through
the discovery of the instant as the seed of motion.
How does animation2 delight us and draw our curiosity to the pro-
cesses of animation1, which underlies all cinematic moving images? As
Panofsky claimed, wonder at the effect of animation increases with the
animation of something otherwise perceived as inanimate (drawings,
painting, geometrical figures, objects, puppets). The process of anima-
tion1 carries an implicit fascination, an element of wonder, which ani-
mation2 unfolds before us. Therefore, the very playfulness of animation2
propels a theoretical project, following both Plato’s and Aristotle’s ob-
servations that all theory (theoria) begins in thauma, the Greek term for
“wonder.”11 If theory begins as an affect of astonishment, it develops
through curiosity, and the wonder triggered by animation2 leads us to
consider the nature of time in cinema through the technological produc-
tion of the instant, the minimal increment of temporality.12
I want to use animation2’s devices of defamiliarization to rediscover
the processes of cinema, not as a primitive stage of technical develop-
ment now surpassed in the digital age but as an essential move in the
modern technological transformation of time. In this context, rather
than opposed to each other, animation and photography both create a
novel image and experience of time and movement through technology.
Both discover a way to experience the most elusive of the concepts as-
sociated with time: the instant. Animation reveals the dynamic nature
of the instant through motion, while photography reveals its potential
through stillness—but considered together these technological pro-

Animating the Instant • 41

cesses also reveal that stillness and movement depend on and trans-
form into each other in the production of the instant.

Photography and the Production of the Instant

We experience animation1 as a visible quality of movement given to

images by cinematic devices. This chapter seeks to probe the technical
processes that makes this production of movement possible: the succes-
sion of individual frames and the parsing of time into instants, frame-­
by-­frame animation, and the creation of an apparatus that presents
these manipulations to human vision. Although the experience of move-
ment as the goal of animation1 can never be forgotten, I want to probe as
well its relation to immobility—not, as is often done, to expose anima-
tion and cinematic movement as an illusion based in our fallible sense
of vision (the old myth of the persistence of vision), but rather to re-
mind us of the wonder of the transformation that underlies animation:
the production of motion through the instant, the metamorphosis of
continuity from discontinuous frames.13 While the rapid movement of
discrete frames through an animation device achieves apparent motion,
instantaneous still photography reveals how the seed of motion can be
contained in an apparently static instant.
Photography has a long history and cannot be reduced to the record-
ing of an image through optical and chemical means. Photography ex-
tends the process of making an image into a representation of time. I will
offer a brief sketch of photography’s complex and evolving engagement
with time, especially the length and control of exposure time and its re-
lation to the instant of movement. An oscillation between stillness and
movement (the discovery of one in the heart of the other) shapes this
story. As the historian of photography Joel Snyder has observed, rather
than producing an image of the world, photographers initially tackled a
more technical task, embedded in previous technology: preserving the
image produced by a camera obscura.14 This first era of fixing an image
precedes the later period, the production of the instant. The still cam-
eras of Nicéphore Niépce, Henry Fox Talbot, and Louis-­Jacques-­Mandé
Daguerre derived from and fundamentally transformed the camera ob-
scura. The ability of a small aperture to project a real image into a dark
container (camera obscura) had been observed since antiquity, when it
was used primarily for astronomical observations, and perfected since
the Renaissance as a way to generate a highly detailed image. But as is

42  • Tom Gunning
too often forgotten, the camera obscura projected a moving image, con-
veying all the complexity of motion, from staged pantomimes to leaves
moving in the breeze.
Talbot, the British inventor of modern photography, after trying
to use a camera obscura as an aid to sketching landscapes lamented:
“How charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natu-
ral images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the
paper!”15 The first era of photography sought to fix this image, exploit-
ing the tendency of certain chemicals to darken on exposure to light
and then taking on the even more difficult task of arresting this process
before the image produced was swallowed in total obscurity. Photog-
raphy intended to capture these fairy pictures and transform them into
material, graspable objects imprinted with still images separable from
their apparatuses. The dancing image of the camera obscura had to learn
to pose, and time had to learn to stand still. The photographic camera
and its product rendered the camera obscura’s moving image a static
one. The photographic image was fixed in two senses: a frozen image was
obtained from the inherent mutability of the camera obscura; and this
image in turn was delivered from a progressive darkening, arresting the
very chemical process on which photography was founded. These vic-
tories over time depended on embalming the moment, eliminating all
movement and change. The historian of photography Michel Frizot has
even declared that “the whole history of the medium could be described
as a race against time.”16
But after this initial victory of fixing the image, another battle with
time loomed: reducing the actual period of exposure during which the
photochemically sensitive surface within the camera had to be exposed
to light in order to form an image. Rather than the monumental immo-
bility and drama of preservation staged in early photographs, this next
temporal threshold introduced the discovery of the instant. The early
photographic exposures by Niépce in the 1820s took hours to imprint
themselves on his chemically treated surfaces. Even as the exposure
time was gradually reduced to minutes, photographers still had to limit
their subjects to static objects and architecture. The emblematic image
of this slow process of photographic exposure is the famous photograph
of the Boulevard du Temple that Daguerre took in 1838, in which the
normally busy street filled with pedestrians and carriages appears de-
serted. None of the moving figures that actually thronged this street
could leave an impression on the photographic plate, due to the ten min-

Animating the Instant • 43

utes of exposure time needed to make the image. The exception is the
lone figure of a man standing still and having his boots blacked (and pos-
sibly the blurred figure of the bootblack as he performs this task) whose
relative immobility allowed him to imprint himself.17
Overcoming this opposition between photography and a mobile
world motivated photographic innovation in the nineteenth century. It
also opened a new realm of time to human culture. The threshold for
the photographing of motion (i.e., for shooting a moving scene without
blurring) was set at one-­tenth of a second (an instant of time that would
take on mythic status in the nineteenth and the early twentieth cen-
turies as the marker of the technical and scientific measurement of time,
as Jimena Canales’s recent book has described beautifully).18 As photog-
raphers cleared this threshold in the late 1870s, the nature of photog-
raphy transformed radically, perhaps even fundamentally. Frizot refers
to the years from 1880 to 1910 as “the era of instantaneity.”19 Reducing
exposure time so that human expression appeared more spontaneous,
moving vehicles no longer produced an unsightly blur, and processes of
nature, such as a waterfall or ocean waves, could be represented con-
stituted goals that photography inherited from aesthetic ideals of real-
ism (i.e., similarity to human perception) and compositional harmony.
But if achieving a reassuring resemblance to normal perception consti-
tuted one of the goals of nineteenth-­century photography, it also had an
unstable relation to technical progress. A combination of factors soon
allowed photographers to further reduce speed of exposure to one-­
hundredth and even one-­thousandth of a second, domains of tempo-
rality only a machine could measure, beyond (or beneath) human experi-
ence. A new realm of time, the temporality of the instant, was opened
by such mechanical precision and brevity. Photography made this tem-
porality available to the human experience. The mechanical shutter, sur-
passing both manual coordination and visual perception, provided, as
Frizot puts it, the master key to this new photographic process of brief
exposures.20
The rapidly closing shutter literally produces the instant, slicing into
the continual flow of time like a guillotine, and both instantaneous pho-
tography and early animation devices employ it, in somewhat differ-
ent manners (arguably the shutter appears in animation devices, such
as the phenakistoscope and zoetrope, before it appears in the camera).
Due to the relatively insensitive photographic chemicals used before the
1870s, the human gesture of removing and replacing the lens cap had
sufficed to determine exposure time. The new emulsion speeds of the era

44  • Tom Gunning
of instantaneity demanded the mechanization and precision, as well as
brevity, of a mechanical shutter.21
The shutter opens on an era of technological precision, rather than
simple human vision, as human perception becomes redefined through
its encounter with technology. As any visual representation would, a
photograph can invoke and engage visual perception, but photography
can never be simply identified with the act of human perception. Shorter
exposure times may eliminate certain technical artifacts that contra-
dict our image of human visual perception (such as blurred outlines or
transparent objects), but other startling deviations from human percep-
tion appeared in the new instantaneous photographs—bodies floating
above the ground, liquids taking on solid forms. Instead of recalling our
normal vision, this instantaneous image exceeds it. It is human vision
plus, an alien vision in which time is stopped or reduced into an unin-
habitable brevity in which the flow of motion in its physical familiarity
is replaced by static poses of an ungainly sort. As Snyder, speaking of
Étienne-­Jules Marey’s chronophotography, said: “Chronophotographs
then, can bring us into a domain we cannot see; yet at the same time,
they can also show us what we do see, though we cannot warrant having
seen apart from the pictorial evidence produced by precision instru-
ments.”22 Instantaneous photography revealed a world no human had
ever seen. An experience of time beyond the limits of human perception
is broached by an optical apparatus.
Rather than simply embalming time, fixing it through a chemically
stable image, the new instantaneous photography processed time me-
chanically—sliced and diced it, if you will. Instantaneous photography
developed alongside new modes of temporal measurement in the sci-
ences, where, as Canales demonstrates, the tenth of a second came to
mark the limits of the “human factor” (the individual variability in re-
sponse time) in scientific observation—a factor that only mechani-
cal operations could remove.23 A new domain of time, the time of the
machine, seemed to open by the end of the nineteenth century. To dip
beneath the tenth of the second, therefore, overcame the human, all-­
too-­human, aspect of time and inaugurated the regime of mechanical
precision. Such an unfamiliar experience of instantaneity belonged as
well to new forces of energy, such as electricity, which seemed to surge
across space as if it did not exist. Indeed, Eadweard Muybridge an-
nounced his instantaneous images in 1877 as “automatic electric photo-
graphs,” referring to the electrical triggering of the camera shutters.24
This new temporality was systematic, measured and produced by pre-

Animating the Instant • 45

cision machinery, and could only be expressed by abstract mathematic
measurements (what person could discern the difference between one-­
hundredth of a second and one-­thousandth?).

The Instant: Denial of Motion or Its Origin?

Here we encounter an apparent paradox about photography’s mastery of

motion and a new phase in the oscillation between stillness and move-
ment within the medium. Motion mastered is, at least in a phenome-
nological sense, motion destroyed. Frizot even speaks of time being
murdered by instantaneous photography.25 Apparently bereft of our
traditional sense of time and movement, the photograph no longer rep-
resented a familiar world. But is this new world truly motionless and
timeless, or does it reveal new dimensions of time and new ways to con-
ceive of motion?
Let me trace this new phase in the oscillation of stillness and motion
by focusing on one of the earliest and most famous of these unfamiliar
images (in addition to being inscribed in film history, since the 1970s
it has nearly been an emblem for animation): Muybridge’s photograph
of a horse in full gallop. This photograph not only revealed all four of a
horse’s hooves suspended above the ground at the same instant (a fact
already established scientifically by Marey’s graphic method) but also
portrayed the position of those legs in a totally unfamiliar and previ-
ously unseen configuration. As is well known, this photograph was ini-
tially received with skepticism, if not outright rejection, especially by
those whose observation of horses had been most intense: equestrian
painters. The positions of the horses’ legs in Muybridge’s images were
considered absurd, ungainly, and impossible. Indeed, Muybridge em-
ployed his device, the zoopraxiscope (a retooling of a projecting phena-
kistoscope), to animate his photographs of animal locomotion, in order
to prove that these odd positions could be synthesized into a continuous
visible movement. At this moment painting and photography dramati-
cally confronted each other with radically different conceptions of the
image of movement. One could claim that modern animation emerged
from this conflict. Here the limitations of Manovich’s alignment of ani-
mation with painting as opposed to photography come sharply into
focus. Rather than following the alleged freedom of traditional painters,
animation drew its inspiration—and its technical process—from the
photographic visualization of the instant. Animation2, however fanciful,

46  • Tom Gunning
roots itself in analytical instants especially as defined by instantaneous
photography.
Even before submitting itself to the lesson of the instant as taught by
photography, animation had pursued the parsing of time into brief in-
crements though submitting human vision to the effect of a rapid shut-
ter. In the 1830s scientists such as Michael Faraday and Peter Roget had
systematically investigated the temporality of human visual perception
using revolving shutter-­like devices. In Roget’s case these studies di-
rectly led to the first device of animation, the phenakistoscope, which
used a revolving-­shutter effect combined with a series of drawn images
that portrayed stages of motion to create a moving image. As Manovich
points out, the first devices of image animation predated photography.
Although early animation devices are practically simultaneous with the
early experiments in photography, the achieving of the instant in pho-
tography occurred some decades later. But my story here is not about
claiming the precedence of one medium over the other; instead, I stress
that both participate in and explore an era of instantaneity.
It may seem perverse to refer to these devices, designed to produce a
moving image, as relating to the instant, since my discussion of instan-
taneous photography has emphasized suspending or freezing motion.
Early animation devices such as the phenakistoscope and the zoetrope
used the shutter to punctuate the circular succession of images that re-
volved within their devices, allowing the human eye to seize them as
separate images and thus synthesize them into a flow of motion. Cer-
tainly the effects of the instantaneous photograph and the early anima-
tion devices are different, even opposed. The camera uses the shutter
to freeze the motion of the world in order to fix the image of an in-
stant; animation devices, in contrast, spin still images into a continu-
ous flow as the shutter transforms this continuity into a discontinuous
presentation of images to the eye, in order to create a single evolving
motion rather than a blur. But both processes use their devices to ma-
nipulate the temporal aspect of vision and create new temporal regimes
of imagery through the manufacture of the instant.
The instant so brief that motion is stilled had been imagined since
antiquity, as the speculations of Parmenides and Zeno testify; mathe-
matics and Zeno’s concept of the infinite division of time supplied a way
to conceive of this paradoxical unit. But the instantaneous photograph
and the phenakistoscope are not concepts; as devices they do things,
and they do them in relation to human perception. Logic opposes con-

Animating the Instant • 47

cepts, whereas perception transforms one into the other. Instanta-
neous photography supplied an image of a time beyond ordinary human
reach, now captured through technology. The instantaneous photograph
opened the way to experiencing the realm of the tenth of the second,
the new microtemporality in which modern technology operates at an
ever-­accelerating pace beyond immediate human experience, yet argu-
ably made visible to us through new media (through, as Snyder put it,
“pictorial evidence produced by precision instruments”) even as it re-
shapes human life and culture.
The modern instant as visualized in both photography and animation
devices differs from the concept found in ancient philosophy. While the
conceptual instant of antiquity in the Parmenidean tradition might have
excluded motion, the instant of instantaneous photography does so only
in a most literal fashion. The instantaneous photograph is an image, not
an abstraction, and its relation to motion depends on its imagery. It
is as revolutionary in its relation to imagery as it is to time. The tradi-
tional static image of painting since the Renaissance strove after a self-­
contained autonomy, an aesthetic coherence, while the frozen image of
instantaneous photography struck observers as ugly, unaesthetic, and
uncanny due to its incomplete and restless nature (a claim often made
at the time about impressionist painting as well). Although still and
frozen, these photographs invoke motion as much as they deny it. Their
visualizing of an apparent defiance of gravity, the strain of outstretched
limbs and the suspended trajectory of drops of water or tossed balls, dis-
plays movement in a more radical manner than had baroque or impres-
sionist painting. These images hardly portray a Parmenidean eternity
of total oneness. Rather, they present an often unbearably incomplete
moment, filled with potential movement, an instant torn from an un-
seen (but imagined) continuity whose contours they evoke almost pain-
fully. The neuroscientist Thierry Pozzo, writing on the effect of Marey’s
images, evokes Theodor Lipps’s concept of empathy, in which the viewer
seems to experience the physical sensation that he or she witnesses in a
performer or image.26 This empathetic sense of kinesthesia renders the
frozen positions of the instantaneous image as more of a cramp begging
to be relieved than a timeless moment. I believe it is nearly impossible
to see an instantaneous photograph of motion without continuing the
frozen motion in our imagination. These instant images practically de-
mand animation1.
Historically speaking, instantaneous photography’s impulse toward
motion becomes most visible in chronophotography.27 It is not simply

48  • Tom Gunning
the positions of Muybridge’s and Marey’s mobile subjects that summon
up motion; their placement within a continuous series of images do so
as well. Images in series demonstrate the profound relation between
practices of instantaneous photography and early animation devices.
Phenakistoscope disks or the strips drawn for zoetropes and praxino-
scopes also presented a series of still images in stages of motion. Still
images serving as sections of motion are designed for these animation
devices (which first emerged in the 1830s, an era when photographic
exposure remained far from brief ). However, these drawn representa-
tions of stages of motion remained necessarily speculative reconstruc-
tions and record no actual temporal relations. Their primary purpose
was not the analysis of motion but the mechanical production of a mov-
ing image. The individually drawn image had little significance outside of
its role in the mobile device.
Instantaneous photography and chronophotography do not imagine
speculative segments but actually record an instant (or a series of in-
stants), rendered visible by abstraction from the flux of time. We see
in these images not a conception of the stages of motion but rather an
image of the material form that bodies take in a specific instant of time.
The chronophotography of the late nineteenth century invokes and in-
vites animation1 not only because the arrangement of images within
a series clearly portrays the trajectory of movement but also because
the series both follows and breaks down an action in strict temporal
order. While animation2 certainly aims at the reconstitution of move-
ment, it fascinates us because we seem to see movement take place be-
fore our eyes. Animation2 reproduces motion and also displays its ori-
gin, its birth, so to speak, the emergence of motion out of stillness, of
continuity out of discontinuity.

Philosophical Dilemma, Visual Resolution

I will resist wandering too far into the philosophy of time and try to re-
main focused on the technical production of a temporal image rather
than speculating on the nature of time itself, with its notorious aporia.
(As Augustine beautifully put it in Confessions: “What then is time? I
know what it is if no one asks me what it is; but if I want to explain it to
someone who has asked me, I find that I do not know.”)28 The ambiguous
term I have used throughout this chapter, the instant, remains crucial
to both philosophical debates and the new image of time that instan-
taneous photography and animation offer. But I differentiate between

Animating the Instant • 49

these meanings. Within philosophy, the instant has primarily been con-
ceived of as a unit of time, expressing a view of time as discontinuous
and successive.29 For Parmenides and his student Zeno, time is indivis-
ible, and consequently change and motion are impossible, philosophi-
cally speaking. Plato posited a distinction between a transcendent time-
less realm and a mutable world as a means of overcoming the immobility
of Parmenides’s system. Robin Durie asserts that the instant arises in
Plato’s system as a means of explaining change and the passing of time.30
In his dialogue Parmenides, Plato writes: “There is no change from rest
while resting, nor from motion while moving; but this instant, a strange
nature, is something inserted between motion and rest and it is no time
at all; but into it and from it what is moved changes to being at rest, and
what is at rest to being moved.”31 Aristotle, in contrast, sees time as fun-
damentally continuous and claims that conceiving of time as an accumu-
lation of discrete instants is incoherent. In place of instants, Aristotle
finds the essence of time in the “now,” which expresses the inherent con-
tinuity of time in the process of change and movement.32 Time is not in-
herently made of discrete instants; instead, its continuity is potentially
divisible. The concept of potentiality determines for Aristotle both the
continuous nature of time and allows its passing. Rather than a discrete
unit, the now functions both to divide and connect time, like a point in
a line. Time is related to motion, stretching into the future, which de-
fines its potentiality.
The philosophy of time recurrently encounters this dilemma. How
can we imagine the dividing of time in such a way that its continuity and
passing are not denied or rendered impossible? Does dividing up time
stop it in its tracks? Inversely, does seeing time as simply continuous be-
tray our sense that time changes radically, that it produces novelty, not
just an endless succession of the same? This dilemma seems to recur in
the modern era, whether as Henri Bergson’s championing of duration
versus Gaston Bachelard’s valorization of the instant, or Alain Badiou’s
promotion of the event over Gilles Deleuze’s defense of Bergson’s dura-
tion.33 I am interested in the issues that these controversies articulate
more than adjudicating the contest (which I could never do).
The alternative models of time as a succession of discrete instants
or as a pure continuity may seem to parallel the opposition between
the frozen image produced by instantaneous photography (or its suc-
cession in the chronophotographic series) and the continuously moving
image produced by animation devices, including the cinema. But this

50  • Tom Gunning
comparison seems to me to dissolve the opposition between models of
time rather than heighten it. The instantaneous photograph may seem
to embody the instant as a discrete unit of time and action, while the
moving image expresses the continuity of duration. But a close examina-
tion of the technology of these images reveals that each seems to derive
its effect from the other. Within its stillness the images of instantaneous
photography strain toward the portrayal of motion. On the other hand,
animation devices all employ still images that, when the device is oper-
ated, yield a perception of movement. In Aristotelian fashion, anima-
tion1 demonstrates the potential of motion in stillness (and vice versa).
In Plato’s view, the instantaneous photograph possesses a “strange na-
ture” in which “what is moved changes to being at rest, and what is at
rest to being moved.” Animation (both definitions) does not exist simply
in the appearance of motion; animation is in the transformation of still-
ness into motion. It is this potential that one senses within the tense
stasis of the instantaneous image; it is this transformation that pro-
duces the wonder of animated movement, Panofsky’s metamorphosis.
Thus, the understanding of the instant that I propose here does not
resemble a discrete unit of time, which somehow paradoxically adds up
to motion and the flow of time. The instant embodies the potential to
move between the regimes of stillness and motion. I am not sure that
this statement is philosophically coherent, yet it describes our experi-
ence of both the instantaneous photograph, which may murder time
but cannot deny it, and the perceptual experience of animation that
resurrects time from its grave of immobility. I do not argue that these
images reveal to us the true nature of time, but I would maintain that
they produce experiences of the instant that avoid viewing time as in-
ertly static. These images visualize the instant’s inherence in motion and
time, either by artificially abstracting it from that flow or by mechani-
cally producing that flow. The suspended gestures and actions of the
instantaneous photograph complement the moment when the static
images passing through an animation device become a moving image.
Each process engages with our experience of time and motion in a defa-
miliarizing manner. Rather than simply conceived of as reproductions of
motion, both instantaneous still photography and motion picture cine-
matography play with our perception of motion in order to produce the
instant as a wonder.

Animating the Instant • 51

Notes

For Jodie Mack, sprite of motion.

1. Manovich, The Language of New Media, 295.

2. Cholodenko, “The Animation of Cinema,” 1. Likewise, Giannalberto Bendazzi,
in the standard reference source on animation, states: “A precise separation
between animation and other media is not easily identifiable.” Bendazzi, Car-
toons, xvi.
3. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, 121. See also the definition of animated car-
toon from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (fourth edi-
tion): “A motion picture or television film consisting of a photographed series
of drawings, objects, or computer graphics that simulates motion by recording
very slight, continuous changes in the images, frame by frame.”
4. E-­mail from Jodie Mack to Tom Gunning, June 8, 2012.
5. Lynda Nead has brilliantly explored this theme, especially in relation to draw-
ing and painting coming to life in early trick films, in her book The Haunted Gal-
lery.
6. Panofsky, “Style and Medium in Motion Pictures,” 160.
7. Crafton, Before Mickey (1982), 11, 347.
8. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “play,” accessed June 22, 2012, http://www.oed
.com/.
9. I am referencing here the late Miriam Hansen’s brilliant explication in her
book Cinema and Experience of the German term Spielraum, as used by Walter
Benjamin (see esp. 192–94).
10. See the description of first projections of Lumière films by O. Winter (reprinted
in Harding and Popple, In the Kingdom of Shadows, 13) and Maxim Gorky (re-
printed in Leyda, Kino, 407–8).
11. In Theaetetes Plato argues that wonder is the beginning of philosophy (155d),
while in the Metaphysics, Aristotle says that wonder is the source of theory
(982b12–13). My understanding of thauma is indebted to the brilliant discus-
sion by Richard Neer in his work The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek
Sculpture, 57–68.
12. Colin Williamson, in his excellent dissertation, “Watching Closely with Turn-
of-the-Century Eyes” (2013), in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies
at the University of Chicago, discusses the close relation of animation with
magic and wonder and also the role that wonder plays in provoking curiosity
in Enlightenment projects of education, especially René Descartes’s account of
wonder in The Passions of the Soul (1649).
13. For the best concise account of this theory, see Anderson and Anderson, “The
Myth of Persistence of Vision Revisited.” For my critique of this theory’s appli-
cation to animation devices, see Gunning, “The Play between Still and Moving
Images.”
14. Snyder, “Visualization and Visibility,” 392.
15. Coe, The Birth of Photography, 22.

52  • Tom Gunning
16. Frizot, Le temps d’un mouvement, 7.
17. See Snyder, “Visualization and Visibility,” 392, as well as the fascinating blog
entry on this photograph by Nicholas Jenkins of Stanford University, “Traces,”
Day by Day: A Blog, August 22, 2007, accessed June 22, 2012, http://www.stanford
.edu/~njenkins/archives/2007/08/traces.html.
18. Canales, A Tenth of a Second.
19. Frizot, Le temps d’un mouvement, 9.
20. Frizot, Etienne-­Jules Marey chronophotographe, 70.
21. See accounts of instantaneous photography in M. Braun, Picturing Time; Frizot,
Le temps d’un mouvement; Prodger, Time Stands Still; and Snyder, “Visualiza-
tion and Visibility,” as well as the recent book by Josh Ellenbogen, Reasoned
and Unreasoned Images. I have also treated these issues before; see Gunning
“Never Seen This Picture Before: Muybridge in Multiplicity”; and Gunning,
“New Thresholds of Vision.”
22. Snyder, “Visualization and Visibility,” 394.
23. Canales, A Tenth of a Second, 21–58.
24. Frizot, Etienne-­Jules Marey chronophotographe, 237.
25. Frizot, Le temps d’un mouvement, 13.
26. Pozzo, “La chronophotographie scientifique,” 18, 20.
27. Chronophotography produces instantaneous photographs in a temporally
regular succession in order to chart a motion through a series of images. Thus,
Frizot quotes the official definition of chronophotography from the 1889 Inter-
national Photographic Congress: “Production of successive photographic
images taken at precisely measured intervals of time.” Etienne- ­Jules Marey
chronophotographe, 233.
28. Augustine, Confessions, book 11, chapter 14, 267.
29. See the excellent anthology of essays collected in Durie, Time and the Instant.
30. Durie, “The Strange Nature of the Instant,” in Time and the Instant, 9–11.
31. Plato, Parmenides, 156d–e; quoted in Durie, “The Strange Nature of the Instant,”
in Time and the Instant, 11.
32. Aristotle, Physics, especially chapter IV, 217–20 (The Basic Works of Aristotle,
288–94).
33. See especially these essays in Durie, Time and the Instant: Gaston Bachelard,
“The Instant,” 64–95; Durie, “The Strange Nature of the Instant,” 9–11; Keith
Ansell Pearson, “Duration and Evolution: Bergson contra Dennett and Bache-
lard,” 144–76; and David Webb, “The Complexity of the Instant: Bachelard, Levi-
nas, Lucetius,” 190–216.

Animating the Instant • 53

3 : : Polygraphic Photography
and the Origins of 3-­D Animation
Al e x a n de r R . G all oway

The Parallel Image

It is now something of a cliché: in order to speak about the images of the

present one feels obligated to come to terms with the nineteenth cen-
tury, weighing in on the old arguments about cinema’s origins; raising
a glass to those brave souls anxious about the growing technological
alienation within art, to Baudelaire or Benjamin or Heidegger or Adorno
according to taste; and pointing out how this or that historical detail
was overlooked in the grand developmental evolution of the image from
mind and memory to the plastic and visual arts, to the automatic cam-
era, to the moving image, and ending up with the digital. Nowadays even
the responses to such pat histories are themselves well rehearsed. To
speak of nineteenth-­century optical toys as “precinematic” offends on
many levels, for not only does this reduce the specificity of real history
to a mere instrumental prehistory within a process that can and must
unfold in one particular way—Hollywood as destiny—it also smacks of
a certain presentism within which the past is cast to play the various
theatrical roles required to narrate our special story. So Eadweard Muy-
bridge and Étienne-­Jules Marey play their respective parts because they
mean something to us today, no matter that chronophotography was
only one chapter in Marey’s life’s work, no matter that Marey wanted
first and foremost to decompose movement, not sew it back together
again, no matter that neither of the two men can claim to have invented
the technique outright, no matter that the most interesting chrono-
photographer was most certainly Albert Londe.
Was this not the problem that structuralism was supposed to solve?
Recall Michel Foucault’s famous concept of the historical a priori:
An a priori not of truths that might never be said, or really given to ex-
perience; but the a priori of a history that is given, since it is that of
 things actually said. The reason for using this rather barbarous term is
that this a priori must take account of statements in their dispersion, in
all the flaws opened up by their non-­coherence, in their overlapping and
mutual replacement, in their simultaneity, which is not unifiable, and
in their succession, which is not deductible; in short, it has to take ac-
count of the fact that discourse has not only a meaning or a truth, but
a history, and a specific history that does not refer it back to the laws of
an alien development.1

How un-­Foucauldian this historical a priori. The scandal is not so much

that discourses have histories, a notion that the discipline of history is
still warming up to, but that Foucault is so willing to give priority to the
prior, what others call, using equally barbarous terms, the real or the
factual. The great Foucauldian compromise, then, is between the anti-
anthropocentricity of worldly data données, which is a benefit of struc-
turalism’s scientific method, and the fact that all these data are really
part of a contingent, historical (read quasi-­anthropocentric) discourse
subject to its own laws and systems of management. The trick is that
Foucault’s a priori is not exactly a Kantian one; in Kant the a priori is a
question of running prior to experience, yet in Foucault it is a question
of running prior to knowledge. One puts the stress on the subject, the
other on discourse. And while the Kantian framework dominated for
two centuries at least, we have most certainly been living within a Fou-
cauldian framework for some time now, a fact that shows no indication
of changing any time soon.
So journey back again into Foucault’s historical a priori, back again
to the nineteenth century, only this time in search of a different kind of
knowledge, what Foucault might have called a subjugated knowledge.
Not political subjugation of course, but a knowledge from an occluded
past, a discourse overlooked and downplayed, tidbits of evidence left
behind as unimportant, or hitherto unresolved. Ever since the noble
contributions of authors such as Friedrich Kittler, media theory has
been shackled to an ignoble narrative of the modern media: the year
1900 marks the age of seriality; the anxiety of the nineteenth century
is the anxiety of reproduction; noise and nonsense are not just threats
to meaning, they are its very substrate; the image is fundamentally a
mechanized image that fires forward in a line, like the rat-­a-­tat-­tat of a
machine gun.
This story of things need not be contested outright. In many ways
Kittler is correct about the media of 1900. Nevertheless, I wish to tell an

Polygraphic Photography • 55
alternate story, parallel to the first, a story that must remain apart from
the Kittlerian corpus because it has a different origin and a different
end. The goal then, to give away the ending before barely having gotten
under way, will be to reconstruct a genealogy not for the moving image
but for the information model, not for serial animation but for parallel
animation, not for the linear but for the multiplexed—in short, not for
the cinema but for the computer.

Petrified Photography

The history of chronophotography is reasonably well documented. But

even as photography experimented with time and movement in the
late nineteenth century, the photographic apparatus also migrated in
another direction seldom discussed. Not just a migration into the mov-
ing image but a migration toward the plastic arts. Not just toward the
protocinematic optical toys but toward that oldest of art forms, sculp-
ture. In fact, photography’s migration into sculpture predates chrono-
photography by several years.
In the early 1860s, a sign with large lettering appeared on the façade
of a modern four-­story building in Paris. The building was newly con-
structed in iron and glass on what was then called the Boulevard de
l’Etoile, stemming northward away from the Arc de Triomphe. The sign
touted “Portraits—from mechanical sculpture: Busts, medallions, stat-
ues.” According to the art historian Robert Sobieszek, “when a large
circular cupola was first erected at 42, Blvd. de l’Etoile, constructed of
metal mullions with blue and white panes of glass, it was thought to be
a conservatory, a zoo for small animals in the English style, an aquarium
and, only finally, a photographic studio.”2 When the poet Théophile Gau-
tier visited the building and its central dome in 1863, a large chamber
forty feet wide and thirty feet high (see figure 3.1), he likened it to “an
Oriental copula, a weightless dome of white and blue glass.”3
The author Paul de Saint-­Victor, who also surveyed the premises,
was impressed by the hollowness of the domed photographic studio:
“Imagine a vast glass rotunda containing no instruments of any kind,
no apparatus visible to the naked eye, nothing to offer any indication of
the wonderful operation about to transpire.”4 Gautier advanced to the
middle of the rotunda, up two steps onto a pedestal, and positioned his
head under a silver pendant hanging to mark the exact middle of the
dome: “Leaving his hat on the coatrack, he tucked his hand into the lapel
of his large jacket and gazed off into the distance.”5 An operator blew a

56  • Alexander R. Galloway
F i g u re 3 . 1 François Willème’s glass dome, housing a perimeter ring of cam-
eras directed inward at a central subject. Source: Théophile Gautier, Photosculpture
(Paris: Paul Dupont, 1864), 5.

whistle and twenty-­four cameras opened at once. The twenty-­four appa-

ratuses were safely hidden behind false walls occupying the perimeter
of the chamber: “Each camera had a primitive shutter arrangement in
front of the lens; these shutters, in turn, were all interconnected, so that
a single cord could be pulled to obtain two dozen simultaneous expo-
sures.”6 A second whistle sounded, and the exposure was complete. The
entire procedure lasted less than ten seconds.
The strange new building on the Boulevard de l’Etoile was in fact not
a zoo for small animals but a studio combining the arts of photography
and sculpture. Bearing the name Photosculpture de France, the studio
was a new commercial endeavor initiated by the artist François Willème.
Willème filed a French patent on August 14, 1860, titled “Photosculpture
Process,” which described a technique for producing portrait sculptures
relatively quickly and cheaply.7
It was wonderful to think of the sun as a photographer, believed Gau-

Polygraphic Photography • 57
tier, “but the sun as a sculptor! The imagination reels in the face of such
marvels.”8 Or as the journalist and editor Henri de Parville put it: “A
sculptor and the sun will become two collaborators working together
to fashion in forty-­eight hours busts or statues of a hitherto unknown
fidelity, of such great boldness in outline, of such admirable likeness.”9
Indeed Willème played up the magical quality of his invention, hiding
the apparatus from the sitter, who likely had no idea how such a precise
sculptural likeness could appear simply by bathing oneself in sunlight
for ten seconds.
After the photographic session, crafters projected each of the twenty-­
four photographs in succession using a magic lantern.10 A pantograph
was used to trace the outline of each projected silhouette, cutting the sil-
houette into a clay blank: “In all probability the manual input required
was very substantial.”11 Artisans turned the clay fifteen degrees on its
vertical axis for each number of the twenty-­four tracings, producing a
rough cut of the sculpture: “It is now necessary to smooth by hand, or by
a tool, all the slight roughness produced by the various cuttings, and to
soften down and blend the small intervals between the outlines or pro-
files. This is a most delicate part of the process; for it must be understood
that it requires an artist of taste and judgment to perform it satisfacto-
rily, and to impart to the work all the finish possible.”12 The technique
was pure magic to Gautier: “Each number carries its own essential line,
its own characteristic detail. The mass of clay is scooped out, thinned
down, and given shape. The traits of the face appear, the folds of the
clothing are drawn out: reflection transformed into form.”13 The hand
of the sculptor had been replaced by a mechanized technique, aided by
the intermediary of photography, and ultimately by the light of the sun.
Solem quis dicere falsum audeat?
Before working in clay, Willème began his research with a prototype
of a woman’s head fashioned from thin slats of wood (see figure 3.2):
This wooden head was probably shown to the Société Française de Pho-
tographie by Willème in May 1861, during the session at which he ex-
plained his new photographic process. However, the head was produced
using a different technique from the one he subsequently developed and
marketed. According to Willème, after taking fifty different angle shots
of a statue, one hundred strips of wood were assembled two by two so
that they could be cut out according to the profiles of the photographs.14

As in the science of psychophysics and its concept of a “just noticeable

difference” in the human sensorium, Willème experimented with the

58  • Alexander R. Galloway
 Fi g ure 3 . 2 François
Willème, Portrait of
a Woman (ca. 1860).
Demonstration speci-
men used by François
Willème in a presen-
tation of the photo-
sculpture technique
on May 17, 1861. Cour-
tesy of George East-
man House, Inter-
national Museum
of Photography and
Film.

width of the digital segmentation in order to achieve an optimal size.

His wooden head of 1861 had a “resolution” of 3.6 degrees around the
vertical axis. Later, once the technique was established using twenty-­
four cameras, the resolution had been degraded by a factor of four to
fifteen degrees.
With Willème’s sculpture instantanée (instant sculpture) in mind,
we are now in a position to compare and contrast photosculpture and
chronophotography. Both techniques are digital techniques; that much
is clear. The difference lies in their divergent employments of the digital.
In the case of chronophotography, digitality appears as a result of dis-
crete photographic impressions segmented across time. For photosculp-
ture, however, digitality appears as a result of discrete photographic im-
pressions segmented in a spindle of space. Instead of a sum of pictures,
there is a sum of profiles.
Willème’s technique reveals something profound. It reveals that there
is an alternate history of photography in which point of view has no
meaning. The point of view, whether single or multiple, as in the case of
montage, has so dominated how one thinks of photography, cinema, and

Polygraphic Photography • 59
visual culture in general that it is initially quite difficult to understand
the ramifications of Willème’s technique. There are two key aspects that
must be underscored. First, one must proliferate the number of points
of view dispersed within a space—proliferated not simply to two or four
but to a mathematically significant number like twenty, or a hundred, or
a thousand. Second, one must conceive of the multiple points of view as
temporally synchronous; in other words, one must reject the basic prem-
ise of chronophotographic animation (and later cinematic animation),
which multiplexes the image through time. In multiplying the number
of views, one is proliferating them along a set of spatial coordinates, not
along the axis of time. Willème opening and closing all the camera aper-
tures at the same moment is crucial. The point of view does not move, as
in the cinema. Instead, the view is metastable, spanning all twenty-­four
cameras at once. Willème’s mode of vision exists as the cumulative sum-
mation of twenty-­four points of view fixed at the same instant in time.
But twenty-­four is no special number: once the shackles of monocular or
even binocular vision have been removed, in other words, the shackles
of the one or the two, it is trivial for twenty-­four to become a hundred,
a thousand, or indeed a virtual totality of “all-­vision,” like the Panoptes
monster in Greek myth.
It is not difficult to see how this mode of vision did not contribute
much to what would become cinematic animation. In fact, one might go
so far as to label this an anticinematic way of seeing. In the cinema the
multiplication of views leads to choice or synthesis. It leads, in other
words, to montage or collage: one either montages a scene together by
choosing which view to sequence at which time, or one composites two
or more image layers together to synthesize a new image. It leads, thus,
to the serial image or the recursive image. By contrast, Willème’s mode
of vision is neither choice bound nor synthetic. It is metastable. Wil-
lème multiplies the view into a virtual view, a virtual camera existing
synchronically across twenty-­four discrete apparatuses. Willème did not
choose or sequence these twenty-­four streams; he did not composite
them backward into a single image. He maintains the metastable view
as such, maintaining the view as manipulable model.
For Paul de Saint-­Victor such metastases of the photographic view led
not to an immaterial, omnipresent gaze but to a pure materiality, an im-
manent image—but a dead one too: “The true mission of this useful and
humble art form will be to bring sculpture into private life and to per-
petuate the photographic image—by petrifying it.”15 To petrify photog-
raphy means to transform it from a visual art to a plastic art. In other

60  • Alexander R. Galloway
words, Willème’s petrified photography is a kind of photography that
has finally escaped the long shadow of the camera obscura. And in es-
caping the limitations of the camera obscura’s single aperture, photog-
raphy smears itself across a limitless grid of points, neutering the axis
of time while emboldening the axes of space.

Photographic Modeling

If Londe did not aim to model the world with his multilens devices from
1883 and 1891 (only photograph it), a slightly different technique, owing
perhaps more to Muybridge and Willème than to Londe, was revealed
in the early 1890s in Germany. Christian Wilhelm Braune and a student
thirty years his junior, Otto Fischer, developed a technique for captur-
ing the motion of a body and modeling it in three dimensions. Today
it would be called a motion-­capture animation device. Where photog-
raphers such as Londe, André-­Adolphe-­Eugène Disdéri, and Augustin
Le Prince unknowingly took small steps in this direction, Braune and
Fischer took a giant leap into the realm of parallel optical dimension-
ality, continuing the evolution begun by Willème. I leave it to Siegfried
Zielinski to describe the details:
The male test person wears a tight-­fitting, black-­knit suit and, for safety
reasons, thick leather shoes. His entire body appears to be wired, includ-
ing his head. The electric supply is connected to the wires at his head,
which enables the test person to move relatively freely. Technically, the
thin white lines running down the sides of the body, called Geissler
tubes, are the decisive feature of the suit. . . . Braune and Fischer’s ex-
perimental design sought to solve a problem associated with Marey’s
method. The test persons in Marey’s experiments had white or shiny
metal strips attached to their limbs when he photographed them in mo-
tion, but these strips left light trails in the photographs and tended to
blur the images. Exact registration and reconstruction of movements
was not possible. The Geissler tubes in Braune and Fischer’s experi-
ment ran parallel to the rigid parts of the limbs and were held in place
by leather straps. In all, there were eleven tubes. The advantage of this
experimental design was that, since the Geissler tubes used induction
current, they could produce short flashes of light in quick succession.
Further, when the thin tubes filled with nitrogen flashed, they emit-
ted much photochemically active light and, in a darkened room, it was
possible to take photographs in which the individual limbs appeared as

Polygraphic Photography • 61
 separate lines. This equipment also enabled precise recording of how the
movements of arm and leg related to each other or how the head related
to the feet.16

What begins as chronophotography ends as dimensional mod-

eling. Similar to the way in which stereometric cameras were used in
photogrammetry, Braune and Fischer deployed a multilens technique
consisting of four different cameras located in a geometrical arrange-
ment around the subject, in the front, at the side, and so on. All cam-
eras fired together, and measurements from the resulting photographs
were correlated. In fact, Braune and Fischer’s goal was not simply to pro-
duce a photographic image, chronographic or otherwise. Their goal was
to record precise mathematical coordinates in x, y, and z dimensional
space for the shoulders, knees, and other parts of the body in motion.
So in this sense, Braune and Fischer are miles away from Marey or Muy-
bridge (even though most history books would group them all together
under the heading of chronophotography). To achieve the desired level
of precision, Braune and Fischer would inspect the resulting chrono-
photographs under a microscope, measuring the precise positions of the
test subject to several decimal points of accuracy. Using the registration
marks that appear in each image and by correlating each measurement
across all four cameras, extremely precise spatial coordinates could be
recorded along three-­dimensional x, y, and z axes. In fact, the long tables
of vertex coordinates recorded by Braune and Fischer in their 1895 publi-
cation are surprisingly similar to today’s 3-­D animation formats. Braune
and Fischer were more data hounds than photographers.
What was innovative, however, was the use that Braune and Fischer
made of their heaps of data. Marey’s bird in flight had been made into
a three-­dimensional geometric model, it is true, but at the end of the
day Marey was no plastic artist. Braune and Fischer instead restaged
their scores of vertex coordinates into actual three-­dimensional models
of human locomotion (see figure 3.3). If Marey’s ultimate métier was
geometric chronophotography, Braune and Fischer added dimension-
ality to the mix and produced something quite different, geometric
chronomodels. The goal here is object modeling, not world simulation.
The goal is a diffuse omniscient gaze engulfing a precisely modeled ob-
ject world, not simply multiple points of view through time (cinema).
Cinematic animation is never spatially synchronous within a single
frame; its achievement is diachrony. Any sense of spatiality achieved
by the cinema is an epiphenomenon. Braune and Fischer on the other

62  • Alexander R. Galloway
F i g u re 3 . 3 Three-­dimensional chronomodel of human locomotion. Source:
Wilhelm Braune and Otto Fischer, “Der Gang des Menschen, 1 Tiel, Versuche am un-
belasteten und belasteten Menschen,” Abhandlungen der Mathematisch-­Physischen
Classe der Königlich Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften 21 (Leipzig: Hirzel,
1895): 153–322, 270–71.

hand achieved both spatial synchrony and diachrony. The object can be
spun around, manipulated at will. This is a fundamentally anticinematic
mode of mediation; likewise it is antiphenomenological, since complete
spatial synchrony is prohibited within the cinematic and phenomeno-
logical systems, themselves forever beholden to the singular experi-
ences of a central gazing subject (or lens eye), however much it may be
complicated by montage or the use of two or three concurrent cameras.
The Braune and Fischer model presents a diffuse totality of the object.
And in this sense, it is aggressively antiphenomenological and aggres-
sively anticinematic. So just as Marey’s geometric work pointed away
from the cinema (even if his moving-­plate work pointed toward the
cinema), Braune and Fischer’s dimensional models push elsewhere too.
They point to a very different mode of mediation, and a very different
kind of device. They point to 3-­D animation. They point to the computer.

Polygraphic Photography • 63
Fi g u re 3 . 4 Graffiti Research Lab, “How to Enter the Ghetto Matrix (diy Bullet
Time)” (2008). Courtesy of Graffiti Research Lab and Dan Melamid. Photographic
animation of the producer and rapper Large Professor, featuring the light graffiti of
2ESAE (a.k.a. Mike Baca).

The Multiplexed Camera

In order to understand the repercussions of this argument, it will be nec-

essary to take the provocation quite literally: Braune and Fischer were
doing three-­dimensional “computer animation” in the 1890s. Consider
the celebrated “bullet time” sequences from The Matrix, or the interesting
reuse of the effect by the Graffiti Research Lab (see figure 3.4). A certain
high-­tech mythology has grown up around this technique, yet in actu-
ality there is nothing particularly high-­tech about it. The ability to freeze
and rotate a scene within the stream of time is easy to perform with nor-
mal cameras. No computer is necessary. One simply needs to arrange a
battery of cameras along the rotation arc and have the technical where-
withal to trigger them at exactly the same instant (which Willème accom-
plished one hundred and forty years earlier). Slice the individual frames
together into a movie strip to achieve the effect. Thus, there is nothing
lacking technologically that would have prevented bullet time from ap-
pearing a hundred years before the Wachowski brothers.17 Braune and
Fischer didn’t use twenty-­four cameras, and their resulting models were

64  • Alexander R. Galloway
plastic not photographic, but it requires no great mental leap to see how
they too were effectively staging the same bullet-­time effect.
So the determinist argument—“it wasn’t technologically possible
to do three-­dimensional animation in the 1890s”—doesn’t hold water.
It was possible; it was done. And it certainly wasn’t a question of the
human sensorium: the stereoscope had already primed large swaths of
the viewing public for the marvels of dimensional media. The interest-
ing pursuit therefore is not so much the chase after the technological
roots of this or that device, but the inquiry into the conditions of possi-
bility for a given mode of mediation, and to try to make some sense as
to why one thing happened instead of another, when the technical condi-
tions were ripe and ready for each. In the case of Marey’s famous photo-
graphic gun of 1882, the sequence of bullet chambers was remediated
as individual photographs, creating the modern convention of a photo-
graphic filmstrip.18 The device creates multiple images of the same scene
from the same point of view, but divided into separate photographs and
extended through time. It took one hundred years for Marey’s time bul-
lets to be transformed into the bullet time of computer animation.19 If
the cinema became dominant in the early part of the twentieth century,
while three-­dimensional computer modeling did not until the late twen-
tieth century, we must find the answer beyond the standard volumes of
industrial and technical history.
The photographic gun is on the side of cinema; bullet time is on the
side of modeling. So it would not be out of place to pose the question
in reverse: why did cinema get invented around the turn of the twenti-
eth century and not modeling? Why does cinema precede 3-­D modeling
when there does not appear to be any obligatory reason why it should?
Perhaps the phenomenological framework determined the technical
one, green-­lighting the cinematic modality of the photographic gun and
sidelining the informatic modality of the photographic array. If that
be the case, then bullet time is the road not taken of late nineteenth-­
century Euro-­American media, sidelined by a stronger phenomenologi-
cal paradigm that pegged visuality to the standard of one viewer, stand-
ing in one place (or moving chronologically through multiple places via
the rational sequences of montage), oriented with its own special per-
spective on its own special world.
By 1900, Kittler’s symbolic year, bullet time goes into hibernation, and
time bullets take center stage. Marey’s time bullets settle time, regular-
ize it into fixed frequency. By 1900 time becomes the natural infrastruc-
ture of cinematic animation, while spatial representation and visual ex-

Polygraphic Photography • 65
pression become variables. But in the case of bullet time (whether in the
1890s or the 1990s), time is the variable, and space is withheld in syn-
chrony. Mine is thus a story of selection and suppression: the cinema
automates time, making it irrelevant (and thereby elevating the value
of worlds); the computer automates space, again making it irrelevant
(thereby elevating something else again, action perhaps). Volumetric
representation becomes the so-­called natural infrastructure of com-
puter animation; whereas in painting or photography space is expres-
sive, never infrastructural. By contrast, discrete temporality becomes
the natural infrastructure of the cinematic image.20
This is why Willème’s photosculpture or Braune and Fischer’s chrono-
photography can be considered protocomputational. The classical
chronophotography techniques of Marey or Muybridge do not have
much to contribute to the prehistory of computer animation. Only
through the multiplexing of vision, in Muybridge’s multiple synchronic
images or in Londe’s grid cameras, do we see a new pathway emerging.
The earlier systems deployed multiple lenses in order to move the test
subject. Willème and Braune and Fischer deployed multiple lenses in
order to animate the camera (by making it metastable and virtual). By
modeling the spatial coordinates of the test subject, it became possible
to translate the movement (of the camera) into spatial dimensionality,
and in doing so, translate photography into sculpture.
Only polygraphic photography can explain the origins of computer
modeling, and by extension computer animation, because this photog-
raphy introduces a way of seeing completely foreign to the cinematic
legacy: the virtualization of the eye into a metastatic virtual camera able
to view an object from any point of view whatsoever.

Notes

A number of people have given me valuable feedback on portions of this chapter, includ-
ing Finn Brunton, Jeff Guess, Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen, James Hodge, Ben Kafka,
and Kirsten Thompson. Nevertheless, the claims (and shortcomings) of the present argu-
ment are my own responsibility. All unattributed translations from the French are mine.

1. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 127.

2. Sobieszek, “Sculpture as the Sum of Its Profiles,” 621.
3. Gautier, Photosculpture, 5. This short booklet was excerpted from Le Moniteur
Universel (January 4, 1864).
4. Paul de Saint-­Victor, “Photosculpture,” La Presse, January 15, 1866, quoted in
Gall, “Photo / Sculpture,” 65.

66  • Alexander R. Galloway
5. Drost, “La photosculpture entre art industriel et artisanat,” 113.
6. Sobieszek, “Sculpture as the Sum of Its Profiles,” 621.
7. François Willème, “Photosculpture Process,” French patent number 46,358, Au-
gust 14, 1860. See also additions filed April 6, 1861; September 9, 1863; and June
14, 1864.
8. Gautier, Photosculpture, 4.
9. Henri de Parville quoted in Sobieszek, “Sculpture as the Sum of Its Profiles,”
622.
10. “Willème almost always used a quarter-­plate camera which accommodated
a negative slightly less than ten and one-­half centimeters high.” Sobieszek,
“Sculpture as the Sum of Its Profiles,” 619.
11. Sorel, “Photosculpture,” 82.
12. “Photo-­Sculpture,” The Art-­Journal 3 (May 1864): 141.
13. Gautier, Photosculpture, 8.
14. Sorel, “Photosculpture,” 81.
15. Quoted in Gall, “Photo / Sculpture,” 76. The phrase petrified photography is
Gall’s.
16. Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media, 245, 248.
17. As James Hodge has pointed out to me, others had been experimenting with
this mode of vision well before it ended up in Hollywood. In the early 1980s,
Tim Macmillan developed what he calls a “time-­slice” camera, which he would
eventually use in a video projection titled Dead Horse, which exhibited at the
London Electronic Arts Gallery in 1998.
18. Marey was not the first to marry camera and gun. See Eder, Die photogra-
phische Camera und die Momentapparate, for any number of exotic devices, such
as Dr. Fol’s photographic gun (p. 587) and E. von Gothard’s photographic gun
(p. 589).
19. A number of articles narrate the mid-­twentieth-­century passage from a tradi-
tional photographic image rooted in perspectival, Renaissance techniques to
a computer-­enhanced photographic image oriented around the techniques of
volumetric capture, multiple points of view, and world simulation. See in par-
ticular Cartwright and Goldfarb, “Radiography, Cinematography and the De-
cline of the Lens.”
20. This is the only reason why someone such as Gilles Deleuze can speak of the
“time cinema” as a kind of art cinema. See in particular Cinema 2 and the end
of Cinema 1. Deleuze’s book on Francis Bacon is also interesting here, since, as
is well documented, Bacon was cognizant of Muybridge and even incorporated
the chronophotographic aesthetic into his paintings, including the nondiegetic
registration marks and the rounded ring as a kind of photographic stage. See
Deleuze, Frances Bacon.

Polygraphic Photography • 67
4 : : “A Living, Developing Egg Is Present
before You”: Animation, Scientific Visualization,
Modeling
Ol iv e r Gayc k e n

Cinema historians have indicated how a wide variety of contexts are part
of the “wonderfully variegated area” of early animation, ranging from
cartoons and caricature to vaudeville and theater.1 Scientific visualiza-
tion has figured only rarely in histories of animation, however, and the
devices that are usually mentioned—optical toys (thaumatrope, zoe-
trope, phenakistascope) and chronophotography—are characterized as
precursors. The relationship between scientific visualization practices
and animation is more complicated and sustained, however. Late nine-
teenth- and early twentieth-­century scientists used serial images in
myriad ways, and a consideration of the links between scientific visual-
ization practices and the history of animation can expand the terrain of
animation studies.
Common to these disparate uses of serial images is a relationship
to the practice of modeling, which provides a rich vein of overlap be-
tween scientific visualization and animation techniques. In the ex-
amples under discussion here, the serial image primarily functions to
re-­create or replicate volumetric space. This tendency allows for a modi-
fication of a widely held contention regarding the early scientific mov-
ing image, namely, its “penchant for flatness,” which is linked to an ar-
gument about “a disciplinary scientific visual apparatus” that obscures
the links between early scientific uses of cinema and animation.2 As So-
raya de Chaderavian and Nick Hopwood have pointed out, the turn to
“visual languages” and “working objects” in the history of science also
has emphasized flat objects.3 Their interest in three-­dimensional models
is relevant for an understanding of the use of 3-­D models in “pedagogy
or popularization,” which also has implications for the “mainstream
of the history of science.” Chaderavian and Hopwood write, “Not only
was teaching the centrally important means of ratifying and conveying
knowledge, and addressing wider audiences crucial to establishing sci-
entific authority, the movements of models also exemplify the impos-
sibility of separating these activities from research.” Models, a form of
“rational recreation,” “were a key medium of traffic between the sciences
and the wider culture.”4
The mobility of models indicates their participation in a boundary
layer between professional and nonprofessional scientific audiences. An-
other ramification of the traffic in models is the recognition of a dense
relationship between two- and three-­ dimensional representations.
Models served as the sources for textbook pictures, for instance. And
models could in turn be made up of pictures, consisting of individual
images that constituted a larger structure, as in embryology, electron-­
density maps, or archaeology. These instances of animation, which are
not representational in the sense of attempting to provide a fully mi-
metic experience, nor inventive in the tradition of animation’s tendency
to create fantastic and metamorphic worlds, schematize movement and
objects, creating a selective reduction of visual information that leads to
a clearer understanding of the phenomenon under investigation.
Considering the importance of three-­dimensional models in the sci-
ences opens up a pathway in film history that has rarely been explored,
namely animation’s use as an educational medium. E. G. Lutz’s Animated
Cartoons (1926) primarily served as a how-­to guide for people interested
in entering the nascent industry; the book provided a source of infor-
mation and inspiration to Walt Disney and the Fleischer brothers.5 What
typically goes unnoticed about this book is how it frames its detailed
discussion of how to make comic cartoons with thoughts about anima-
tion’s destiny as an educational medium. Lutz begins the book by em-
ploying the rhetoric of “visual instruction,” and his final chapter is titled
“Animated Educational Films and the Future.” He underscores both
the importance and relative neglect of this issue when he writes: “On
the making of animated screen drawings for scientific and educational
themes little has been said. This is not to be taken as a measure of their
importance.”6 Further stations along this path would include the de-
velopment of this mode of animation, which is largely part of popular-­
science filmmaking and incorporates the disciplines of medical illustra-
tion and technical drawing; some notable examples from the silent era
include Percy Smith’s animated war maps, the instructional films from
Bray Studios, and the use of animated sequences in Soviet cinema, such
as Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Mechanics of the Brain (1926).7

“A Living, Developing Egg” • 69

Wingbeats, Heartbeats, and “A Living, Developing Egg”

In addition to the aforementioned assumption of a “penchant for flat-

ness,” another familiar, and related, component of the reception of early
scientific cinema is the supposition that the synthesis of movement was
of no interest from a scientific point of view. So, for instance, Lisa Cart-
wright writes of “[Étienne-­Jules] Marey’s mistrust of cinematography
as a physiological technique,” asserting, “the moving image was of little
use to [Marey’s] project precisely because it did not facilitate the ana-
lytical and disciplinary task undertaken in chronophotography.”8 The
moving image did play a role in Marey’s research, however, and an ap-
preciation of the uses to which Marey put the moving image allows the
constellation of scientific visualization, modeling, and animation to
emerge more clearly.
Chronophotography and graphic abstraction played a multivalent
role in Marey’s work. On the one hand, the reduction of phenomena to
graphic traces did relate to and allow for the stilling and disciplining of
movement, as is perhaps best represented by the image that has become
an icon of Marey’s method, the homme squelette (skeleton man). The
graphic registration of movement also was related to the re-­creation of
movement in Marey’s work, however. Marey had a variety of interests in
the synthesis of movement that ranged from being able to show move-
ment to an audience to making movement portable and reproducible.9
Conjoined to the graphic rendering of movement was Marey’s inter-
est in re-­creating objects volumetrically. In the final chapter of Le mouve-
ment (1894), which is dedicated to a discussion of the value of synthetic
movement, Marey discussed his stereoscopic zoetrope. This device was
created to counteract the drawback introduced by previous zoetropic
methods whose flattening of the phenomenon into images introduced
distortions. The zootrope à figures en relief (zoetrope with figures in relief )
overcame these distortions by using three-­dimensional figures instead
of flat images. Using chronophotographic images as a guide, Marey had
ten small wax sculptures of a gull in the successive postures of a single
wingbeat placed inside a zoetrope (see figure 4.1). Marey describes the
result in the following terms: “The illusion is thus complete and one can
see turning in the apparatus birds that fly in a circle and that first seem
to move away from, then pass before, and return to the observer.”10 The
stereoscopic zoetrope combined an illusion of movement with the re-
duction of that movement to a single wingbeat cycle. Marey, in other
words, created a generalized movement as opposed to a specific move-

70  • Oliver Gaycken
Fi g u re 4 . 1 Stereoscopic zoetrope depicting a gull’s wingbeat cycle. Source: E.-J.
Marey, Movement (1894; New York: Arno Press, 1972).

ment. Or, rather, he extracted a generalized model of gull-­wing move-

ment from a series of specific chronophotographic observations.
Ludwig Braun’s work on the dynamics of the heart provides another
example of the importance of animated movement in the framework of
a scientific project that is quite similar to Marey’s. According to Cart-
wright, Braun also used cinema primarily as a method of graphic in-
scription: “The use to which Braun put his images suggests that he, like
[John] Macintyre, regarded his film as something akin to a kymographic
trace, a graphic register of change over time. . . . Braun’s film is a precise,
incremental index of life and death—a register that is, in very impor-
tant ways, a graphic trace and not a moving picture.”11 But here too the
graphic trace contains an important relationship to volume; the two-­
dimensional image lies in intimate contact with the three-­dimensional
image.
Braun, like Marey, was interested in creating a model of the ideal/
normal heartbeat. The cinematic image was a method that allowed him
to measure and thereby establish the volumetric parameters of “a single
cardiac cycle.”12 Braun saw in the chronophotographic series the ability
to establish not only and not even primarily the temporal rhythm of

“A Living, Developing Egg” • 71

the heartbeat but rather its spatial displacements. He provided a brief
history of chronophotography, explaining that Eadweard Muybridge’s
chronophotographic images were insufficient because they were only sil-
houettes that did not allow for the apprehension of their “plastic mod-
eling.”13 Braun claimed, however, that his camera’s optics allowed for
“exact, quasi-­three-­dimensional reproductions [reliefartige Wiedergaben]
of the beating heart.”14 And he used these sequences in order to extract
volumetric data from the flat images. By laying successive cinemato-
graphic images on top of each other, he measured the displacement of
the moving parts of the heart: “Thus one can recognize the spatial dis-
placements, judge them better than before, and to a certain degree also
measure and calculate them.”15
Braun and Marey thus used serial images to create models of limited
temporality, idealized movement cycles.16 These cycles were as much
about re-­creating objects in volumetric space as they were about cre-
ating a temporal sequence. The graphic register of these images is not
primarily a matter of stilling and disciplining but rather a re-­creation,
or animation, of a virtual object that can be measured and understood
both temporally and spatially.17
The use of serial images to re-­create volumetric depth was not always
coupled with the synthesis of movement, however; serial imaging also
could re-­create atemporal objects. Ludwig Münch provides an instance
of this kind of animation. Münch created more than twenty-­five films
on mathematical subjects that ranged from a graphical demonstration
of the Pythagorean theorem to an animation of Copernican astronomi-
cal movements (see figures 4.2–4.5).18 These films appeared in 1912, but
a review mentioned that they were the result of “four laborious years,”
which means Münch began work on them in 1908, contemporaneous
with the appearance of Emile Cohl’s earliest animated films.19 Indeed,
Münch’s method of hand drawing large images on paper and directly
photographing them is similar to Cohl’s method. Furthermore, Münch’s
use of clear, simple line drawings makes his films’ fluid transformations
resemble Cohl’s metamorphic aesthetic.20
These coincidences should not be taken as indicating an argument
about influence; rather, they mark the presence of an alternate anima-
tion practice running alongside other, more familiar traditions.21 For as
much as Münch’s films may resemble Cohl’s, their significant differences
are worth underscoring. Whereas Cohl’s films demonstrate a series of
changes motivated by an oneiric logic, Münch’s geometrical demon-
strations are essentially depictions of atemporal, ideal objects. Münch’s

72  • Oliver Gaycken
F i g ure 4 . 2 Original drawings used for Lud­ F i g u re 4 . 3 Video still of animated geometry
wig Münch’s animated geometry films. Source: film, Ludwig Münch, ca. 1912. Source: Virgilio
Virgilio Tosi, Cinema before Cinema. Tosi, Cinema before Cinema.

F i g ure 4 . 4 Video still of animated geometry F i g u re 4 . 5 Münch’s geometry animations

film, Ludwig Münch, ca. 1912. Source: Virgilio published as a flip-book. Source: Virgilio Tosi,
Tosi, Cinema before Cinema. Cinema before Cinema.

films animate geometrical concepts that exist out of time, a point under-
scored by the fact that three-­dimensional objects were also used to illus-
trate and teach these same geometrical concepts.22
Embryologists prominently employed serial imaging to generate
atemporal forms as well, and embryological models exhibit points of
contact with later animation practices. Nick Hopwood has written ex-
tensively about the history of embryology’s use of models and has noted
that the microtome was a key instrument because of its ability to cre-
ate identical slices of samples. Chronophotography and cinematography
provided a similar kind of benefit, allowing for the creation of precisely
separated photographic images. The space between the images on the
perforated film stock is similar to the thickness of the individual em-

“A Living, Developing Egg” • 73

bryological slices cut by the microtome; the difference is that the inter-
stices between images on a filmstrip are temporal while the thickness
of microtome slices are spatial. Time and space are similarly fungible
with these methods, however. The registration system employed in Gus-
tav Born’s method of model construction consisted of notches on one
edge of the plate that kept the plates in alignment, which functioned
similarly to both the perforations in film stock as well as the perf-­and-­
peg system that was such a significant part of the technical innovations
leading to classical cel animation (see figures 4.6–4.9).
Other scientists used cinema in the service of modeling as well.
In 1907 Karl Reicher, a neurologist at the Charité Hospital in Berlin,
wrote about wanting to extend the benefits of photography’s “techni-
cal achievements” to medical science. Reicher was particularly inter-
ested in the ability to demonstrate neuroanatomy in a new way, and
he used cinematography to create an animated record of a portion of
an adult human brain stem (from around the decussation of pyramids
at the beginning of the medula oblongata to the middle of the pons) by
photographing a series of slides. Reicher was most interested in how
this method of visualization might allow for new insights, although he
was hesitant to predict what such insights might be (one suggestion was
that slowly following individual nerve groups could contribute to the
understanding of nerve pathways).
His article spends a fair amount of time describing the painstaking
process of centering the slides, and he apologizes for the jitter [Zittern]
that the first series displayed, which consisted of 1,060 images.23 Even
though he uses a significant part of the article to enumerate the dif-
ficulties encountered and promise impending improvements in image
quality, he does express confidence in one aspect of the endeavor: “One
thing seems certain even today, the didactic usage of such cinemato-
grams [Kinematogramme].” His reasons for this confidence were linked to
the perceptual qualities of the animation. He declares that “one has the
impression of active processes” and that “it is precisely its activeness [of
the moving image] that impresses itself better on the learner and also
provides better spatial representations of paths and centers than the
viewing of even an expanded series of cross sections.”24 This assertion of
the moving image’s power resonates with Hopwood’s description of the
effects of embryological models when he writes about their “vividness
and tangibility that no flat picture could match,” and it resonates more
generally with the discourse of visual education and its endorsement of
the pedagogical superiority of the visual.25

74  • Oliver Gaycken
 4.7

4.6
4.8

4.9
Fi g ure 4 . 6 Gustav Born’s wax-­plate method of “plastic reconstruction.” This is an
individual section whose image will be transferred to a wax plate. Note the registra-
tion line on the left of the image. Figure 12 in Karl Peter, Die Methoden der Rekon-
struktion (Jena, Germany: Fischer, 1906).
Fig ure 4 . 7 A stack of the wax plates from the side of the registration line. Figure
34 in Karl Peter, Die Methoden der Rekonstruktion (Jena, Germany: Fischer, 1906).
F i g u re 4 . 8 The same stack as in figure 4.7 from the opposite side, where the
model, in this case of a lizard embryo brain, is visible. Figure 35 in Karl Peter, Die
Methoden der Rekonstruktion (Jena, Germany: Fischer, 1906).
Fig ure 4 . 9 The nearly final product, after extraneous material has been cut away
from the model, which was then smoothed and painted. Figure 36 in Karl Peter, Die
Methoden der Rekonstruktion (Jena, Germany: Fischer, 1906).
 Hopwood also notes that models came to be seen as “too static” for
the next generation of embryologists, whose interests lay in experimen-
tation.26 This observation accords with Christopher Kelty’s and Hannah
Landecker’s observations about how static and animated views of the
cell have alternated in prominence over the course of the twentieth cen-
tury in the cultures of microscopic imaging.27 Their discussion of Julius
Ries’s use of cinema to create a record of the development of the sea-­
urchin egg demonstrates the importation of embryological modeling
into the domain of the cinematic image. Ries’s comment, “You actually
believe a living, developing egg is present before you,” testifies to the
cinematic image’s ability to create a living presence, which involves a
tangibility indebted to both temporal and spatial qualities.28
Ries’s film does not capture new knowledge; the sea-­urchin egg was
a model organism, in large part because its developmental stages were
comparatively clear and easily visible. Kelty and Landecker note about
Ries’s film: “Theory animates observation. . . . A machine is built to ani-
mate observation’s codification, and the resulting moving image is per-
ceived as an animation of theory.”29 Like Marey’s and Braun’s employ-
ment of serial images, these images had to be projected, which is to say
animated, for them to be useful. And even though the developmental
process was well known from countless observations, the projection led
to new insights: “The return to the perception of movement is not a
circle right back to the starting point but is itself a new cycle of observa-
tion, revealing previously ‘unperceived details’ of movement.”30

“Relief in Time”

The revelation of new details in Ries’s film was partly due to its tempo-
ral selectivity, which is to say that certain periods of the developmental
process were compressed through time-­lapse photography. Marey and
Braun also used this feature particular to temporal modeling, namely
the ability to vary the time scale. Immediately after Marey’s discussion
of the zoetrope’s ability to slow down the time of observation, he men-
tions the possibility of moving time into the realm of movements too
slow to be observed by human perception. In other words, if one rami-
fication of the cinema’s ability to model movements was to slow them
down, another option was to accelerate movements too slow for human
perception to register.
In one of the first reflections on this possibility for scientific photog-
raphy, Ernst Mach introduces the concept of time lapse in a series of

76  • Oliver Gaycken
analogies. A notebook entry strings together a number of concepts and
serves as an outline for an essay that he would publish in 1888:
Photography
Stereoscopy. Transparency.
Expansion of the senses.
Magnification
Diminution
Temporal diminution
Temporal magnification
Expansion of the sensory field.
Kepler’s laws.
Plant growth. Embryo. Mvt.
[Instantaneous photography]
who knows how much would reveal itself to us
Flying
Marey31
This series indicates that the moving image for Mach is one of a num-
ber of technical devices to produce knowledge—intellectual prostheses
that help to generate what he calls mental strength. Above all, he ad-
dresses sensual perception; he says that recording a number of obser-
vations that come from sensual perception provides knowledge that re-
mains wedded to the singular. The intellectual insights that interested
Mach in time-­lapse imaging are similar to what he had been working
on in various ways earlier—his conception of stereoscopy as providing
an enhanced view of a thing, a “seeing-­at-­once” view (seeing more than
one side of an object). It is a matter of using technology to show things
that have never been seen before or to show known things in a man-
ner that is strikingly new.32 And, indeed, Mach analogized the process
of time lapse with other processes in a way that made clear that he saw
no fundamental difference between the manipulation of time or space.
This point is further underscored by the fact that he uses two different
neologisms for time lapse—Zeitverkürzung and Zeitverkleinerung—both
of which apply to time as well as space. The animation that time lapse
provides thus emerges as a form of modeling, a process that reveals an
object, a phenomenon, or a process in relief. Time lapse shows things
that are usually perceived as motionless moving, and by extension, it
allows for a phenomenal understanding of how the seeming fixity of
space is undone by the flux of time.
Classical film theory contains occasional considerations of these

“A Living, Developing Egg” • 77

issues. One of the more remarkable passages takes place in Jean Epstein’s
“On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie,” where he writes: “To the ele-
ments of perspective employed in drawing, the cinema adds a new per-
spective in time. In addition to relief in space, the cinema offers relief
in time. Astonishing abridgments in this temporal perspective are per-
mitted by the cinema—notably in those amazing glimpses into the life
of plants and crystals—but these have never yet been used to dramatic
purpose.”33 These uses of cinema as a scientific tool have much in com-
mon with the traditional understanding of what constitutes animation;
here the scientist uses cinema in a process that is explicitly opposed to
recording or reproducing an already evident phenomenon. These cre-
ations are thaumaturgic. As much as animation has been associated with
an anthropomorphic tendency, here the opposite tendency appears. As
with Marey’s use of the zoetrope, it is not simply a choice between show-
ing what the eye already sees versus something the eye cannot grasp
without the new technology; instead, the technological enhancement to
vision becomes tied to conceptual growth—Mach wrote about this type
of technically aided vision as “invigorated.”34 Time lapse reveals the flux
of life in new places, leading to a novel form of perception that partici-
pates in what Katrin Solhdju terms “a strategy of concrete pluralization
of experience and therefore of reality.”35 When Mach invokes an “ethi-
cal” dimension of time-­lapse imaging, he gestures toward the opening it
provides for access to a new domain of alterity.
Immediately after invoking time lapse, Epstein describes the cinema
as “animistic; it attributes, in other words, a semblance of life to the ob-
jects it defines.” He continues:
It is hardly surprising that it should endow the objects it is called upon
to depict with such intense life. . . . I would even go so far as to say that
the cinema is polytheistic and theogonic. Those lives it creates, by sum-
moning objects out of the shadows of indifference into the light of dra-
matic concern, have little in common with human life. . . . If we wish
to understand how an animal, a plant, or a stone can inspire respect,
fear, or horror, those three most sacred sentiments, I think we must
watch them on the screen, living their mysterious, silent lives, alien to
the human sensibility.36

This passage indicates a way of thinking of cinema as animation that is

related to its use as a mode of scientific visualization. To animate in this
sense means something other than to reproduce or to caricature; the

78  • Oliver Gaycken
practices of scientific visualization foreground the cinema’s ability to
create a view of something—a process, an object—previously invisible.

Notes

I would like to thank Karen Beckman for her patient editorial guidance. I also would like
to thank Hannah Landecker and Scott Curtis for their helpful responses to a draft of this
chapter. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

1. Crafton, Before Mickey (1993), 5.

2. Cartwright, Screening the Body, 33, 29. Cartwright does take care to qualify this
judgment: “I may be overstating my case here by considering only the tendency
toward the flat and the digital in Marey’s work. One could certainly point to
counterexamples—for example, his sculptural models of birds in flight. How-
ever, even these dimensional objects were perceptually contained and flattened”
(37). As the last sentence makes clear, however, this qualification is raised only
to be dismissed.
3. The authors cite Bruno Latour’s memorable sentence: “There is nothing you
can dominate as easily as a flat surface.” Latour, “Drawing Things Together,” 45.
See also Latour’s concept of the “immutable mobile,” a graphical representation
that reduces the complexity of a phenomenon and allows it to circulate more
easily, in Science in Action.
4. Chadarevian and Hopwood, “Dimensions of Modelling,” in Chadarevian and
Hopwood, Models, 3, 6.
5. See Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons; and Crafton, Before Mickey (1993).
6. Lutz, Animated Cartoons, viii. He also writes, “Photography and the rendering of
sounds by the phonograph have both been adopted for instruction and amuse-
ment. The motion-­picture also is used for these purposes, but in the main the
art has been associated with our leisure hours as a means of diversion or enter-
tainment. During the period of its growth, however, its adaptability to educa-
tion has never been lost sight of. It is simply that development along this line
has not been as seriously considered as it should be” (vii).
7. Further along this path lie photographic processes that are not usually seen as
part of cinema history, such as the Lumière brothers’ process of photo-­stéréo-­
synthèse, the tomographic photography of Dr. Eugene Doyen, and X-­ray tomog-
raphy. For more on the intersections between cinema and tomography, see
Cartwright and Goldfarb, “Radiography, Cinematography and the Decline of
the Lens.” An obvious continuation of the practices of modeling in embryol-
ogy that has received considerable attention from media scholars is the Visible
Human Project. See also Alexander Galloway’s chapter in this volume for a
consideration of how nineteenth-­century imaging techniques may be thought
about in relation to contemporary computer animation.
8. Cartwright, Screening the Body, 22, 38.
9. For counterpoints to the supposition that Marey had no use for the synthesis

“A Living, Developing Egg” • 79

 of motion, see Gaycken, “ ‘The Swarming of Life’ ”; and Tortajada, “The ‘Cine-
matographic Snapshot.’ ”
10. Marey, Le mouvement, 304.
11. Cartwright, Screening the Body, 22–23.
12. Braun, Über Herzbewegung und Herzstoss, 13. Braun picked the dog because it
was sufficiently close to the human heart to allow for extrapolation; his pri-
mary interest was to help clinicians understand the heart in order to aid in the
diagnosis of abnormalities.
13. Braun, Über Herzbewegung und Herzstoss, 15. Later Braun uses a very similar
phrase to denote the kind of image that is useful to the physiologist, “plastically
modeled bodies [plastisch modellierte Körper]” (15).
14. Braun, Über Herzbewegung und Herzstoss, 25. Braun used a Viennese copy of the
Lumière cinematograph equipped with Zeiss lenses.
15. Braun, Über Herzbewegung und Herzstoss, 29. This procedure of superimposing
successive images is similar to the working method of traditional cel animators.
16. This dynamic is similar to traditional animation’s attention to walk cycles; see
Lutz, Animated Cartoons, 40, 132–33. Lutz advises animators to study chrono-
photographic series in order to better understand movement.
17. For an analysis of the scientific film that foregrounds the still/moving dialectic,
see Curtis, “Still / Moving.”
18. See Tosi, Cinema before Cinema; see also Nicolet, Intuition mathematique et des-
sins animés.
19. “Lebende Mathematik,” Die Lichtbild-­Bühne, no. 15 (April 13, 1912): 28; cited
in “1912: Mathematische Trickfilme,” entry on the website of the Deutsches
­Institut für Animationsfilm; http://diaf.tyclipso.de/de/home/rubriken/Blog
_Detailseite.html?b=289; accessed June 28, 2013.
20. In an early response to Emile Cohl’s films, a reviewer for the Motion Picture
World mentions that Love Affair in Toyland (Un Drame chez les fantoches) (1908)
“recalled the ‘geometry at play’ games from a few years prior.” Moving Picture
World 3, no. 25 (December 19, 1908): 500; cited in Crafton, Before Mickey (1993),
85. What exactly “geometry at play” refers to is not clear; it may refer to flip-­
books that animated drawings of geometrical proofs (Münch’s drawings were
also published as flip-­books), or it may refer to another type of rational amuse-
ment, probably visually similar enough to forge the associative link in the re-
viewer’s mind. Noteworthy in any case is that a film routinely cited as one of
the first animated films was understood in terms of a popular-­scientific prede-
cessor. See Crafton, Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film, for the contextualization
of Cohl’s films within traditions that range from comic strips to theater to cari-
cature to the popular press.
21. As Crafton notes, “There are many other animation histories, though, besides
the cultural series encompassed by the classical cinema. Examples include the
abstract and avant-­garde works of the 1920s, independent animation through-
out the century and ‘orphan’ animation from industrial and sponsored films.”
Crafton, “The Veiled Genealogies of Animation and Cinema,” 105.
22. See Mehrtens, “Mathematical Models.”

80  • Oliver Gaycken
23. This number of frames would result in a duration of one minute and six seconds
at a projection speed of sixteen frames per second.
24. Reicher, “Kinematographie in der Neurologie,” 235.
25. Hopwood, “ ‘Giving Body’ to Embryos,” 463. For an account of the rhetoric of
vividness used in relation to early education cinema, see Gaycken, “The Cinema
of the Future.” Inspired by Reicher’s presentation of his films in Dresden in
1907, V. Widakowich announced his own experimentation with the cinemato-
graphic process, in which he directly applied slices of a preserved rat embryo
onto clear 35mm film stock. Widakowich, “Über kinematographische Vorfürung
von Serienschnitten durch Embryonen.” This procedure calls to mind certain
avant-­garde cinema practices, particularly Mothlight (Stan Brakhage, 1963). My
thanks to Hannah Landecker for sharing the citations to Reicher’s and Widako-
wich’s work.
26. Hopwood, “ ‘Giving Body’ to Embryos,” 495.
27. Kelty and Landecker, “A Theory of Animation.”
28. Ries, “Kinematographie der Befruchtung und Zellteilung,” 6.
29. Kelty and Landecker, “A Theory of Animation,” 38.
30. Kelty and Landecker, “A Theory of Animation,” 38. Soon after Ries’s work, three-­
dimensionality became an explicit feature of time-­lapse embryological films.
See Gräper, “Die Methodik der Stereokinematographischen Untersuchung des
lebenden vitalgefärbten Hühnerembryos,” which contains a bibliography with
further citations to his work with stereoscopic imaging. My thanks to Christian
Riess for alerting me to Gräper and sharing the citations with me.
31. Ernst Mach, Notizbuch B22 (August 19, 1884), Ernst-­Mach-­Institut, Freiburg
im Breisgau; quoted in Stiegler, “Ernst Machs ‘Philosophie des Impressionis-
mus’ und die Momentphotographie,” 268.
32. For other accounts of uses of photography that further illuminate this position,
see Cartwright and Goldfarb, “Radiography, Cinematography and the Decline
of the Lens”; Ellenbogen, “Educated Eyes and Impressed Images”; and Frizot,
“Le temps de l’espace.” Finally, the use of cinema in time-­lapse applications
is similar to the use of the series in medical thought; see Curtis, The Shape of
Spectatorship.
33. Epstein, “On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie,” 316.
34. Mach, “Bemerkungen über wissenschaftliche Anwendungen der Photographie,”
285.
35. Solhdju, “L’expérience ‘pure’ et l’âme des plantes,” 93.
36. Epstein, “On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie,” 316, 317.

“A Living, Developing Egg” • 81

II : : Cinema and Animation
5 : : André Martin, Inventor of Animation Cinema:
Prolegomena for a History of Terms
H e rv é Joub e rt -­L au re nc i n
T r a n sl at ed by Luc y S wa ns on

In 2000, Bernard Clarens published the only work to date that collects
even a small portion of André Martin’s (1925–94) fundamental body of
critical work. A third of the book (more than ninety pages) is dedicated
to Norman McLaren and constitutes a veritable forgotten monograph.
The entirety of the anthology, titled Pour lire entre les images (Reading
between the images), such as it was conceived, also situates the intrigu-
ing and important place of animation cinema as an experience and an
idea in the history of the twentieth century.1
Before his death in 2006, Clarens entrusted me with the articles and
documents that he had systematically collected in hopes of publish-
ing other volumes. I have therefore recently come to possess an archive
solely devoted to André Martin, which I have named the Fonds Bernard
Clarens (Bernard Clarens Collection) and presented publicly at a confer-
ence in January 2011 at the University of Picardie. I supplemented the
archive with my own collection, which I began prior to 1990 in support
of my doctoral thesis offering a preliminary reading of Martin’s compre-
hensive discursive production. And my collection was immediately en-
hanced, notably by the contribution of Pierre Hébert, an animator from
Quebec as well as a true researcher in this case, who discovered impor-
tant traces of the Canadian period of the French critic and researcher.2
The place of Norman McLaren throughout Martin’s writing can thus
be grasped in its entirety. The Bernard Clarens Collection also brings to
light another important director worthy of examination—not a distant
contemporary like McLaren (temporally close, but spatially far from
Martin) but a pioneer and fellow Frenchman: Emile Cohl (culturally
similar, but temporally distant from the critic), who is better known by
cinema historians today than he was during Martin’s time.3
It is possible, thanks to two sets of Martin’s writing—twenty-­four
notations on the creator of Fantasmagorie (1908) and thirty-­four studies
and notations on that of Blinkity Blank (1955)—to write a page in cine-
matic history otherwise little examined by historians: the invention of
animation cinema. This history is little known because of its peculiar re-
sistance to the chronological imperative, and thus its failure to present
(either in order or according to common logic) two chapters typically
found in histories of animation cinema: those dedicated to so-­called
precursors, inventors, and pioneers, which never fail to leave a place for
Cohl, and those dedicated to McLaren. I offer an overview of another
history, that of the expression animation cinema, that is to say, an act of
naming, a formative statement, to borrow a term recently introduced by
a historian in another field.4 This linguistic act and its implementation
in reality is based on the events of the 1950s—McLaren’s glory years, a
fact that certainly had something to do with the possibility of such an
invention—and yet it is simultaneously retrospective, oriented toward
the rediscovery of pioneers. Within the system created by Martin, Cohl
operates from a distance as an archaic model of singular invention,
toward which McLaren’s modernity will return. In sum, what is at stake
here is the affirmation that the birth of animation cinema should not be
situated in the 1870s, 1890s, or 1910s but rather around 1955.

The Invention of Animation Cinema

The expression animation cinema appeared for the first time, at least
in Martin’s writing (although I have yet to find any examples prior to
his use of the term), in the body of a Cahiers du Cinéma article from
July 1953: “Films d’animation au festival de Cannes” (Animation films
at the Cannes festival). It is a report on the first specialized interna-
tional meeting, organized by the Association française pour la diffusion
du cinéma (French association for the promotion of cinema), which or-
ganized the “Journées du cinéma” (Days of cinema).5 The article is an
explicit attempt to impose “this adventurous animation cinema which
insists that a film . . . cannot be anything other than a work felt and ar-
ranged frame by frame.”6 In reading the article, it becomes clear that
that in the time and place in question, the use of the expression was
not self-­evident and represented a verbal problem that could not be
resolved, even among cinema specialists: “At the international meet-
ing of Cannes [in 1953], animation films, as always, disconcerted en-
thusiasts and made specialists misspeak. Once again, advertisements,
press releases, technical specification sheets, blithely mixed everything

86  • Hervé Joubert-­L aurencin

together, confusing marionettes and animated cartoons. As soon as ani-
mation film was being discussed, whether they were English or Japa-
nese, translators no longer knew their language and gave in to the same
incompetent Esperanto.” Here Martin addresses the cinephile commu-
nity and clearly underlines the distinction between cinema and films,
which thus reveals itself to be one of the historical markers of the inven-
tion: “Nevertheless, how can one love the Cinema so much, to what end
can it serve to see ALL films, if one is incapable of seeing and following
ALL Cinemas.”7
Martin took up the expression again with more success the following
year and subsequently in all his writings in the 1950s, until the name
took hold in common speech, although with some difficulty, since it ap-
peared pleonastic and complicated to commentators. With the third
“Journées internationales du cinema d’animation” or “jica” (Interna-
tional days of animation cinema) in 1960, the phrase became the official,
institutionalized name of a grouping that had never been conceived of
as such, because the films categorized under this rubric had previously
been designated by a variety of expressions: animated cartoons, children’s
films, trick films, puppet films, Chinese shadows (for silhouette films), and
a few other variations.
Without having undertaken systematic international research—a
task that would be impossible for me to do alone—I believe it is pos-
sible to locate this terminological dispersal on either side of a worldwide
caesura that took place around the year 1955. It is not only a question of
word-­for-­word translation. Even if there is little doubt that the French
word animation has been exported directly to other languages, this fact
is no more decisive than finding a “first occurrence” of the term. It is,
rather, a question of knowing whether there was a spread, during the
1950s (or later) of three characteristics: (1) the use of a noun (animation
in French and animation in English) in place of an adjective (animé in
French, found in dessin animé, and animated in English, present in ani-
mated cartoon); (2) the association of animation with cinéma rather than
with films (animation cinema in English); (3) the beginning of a rivalry
between the new term and dessin animé (animated cartoon in English),
when it is a question of defining a group of films broader than the genre
of the animated cartoon, including nongraphic films that were regarded
as more or less composited or manipulated and in this way opposed to
the typical recording style perceived as the norm; and (3b) the appear-
ance of a new term, prise de vue directe in French, live action in English,
to designate not all cinema but all cinema except for animation cinema.

André Martin • 87
 The association implied by the term animation cinema was new be-
cause it suggested, beyond the technical correlation between the films,
a grouping that might allow for organized screenings and the existence
of a community of interest, of spectators (in 1960 the “jica” were held
in Annecy by the militant cinephiles of the largest film club in France) or
of artists (the Association internationale du film d’animation [Interna-
tional Association of Animation Film] was created there the same year).
To my knowledge, the oldest work that uses the term in its title is Ital-
ian, and it ends with a chapter on McLaren and an acknowledgment of
the “Journées du cinéma”: Il cinema di animazione, 1832–1956 by Walter
Alberti.8 The progressive birth of innumerable specialized festivals in
the world, and the country-­by-­country development of the Association
internationale du film d’animation, rendered the progressive dissemina-
tion of the new expression possible.9

McLaren’s Invention

From the first specialized public display of animation cinema in 1953,

which took place then in the form of a thematic projection in a room of
the Cannes festival, until the institutionalization of an autonomous fes-
tival in the city of Annecy in 1960, Martin himself composed the press
releases, programs, and major reports in the French press. He was judge
and jury, organizer and critic, almost a lobbyist for animation cinema.
In 1960 the name animation cinema, taken up repeatedly from that
point on, still had not become established, nor had it entered into com-
mon usage: “Thus”—writes Martin again—“a new Festival has just ap-
peared dedicated to animation cinema. This expression might upset the
purists who feel it is an annoying pleonasm. Is cinema not inevitably the
art of movement, of animation par excellence? Why organize another
festival devoted, as it would appear to cinema-­cinema or to animation-­
animation?”10
Several historical facts pertaining to McLaren’s career played an un-
deniable role in the invention. The official position that he was offered
by John Grierson in Canada (the creation of an “animation service” in
1942–43, soon after his arrival in 1941, when he was only a simple, un-
known experimental filmmaker emigrating in the midst of a war) and
what resulted from it in the following decade laid the groundwork for
his career.11 It truly began to take off in the period from 1952 to 1958,
which saw the successive release of Neighbours, Two Bagatelles, Blinkity

88  • Hervé Joubert-­L aurencin

Blank, Rythmetic, A Chairy Tale, and Le Merle. It was the golden age of his
filmography. In 1954 his film Two Bagatelles was screened at Cannes, and
in 1955 a foundational moment occurred: Blinkity Blank was awarded
the Palme d’Or for best short film. Finally, by entrusting, or abandon-
ing, to Martin a few famous lines drafted on “invisible interstices” and
“drawn movements”—lines that long served as a flag for the small world
of animation—McLaren assured their global transmission in a few short
years. Among other places, Martin had them reproduced in their calli-
graphic form (equal to an illustrated or filmed work) in the special edi-
tion of the journal of the French federation of cinema clubs, Cinéma 57,
which was created exclusively in order to launch the new form of cinema
as defined by the first jica.12
One likely hypothesis is the historical influence of the film Neigh-
bours on Martin (the film was released in 1952, the year he began writ-
ing about cinema). The use of pixilation following more classical tech-
niques was also an invention and a rediscovery of practices used in the
early days of cinema. Like animation cinema, pixilation (stop-­motion
animation of human beings) had always been there but had also been
forgotten: it had no name.
Neighbours restored photographic recordings of human bodies to ani-
mation; that is to say, at least nominally, it reinserted live-­action cine-
matography into the fabricated, artificial space of stop-­motion anima-
tion. Pixilation historically brings our understanding of recorded cinema
back to our understanding of drawn cinema.
Martin alone was in a position to take full stock of the paradoxes at
play—and to allow himself to be submerged by them.13 Neighbours is
not merely an example—it is not even paradigmatic of stop-­motion ani-
mation cinema. It is the blind spot, the impossible space, or rather the
utopian nonspace of the term animation cinema championed by Martin.
The neighbors in this film, based entirely on doubling and reversal, are
revenants because they bring about the return of animated photography
(revenant is the first name in French for “cinema”), but also because ani-
mation cinema appears as a return of the first days. Cohl used pixilation
at least in Le mobilier fidèle (His faithful furniture) (1910) and in Jobard
ne ve pas voir les femmes travailler (Jobard doesn’t want to see women
working) (1911).
What, precisely, did Cohl represent, in the age of McLaren, in the dis-
course of Martin?

André Martin • 89
Emile Cohl’s Invention

Fantasmagorie (1908)

The historian Christophe Gauthier has demonstrated that in France the

early 1930s saw the discursive “invention” of precursors, in this way au-
thorizing a rereading of cinema history that reverses the aesthetic gene-
alogy accepted up to that point.14 French ancestors (primarily Georges
Méliès, but also Max Linder) were found for the American directors
Cecil B. DeMille and D. W. Griffith, in order to posit them as founders of
world cinema as a language. Méliès was not only redeemed but became
a founding father of cinema.
The history of animated cartoons that emerged throughout the
1930s, in particular through the dispute over attributing its invention
to Cohl, was based on the same premises, adds Gauthier.15 The new de-
cade began with an article rehabilitating Cohl, exactly contemporaneous
to the Méliès Gala on December 16, 1929, and written by a co-­organizer
of the event, Jean-­George Aurio.16 The conditions for the birth of Fan-
tasmagorie in 1908 and Cohl’s beginnings at the Gaumont film company
were discussed, notably in a series of articles in Comoedia in early 1936.
And the year 1938 opened with the deaths of Cohl and Méliès, a few
hours and a few kilometers apart, after difficult, almost miserable ends,
which attest to a truly communal destiny. The idea of a possible com-
memoration of the anniversary of the “first animated cartoon” arose in
part from this double coincidence: the concurrent death in 1938 (Janu-
ary 20 and 21) of two patriarchs with the same pointed white beard, and
the affirmation of the 1908 birth of the new cinematic genre of the ani-
mated cartoon with Fantasmagorie.17
The commemoration fell flat. A monument to Cohl and Méliès was
conceived of and financed before the wars, following their simultaneous
deaths, but it was never built. Twenty years later, after another world
war and another postwar period, the year 1958 marked the fiftieth anni-
versary of Cohl’s alleged invention, although this memory was not yet
truly visible outside of specialist circles. However, the difference twenty
years after 1938 was that these specialists existed and the term anima-
tion cinema had been introduced. For these reasons, Martin attempted a
media operation in the summer of 1958, more or less on his own, likely
thanks to the space freed up in the journals during the season.

90  • Hervé Joubert-­L aurencin

The Fiftieth Anniversary (1958)

Martin lead a campaign for the commemoration of August 17, 1908,

the exact date of the first screening of Fantasmagorie in Paris, in three
rather significant journals—Arts, Radio-­Cinéma-­Télévision, and Cahiers
du Cinema. His procedure can be summed up in three coherently articu-
lated points: (1) the French would have fatally forgotten to commemo-
rate in a dignified manner the anniversary of the worldwide birth, in
their country, of the animated cartoon;18 (2) all the signs of the decline
of the classic American animated cartoon, which had until then domi-
nated world production, were in 1958 clearly perceptible and definitive;19
and (3) a renewal was already visible but, with a few exceptions, it was
under way outside both France and the United States (see all the conclu-
sions to the articles of the second stage). This transnational modernity,
constituted by “young Czech, Canadian, Polish, Hindu or Yugoslavian
productions” (the last words in the September 7 article in Radio-­Cinéma-­
Télévision), or “happy Russian surprises” (the last heading in the May 18
issue of Arts), crossed borders, notably including the iron curtain of the
cold war.20
Finally, the legend to an illustration concisely sums up Martin’s
three-­part logic in which a central place is occupied by the reactivation
of the national myth of a certain Cohl, worthy of international merit but
forgotten by the state: “No celebration or homage for the Fiftieth Anni-
versary of the French Animated Cartoon. No more animated cartoon in
the Americas. Yet frame-­by-­frame Cinema continues.”21

April 1953

A few years earlier, Martin’s first text published in Cahiers du Cinéma

appeared, the manifesto for the “Journées du cinéma” (the principle be-
hind these “days of cinema” was to wholly dedicate a provincial city to
cinema for an intensive week), cosigned by Pierre Barbin and Michel
Boschet. Although the text did not yet constitute a defense of anima-
tion, it already proposed screenings devoted to Cohl and Méliès, iden-
tifying them together by the same vivid term: “Makeshift screens, set
up on street corners, offer impromptu showings of rapid and energetic
films: phantasmagoria by Cohl or Méliès, illustrated poems by Paul Gri-
mault.”22 But phantasmagoria is neither capitalized nor italicized in the
original edition.23 It is certainly a question of a reappropriation of Cohl’s
title to make a lexical equivalent of trick films.

André Martin • 91
The Hundred-­Year Anniversary (1977)

In 1977, that is to say twenty years after this period of invention, Martin
wrote a small book at the behest of Raymond Maillet, an independent
archival historian and the first Cohl specialist who was at the time direc-
tor of the eleventh jica in Annecy. Martin expresses in the book, retro-
spectively, and with more clarity, the place that his historical system ac-
corded to Cohl. In the form of a fictive daily newspaper, the short work
titled Image par image (Frame by frame) was placed under the follow-
ing auspices: “Fondateur: Emile Reynaud. 100e année. Directeur : Emile
Cohl” (Founder: Emile Reynaud. 100th year. Director: Emile Cohl).24 The
coupling of Reynaud and Cohl is classic in the histories and accounts of
animation enthusiasts. It creates a cinematic counterhistory through
the use of wordplay, since it makes it possible to avoid placing any defini-
tive birth of the animated cartoon or of the animation film in 1895: the
first Emile preceded this threshold by fifteen years, a fact that the sec-
ond was unaware of when his invention followed it by more than twelve
years. In this historical panorama of French animation cinema, Martin
left the task of writing the report on Cohl to the specialist Maillet, but
he evoked elsewhere the filmmaker’s “seriousness” in his “responsibility
to new combinations,” making the rather striking comparison between
Cohl’s puppets and schemata taken from the notebooks of a contempo-
rary, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Anachronisms

Martin views Cohl as a pioneer. In this case, a solitary worker who values
the everyday invention of new, expeditious techniques commensurate
with one man, a singular island in an economy that could not assimilate
him nor make him fit into its framework.
But a pioneer or, according to Martin, a “primitive,” is not the pro-
tagonist of a nationalist discourse on the past. Cohl was not, in him-
self, a patrimonial resource to be profited from, a treasure of French his-
tory or a genius who gave everything to the Americans. On the contrary,
he was a present energy, a nonchronological event that returned in the
current McLarenian moment of international creation, more precisely
in its most advanced stage, which was geared toward the future of the
art of animation, an art that invents new techniques consistent with a
poetics and a concrete, expressive necessity. Regarding McLaren, Martin
asserts in an article titled “N’oublions pas le mode d’emploi” (Let’s not

92  • Hervé Joubert-­L aurencin

forget the owner’s manual): “In the same way, browsing through the reel
of unreleased negatives of that other pioneer, Emile Cohl, I was not sur-
prised to discover (notably in Le peintre néo-­impressionniste [The neo-­
impressionist painter]) an example of that discontinuous animation
which, forty-­five years later, would impassion Norman McLaren when
he had pushed his attempts at drawn-­on-­film animation to the limit
with Blinkity Blank.”25
The movement of an anachronistic history continued with a word
from McLaren reported and commented on by Martin in January 1958:
“When he saw himself ranked among the pantheon of avant-­garde cre-
ators, Norman McLaren, more aware of origins, protested: ‘Put me,
rather, with the rear-­guard, after Cohl, Fischinger and Len Lye.’ In fact
it was Emile Cohl who, long ago, first gave the example of solitary ani-
mation, of schematic drawing, and of analogical freedom in the devel-
opment.”26
In a more theoretical passage on McLaren, Martin evokes Stéphane
Mallarmé and Paul Valéry to situate the “problem of the subject” specific
to animation, the precise location where it moves away from the rest of
cinema, all the while digging deeper into the central question (the philo-
sophical basis of Martin’s contribution was to invent, for cinema, such
an “outside thought”). Against “dramatic, oratory or comedic” contem-
porary cinema, McLaren sustains interest with purely abstract material
“because movement is enough to make him happy.” And Martin adds:
“Emile Cohl, possessed by the demon of analogy, also directed films of
pure, perpetual movement that had no beginning and no end.”27 For our
part, we could name this magnificent intuition that Cohl’s work offers
to Martin “the demonic analogy.” Because, in effect, the realist strength
of the movement of objects and bodies in animation constitutes an ana-
logical force no less important than that of photomechanical reproduc-
tion (if animated images resemble each other to the point of passing
from one to another imperceptibly, then they can just as well trans-
form, in the spectator’s experience, into real bodies and objects). Para-
doxically, this idea opposes the autonomy of an animation cut off from
cinema; on the contrary, it comes full circle to locate a troubling effect
at the edge of cinematographic realism.
Moreover, the fact that Cohl’s films have “no beginning and no end”
recalls a more general question brought to light by Martin, one pertain-
ing to community and cinematography: animation cinema’s capacity
for national and chronological unmooring. One could say, effectively,
that Martin’s specific ideological contribution can be located in the af-

André Martin • 93
firmation of the art of animation’s fundamental absence of chronological
inevitability, and in the instinctive negation of the traditional history
that went hand in hand, in his writing, with a refusal of geopolitics and
established national borders. This study of his discourse reveals a tem-
porality less subject to chronology, in order to return to Martin’s in-
stinctive practice of a history that goes against the grain.

Notes

1. Clarens, André Martin. It is a remarkable critical anthology, accompanied by

contextualization that gives several precise and original historical points re-
garding the history of French cinema culture. It brings together critical articles
spanning, without exception, 1952 to 1965. Nevertheless, the collection repre-
sents less than a third of Martin’s complete works.
2. Martin published his first article in 1952 in L’Âge du Cinema, and his last writ-
ten publication known to date is an encyclopedia entry published in 1987 in
L’encyclopaedia universalis. After this date, a debilitating illness prevented him
from working. In France, beyond his activity in film criticism in the 1950s
(forty-­nine articles in Cahiers du Cinéma between 1953 and 1960), and more
occasionally in Radio Cinéma Télévision, France Observateur, Le Cinéma Chez
Soi, Le Cinéma Pratique, Artsept, Cinéma Quebec, Images et Son, Banc-­titre, and
a few other locations, he was a general delegate of an association for the pro-
motion of cinema subsidized by the state (the Association française de diffu-
sion du cinéma), in which the current festival in Annecy has its origins. He was
also present at the creation of the Groupe de recherche image (Image Research
Group) in 1961 at the Office de radiodiffusion-­télévision française (French
Office of Radio-­Television); was producer and director of animation films in
association with Michel Boschet (with the company Les films Martin-­Boschet);
and then, in 1970–80, upon his return from a visit to Canada, was a research
engineer at the Institut national de l’audiovisuel (National Audiovisual Insti-
tute), charged with reflecting on the future of images and in particular cgi. To
this end, he contributed to the founding of Imagina in Monte Carlo in 1981. In
Canada, after a first trip at the invitation of the festival in Montreal in 1961,
Martin was brought on by Pierre Juneau in 1965 as the director of research
services at the Canadian Radio-­television and Telecommunications Commis-
sion, and he lived in Montreal from 1966 to 1974 with his family. He directed
films there and prepared the International Retrospective of the Cinema of Ani-
mation that the Cinémathèque canadienne (future Cinémathèque québécoise)
offered on the occasion of the 1967 International and Universal Exposition
in Montreal; his fabulous giant synoptic chart “Origin and Golden Age of the
American Cartoon from 1906 to 1941” was exhibited at this occasion. He con-
versed with Marshall McLuhan, whom Martin helped to introduce in France in
a long article documented in Image et Son in 1965, and he made an unpublished
series of recorded and transcribed interviews with Northrop Frye in 1968–69.

94  • Hervé Joubert-­L aurencin

3. On Cohl, see Crafton, Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film; and for recent French
works, see Courtet-­Cohl and Génin, Émile Cohl; Vignaux and Courtet-­Cohl,
Emile Cohl; and Vimenet, Emile Cohl.
4. See Dufoix, La dispersion, 14–28. These pages in particular offer a useful pano-
rama of the diverse schools of thought—historical, philosophical, and philo-
logical—that have worked on a historical semantics that has proposed histories
of the word. See also, in the artistic sphere, Roque, Qu’est-­ce que l’art abstrait?
Neither of these two studies ever anticipates a predefined object that would
exist before its naming and the use that its interpreters would make of it. The
first part of the work that came out of my doctoral thesis followed the same ap-
proach, interrogating the term animation cinema. See Joubert-­Laurencin, La let-
tre volante, 35–68. In critiquing the reprisal of the Austinian notion of “perfor-
mativity” by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, which he judges erroneous,
Stéphane Dufoix proposes the idea of the “formativity” of words to designate,
in their progressive polysemic dispersal, their influence on reality when they
are successful and widely revived in different places and times.
5. See Clarens, André Martin, 25.
6. Martin, “Films d’animation au festival de Cannes,” 39; emphasis added.
7. Martin, “Films d’animation au festival de Cannes,” 39.
8. Alberti, Il cinema di animazione, 1832–1956.
9. What followed this history is not the subject of this chapter, but it is notable
that the definition and the delimitation of animation was followed by violent
modifications: the end of the institutional restriction to frame-­by-­frame ani-
mation in 1980 by the Association internationale du film d’animation during
the Zagreb festival (see Joubert-­Laurencin, La lettre volante, 41–42), and the
end of the trenchant break between animation cinema and live-­action cinema
as a result of the advent of the digital age (see Joubert-­Laurencin, “Le cinéma
d’animation n’existe plus”).
10. Clarens, André Martin, 133.
11. Before 1953 animation and animated film existed in specialized vocabulary. It is
possible to follow the slow modification of the vocabulary in the revisions to
the small volume Technique du cinéma in the scholarly paperback series of the
Presses Universitaires de France, titled “Que sais-­je?” written by Joseph-­Marie
Lo Duca, also the writer of the trailblazing book Le dessin animé. In the first edi-
tion (1943), the chapter “Technique du dessin animé” (“Animated Cartoon Tech-
nique”) aims to be prophetic (“Animated cartoons tend to evolve. The ‘one turn,
one picture’ technique has just begun”) and proposes an initial rough classifica-
tion of stop-­motion films, described as a “branch of cinematography.” Lo Duca,
Technique du cinéma (1943), 115. The return of the same classificatory table in Lo
Duca’s specialized 1948 work is unchanged, as is the 1956 edition, but the 1971
edition adds a name to this “branch,” which is still not “animation cinema,” but
“animation films” (113).
12. Norman McLaren, Cinéma 57, no. 14 (January 1957): 12. Martin’s published re-
production of McLaren’s calligraphy can be found, followed by a commentary,
in Joubert-­Laurencin, La lettre volante, 52, among other places. The text, as

André Martin • 95
 presented by Martin, is the following with underlining and the lapsus of the
crossed out that: “Animation is not the art of drawings-­that-­move but the art
of movements-­that-­are drawn. What happens between each frame is much
more important than what exists on each frame. Animation is therefore the art
of manipulating the invisible that interstices that lie between frames. Norman
McLaren.”
13. In fact, Martin must have had a belated awareness, or perhaps was never able
to see On the Farm (directed by McLaren in 1951), in which the word pixilation
appeared for the first time in the closing credits, based on pixie or pixilated,
a word found in a philological discussion in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (directed
by Frank Capra in 1936; the word appears ninety-­four and ninety-­five minutes
in). Martin uses circumlocutions rather than la pixillation in 1953, and again in
1958. See Martin, “Films d’animation au festival de Cannes,” 39. And, exception-
ally, one of his final encyclopedia entries in Passek, Dictionnaire du cinéma, “Ani-
mation (techniques de l’)” (22–25), which is dedicated to the subject, manages
neither to spell (he only puts a single l) nor to define the technique (he cites
two animations of objects in two of Cohl’s films, whereas pixilation is defined,
precisely, in opposition to the animation of objects, by the presence of human
bodies in the field of vision).
14. Gauthier, “L’invention des ‘primitifs’ à l’orée du parlant,” 164. This is the first
publication of the results of his doctoral thesis, “Une composition française.”
15. Gauthier, “L’invention des ‘primitifs’ à l’orée du parlant,” 172 n. 52.
16. Auriol, “Les premiers dessins animés cinématographiés.”
17. On December 21, 1937, a few weeks before the death of the two French pioneers,
the animated cartoon saw renewed interest worldwide with the American re-
lease of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at Carthay Circle Theatre in
Hollywood. On the film’s reception in France, see the indispensable, encyclo-
pedic dissertation of Sébastien Roffat, “L’émergence d’une école française de
dessin animé sous l’Occupation (1940–1944),” 116–28 and appendixes 7, 11, 12,
and 15.
18. For Martin, “Cinquante ans après, le dessin animé revient à ses origines,”
Arts, no. 684 (August 20, 1958), see Clarens, André Martin, 127–31; for Martin,
“Le 17 Août 1908,” Radio-­Cinéma-­Télévision no. 448 (August 17, 1958), see Cla-
rens, André Martin, 177–78; and for Martin, “Un cinquantenaire par comme les
autres,” Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 86 (August 1958): 42, see Clarens, André Martin,
55–56.
19. For Martin, “L’Amérique a perdu le monopole du dessin animé,” Arts, no. 672
(May 28, 1958), see Clarens, André Martin, 125–27; for Martin, “Le dessin animé
américain est-­il mort?,” Radio-­Cinéma-­Télévision no. 451 (September 7, 1958),
see Clarens, André Martin, 179–80; and for Martin, “Feu l’animated cartoon,”
Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 86 (August 1958): 43–44, see Clarens, André Martin,
54–55.
20. Martin, something of a legal activist, certainly thinks of animation and its fes-
tivals (the triangle Annecy-­Zagreb-­Ottawa of the 1960 to 1980s) as a means of
saving the artists from the countries under the yoke of communism.

96  • Hervé Joubert-­L aurencin

21. André Martin, “Pour faire partager son indignation et remuer les foules ciné-
philes,” Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 86 (August 1958): 43; cited in Clarens, André
Martin, 52 (there is an identification error added by the publisher Dreamland).
22. Clarens, André Martin, 38.
23. The original edition is Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 22 (April 1953).
24. The twenty-­four-­page pamphlet published on the occasion of the eleventh
annual “Journées Internationales du Cinéma d’Animation: 14–18 juin 1977,”
alongside the exhibition Cent ans de dessins animés 1877–1977, which was held
at the Musée-­Château d’Annecy, summer 77, Bernard Clarens Collection; it is
not reproduced in Clarens, André Martin. The year 1877 represents when Emile
Reynaud received the patent for the praxinoscope, which marks, according to
Martin, who justifies this date on the first page, “not only the beginning of the
idea of animated cinema but also the beginning of this very particular form of
cinema in France.”
25. André Martin, “N’oublions pas le mode d’emploi,” Cinéma 57, no. 14 (January
1957): 36; cited in Clarens, André Martin, 254.
26. Quoted in Clarens, André Martin, 191.
27. André Martin, “III. On a touché au cinema,” Cahiers du Cinéma no. 82 (April
1958); cited in Clarens, André Martin, 240; emphasis added.

André Martin • 97
6 : : “First Principles” of Animation
Al a n C hol ode nko

All my publications on animation of the last twenty-­three years are

dedicated to animating film theory—not only addressing what animation
adds to the theorizing of film but doing that adding, while trying to re-
dress the marginalization of animation by film studies, film history, and
film theory. For animation has been their blind spot. My animating (of )
film theory as film animation theory applies especially to the theorization
of live action film through animation and responds to late 1960s French
Marxist film theory and the Anglo-­American film theory derived from
it.1 Given that there is no way I can offer here a comprehensive rehearsal
of my interventions over those twenty-­three years, I ask the reader to
consult my publications, especially my introductions to the anthologies
I edited—The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation (1991), the world’s first
book of scholarly essays theorizing animation, and The Illusion of Life 2:
More Essays on Animation (2007)—which directly address film studies
and film theory, as well as animation studies and animation theory.2 In
this chapter I offer my key results to date, my “first principles” of ani-
mation.
To ask the question, “By not writing about animated films, have theo-
rists simply been prioritizing the live action film while still producing
theory that is applicable to animation?,” misses the key first point of my
1991 introduction in The Illusion of Life, which I reiterated in my essay
in that anthology.3 It is a claim I still find to be radical, and it was made
ten years before Lev Manovich’s similar assertion.4 Let us call it our first
“first principle” of animation: not only is animation a form of film but
all film, film “as such,” is a form of animation.
Given all film by definition includes live action, live action is a form
of animation. Consequently, film theorists have never not been writing
about animated films and film (as) animation, knowingly or unknow-
ingly. I say animated films to designate that genre or mode of films tradi-
tionally defined as “animation” and treated as the least significant form
of film or even not a form of film at all, rather a form of graphic art, by
film studies, film history, and film theory.5
It is not only recently, with the advent of digital film, that animation
has become the paradigm for all forms of cinema, and its study conse-
quently become the study of cinema’s basic ontology overall. For me—
our second principle—this has never not been the case (with the caveat,
as I shall explain, that I do not subscribe to a simple ontology of cinema,
much less of animation). And that primacy includes necessitating the re-
versal of the historical and theoretical prioritization, by those speaking
for film, of film over animation. Such a reversal results in the privileg-
ing of the heretofore degraded animated film for film animation, for all
film, for film “as such,” for which, as a result, the animated film becomes
the paradigm.
Put simply, historically as well as theoretically, film is the “stepchild”
of animation, not the other way around. This is a second radical claim
that I posed in The Illusion of Life, in terms that included the film ani-
mator Emile Reynaud, creator of the praxinoscope and, most crucially
here, the Théâtre Optique of 1892–1900. Reynaud is the most singular
figure in film forgotten by both film studies and animation studies—and
whose name, work, and achievements I sought to resurrect, reanimate.6
Indeed, Reynaud’s key term, animated, used in all his publicity, passed
on to the term animated photographs, a term by which cinema was in its
earliest years known, at least in France, England, and England’s ­colonies.
These two principles have a radical consequence. First: to theorize
film without theorizing animation is to not theorize film. And a second,
even more radical, one: to theorize film, including live action, without
theorizing it through animation is to not theorize film. That theorizing
of and through animation has been my project of the last twenty-­three
years.7 At the same time, insofar as live action is the special case, the
conditional, reduced form of animation, what has been written about
live action is by definition applicable to animation, in obviously a condi-
tional, reduced way. By definition what has been written about anima-
tion is applicable to live action, since animation subsumes live action,
is the unconditional, unreduced form of live action. Therefore, anima-
tion theory is by definition theory of live action, of what live action has
come to denominate: cinema and film. And animation theory, like the

“First Principles” of Animation • 99

film it animates, is more. For animation film and film animation operate
within, at, and beyond the limits of live action. Not only is animation
never not operating within live action, the expanded field of live action
is animation.
Here it is imperative to note the decades-­long existence of scholars,
scholarship, and publications in animation history and theory, includ-
ing the ongoing, increasingly burgeoning, and increasingly animated
existence of the Society for Animation Studies, founded in 1987. That
scholarship in animation must be acknowledged by film historians and
theorists, for it is crucial to understand that we are not at a zero-­degree
state in animation scholarship. Far from it.8 Nor are we at a zero-­degree
state in terms of film theorists theorizing animation. Here I reference
not only my work but that of fourteen other authors in my two antholo-
gies who have come out of film studies and film theory, accounting for
twenty of the twenty-­seven essays in the two volumes.9
In sum, film studies needs to engage with animation studies, as ani-
mation studies needs to engage with film studies.10 Animation schol-
ars have much to learn from film studies scholars, especially from the
theorizing of film and from the history of that theorizing. Put simply,
for me film studies is by definition the conditional, reduced form of ani-
mation studies, and animation studies the unconditional, unreduced
form of film studies. These constituencies are commingled, inextricably
so, despite the lack of general acknowledgment of that on the part of
either. So, yes, theorists prioritizing the live action film are still produc-
ing theory that is applicable to animation; but the specifics need to be
teased out, examined, and assessed.
The questions are: first, how has animation been marked and in-
scribed in live action theory? And second, is this marking and inscrip-
tion adequate to animation? For me, live-­action theory must by defini-
tion be so marked, including with terms derived from and associated
with animation, not just with the lexical forms of animate itself but with
cognate terms such as authoring and engendering, and cognate expres-
sions too, such as something has a life of its own, is coming to life, brought
to life. Such terms appear often in discussions of film but are used with-
out any awareness of, much less inquiry into, what they point to and
open up as something substantive in its own right: animation. So, in
response to the question, “Exactly where is film theory lacking in its
consideration of animation?,” I would say: in the general absence in that
theory of a direct address of animation! Theorization of live action qua
live action can only get one so far in terms of theorizing animation, not

100  • Alan Cholodenko

just in the theory’s consideration of live action but in the operations
within that theory of animation.
For what is the point of a fixed, static—inanimate—theory of ani-
mation? Or at best a conditionally, reductively animated theory of it?
What is called for is a theorization of live action, and of theories past
and present of live action, through animation, even as animation calls for
an animated and animating theory of itself, an animating / reanimating
film animation theory, as it were, indeed an animatic theory of it, whose
purport I shall elucidate.
To answer these questions, we must posit what animation is, includ-
ing offering its two major definitions: the endowing with life and the en-
dowing with motion.11 Any theorizing of animation cannot limit itself to
that endowing with life and motion but must consider the full cycles of
each, that is to say, their metamorphoses, their diminutions, and their
terminations—death and nonmotion—as well as their inextricable
commingling throughout their cycles.12
Of course, animation immediately imbricates Latin anima (air, breath,
soul, spirit, mind), Latin animus (mind, soul), and animism, even as ani-
mism is never not inextricably commingled with its opposite, mecha-
nism.13 The inextricable, deconstructive commingling of animism and
mechanism (and therefore of the institutions and discourses each privi-
leges and is privileged by—the arts and humanities and the sciences and
technology, respectively) in film animation makes the cinematographic
apparatus the animatographic apparatus, indeed the animatic apparatus,
what I dubbed animatic automaton, “ur,” “defining” technology of anima-
tion for me.
Animating not only the illusion of life but the life of (that) illusion,
the vital machine that is the animatic automaton has as consequence:
any theorizing of film animation only in terms of motion (and mecha-
nism) while excluding life (and animism) is reductive, doing an injustice
to animation, as is any theorizing that theorizes film animation only in
terms of life (and animism) while excluding motion (and mechanism),
as is any theorizing that theorizes the cinematographic apparatus with-
out theorizing the animatographic apparatus, as is any theorizing that
theorizes the animatographic apparatus without theorizing the ani-
matic apparatus, the animatic automaton.
Given that Latin anima is a translation of Greek psyche, it crucially
opens up the relation of Plato’s psyche (air, breath, soul, spirit, mind)
and its ontological and ontotheological inheritance both by Western
metaphysics and Christianity—and, crucially, by ontological and onto-

“First Principles” of Animation • 101

theological film theory, most notably André Bazin’s—to Homer’s psuché,
his simulacral spectre wandering as a flitting shade in Hades.14 I shall
return to this.
Insofar as animation privileges the primitive, the savage, the pri-
mal, the nutty, the loony, the child, the nonhuman (including all other
organic forms, as well as the inorganic), and the object over what for us
cinema has privileged—the civilized, the sane, the adult, the human,
and the subject15—the cartoon is the privileged example of what oper-
ates within animated film. The cartoon is therefore the privileged ex-
ample of animated film, and the privileged example of film animation
and of what operates therein—the animatic. While late 1960s French
film theory (including as taken up in Anglo-­American film theory, itself
strongly influenced by and influencing cultural studies) privileged the
subject, production, and identity, including self-­identity, it neglected
what is superior to them, superior to the subject and its desires: the ob-
ject and its games, the world and its play.16 Which is to say all the things
that animation for us privileges. Their vital, unmasterable life of illusion
is privileged for us by animation, animation as the animatic, a life never
not operating within live action and its zone of reality. Consequently,
one must theorize not only the illusion of life but also the life of that
illusion (illusion is from the Latin ludere, meaning “ludic” and “play”).
For animation is not delimited to film.17 It is idea, concept, process, per-
formance, medium, and milieu. As I wrote in 1991:
To seek to account for animation film, the theorist would be compelled
to approach the idea of animation precisely as not delimited to and by
the animation film (and conventional ideas of it) but as a notion whose
purchase would be transdisciplinary, transinstitutional, implicating the
most profound, complex and challenging questions of our culture, ques-
tions in the areas of being and becoming, time, space, motion, change—
indeed, life itself.18

There is a privileged relation between film animation and philosophy,

a privilege I have posited as the second key neglect of film studies, and as
the key neglect of animation studies too, a neglect that a number of us
have been working to remedy. Which is to say that we are not at a zero-­
degree state in theorizing film animation in terms of “philosophy,” in
treating film animation as a mode of “philosophizing,” and, let me add,
“philosophizing” as a form of animation. But with this caveat: our em-
brace of “poststructuralist” and “postmodernist” approaches means not
simply an espousal of the ontological, of Western philosophy as a meta-

102  • Alan Cholodenko

physics of presence, of fullness of living being, but rather a challenge
to them, especially for me from the perspective of Jacques Derrida and
Jean Baudrillard. Of course, for Derrida, deconstruction is not philoso-
phy; it is aphilosophy, on both sides of the horizon of philosophy at the
same time, at once the philosophy of nonphilosophy and nonphilosophy
of philosophy. In other words, deconstruction is an in-­betweener—
privileged in and for the theorizing of film as form of animation, of the
animatic. This makes deconstruction isomorphic with animation, and
with my aphilosophy of animation.19
For animation—animation as the animatic—is an in-­betweener,
coming between any and every thing, including all oppositions, con-
founding all either / or-­isms, as well as operating within any and every
thing, as well as forming the milieu, the medium, for any and every
thing, thing including one.20 But here I need to explain the animatic, as
there is more to animation than animation! For the past twenty-­three
years, I have been working between and across film studies, film history,
and film theory and animation studies, animation history, and anima-
tion theory, reanimating them, even the very idea of film, through the ani-
matic. And this means working to turn animation theory and film theory
into film animation theory, to turn animation studies and film studies
into film animation studies, to turn animation and film into film anima-
tion, and thereby to turn the cinematographic apparatus into the ani-
matographic apparatus, even the animatic apparatus. And this includes
working to mark their never not being so reanimated, as well as to mark
the blind spot of the animatic as never not operative therein.
I theorize the animatic as the very singularity of animation, anterior
and superior to animation, not only the very logics, processes, perfor-
mance, and performativity of animation but the very “essence” of ani-
mation—the animation and animating of animation. The animatic sub-
sumes animation, is its very condition of possibility and at the same
time impossibility—at once the inanimation never not in and of anima-
tion and the animation never not in and of inanimation. Making anima-
tion never totally animate and inanimation never totally inanimate, the
animatic is that nonessence that at once enables and disenables anima-
tion as essence—including Sergei Eisenstein’s plasmaticness, his animis-
tic essence of film (as) animation21—as it does all essentialist theories of
film and / as animation. This is why I put the word essence in quotation
marks, under erasure. Put simply, the animatic indetermines and sus-
pends all things, including animation. Including “itself.”
The animatic is to animation what psuché is to psyche/anima (and to

“First Principles” of Animation • 103

all derived from psyche / anima), what specter is to soul, what for Der-
rida différance is to presence, what dissemination is to essence, what the
hauntological is to the ontological. Not simply different but radically,
irreducibly Other—the animatic is “ur” in-­betweener (with “ur,” hence-
forth marking nonessence)—animation itself gifting us this term in-­
betweener! So while Norman McLaren declared that “difference . . . is the
. . . soul of animation,” for me, Derridean différance is the specter of ani-
mation, is animation as the animatic.22
Insofar as there is no essence to the animatic, animation is not in-
trinsically anything. Meaning there is no essence to film animation, in-
cluding cinema. Insofar as there is no proper, propriety nor property to
it, animation is always already, never not, expropriated, as is any fixed,
final definition of it. As expropriated, animation cannot be appropriated
by or to anything.
The animatic: what conjures animation (cinema, live action, included)
and what animation seeks to conjure away but cannot, what uncannily
haunts animation as its ghost, its specter, its death, cryptically incorpo-
rating, deconstructing, disseminating, and seducing it. Put simply, what
is at stake in animation, including film animation, is life and death, as well
as their inextricable commingling. And animation’s own life and death.
As I have written: “Animation—the simultaneous bringing of death
to life and life to death—not only a mode of film (and film a mode of
it) but the very medium within which all, including film, ‘comes to be.’
The animatic apparatus—apparatus which suspends distinctive opposi-
tions, including that of the animate versus the inanimate—apparatus of
the ‘uncanny.’”23 This uncanny simultaneous bringing of death and the
dead to life and life and the living to death is what, after Derrida, I call
lifedeath, at once the life of death and the death of life—both alive and
dead, neither alive nor dead, at the same time. In consequence, one can
never know life or death, motion or nonmotion, as such.
Lifedeath, cryptically incorporated in and deconstructing the life and
death of film animation, necessarily implicates the spectator (including
author, reader, analyst, and theorist)—drawing the spectator, return-
ing it, toward death even as it draws forth, returns, toward life those
dead imaged in the film. In other words, film animation, as animatic
in-­betweener, occupies that in-­between space, that “meeting ground”—
that haunted house, that crypt24—between life and death, between mo-
tion and nonmotion.
Insofar as film animation puts life and death at stake, films and film
genres that explicitly stage and perform that stake are privileged for

104  • Alan Cholodenko

and as animation. This privileges the horror genre, with its family of
specters of the living dead (the vampire, the zombie, the mummy, and so
on), and science fiction too (with its automata, robots, and cyborgs, and
aliens)—and their remakings, their metamorphosings, of the human
and the nonhuman.25
But that putting of life and death at stake is already there in Maxim
Gorky’s paradigmatic (for Tom Gunning and me) July 4, 1896, review of
the Lumière brothers’ program at the Nizhny Novgorod fair. Gorky’s is
a traumatic experience and review that places cinema, film animation,
in what he calls the “Kingdom of Shadows.” For me, this is the kingdom
of specters, of psuché, of lifedeath, and the animatic. Through reference
to this canonical review, I have repeatedly posited a privileged relation
between animation and its apparatus and Freud’s uncanny (in both its
psychological and anthropological modes) for the theorizing of film ani-
mation. Along with Gunning’s “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early
Film and the (In)credulous Spectator” (1989), this review enabled me
to posit as first, last, and enduring attraction, even primal, “ur” attrac-
tion, of cinema, of film animation . . . animation itself! The astoundingly
attracting and attractingly astounding endowing with animation by
means of a mechanical apparatus, marked by Gorky’s famous Franken-
steinian words: “Suddenly a strange flicker passes through the screen
and the picture stirs to life.”26 Not just motion but life!
And these two texts enabled me to characterize as “first, last and en-
during attraction of animation,” including film animation . . . the ani-
matic “itself”! And to posit the specter as “ur” figure of film animation
as the animatic. And to posit as “ur” experience of film animation “the
Cryptic Complex,” “ur” complex, composed, after Derrida, of the un-
canny, the return of death as specter, endless mourning and melancho-
lia and cryptic incorporation.27 It is a complex of the shocking return of
the dead as specters and of their attraction28 to and for the spectators,
and of the aftershocks felt by the spectators. Put simply, the “ur” experi-
ence, “ur” attraction, of cinema is that of animation as the animatic, as
the Cryptic Complex, as the shocking, traumatic, uncanny reanimation
of the dead as living dead. And at the same time, the shocking, trau-
matic, uncanny reanimation of the living, including the spectator, as
living dead, turning spectatorship (including analysis and theorizing)
into spectership, into haunting and being haunted, encrypting and being
encrypted—the cryptic incorporation of the living dead specters in the
spectator, and vice versa—accompanied by mourning and melancholia
in perpetuity, no matter what other affects might be generated to cover them

“First Principles” of Animation • 105

over. The animatic lifedeath of the Cryptic Complex is for me the “foun-
dation,” the foundation without foundation, of cinema and movies—of
film animation. As the animatic is of all animation, its singular attrac-
tion, the “life” of its illusion.
The Cryptic Complex of animation as the animatic enabled me to re-
cast Gunning and André Gaudreault’s “cinema of attractions” as “anima-
tion of attractions,” Gunning’s “cinema of narrative integration” as “ani-
mation of narrative ‘integration,’” and Gunning’s return of the cinema
of attractions in the “Spielberg-­Lucas-­Coppola cinema of effects” in the
1970s and 1980s as the reanimation of the animation of attractions, as
the hyperanimation of hyperattractions.29 Marking the increasingly per-
vasive impact of digital film animation as well as anime,30 such hyperani-
mation is of the order not of the hauntological nor of the ontological but
of what I call the oncological.
Insofar as animation is never not informing film in all its registers,
animation recasts not just the classic realist text but also the cinematic
text “as such” as what I call the animated text, indeed the animatic text,
text animated by the Cryptic Complex, by lifedeath. Thus, it becomes
necessary to conceive of cinema, of film, as spectrography (the writing of
the specter—ghost writing), as cryptography (the writing of the crypt),
as thanatography (the writing of death).
But crucially, after Baudrillard, the return of death and the dead, and
as specters, means yet more, for it is the return of the “ur” radical, ir-
reconcilable, irreducible, excluded Other—the model of all radical, ex-
cluded Others. While animation privileges the simple other of what live
action privileges, the animatic privileges the Other, the radical Other,
the Other irreducible to simple other, simple other to the same, of both
animation and film. This is the animatic—radical Other of animation,
animation as radical Other—as what I call “death the animator.”
But as many of my articles after Baudrillard propose, it is not enough
to theorize animation and the animatic. One must also, where appli-
cable, theorize hyperanimation—the pure and empty form of animation,
where the animate becomes more and less inanimate than inanimate
and at the same time the inanimate becomes more and less animate than
animate—and the hyperanimatic—the pure and empty form of the ani-
matic.31 Hyperanimation and the hyperanimatic are for me of the order
of the oncological, of Baudrillard’s disillusioned, disenchanted, hyper-
real third and fourth orders, orders of virtual, viral, metastatic, pure
and empty forms. One must theorize hyperanimation and the hyper-
animatic most especially in terms of post–Second World War film and

106  • Alan Cholodenko

of course computer animated film, including live action, where film be-
comes hyperfilm, live action becomes hyperlive hyperaction, or, better,
hyperlivedead hyperaction nonaction—the pure and empty forms of
film, life, the living, death, the dead, lifedeath, the living dead, action,
and nonaction.
Arguably, since the Second World War, we live increasingly in the
era of the hyper, of hyperreality, where hypertelia rules. Here all things
push and are pushed to their limits, where they at once fulfill and anni-
hilate themselves, including all the components of the Cryptic Complex,
therefore the Complex too, which morphs into the hyperCryptic hyper-
Complex. It is no longer the era of lifedeath but of hyperlifedeath, and
hypermotion, of hypermotion nonmotion, where the human passes into
the posthuman, the hyperhuman, figured for Baudrillard by the clone,
the clone figured by me as the zombie,32 the cyborg, and the replicant in
Blade Runner.33 Here death takes on the form of hyperdeath, the absence
of death, absence of the radical Other, and therefore of all others. Here
hyperlifedeath reigns, where life and the living are more dead than dead,
and death and the dead are more alive than alive. In other words, not
only life but death has died, each replaced by cold, clonal hyperimmor-
tality, fulfilling the human’s wish for escape from death—escape from
the uncanny valley, valley for me of the shadow of death—the death of
death, by definition, an escape from the human itself.
Hyperanimation and the hyperanimatic increasingly present them-
selves as the most compelling and singular processes of not only con-
temporary “film” but the contemporary “world” and “subject.” The im-
plication is clear: we need animation film theory, film animation theory,
animation theory “as such,” and especially hyperanimation hyperfilm
theory and hyperfilm hyperanimation theory, to attempt to understand
film, the world and the subject, especially in their hyperforms. And we
need television, video, and especially computer animation theory, be-
cause these media, these technologies—like film, by definition anima-
tors / reanimators, including of the world and the subject—­increasingly
pervade and reanimate the mediascape, or rather immediascape, of the
world and the subject, an immediascape, world, and subject that are
increasingly hyperanimated, hyperanimatic. For today not only do we
swim in a sea of hyperanimated hypermedia, hypertechnologies, but
that sea swims inside hyperanimated, immediated, hypermediated,
hypertechnologized, hyperremediated, hyperirradiated us.
To conclude, but alas with a few caveats: whether Baudrillard’s first
order of the Radical Illusion of Seduction (for me, the animatic) has been

“First Principles” of Animation • 107

annihilated in the passage into the Perfect Crime of Virtuality of his
third/fourth orders of hyperreality, virtual reality (for me, the hyperani-
matic), or the hyperanimatic is but the avatar of the animatic is for me,
as it was for him, undecidable, irresolvable.34
This is a reminder of the hypothetical nature of the “principles” I have
proposed—speculations, indeed specters, spectering, cryptically incor-
porating, this specter-­speculator-­spectator-­analyst-­theorist, and I they.
Specters never laid to rest, never resolved, never reconciled. In fact, a
specter, an evil demon, after Baudrillard, keeps pressing me to propose:
thanks to the animatic, the only first principle of animation is there is no
first principle of animation.
And there are never not more specters, crypts, analyses to come.

Notes

A nod of acknowledgment to John Grierson’s famous “First Principles of Documentary.”

But unlike the essentialist Grierson, I put First Principles in quotation marks to show
their deconstructive nature, undoing themselves in their very inscribing.

1. My animating (of ) film theory also, in my own small way, responds to cognitive
film theory. See Cholodenko, “Animation (Theory) as the Poematic: A Reply to
the Cognitivists.”
2. In addition to the introductions to my two animation anthologies, see the fol-
lowing for my discussion of film studies and film theory, as well as animation
studies and animation theory: “Animation (Theory) as the Poematic”; “Ani-
mation—Film and Media Studies’ ‘Blind Spot’ ”; “The Animation of Cinema”;
“Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or the Framing of Animation”; and “Why Anima-
tion, Alan?”
3. See Cholodenko, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or the Framing of Animation.”
4. See Cholodenko, “Introduction,” The Illusion of Life 2; and Cholodenko, “The
Animation of Cinema.” In both texts I acknowledge those who I discovered
have theorized film as a form of animation before both Manovich and I did:
Alexandre Alexeieff, Ralph Stephenson, Taihei Imamura, and Sergei Eisenstein.
5. I abandon here what I have done in a number of publications over the years,
that is, to capitalize film studies to mark it, unlike animation studies, as an
established discipline, only then to deconstruct film studies consistent with
my claim that all film is a form of animation. Put simply, film studies must be
obedient to (the very “principle” of ) animation itself, never fixed, static, immo-
bile, such as a capital letter might be thought to denote.
6. See Cholodenko, “The Animation of Cinema.”
7. That theorizing includes the necessary (re)theorizing through animation of all
modes, forms, registers, and aspects of film and its apparatus. As examples
of my retheorizing of authorship, auteur theory, and genre theory, see “Intro-

108  • Alan Cholodenko

 duction,” The Illusion of Life; “(The) Death (of ) the Animator, or: The Felicity of
Felix,” part II; and “The ‘abcs’ of B.”
8. See Cholodenko, “Introduction,” The Illusion of Life 2; and Cholodenko, “Anima-
tion—Film and Media Studies’ ‘Blind Spot,’ ” 16.
9. I also reference the work of Vivian Sobchack and that of authors in this volume.
Many more are to come, led there by digital film animation.
10. See Cholodenko, “Introduction,” The Illusion of Life 2; and Cholodenko, “Anima-
tion—Film and Media Studies’ ‘Blind Spot.’ ” For my critique of the animation
studies we encountered in 1991, see Cholodenko, “Introduction,” The Illusion of
Life, 14.
11. See Cholodenko, “Introduction,” The Illusion of Life, 15. A student, Dominic Wil-
liams, once nicely noted for me that the term live action contains both perti-
nences of animation—life and motion.
12. See Cholodenko, “Introduction,” The Illusion of Life 2; and “Speculations on the
Animatic Automaton.” Metamorphosis is a privileged figure in and for anima-
tion.
13. See Cholodenko, “Speculations on the Animatic Automaton.”
14. See Cholodenko, “(The) Death (of ) the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix,”
part II.
15. See especially Cholodenko, “The Nutty Universe of Animation, the ‘Discipline’
of All ‘Disciplines,’ and That’s Not All, Folks!” Animation as the animatic privi-
leges the “life” of inorganic objects.
16. See Cholodenko, “Introduction,” The Illusion of Life 2. On the enchanting, magi-
cal, seductive life of objects, see Cholodenko, “Introduction,” The Illusion of Life,
32–33 n. 23.
17. For my “principles” drawing the longest reach possible for animation, see
Cholodenko, “Introduction,” The Illusion of Life 2, 67–68. See also “The Nutty
Universe of Animation, the ‘Discipline’ of All ‘Disciplines,’ and That’s Not All,
Folks!,” where I posit a privileged relation between animation as the animatic
and quantum physics and quantum cosmology; and “(The) Death (of ) the Ani-
mator, or: The Felicity of Felix,” part III, where I relate animation to biogenetics.
18. Cholodenko, “Introduction,” The Illusion of Life, 15.
19. For me, the work of Derrida offers the richest ways to theorize film animation,
offering not only a theory of film animation as the animatic but an animated,
indeed animatic, theory of it. See below.
20. Norman McLaren apprehended the key nature of the in-­between for animation
when he made the foundation of animation the “invisible interstice” that lies
between frames. Cited in Sifianos, “The Definition of Animation,” 62.
21. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, 21.
22. Sifianos, “The Definition of Animation,” 66. Also quoted in Annemarie Jonson,
“Porky’s Stutter: The Vocal Trope and Lifedeath in Animation,” in The Illusion of
Life 2, edited by Cholodenko, 445.
23. Cholodenko, “Introduction,” The Illusion of Life, 29.
24. See Cholodenko, “The Crypt, the Haunted House, of Cinema”; and “(The) Death
(of ) the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix,” part III.

“First Principles” of Animation • 109

25. See Hutchings, “The Work-­Shop of Filthy Animation”; and Trahair, “For the
Noise of a Fly.”
26. Quoted in Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment,” 34.
27. On cryptic incorporation, see Cholodenko, “The Crypt, the Haunted House, of
Cinema.” Cryptic incorporation (i.e., incomplete, failed mourning) makes the
self forever for Derrida a “lodging, the haunt of a host of ghosts,” as is for me
the movie theater. Derrida, “Fors,” xxiii.
28. Here I must highlight attraction as a term of drawing, from the Latin trahere.
But the attraction of the animation of attractions is animatic, at once attraction
and repulsion / retraction. This is to mark, too, the privileged relation between
the graph (from Greek graphein, meaning both writing and drawing) and ani-
mation, of what I call the graphematic (the inextricable coimplication of writing
and drawing) and the animatic. The graphematic and the animatic are them-
selves inextricably coimplicated, making writing / drawing a form of animation
and animation a form of writing / drawing. In “The Animation of Cinema,” “The
Illusion of the Beginning,” “Still Photography?,” and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,
or the Framing of Animation,” I demonstrate why drawing and animation have
priority over live action, over cinema, as photo-­graphed film, making live action
cinema ironically a form of the graphic too! In response to film theorists who
posit photography as the foundation of cinema, including Siegfried Kracauer
and Bazin, there are two key “foundations” before photography, including and
subsuming it: graphics and animation, thereby deconstructing and seducing
photographic “indexicality.”
29. Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction,” 70.
30. On anime, see Cholodenko, “Apocalyptic Animation”; and Cholodenko, “Intro-
duction,” The Illusion of Life 2.
31. See Cholodenko, “The ‘abcs’ of B”; Cholodenko, “Apocalyptic Animation”; Cho-
lodenko, “(The) Death (of ) the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix,” part III; Cho-
lodenko, “The Nutty Universe of Animation”; Cholodenko, “‘objects in mir-
ror are closer than they appear’ ”; and Cholodenko, “Speculation on
the Animatic Automaton.” See also Cholodenko, “‘The Borders of Our Lives’”;
and Cholodenko, “Jean Rouch’s Les maîtres fous.”
32. Or rather, as the hyperzombie, George A. Romero’s zombie, to be distinguished
from the classic voodoo zombie. On the hyperzombie, see Cholodenko, “The
‘abcs’ of B”; and “(The) Death (of ) the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix,” part
III. On the cyborg and replicant, see Cholodenko, “Speculations on the Ani-
matic Automaton.”
33. In terms of animism and mechanism, film animation has passed from Baudril-
lardian first order seductive, enchanting animatic automaton and second order
productive, animated, automatic robot to third and fourth order hypersimu-
lacral, disenchanting, hyperanimated, hyperautomated cyborg, hyperzombie,
and replicant. See Cholodenko, “Speculations on the Animatic Automaton.”
34. See Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, 5, 74; and Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion, 53, 55.

110  • Alan Cholodenko

7 : : Animation, in Theory
S uza nn e Buc h a n

Most of us today are aware of the many ways that animation has in-
filtrated our visual culture. For scholars and the public, exposure and
access to commercial and especially independent animation film—
through broadcast television, online archives, artist and studio websites,
and new media platforms—have dramatically increased. While anima-
tion studies has been active for more than fifty years, film studies is
only beginning to deeply engage with a cinematic form that has more to
do with sculpture, algorithms, or painting than with the genres of nar-
rative cinema. As a film studies scholar who specializes in animation
and experimental film and digital media, I have examined film theory
texts over the years for gaps and queries that seemed to address anima-
tion—or not. These trawled fragments formed the origins of animation:
an interdisciplinary journal, published since 2006. This chapter traces the
intellectual genesis of the journal, locating it in a historical and theoreti-
cal framework that, with some exceptions, spans the 1970s to the mid-­
2000s. In doing so, I take the long view—without Plato there would be
no Gilles Deleuze, without Émile Cohl no Wall-­E, and, in my view, with-
out Jean Mitry, Heinrich von Kleist, Noël Carroll, and Stanley Cavell
no animation theory. I reflect on past achievements but also write to
appeal to future researchers and makers of animation to be sensitive to
the historical continuum of authorship and creating in the (mainly digi-
tal) striving ahead. I will not address writing about commercial canons
or digital animation (Disney, Aardman, Pixar, and others) and will focus
on some theoretical writings. This doesn’t mean that others are less im-
portant; the selection is based on queries and positions that are relevant
to my premise of “animation, in theory” that entails a skeptical but pro-
active attitude to theorizing animation.
Animation Studies: The Long View

My discussion here of some past developments in animation studies

does not suggest this is the only way to survey this legacy.1 Early writing
on animation was composed of a dispersed and international authorship
from various disciplines, professions, and national or cultural contexts,
published in festival catalogues and specialist screening supplements,
with little or no reference to film theory. Some of these writings set
the tone and direction for later research, forming an eclectic primary-­
knowledge base. Scholars working on animation often did so as a tan-
gent to their disciplines, more often than not cultural studies, languages
and literature, or art history, frequently providing historical and con-
textual information; but there were few research-­specific or theoretical
book-­length publications on animation. The 1990s was a period of ex-
pansion of animation practice programs at universities and art schools,
accompanied by a rash of animation publications: historical, national,
and stylistic surveys; general introductions, and overviews of produc-
tion systems, specific eras and studios, and individual filmmakers. Ani-
mation film also enjoyed critical attention in experimental film theory.
Some scholars explored aesthetic implications of techniques other than
planar (painted and drawn) animation, intersections with the avant-­
garde, and experimentation in animation by fine-­art practitioners. The
industrious scholar will also find a range of articles relating to anima-
tion film in the fiaf Index to Film Periodicals, and will also look for key-
words in the indexes of nonfilm publications.
Authors increasingly explored the vast richness of animation film
using frameworks of critical theory, semiotics, postcolonialism, and
gender studies. These were and are frequently published as chapters in
thematic or theoretical anthologies in film, media, and cultural studies,
often as the “animation” chapter, and often working with established
(and tired) canons. Sometimes it is the case that, in admirably trying to
do too much, authors achieve the opposite effect. Gone awry, it can re-
sult in writings that skim colonialism, queer theory, feminism, cognitive
theory, and spectatorship within a single chapter or article, and without
much evidence of these being applied to animated film.
Others engaged more specifically with structuralism, realism, semi-
otics, psychoanalysis, national cinemas, and with postmodernism, not
least because of the potential in animation for parody and merging high
and low art. In the last decade, book-­length publications and collections
with film’s theoretical subareas such as formalism, critical theory, appa-

112  • Suzanne Buchan

ratus, and spectatorship are on the increase, and an observable phe-
nomenon is a strengthened interdisciplinarity in these writings. This
could be expanded: there are dozens of theoretical book-­length publi-
cations on animation in French, German, Japanese, Korean, Chinese,
and Russian. When texts by Christian Metz, the Cahiers group, Mitry,
and Deleuze were made available in the academic lingua franca, their
impact on developments in cinema theory were significant. Similarly,
English translations of writings outside the Anglo and Euro intellectual
landscape (of publishing) that introduce new approaches to animation
would provide a new impetus and enrich academic communities with
works that communicate through other cultural lenses and intellectual
traditions.

The “Problem” of Animation

Much like the term experimental film, animation is an imprecise, fuzzy

catchall that heaps an enormous and historically far-­reaching, artisti-
cally diverse body of work into one pot. In 1997 Philip Denslow made a
point that is still valid: that a single definition is incomplete and “that
no matter what definition you choose, it faces challenges from new de-
velopments in the technology used to produce and distribute anima-
tion.”2 He goes on to explain how studio ideology, production hierarchy,
union contracts, special effects hybridization, and independent film af-
fect the definition of animation. Denslow’s discussion leads to a topic
that Christian Metz also mentions in this context: “The rubric of special
effects will obviously form, for the semiologist, a heteroclitical group.
Jean-­Louis Comolli is quite right in remarking that the notions of tech-
nicians—who sometimes have a professional, and therefore corporate,
personality—cannot automatically be considered as theoretical con-
cepts. Each case must be examined separately.”3 One method to describe
what animation is within the diversity of cinema is to treat animation
as a heteroclitical group of films (ultimately, an animation filmmaker
working alone is a technician in complete control of the image), and to
examine each film as an individual case.
In a search for a unifying definition, Maureen Furniss reviews a num-
ber of proposals made by filmmakers and theorists, and she concludes
that a “lot of energy was spent to reach this point, but little has been
achieved.”4 Furniss then proposes a continuum between mimesis and
abstraction: “A continuum works with similarities to position items in
relation to one another, while a definition seeks difference, to separate

Animation, in Theory • 113
items in some way. Using a continuum, one can discuss a broad range
of materials without qualifying the extent to which each example be-
longs to a precisely defined category called ‘animation.’”5 Furniss widens
the scope of animation to include the diverse overlaps between anima-
tion and live action, but in my view her definition remains too broad
and without a differentiation between items. Noël Carroll comments on
criticism are helpful here: he regards central activities of criticizing art-
works to be “description, classification, contextualization, elucidation,
interpretation, and analysis,”6 and he emphasizes artistic evaluation as
the primus inter pares central to the critic’s role.7 To undertake this kind
of critical work, each technique requires its own unique description,
classification, and a set of suitable and applicable formal parameters
that would allow analysis based on distinctive aesthetic qualities and
technical properties of artistic media. For example, a material taxon-
omy (oil painting, collage, sculpture, watercolor, etchings, drawing, etc.)
differentiates the technical definitions of planar animation, clay anima-
tion, painting on glass, object animation, and so forth. These qualities
not only affect production; they also have profound ramifications for the
critic’s (and viewer’s) experience and interpretation of the work.
In the introduction to The Illusion of Life (1991), Alan Cholodenko
addresses animation as an object of theoretical inquiry: “In terms of
scholarship, animation is the least theorized area of film. In neglect-
ing animation, film theorists—when they have thought about it at all—
have regarded animation as either the ‘step-­child’ of cinema or as not
belonging to the cinema at all, belonging rather to the graphic arts.”8
At the time of publication, few readers would have paused at this state-
ment—the anthology was, after all, a major contribution to animation
studies at the time. Yet Cholodenko’s concern that animation not be re-
garded as part of cinema ends with a revealing assumption that when
we talk about animation, we usually mean graphic animation (planar
2D drawn, cel, or digital). The published collection and other lectures
listed in the book’s overview of “The Illusion of Life” conference9 fo-
cused almost exclusively on planar and computer animation. This reveals
how graphic animation did and still does dominate the understanding of
what animation is. Writing on cinema made before 1906, Tom Gunning
observes: “The history of early cinema, like the history of the cinema
generally, has been written and theorized under the hegemony of narra-
tive films.”10 Similarly, the hegemony in theorizing animation primarily
through graphic and cel techniques determines canons and influences
topics in the quickening of animation theories.

114  • Suzanne Buchan

 In the two decades since Cholodenko’s publication, much has changed
to improve the low profile of animation in cinema theory, but at a price
for predigital and nongraphic animation. In 2001 Lev Manovich made a
now well-­known polemical assertion for cinema as a particular case of
animation, provocatively proposing that we need to reverse the tradi-
tional hierarchy and position digital animation as the general, higher-­
order category for the cinema.11 The notion of animation as the para-
digm for all cinematic production, and for the study of its ontology
overall, is an assertion that film studies has begun to seriously challenge
or support. But again, we must pause. Manovich’s argument is based on
the premise of cinema as digital, and on graphic cinema, and he doesn’t
account for animation that uses manifold other techniques like object
or puppet animation. Alla Gadassik argues, “[Manovich] admires anima-
tion’s hand-­crafted tradition, and yet his vision of digital cinema does
not foreground the constructed character of the early animated image.
. . . In this network of digital technologies, the hand of the animator is
seen as an antiquated curiosity, which has been rendered obsolete by
faster, more powerful machines.”12 What is largely missing in this debate
is an approach to animation films that elaborates on the solid work that
has been achieved regarding history, techniques, and aesthetics. Anima-
tion is, after all, a cinematic form that can be analyzed through almost
all formal and stylistic cinematic parameters and theorized using many
film studies approaches. In a critical discussion of what he calls the two
constructions of British and American cultural studies, Stuart Hall re-
marks: “In Britain, we are always aware of institutionalization as a mo-
ment of profound danger.”13 The “danger” of institutionalizing anima-
tion “theory” in a hegemony of graphic animation, digital or otherwise,
within film theory is the risk of neglecting other techniques and their
analyses when developing specific questions pertinent to individual
films. This omission could also thwart opportunities to discover new and
innovative ways of theorizing animation that don’t nominally fit in the
formal, stylistic, and theoretical frameworks of film studies.

Microanalysis and Methods

In film studies, animation was a tangential object for research and

teaching for many years, but this is changing. As universities become
mass-­educating “multiversities,” they are forced to respond to market
demand, and the number of animation programs is rising, as animation
is now pervasive on other platforms than cinema screens, for example in

Animation, in Theory • 115
apps, games, the web, and advertising. While much of film theory could
be instrumentalized for theorizing animation to enhance curricula—
cognitivist, queer, formalist, reception, sociocultural, feminist, semio-
logical, immersion, narrative—many chapters and articles on animation
film lack specificity, and they tend to use idiosyncratic or tired, self-­
perpetuating canons to prove or disprove an element of cinema theory.
David Bordwell has suggested, as Alissa Quart points out, that “the true
business of film scholars is to account for craft of filmmaking and the ex-
perience of film viewing—and not to cull examples from the movies in
order to illustrate sweeping theories of the human psyche or society.”14
This is as true for animation as it is for film studies. I have found micro-
analysis (a term used in the sciences for analysis of minute quantities of
materials) to be a useful bottom-­up method to initially unpack the craft
and construction of an animation film in a way that elegantly fits with
film studies methods. By describing formal cinematic parameters in de-
tail (shot length, image composition, lighting, camera movement, point
of view and angle, lenses, music, sound, transitions), it is then possible
to work with this stylistic information and use film theory to develop
sustained discussions about the experiential complexity of a single ani-
mated film, sequence, or scene.15 In planar animation, visual parameters
are rendered through artistic techniques, exceptions being perspective
created using multiplane setups and transitions, and puppet and ob-
ject animation that is shot in miniature stage sets, which in most cases
uses the same equipment and principles as live-­action filmmaking.16
Such microanalyses can serve as methodological models for theoriz-
ing about other animation films and augmenting animated film criti-
cism and theory, mitigating what Paul Coates describes as the isolating
effect of writing without comparison.17 A method I have found especially
useful in tandem with microanalysis is the philosophical and practical
method that Carroll calls “piecemeal theorizing,” a process of “breaking
down some of the presiding questions of the Theory into more man-
ageable questions, for example, about the comprehension of point-­of-­
view editing, instead of global questions about something vaguely called
suture. As compelling answers are developed to small-­scale, delimited
questions, we may be in a position to think about whether these an-
swers can be unified in a more comprehensive theoretical framework.”18
Because animation as yet has no comprehensive theory equivalent to
what Bordwell ironically calls “slab Theory” (Saussure, Lacan, Althus-
ser, Barthes), new theory will not have to defend or discern itself from
dominant film theory.19 On the other hand, animation theory must also

116  • Suzanne Buchan

develop its own contexts while seeking embedment within film theory
and try to avoid the heterogeneity of piecemeal theory that could mean
that no unified theoretical base is formed at all.

Fragments: Useful Film Theory

The introduction of digital technologies was also a developing force in

animation production, but film scholars left its precursor—predigital
animation—by the wayside, and to articulate an ontology of anima-
tion—digital or otherwise—means revisiting these (celluloid) casual-
ties. There are many film theorists who are useful for developing ani-
mation theory (Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balázs, André Bazin, Walter
Benjamin, Donald Crafton, Deleuze, Mary Ann Doane, Sergei Eisen-
stein, Gunning, Siegfried Kracauer, Mitry, Hugo Münsterberg, Laura
Mulvey, and others), and some appear regularly in writings on anima-
tion. During studies at the University of Zurich, I began the detective
work that I continue to do of scanning indexes and tables of contents of
thousands of books and journals on film theory for animation-­related
themes, key words, filmmakers, and film titles. More often than not,
what I found expressed a puzzling attitude toward animation as a cine-
matic form. I sensed that animation’s marginalization in academia did
not take into account animation’s influence in private and public do-
mains, and I began thinking about animation’s aesthetic, perceptual,
and ideological values, meanings and impacts. Sometimes I found a sen-
tence, a paragraph, and rarely more, but these brief mentions of anima-
tion—or no mention at all—offer fecund territories as springboards for
theorizing animation. I have used the exemplars of Cavell, Alexander
Sesonske, Dudley Andrew, Mitry, Carroll, Deleuze, and Sobchack in my
own writing (other scholars will have their own lists of names), and in
the following (for reasons of space) I concentrate on concepts around
figures and worlds.
In the final section of Cavell’s The World Viewed: Reflections on the On-
tology of Film (1979), there are more than thirty mentions of cartoons. In
a debate with Sesonske, Cavell describes cartoons: “[They are] a region
of film which seems to satisfy my concerns with understanding the spe-
cial powers of film but which explicitly has nothing to do with projec-
tions of the real world—the region of animated cartoons. If this region
of film counters my insistence upon the projection of reality as essen-
tial to the medium of movies, then it counters it completely.”20 While
Sesonske raises a number of ontological ideas about cartoons, he ad-

Animation, in Theory • 117
dresses a key concept of worlds: “There is a world we experience here,
but not the world—a world I know and see but to which I am neverthe-
less not present, yet not a world past. . . . It exists only now, when I see
it; yet I cannot go to where its creatures are, for there is no access to
its space from ours except through vision.”21 Cavell describes Sesonske’s
“rebuttal” as “[a] negation or parody of something I claim for the experi-
ence of movies.” One of many epistemologically tantalizing remarks that
Cavell makes is this: “But on my assumption (which I should no doubt
have made explicit) that cartoons are not movies, these remarks about
their conditions of existence constitute some explanation about why
they are not.”22 Though he makes some concessions, for Cavell cartoons
completely counter his insistence on the projection of reality as essential
to the medium of movies. In other words, Cavell seems to consider car-
toons (again, a symptomatic omission of other animation techniques)
as not belonging to the domain of his conception of cinema, and he puts
forth that maybe we can’t consider them as films at all.23 Sesonske’s hy-
potheses on how animation differs from reality are especially interest-
ing: he points out that Cavell omits that projection enables the illusion
of movement and the experience of these drawings as a “reality” particu-
lar to the “region” of animation. We need to develop a more precise defi-
nition, an ontology, of what Sesonske means by “a world.”
This led me to Andrew’s phenomenological questioning in 1978 of the
concept of cinematic worlds: “What exists beyond the [film] text and
what kind of description can be adequate to it? Here we encounter the
exciting and dangerous term ‘world.’ A film elaborates a world which it
is the critic’s job to flesh out or respond to. But what is this cinematic
world?”24 Animation can visually represent endless possible worlds,
each of them often unique and often with little or no relation to the
phenomenal world that surrounds us. I found a way to understand these
worlds, and a method to describe them, through Deleuze: “A work of art
always entails the creation of new spaces and times (it’s not a question
of recounting a story in a well-­determined space and time; rather, it is
the rhythms, the lighting, and the space-­times themselves that must be-
come the true characters). . . . A work of art is a new syntax, one that is
much more important than vocabulary and that excavates a foreign lan-
guage in language.”25 Many animation films create visual equivalents to
neologisms in the particular animated space-­times—the worlds—that
are the true characters of the films, and theorists need to develop a new
syntax in the stylistic and critical language used to describe these works.
Animation evokes many diverse phenomena in its reception that

118  • Suzanne Buchan

have little to do with our experience “in the world.” Andrew’s formula-
tions on the usefulness of experiential, phenomenological approaches
to cinema and “the constitution of a cinematic world” can help to de-
velop a framework that takes into account the spectator’s lived experi-
ence of animated films, of animated worlds that might not exist in the
natural world, but that have a very real existence in projection for the
viewer.26 Sobchack sees the appeal of phenomenology in “its potential
for opening up and destabilizing language in the very process of its de-
scription of the phenomena of experience.”27 Opening up and destabi-
lizing may also lead us toward a new theoretical syntax, but this must
be done via a “well-­made language.” More than sixty years ago, Étienne
Souriau wrote of the challenges facing the French filmology movement
that, according to David Rodowick, “approached the cinema from the
outside, carrying out research on cinematographic facts through the do-
mains of psychology, psychiatry, aesthetics, sociology, and biology.”28
Souriau writes: “Since filmology is a science, it must be and must want
to be one. And if a science is not, in the famous words of [Étienne Bon-
not de] Condillac, simply a ‘well-­made language,’ then it clearly requires
one as its precondition.”29 One of the so-­called problems that the theo-
rizing of animation needs to resolve is the definition of a well-­made lan-
guage—comparative and interdisciplinary criticism is implicit in this.
These animated worlds are populated by animated figures that also
pose ontological puzzles; writing within film studies on animation often
discusses animated figures with the same terms and descriptors as for
human actors. Although Mitry refers minimally to animation films in
his profound aesthetic and psychological analysis of cinema—it may be
for him that the animated image is, simply, a cinematic image—here I
will use his writing on figures as an example for how concepts in film
theory not specific to animation can be used to theorize about anima-
tion. Mitry discusses relationships between the literary author’s person-
ality that “is always evident in his characters” and the cinema, which
“presents only actions. Though the characters are the creation of the
filmmaker, at least they are there, present and active, ‘in the flesh.’ Dis-
sociated from creative imagination, they seem to have an independent,
exclusive existence which is objective and no longer merely concep-
tual.”30 The animated figure is not “dissociated from creative imagina-
tion”; it embodies just this, in that the figure’s existence and character
are defined entirely by the conceptual, stylistic, and technical processes
of its design, construction, and animation.
Mitry makes an observation about actors that is thought-­provoking

Animation, in Theory • 119
for animated figures. “However basic [the actor’s] psychology, it is always
‘located.’ The characters are drawn according to circumstance and their
development always depends on an effectively ‘experienced’ reality.
They are human beings ‘in the world’; they act and are acted upon.” The
scare quotes Mitry uses throughout these passages are meant to incite
curiosity: if Mitry means that the character’s psychology is located in
the living actor, then the psychology of an animated figure is located
in the filmmaker whose personality and psychology are transmuted
into the character, “ascribing to it [the filmmaker’s] thoughts and emo-
tions.”31 The character’s psychology is read by the audience using codes
of behavior and gesture. Another concept from Mitry that is promising
for animation that uses abstract, nonanthropomorphized figures is his
proposal that “one might say that any object presented in moving images
gains a meaning (a collection of significations) it does not have ‘in reality,’
that is, as a real presence.”32 A related insight into the viewer’s engage-
ment is Christine N. Brinckmann’s exploration of empathy in abstract
forms in the Absolute films of Walter Ruttmann and Viking Eggeling.
Brinckmann describes how movement creates alliances and choreogra-
phies between the figures, and she then queries the audience’s engage-
ment: “In light of such cinematic processes the temptation is there, both
to identify the moving forms and to animate them with characteristics
and intentions.”33
A defining feature of many animation films is that figures are often
composed of a combination of physically incompatible elements, and
in projection they and the spaces they are in can visually defy physical,
optical, and natural laws of gravity, electromagnetism, perspective, and
entropy (an obvious example is Chuck Jones’s 1953 Duck Amuck). While
we can say the same for live-­action films that employ profilmic special
effects (I am not considering digital or in-­camera effects) to create im-
possible figures, worlds, and events, these retain an indexicality that
represents the physical world and the materials that the effects are cre-
ated in and of. Carroll’s “A Note on Film Metaphor” elegantly and effec-
tively takes on this conundrum. Referring to a range of examples, from
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to Popeye cartoons, Carroll introduces two
terms with great potential for describing animated figures and worlds,
and the remainder of his text elaborates on conditions that explain how
and why we engage with what we see on screen.34 The first term is physi-
cal noncompossibility: “It is not physically compossible with the universe
as we know it that muscles be anvils, that people be cassette recorders
or that spies be foxes.”35 Carroll discusses drawn animation, but his con-

120  • Suzanne Buchan

cepts also work for a range of techniques that animate objects and mat-
ter from the phenomenal, physical world—disparate elements that can
be fused together in composite figures. He then explains why we under-
stand this noncompossibility by introducing another incisive term,
homospatiality (elements copresent in the same figure). Homospatiality
is a prerequisite for what he describes as visual metaphors, as it “pro-
vides the means to link disparate categories in visual metaphors in ways
that are functionally equivalent to the ways that disparate categories
are linked grammatically in verbal metaphors.”36 Carroll suggests that
“metaphors interanimate the relations between classes or categories.”37
As one of many possible categories of a taxonomy and ontology of ani-
mated figures, noncompossibility interanimates between disciplines
and categories of fine arts and commodity culture and disciplines of film
theory, philosophy of perception, and literary theory.

Animation, in Theory

Perhaps it is time to ask some questions. The first is: what is the problem
of animation that it requires a theory? I see a partial answer in Deleuze’s
remarks that “the encounter between two disciplines doesn’t take place
when one begins to reflect on the other, but when one discipline realizes
that it has to resolve, for itself and by its own means, a problem similar
to one confronted by the other.”38 The discipline of animation studies is
riddled with what amounts to an avoidance of resolving the problem of
animation within the larger scope of film studies. It has been informed
in part by discourses that weakly lean on cinema theory and are driven
by the legacy of an innate difference between live action and animation
film that animation studies has tried to solve. Deleuze goes on to sug-
gest that “the same tremors occur on totally different terrains. The only
true criticism is comparative (and bad film criticism closes in on the
cinema like its own ghetto) because any work in a field is itself imbri-
cated within other fields.”39 The marginalization of animation studies is
often referred to by its own authors as a “ghetto”—and it is pertinent to
consider Deleuze’s idea that the ghetto of bad criticism is due to it not
being comparative. Historically, many animation studies texts do not
use the critical, comparative approaches that Deleuze suggests are nec-
essary to solve the problem, just as film studies often does not take key
queries about properties of animation into account. This may help us to
understand animation scholarship’s slow integration into film studies.
A second question is: why the recent interest in animation “theory”?

Animation, in Theory • 121
Hall suggests that “movements provoke theoretical moments. And his-
torical conjunctures insist on theories: they are real moments in the evo-
lution of theory.”40 The Chinese term for crisis (weiji) is formed of two
characters that mean crisis and crucial point:41 the crucial point for ani-
mation was the digital shift, a commercially motivated historical con-
juncture, and this rupture caused a crisis in film studies—the loss of
its material object, celluloid, and of photoindexicality—through cine-
matic production’s increasing reliance on digital animation techniques.
Already in 1998 Thomas Elsaesser suggested that “any technology that
materially affects [the status of indexicality] . . . and digitisation would
seem to be such a technology, thus puts in crisis deeply-­held beliefs
about representation and visualization, and many of the discourses—
critical, scientific or aesthetic—based on, or formulated in the name of
the indexical in our culture, need to be re-­examined.”42 While many au-
thors initially engaged primarily with technological marvels and popu-
lar feature-­length film, responses to this so-­called crisis are manifold
(the second Chinese character for the term crisis understood here in the
more common [mis]perception as opportunity), provoking valuable de-
bates to move on from Manovich’s polemic. There are other themes in
this crisis of film studies that have the potential to embed animation in
rigorous and well-­developed critical disciplines. I see the digital’s com-
plex ethical relationship to realism and its aesthetic, political, and tech-
nological impacts on the moving image in a continuum with Andrew’s
“exciting and dangerous term ‘world.’” The aesthetic representation of
worlds is thematized in philosophical, cognitive, and psychoanalytic dis-
courses with impacts on almost all areas of the humanities, and ani-
mated worlds can visualize worlds in ways that photoindexical cinema
cannot.
So, in theory, what could a theory of animation look like? This is an
impossible question, and I’d like to work with what Hall describes as a
tension that arises for theory and culture. In this context I’m thinking
about theory and the visual culture of animation—about the impossi-
bility of getting “anything like an adequate theoretical account of cul-
ture’s relations and its effects.”43 The cultural impact of animation is im-
possible to funnel into a theory of animation for a number of reasons.
It is not a single profession or discipline, and academic understanding
and inquiries both originate from and extend into other disciplines. We
must ensure that we can extend acquired knowledge to develop “theory”
without losing the dispersed wealth of existing scholarship. In my view,
we need to

122  • Suzanne Buchan

• consider fine-­art practice in conjunction with cinematic representa-
tion using parametric description and microanalysis;
• work with paradigmatic films to develop central queries based on
film theory;
• draw on interdisciplinary methodologies to contextualize the
making of animation films in related practice areas;
• understand how nonhuman figures and animated worlds affect a dif-
ferent spectatorial experience in terms of perceptive modalities; and
• approach high-­flowing generalities by a roundabout (piecemeal)
route and work across multiple fronts and disciplines in dialogical
exchange.

animation: an interdisciplinary journal

Peer-­review journals incite, foster, and disseminate critical reflection on

diversity in practice; challenge or expand existing canons; and provide a
platform for exploratory hypotheses and developing theories that have
not yet found their ways into themed anthologies or monographs. These
journals also provide opportunities for the growing number of inter-
national PhD students to publish their innovations and contributions
to new knowledge. Concepts and ideas from the film studies theorists
I mentioned earlier, and from others, were fertile ground for the intel-
lectual genesis of animation: an interdisciplinary journal. Its core edito-
rial aims are closely linked with my own research into animation’s rela-
tionship to moving-­image practice and the epistemological question of
how animation helps us know the world. Because intellectual endeavors
thrive best in a constituency, this research is collaborative in nature, and
is informed in part by the journal’s editorial team and board. The jour-
nal aims to reveal animation’s pervasive impact on other forms of time-­
based media expression—past, present, and future—and illuminate
how these affect our lives. It also, crucially, regularly publishes writings
from artists, to ensure a dialogue between practice and theory. Many of
the articles originate in informal discussions with film studies scholars
and other academics about how they could shift their focus askew and
apply their expertise, specialisms, and research interests to explore ani-
mation, analogous to how scholars of art history, philosophy, and lit-
erature in the 1950s and 1960s explored cinema to develop film studies
as a respected academic discipline. Perhaps animation studies, like film
studies, will eventually have a variety of journals on diverse subgenres
for developing readerships, and we need to anticipate their needs. This

Animation, in Theory • 123
would help open up the field and encourage specific research in inter-
related yet unique creative areas.
Journal authors have contributed a variety of articles and themes
that question and grow the field of animation theory. For instance, some
authors are engaged in debates around loosening assumptions of anima-
tion’s medium specificity and purist essentialism, as Andrew Darley con-
vincingly argues in his polemic “Bones of Contention.” His main topics
are “inflated claims of medium superiority; essentialist and reduction-
ist definitions of the form; exaggerated claims that animation is inher-
ently, somehow, a more expressive or imaginative visual medium than
others.”44 Darley makes some interesting correctives to this by point-
ing out similarities and differences and freedoms and constraints that
animation shares with a diversity of media; he also effectively critiques
the detrimental effect of usurping animation in the name of “Theory.”
Many of the journal’s authors work with film theory and are develop-
ing the “well-­made language” crucial to formulating queries and ap-
proaches to an intentionally wide concept of animation across platforms
and media.45 Some of these questions are direct responses to writing
that doesn’t overtly theorize animation much at all. Sean Cubitt’s re-
view of the anthology The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (2006), which
celebrates Tom Gunning’s writing, engages with Gunning’s seminal
concepts and asks the question: “For readers of animation: an interdisci-
plinary journal, the key issue must be: what relevance do these concerns
have for our field of enquiry?”46 Over the course of his article, Cubitt
answers this himself, finding relevance in animation works from early
cinema to postmillennial architecture installation and generously pro-
viding topics for further research.
Other contributions expand existing notions of animation in terms
of culture, technology, ideology, and aesthetics, some from film studies
and some from animation studies or other disciplines. Pan-­Asian au-
thors introduce cultural and philosophical perspectives to theorize
about animation made within these cultures and for their indige-
nous populations. Others discover relations between animation, early
cinema, and consumer culture in international contexts (a special issue
was on animation, precinema, and early cinema). Artists theorize their
own work (Gregory Barsamian on sculpture and perception, Dennis
Dollens on biomimetic architecture, Thorsten Fleisch on chemistry and
physics): such multidisciplinary animation artworks that lie outside
the traditional canons of animation studies are key to encouraging dis-
courses that center on, for instance, animation used in so-­called high-­

124  • Suzanne Buchan

art practice, in architecture, or in the sciences. The journal also revisits
and recontextualizes artists who have slipped off the radar: a special
issue from July 2010, guest edited by Mark Bartlett, on Stan Vanderbeek
demonstrates intersections with early computer and communication
technologies and artist-­thinkers. It situates his politically and poetically
informed and technologically enabled texts—moving images, artworks,
writings—both within and distinct from the received histories of ani-
mation from which he is often elided. One area that is recently taking on
substantial theoretical form is documentary animation. In a 2011 spe-
cial issue, Making it (Un)real: Contemporary Theories and Practices in Docu-
mentary Animation (guest edited by the filmmaker and theorist Jeffrey
Skoller), authors not nominally associated with animation studies en-
gage almost exclusively with single films or works by a single filmmaker.

Conclusion

As animation increasingly defines our visual moving image culture, the

number of researchers and students of animation studies, and anima-
tion theory, is growing, and the boundaries between film theory and
animation theory are diminishing. Although rarely invoked in anima-
tion studies, the notion of blending media is implicit in animation film-
making because it has always been a collaborative part of the interdisci-
plinary contagion and hybridity that define so much of our visual culture,
and animation is also used in many creative and scientific disciplines.
From performance (Windsor McCay’s “interactive” stage performances
with an on-­screen animated figure in Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) and
Miwa Matreyek’s Dream of Lucid Living) and painting (Oskar Fischinger’s
1947 Motion Painting No. 1 and Jeremy Blake’s digital time-­based paint-
ing) to architecture (1990s computer-­aided design walk-­throughs and
Kas Oosterhuis’s 2002 proposal for Ground Zero in New York) and elec-
tronic engineering (animated mri images and the design and simula-
tion of micro and nano systems), animation has always blended media.
This is because while animation’s predigital forms share film’s photo-
chemical base and projection processes, with few exceptions, animation
is visually and materially constituted by other artistic media, including
photography, theater, painting, sculpture, fine arts, graphics, and text.
As practice differentiates and technologies and production methods
develop, some animation is also breaking through low-­art barriers to
achieve high-­art status and becoming an artistic partner in manufactur-
ing and sciences. Animation’s critical companion, theoretical conceptu-

Animation, in Theory • 125
alization, will also develop and differentiate, perhaps one day forming
something close to an interdisciplinary theory of animation.

Notes

1. For reasons of space I will not include titles; there are many animation bibliog-
raphies available online and in print.
2. Denslow, “What Is Animation and Who Needs to Know?,” 1.
3. Metz, “Trucage and the Film,” 153. Metz cites Comolli, “Technique et idéologie
(3),” 47.
4. Furniss, Art in Motion (1998), 5.
5. Furniss, Art in Motion (1998), 7.
6. Carroll, On Criticism, 13.
7. Carroll, On Criticism, 9.
8. Cholodenko, “Introduction,” The Illusion of Life, 9.
9. In a note at the end of his Introduction to The Illusion of Life, Cholodenko writes
almost all essays in the collection were presented at the Illusion of Life confer-
ence held July 14–17, 1988 (29).
10. Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction,” 64.
11. Manovich, The Language of New Media.
12. Gadassik, “Ghosts in the Machine,” 229.
13. Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,” 273. Hall’s incisive and
critical evaluation of the gestation of cultural studies from multiple disciplines
and their conflicts offers some interesting correlations with the interdisciplin-
arity of animation studies.
14. Quart, “The Insider,” 36.
15. I am indebted to Christine Noll Brinckmann for introducing me to parametric
film analysis in her undergraduate “Introduction to Film Analysis” classes at
the Seminar for Film Studies, University of Zurich.
16. For an analysis of this in the Quay Brothers’ films, see chapters 3, 4, and 5 in
Buchan, The Quay Brothers.
17. Coates, The Story of the Lost Reflection, 1.
18. Carroll, “Prospects for Film Theory,” 58.
19. “What we call Theory is an abstract body of thought which came into promi-
nence in Anglo-­American film studies during the 1970s. The most famous avatar
of Theory was that aggregate of doctrines derived from Lacanian psychoanaly-
sis, Structuralist semiotics, Post-­Structuralist literary theory, and variants of
Althusserian Marxism.” Bordwell and Carroll, Post-­theory, xiii.
20. Cavell, The World Viewed, 167.
21. Cavell, The World Viewed, 167–68.
22. Cavell, The World Viewed, 168.
23. For an extended discussion of Cavell’s concept of cartoons and the realism of
puppet animation’s use of real-­world objects, see Buchan, “The Animated Spec-
tator: Watching the Quay Brothers’ ‘Worlds,’ ” in Buchan, Animated “Worlds,” 17.

126  • Suzanne Buchan

24. Andrew, “The Neglected Tradition of Phenomenology in Film Theory,” 47.
25. Deleuze, “The Brain Is the Screen,” 370.
26. Andrew, “The Neglected Tradition of Phenomenology in Film Theory,” 49.
27. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye, xviii.
28. Rodowick, “A Care for the Claims of Theory,” 31–32.
29. Souriau, “Die Struktur des filmischen Universums und das Vokabular der
Filmologie,” 141; my translation.
30. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema, 50.
31. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema, 50.
32. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema, 45.
33. Brinckmann, Die anthropomorphe Kamera und andere Schriften zur filmischen
Narration, 265; my translation.
34. As just one example for how a few theoretical sentences or concepts provide
fruitful terrain for generating interdisciplinary approaches, to explain viewer
comprehension and cocreative engagement with the Quay Brothers’ films, I ex-
panded on Carroll’s concepts using writings from Trevor Whittock (Metaphor
and Film [Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1990]), Deleuze (The Logic
of Sense [Logique du sens, 1969], trans. Mark Lester [London: Athlone Press,
1990]), Deleuze with Félix Guattari (Anti-­Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane [London and New York:
Continuum, 2004]), Fritz Senn (Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Trans-
lation, ed. Jean Paul Riquelme [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1984]), and Benjamin (his poetic concept of “detritus” in “Old Forgotten Chil-
dren’s Books” [a translation of “Alte vergessene Kinderbucher” (1924)], Walter
Benjamin: Selected Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone, vol. 1 [Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press, 1996], 406–13). See chapter 2, “Palimpsest, Fragments,
Vitalist Affinities,” and chapter 4, “Metaphysical Machines,” in Buchan, The
Quay Brothers.
35. Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image, 213.
36. Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image, 214.
37. Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image, 219.
38. Deleuze, “The Brain Is the Screen,” 367.
39. Deleuze, “The Brain Is the Screen,” 367.
40. Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,” 270.
41. Victor H. Mair, “Danger + Opportunity ≠ Crisis: How a Misunderstanding about
Chinese Characters Has Led Many Astray,” http://www.pinyin.info/chinese
/crisis.html (access date June 26, 2013).
42. Elsaesser, “Digital Cinema,” 201–22.
43. Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,” 271.
44. Darley, “Bones of Contention,” 72.
45. Journal contributors and editorial board members include a number of authors
from this collection (Karen Beckman, Scott Bukatman, Alan Cholodenko, Yu-
riko Furuhata, Thomas LaMarre, Esther Leslie, Marc Steinberg, and Tess Taka-
hashi).
46. Cubitt, “The Cinema of Attractions,” 276.

Animation, in Theory • 127
III : : The Experiment
8 : : Film as Experiment in Animation:
Are Films Experiments on Human Beings?
G e rtrud Ko c h
T r a n sl at ed by Da ni e l H e ndric kson

The goal of experiments, according to the optimistic, empirical defini-

tion, is to reveal rules, if not also laws. In the way that experiments are
arranged, they define x conditions, under which y occurs. If y occurs, it
is inferred that in the arrangement x there are generally applicable con-
ditions for the appearance of y. The general applicability is temporally
defined through repetition. Whenever x, then y. According to skeptics,
however, since conditions are defined by the arrangements in the experi-
ment, the experiment turns into experimentation, that is, it is itself al-
ready a hypothetical action that interferes in the field that it is meant
to research by induction. Gaston Bachelard summarizes this in a bon
mot: “Un fait est un fait” (a fact is a fact). And Hans-­Jörg Rheinberger
proposed the nifty German translation that draws attention to the rela-
tion between the being-­done of the fact and the action, the doing: “Eine
Tatsache ist eine Tatsache.”1 The experiment thus once again comes out
of the fantasmatic realm of pure empiricism and into the contaminated
zone where human beings and nature overlap. The experiment, the em-
piricism of which is itself made relative in the experiment’s quality as
artifact and as something done, becomes a paradox. This originates in
the experiment’s two interwoven natures, the physical one crisscrosses
the human one. The anthropological explanation of the human being as
a natural being, eccentrically situated in relation to its own physicality,
as Helmut Plessner has put it, allows us to draw further conclusions that
call into question whether hypotheses, condemned by experimental phi-
losophy as a humanoid relapse of empiricism into metaphysics, can be
abolished, or whether it is better to take on the fact that the human is a
being that creates hypotheses.2
A popular television comedian from Cologne, Willy Millowitsch, puts
it succinctly: “What you yourself don’t know, you have to explain to
yourself.” Since we are constantly running up against the limits of our
tacit knowledge (Michael Polanyi), which constantly shifts the horizon
of our previous understanding (Hans-­Georg Gadamer), we are also con-
stantly forced to shift the horizon of our nonknowledge further, to form
new hypotheses, while those that hold up in the current situation are
expanded into a theory.3 The beginning of expanding such theories, and
this includes routine theories, scientific theories, absurd theories, and
any others as well, is thus marked by an experience of lack, of a need, a
need for explanation. To form a theory is to react to the experience of
reaching a limit of understanding and wanting to get beyond it. Presum-
ably, we construct theories where our curiosity runs up against some-
thing that escapes the empirical descriptive capabilities of our ordinary
consciousness. This is why theories are at their cores nonempirical and
speculative, even if theories refer to concrete empirical objects and inci-
dents. At the same time, however, theories are driven by a longing for
the real. It is not by chance that this brief polemic against theory origi-
nates from Ludwig Wittgenstein, who succinctly states: “Philosophy
must not interfere in any way with the actual use of language.”4 And, he
says, “we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be any-
thing hypothetical in our considerations. All explanation must disappear,
and description alone must take its place.”5 These descriptions, however,
“must not interfere in any way with the actual use of language.”6 In a cri-
tique of this apodictic thesis, which it is only almost correct to dismiss,
Herbert Marcuse raises the thought-­provoking objection that thinking
here is “pressed into the straitjacket of common usage,” and it is as-
sumed that common-­language use is always already all right—that is, in
a certain sense it lies outside the experimental. “What,” asks Marcuse,
“remains of philosophy? What remains of thinking, intelligence, with-
out anything hypothetical, without any explanation?”7
The motif of forming theories, which is a precursor to any experi-
ment, is similar to that of forming fictions in another area, namely aes-
thetics. Not only can we aesthetically relate to theories, as we can to any
other objects, phenomena, and ideas, but I would go so far as to say that
there is an isomorphism in the affective priming of both variations to
confront the impenetrability of the physical world and the contingency
of the social world. When a circumstance can no longer be ascertained in
the usual way and can be integrated into the operative consciousness of a
possible space of action, the spheres of fantasy, imagination, and fiction
begin. At this point, a need emerges to convert the imaginary, which en-
velops the real, into a form that we, following Wolfgang Iser, could call

132  • Gertrud Koch

fiction.8 Even if Iser explicitly seeks to delimit his model of the acts of fic-
tionalizing from theories of theoretical fiction, his argument is nonethe-
less grounded on the affective basis of the behavior of the physical body,
which makes it of vital interest to see one’s own corporal frontality, and
in which we go into the world, as a process of continually unlocking and
opening new horizons. This is a process that does not remain bound
by the limits of the physically visible but is directed at relationality: in
space by assumptions about what lies far away, close by, and off to the
side, and in time by the constant links between modes of time made by
memory and recognition, as needing to be recognized, forgotten, and so
on, in the future. The stream of consciousness permanently interweaves
experiences, perceptual impressions by the senses, with linguistic and
visual ideas that constitute an imaginary that pushes us onward to per-
formative formation. Theories, hypotheses, images, and experiments in
thought have a common reservoir in the real, which has to be material-
ized and substantiated as fact in the very act of fictionalizing.
From this store of imaginary ideas, both linguistic and visual, we
form the theoretical network with which we attempt to capture the real
as a kind of grid by which we perceive and orient our actions. For this
reason, theories are not possible outside of visual and affective ideas and
circumstances. Martin Saar, in his reconstruction of the Nietzschean
model of genealogy, raises exactly this point to emphasize that theories
emerge in a crisis as a critique of existing models of explanation and in-
terpretation.9 The fact that these theories have any bite as criticism at all
is due to their temporal arrangement—that is, that they always emerge
when something new turns up that we need to know more about. The
mistrust of theory is much larger than that of dogmas, which have al-
ready established themselves as incontrovertible and can gather believ-
ers around them who no longer need to be convinced. Theories, on the
other hand, are trophies that have to be passed on, since the horizons of
our world can have no fixed limits.
The skeptical demand to mitigate the question of why (the explana-
tion) with that of how (the description) is countered, however, by the
fact that our need for explanation has an affective basis, which cannot
be fobbed off onto any call for empirical modesty. When Sigmund Freud
presents a biologically based affect theory of knowledge by assuming
a “drive to knowledge,” this brings a new angle to the question of how
the biological materialization of thinking is connected to human corpo-
rality.10
I take the experiment to be a kind of dispositif, in which the relation

Film as Experiment in Animation • 133

between physical nature and physical bodies must always be defined and
redefined in reference to the human body and its physical and mental
capacities. In this context, the experiment is also always an experiment
on human beings as much as it is an experiment by human beings. The
anthropocentric dimension of the experiment, as an artificial, humanly
conceived trap, in which nature is meant to show itself to us and speak
to us, turns into the experimental investigation of the boundaries of
the human itself. In the experiment, if an untouched nature is supposed
to be animated into one that speaks to us, the human being itself soon
becomes positioned in the experiment as a mystery.11 At the beginning
of the experiment is the question of the nature of nature, and at the
end the question of the nature of the human being within the experi-
ment. The fascination that the experiment has held as a technologically
grounded cultural technique of desiring desire against any and all skep-
ticism is above all emphasized where the experimental arrangement di-
rectly targets human perception, that is, the impact of an experiment,
which is supposed to be new and take place in the interplay between the
reception of the senses and the reception of affect. If the boundaries
between the disciplines become fluid there, this should come as no sur-
prise. Philosophy becomes psychology, psychology becomes aesthetics,
and experimental aesthetics sets out once again to revise experimental
philosophy.
In a review of Kurthian music psychology, Theodor W. Adorno points
to comparable developments in music theory in the transition from
the nineteenth to the twentieth century. He refers to the subjectifying
power of music, which works directly against the experimental-­exact
models of examination:
It is much more characteristic of [Hugo]Riemann’s teachings than of the
most effective of recent work that they believe they can banish the ele-
ment of subjective tension in a static-­objective, mathematizing schema,
which was incompatible with the dynamic of the phenomena and which
collapsed in the end.—Static, systematic, but always essentially didac-
tic “music theory” figured as a supplement to a “psychology of sound,”
which hoped to overcome the subjective side of musical phenomena
in the psychological experiment by using the measuring methods of
psychophysics. It saw its central problem as the relation between basic
appeal and the strength of sensation, also already essentially getting
beyond the mere analysis of elements in Carl Stumpf’s examinations,
which were extensive and oriented to material, but still remaining for-

134  • Gertrud Koch

 eign to spontaneous subjectivity, even in its themes, in the forms of
musical cohesion as such.12

I am not so much interested in historically reconstructing the shift be-

tween philosophy, psychology, and aesthetics as I am in attempting to
break down the inherent model of animation for the production of com-
municative expressivity as an aesthetics proper to the experiment in
film. I take animation in film to be a process of bringing to life in a double
sense: (1) through the technological setting-­into-­motion of individual
pictures, the film itself is animated in a general sense, which exceeds the
strict definition of the genre “animation film” and constitutes anima-
tion as a moving image that suggests the quality of vitality, and (2) the
spectator is animated by the animation and displaced in a specific way
into the state of vitality.
Materialist theories of film, which originate in the materializing film
effects in the perceptual events of the recipient, tend to draw on the
transformed vocabulary of experimental philosophy. This begins with
the work of Gustav Theodor Fechner, whose psychophysics was strongly
critiqued and rejected as a one-­sided relation of causality, but whose
terminology has meandered through the disciplines and the centuries
ever since in a wide variety of ways. Both Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche,
in the ideas they formulated, showed themselves to be open to a direct
connection between the physiological and the psychological—and in
individual cases it is not at all easy to detect where the terms came from
in these authors. Max Weber, in his study “Zur Psychophysik der indu-
striellen Arbeit” (On the psychophysics of industrial work), was exten-
sively concerned with the works of labor psychology, which he sought
to link to sociology’s new questions and methods. Here he already cites
studies on typewriter writing that resemble Siegfried Kracauer’s de-
scriptions of disciplining employees with metronomes that set the pace.
Weber’s study cited concerns about the so-­called loss of practice, which
occurs when an established routine is interrupted by a break and has to
be practiced anew:
An (American) test in typewriting showed, for instance, that the level
of proficiency attained after 50 days when first learning to type was
later achieved, after a break of more than two years during which the
test subject had completely broken off any contact to typing, after only
13 days. In this shortening of the necessary practice time to around a
fourth, we can see the “practice balance.” On the other hand, it seems
to be demonstrable, in experimental review of familiar everyday experi-

Film as Experiment in Animation • 135

 ences, that no level of proficiency, no matter how high, provides an im-
munity to “loss of practice,” but that every interruption, even of the
most proficient worker (typesetter, bookkeeper, piano virtuoso) makes
its presence known at once in the continuing practice—which is of prac-
tically considerable significance for the question of diversifying work.13

Weber remains notably skeptical of psychophysics in connection with

Fechner, Wilhelm Wundt, and Emil Kraepelin, emphasizing the discrep-
ancy that exists between the simple assumption that it is physical ap-
peal that triggers a parallel emotion, and the complex construction of
emotions in social structures of activity, which themselves can become
further triggers. Kracauer speaks of “psychophysical correspondences,”
which securely found their way into his Theory of Film, by referring back
not to Fechner but to Freud and to the French psychologist Henri Wal-
lon, who was one of the founding figures of French filmologie and who
had been examining film from a psychological perspective since the for-
ties. Kracauer cites Wallon in the spectator chapter, including his essay
“De quelques problèmes psycho-­physiologiques que pose le cinéma” (On
some psycho-­physiological problems posed by cinema).14 This critique of
positivism and its opposition of man and nature is taken from Wallon:
Between it [the object] and the observer, there is no impenetrable inter-
val as is postulated by positivism, nor all the old doctrines that go along
with it, for which the universe and humanity come to be juxtaposed like
two more or less distinct entities. Pushed to a sufficient degree of mi-
nutia, the measure of physics shows that observation modifies the fact
observed, since there is no such thing as observation disembodied from
all physical action, nor is there intelligence without an organ nor a man
without a body.15

Kracauer refers to Wallon’s film studies in order to document his own

theory of cinema, which affects the spectator “with skin and hair.” The
center of these reflections is occupied by movement itself: “Movement
is the alpha and omega of the medium. Now the sight of it seems to
have a ‘resonance effect,’ provoking in the spectator such kinesthetic re-
sponses as muscular reflexes, motor impulses, or the like. In any case,
objective movement acts as a psychological stimulus. . . . The effect itself
appears to be well-­established: representations of movement do cause
a stir in deep bodily layers. It is our sense organs which are called into
play.”16 The spectator involuntarily adapts to rhythms and movements
well before any meanings arise between the shots in the montage or nar-

136  • Gertrud Koch

rative dramaturgies—and herein lies the analogy to music that Kracauer
underscores: “Aside from its meaning in each case, music has a direct
effect on the senses; its rhythms directly stimulate the senses. The ma-
terial phenomena represented in film and their movements fundamen-
tally produce the same effect—indeed, film images are thus doubly al-
lotted to this effect because without it they sink back lifelessly into the
surface.”17 To sink back, “lifelessly into the surface,” would spell the aes-
thetic end of film—it would have lost its power to bring to life. The fact
that this bringing to life becomes the telos of film aesthetics in Kracauer
is omnipresent in the spectator chapter.
“Life” is nature animated, and film is the experiment that exposes
this. “Whitehead for one,” writes Kracauer, “was deeply aware that sci-
entific knowledge is much less inclusive than aesthetic insight, and that
the world we master technologically is only part of the reality accessible
to the senses.” He continues, “The concept of life may also designate
this reality which transcends the anemic space-­time world of science.”18
The reality that Kracauer finds rescued in film aesthetics is exactly this
nature, experimentally produced, brought to life, animated in our gaze.
The experiment of film, however, also differs from scientific experiments
in another respect. While the scientific experiment is aimed at identical
reproducibility, which is basic to its claim to legitimacy, the aesthetic ex-
periment lives from the fact that it is temporally open and its repeated
reception is precisely not aimed at identical reproduction but at the in-
terminability of a process, a process in which signs are found in relation
to one another in a movement that is not fixed by any identity of mean-
ing. Adorno shifts the focus to the open temporal horizon of the aes-
thetic experiment when he describes its dialectic as targeted at “realizing
the demand that is recognized without forgetting the nature that condi-
tions the demand. For neither of them ever come into accord within the
existing, but merely in what is to come: dialectically. Experiments are
the genuinely dialectical moments in the life of the artwork.”19
The nature that speaks to the camera is different from the nature of
the squeaking laboratory rat; what the scalpel (Benjamin’s camera) cuts
free are points of view and not facts. These points of view are the re-
sult of alternating standpoints, which—and this is the insight of Nietz-
sche’s perspectivism—do not only stand open to principal alterability
and ecstatic cross fading but can also be anticipated. As such, the film
experiment goes after the subjectivity of reception without fixing it into
a subject-­object schema. In the experiment of film, therefore, it is not
only the identity of the object that comes into question but also the

Film as Experiment in Animation • 137

identity of the subject. In the open temporal horizon of what will be, sub-
jectivity and objectivity are experimentally interwoven with each other.
The life of the artworks and the life of their recipients are ecstatically
intertwined in the moment of bringing to life, which occurs in separate
temporal windows. This is the criterion for the success of the aesthetic
experiment, the twisting of the externality of the test arrangement with
the interiority of the sensations of the senses.
Sergei Eisenstein also sees this duality as dialectically dynamic:
The dialectic of a work of art is constructed upon a most interesting
“dyad.” The effect of a work of art is built upon the fact that two pro-
cesses are taking place within it simultaneously. There is a determined
progressive ascent towards ideas at the highest peaks of consciousness
and at the same time there is a dual process: an impetuous progres-
sive rise along the lines of the highest conceptual steps of conscious-
ness and at the same time there is a penetration through the structure
of the form into the deepest layers of emotional thinking. The polarity
between these two creates the remarkable tension of the unity of form
and content that distinguishes genuine works. All genuine works pos-
sess it.20

Eisenstein, who was fascinated by psychological experiments, never for-

got that the form does not only penetrate the inner storyline of the film;
the form also penetrates the spectator. “Emotional thinking” is con-
nected to the ecstatic states of the spectators, which it exemplifies with
recourse to the concept of life. And it does so in film objects, which still
undermine the materialistic concept of the nature of our physical sur-
roundings—this seems to be fundamental for Benjamin and Kracauer.
In his euphoric commentary on Walt Disney’s early animated films,
Eisenstein developed a poetics of film and life with the goal of connect-
ing the permanent re-­forming of the drawn line into new forms with
a motif of plasmaticness. Animated films are, as he writes, “mocking
at their own form.”21 The infinite life of the endlessly metamorphizing
characters becomes an ecstatic celebration of a life that is continually
created anew, free of the production of meaning and responsibility:
“Disney is simply ‘beyond good and evil.’ Like the sun, like trees, like
birds, like the ducks and mice, deer and pigeons that run across his
screen. . . . Disney’s films, while not exposing sunspots, themselves act
like reflections of sunrays and spots across the screen of the earth. They
flash by, burn briefly and are gone.”22 The Nietzschean citation, set in
single quotes, is not the only allusion to the Dionysian celebration of

138  • Gertrud Koch

merging with drives, with nature, or with whatever else will be called
on as a generic primeval ground to picnic with plasma. The Apollonian
trump card, which refers to the Dionysian ecstasy of borders, is nothing
more than time itself:
And if most of them did not flash by us so quickly . . . we could be made
angry by the moral uselessness of their existence on the screen.
But because of the fleeting ephemerality of their existence, you can-
not reproach them for their mindlessness.
Even the string of a bow cannot be strained forever.
The same for the nerves.
And instants of this “releasing” . . . are just as prophylactically neces-
sary as the daily dose of carefree laughter in the well-­known American
saying: “A laugh a day keeps the doctor away.”23

The energetic model of tension and release used here by Eisenstein is

that of nerve stimulation; at a different point he relates it to another
element that has an effect on the nerves by means of light and warmth,
that of fire. The love of fire, and here he is following a study of pyromania
by the psychiatrist Paul Näcke, is based on the following reasons: “Fore-
most phototropism, characteristic of all living matter—that is, the at-
tracting power of bright light, the sun, or fire . . . thermotropism—that
is, the magnetic power of warmth on the cells of an organism.” Eisen-
stein emphasizes “the magnetic power of . . . movement.”24 The synaes-
thetic model of a connection between visual, haptic, and tactile qualities
in perception is a model for film perception: it gets on our nerves. Film
is an experience that we sense synaesthetically, which is subcutaneously
brought into a rhythmic shaping of time through light and movement.
This is the poetic plasmaticness that the material of film presents and
that protects us from “ossification.” There is “a rejection” at work, “of
once-­and-­forever allotted form, freedom from ossification, the ability
to assume dynamically any form. An ability that I would call ‘plasmatic-
ness.’ ”25
Eisenstein finds these poetics in Japanese woodcut prints; in Maxim
Gorky’s description of fire in alternating images of animals, whose forms
assume the shape of flames; in the snake people who share a world with
Lewis Carroll’s Alice, who can become quite small and quite large in
Wonderland; and more. Movement becomes a media-­anthropological
tertium comparationis, and it is movement that has an effect as the
animation of drawing. The pneuma of the film, we might add, lies in
the rhythm of the montage’s cuts, the temporality of the twenty-­four

Film as Experiment in Animation • 139

frames per second, the vibration of the flicker that is obstructed as inner
agitation in the very film being screened. The film is thus similar to the
attractiveness of fire, which—and here Eisenstein cites Hegel’s Lectures
on the History of Philosophy—“is physical time, absolute unrest, absolute
disintegration of existence, the passing away of the ‘other,’ but also of
itself.”26 Film goes by in physical time, but over and over again it takes
on form; it burns up and is animated once again in the apparatus.27
If Eisenstein had simply remained with the celebration of biologi-
cal life, we would probably attribute to him today a life-­sciences para-
digm that had quite abandoned the obstinacy of an aesthetic concept
of form, jumping back once again into psychophysics. This is an option
that Eisenstein rejected expressis verbis. Eisenstein has bigger plans
for Disney. The comedic quality of the film cannot simply be explained
through biological regression to plasmatic merging. The matter that be-
comes the material of the film cannot be plasma.
In terms of their material, Disney’s pictures are pure ecstasy—all the
traits of ecstasy (the immersion of self in nature and animals etc.)
Their comicality lies in the fact that the process of ecstasy is repre-
sented as an object: literalised, formalised.
That is, Disney is an example (within the general formula of the comi-
cal) of a case of formal ecstasy!!! (Great!) (Producing an effect of the same
degree of intensity as ecstasy!).28

The comedic as a form is based on a shift of the metaphor of metonymy,

a procedure that Eisenstein also sees in effect without the shift to the
comedic in the following line that he cites in German from Friedrich
Hölderlin’s Der Wanderer (The wanderer, 1797):
Fernhin schlich das hagere Gebirge, wie ein wandelnd Gerippe,
Streckt das Dörflein vergnügt über die Wiesen sich aus.

[Far away crept the haggard mountains, like a mutating carcass,

The village merrily stretches out past the meadow.]29

The fact that it is the village itself that “stretches” fascinates Eisenstein:
“This kind of motor metaphor . . . is the very earliest, most ancient type
of metaphor—directly motory. . . . Not objectively visible, even less ‘a
comparison of something with something’ . . . but rather a motori-­
subjectively sensed metaphor, par excellence.”30
This is what fascinates him so much in the elongated necks of the
Disney bestiary, in the legs that get longer as they run, for example: that

140  • Gertrud Koch

the contours become independent and form themselves into a second
object, which exists alongside the first and which does not simply meta-
phorically replace it. “And only after the contour of the neck elongates
beyond the possible limits of the neck—does it become a comical em-
bodiment of that which occurs as a sensuous process in the cited meta-
phors.”31 Referring to Walt Disney’s The Karnival Kid (1929), Eisenstein at
one point notes—without mentioning the title of the film—that “there
are the hotdogs whose skins are pulled down and are spanked.”32 The an-
archistic shifts of metaphors into metonymies are clearly shown in the
film. Mickey plays a hot-­dog seller, running his mobile business out of a
small wagon at a fair. This is one of the first sound films in which Mickey
speaks, and he intones a staccato “hooot dogggs, hooot dogggs,” each
time sticking a fork into one of the sausages, which then responds with a
bark. As the film goes on, the hot dogs undergo different kinds of trans-
formations, for example, from sausage to a dog that bites, to a boy that
gets his behind paddled. The hot dogs that bark are not metaphors for
dogs. Rather, their proper name is used metonymically: the hot dogs be-
come dogs, the bites become biters, the sausage casing becomes a textile
covering, and so on. The comedic arises at the level of a motory-­sensual
knowledge about how it feels to be in motion, and of the object-­like rep-
resentation of its intention, such as getting away quickly, or its mood,
such as feeling agitated.
Eisenstein is fascinated by Émile Zola’s formula: “Une réalité vu à
travers un tempérament” (a reality seen through a temperament).33 The
world is seen through a temperament, or, one could add, following Hei-
degger, through a mood. Moods are ways of perceiving the world. They
are not simply bad filters or distorting mirrors; they are our own mem-
branes, which connect us to the world as we perceive it. Films, and par-
ticularly those of Disney, create this membrane, which is required for us
to experience the world as one in which will and representation can ap-
pear side by side. And precisely because of this these films allow the will
and the wish to come forth to color our representation of the world and
provide it with its plasticity by distributing light and shadow.
The poetics of film that Eisenstein develops with Disney’s animated
films is thus based on a threefold conception of life:
1. Biological life as matter or plasma, which precedes any implementa-
tion of individual life as substance.
2. The artwork as an experiment of animation, which grants itself a
life.

Film as Experiment in Animation • 141

3. The artwork as an experiment of animation, which arouses the spec-
tator to life and allows the spectator to experience himself or herself
as living.
By mediating the three layers, film becomes an aesthetic experiment in
which, as I proposed in the definition of the experiment, something is
to be given voice in its nature. In his astute study Ästhetik der Lebendig-
keit: Kants dritte Kritik (Aesthetics of vitality: Kant’s third critique), Jan
Völker has derived a principle of difference from Kant’s concept of life
and nature: “If we return once again to the third Critique, then Kant’s
definition of the human animal—as that animal that is an organic
being and at the same time a being that can express its difference in
nature—can be read differently. The specificity of the human being lies
in its nonnatural life.”34 The experiment of animated film gives voice to
exactly this aspect. The “ecstasy of form” is not the dull celebration of the
organic around the plasmatic melting pot; it is the enhanced experience
of an animated nature, a fictitious nature, which is the effect of a human
act, an action that it has manufactured: “This is Kant’s solution to the
question of spirit. The spirit is the human faculty of negating the order
of nature, and therein lies the paradoxical nature of the human being. It
is its nature to negate nature.”35
Whether it be barking sausages, talking mice, or czars drawn out in
their shadows, in the film experiment of animation, the open quality of
natural definition can be experienced as a permanent metonymic shift.
If we define the experiment as a dispositif, it can be deployed, as Eisen-
stein has shown, as a basic building block of cinema aesthetics.

Notes

All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

1. The standard German translation for “fact” is Tatsache, which is made up of the
parts Tat (act, action) and Sache (thing, matter). Rheinberger, “Wissensräume
und experimentelle Praxis,” 368.
2. Plessner, Conditio humana; and Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der
Mensch.
3. Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension; Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode.
4. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 124, 55e.
5. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 109, 52e.
6. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 124, 55e.
7. Marcuse, One-­Dimensional Man (2002), 182–83.
8. See, for example, Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary.

142  • Gertrud Koch

9. See, for example, Saar, Genealogie als Kritik.
10. Freud also speaks of “infantile sexual theory,” the child’s “instinct for knowl-
edge,” and the “instinct for discovery” of intellectuals and scholars. See
Sigmund Freud, “Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie,” in Gesammelte Werke,
Band V (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1968).
11. See, for example, the writings of Robert Hooke, the curator in charge of experi-
ments at the Royal Society: “Such Experiments therefore, wherein Nature is as
’twere put to Shifts and forc’d to confess, either directly or indirectly the Truth
of what we inquire, are the best if they could be met with.” Cited in Nelle, “Im
Rausch der Dinge,” 145.
12. Adorno, “Ernst Kurths ‘Musikpsychologie,’ ” 350–51. Translation by Daniel
Hendrickson.
13. Weber, “Zur Psychophysik der industriellen Arbeit,” 188–89. Translation by
Daniel Hendrickson.
14. Wallon, “De quelques problèmes psycho-­physiologiques que pose le cinéma,”
15. Translation into German is mine, into English from German by Daniel
Hendrickson.
15. Wallon, “Le réel et le mental,” 456. “Entre lui [l’objet] et l’observateur, il n’y a pas
cet intervalle étanche que postulent le positivisme et, avec lui, toutes les vieilles
doctrines pour qui l’univers et l’homme en viennent à se juxtaposer comme
deux entités plus ou moins distinctes. Poussées à un degré suffisant de minutie,
les mesures de la physique montrent que l’observation modifie le fait observé,
car il n’y a pas d’observation désincarnée de toute action physique, pas plus
qu’il n’y a d’intelligence sans organes ni d’homme sans corps.” Wallon’s essay is
a thorough examination of the 1935 book by Lucien Lévy-­Bruhl, La mythologie
primitive: Le monde mythique des Australiens et des Papous (Paris: Alcan, 1935).
16. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 158.
17. Kracauer, “ ‘Marseiller Entwurf’ zu einer Theorie des Films,” 579.
18. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 170.
19. Adorno, “Musikalische Aphorismen,” 27.
20. This is from Eisenstein’s speech to Soviet filmmakers on January 8, 1935; quoted
in Eisenstein, The Eisenstein Collection, 80 (in Naum Kleiman’s “Introduction” to
the chapter “On Disney”).
21. Eisenstein, The Eisenstein Collection, 88.
22. Eisenstein, The Eisenstein Collection, 93.
23. Eisenstein, The Eisenstein Collection, 92.
24. Eisenstein, The Eisenstein Collection, 107.
25. Eisenstein, The Eisenstein Collection, 101.
26. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 287.
27. See, for example, Lyotard’s position on film aesthetics as explosion in L’acinéma.
Lyotard, L’acinéma.
28. Eisenstein, The Eisenstein Collection, 126.
29. Eisenstein, The Eisenstein Collection, 141.
30. Eisenstein, The Eisenstein Collection, 141.
31. Eisenstein, The Eisenstein Collection, 142.

Film as Experiment in Animation • 143

32. Eisenstein, The Eisenstein Collection, 94.
33. Eisenstein, The Eisenstein Collection, 158. Zola, however, does not speak of
“reality” but of “a corner of creation”: “J’exprimerai toute ma pensée en disant
qu‘une oeuvre d’art est un coin de la création vu à travers un tempérament”
(I will express the entirety of my thought in saying that a work of art is a corner
of creation seen through a temperament). Zola, Mes haines, 234.
34. Völker, Ästhetik der Lebendigkeit, 263. Translation is mine.
35. Völker, Ästhetik der Lebendigkeit, 262.

144  • Gertrud Koch

9 : : Frame Shot: Vertov’s Ideologies of Animation
M ih a e l a M i h a il ova a nd Joh n MacK ay

We could begin by postulating that only the technological-­economic

limitations plaguing Soviet art workers in the early 1920s—absence
of equipment, most pertinently, along with shortages of raw film—­
prevented the extravagantly gifted creators associated with Soviet con-
structivism from engaging with animated film as seriously and cre-
atively as they practiced (among other things) graphic, architectural,
clothing, and industrial design. Indeed, if we think of constructivist ani-
mation during the movement’s glory years, little comes to mind apart
from the moderately well-­known mobile intertitles that Aleksandr Rod-
chenko created, in some cases reworking some of his own “spatial con-
structions,” for Dziga Vertov’s Kino-­Pravda (Film Truth) experimental
newsreel series (1922–25). Not much to go on, it would seem: still, what
light might these intertitles shed on the obscure relationships between
animation, constructivism, and Vertov’s “kino-­eye” cinema?
To be sure, some of these intertitles can be called animations only in a
loose sense. Near the beginning of Kino-­Pravda’s fourteenth issue (1922),
which was dedicated to the Fourth Congress of the Communist Interna-
tional in Moscow (November 5 to December 5, 1922), a Rodchenko con-
struction, identified by Yuri Tsivian as Spatial Construction 15 (1921), is
shown turning clockwise around its vertical axis and bearing the words
“ON ONE” on one side and “SIDE” on the other (see figure 9.1).1 These
five seconds of rotation are wedged between a shot of a globe turning
counterclockwise and evidently advancing toward the camera, and a
shot of another Rodchenko construction with the letters of the word
“America” distributed more or less syllabically over its rotating surfaces.
Thus, it could be said that we are looking at a moving photograph of
a sculpture turned into a suspended mobile rather than animation as
Fi g u re 9 . 1 Spinning Rodchenko title from Kino-­Pravda 14 (Dziga Vertov, 1922).
Source: Russian State Archive of Film and Photo Documents 12998.

such. But surely this is a borderline case, and we might feel justified in
considering it a very simple kind of stop-­action (or to use the parlance of
1920s Soviet animators, volume [obyomnaia]) animation,2 at least in light
of the intention animating Vertov’s decision to make his titles move:
Considering it established that the motion picture is but a skeleton of
intertitles plus cine-­illustrations,
In the name of the liberation of cine-­spectacle from the literary yoke
I propose:
break the back of this scum! 3
...
Illuminated advertisements, a slogan written in fireworks, a slogan [on]
a revolving construction, and similar mobile things [dejstvennye veshchi]
that fulfill the task they are set, are acceptable to us.
In those cases when the construction of a slogan does not satisfy us,
we temporarily retain the right to construct the slogan we need, a slogan
in movement that would provide the correct interval between the shots
coming before and after.
...

146  • Mihaela Mihailova and John MacKay

Fi g u re 9 . 2 First shot of Kino-­Pravda 14: another Rodchenko construction, turn-
ing. Source: Russian State Archive of Film and Photo Documents 12998.

The mobile intertitles of Kino-­Pravda 14 are just a bolder step in the

only correct direction: toward the complete destruction of static inter-
titles.4

True, the motives behind Vertov’s decision to put his intertitles into
motion are not easy to grasp or summarize—they evidently derive from
both his antiliterary bias and his futurist enthusiasm for speed and mo-
bility, among other inspirations—but in the case under discussion, it
seems that the intershot intervals that he is at pains to articulate in-
volve movement and meaning at once. Kino-­Pravda 14’s very first shot is
of another Rodchenko construction, a simple turbine-­like affair turning
in two abrupt shifts on its horizontal axis to announce the newsreel’s
title (“Kino / Pravda / 14”) (figure 9.2). After a credits title in construc-
tivist lettering, the spinning motif returns, along inconsistent axes and
in varied directions, with the globe and the two whirling constructions,
thus providing a strong “revolving” cadence as prelude to the newsreel
to come.
Turning carries semantic-­associative weight as well, activated above
all by the globe—shown three more times, along with images of maps

Frame Shot • 147
of both the Western and Eastern Hemispheres—and by the internation-
alist occasion of the newsreel itself, the Comintern’s fourth congress,
here announced in what the constructivists hoped would be the Left’s
“new international” style: their own. The rotations may well encrypt per-
sonal references (Vertov derives from vertetsia, meaning “to turn”) and a
political one (“revolution”), together with the more narrowly geopoliti-
cal motif.5
Two other features of the intertitle, slightly less obvious than its mo-
bility, link it to constructivist practice in a more interesting way. First, it
is, as Vertov puts it, “a slogan [on] a revolving construction,” or rather a
fragment of such a slogan, a rhetorical device that introduces a capital-
ist world dominated by the United States, incorporating nations “obedi-
ent to America” (pokornye Amerike), such as France and Britain, and
contrasted with the USSR—the “other side,” a phrase introduced on
yet another spinning Rodchenko construction—about two and a half
minutes into the film. And slogan making, or more generally the practi-
cal application of constructivist design to the production of announce-
ments, propaganda posters, and (above all) advertisements, would be-
come one of the hallmarks of the movement (especially during the years
1922 to 1925).6
Second, the intertitle is a quite strictly modular construction,
“knocked together out of ten identical 9-­ inch-­long square-­ profile
wooden bars extending in three dimensions at right or 45-­degree angles
to each other.”7 As the art historian Maria Gough has shown, modular
principles of construction—that is, the use of uniform, standardized
units, whether two- or three-­dimensional, to generate “things” (vesh-
chi) of unpredictable scale and formal shape—became central to con-
structivist theory and practice beginning around 1922, particularly in
the work of Rodchenko, Karl Ioganson, and El Lissitzky.8 Indeed, we are
tempted to suggest that modularity—an unimpeachably contempo-
rary and industrial approach to construction, as well as a strategy for
reducing the role of the artist’s subjectivity in the creative process—is
part of what is announced by the intertitle, however briefly and crypti-
cally: a new, constructivist practice, and perhaps a new constructivist
film practice, will take these principles of making as its own.
The twin (and, in a certain way, related) preoccupations with adver-
tising propaganda and modularity, emerging out of the constructivist
matrix of the early 1920s, underlie Vertov’s own enduring interest in
and practice of animation, from the Kino-­Pravda period onward to the
stop-­action animations in Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and animated

148  • Mihaela Mihailova and John MacKay

sequences planned for major late (and unrealized) projects, such as The
Girl and the Giant (1940).9 As a platform for propaganda, advertisement,
slogan, and announcement, animation technique had the advantage of
being able to generate images at once vividly distinct—distinct, that is,
from more straightforwardly photographic mimeses of the world—and
immediately legible, by virtue of the way that putatively basic principles,
ideas, or essences, such as “the global / international” in Kino-­Pravda 14,
could be built into their visible structure.10
The best way to practically command those basic principles—not to
know them, but to mobilize them, make them manifest—was to con-
figure them out of still more basic, essentially neutral (modular) ele-
ments, in line with the most up-­to-­date industrial theory and practice.
Such was the method, on this reading, of animation as such, insofar as
it was a way of building up a film piece by piece, in a process of “frame
shooting” (kadro-­syomka, in the parlance of the 1920s), rather than
fashioned through the larger “shot” units typical of more conventional
photographic cinema. However, modular animation practice had impor-
tant ideological ramifications for Vertov as well, insofar as it offered cer-
tain tropes that enabled him to link his own work in film with advanced
industrial labor, and indeed with the labor of machines as such.

From Agitation to Ads

In many ways, Vertov’s experiments in Kino-­Pravda set the tone for

the initial development of drawn Soviet animation, not least in Kino-­
Pravda’s application to advertising and propaganda. In his memoir, aptly
entitled Kadr za kadrom (Frame by frame), Ivan Ivanov-­Vano—a major
member of the first contingent of Soviet animators, along with Vladi-
mir Suteyev, Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg, and Nikolai Khodataev—
writes that animators should recall Vertov with gratitude for involving
a small collective of animators (most notably Aleksandr Bushkin) in the
production of Kino-­Pravda.11 The animation scholar Sergei Asenin de-
scribes Vertov’s inclusion of drawn imagery in Kino-­Pravda as insepa-
rably linking animation in the Soviet Union “from its first steps” with
political issues, political journalism, topical subjects, satirical political
posters, and newspaper caricature.12
Commercials composed a large proportion of all early Soviet ani-
mated film. In 1926 Mikhail Boytler claimed that film advertisements
(including animated ones) were already among the more widely em-
ployed, diverse, and well-­developed varieties of reklama (commercials

Frame Shot • 149
Fi g u re 9 . 3 The cameramen Mikhail Kaufman (Vertov’s brother) and Ivan Belia-
kov at an animation stand. Still from A Survey of Goskino Production in March 1924
(1924). Source: Russian State Archive of Film and Photo Documents 11622.

or ads) on view in the Soviet Union.13 As in so many areas of early Soviet

film, Vertov was one of the pioneers not only of animation and film ad-
vertising but also of their cross-­fertilization. In his 1923 article “Ad-
vertising Films,” for instance, he includes two examples of animated
commercials, the “special-­effects advertisement” (stop-­action) and the
“cartoon advertisement” (drawn), in his long list of extravagant and
often amusing pitches (Vertov obviously had an aptitude for this sort of
thing).14 The rise of the animated ad had coincided with the great years
of constructivist advertising (1923–25), with Rodchenko and the poet
Vladimir Mayakovsky only the most prominent of the artists engaged in
the design of posters, product labels and packaging, journal and maga-
zine covers, logos, trademarks, and much else. This was all in an effort
to at once help rebuild the shattered post–Russian Civil War economy,
participate in a practical (rather than irrelevantly artistic) way in the
construction of a new society, and create models for reklama—a repre-
sentational form out of place, it would seem, in a postcapitalist coun-
try—proper to Communism.15
Some of the most interesting constructivist ads seem to reflexively

150  • Mihaela Mihailova and John MacKay

theorize socialist advertising as such, as in the case of a remarkable 1923
mise en abyme maquette by Rodchenko and Mayakovsky for a cooking-­
oil ad, where the ad (in Leah Dickerman’s words) “uses a smaller image
of itself as the label on its central bottle of oil . . . [to conjure] a mythic
socialist plenitude[,] . . . at the same time [working] to develop a coordi-
nated system of identity between the advertising graphic and the prod-
uct itself.”16 Vertov also managed to enclose his sole-­surviving entirely
animated film, Soviet Toys (1924), in a kind of self-­reflexive bracket—of
a type familiar from his films of the Kino-­Pravda period, and later funda-
mental to the structure of Man with a Movie Camera—that draws atten-
tion to the power of animated advertising as such. This is perhaps not
apparent on a first viewing, as the central section of Soviet Toys is taken
up by a crude and somewhat bloodthirsty political allegory whose ico-
nography (some drawn, some cut out) derives to a considerable extent
from Russian Civil War–era models. In that main narrative, Soviet Toys
offers a representation of the capacity of united workers, peasants, and
soldiers of the Red Army to extract surplus (through taxation) from New
Economic Policy–era capitalists (“Nepmen”), and eventually to remove
the latter and their hangers-­on (priests, prostitutes) from the historical
stage entirely.17
What is most interesting for our purposes is the cartoon’s overt if
inconsistent cinematic self-­reflexivity: nothing new in animation glob-
ally by 1924 (think of Dave and Max Fleischer’s great “Out of the Ink-
well” series of 1918–29, for example), but quite startling in the otherwise
unsophisticated Soviet Toys. A certain self-­consciousness is announced
with the very first (animated) title card: two cameras, top right and bot-
tom left, and pointed left and right, respectively, flank the names of the
film and the studio (“Goskino,” centered top and bottom). The names are
apparently no more than logos at this point, but they preface more overt
metacinematic references to come.
About eight minutes and forty seconds into the film, after the ap-
pearance of a series of ornament-­like Red Army soldiers (who eventu-
ally gather into an arboreal configuration that will double as a scaffold),
a strange new personage, with bulbous eyepieces and a whirling movie-­
camera shutter protruding from his mouth, walks on from the left.
Granted one of several iris-­shot close-­ups included in Soviet Toys, this
figure is identified as “goskino film advertising” (Kino-­Reklama
Goskino), performing a cameo appearance. He then reverses direction
and leaves screen left (see figure 9.4). Immediately following his depar-
ture, the bloated and much-­abused Nepman also shrinks to ornament

Frame Shot • 151
F i g u re 9 . 4 “Goskino Film Advertising,” from Soviet Toys (1924). Source: 35mm
print, Yale University.

size, thus suggesting through contiguity (as Lora Wheeler Mjolsness

has hinted) the power of cinema to provide different ways of imagining
otherwise inert and recalcitrant realities.18
At the very end of the film, after the central narrative has concluded
with the allegorical hanging of class enemies on the branches of the
rather complicated Red Army “tree” (which converts suddenly and fes-
tively into a “Soviet Christmas tree”), a wipe reveals another (animated)
scene. This scene is perspectivally relatively “realistic,” showing part of
the studio where the film we have just seen was presumably made and
first exhibited (see figure 9.5). A man in an overcoat looking to the right
watches, in seeming delight and amazement, what is apparently the
conclusion of the film we have just seen (i.e., Soviet Toys). The goggled
mascot of Goskino Film Advertising sits near him at a desk, while the
man—evidently a client of Goskino Film Advertising, perhaps even a

152  • Mihaela Mihailova and John MacKay

Fi g u re 9 . 5 Still from Soviet Toys (1924). Source: 35mm print, Yale University.

Nepman—comes to his senses, mugs a bit, takes a seat, and looks down
at a piece of paper in his hand. That paper, the last shot reveals, is a
simple flyer for “Goskino / Film Newsreel / Film Advertising / Tverskaia
Street 24 / Tel. 5-­70-­71.” Thus, Soviet Toys turns out to have been an ani-
mated ad for animated advertising; and the film’s politically ambivalent
message, on this meta level, seems to be that animated film techniques,
fortified by the long agitprop experience during the Russian Civil War,
might be effectively mobilized for purposes other than political agita-
tion, attracting both audiences and new clients.

Units of Motion

But what can animated ads—rather expensive and labor-­intensive,

after all—do that other ads can’t, or can’t do as well? Both in Russia
and abroad, and well before 1917, animated film had been identified
as a valuable tool for the conveying of complex messages with clarity,
force, and (sometimes) humor—sometimes in advertisements, but par-
ticularly in educational and scientific applications. (Intriguingly, some
important early advertising theory identified pedagogy as one of the

Frame Shot • 153
powers of filmed ads in general, insofar as they tended to teach audi-
ences something about the commodities they were peddling, including
details about how they were produced.)19 When the pioneering producer
Aleksandr Khanzhonkov established a scientific-­educational division
in his studio in 1911, he recruited Vladislav Starevich, then involved in
filming insects and soon to become one of the greatest early animators,
as both consultant and filmmaker. For Khanzhonkov, Starevich pro-
duced some of the first successful Russian educational animations. One
of the studio’s most popular productions of 1913 was Drunkenness and Its
Consequences, starring the acting legend Ivan Mozzhukhin and incorpo-
rating a Starevich animation in which a tiny devil crawled out of a half-­
empty bottle of vodka—presaging a famous “trick” shot in Man with a
Movie Camera by some fifteen years!—and then proceeded to tease and
torment the drunkard (played by Mozzhukhin).20
By the 1920s, important Soviet writers on film, such as Lazar Su-
kharebsky and A. Tyagai, presented animated imagery as the most suit-
able means of visualizing and explaining scientific phenomena and hid-
den physical and chemical processes, and as a particularly powerful
exploitation of that capacity to enhance “visibility” (naglyadnost) specific
to cinema. Both authors provided examples of educational and instruc-
tional cartoons and praised their pedagogical and illustrative value. In
his 1928 book Uchebnoe kino (Educational cinema), Sukharebsky discusses
how animation could be used to illustrate the mechanisms of nutrient
absorption in trees in such a dynamic and clear way that it would make
the principle accessible and understandable to children.21
For his part, Tyagai mentions that animation had been used in the
creation of a series of instructional films about petroleum with titles like
Drilling and Prospecting.22 He references a 1926 film titled From Artisanal
Labor to the Mechanization of the Silicate Industry, wherein animated
sequences depict the work of the most advanced glass-­production ma-
chinery available in Soviet factories.23 Tyagai extols the “practical signifi-
cance” of such films and suggests that they may substitute for foreign
technical literature, obviously less readily accessible due to its reliance
on verbal, as opposed to visual, instruction. Animation, he stresses,
allows the filmmaker to show the viewer the fundamental processes per-
colating beneath high-­speed mechanical movement, processes virtually
always hidden from the human gaze.24
Many of Vertov’s better-­known animations have clear expository mo-
tivations, such as the animated diagrams explaining radio installation

154  • Mihaela Mihailova and John MacKay

in Kino-­Pravda 23 from 1925 (a.k.a. Radio-­Pravda), or the stop-­action ani-
mations of bread in Stride, Soviet from 1926 (a fanciful illustration of
wartime rationing and its welcome termination), or of the movie cam-
era toward the end of Man with the Movie Camera from 1929 (illustrat-
ing the main parts and basic functions of the camera and tripod).25 And
his most famous animation-­related statement seems to refer as much
to this power of (in Donald Crafton’s words) “scientifically concretizing
abstract thought”26 as to any capacity for projecting utterly novel imag-
inings:
Cinema is, as well, the art of inventing movements of things in space in
response to the demands of science; it embodies the inventor’s dream—
be he scholar, artist, engineer, or carpenter; it is the realization by kino-
chestvo of that which cannot be realized in life.
Drawings in motion. Blueprints in motion. Plans for the future. The
theory of relativity on the screen.27

Thus, a certain rationalizing motive, grounded in the conviction that

generalizable principles do subtend chaotic reality and can be legibly
represented, lies behind these applications of animation.
In this light, Vertovian animation might be usefully related to its
dialectically opposite number, namely the use of film by Soviet expo-
nents of the Frederick Winslow Taylor–inspired scientific organization
of labor (nauchnaia organizatsiia truda, often abbreviated as not), not
to synthesize individual moments (or frames) into an animated illusion
of movement but rather to break larger-­scale movements down into
what was believed to be their component parts: to do animation back-
ward, as it were. The Taylorist method, wrote the great not theorist
Osip Ermanskii, involved “the organization [not only] of lifeless objects,
but of living humans [as well]. All movements performed by a worker
. . . are broken down into elements, into single, basic partial movements
[Teilbewegungen].” This segmentation was executed in order to measure
the time and effort taken to perform each movement, with an eye to re-
ducing them and thereby secure “some profit, some savings.”28 Film en-
abled both the character and the duration of movement to be analyzed:
“A stopwatch is put next to a worker [who is being filmed]; the clock is
filmed along with the worker. The place of the clock hand at the begin-
ning and end of the film strip, corresponding to the beginning and end
of a given partial movement, enable the determination, through sub-
traction, the length of time taken by this movement.”29 That is, move-

Frame Shot • 155
ment is taken as ideally modular, as composed of basic elements that can
be refined and redistributed in accord with some larger project of effi-
cient production.30
We suggest, as have other scholars, that Vertov’s preoccupation with
the visual segmentation of work processes reflects the influence of these
Taylorist practices of managerial labor analysis, an influence shared by
his constructivist contemporaries (see figures 9.6 and 9.7).31 This influ-
ence is particularly evident in the three Ukrainian features released dur-
ing the period of the First Five-­Year Plan: The Eleventh Year (1928), Man
with a Movie Camera, and Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass (1931).
For “kino-­eye” and constructivism alike, adopting the modular was one
way to replace studio-­based models of creative practice with those of the
factory, and thus a means of undoing the distinction separating artis-
tic from industrial kinds of production, and indeed between intellectual
and manual labor.32
It worth noting in this connection, though perhaps unsurprising,
that an important strand of Soviet animation theory of the 1920s began
defining animation in effectively modular terms. Bushkin, in particu-
lar, took issue with the odd application of the term multiplication to
animated film (still today normally called multiplikatsiia in Russian),
noting that it was live-­action film that involved the shooting of “mul-
tiple” frames with each turn of the camera’s handle, in contrast to the
frame-­by-­frame fixing of every constituent part of a movement typical
of animation. In that sense, Bushkin argues, animation would more pre-
cisely be termed “frame shooting” (kadro-­syomka), where the basic units
of the film are taken to be frame-­sized modules, rather than shots of un-
predictable duration.33
Indeed, we wish to conclude by speculating, largely on the basis of
new archival evidence, that Vertov took frame shooting—that is, a con-
ception of filmmaking as modular—as a more general model for his
mature practice (at least in the late silent period), in part because the
modular was so evidently up-­to-­date as a method of construction, and
so closely affined with industrial labor. The evidence in question is Ver-
tov’s 1929 diagram of a fragment of a montage phrase from Man with a
Movie Camera (figure 9.8), which provides a chart or schema of a brief
(thirty-­one-shot) passage of extremely rapid montage from near the end
of the film’s fourth reel. Along the chart’s vertical axis, on the left-­hand
side, are the main categories of represented object in the sequence: the
lens of the movie camera, the man with the movie camera, “light ma-
chines,” “dark machines,” and so on (there are nine categories in all).

156  • Mihaela Mihailova and John MacKay

F i g u re s 9 . 6 a n d 9 . 7 The work of making cigarette cartons, broken into
­component parts, from Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Source: 35mm print, Yale
­University.
F i g ure 9. 8 Vertov’s handwritten “diagram of a fragment of a montage phrase from mwmc [Man with a Movie Camera].” Source: Russian State
Archive of Literature and Art f. 2091, op. 2, d. 407, l. 65.
F i g u re s 9 . 9 a n d 9 . 10 Alternation of “man with the movie camera” with
“light machines” from Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Source: 35mm print, Yale
Uni­versity.
Fi g u re s 9 . 11 an d 9. 1 2 Alternation of “man with a movie camera” and “cable
factory machines” from Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Source: 35mm print, Yale
University.
Fi g u re 9 . 13 Penultimate single-­frame image of camera lens (filming the camera)
in the “fragment of a montage phrase.” Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Source:
35mm print, Yale University.

Along the horizontal axis at the top of the chart stretches a sequential
numbering of all the shots, from one to thirty-­one.
On the chart proper, Vertov has inscribed the number of frames (not
seconds!) devoted to each shot: one frame of “the man with the movie
camera” alternating with two frames of “the movement of light ma-
chines” from shots 1 to 7; a single one-­frame alternation of “dark ma-
chines” and “man with a movie camera” in shots 8 and 9; one single-­
frame alternation of “machines in the cable factory” with “man with the
movie camera” in shots 10 and 11; back to the one-­frame alternations
of “dark machines” and the “man” in shots 12 and 13; a complex series
of one frame of the “cable factory machines” (shot 14), one frame of the
“man” (15), one frame of “light machines” (16), two frames of the “man”
(17), another single frame of the “cable factory machines” (18), and one
frame of the “dark” machines (19); then a rapid one-­frame alternation
from shots 20 to 29 between “light” and “cable factory” machines, where
the “man” has dropped out entirely; a single frame of the camera lens in

Frame Shot • 161
shot 30; and, finally, 130 frames (a virtual eternity!) of a policeman di-
recting traffic, one of the film’s central motifs and self-­reflexive indices.
The most remarkable parts of the schema, however, are at lines 5, 6,
and 7 on the left-­hand side of the graph. For the categories “cogwheels”
and “blast furnaces,” no indications of numbers of frames are given. In-
stead the simple word pausa (pause) is written across the page. This is
peculiar at first sight, for why would an element not in the sequence find
any place in the notation whatsoever? A moment’s comparative reflec-
tion, however, makes clear the actual structural model for the notation
and the sequence. That model is plainly musical, with the frames stand-
ing in for tones, and the absence of frames representing rests (pausa also
means “[musical] rest” in Russian), inserted within the overall orches-
tration of the material. Just as a composer or arranger does not simply
let the string portion of an orchestration vanish from the page when
the strings are not participating in the piece, so too the elements of
Vertov’s visual sequence, like the blast furnace and cogwheels, inhabit
the sequence even in their absence. What Vertov is trying to do here, it
seems, is use existing, familiar ways of organizing artistic material heu-
ristically, as a kind of ladder to vastly intensified powers of (in this case)
visual perception. We can grasp musical (sonic) material of this density
and at comparable speeds, when properly organized; why not try the
same with images, even single frames?
From the perspective of ideological analysis, what is sought by this
heuristic and modular technique of frame shooting (and frame edit-
ing)—where the conception of animation as radical modularity takes
over ostensibly live-­action cinema—is total simultaneity. This simulta-
neity is about bringing audiences up to speed, on the level of percep-
tion, with the ideal perceiver, who (actually which) is of course the opti-
cal machine itself, whose industrially produced units of vision are single
frames. The technique involves a certain (purely ideological) reduction
of the distance between intellectual (Vertovian) and manual (prole-
tarian) labor as well, inasmuch as artistic strategy and industrial pro-
cess seem to converge in the kino-­eye. Is the elite filmmaker using art
(music in this case) to expand and free up the perceptual capacities of
the industrial proletariat, or is the film artist trying to find ways to orga-
nize materials in accord with the modularity and new, rapid rhythms of
industrial production (abundantly referenced in the iconography of the
sequence)? The answer, it would seem, must be both.
In tune with this musical thematic, however, we must add a final

162  • Mihaela Mihailova and John MacKay

coda: a qualification, rather, that complicates or even contravenes some
of what we have been saying, or at least confronts certain dissonances.
Vertov’s work may well be modular, and we can hardly doubt his desire
to affine his practice with that of modern industry and proletarians, but
surely his choices can also be read as drastically sui generis. They can be
as idiosyncratic in their own way as the montage and animation experi-
ments of the post–Second World War European and American avant-­
garde. And his choices can hardly be understood as the erasure through
modular procedures of (to borrow the language of the constructivist
ideologue Alexei Gan) “blind taste and aesthetic arbitrariness.”34 Much
the same could be said of Rodchenko’s revolving intertitles with which
we began: garden-­variety static intertitles, created with templates and
much despised by Vertov, are the truly standardized form of silent movie
text. Relative to these nearly invisible typographic norms, Rodchenko’s
constructions must be seen as highly eccentric outliers. Indeed, we could
compare Vertov’s frame shooting with predodecaphonic atonal compo-
sition, where the movement from each unit (note, frame) to the next is
a matter of radical, moment-­by-­moment choice, rather than efficiently
eased through adherence to paradigm or convention: artisanal (kustar-
naia) work rather than industrial.35 Yet Vertov’s constructivist and mod-
ernizing agenda can hardly be denied. And so we can see how think-
ing about Vertov’s work through animation brings to the fore the central
paradox of Man with a Movie Camera as considered within its historical
situation. In its radical and self-­conscious emphasis on construction,
frame by frame, it is at once a completely autonomous avant-­garde work
and completely participatory in the dominant production-­oriented dis-
course of the First Five-­Year Plan.

Notes

All translations are our own unless otherwise indicated.

1. Tsivian, “Turning Objects, Toppled Pictures,” 102.

2. See Bushkin, Triuki i multiplikatsiia, 15–16. The other two types identified by
Bushkin—a pioneer animator who worked with Vertov—are flat (ploskostnaia)
or drawn and mixed (smeshannaia) modes incorporating live action, drawing, or
stop-­action.
3. Russian Civil War–era bombast, recycled for Vertov’s “war” against fiction film.
4. Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (rgali [Moscow]), f. 2091, op. 2,
d. 390, ll. 7–9. “Static intertitles” here translates to plakaty nadpisej; the quota-
tion is from a talk Vertov delivered in 1923.

Frame Shot • 163
5. The newsreel’s opening section sets up a strong contrast between the U.S.-­
dominated capitalist West and the USSR as the seat of internationalism. For
more on this issue of Kino-­Pravda and the twin internationalisms of commu-
nism and constructivism, see MacKay, “Vertov and the Line.”
6. It is worth noting that in some national varieties of Spanish (e.g., that spo-
ken in Argentina), the Spanish word for propaganda is used to describe what
we term advertising: a usage whose importation into English might well prove
politically useful!
7. Tsivian, “Turning Objects, Toppled Pictures,” 103. By all appearances, the inter-
title introducing “the other side” is also built out of identical modular seg-
ments.
8. In her seminal The Artist as Producer, Gough writes of Ioganson’s discovery,
through the use of “the standardized modular unit,” of “the possibility of poten-
tially infinite expansion within a nonrelational progression” (86). In another
essay, Gough defines “nonrelational progression” as “a structure governed by
the repetition of homogeneous units rather than the compositional balancing
of heterogeneous ones” (“Constructivism Disoriented,” 97). See also Hubertus
Gassner’s description of Ioganson’s structures as “made of standardized ele-
ments and homogeneous materials and rendered transformative through vari-
able central connections or kinetic mounting” (“The Constructivists,” 313).
9. For a script and storyboards of The Girl and the Giant—perhaps the most impor-
tant of Vertov’s many tragically unrealized projects—see Vertov, Iz Naslediia,
302–26. It seems that Vertov planned to use only stop-­action animation in this
film, and he was opposed by this time to the inclusion of any drawn animated
sections (rgali f. 2019, op. 2, d. 215, l. 30; rgali f. 2019, op. 2, d. 429, l. 18).
10. Let us qualify our thesis here by acknowledging that early animation did not
always strive to be distinct from photographic mimesis. Consider, for instance,
Winsor McCay’s The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918).
11. Bushkin worked with Vertov on some now-­lost animations (Humoresques,
1924), a section of Kino-­Pravda 23 (1925), and wrote one of the first important
Russian-­language books on animation (Triuki i multiplikatsiia). Ivanov-­Vano de-
scribes Bushkin as “one of the first to sense the great potential of using anima-
tion as a means of visual agitation and cinematic propaganda.” Ivanov-­Vano,
Kadr za kadrom, 22. For an overview of Vertov’s work in animation, complete
with filmography, see Deriabin, “Vertov i animatsiia.”
12. Asenin, Volshebniki ekrana, 21. Good examples of animated political caricature
can be found in the mid-­1920s newsreel, which sometimes concluded with
animated versions of Viktor Deni’s satirical cartoons. See Sovkinozhurnal, no.
23 / 42 (1926); available at the Russian State Archive of Film and Photo Docu-
ments (rgakfd) 816; and Sovkinozhurnal, no. 22 / 41 (1926) at rgakfd 263.
Sovkinozhurnal no. 37 / 95 (1927) ends with a folktale-­like satirical animation
urging peasants to open bank accounts (rgakfd 1660).
13. Boytler, Reklama i kino-­reklama, 3. Examples of animated advertising from 1920
to the early 1930s would include Aleksandr Ptushko’s extraordinary Sluchai na

164  • Mihaela Mihailova and John MacKay

 stadione (Incident at the stadium) from 1929 (available at rgakfd 3924), which
is actually an ad for the film Vsesoiuznaia Spartakiada (All-­Union Spartakiade,
1929); and an ad for the new Palace of Arts of the USSR included in Sovkinozhur-
nal 10 / 273 (1930) (rgakfd 2113).
14. Vertov, “Advertising Films,” in Kino-­Eye, 25.
15. See Dickerman, “The Propagandizing of Things,” esp. 66–72. To be sure, the use
of animation in advertising was neither a novel phenomenon nor limited to the
Soviet Union. Many animators on both sides of the Atlantic began their careers
by working on advertisements. While American cartoon directors often moved
away from this type of production as their careers took off, their European col-
leagues tended to remain involved with commercial filmmaking. See Crafton,
Before Mickey (1993), 228–30.
16. Dickerman, “The Propagandizing of Things,” 71.
17. The New Economic Policy (1922–28) is a period during which limited private
enterprise was encouraged for purposes of economic development. For a recent
examination of this film with animation history in mind, see Mjolsness, “Dziga
Vertov’s Soviet Toys.”
18. Mjolsness, “Dziga Vertov’s Soviet Toys,” 263.
19. See, for instance, Hartungen, Psychologie der Reklame, 195.
20. See “Spisok kinematograficheskikh kartin, kotorye dopushcheny k publich-
nomu demonstrirovaniiu,” Vestnik Kinematografii 87, no. 7 (April 1, 1914): 51;
and Ginzburg, Kinematografiia Dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii, 96; Roshal’, Nachalo
Vsekh Nachal, 58.
21. Sukharebsky, Uchebnoe kino, 15.
22. Tyagai, Kino v pomoshche tekhnicheskomu podkhodu, 16. Almost three decades
later, the famous animation team Halas and Batchelor directed the animated
shorts We’ve Come a Long Way (1951), which tells the history of the oil tanker
and Down a Long Way (1954), which illustrates the functioning of an oil well.
23. Tyagai, Kino v pomoshche tekhnicheskomu podkhodu, 9. The Russian word for
“labor” used here is kustarnichestvo.
24. Tyagai, Kino v pomoshche tekhnicheskomu podkhodu, 15. Once again, similar dis-
cussions were taking place abroad, particularly in the United States. In 1926
John A. Norling and Jacob F. Leventhal wrote that animation had “become of
increasing value to every branch of industry and science.” Like their Soviet con-
temporaries, they suggested that, in the field of education, animation is more
valuable than any other mode of filmmaking, since it can show the “most intri-
cate mechanical actions.” Norling and Leventhal, “Some Developments in the
Production of Animated Drawings,” 60–61.
25. Vertov’s animated tripod looks remarkably similar to Starevich’s animated
grasshopper in The Grasshopper and the Ant (1911), a film that Vertov exhibited
many times on agit-­trains in 1920.
26. Crafton, Before Mickey (1993), 235.
27. Vertov, “we: Variant of a Manifesto,” in Kino-­Eye, 9; kinochestvo is an early term
for Vertov’s own “kino-­eye” (kino-­oko) nonfiction experimental practice. Esther

Frame Shot • 165
 Leslie glosses the passage as follows: “Film must broadcast that which cannot
be realized in life, and this will allow the analytical, scientific attitude, the dis-
section of reality. And it will allow an opening onto the future, the possibilities
of the new world, on the bases of the science and technique of the present”
(Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands, 224).
28. Ermanski, Wissenschaftliche Betriebsorganisation und Taylor-­System, 110. This
was a translation of Ermanski’s highly popular Nauchnaia organizatsiia truda i
proizvodstva v sisteme Teilora, which appeared in Moscow the same year in the
first of five editions. Of course, such procedures had their roots in the classic
chronophotographic experiments of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-­Jules
Marey. Marey, in particular, had been known in Russia at least since 1875, when
a translation of his 1873 Machine animale: Locomotion terrestre et aérienne ap-
peared as Mekhanika Zhivotnago Organizma: Peredvizhenie po zemle i po vozdukhu
(St. Petersburg: Znanie, 1875), and he was regularly recalled in prerevolution-
ary film journals (e.g., “Pamiatnik frantsuzskomu uchonomu Zhiuliu Marej—­
pervomu izobretateliu kinematografa,” Vestnik Kinematografii 92, no. 12 [June
21, 1914]: 13). A 1930 book on scientific uses of the movie camera, cowritten by
Sukharebskii and the animator Aleksandr Ptushko, mentions Marey as the first
to use the camera in physics. L. Sukharebskii and A. Ptushko, Spetsialnye Spo-
soby Kinos’emki (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1930), 3.
29. Ermanski, Wissenschaftliche Betriebsorganisation und Taylor-­System, 155.
30. On the use of film to Taylorist ends in the United States during the same
period, see Grieveson, “The Work of Film in the Age of Fordist Mechanization,”
esp. 30–34.
31. Among the earliest important discussions of the link between Vertov and Tay-
lor are in Aronowitz, “Film,” esp. 118–21; and Linhart, Lénine, les paysans, Taylor,
esp. 129–33.
32. On Rodchenko’s conceptualization of “construction” as the organization of
modular units with a distinct utilitarian goal in mind, see Lodder, Russian Con-
structivism, 73.
33. Bushkin, Triuki i multiplikatsiia, 5.
34. Cited in Gough, The Artist as Producer, 86. For an essay that touches on some of
the avant-­gardists who might be considered in these terms, see Tode, “Absolute
Kinetika.”
35. On the problems emerging from the demands of and resistance to standardiza-
tion, see Adorno, “Criteria of New Music,” esp. 175–93.

166  • Mihaela Mihailova and John MacKay

10 : : Signatures of Motion: Len Lye’s Scratch
Films and the Energy of the Line
A n dre w R . Joh nst on

Line, no matter how supple, light or uncertain, always implies a force, a direction.
It is energon work, and it displays the traces of its pulsation and self-­consumption.
Line is action become visible.
Roland Barthes, “Non Multa Sed Multum”

After a decade-long hiatus in which he mostly produced wartime docu-

mentaries and military training films, Len Lye in the 1950s once again
began using the technique of direct animation that he had helped pio-
neer more than twenty years earlier. These previous films, such as Colour
Box (1935), Colour Flight (1938), and Swinging the Lambeth Walk (1939),
develop what Lye calls a “sensory-­ballet” in which abstract forms and
music are knit together with color to produce sensations of motion.1 The
point was to create a sensual experience of pleasure generated through
color whose abstract and direct appeal avoided narrative forms and the
kinds of associations that Lye believed plagued realistic imagery. In the
early 1940s, Lye stopped producing these films, in part because of the
war and an increasing scarcity of financial supporters and in part be-
cause of his growing interest in politics and a desire to counter Nazi
propaganda films.2 However, when invited to submit a film to the
1958 International Experimental Film Competition in Brussels by his
friend Alberto Cavalcanti, Lye produced a direct animation but moved
away from painting bold colors as he had done previously. Instead, he
scratched into black 16mm film stock to produce lines, points, strokes,
and zigzags that frenetically move across the screen and play not only
with two-­dimensional space but also with depth perspective, as some
forms twist and rotate on the z-­axis. The resulting film, Free Radicals
(1958, revised 1979), is an ecstatic celebration of energy that elides any
kind of figuration and instead embraces a profoundly chaotic abstrac-
tion. Producing this film was no simple task. Because of the small scale
in which Lye was working, he explains in his writings that when making
etchings into the filmstrip he had to keep the needle very still while af-
fecting its direction by moving other parts of his body, so that the re-
sulting movements of the line are registrations of his own kinesis. It
is the energy and sensation associated with movement that, according
to these writings, he conveys through these films, generating formally
innovative works that also open spectators to a new understanding of
motion and how it is sensed by the body.
Such activity is achieved through a misleading simplicity of form
whose expressive power has been the subject of numerous investiga-
tions into modernist aesthetics and the power of abstraction: the line.
Little criticism exists on Lye’s scratch works, but what does often places
them within a tradition of abstract expressionism that was popular in
the artistic circles that Lye circulated through in 1950s New York. Wystan
Curnow, for instance, argues that Lye’s interest in atavistic thought and
ideas about a possible link between the unconscious and proprioception
indicates an indebtedness to the aesthetic argued over and defined by
critics such as Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Louis Finkel-
stein.3 Each of these critics, to various degrees, claim that the gestural
abstractions of Jackson Pollock and others bare the afterlife of the art-
ist’s unconscious subjectivity. Associating a gestural mark or inscription
with the articulation of this form of subjectivity, however, is reductive of
Lye’s work and, as other scholars and critics point out, the work of other
artists who traditionally fall into the canon of abstract expressionism or
action painting. T. J. Clark points out that though the space of Pollock’s
canvases reveals an autonomous, subjective realm produced outside the
force of market operations, “the marks in these paintings . . . are not
meant to be read as consistent trace of a making subject, but rather as a
texture of interruptions, gaps, zigzags, a-­rhythms and incorrectnesses:
all of which signify a making, no doubt, but at the same time the absence
of a singular maker—if by that we mean a central, continuous psyche
persisting from start to finish.”4 If we sever the associations of Lye’s ges-
tural lines, or what he calls “figures in motion,” from the divestiture of
Lye’s unconscious, what do we make of these raw, abstract lines that spin
or wiggle frenetically across the screen? Why does Lye turn to this form
of abstraction compared to his earlier direct animations? What is the
relationship between animation and the dynamism or force of move-
ment that Lye wishes to generate in viewers through these abstractions?

168  • Andrew R. Johnston

Furthermore, how do these abstract animations position cinema as a
medium?
Lye posed these same questions to himself and was, throughout his
career, very deliberate about the aesthetic, formal, and technological
choices that he made in a variety of media. In his article “Why I Scratch,
or How I Got to Particles” he explains that the lines in Free Radicals,
Particles in Space (1960s, revised 1979), and Tal Farlow (1980) are meant
to be formal expressions of a vitalistic energy that swirls around indi-
viduals, or “the stuff out of which we came, and of which we are.” Such
forces are felt by the body according to Lye and are stored in what he
calls the “old brain of our primal organs,” a localization of the body’s
capacity to sense movement that has been suppressed by human evo-
lution, and further by contemporary culture, until, he says, movement
exists as a diffused and unintelligible sensation in the body.5 For Lye,
this energy is more connected to the senses and the body than to the
unconscious and repressed elements of the psyche. He explains that this
energy comes from outside the body in nature, but that it is also respon-
sible for the composition of the body. Associations or communions with
this energy are what transpire unconsciously, or more exactly, outside
analytic thought. This vitalistic formulation is similar in orientation to
the cosmological analysis put forward by Alfred North Whitehead, espe-
cially in Process and Reality (1929) where he claims that all matter, both
animate and inanimate, is constantly reemerging and forming, usually
outside of consciousness. This process of becoming takes place through
what Whitehead calls feeling, arguing that all forms of matter and life
are generated out of affect and perceptual vectors, “pulses of emotion”
or invisible energy that produce forms of relative unity. Objects such as
rocks, people, and atomic particles affect and are affected by others and
thus exist as subjects in a matrix of experience.6
Lye believed that certain types of abstraction tapped into a similar
sensual energy that structures the inner identity of both the body and
nature. Thus, the deep drumbeats on the soundtrack of Free Radicals rep-
resent, for Lye, an expression of energy in the same way as the mecha-
nistic, whirling sounds produced by his metal kinetic sculptures. For this
reason, he incorporated both kinds of sounds on the audio track of Par-
ticles in Space. The marks and lines in his scratch films visually operate
in the same manner and are oriented as modulations of energy made
visible through direct contact with the filmstrip. These have a deliberate
force that is often structured and precise rather than generated through
techniques of spontaneity that aim to perpetually hold the sense of

Signatures of Motion • 169
Fi g u re 10. 1 Filmstrip from Free Radicals (1958, revised 1979), 16mm. Courtesy of
the Len Lye Foundation and New Zealand Film Archive.

presence and articulation of subjectivity bound up, as some argue, in

Pollock’s drips. For instance, in Particles in Space, dots congregate and
sway to the sounds of one of Lye’s metal kinetic sculptures, providing an
animated visual projection of its oscillations. In Free Radicals, vertical
lines many times run down the frame to create a grid that other forms
oscillate within. Other marks in the film maintain a consistency of shape
as they spin on the z-­axis, indicating a stronger connection to Alexander
Calder’s mobiles than to Pollock’s drip paintings (see figure 10.1).
These marks and lines reveal a play not only with dimensionality and
figure-­ground relations but also with the material base through which
these forms are generated. Though Lye was indebted to a tradition of
painterly gesture and abstraction, his primary interests were in the aes-
thetics of motion and cinema’s privileged role as a medium in portraying

170  • Andrew R. Johnston

motion. This emphasis on cinema as a technological and aesthetic form
best suited for conveying and playing with senses of movement strays
from the notion that film is defined through a photochemical material
base whose indexicality aligns it with certain aesthetic modes of real-
ism. Lye’s frustration with this formulation that guided both film prac-
tice and the arguments made within what is now considered classical
film theory influenced the construction of his films and theoretical writ-
ings on cinema and points to an alternative conceptualization of cinema
rooted in graphic manipulations and sensations of movement. His focus
on the body of the spectator in his films and writings and the empa-
thetic relation between the senses and moving forms in cinema led him
to produce increasingly extreme abstractions to both distill this connec-
tion’s elements and analyze their relations. In this light, Lye’s animation
of graphic forms functions as a site for working through and exploring
how the body sensually engages with different materials, a workshop
and playground of materialist phenomenology.
Accordingly, for Lye, each type of animation contained its own spe-
cific aesthetic potentials, and scratching rather than painting lines was
a key distinction between the types of direct animations he produced.
The force applied to the celluloid through a technique of negation where
parts of the emulsion are removed produces a work with a kinetic energy
whose specificity intrigued Lye immensely. From such a seemingly anar-
chistic technique and reduction of form came a paradoxical explosion of
vitality that Lye believed better conveyed the energy of motion relative
to other abstractions. That such an exploration takes place through the
abstractions and movements of the line exposes this form’s own contra-
dictory simplicity and expressiveness. And in animation these scratch
lines move wildly while simultaneously isolating a sense of force in the
perceptual encounter with the viewer, multiplying the kind of dyna-
mism that Roland Barthes describes in the epigraph to this chapter. I
argue that when in motion, the permutations of Lye’s lines take on an
animism that no longer simply bares the afterlife of his kinesis—the
“action become visible”—but becomes a source of the lines’ own vitality
and transmission of movement in viewers. The movements of the line
become, according to Lye, the line’s own “life-­manifestations.”7
Lye was not alone when thinking through the qualities of different
media during and after the Second World War. Questions of medium
specificity and materiality were on the minds of a number of critics, espe-
cially within the arena of modern painting. Perhaps the most well-­known,
and belabored, formulation of medium specificity and the role of differ-

Signatures of Motion • 171
ent aesthetic forms in modernity came from Greenberg, a critic who has
generated both admiration and ire to the point of being so controversial
that, as Caroline A. Jones explains, his name alone sparks debates and
stands in for a number of ideas about aesthetics in a many times reduc-
tive fashion.8 Without focusing here on this discourse and its polemics,
Lye’s abstractions and writings from this time did contain traces of these
debates, though it is clear that his interest in aesthetics and abstraction
lay in the perceptual address of his films and the variations in experience
that different formal manipulations could produce. Similar to Rosalind
Krauss’s later analysis of a medium that works through this discourse,
Lye viewed cinema as a form that participated in the construction of
an aesthetic event, but a form that was in flux historically and open to
bringing new techniques, technologies, and sensual experiences into its
fold.9 This emphasis on aesthetic effects as the final address of a medium
is apparent in the opening of Lye’s first published essay where he inverts
the primacy given to form over movement in perception: “The result of
movement is form. . . . When we look at something and see the par-
ticular shape of it we are only looking at its after-­life. Its real life is the
movement by which it got to be that shape. The danger of thinking of
physical things in terms of form rather than of movement is that shape
can easily seem more harmonious, more sympathetic with other shapes
than its historical individuality justifies.”10 The consequences of such a
shift result in Lye positing “movement as a medium” whose formal in-
stantiations are more the residue of movement rather than that which
conditions its possibility. In such a framework, marks in Paleolithic cave
paintings speak to the contact of movement and also project in viewers
a sense of motion through an intuitive force. Movement exists as vitalis-
tic energy in this formulation and can be transferred through a “kinetic
kind of osmosis” between different forms and materials, or between a
body and an object, the traces of which are always visibly apparent.11
Thus, for Lye, “to extricate movement from the static finalities or shapes
which the mind imposes on living experience is to translate the mem-
ory of time back into time again—to relive experience instead of merely
remembering it.”12 Shapes and forms are not static in this formulation;
instead, they contain traces of action and duration constitutive of their
making. The movement of the hand of the artist can become embedded
within forms, and aesthetic experience is guided through a subsequent
tracing of that movement, recreating the arcs, peregrinations, and pres-
sures of the artist’s hand. This aesthetic and intuitive force described by
Lye operates through recognition and kinesthetic empathy along tactile

172  • Andrew R. Johnston

and optical vectors. Just as Wilhelm Worringer explains, when a specta-
tor traces the movement of a line in visual space, “we feel with a certain
pleasant sensation how the line as it were grows out of the spontaneous
play of the wrist,” almost as though we had drawn the line ourselves.13
In this light, the scratches in Free Radicals exist not only as the resi-
due or signatures of Lye’s bodily motion but also as vectors along which
the energy of motion exists. The title of the film came from a New York
Times article Lye had read about the existence of highly reactive and
unstable molecules called free radicals, and Lye felt that his aesthetic
shared these forms’ density of energy and eruptive potential.14 He also
believed that the title was appropriate given his own orientation to film-
making and persona as an artist. Throughout Lye’s career he felt a frus-
tration with the emphasis on photographic realism in film and the conti-
nuities of space and time constructed through what he describes as “the
Griffith technique.” Film, like kinetic sculpture, has a privileged ability
to work with the aesthetics of motion because of the way it internalizes
time. But Lye found instead that film was increasingly becoming an ad-
junct and illustration of literature and proposed ways of “get[ting] out
of the Griffith technique” in a lecture to the Film-­Makers’ Cinemath-
eque.15 One possibility he suggested was to use techniques taken from
cartoon animation in live-­action filmmaking, so that a hybrid aesthetic
would be generated that creatively explains how movement is composed
through time in cinema.
This hybridity can be seen in some of Lye’s films, such as Rainbow
Dance (1936), where colors play off one another in counterpoint as
shapes and silhouettes of bodies moving about the screen dance to the
musical accompaniment. His later complete abandonment of figuration
was not a denial of the possibilities of this combination. Instead, this
departure came about because of an increasing interest in how cinema
engenders kinesthesia in viewers through the channels of empathy de-
scribed above. While Rainbow Dance also aimed its address at sensual in-
tensities, it did so through color patterns and an identification with the
body on screen dancing and playing tennis. This produces a different aes-
thetic formation with its own specific “vibration-­pattern,” as Lye put it,
which here played with the differences between static and kinetic forms
and the sense of movement still attributed to a body frozen in action.16
In contrast, the jerky, intermittently rigid, and chaotic scratches in Free
Radicals use the gestural mark not to simply witness the body in motion
but instead to feel its corporeal pressure through the lines’ moving un-
dulations.

Signatures of Motion • 173
 Several writers have examined the pathways through which lines pro-
duce aesthetic effects on multiple perceptual registers simultaneously,
and in animation Sergei Eisenstein’s writings on Disney and the line
are the most cited. For Eisenstein, animation could offer a spectacu-
lar liberation from social and physical laws by projecting a world whose
fluidity of shape plays with subject and object relations as bodies, ob-
jects, and the environment constantly shift through a “plasmaticness”
that destabilizes forms and mesmerizes spectators in the same man-
ner as fire. Just as Lye argues, this nonrealistic motion can still produce
physiological sensations, and Eisenstein similarly links animated action
with a sensual address to the body. While the animated form of Mickey
Mouse, or other figures in Disney films, continually morphs, the contour
of such a transformation was always the line, which was responsible for
viewers sensing that these figures were alive and for producing any kin-
esthetic empathy. Eisenstein explains that the movement and combina-
tion of abstract elements in animation are a manipulation of “heartless
geometrizing and metaphysics [that] here give rise to a kind of antithe-
sis, an unexpected rebirth of universal animism.”17 The source of such
animism is not only the projected movement of these figures, so that
one believes that “if it moves, then it’s alive,” but also the observer, who
endows life to these forms with both the eye and the body.18
Traditionally, the line functions as a contour or boundary, a two-­
dimensional abstraction that demarcates the visible and establishes
figure and ground relations in a separation that usually focuses atten-
tion on the content it delimits. That said, it hardly disappears, a point
that William Hogarth makes in The Analysis of Beauty (1753). He explains
that the line “leads the eye” around forms in a game of chase, suggest-
ing that an imaginary ray emanating from the eye traces the contours
and movements of forms, imbuing motion to the object and to the sub-
ject as well.19 Eisenstein, possibly following Hogarth’s lead, makes a
similar argument about the ways that the line affects viewers sensually,
but Eisenstein recognizes how perceptual activity and attention are af-
fected by cultural and historical circumstances and how, additionally,
this context can affect the development of artworks that respond to
such changes. Maurice Merleau-­Ponty in “Eye and Mind,” a phenome-
nological analysis of painting and the visual arts, also tracks the histori-
cal nature of aesthetic encounters by showing how techniques and ten-
dencies in different periods are oriented toward and affect the body in
different ways, so that “every technique is a ‘technique of the body.’ ”20

174  • Andrew R. Johnston

In the modern art of Paul Klee the line is freed from its traditional role
of articulating visible forms, of being “the apparition of an entity upon
a vacant background” and now functions as a modulation of a space and
according structures aesthetic experience in a different way from, for in-
stance, baroque painting. Throughout the essay Merleau-­Ponty attempts
to explain the power of painting and the line, arguing that they function
as vehicles for the transmission of energy, or “the body’s animation,” be-
tween different bodies of producers and viewers. Thus, painting does not
produce an imaginary field of contemplation for the mind but rather a
sensual one directed toward the eye.
Variations in formal choices have important aesthetic consequences
when this sensual address is foregrounded. Hogarth, for example, ar-
gues that the “serpentine line” or abstract line that does not give shape
to form and does not function as a contour can produce the most aes-
thetic pleasure because of the way it sets the eye in motion. Similarly,
Worringer argues that the Gothic line that moves in and out of figura-
tive and abstract articulations also has a fascinating vitalistic power. In
Abstraction and Empathy and in his following book, Form in Gothic, Wor-
ringer argues that two fundamental aesthetic desires drive the forma-
tion of visual art through its history: abstraction and empathy. While
for Worringer empathy denotes the ways in which viewers engage with
artworks where a phenomenal world is reproduced or projected in a figu-
rative manner, abstraction pulls objects out of space and time in order
to purify them from the contingencies of nature, or from what he de-
scribes as the arbitrariness, entropy, decay, and imperfections that suf-
fuse everyday life. This is fundamentally a desire for transcendence both
from the world and from the body’s relation to this space. The pleasure
of abstraction in this argument is generated out of witnessing a form
break away from the world and become absolute in a sense, so that it
is self-­contained and self-­perpetuating, inorganic and mechanical.21
Gothic lines have this kind of energy. But they are not pure abstract
forms in the way that Worringer sees ancient Egyptian pictographs as
being a more exemplary articulation of the desire for abstraction. In-
stead, the Gothic line contains traces of both empathy and abstraction,
so that a vitality remains within this line that is not a hard geometric
figure, but one that is labyrinthine and endless, that is jagged, and that
stops and starts in interruptions and pulsations that also distinguish
it from a smooth, curved line found in classical Greek art. No longer
bound to the urge for a figurative representation or for an absolute ab-

Signatures of Motion • 175
straction, the Gothic line exhibits an independent will to form with its
own mechanical laws and values; it has an “expression of its own, which
is stronger than our life.”22
This story of the line’s revolt and independence from figuration has
been thematized by a number of filmmakers, most notably in Emile
Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) and Robert Breer’s A Man and His Dog Out
for Air (1957). In these films the dialectic between figuration and ab-
straction through the line is literally animated and cinematically rep-
resents Klee’s famous formulation of the line’s own sense of deliberate-
ness, which “the principle and active line develops freely. It goes out for
a walk so to speak, aimlessly, for the sake of a walk.”23 The lines in these
films never cease to oscillate, split, intersect, and take new directions,
creating a geometry of peregrinations no longer solely in the service of
representation. That said, their vectors still coalesce into figures whose
own disintegration keeps the oscillation between abstraction and figu-
ration moving and generates a play with expectations and form. Lye’s
lines in Free Radicals, on the other hand, are forceful graphic marks lack-
ing any kind of figuration. These lines are insubstantial, in that they de-
limit nothing and serve as ends within themselves. Instead, they focus
on the elements and processes through which form is generated, some-
thing that Klee’s line emphasizes. In his lectures and writings, Klee ex-
plains that figuration and the projection of objects and form should not
be the goal of aesthetic production. Rather, the approach to how form is
constructed should be emphasized, revealing “genesis, essence, growth
. . . [and] form as movement, action, active form.”24 Lye’s scratch lines
focus on this kind of action and take on a similarly vitalistic tenor as
they dance across the dark space of the filmstrip while never operating
as figurative contours. These independent abstractions instead attempt
to give expression to incoherent forms of energy, reveling in a figura-
tive void.
That these lines are constructed through Lye’s bodily gestures em-
phasizes this point. Rather than signifying some form of unconscious
subjectivity, these gestural lines articulate a play with indeterminacy
and structure through the at times controlled and other times chaotic
assemblage of marks. Yet the body was not the only source of energy
that could generate a force upon materials. Lye locates this same power
in many places throughout the natural world, describing how the ab-
stractions seen in the cracks of rocks or in the cross sections of trees also
bear witness to this force of energy in nature. His drawings and studies
for his scratch animations were analyses of moving shapes affected by

176  • Andrew R. Johnston

F i g u re 10. 2 Len Lye’s Abstractions and Rock Paintings (‘Bush-­Mine’) (1933), ink
on paper, 113 × 178mm. Courtesy of the Len Lye Foundation Collection, Govett-­
Brewster Art Gallery.

this energy manifested in the natural world, such as flames, waves, or

flapping pieces of cloth. But he only worked from these transcriptions
to generate ideas of how this force manifests and how motion operates,
attempting to project abstractions of movement rather than the con-
tours of specific forms in motion (see figure 10.2). As Vivian Sobchack
argues, the energy of the animated line as it moves across the screen is
doubled.25 And while Sobchack’s argument applies to several types of
animation, this doubled expression of force is put on dramatic display in
Lye’s films, exponentially increasing an aesthetic pleasure of movement
that once stemmed from his abstract transcriptions and now appears to
be immanent to the projected lines, a spectacular autopoiesis.
That this energy can exist independently from the original source of
movement, and even from the hand of the artist, is important since
Lye believes that this energy can reside outside the body as a rhythm
of vibration.26 Thus, in addition to producing kinesthetic responses in
spectators, Free Radicals and Particles in Space aim to render visible the
sources of sensation that suffuse all matter, the literal free radicals and
particles in space usually invisible to the eye. This goal became particu-
larly important for Lye in his later work, when he was simultaneously
producing his scratch films and the kinetic sculptures that he began
working on in the late 1950s and into the 1960s. In his article “The Art

Signatures of Motion • 177
That Moves” he addresses this issue directly, explaining that the energy
of his sculptures, such as Rotating Harmonic (1959) or Fountain (1963–
76), operates and exists independently of a perceiving body.27 Though
such works house the possibility of a kinesthetic experience for viewers,
they have taken on their own, independent life.
At a moment in modernism when a reexamination of ontological
claims about media pressed into aesthetic practice, Lye’s films that seem
to technologically strip the cinema down to its most basic elements were
paradoxically an attempt to open the medium up and reveal potentiali-
ties skipped over by others. Lye’s focus on the force of energy that could
be conveyed through film by scratching out kinetic movement in its sur-
face was not for the sole purpose of reducing film’s materiality to its zero
point. Instead, this aesthetic reveals what can be done without photog-
raphy in film and that the medium of film is more than a projection of
moving images of the world. Though there is a play with the material
of film in Lye’s scratch works, he uses scratches in the black celluloid to
generate senses of movement, a vitalistic activity that he argues is the
medium he works in.
This is why, after many years of unsuccessfully supporting himself as
a filmmaker, he turned to kinetic sculpture, since he could more easily
find financial support through museums and galleries and because he
believed he was performing the same kind of aesthetic operation. These
works, such as Blade (1959), Fountain (1963–76), Grass (1965), and Flip
and Two Twisters (1977) are composed of polished steel rods and sheets
that move through concealed motors or by the force of the wind (figure
10.3). The metallic sounds produced by these sculptures are just as im-
portant as their shining visual undulations, generating an audio-­visual
projection of energy that articulates movement in the same way as Free
Radicals and Particles in Space. Flip and Two Twisters, for instance, con-
tains one loop of metal and two other straight pieces on either side of it,
all suspended from the ceiling. These are twisted and attached to motors,
that, when on, produce a violent thrashing and swishing to accompany
the flailing metal arcs made of flexible steel. Once again, the expres-
sion of energy through the manipulation of material, by natural or me-
chanical forces, is the focus of Lye’s aesthetic that cuts across traditional
definitions of media. The articulation of force through a work becomes
the focus instead. It is this state of initial impartiality, where the force
behind the generation of the mark is made visible, that Lye attempts
to work through in his scratches and that sets apart this aesthetic of
negative force applied to black film stock from his earlier colored lines

178  • Andrew R. Johnston

 Fi g ure 10. 3 Len
Lye’s Fountain III
(1976). Courtesy of
the Govett-­Brewster
Art Gallery.

painted on clear celluloid. Putting these scratches in motion through the

technology of film only increases a sense of their power, as they seem to
take on a living energy of their own, which, once imparted by the hand
of the artist, has become independent and sovereign.

Notes

1. Lye, “Experiment in Colour” (1936), in Figures of Motion, 48.

2. Lye was supported by John Grierson at the gpo Film Unit in the mid-­1930s and
was afterward commissioned by corporations, such as Imperial Airways, to gen-
erate advertisements. This complicated both the production and reception of
these films, especially since they could not be distributed in the United States
because of restrictions on advertising films. See Horrocks, Len Lye, 170.
3. Curnow, “Lye and Abstract Expressionism.”
4. Clark, Farewell to an Idea, 331–32.
5. Lye, “Why I Scratch, or How I Got to Particles” (1979), in Figures of Motion, 95.
These scratch films were created and exhibited in the late 1950s and early 1960s
by Lye, but he afterward stopped making films and dedicated all of his energy
to kinetic sculpture, claiming that the culture of avant-­garde filmmaking and

Signatures of Motion • 179
 exhibition was caustic at the time. At the end of his life (he passed in 1980), he
revised Free Radicals and Particles in Space, but he failed to finish the revision
of Tal Farlow. This was completed after his death by one of his assistants, Steve
Jones.
6. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 166.
7. Lye and Laura Riding, “Film-­making” (1935), in Figures of Motion, 40.
8. Jones, Eyesight Alone, xxii.
9. Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea.
10. Lye and Laura Riding, “Film-­making” (1935), in Figures of Motion, 39.
11. Lye, “The Art That Moves” (1964), in Figures of Motion, 82.
12. Lye and Laura Riding, “Film-­making” (1935), in Figures of Motion, 41.
13. Worringer, Form in Gothic, 42.
14. Horrocks, Len Lye, 266.
15. Lye, “Len Lye Speaks at the Film-­Makers’ Cinematheque,” 50.
16. Lye and Laura Riding, “Film-­making” (1935), in Figures of Motion, 41.
17. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney (1988), 35.
18. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney (1988), 54.
19. Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, 55.
20. Merleau-­Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 168.
21. Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy.
22. Worringer, Form in Gothic, 41.
23. Klee, Notebooks, Volume 1, 105.
24. Klee, Notebooks, Volume 2, 43.
25. Sobchack, “The Line and the Animorph or ‘Travel Is More Than Just A to B.’”
26. Lye, “The Art That Moves” (1964), in Figures of Motion, 85.
27. Lye, “The Art That Moves” (1964), in Figures of Motion, 85–87.

180  • Andrew R. Johnston

11 : : Animating Copies: Japanese Graphic Design,
the Xerox Machine, and Walter Benjamin
Y uriko F u ru h ata

When studying film theory today, one would surely encounter Walter
Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc-
tion” (1936) at one point or another. This seminal essay on the historical
effect and the potential of technological reproduction has arguably be-
come one of the most widely read texts in the canon of film theory, at
least in Anglo-­American academic circles. Benjamin’s work has consis-
tently gained attention from literary and film scholars since the English
translation of Illuminations (1969), a collection that includes the artwork
essay. Since then, this text has become a standard entry in film theory
books.1 A similar upsurge of interest in Benjamin took place in Japan
during the 1960s. The artwork essay was translated into Japanese in
1965, three years prior to its English counterpart.2 A considerable num-
ber of Benjamin’s work, including fifteen volumes of the collected works,
had appeared soon after. Book reviews and short articles on Benjamin
appeared in Japanese newspapers as early as 1967.3 While this situation
in Japan seems to parallel that in North America, the initial reception
of the artwork essay has taken a slightly different path. The essay first
found its most ardent readers and critics among the ranks of graphic
designers and artists, a number of whom turned to the medium of ani-
mation in the 1960s. Work needs to be done to trace the distinct path
the Japanese reception of Benjamin took at its early stage. This investi-
gation in turn offers us a unique opportunity to rethink animation’s re-
lation to film theory—in this case that of Benjamin—as well as experi-
mental animation’s relation to graphic design.
What were the discursive, aesthetic, and technological conditions
that undergirded the initial reception and uptake of Benjamin’s artwork
essay in Japan (see figure 11.1)? One way to answer this question is to
examine the writings by critics, animators, graphic designers, and pho-
 Fi g ure 11 . 1 The
1965 Japanese trans-
lation of Walter
Benjamin’s artwork
essay. Cover image.

tographers in the years leading up to and subsequent to the transla-

tion of this essay. More specifically, I will explore how the twin issues
of reproduction (fukusei) and copying (fukusha) came to be entangled in
Japanese art and media criticism during the mid-­1960s and early 1970s.
Crucial to note here is that the translation of Benjamin’s artwork essay
coincided not only with a new current of experimental animation but
also with the rise of a new type of publication. In addition to art and
film journals, discussions of Benjamin’s artwork essay appeared in a
most unlikely venue: Fuji Xerox’s corporate pr magazine, Graphication.4
Graphication offered a unique platform for art and media critics who ad-
dressed the issues of technological reproduction and duplication. I thus
aim to contextualize the initial reception of Benjamin’s work in relation
to these various historical factors. In so doing, I tease out a productive
tension between technological play (or playfulness) and technological
display found in the experimental animation films of this period.

182  • Yuriko Furuhata

Experimental Animation

In addition to the publication of the Japanese translation of Benjamin’s

artwork essay, the year 1965 also saw two other notable events: the
legendary Perusona ten (Persona Exhibition), which featured works by
ten young graphic designers, and the second annual Sōgetsu Animation
Festival, curated by three young animators (Kuri Yōji, Yanagihara Ryō-
hei, and Manabe Hiroshi) who formed the Animation Group of Three
(Animēshon sannin no kai) in 1960. I mention these two exhibitions—
one for graphic design and the other for animation—since it was around
this time that a new generation of now-famous graphic designers and
illustrators, including Yokoo Tadanori, Uno Akira, Tanaami Keiichi, Wada
Makoto, and Awazu Kiyoshi, began to push the envelope of graphic art
by making forays into animation filmmaking. This crossover between
animation and graphic design in the 1960s has received little attention
from scholars working on the history of Japanese cinema and anima-
tion. However, this crossover reveals an intriguing aspect of this history
and sheds light on the specific context within which Benjamin’s artwork
essay was initially discussed.
One of the key characteristics of this new generation of animators is
the strong emphasis that they placed on the formal graphic features of
the image, including elaborate typography. Stylized graphics take prece-
dence over the illusion of motion, as films keep the movement within
the image to a minimum. Take, for instance, Uno Akira’s experimental
short, La fête blanche (Shiroi matsuri) of 1964, which was screened at the
first Sōgetsu Animation Festival. The film heavily relies on a series of
dissolves to give the impression of movement to otherwise fairly static
drawings, accompanied by a score of baroque music. Similarly, Wada
Makoto’s prize-­winning animation, Murder (Satsujin, 1964), is a film
that flaunts the style of limited animation.5 The film toys with genre ex-
pectations associated with crime and mystery films. It repeats the exact
same opening scene where a maid discovers a dead body seven times.
Each iteration of the murder introduces a different detective figure
and is accompanied by variations of the same jazzy tune. The film is a
series of animated parodies, including a parody of Last Year at Marienbad
(1961).6 In spite of its extremely sparing use of motion, the film holds the
attention of the spectator with its ingenious use of sound and seriality.
Commenting on Wada’s restraint over the expression of movement, the
well-­known animation critic Mori Takuya argued that Murder and other

Animating Copies • 183
F i g u re 11 . 2 A close-­up of Yokoo’s illustration. Still from Yokoo Tadanori’s An-
thology No. 1 (1964).

works presented at the Sōgetsu Animation Festival are “film illustra-

tion” or “nonanimated animation.”7
Yokoo Tadanori’s Anthology No. 1 (1964), which also screened at
the first experimental animation festival, equally foregrounds the
static, graphic quality of unanimated images. The film is a collage of
rephotographed illustrations, most of which are publicity posters and
book-­cover designs he made (see figure 11.2). Rapid editing, pans, and
dissolves are used to animate and give a sense of variation to still illus-
trations. To borrow a dictum by Marshall McLuhan, whose work was
frequently cited by Japanese critics at the time, “the ‘content’ of any
medium is always another medium.”8 Here the content of the anima-
tion is literally the print medium. In Yokoo’s two other experimental
animation films—kiss, kiss, kiss (1964) and Kachi kachi yama meoto
no sujimichi (1965)—the graphic quality of the print medium is similarly
brought to the fore. While Yokoo drew new illustrations for kiss, kiss,
kiss, instead of simply recycling old materials, the film’s overt imita-
tion of American comics suggests its continuity with the aesthetics of
remediation, which he foregrounds in his other works such as Anthology
No. 1.9 As Yokoo’s comments on his own animation works indicate, this
nesting of one medium within the other medium was intentional: “Each

184  • Yuriko Furuhata

of these mass-­produced works that appear on screen are ruins of the
former works, robbed of their short life after being exhausted on the
commercial front. I am playing the role of a spiritual medium who con-
jures their spirits from the ghostly past and confers them a new light
of life.”10 Arguably, animation allows Yokoo to both preserve otherwise
ephemeral works of graphic design and to breathe new life into them, all
the while highlighting his investment in repetition as a central compo-
nent to his artistic process. While not everyone recycled already-­printed
materials as Yokoo did, many of the experimental animation films pre-
sented at the Sōgetsu Animation Festival displayed a similar tendency
to downplay the appeal of animated movement and to accentuate the
graphic and typographic aspects of print-­based illustrations.
This visible affinity between the world of graphic design and that of
animation led Mori to conclude that the films screened at the festival
are not really animations but “illustrations done on film.”11 Elsewhere
he calls these films “graphic animation,” a term he coined to describe the
intermedial form of graphic design and animation.12 Kaji Yūsuke, the
advertising copywriter of the time, also took note of this new current
of experimental animation filmmaking. Kaji, who worked for the lead-
ing advertising agency Nihon Design Center along with Yokoo and Uno,
welcomed this tendency to blur the boundary between animation and
graphic design. Unlike Mori who saw this situation as an unhappy infil-
tration of cinema by graphic designers, Kaji saw it as a means to trans-
form cinema. He argued that such hybridization expands the horizon
of cinema and allows it to be more competitive in light of the arrival of
television.13
During the 1960s television did become one of the important venues
for presenting experimental animation films, as exemplified by the
weekly broadcasting of Kuri Yōji’s animation shorts on the popular mid-
night television program 11pm. While traditional venues of exhibition
such as film festivals played a key role in establishing this new current
of experimental animation, television also offered an effective means
to disseminate it. The growing affinity between the formal qualities of
graphic design and experimental animation, which Mori and Kaji ac-
knowledge, had much to do with the proliferation of television as well.
The connection between experimental animation and television was
also strengthened by the fact that many of the graphic designers who
participated in this new current worked within the advertisement in-
dustry. This added factor of advertising practice uniquely inflects this
new current of experimental animation, which Mori calls graphic ani-

Animating Copies • 185
mation. Take, for instance, Commercial War (1971). This is one of the
celebrated experimental animations made by the graphic designer and
artist Tanaami. The film is a composite of print illustrations and photo-
montages, most of which are fragments of magazine ads. Tanaami edits
these images with the audio track of Japanese television commercials. It
is a work that playfully mimics the sensation of watching television ad-
vertisements. Like Wada’s Murder, the film heavily relies on repetition,
a nod to the cyclical temporality of advertisements. In a manner remi-
niscent of Yokoo’s Anthology No.1, Tanaami’s Commercial War also turns
advertising ephemera into its enduring content. The fact that this short
animation was commissioned by 11pm suggests a deeper connection be-
tween graphic animation and advertisement. I will come back to this
issue of advertisement shortly. However, before doing so, it is worth in-
vestigating how the Japanese discourse of graphic design came to inter-
sect that of animation.

Graphism and Technological Reproduction

How might we understand the relation between the print medium and
the filmic medium? One clue is offered by the discursive currency of the
term graphic. The notion of the graphic gained new connotations in the
1960s. Here I want to point out the novel use of the word graphic (or
gurafikku in Japanese), which was used to signify not only printed illus-
tration but also animation and cinema. The precise semantic parameter
of the term graphic as used by artists, critics, and filmmakers during this
decade is difficult to pin down. Nonetheless, since it was widely used in
Japanese art and media criticism during this decade, the meaning of the
term deserves scrutiny. According to the art historian Hayashi Michio,
we can identify at least two axes of meaning: “One is the graphic in the
sense of linear drawing, writing, or illustration (as the Greek graphikos
and Latin graphicus originally implied), and the other is the graphic in its
modern (post-­Gutenberg) conceptual association with the technology
of reproduction, as in words such as photography and lithography.”14
The visible affinity between experimental animation and graphic design
that we have observed in films by Yokoo, Uno, Wada, Kuri, and Tanaami
hinges on these two axes of the term graphic: the manual mode of draw-
ing or writing and the mechanical mode of drawing or writing. While the
two are divided by technologies of reproduction (such as the camera),
they are clearly complementary.
By calling attention to the act of tracing that binds the manual and

186  • Yuriko Furuhata

mechanical processes of graphic production, Hayashi argues how the sec-
ond process heightens the possibility of iteration implied by the notion
of trace: “While graphic linearity provides the very basis for the act of
tracing (the appearance of objects in the world or an imagined architec-
tural plan), the act of tracing simultaneously opens up the possibility of
repetitive tracing and its technological mediation.”15 Paradoxically, then,
to trace means to follow a mark or to follow a course, as well as to leave
a mark or to chart out a course. The graphic as tracing is both creative
and iterative, an original act of marking and a secondary act of copying
the mark.
In the essay “Thoughts on Total Design” (Tōtaru dezain kō, 1967), the
graphic artist and filmmaker Awazu Kiyoshi articulates this duality and
inverses an implied hierarchy between the manual and the mechanical.
Instead of defining graphic design as an art of drawing or producing a
trace, which could then be reproduced through the technical mediation
of printing or photographing, Awazu inverts the logic and defines it as
first and foremost as the iterative act of reproduction. Noting how the
practice of graphic design must realize its promise of total visual com-
munication, he argues that illustrators must not be limited to print and
should start using the electric media of television, animation, and the
neon sign, because their task as designers is to develop a means of trans-
mitting information most suited to “the age of reproduction.”16 Awazu
reiterates this view in a number of published essays, and he proposes
to redefine graphic design not simply as a visual mode of communica-
tion but as a uniquely visual mode of communication that relies solely
on reproductions without originals. “The age of technological reproduc-
tion is called graphism,” writes Awazu.17 In the essay “The Age When the
Reproduction Is the Original” (Fukusei ga honmono de aru jidai, 1972),
Awazu argues that technologically reproduced images without origi-
nals have become our environment, our second nature; the imitation
has replaced the real: “In the past, a reproduction [fukusei] was an imi-
tation, copy, or miniature model of the original, but today the reproduc-
tion is reality, that is to say, another kind of original in its own right.”18
It is precisely this inversion of the hierarchy between the original and
its reproduction—to the point of the disappearance of the original as
such—that Awazu describes by using neologism graphism (or gurafizumu
in ­Japanese).
Awazu’s use of the term graphism to describe the conditions in which
reproductions or copies replace originals is partly inspired by Benjamin,
whom Awazu frequently cites in his writings. But Benjamin is not the

Animating Copies • 187
only source of inspiration. Rather, Awazu seems to have borrowed the
phrase from the Japanese translation of Daniel Boorstin’s influential
book The Image: Or, What Happened to the American Dream (1962). Trans-
lated one year before Benjamin’s artwork essay, Boorstin’s text helped
shape the Japanese discourses of cinema, animation, and graphic art. It
was Boorstin’s argument about the inversion of values in which copies
generate a greater sense of reality than the original that gained the most
popularity. This inversion of values has a precise historical origin: the
modern graphic revolution. By the phrase graphic revolution, Boorstin
means post-­Gutenberg inventions of technologies of reproduction and
communication, including movable-­type printing presses, photogra-
phy, cinema, radio, and television. Of particular interest to us is the fact
that the English phrase graphic revolution was translated into Japanese
as “revolution in reproduction technologies” (fukusei gijutsu kakumei).19
This literal equation of the graphic with reproduction technologies, I
think, helped Awazu to draw a metonymic association between graphic
design and Benjamin’s analysis of reproducible media. Other critics fol-
lowed suit and used the term graphic to signify a surprisingly wide range
of media, from print to animation. This interchangeability of the graphic
and technological reproduction, prompted by the translation of Boor-
stin, explains why Benjamin’s artwork essay attracted such attention
from graphic designers who experimented with film and television.
A 1968 article published in the leading art journal, Bijutsu Techō, is
telling in this regard. “Graphic Art in the Age of Electronics” defines
graphic art simply as an “art of copy and reproduction.”20 This expanded
definition of graphic art as the general art of reproduction nullifies the
distinction between graphic and photographic images, and between ani-
mation and cinema, with which we are familiar.21 Regardless of their
indexical or manual processes of production, cinema and animation
are both graphic in the sense that Japanese critics use the word. In this
framework, the categorical distinction between the photographic image
and the graphic image, which often separates live-­action cinema from
animation, disappears. From the perspective of the graphic (rather than
the photographic), there is no ontological difference between cinema
and animation. Animation is often contrasted to cinema on the basis
of “manipulation” and its material process of production.22 Similarly,
the drawn is separated from the photographic. The rise of the digital is
generally seen as the moment where these differences between anima-
tion and cinema, and the drawn and the photographic, break down.23
However, the notion of graphic already breaks down the supposed onto-

188  • Yuriko Furuhata

logical divisions between these practices. And it is because of the ter-
minological slide of the graphic to encompass all arts of reproduction
that Benjamin’s essay becomes as productive for thinking animation in
Japan as it is for thinking film.
In the context of this timely reception of Benjamin and Boorstin, it
is worth noting a preceding work on technological reproduction penned
by a Japanese critic. This is the literary critic Tada Michitarō’s book Fuku-
sei geijutsuron (On the art of technological reproduction, 1962).24 While
Tada’s work may have had a lesser impact on the Japanese discourse on
reproduction, it addresses one of the same issues that Benjamin’s essay
articulates: the impact of technological reproduction on the perception
of art. Tada’s title text, which was originally published in essay form in
1958, presents cinema, photography, and electronic music as “reproduc-
tion arts [fukusei geijutsu] without originals.”25 These modern techno-
logical media differ from older media of communication and expression
(e.g., painting and theatrical performance) because of their inherent
multiplicity and the absence of the original. Because of their penchant
toward mass dissemination, artworks made with such technological
media radically democratize art criticism, hitherto considered the exclu-
sive domain of the select few: “The masses throughout the whole world
can now have the credentials to become an art critic.”26
Despite the remarkable similarity between his argument and the ar-
gument found in Benjamin’s artwork essay, Tada was not yet familiar
with Benjamin’s work when he first wrote his text.27 But when he revis-
ited the same topic in the 1971 essay, published in the magazine Graphi-
cation, Benjamin not surprisingly became Tada’s main interlocutor.28
Building on Benjamin’s definition of aura as the singularity of “the here
and now” as well as an attribute of the sacred experienced as “the unique
phenomenon of a distance, however near it may be,” Tada discusses how
the technological reproducibility of artwork severed its ties to religion.
Tada’s analysis of art unfortunately lacks the critical force of Benjamin,
who warns against the process of aestheticizing politics that satisfies
the masses’ desire for reproduction without transforming existing class
relations.29 Instead Tada emphasizes the utopian dimension of play as
the defining characteristic of art in the age of its technological reproduc-
ibility.30 This element of play is the aesthetic telos of the secularized art.
Tada’s focus on play as the characteristic element of the secularized and
mass-­produced artwork is useful insofar as he lists Yokoo as the exem-
plary artist of this second phase of reproduction arts. Before investigat-
ing this question of play further, I would like to reflect on the historical

Animating Copies • 189
and political implications of the fact that Tada’s revised essay on techno-
logical reproduction appeared in Graphication, Fuji Xerox’s pr magazine.

The Copying Revolution

Launched in 1969, Fuji Xerox’s Graphication was a highly successful

corporate pr magazine that presented itself as a cutting-­edge publica-
tion venue for art and media criticism. The very title of the magazine
(“graphic” plus “communication,” defined as “methods of communi-
cating information through the image, such as letters, signs, painting,
design, photography, comics, film, and television”) conveyed its ambi-
tion.31 This idea of graphic communication in the age of informatiza-
tion allowed Fuji Xerox to market its own product (the photocopy ma-
chine) as the latest medium of communication, and gave a new twist to
the already expanded understanding of the graphic. It was within this
historical context that Benjamin’s artwork essay received notable atten-
tion from Japanese artists and critics in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
For instance, a number of essays dedicated to the issues of reproduc-
tion and aura appeared in the beginning of the 1970s. In March 1971
Graphication published a special issue dedicated to the topic of techno-
logical reproduction that included Tada’s aforementioned essay.32 Half
a year later, the art journal Bijutsu Techō published an issue focusing
on the exact same topic. As indicated by the essay titles, such as “After
Benjamin: Contemporary Tasks of Art and Reproduction,” “Aura—The
Traumatic Experience of Art,” and “From the Aura of Life: Organization
in the Age of Post-­reproduction Technology,” most of the essays pub-
lished in this issue of Bijutsu Techō consciously engage with Benjamin.
Similarly, the essays published in Graphication make extensive refer-
ences to Benjamin’s artwork essay.33
The concurrent publications of these two journals—one from the
leading art journal and the other from the corporate pr magazine—
attest to the heightened interest in Benjamin’s work. But more impor-
tant, they point to the proximity between advertisement and art criti-
cism of the time. Indeed, when Graphication published a follow-­up issue
in 1974, a number of critics and theorists associated with Bijutsu Techō
contributed their articles. While it is not surprising to see Benjamin ref-
erenced in art journals, it seems odd to see his name appearing in a cor-
porate pr magazine. One may be tempted to dismiss it as a mere histori-
cal oddity. But given Benjamin’s refusal to uphold the autonomy of art
(unlike Theodor Adorno) in his artwork essay, and given that advertising

190  • Yuriko Furuhata

and experimental animation were already in dialogue, it would be a mis-
take to simply pass over this point.34 We should take it as an opportunity
to reflect on the circulation of theory itself as a mass-­produced com-
modity, and how theory travels outside the narrow confines of academic
journals. After all, it is quite suggestive that Benjamin’s analysis of tech-
nological reproducibility appears in the pr magazine for Xerox, a com-
pany that sells photocopy machines. The fact that Benjamin’s work was
circulated through this nonacademic venue is enough to make us pause
and reflect on the implication this may have on our codified assumption
about film theory.
One thing to note is that the great divide between commercial and
academic publications that we see in North America did not and still
does not exist in Japan, where the bulk of critical theories are trans-
lated, published, and disseminated through nonacademic journals. The
most telling indicator of this unique phenomenon is the introduction of
semiotics and poststructuralism in the 1970s and 1980s through com-
mercial publication venues such as the journals Eureka and Gendai Shisō.
Similarly, to date it is companies such as Kashima Corporation, Dentsū,
and ntt that have been major publishers of influential media and archi-
tecture journals, rather than university presses. Along with Esso’s pr
magazine Energy (which elevated the status of corporate pr magazines
from publicity organs to cultural magazines), Fuji Xerox’s Graphication
was one of the earliest corporate pr magazines to publish scholarly
articles on art and communication media in a style evocative of commer-
cial journals, such as Eureka.35 When we take note of the initial reception
of Benjamin in Japan, this factor cannot be overlooked.
Yet if Fuji Xerox’s Graphication succeeded in presenting itself as a
cultural magazine, it is also because the novelty of the photocopying
technology had already attracted the wide attention of artists and crit-
ics. Fuji Xerox’s investment in art criticism and media theory, and art-
ists’ and critics’ interests in the photocopying machine went hand in
hand. For instance, the May 1970 issue of Graphication featured Xerox
art pieces created by leading Japanese visual artists such as Takamatsu
Jirō and Tanaka Shintarō. The artists were cordially invited to the Tokyo
headquarters of Fuji Xerox to freely use its latest photocopy machines to
make their artworks. The same year also saw the then-­young (and now
world-­renowned) photographer Araki Nobuyoshi self-­publish a unique
photo book titled Xeroxed Photo Albums. To make this book, Araki used
a Fuji Xerox photocopy machine at Dentsū, a major advertising agency
for which he was working at the time. Similarly, the July 1972 issue of

Animating Copies • 191
the film journal Kikan Firumu published a series of essays under the
title “Sharing of Media and Thoughts on the Copy” (Media no kyōyū to
fukusha no shisō), along with playful visual works all using the photo-
copy machine. Most of the articles published in this issue reference
Benjamin.36 This collective fascination with xerography and the persis-
tence of Benjamin as the primary point of reference are significant for
three reasons. First, Benjamin’s analysis of technological reproducibility
of the image was mobilized to discuss this latest medium of reproduc-
tion, the photocopy machine.37 Second, the imbrication of art criticism
and advertisement that we find in publications such as Graphication also
extended to visual practice. Third, artists who responded to the prob-
lematic of the “copy” associated with the technology of photocopying
were predominantly photographers, graphic designers, and animators.
In this regard, the avant-­garde photographer Moriyama Daidō’s
timely contribution to the debates on technological reproduction war-
rants our attention. Before Araki’s experiment with the Xerox photo-
copy machine, Moriyama had already declared that the camera was itself
a mere copy machine (fukushaki). As exemplified by the series Accident
(1968), in which Moriyama simply rephotographed then-­current jour-
nalistic materials (such as press photographs of Robert Kennedy’s as-
sassination, crime prevention posters, and screen shots of television
news), Moriyama’s work toys with the idea of multiple copies. Photog-
raphy is an art of duplication, and to photograph a photograph is to
draw attention to this foundational fact. Echoing Awazu’s definition of
graphic design as communication based on reproductions without origi-
nals, Moriyama dispenses with the notion of the original. Instead of
claiming authorship of the image, he thus signs “copy & composition
by Moriyama Daidō.” The word copy (fukusha) used here highlights the
graphic process of remediation, of tracing a mark left by a prior moment
of tracing.
Moriyama’s conceptual framework for the Accident series is clearly
indebted to Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster series from 1962 to 1963.
For this reason, Moriyama’s play with the notion of copy appears to be
derivative of Warhol.38 Moriyama’s fascination with sensational subject
matters, such as high-­profile crimes, spectacular accidents, and celebrity
gossip, would support this reading. However, if we simply write Mori-
yama off as a mere copy of Warhol (though this gesture of mimicry is
interesting in its own right), we may miss the specific context within
which he positioned his photographic work. One of the key elements of

192  • Yuriko Furuhata

this context is Fuji Xerox’s ad campaign, which helped popularize the
very notion of the copy. The word fukusha (copy) gained currency in the
media soon after Fuji Xerox launched its inaugural marketing campaign
for the Xerox 914 Copier in 1962. This was the year when a joint-­venture
business agreement between the American company Xerox Corporation
and the Japanese photography firm Fuji Film was signed. This agree-
ment marked the beginning of Fuji Xerox. In its first marketing cam-
paign promoting the Xerox 914 Copier, the company used the catchy
slogan “The copying revolution starts today” (Kyō kara fukusha kakumei
ga hajimaru). With this slogan the company aggressively promoted its
product through an innovative leasing system wherein business and
government offices would rent the machine and receive maintenance
service (see figure 11.3).
Moriyama’s tongue-­in-­cheek reference to the notion of copy, and his
positioning of himself as copier or duplicator of the images, gains added
significance if we consider this historical factor of the Fuji Xerox’s cam-
paign. The calculated publication of Graphication was part of an adver-
tising strategy that had begun with the idea of a “copying revolution.” In
addition to the influence of Warhol, Moriyama’s definition of the cam-
era as a copying machine must be interpreted in relation to this spe-
cific local context. Incidentally, the influential photographer and critic
Nakahira Takuma argued that Moriyama’s photography intuitively re-
sponds to the decline of aura in the age of technological reproduction.39
Published in 1968, on the cusp of what might be called the Benjamin
boom, Nakahira’s attempt to analyze Moriyama’s work through the lens
of Benjamin’s artwork essay suggests how the parallel discourses on re-
production (within art criticism) and copy (within marketing) came to
converge around the impact of this technology of photocopying.40
We thus find a surprisingly close connection between the marketing
discourse and art criticism of the 1960s. This connection is historically
specific, and the rise of graphic animation and the Japanese reception
of Benjamin in its initial stage are deeply implicated in the connection.
To wit, Graphication blurred the boundary between advertisement and
theory, and graphic animation by designers working for the advertising
industry also blurred the boundary between advertisement and art. In
contrast to the highly politicized milieu of avant-­garde cinema, which
attracted leftist intellectuals and activists, the practice and criticism of
experimental animation are more visibly and less antagonistically tied
to the advertising industry.41

Animating Copies • 193
Fi g u re 11. 3 The first Fuji Xerox advertisement (1962) announces: “The copying
revolution starts today.”
Technological Play versus Technological Display

I want to push this inquiry one step further by connecting this proximity
between art and advertisement to Benjamin’s own reflection on two
types of technologies. As Miriam Hansen and others have noted, this
reference to two technologies only appears in the second version of the
artwork essay, which was not translated into Japanese until the 1990s.
Nonetheless, this version offers a useful framework through which to
understand the centrality of play that appears in the art and advertise-
ment discourses in 1960s Japan. This will also allow us to revisit Tada’s
claim that the principal characteristic of the “reproduction art” is play.
In the concluding passage in the 1971 essay in Graphication, Tada cites
Yokoo’s observation about his own artwork: “At the roots [of my work]
is a philosophy of mimicry, which negates the original in order to cre-
ate the original.”42 This issue of mimicry is precisely what Benjamin ad-
dresses in the second version of the artwork essay.
Benjamin aligns what he calls the first technology with the ritual,
magical, and auratic works that retain a beautiful semblance as well as
their cult value. This first technology is linked to the singularity of the
work and to the mastery of nature through the representational process
of mimesis. In contrast, the second technology does not aim at master-
ing nature or preserving the aura. Instead, the second technology re-
lates to the noninstrumental aspect of mimesis, which Benjamin asso-
ciates with the utopian dimension of play. He writes, “What is lost in
the withering of semblance and the decay of the aura in works of art is
matched by a huge gain in the scope for play [Spiel-­Raum].”43 Works of
art that are produced by technologies of reproduction place more em-
phasis on play than beautiful semblance. The historical transformation
of art from the auratic to the reproducible is, for Benjamin, inseparable
from the tension between the first and the second technologies.
But what binds the two together? According to Hansen, Benjamin’s
interest in the mimetic faculty connects semblance to play, and thus the
first technology to the second technology.44 Mimesis for Benjamin con-
cerns, on the one hand, the production of semblance and thus aesthetic
representations and, on the other, the repetitive structure and the cre-
ative potential of children’s play acts. It is this second aspect of mimesis
characterized by playful repetition that Hansen links to photography
and cinema, forms of “mechanical reproduction as replication that lacks
an original.”45 This idea of a replication that lacks an original is what
Yokoo associates with his own art of mimicry, which Tada in turn cites

Animating Copies • 195
as an exemplary case of playful art that basks in the glow of technologi-
cal reproduction. By extrapolating from Benjamin, I would argue that
Yokoo’s animations heighten the playful potential of the second tech-
nology that is already at work in the medium of cinema, as they recycle
original-­less graphics and illustrations.
The strategy of reproduction, undertaken by Japanese graphic de-
signers turned animators such as Yokoo reminds us of the critical poten-
tial of the second technology, though they are by no means immune to
the auratic domain of semblance and the cult value aligned with the first
technology. Indeed, a tension between the first and second technologies
persists in their animations. This tension manifests itself in the com-
plementary functions of display and play. For these animators’ works
equally rely on the first technology that generates the beautiful sem-
blance, which Benjamin also links to the function of display and to the
“phony spell of the commodity.”46 The phony spell of the commodity is an
illusion of aura that lingers after the disappearance of genuine aura. This
phony spell of the commodity is the phantasmagoric structure of sem-
blance that Marx associates with commodity fetishism. For Benjamin,
an exemplary instance of this return of beautiful semblance through
the lure of the commodity is advertisement. In discussing the commer-
cial use of photography for advertising purposes, Benjamin writes: “The
creative in photography is its capitulation to fashion. The world is beau-
tiful—that is its watchword. In it is unmasked the posture of a photog-
raphy that can endow any soup can with cosmic significance but cannot
grasp a single one of the human connections in which it exists.”47 The
glossy veneer of advertisements that don the semblance of the beauti-
ful appearance conceals the material conditions of production rooted in
human labor. A photograph that enhances the fetishistic allure of the
commodity it advertises forfeits its critical potential as the second tech-
nology and reverts back to the realm of magic. Similarly, the experimen-
tal animations by graphic designers tread the thin line between critique
and publicity, as they appropriate ephemera from the world of adver-
tising into their content. Yokoo’s and Tanaami’s works are exemplary in
this regard. Their works are organized around the playful reproduction
and citation of publicity materials, which celebrate the disappearance of
the original artwork. At the same time, their works partake in the resur-
rection of the beautiful-­semblance characteristic of advertisement.
In his 1970 essay, titled “Year Zero of Design” (Dezain 0 nen), Awazu
references Benjamin’s 1935 essay, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth
Century,” suggesting that the practice of graphic design is phantasma-

196  • Yuriko Furuhata

goric.48 Graphic design is a practice geared toward the lure of the ap-
pearance; it is an art of display appropriate for advertising. The historical
development of advertising is inseparable from the rise of mass media
and from commodity economy.49 The graphic animation that emerged
in the 1960s shares the same phantasmagoric quality with graphic de-
sign, and oscillates between two poles of mimesis: illusory semblance
(or display) and playful repetition without an original. This ambivalence
on display in graphic animation symptomatically visualizes the recep-
tion of Benjamin’s artwork essay in 1960s Japan. This reception also
oscillated between critical engagement and fashionable consumption,
as Benjamin’s work reached far and wide beyond the narrow confines
of academic circles. On the one hand, the artwork essay inspired critics
and artists such as Awazu to theorize the relation between technological
reproduction and graphic design. On the other hand, the essay also con-
tributed to the promotion of the corporate pr magazines like Graphica-
tion. In this sense, this profane encounter between graphic animation
and Benjamin’s artwork essay should caution us against maintaining any
illusions about the autonomy of theory. Indeed, as Benjamin warned us,
the desire for autonomy—whether it is that of art or theory—must be
both distrusted and historicized. The Japanese reception of his text may
well be used to dispel and historicize our investment in the autonomy of
film theory. Yet as we have seen here, the fascinating encounter between
theories of reproduction and the rise of reproduction technologies such
as the photocopy machine also provides an indispensable context for
understanding experiments in graphic animation in 1960s Japan.

Notes

All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.

1. Jeffrey Grossman, “The Reception of Walter Benjamin in the Anglo-­American

Literary Institution,” German Quarterly 65, nos. 3 / 4 (Summer 1992): 417.
Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” re-
mains one of the central theoretical texts of cinema and modernity. As Gertrud
Koch notes, the text also stands as an important precursor to the apparatus
theory. See Koch, “Cosmos in Film.” See also Mast and Cohen, Film Theory and
Criticism.
2. The first Japanese translation of the artwork essay was included in an an-
thology of Benjamin’s essays, which was given the title of this iconic work, Fu-
kusei gijutsu jidai no geijutsu. While different versions of this essay have been
variously translated into English as “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction” in Illuminations and “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Techno-

Animating Copies • 197
 logical Reproducibility” in Selected Writings, a literal translation of the Japa-
nese title of the essay would be “Art in the Age of Reproduction Technology.”
See Benjamin, Illuminations, 217–51; Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 3,
101–38; and Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 251–83. According to the
translator Takahara Kōhei, the publication of Fukusei gijutsu jidai no geijutsu
was prompted by a study group on Benjamin led by the German literary scholar
Johannes Ernest Seiffert, who was teaching in Japan at the time. See Tahakara
Kōhei, “Kaisetsu,” in Benjamin, Fukusei gijutsu jidai no geijutsu, 252.
3. One of the first book reviews of Benjamin’s work, referencing the German pub-
lications of Illuminationen (1961) and Angelus Novus (1966), appears in “Benya-
min chosakushū,” Asahi Shinbun, January 9, 1967, 5. The same newspaper also
introduced Benjamin as one of the most influential thinkers on the current
student movement in Germany under the heading “best sellers” in 1968. See
“Besuto seraazu: Wakai sedai ni tsuyoi anji,” Asahi Shinbun, June 28, 1968, 18.
4. Fuji Xerox’s Graphication belongs to a new type of corporate pr magazine
that appeared in the 1960s and that focused on cultural and artistic contents.
Graphication published graphic works and writings by artists and critics such
as Awazu Kiyoshi, Yokoo Tadanori, Kimura Tsunehisa, Nakahira Takuma, Taki
Kōji, and Oshima Nagisa. Other notable pr magazines founded around this
time include Energy by Esso and Mugendai by Japan ibm. For more on the his-
tory of corporate pr magazines, see Mishima, Kōhōshi ga kataru kigyōzō, 25–26.
5. As indicated by the music score, the sixth episode of Murder is also a parody of
Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atomu, 1963), the television animation series known for its
use of limited animation style.
6. The seventh episode of Murder appears under the title “Murder for Art Theater,”
a tongue-­in-­cheek reference to the Art Theater Shinjuku Bunka, where Alain
Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad was premiered in May 1964, two months be-
fore the Sōgetsu Animation Festival.
7. Mori, “Caatōn to gurafikku anime,” in Sōgetsu Aato sentaa no kiroku kankō
iinkai, ed. Kagayake 60 nendai, 338.
8. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 8. The Japanese translation of this book,
Ningen kakuchō no genri, translated by Gotō Kazuhiko and Takagi Susumu
(Tokyo: Takeuchi Shoten), appeared in 1967.
9. I wish to thank Ikegami Hiroko for bringing this fact to my attention.
10. See Yokoo, “Anthology No. 1, kiss, kiss, kiss,” in Sōgetsu Aato sentaa no kiroku
kankō iinkai, ed. Kagayake 60 nendai, 336.
11. Mori, “Sōgetsu anime fesutibaru o mite,” 45–47.
12. Mori, Animēshon nyūmon, 23.
13. Kaji, “Dezainaa no eiga ni kitai suru,” in Sōgetsu Aato sentaa no kiroku kankō
iinkai, ed. Kagayake 60 nendai, 339.
14. Hayashi, “Tracing the Graphic in Postwar Japanese Art,” in Chong, Tokyo 1955–
1970, 95.
15. Hayashi, “Tracing the Graphic in Postwar Japanese Art,” in Chong, Tokyo 1955–
1970, 95.

198  • Yuriko Furuhata

16. Awazu, “Hōhō to hyōgen ni tsuite: Tōtaru dezain kō,” 81. See also Awazu, De-
zain ni nani ga dekiruka.
17. Awazu writes, “In the past reproduction meant an imitation, copy, or miniature
model of the original, but today reproduction is the reality and has replaced the
original.” Awazu, “Fukusei ga honmono de aru jidai,” in Awazu, Dezain Yakō, 124.
18. Awazu, “Fukusei ga honmono de aru jidai,” in Awazu, Dezain Yakō, 124.
19. See Boorstin, Gen’ei no jidai, 96.
20. See Hinata, “Gurafikku aato,” 106–7.
21. Imamura Taihei’s earlier analysis of animation and documentary film relies on
this distinction. See Imamura, Manga eigaron.
22. Andrew, What Cinema Is!, 42.
23. Manovich, The Language of New Media, 295.
24. I would like to thank Matsui Shigeru for pointing out the importance of Tada’s
work.
25. Tada writes, for instance: “Is there any original version of Potemkin? No, there
is none. The film archived in Leningrad and the one imported to Japan both are
equally reproductions.” Tada, Fukusei geijutsuron, 3.
26. Tada, Fukusei geijutsuron, 37.
27. Tada, “Fukusei geijutsu to wa nani ka,” 114. Tada also notes that the term repro-
duction art was first used by Hasegawa Nyozekan, a journalist and film critic,
who wanted to differentiate the work of modern media such as radio from what
he called “original art” (genkei geijutsu) in 1938.
28. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility:
Third Version,” in Selected Writings, Volume 4, 257.
29. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility:
Third Version,” in Selected Writings, Volume 4, 269.
30. Tada, “Fukusei geijutsu to wa nani ka,” 139.
31. Kamiyama, “1970 nendai shotō no Nihon no zerogurafii aato,” 21.
32. The essays collected in this volume approached the history of reproduction
from antiquity to the present.
33. Contributors included Hariu Ichirō, Tone Yasunao, Kimura Tsunehisa, Yokoo
Tadanori, Akasegawa Genpei, and Araki Nobuyoshi.
34. Adorno criticizes Benjamin for assigning “a counter-­revolutionary function” to
the “autonomous work of art.” See Adorno and Benjamin, The Complete Corre-
spondence, 1928–1940, 128.
35. Founded in 1959 by the oil company Esso, Energy consciously adopted a glossy
cover most frequently associated with art journals. Like Graphication, Energy
also published essays by leading scholars and well-­known novelists such as
Tada Michitarō, Umesao Tadao, and Komatsu Sakyō. See Mishima, Kōhōshi ga
kataru kigyōzō, 92; Shiozawa, Sengo shuppanshi: shōwa no zasshi, sakka, henshū-
sha, 104–5.
36. See Kikan Firumu 12 (July 1972).
37. In this regard, the Japanese translation of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s text
“Constituents of a Theory of the Media” in 1971 cannot be overlooked, given

Animating Copies • 199
 Enzensberger’s extensive use of Benjamin and his discussion of the democratic
and political potential of the photocopier.
38. For a comparison between Warhol and Moriyama, see Kai, “‘Akushidento’ no
shōgeki nao,” 176.
39. Nakahira and Moriyama, “Shashin to iu kotoba o nakuse,” 102–7.
40. When discussing the issue of the copy and reproduction in 1960s Japan, the
first and most obvious reference would be the Model 1000-­Yen Note art project
(1962) by Akasegawa Genpei, who hand-reproduced the 1,000 yen note and
was charged with counterfeiting. Akasegawa’s positioning of his artwork as a
“model” (mokei), rather than reproduction or copy, adds another context to this
history of reproduction art. On the work of Akasegawa, see Marotti, “Simulacra
and Subversion in the Everyday”; and Tomii, “State v. (Anti-­) Art.”
41. Given the history of animation in Japan, however, this proximity is perhaps not
surprising. As the recent studies by Thomas LaMarre and Marc Steinberg sug-
gest, animation had historically played a key role in the development of state
propaganda and the advertising industries, from animation’s use in wartime to
its use in postwar television commercials. The specificity of the experimental
animation that flourished in the 1960s cannot be seen as a radical break from
the mainstream practice of animation, but is rather its experimental counter-
part. See LaMarre, “Speciesism, Part I”; and Steinberg, Anime’s Media Mix.
42. Tada, “Fukusei geijutsu to wa nani ka,” 143. My translation.
43. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in
Selected Writings, Volume 3, 127.
44. Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 184.
45. Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 195.
46. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illumi-
nations, 231.
47. Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Selected Writings, Volume 2, 526.
48. Awazu, “Dezain 0 nen,” 17. Awazu was also one of the founding members of the
architectural group Metabolism as well as a principal organizer of the inter-
media event “Nanika ittekure, ima sagasu: expose · 1968” and a contributor of
the gigantic multiscreen projection work at Expo 70.
49. Benjamin writes: “The commodity economy reinforces the phantasmagoria of
sameness, which, as an attribute of intoxication, at the same time proves a cen-
tral figure of semblance.” See Benjamin, “Exchange with Adorno on ‘The Fla-
neur,’ ” in Selected Writings, Volume 4, 208.

200  • Yuriko Furuhata

12 : : Framing the Postmodern: The Rhetoric of
Animated Form in Experimental Identity-­Politics
Documentary Video in the 1980s and 1990s
T e ss Ta k ah a s h i

There are two counterintuitive aesthetic paradigms: animation and the

1980s and 1990s experimental identity-­politics documentary video. By
experimental identity-­politics documentary, I mean the kind of work
sometimes called personal documentary, domestic ethnography, or
autoethnography.1 In this work, the often-­minority filmmaker’s per-
sonal experience, personal memory, and personal media (in the form of
family photo albums and home movies) were used to present the self in a
purposefully different way. These works, frequently made on video, were
self-­consciously different from both mass-­media representations of
Otherness and from ethnographic representations, on which the works
often drew and critiqued. While some of these works showcased naive
voicings of identity, more often various kinds of formal fracturing com-
plicated the autoethnographic voice, as in work by artists such as Sadie
Benning, Joan Braderman, Tony Cokes, Marlon Fuentes, Mona Hatoum,
Isaac Julian, Trinh T. Minh-­ha, Marlon Riggs, and Rea Tajiri. Reconsid-
eration of the experimental identity-­politics video through the lens of
animation offers an important counterdiscourse to standard thinking
about this now sometimes-­disparaged genre of film. Understanding the
role of animation in this work complicates the ways in which we under-
stand how the two dominant discourses of this decade came together in
the regularly forgotten medium of video: namely, postmodern theory
and identity politics.
While documentary film scholars have not talked much about ani-
mation in documentary films of the 1980s and early 1990s, many of
the present anxieties about digital animation’s supposed destabiliza-
tion of the relationship between sign and referent in documentary are
very similar to, or follow from, those anxieties raised by the prolifera-
tion of postmodern theory in the academy. At that time, theories of
postmodernity were perceived as threatening established documentary
guarantees by flattening not only structures of signification but also the
grand narratives that held them in place. By documentary guarantee,
I mean the ways in which documentaries establish their truth claims.
Video technology was seen as operating hand in hand with postmodern
aesthetics. Many theorists figured video technology and video aesthet-
ics, like those of television, as slippery, malleable, flowing, and capable
of flattening our sense of history.2 Indeed, in some video work, mtv
music-­video aesthetics seemed to privilege a jumble of ideas via the use
of found footage, animation, live action, and video keying. In the ex-
perimental identity-­politics video, these forms of video special-­effects
animation can be seen not only as a symptom of postmodernity but as
an antidote to it.
The video special effects of the 1980s and early 1990s, although not
usually thought of as animation, operated rhetorically much as digital
animation does today. Techniques such as video keying, the palimpses-
tic layering of images, the insertion or scrolling of video and computer-­
generated text, the use of the frame within a frame, and the manipula-
tion of image speed through slow motion, stuttering, and looping gave
documentary and experimental filmmakers alike a way of figuratively,
visually, and rhetorically opening up critical space in a flattened post-
modern world. These techniques of animating the image, of manipulat-
ing the image at the level of the frame, also allowed artists to open up
a space of playful and transformative personal and political imagining.
Animation allowed them to deessentialize notions of race, class, gen-
der, sexuality, and nationality—and imagine other ways of being. Art-
ists’ aesthetic use of video animation tools actively theorized and his-
toricized questions of subjectivity. In this way, artists’ use of animation
contributed to larger theoretical conversations on the impact of post-
modern theory on subjectivity. These artists did not just represent their
subjectivities but additionally enacted them through various forms of
video animation. Looking at the experimental identity-­politics docu-
mentary video through the lens of animation and defining forms of ani-
mation more precisely as rhetorical structures allow these practices to
become visible as theoretical interventions into the critical discourse of
the day. This approach encourages us to think about how aesthetics re-
flects and also shapes shifting epistemological discourses in the larger
culture. In other words, experimental identity-­politics video illuminates
the way that animation both was shaped by and shapes the ways we
know the world and understand ourselves.3

202  • Tess Takahashi

Hybrid Animation

Looking at video special effects as animation allows us to draw connec-

tions between questions about documentary in the 1980s and current
concerns about animation in documentary today. With the rise of digi-
tal animation in the past decade, some documentary theorists have de-
fined animation as a problem for documentary because documentary
seems to require the indexical image to point to reality. Here I want to
define animation as not limited to a problem for documentary certainty
but as comprising a range of devices that work to enact specific rhetori-
cal strategies within documentary. As such we can talk more specifically
about particular tropes and techniques rather than talking about ani-
mation in general.
These video animation techniques function very similarly to digital
animation techniques used in documentary and across moving-­image
culture today, where animated lines, frames, color, and moving text
are embedded within live images. Lev Manovich describes these as hy-
brid forms of animation, forms that we have come to encounter most
regularly in “commercials, music videos, motion graphics, television
graphics, and other types of short non-­narrative films and moving image
sequences.”4 Contemporary image culture features digital composites,
composed of registers of analog and digitally animated images. Hybrid
images, as Manovich notes, have proliferated in the wake of cheap and
accessible animation programs such as AfterEffects and Photoshop,
which became widely available in the mid-­1990s. Hybrid forms of the
animated image, in which editing occurs within the image rather than
between images, are today ubiquitous and unremarkable. We assume
that most images we see are digitally animated, whether obviously so
or not. Whether or not such images present themselves as seamless or
foreground their hybrid status, today editing and animation within the
image are taken for granted. Hybrid forms of animation challenge in-
dexicality and also integrate different registers and forms of the image,
palimpsestically layering various forms of representation, such as video,
television, photographs, and 16mm and 8mm film footage.
We should remember that before AfterEffects and Photoshop, the
1980s and early 1990s witnessed an explosion of editing within the
frame. As with today’s digital animation, video animation was partly
automatic and partly undertaken through personal manipulation of
video editing tools. While clunkier than current digital editing tools,
analog video editing systems allowed editors to manipulate and gener-

Framing the Postmodern • 203

ate various kinds of hybrid animated images. Artists’ experiments with
documentary form in this period often incorporated complex integra-
tions of images and sound. Like the image track, the soundtracks of the
experimental identity-­politics video documentary were often composed
of multiple tracks, including found music, sound, other recordings,
and voices in the forms of monologue, poetry, and interview. Rather
than presenting a seamless image, these experimental identity-­politics
videos often seem to foreground their status as composited. At least it
seems this way in hindsight compared to the relative seamlessness of
current digital media.
The use of these kinds of animated special effects was not limited
to experimental documentaries edited on video. In the same period,
similar animated special effects were widely produced on celluloid film
with optical printers. These techniques and the larger theoretical ques-
tions they addressed were not technologically determined. The optical
printer, sometimes called a step printer, which invokes the step-­by-­step
nature of the printing process, allowed filmmakers to produce compli-
cated image effects one frame at a time on celluloid film, in a process
more akin to what we think of as traditional sequentially produced ani-
mation. This can be seen in experimental work by Peggy Ahwesh, Betsy
Bromberg, Bruce Elder, Nina Fonoroff, Su Friedrich, Malcolm LeGrice,
David Rimmer, and Barbara Sternberg. The proliferation of experimen-
tal animation techniques across video and celluloid production in this
period shows that something larger was happening throughout the cul-
ture than in just this small niche of experimental identity-­politics video.
It also helps to connect the aesthetics and concerns of the experimental
identity-­politics video to many experimental works made on film that
also examined questions of personal experience and voice.
Just as hybrid digitally animated images incorporate various regis-
ters of appropriated images, the 1980s and early 1990s saw a strong turn
to the incorporation of found footage from both mass media and more
obscure sources. Television and video found footage were relatively easy
to get and use, with improved accessibility to home-­video recorders.
Universities, media centers, and community groups, often organized
around race, gender, or medium, provided access to cameras and edit-
ing systems. Found footage appeared in experimental and documentary
work alike, whether made on film, video, photographs, or combinations
thereof. Animated special effects were imbricated with artists’ use of
found footage. Some hybrid animated special effects in both film and
video included the use of the frame within a frame (for both found foot-

204  • Tess Takahashi

age and original footage); the manipulation of the speed of the image
via slow motion, as well as the looping and stuttering of the image; and
the editing, movement, and palimpsestic layering of image and text
within the frame.5 These special effects for animated video, often used
in combination, gave documentary and experimental filmmakers a way
of figuratively, visually, and rhetorically doing three important things:
comment on postmodern flattening, open up critical space, and create
spaces of playful and transformative personal and political imagining.

Documentary Theory and the Problem of Postmodern Collapse

The formal and rhetorical uses of animated special effects were signifi-
cant within documentary production in the 1980s and 1990s, yet these
uses were not often remarked upon by documentary theorists and crit-
ics. With the rise of postmodern theory, investment in the guarantees
of observational documentary, once endorsed by direct indexical record-
ing and the project of authoritative truth telling, met with consider-
able challenges. Postmodernism produced a crisis within documentary
theory dominated by “discourses of sobriety” that were “devoted to cer-
titude.”6 This crisis occurred partly in response to postmodern theory’s
description of a number of supposed collapses. These include the col-
lapse of grand narratives, the collapse of history, the collapse of high
and low culture, and the collapse of the avant-­garde and mass cultures.
Perhaps most significant for documentary were the supposed collapses
between fact and fiction, between historical reality and the image, and
between sign and referent. However, these convergences also generated
anxiety over the possibility for generating critical art in the modernist
tradition. As Fredric Jameson writes in a most influential, and anxiety-­
provoking, passage: “Now reference and reality disappear altogether,
and even meaning—the signified—is problematized. We are left with
that pure and random play of signifiers that we call postmodernism.”7
Documentary theory showed marked anxiety about the status of
documentary and its capacity for political efficacy in the context of this
supposed flattening of signification and reference.8 In particular, many
documentary theorists bemoaned the limited possibilities for opening
up critical space under the weight of so much historical, ideological, and
semiotic flattening. The following quotations from essays written a de-
cade apart by E. Ann Kaplan (in 1983) and Linda Williams (in 1993) dem-
onstrate the durability of this anxiety for documentary theory. Kaplan
writes, “The danger of semiology has been the sliding away from the

Framing the Postmodern • 205

referent that I mentioned earlier. . . . Semiologists run the danger of col-
lapsing levels of things that need to remain distinct if we are to work
effectively in the political arena to bring about change.”9 For Kaplan, the
collapse of the realms of text and the material world seemed to threaten
possibilities for political change. A decade later, Williams writes, “While
not all theorists of postmodernity are as disturbed as Jameson by the
apparent loss of the referent, . . . many theorists do share a sense that
the enlightenment projects of truth and reason are definitively over. . . .
We seem to be plunged into a permanent state of the self-­reflexive crisis
of representation. What was once a ‘mirror with a memory’ can now
only reflect another mirror.”10 Williams describes a widespread contem-
porary feeling of crisis regarding the status of critical visual representa-
tion. The metaphor of reflection that had been so important to theories
of critical and political modernism now signaled a collapse of space for
critical reflection.
For many theorists of documentary, postmodern theory’s troubling
of the relationship between sign and referent threatened the status of
documentary representation as a political vehicle with potentially ma-
terial effects in the world. The collapses associated with postmodernity
were often figured through the ways in which the increasingly dominant
media of television and video presented both original and found foot-
age. If celluloid was figured as a modernist medium with the capacity
for critical juxtaposition of historically marked images, then television
and video were figured as epitomizing postmodern flow and obliterat-
ing historical consciousness. Jameson notoriously describes video as
the “art form . . . par excellence” of postmodernism and late capitalism,
“ceaselessly reshuffl[ing] the fragments of preexistent texts,” and col-
lapsing the critical and political capacity associated with modernist style
through a supposedly indiscriminate incorporation of found footage.11
However, postmodern theory was less a threat than a tool for many
political artists and documentary practitioners in this period—a group
whose forays into documentary tended more toward experimental ex-
plorations of political subjectivity than the tradition of modern social
documentary. Theories of postmodernity became illuminating tools for
groups seeking a certain slipperiness or contingency in order to change
their relationships to existing power structures. Postmodern theory met
identity politics in this period, in what Linda Hutcheon describes as a
most productive meeting, as individuals and groups worked to decon-
struct essentialist notions of racial, sexual, and gender identity. “What
these various forms of identity politics shared with the postmodern,”

206  • Tess Takahashi

Hutcheon writes, “is a focus on difference and ex-­centricity, an inter-
est in the hybrid, the heterogeneous, and the local, and an interroga-
tive and deconstructing mode of analysis.”12 Linda Nicholson and Steven
Seidman also note that “it is among the American left, among neo-­and-­
post-­Marxists, feminists, queers, and Third World and postcolonial
intellectuals, that postmodernism has been most enthusiastically em-
braced.”13 While now sometimes disparaged as simplistic, in that histori-
cal period, identity politics, feminism, and postcolonial concerns pro-
duced a set of grounding political (and physically material) stakes that
butted up against the seemingly relentless textual circularity of post-
modern theory. This was nowhere more visible than in the experimental
identity-­politics documentary video, and made visible by video anima-
tion techniques.
Under postmodernity, with its convergence of categories, medium
specificity also became an outmoded category of analysis. Video’s adapt-
ability and ease of use meant that it was often figured as a nonmedium
capable of blending into a larger discursive field. Even so, video still re-
called Rosalind Krauss’s “video narcissism” and the remnant of its early
critical figuration as a mirror.14 The nonmedium of video seemed to offer
transparent access to the minority author-­subject of the experimental
identity-­politics video. Indeed, documentary criticism has examined
the experimental identity-­politics video of the 1980s and early 1990s
primarily in terms of authorship and identity with transparent access
to even the most multiple and dispersed of subjects provided by the
medium of video. In turn, many critics have tended to collapse author-
ship, subjectivity, and the video into a transparently accessible autobio-
graphical voice. If theories of postmodernity unsettled traditional guar-
antees for documentary film theory, then via identity politics the lived
experience and authentic voice of the minority subject-­artist seemed to
ground meaning in physical and emotional experience. In this context,
for some theorists of documentary, the experimental identity-­politics
video appeared to offer the impression of grounded, embodied author-
ship, even as these works complicated the status of that authorship and
of those bodies.
Still, despite all this animation and manipulation, there remained a
strong tendency to see video as a mirror of the self that reflected the
author-­subject rather than figuring the field of video as a complex dis-
cursive space. The place of formally complex films and videos by mi-
nority subjects, often taken up within the academy, was often seen as
revealing a fractured psyche. Writing in 1988, Judith Williamson notes

Framing the Postmodern • 207

that “it is particularly striking that the black British work that’s been
taken up most widely in the world of theory, been most written about
and also picked up at festivals, on tours, and so on, is the work that fits
most obviously into that category avant-­garde.” And yet, as Williamson
writes, and as I also note, “the formal properties of those films have
somehow, in most of the critical discourse surrounding them, been sub-
sumed into their ‘blackness.’ ”15 Formal inventiveness by women and
blacks (not to mention black women) was seen by many critics as ar-
ticulating a specifically women’s—or black—aesthetics. Work by lgbt
artists was likewise seen as articulating a specific point of view, where
fractured aesthetics were linked to fractured identity. Further, artistic
choices in experimental identity-­politics work on video, far more than
on film, were subsumed into categories of identity and understood as
self-­expression. Coco Fusco observes: “Since the early ’70s, the reigning
interpretation of Eurocentric film theory has led to the fetishisation of
formal complexity and the obsessive search for visual illustrations of
psychoanalytic ‘truths.’”16 In other words, academic criticism has tended
to equate formal complexity with direct access to the minority subject’s
complex inner life and complicated subject position. In experimental
identity-­politics videos of the late 1980s and early 1990s, “formal com-
plexity” and “visual illustrations of psychoanalytic ‘truths’ ” were seen
as one and the same.
Rather than simply reflecting a state of being through video, the
often-­minority author-­subject of the experimental identity-­politics
video used animation to critique the notion of unified subjectivity.
Special-­effects animation for video was used to visually enact, rather
than merely reflect, the disjunctions of that subjectivity under specifi-
cally historical conditions. In this period, these animated special-­effects
techniques emphasized spatial and temporal disjunction as a meta-
phor for disunified, fragmented subjectivity. It should be noted that the
use of sound (spoken monologues, popular music, fragments of voice,
sound from movies) operated in similar ways. Rather than merely re-
producing the supposed collapse of history and signification under post-
modern conditions, artists used video animation to pry open figurative,
rhetorical, and critical space. Some of these techniques worked in Mar-
lon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989), Rea Tajiri’s History and Memory (1991),
and Tony Cokes and Donald Trammel’s Fade to Black (1990).

208  • Tess Takahashi

Frame within a Frame

Perhaps one of the most widely used animation techniques in the 1980s
and 1990s was the frame within a frame. In the present day, filled as it
is with digital windows and frames, a hybrid image such as the frame
within a frame so pervades our daily field of vision that it almost fails
to register. Today these frames operate less as framing devices and more
as portals or windows into different websites, images, photographs,
texts, YouTube videos, and so on, which are layered over one another
on our laptops and desktop computers.17 In the 1980s and 1990s, the
frame within a frame functioned very differently. While it sometimes
served as a window to memory, it more often functioned as a critical,
reflexive gesture that drew attention to the status and ideology of the
media image. This media image was figured regularly through the pres-
ence of the television raster, which sometimes stood for a certain kind
of ideological framing aligned with mass culture, rather than as a win-
dow through which to access images and information. The frame within
a frame as a formal and rhetorical technique in experimental documen-
tary includes more than just video and optically animated frames around
found and originally shot footage and photographs. These frames also
appeared as actual material television frames, picture frames, book
pages, and mirrors, as can be seen in examples as diverse as the criti-
cal cable-­access show Paper Tiger tv, Leslie Thornton’s Peggy and Fred
in Hell, Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s The Riddle of the Sphinx, and a
number of pieces by Isaac Julien, including The Passion of Remembrance,
The Attendant, and Looking for Langston.18
In the 1980s and early 1990s, the animated frame within a frame was
a privileged formal structure that artists and documentarians widely
employed in attempts to, on the one hand, figuratively pry open critical
space for the analysis of images and, on the other hand, serve as por-
tals to spaces of memory, play, and fantasy. Criticism and fantasy are of
course two important functions of animation in documentary. They also
help us to see the two sides of experiments with documentary in this
period. The mobility of the animated image is important both in the con-
text of postmodernist challenges to the stability of the human subject
and in the possibility for playful transformation.
For example, Riggs’s now-canonical Tongues Untied makes use of a
number of animated special effects in relation to found and originally
shot footage. In one instance, Riggs uses the frame within a frame as
a space of fantasy to animate a high school photograph in a segment

Framing the Postmodern • 209

 Fi g ure 1 2 . 1 Still from
Marlon Riggs’s Tongues
Untied (1989). Image
courtesy of Signifyin’
Works.

that recalls the miracle of friendship offered by “the boy with the gray-­
green eyes,” told in longing voice-­over, against the sonorous backdrop
of Roberta Flack singing The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. Animated
against a black field, the photograph advances, eventually filling the
frame and the space of the present before receding, as Riggs narrates
his story on the audio track.19 Here the animated photograph opens not
only a space of memory, fantasy, and personal history but also a space
of recognition that produces a sense of wholeness for the young Riggs.
This frame-­within-­a-­frame animation segment generates a strik-
ing rhythmic and emotional contrast with the narration of childhood
experiences that precedes it. Riggs describes that childhood as spent
“cornered by identities [he] never wanted to claim”: “Punk—homo—
faggot—freak—mother-­fucking coon—niggas, go home—Uncle Tom.”
These stereotypical names delivered in clipped fragments come out of
anonymous mouths set in partial faces, eyes cut off by the frame, flash-
ing across the screen. These aggressive staccato audio-­visual rhythms
are hushed by the lush, lyrical wholeness of the song sung by Flack and
the wholeness of the face of the boy with gray-­green eyes, framed in a
high school photo. The boy Riggs loved, who called him a friend, did not
only have eyes that Riggs could disappear into. More important, they
were capable of seeing him and making an alienated young black gay
man feel whole. Riggs says looking into the camera: “In search of self I
listened to the beat of my heart, to rhythms muffled beneath layers of
delusion, pain, alienation, silence. The beat was my salvation. I let this
primal pulse lead me past broken dreams, solitude, fragments of iden-
tity to a new place, a home.” However, this particular use of the frame
within a frame as a space of longing in Tongues Untied constitutes a mere

210  • Tess Takahashi

moment in a complex tale of often-­fractured subjective experience, ar-
ticulated through a range of formal animation and editing devices. This
interplay between a sense of broken, fragmented selfhood and a longed-­
for, if ideologically suspect, feeling of wholeness is echoed in most of the
prominent experimental identity-­politics videos of the day.

Slow Motion, Looping, and Stuttering

Slow motion, looping, stuttering, and repetition of both found and

originally shot images also were used for multiple purposes in experi-
mental identity-­politics documentary. Sometimes slow-­motion ani-
mation techniques contributed to a sense of lyrical wholeness, while at
other times they constituted critical strategies that attempted to break
apart the apparently obvious meaning of an image and make it signify
differently. Looping and stuttering were used more often in the service
of intellectual critique, but also to draw attention to feelings of displace-
ment and alienation. Variations on these animation techniques can be
seen in Trinh T. Minh-­ha’s Reassemblage (1983), Joan Braderman’s Joan
Does Dynasty (1986), Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989), Rea Tajiri’s History
and Memory (1991), Shashwati Talukdar’s My Life as a Poster (1996), and
many others. In part, the regular use of slow motion, looping, and stut-
tering of the image as critical devices helps explain why scholars of docu-
mentary were outraged during the Rodney King trial in 1992 by the de-
fense’s use of slow motion and frame-­by-­frame analysis to scrutinize the
video footage of Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King. The use
of frame-­by-­frame analysis in deconstructing a grainy home video disre-
garded the visible evidence of a brutal beating, yes. However, even more
disturbingly, the defense used a supposedly critical methodology in the
service of the state.
Tajiri’s exemplary History and Memory (1991) employs slow motion,
looping, and stuttering to manipulate found footage from various
sources, including army footage, government-­produced documentaries,
Hollywood movies, home movies, and Tajiri’s own original footage,
in ways that range from identificatory to poetic to critical. One seg-
ment uses the stuttered video image to point to the fragmentation of
her mother’s memory of past experiences in the Japanese internment
camps during the Second World War. These stuttered images also ges-
ture to Tajiri’s own sense of incompleteness, “feeling a lot of pain,” as she
says in voice-over at one point, not knowing how the incomplete stories
and fragmented images of that time fit together.

Framing the Postmodern • 211

 This segment begins with found footage taken from the Hollywood
film Bad Day at Black Rock, in which the actor Spencer Tracy investigates
the death of a Japanese man around the time of the internments. The
animated title “wildflowers” is superimposed over a man’s hands as he
picks flowers. The next image features the stuttered image of Tajiri’s
mother laughing and leaving the frame, followed by the title “Mother’s
voice 1989,” and scrolling white text over a black field:
She tells the story of what she does not remember
But remembers one thing:
Why she forgot to remember.

This text scrolls over audio of Tajiri’s mother talking about the conse-
quences of thinking too much about why the Japanese had been in-
terned, as she recalls the memory of a beautiful young woman who lost
her mind from the experience. As the stuttering image emphasizes its
missing frames, it points to Tajiri’s mother’s lost memories, and the
beautiful young woman’s lost mind.
As the mother voice speaks on the soundtrack, two other forms of
animation appear. A young boy’s face in negative with an artificial bright
pink glow emerges from the blackness. Over his face, the following text
scrolls in glowing green letters: “Letter sent to selected members of the
Japanese community post-­Pearl Harbor: ‘Certain Japanese persons are
being considered for repatriation to Japan. You and those members of
your family listed above are being so considered.’ ” The sequence evokes
the feeling that things are not as they should have been. Black seemed
white. White seemed black. The animated video’s keying of an unnatu-
ral pink pervades the negative image of an innocent child who could not
understand what was happening. The historical “reasons” for the Japa-
nese interment in glowing green scroll deliberately over the image. They
make no sense, but they continue their relentless animated pace.
The end of this segment returns to a clip from Bad Day at Black Rock.
Pulling a few wildflowers out of his pocket, Tracy says: “There’s some-
thing buried up there—wild flowers? That means a grave. I suppose you
knew that.” Following this bit of footage is a slow, stuttering image of
a plant identified by the title “Wildflowers in Mother’s Yard 1989,” im-
plying that something lies buried there in Tajiri’s mother’s memory
(see figure 12.2). The stuttering image points to the lost, discontinuous
spaces of not only memory but self. For Tajiri, the loss of memory im-
plies a fragmented sense of self, one that haunts her too. Later in His-
tory and Memory, Tajiri says in voice-­over: “I began searching because I

212  • Tess Takahashi

 F i g u re 1 2 . 2 Still from Rea Tajiri’s
History and Memory (1991). Courtesy
of Electronic Arts Intermix (eai),
New York.

felt lost, ungrounded, somewhat like a ghost that floats over terrain,
witnessing others living their lives and yet not having one of its own.”
“Somehow I could identify with the search,” she says, “the search for an
ever-­absent image and the desire to create an image where there are so
few.” By making a picture, she could connect to the story, Tajiri says: “I
could forgive my mother her loss of memory and could make this image
for her.”

Editing within the Frame

Cokes and Trammel’s Fade to Black, which appeared in the Whitney Bi-
ennial in 1992, employs a range of animated special effects in critical
ways. Unlike many of the experimental identity-­politics videos of its
day, Fade to Black is more interested in exploring and evoking a frag-
mented sense of subjectivity than resolving it in wholeness. For this rea-
son, I believe that Fade to Black has received less critical attention than it
deserves.20 Fade to Black’s prologue sets up its overall logic, reorganizing
meaning and deconstructing subjectivity via a juxtaposition of original
and appropriated sound with a sophisticated and layered image track.
The image track of the prologue begins with the appropriation of the
credit sequence to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, in which a spiraling line
disappears into actress Kim Novak’s eye, set in a box within a larger
black field. This box frames specific parts of the original credit sequence,
using Vertigo’s animations of spirals and overlays of color to imply the
themes of vertiginous experience, desire, split subjectivity, and perfor-
mative identity that Vertigo’s narrative explores, and that likewise con-
stitute some of the major themes explored in Fade to Black. Here the
frame within a frame serves as a citation, zeroing in on portions of Ver-
tigo’s image that Cokes and Trammel wish to isolate and emphasize. This
procedure foreshadows a recurring sequence on Fade to Black’s image

Framing the Postmodern • 213

 F i g u re 1 2 . 3 Still from Tony Cokes
and Donald Trammel’s Fade to Black
(1990). Courtesy of Electronic Arts
Intermix (eai), New York.

track, which features a historical accounting of iconic Hollywood films,

some represented through framed visual excerpts, and others repre-
sented only by text stating their titles and years of release; this offers an
idiosyncratic history of race, representation, and uneasy identification
across a century of image production.
Below the box that cites images from Vertigo, glowing animated text
emerges from and fades into a black field. “In this darkened room,” the
text begins, “there is nothing for me to see. The plot in this darkness
revolves around recognition—But this recognition is always, already a
mistaken identity” (see figure 12.3). The text continues, asking questions
about the writer’s subjectivity and desire in relation to the film, saying:
“I find my fragmented self posing questions I should have asked,” for
example, “what does this film have to do with me?” in this text where
“no one looks like me.” This animated writing seems to offer a distinct
point of view, a clear voice, which the viewer might associate with Fade
to Black’s authors. However, the work’s dual authorship complicates the
ascription of a clear subject position to the voice behind that text, or to
any singular experience of being a black man in North America.
The sounds and voices that accompany the image track also ask ques-
tions about subjectivity, wholeness, and identification, both on the level
of the human subject and on the level of the text. Like the image track,
the soundtrack foregrounds the excerption and appropriation of found
texts, very similar to the snippets of rap music that weave in and out. The
audio track of the prologue begins with an excerpt from Public Enemy’s
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, followed by an appropriated
clip of a man’s voice talking about the function of rap as a form. “As an
art form,” the voice intones, rap allows “the youth of our culture be able
to pick up the bits and pieces of life as it is lived and transform mess
into a message.” Like its image track, Fade to Black’s audio track takes

214  • Tess Takahashi

up bits and pieces in order to form a new whole, as rap does, even as the
sampled parts remain distinct. In this sequence the sound of a tape re-
winding punctuates the spoken text’s ability to be excerpted. A man’s
voice reads from Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Appa-
ratuses” on the way that ideology works to transform individuals into
subjects: “It transforms them all, by that very precise operation that I
have called interpolation, or hailing, and which can be imagined along
the lines of the most commonplace everyday police or other hailing,
‘hey, you there!’” The verbal citation of Althusser on the hailing of the
subject continues through Fade to Black’s prologue, which points to the
way that differently raced subjects respond to the call. Likewise, Fade to
Black’s use of animation continually points to the slippage between the
hailing call and the subject’s sense of self.
The prologue ends with the title “Fade to Black,” followed by more
computer-­ generated texts giving credits, but also citing the texts
used—audio, music, voices, sounds. In this way the prologue points to
the fragmented amalgamation of sources, including David Byrne and
Brian Eno, Last Poets, Living Colour, Jesse Jackson, N.W.A., Pet Shop
Boys, and Public Enemy, in conjunction with jokes told by the two narra-
tors, personal stories, and quotations from people ranging from Althus-
ser to Malcolm X. Fade to Black is elegantly assembled but points to the
multiplicity of its sources and the difficulties of resolving them into a
seamless whole.

Conclusion

By examining these animated special effects for video within the ex-
perimental identity-­politics video of the 1980s and early 1990s, we are
able to rethink a number of questions that were under discussion at the
time. First, this examination allows us to see how the split figuration
of video technology as an epistemological tool functioned. On the one
hand, video was figured as a mirror, capable of rendering an accurate
documentary image of its often-­minority subject-­author. On the other
hand, video via editing and animation also was figured as the opposite of
a mirror, a field of playful experimentation that could be used to render
that minority subject fragmented, unstable, and critical of the notion
of coherent subjectivity. Ironically, this fragmentation of self via edit-
ing and animation was often read as mirroring the subject’s inner state
rather than as a discursive intervention. The video representation of

Framing the Postmodern • 215

subjective fragmentation was seen as a most authentic mirroring. At
the same time, with the category of medium specificity officially dead,
the nonmedium of video blended easily into the larger discursive field.
Second, rather than seeing video special effects as a symptom of
postmodern collapse, an examination of animation as a rhetorical tool
within this work helps us to see artists’ use of video animation as making
significant theoretical interventions into contemporary discourse. As
Trinh has noted, the stories and experiences of people of color tend to
be relegated to the realm of the personal rather than the ideological. I
suggest that in documentary theory, the experimental identity-­politics
video has tended to be relegated to the realm of autobiographical rather
than the theoretical. Like more traditional editing, editing within the
video frame by way of animation enabled artists to make a variety of rhe-
torical interventions. Special effects such as the frame within a frame,
video keying, scrolling text, and the palimpsestic layering of images did
not produce mirror reflections of fragmented subjectivity. Rather, art-
ists and filmmakers employed special effects to negotiate the intersect-
ing concerns of postmodern theory and identity politics. Through ani-
mation, artists enacted investigations of the personal, historical, and
discursive conditions under which subjectivity was constructed.
Finally, interrogating video animation as a form of editing within
the frame in experimental identity-­politics video helps connect video
editing practices in the 1980s and 1990s to present digital animation
practices. Within the field of cinema and media studies, video and digi-
tal media were figured as similar, often appearing in the same edited
collections with little distinction between them until the mid-­1990s.
Only toward the late 1990s, with the increased presence of the web and
questions of interactivity, did documentary scholars start to distinguish
video and digital media from one another. Part of what this examination
of experimental video animation techniques shows is how animation
has long operated as a form of editing. Such an insight asks that we re-
consider the status of not only animation in this period but also editing.
This insight makes us think about the shift from editing between frames
to editing within the frame as a kind of critical intervention rather than
simply a collapse of images upon one another. In some ways, the over-
whelming nature of these visual and aural aesthetic practices was asso-
ciated with the collapses of postmodernity. However, video animation
in the 1980s and 1990s also points to shifting forms of critical interven-
tion within documentary practice in a period when political modernism
found itself in crisis.

216  • Tess Takahashi

Notes

1. For “domestic ethnography,” see Renov, The Subject of Documentary, 218. For
“autoethnography,” see Nichols, Blurred Boundaries, 65.
2. For “flow,” see Williams, Television, 78.
3. Artists and filmmakers, many of whom were familiar with theoretical dis-
courses on postmodernity, as well as the discourse of race, gender, and sexu-
ality that pervaded the academy, also examined the relationship between docu-
mentary guarantees and authorial subjectivity.
4. Manovich, “After Effects, or the Velvet Revolution,” 7.
5. Other animated video special effects include the movement of photographs
within the frame (or into and across photographs) and video keying (which in-
serted color and image in irregular ways into the frame).
6. Nichols, Representing Reality, 4; and Renov, The Subject of Documentary, 136.
7. Jameson, Postmodernism, 96.
8. In the 1980s through the 1990s, numerous theorists of documentary, including
Bill Nichols, Michael Renov, Jay Ruby, Paul Arthur, Seth Feldman, Phil Rosen,
Trinh T. Minh-­ha, Linda Williams, Brian Winston, Katie Russell, and Laura
Marks, investigated a range of challenges posed by theories of postmodernity
to documentary guarantees. Among the most influential at the time were theo-
ries of documentary reflexivity, performativity, and failure as modes of produc-
ing new forms of documentary authority.
9. Kaplan, “Theories and Strategies of the Feminist Documentary,” 60.
10. Williams, “Mirrors without Memories,” 10.
11. Jameson, “Reading without Interpretation,” 207, 223.
12. Hutcheon, “Postmodern Afterthoughts,” 5.
13. Nicholson and Seidman, “Introduction,” Social Postmodernism, 1.
14. Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism.”
15. Williamson, “Two Kinds of Otherness,” 109, 110.
16. Fusco, “Fantasies of Oppositionality,” 90; emphasis added.
17. For a broader discussion of the evolution of frames and windows in media, see
Anne Friedberg’s book The Virtual Window from Alberti to Microsoft.
18. The use of the television raster can be seen in Paper Tiger tv, a cable-­access tele-
vision show that was dedicated to the critical analysis of mass media, in par-
ticular, but not exclusively, television. Shows often took the form of academic
lectures, as in “Brian Winston Reads T.V. News March 16, 1983” (1983), “Joan
Does Dynasty” (1986), and “Ads, Ads, Ads! Mark Crispin Miller Journeys thru
the Expanding Geography of American Advertising” (1991).
19. More colloquially known as the “Ken Burns effect,” the camera’s movement into
the photographic image, across images, and through images is an example of
mainstream usage, as in Ken Burns’s miniseries The Civil War (1990).
20. For a very different account of Fade to Black, see Scott MacDonald’s “Desegre-
gating Film History.”

Framing the Postmodern • 217

IV : : Animation and the World
13 : : Cartoon Film Theory: Imamura Taihei on
Animation, Documentary, and Photography
T hom a s L a M a rre

As initially developed in the 1930s, Imamura Taihei’s theory of anima-

tion took American cartoons as a point of departure, especially Disney
cartoons such as Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies, but also those of
Disney’s rival, Fleischer Studios, such as Popeye the Sailor and Color Clas-
sics. This is not particularly surprising: other theorists of film and mass
culture such as Sergei Eisenstein, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno
repeatedly turned to Disney cartoons in articulating their reflections.1
Yet Imamura’s film theory is unusual in its equal emphasis on anima-
tion and documentary. While his publications tend to treat them sepa-
rately, animation and documentary were for him two faces of cinema,
interrelated and inseparable. Moreover, he did not relegate animation in
advance to the realm of fantasy in contrast to the reality of live-­action
cinema, nor conversely did he see documentary in terms of objectivity
in contrast to the subjectivity of fiction. His film theory was ultimately
able to work across animation and documentary because it centered on
an unusual conceptualization of photography, which led to his distinc-
tive approach to cartoons as a form of realism.
Imamura’s reflections used American cartoons not only as a point of
departure for theorizing the realism of animation but also as a practical
model for improving the quality of Japanese cartoons. Imamura’s 1938
essay, “For the Sake of Japanese Cartoon Films” (“Nihon manga eiga no
tame ni”), opens with such concerns: “I recently went into a theater for
short films, and there was but one cartoon. Surprisingly, it was a Japa-
nese cartoon, Kaeru no kenpō [Frog swordplay]. Accustomed to seeing
cartoons like Mickey Mouse and Popeye the Sailor, I found Japanese car-
toons impoverished.”2
Another aspiration of Imamura’s cartoon theory, then, was to reform
cartoon production in Japan. In this respect, Imamura’s theory shows
continuity with concerns of prior film criticism for reforming national
production, particularly as articulated in the pure film movement that
gathered steam from the late 1910s through the 1920s in Japan.3 Yet
Imamura’s interest in reforming Japanese cartoons took a turn that
seems, at least at first, to be at odds with his interest in realism. For
his reflections turned toward how cinema might enable a practical re-
purposing of traditional Japanese art forms, which he himself does not
deem realist. As a consequence, Imamura’s work consistently flirts with
forms of cultural nationalism or, more precisely, national culturalism
in the form of traditionalism. In addition, insofar as Imamura turns to
Japanese traditions in an attempt to take Japanese cartoons beyond re-
ceived oppositions between Japanese tradition and Western modernity,
his film theory verges on the modernist conceit commonly referred to
as “overcoming modernity.”4
In sum, Imamura’s film theory operated between two modernist ten-
dencies—traditionalism and realism. I propose to look at how Imamura
resolved this tension through a conceptualization of photography that
allowed him to produce an original variation on apparatus theory. In-
stead of the familiar emphasis on the monocular lens of the camera and
regimes of one-­point perspective, Imamura stressed the descriptive,
explanatory, and even narrative force of the camera and photography,
both in cartoons and documentaries. This emphasis allowed him to mo-
bilize techniques of traditional Japanese arts as potential modes of real-
ism that, because they were no longer standing in opposition to modern
cinema, could actively reform or even move beyond it.
I also propose to explore the sociohistorical implications of Ima-
mura’s invention of a “transcriptive apparatus” to resolve the tension
between traditional arts and realist cinema. As Irie Yoshirō notes, “Ima-
mura’s investigations into the essence of cinema began alongside his
emerging consciousness of Marxism.”5 When Imamura leapt into film
theory in earnest in 1934, contributing to the reader’s column of Ki-
nema Junpō and founding and contributing to the film magazine Eiga
Shūdan, a series of mass arrests of communists and others deemed po-
litically suspect (among them Marxists) was leading to the collapse of
the Japanese Communist Party and to conversions (tenkō) of intellec-
tuals and artists from Marxism to nationalism, among them Imamura.
It is thus difficult to gauge the impact of Marxism on Imamura: for in-
stance, where Irie calls attention to the Marxist currents of Imamura’s
film theory, Ōtsuka Eiji stresses Imamura’s renunciation of Marxism.6
It is consequently possible to see a tension between Marxism and na-

222  • Thomas LaMarre

tionalism within ­Imamura’s theory, which is analogous to the tension
between realism and traditionalism. Indeed, Imamura’s goal of produc-
ing distinctively Japanese cartoons and documentaries might be seen
as analogous to the formation of cultural nationalism out of cosmopoli-
tanism and Marxism.
I will focus largely on his “For the Sake of Japanese Cartoon Films,” for
a number of reasons. First, although Imamura is best known for his 1940
book on documentary film, A Theory of Documentary Film (Kiroku eiga
ron), and for the first book-­length treatise on animation, A Theory of Car-
toon Film (Manga eiga ron), which was first published in 1941, revised and
published again in 1948 and 1965, and recently republished in 2005, “For
the Sake of Japanese Cartoon Films” not only anticipates the arguments
of the 1941 book but also presents them in a condensed form, making
clear the connections between arguments that are sometimes held apart
in the book.7 Second, the 1938 essay addresses a specific moment in the
history of animation: the introduction of new techniques for producing
a sense of depth in animation, that is, the multiplanar camera system,
which received a great deal of popular and critical attention in the con-
text of Disney’s The Old Mill (1937) and Fleischer’s Popeye the Sailor Meets
Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves (1937). Imamura continued to evoke new Disney
and American cartoons throughout his career, but there is a sense of his-
torical urgency at this early stage in his career. Arguably, it was the criti-
cal buzz surrounding the technical achievements of American cartoons
that spurred Imamura to focus attention on the apparatus and realism
in animation. Third, this buzz about technical innovations in animation
around 1937, in combination with the economic ascendency of American
cartoons throughout the world, imparts a sense of urgency to Imamura’s
reflections on the relation between the technical and the economic, and
to his concerns about how to produce cartoons in Japan.

Photography

Imamura opens “For the Sake of Japanese Cartoon Films” with praise
for the vitality of movement in Disney cartoons, in contrast to which
Japanese cartoons prove deficient, as the example of Kaeru no kenpō
makes woefully clear to him.8 As his discussion shifts to the practical
matter of how to produce such vitality in cartoons, he takes a rather sur-
prising tack. Imamura associates the vitality of animation with realism
of movement, and at the same time he stresses the importance of pho-
tography over drawing or painting techniques.9 He thus writes, adding

Cartoon Film Theory • 223

emphasis to underscore his points: “The realism [shajitsusei] of Disney’s
cartoons—this wellspring of vital force—where does it come from? It
comes from that fact that the drawings [e] are not just drawings; they are
drawings combined with photography [shashin to ketsugō shita e]. In fact,
in the cartoon, photographic methods prevail over drawings [shishin teki
na hōhō ga kaiga o shihai shite iru no de aru].”10 This may seem an obvious
point: the distinctiveness of cartoons lies in movement, and movement
takes precedence over techniques of drawing and painting, at once con-
joining and governing the images. Yet discussions of the vitality of ani-
mation usually privilege the art of the hand over the “technical work”
of photography. In Sergei Eisenstein’s unfinished manuscript and notes,
written in the late 1930s and early 1940s, on Disney cartoons, for in-
stance, he calls attention to what he calls plasmaticness, that is, the plas-
ticity and elasticity of line and figure in animation.11
Eisenstein deftly steers his discussion toward the stroke drawing, a
drawing in which the line traces a continuous contour in a single stroke,
in form rather like an amoeba.12 Eisenstein highlights how this basic
feature of cartoons—the stroke drawing—allows for a continual trans-
formation and deformation of form, without an actual loss of form. At
one point he refers to its “poly-­formic capabilities.” Eisenstein thus calls
attention to the elasticity of shapes, the mobility of contours, and the
fluidity and diversity of forms, which he frequently links to primordial
protoplasm-­like vitality, to primitive exuberance and ecstasy, and to ani-
mism: “The very idea, if you will, of the animated cartoon is like a direct
embodiment of the method of animism.”13
In contrast, while Imamura is similarly interested in the vitality and
movement of animation, his account goes to great lengths to deempha-
size the primacy of drawing: “Taken one by one the still drawings are
not particularly attractive. A still image of something like Mickey Mouse
tends rather to be ugly. How is it that an image crudely drawn in heavy
lines without any particular charm, when set in motion, becomes full of
life and spirit, and simply put, is no longer a drawing? The secret must lie
in movement itself, that which moves the drawings.”14 But also in con-
trast to Eisenstein’s emphasis on animism, animation for Imamura is
above all a matter of the realism of movement, and that realism derives
from photography and photographic methods—over and above tech-
niques of drawing or painting. But what are these photographic m ­ ethods?
Imamura calls attention to how photography allows for “parsing
action” or “parsing movement.” His turn of phrase is dōsa no bunkai,
which might be translated in a number of different ways, among them

224  • Thomas LaMarre

Fi g u re 13 . 1 Still from The Country Cousin (1936).

“decomposing motion” or “breaking down movement,” for Imamura’s

usage implies the decomposition and recomposition of the movement
of distinct entities—in effect, his emphasis falls on character animation
or object animation. Take, for instance, his example of the animation
of the drunken mouse in Disney’s The Country Cousin (1936), which, he
claims, “is nothing other than photography of a person in an inebriated
state,” calling attention to how “each frame of film is rendered in draw-
ings” (see figure 13.1).15 In other words, although he does not directly
refer us to rotoscoping, which was common practice in 1930s American
cartoons, Imamura’s emphasis on how the animation of the drunken
mouse is rendered by drawing the photographed movement of a person
frame by frame suggests that he has something like rotoscoping in mind.
His subsequent example from Fleischer’s Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad
the Sailor (1936) similarly calls attention to the photographic parsing of
movement, focusing on the scene in which the roc takes flight in the
first reel. As Imamura notes, the roc’s extended takeoff resembles that
of a Douglas passenger plane (probably the Douglas DC-­2, introduced in
1934, or the DC-­3, introduced 1936). Indeed, the giant cartoon bird skips
and bumps along its runaway, gaining elevation only to fall back to the
ground, with the sound of engines buzzing over the music (see figures

Cartoon Film Theory • 225

13.2–13.4). But then Imamura adds, “The thoroughly realistic movement
of its wings is clearly a pictorial rendering based on parsing the flight of
a bird with photographic filming [shashin satsuei].”16
As such examples attest, Imamura’s use of the term shashin, con-
ventionally translated as “photography,” is complex. His use of shashin
implies two distinctive orientations. On the one hand, what he calls
photography seems to be the same thing as filming, or at least seems
practically indistinguishable from it. The term shashin appears in dif-
ferent combinations and contexts in which photography merges with
filming, that is, producing film footage. Thus, we find Imamura restating
his basic thesis about animation: “If the parsing of action did not pro-
ceed instant by instant through photography, the vitality of the mouse,
duck, and dog [Mickey, Donald, and Goofy] could not be expressed.
The parsing of a continuous chain of vital movement by means of mov-
ing photographs [katsudō shashin] begins with drawings to bring about
movement-­time.”17
I will discuss Imamura’s conceptualization of temporality, but I wish
first to make two points about this first orientation of shashin in Ima-
mura. First, his use of shashin moves easily between kinds of mediatic
capture that are frequently held apart today. We often think of pho-
tography in terms of instantaneity, stills, and stopped time (snapping
photos) in contrast to the continuity, movement, and temporal flow of
filming sequences. Yet we do not resolve anything by concluding that
shashin in Imamura really refers to filming and not to photography.
Similarly, it won’t fix matters to assume that he is really thinking of the
movie camera rather than the still camera. We should not presume that
we know what photography really is or what cinema really is. Rather, we
should accept the challenge of the uncertainty of received distinctions
afforded in Imamura’s use of shashin. Let me begin by considering what
is common to cinema and photography that might explain Imamura’s
conceptualization, if only by way of contrast.
In Japanese, both photographs and films are sometimes included
under the rubric eizō, a term that is commonly translated as “image,”
but that refers more specifically to mechanically produced and repro-
duced images. Imamura occasionally uses this term near the end of “For
the Sake of Japanese Cartoon Films.” Although Imamura is interested
in the scientific and technical aspects of cinema, he tends to separate its
photographic methods from the domain of (capitalist) mass production
and reproduction. His primary concern then is not the reproducibility of
images that is often associated with the term eizō.

226  • Thomas LaMarre

F i g u re s 13 . 2 , 13 . 3 , a n d 13 . 4 Stills from Popeye the
Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor (1936).
 In English usage, the term shooting refers both to taking photos and
filming. This usage directs attention to the importance of capture, with
emphasis on targeting and contacting, which is also very different in
tone from Imamura’s notion of “parsing action.” Parsing movement
with photographic methods for him is not a matter of referentiality in the
sense of a one-­point, one-­moment contact between object and image,
spatially or temporally. Nor is there a sense of the object captured, mum-
mified, or frozen. On the contrary, Imamura associates the photographic
parsing of movement with the expression of vitality. As such, his under-
standing of shashin stands in contrast to currents in film theory related
to Bazinian realism as Phillip Rosen describes them: “Photographic and
filmic images have normally been apprehended as indexical traces, for
their spatial field and the objects depicted were in the camera’s ‘pres-
ence’ at some point prior to the actual reading of the sign. The indexical
trace is a matter of pastness.”18
There is something similar to the indexical trace at work in Imamura’s
examples of the animation of the drunken mouse and the flight of the
roc, and yet, rather than a matter of pastness, it is a matter of vitality.
This makes sense if we consider the procedures of rotoscoping, already
in use from the mid-­1910s, in which animation was drawn frame by
frame from film footage. Donald Crafton describes it as “a new process
Max Fleischer called rotoscoping. Motion pictures of various mecha-
nisms were made; then, by projecting the developed footage on frame at
a time and tracing it on cels, a film of schematic clarity could be made.”19
In rotoscoping, the “presence” of the camera is thus doubled. The
camera is first present to film the live-­action footage and then again to
film the drawn images based on the live-­action footage. In some cur-
rents of cinematic realism, the presence of the camera is often taken
as a guarantee of one-­point referentiality and thus of a linear relation
capable of assuring that a photo, for instance, can be a document and
therefore ground a historical relation. Consequently, the realism of ani-
mation, evident in rotoscoping, must grapple with multiple presences
and cannot make claims for linearity. In this respect, it is telling that
Imamura’s example of the flight of the roc has two indexes: the Douglas
airplane and the flight of a bird. And if, as Imamura suggests, both of
them drew on photographic sources, then both entailed two camera
“presences” during production. If we think of realism in terms of refer-
entiality, there are already four points of camera presence.
As such, animation presents a profound challenge to theories of cine-
matic realism, which have tended to treat indexicality as a form of one-­

228  • Thomas LaMarre

point referentiality based on a moment of indexical contact or capture,
which is in turn grounded in the sense of photographic instantaneity.
Animation automatically doubles and redoubles the index. This is surely
one of the reasons why animation has so often been associated with the
digital (the multiplication of sources within a single image or the multi-
plication of images from a single source) in contrast with the analog (one-­
point or one-­moment presence). While the contrast between the digital
and analog has often tended to exaggeration and thus to an unworkable
opposition,20 it does concisely point to the challenge of Imamura’s theory
of animation: its realism is based neither on reproducibility nor on one-­
point referentiality. What is more, animation does not stand in oppo-
sition to documentary, because realism for Imamura is not a matter of
guaranteeing the one-­point, one-­instant presence of the camera.
Nonetheless, Imamura stresses the temporality of photographic
methods. It is photography that transforms the spatiality of painting or
drawing into the temporality of cartoons. He writes,
What becomes evident here is that, conceptually, the cartoon [manga]
is something fundamentally different from painting [kaiga]. Of course,
individual images are paintings. Yet these paintings in cartoons, taken
one by one, do not possess any particular artistic meaning. Painting is
essentially a spatial art. However, while the paintings in the cartoon film
may be spatial, they first take on artistic consistency on the strict condi-
tion of being temporal paintings. Accordingly, insofar as the arts of draw-
ing and painting in cartoons are grounded in photographic methods and
combined with photography [shashin to ketsugōshi], cartoons come into
being as a temporal art, wherein lies their specificity.21

Once again, Imamura uses the verb ketsugō suru (to combine, join, or
unite) in a manner that invites us to read the effect of photography in
two ways. On the one hand, photography refers to the process of com-
bining drawn images into a sequence that will move when projected.
When Imamura insists that cartoons must be based in photographic
methods and combined with photography, his account appears conso-
nant with rotoscoping, and with using film photography to decompose
motion and then to recompose that motion with drawings. On the other
hand, there is some ambiguity in his description of drawings being com-
bined or united with photography, for we have the impression that not
only does photography connect one image with another but also the
images themselves are becoming somewhat photographic, being com-
bined or suffused with photography itself. Here we reach the limits of

Cartoon Film Theory • 229

translating the term shashin as “photography” and arrive at the second
orientation of photography in Imamura’s film theory.
As has often been noted, photography in Japan did not give rise to
a new term or neologism, as it did in Europe. Rather a term already
in usage, shashin, was applied to photography. Photography was thus
placed in a specific lineage of artistic practices and discursive frame-
works. As Maki Fukuoka writes,
In writing on the history of photography in Japan, scholars commonly
note that the Japanese word shashin conveys different meanings than
the English word photography. While the term shashin existed prior to the
introduction of photography in Japan, only in the 1870s did it become
a stable reference to the technology. Indeed, in the discourse on Japan’s
photographic history, shashin is a cumbersome term that does not yield
valuable discussion. And yet shashin casts an unmistakable and enduring
symbolic shadow on the field and is a distinct part of its ­history.22

Fukuoka goes on to explain that, if the cumbersome term shashin has

not yielded valuable discussion, it is because commentators have re-
mained content to indicate that, before the advent of photography,
shashin signified something akin to “realism,” and their investigations
have stalled there, with a vague notion of realism. In contrast, to histori-
cize the putative realism of shashin, Fukuoka explores the discourses
and practices associated with shashin prior to the introduction of pho-
tography, showing how “the concept of shin and shashin that came to
be associated with copper-­etching prints, sketches, and ink rubbing
underwent multilayered processes of intellectual challenge, confirma-
tion, and authentication. As tensions in textual and pictorial represen-
tational systems were resolved, the concepts of shin and shashin con-
gealed and symbolized ideas of fidelity between depicted subject and
print.”23 It was within this epistemological and historical context that
shashin came to serve as a stable reference to photographic technology
in the 1870s, as in the writings of the translator Yanagawa Shunsan.
Fukuoka thus concludes, “Yanagawa’s characterization [of photography
as shashin] stemmed from his concern for the process and his attention
to the space between image and object, the level of fidelity maintained
within this space, rather than the impression gathered from the photo-
graphs in and of themselves.”24
While Imamura’s concerns differ from Yanagawa’s, Imamura’s insis-
tence on the realism of photography in the 1930s does inherit some-
thing of this sense of shashin that began to hold sway from the 1870s:

230  • Thomas LaMarre

shashin as a process of maintaining fidelity between image and object
rather than an impression imparted by the photographs themselves. In
this respect, even though Imamura insists on a contrast between kaiga
(drawing or painting) and manga (cartooning) on the basis of shashin,
his use of photography or photographic methods is not antithetical to
painting. Photography might even be characterized as another kind of
drawing or painting, as indicated in Imamura’s characterization of car-
toons as “temporal painting” ( jikan teki na kaiga). Moreover, Imamura
subsequently situates photography in a lineage of materialist depiction
that he associates with oil painting.
In sum, there are two orientations implicit in Imamura’s use of
shashin. Shashin feels closer to filming or cinematography than to pho-
tography insofar as it implies a cinematic decomposition and recompo-
sition of movement or action. But shashin implies a practical sense of
photography as a process of sustaining and guaranteeing fidelity be-
tween image and object. Such fidelity is a matter of indexicality, but this
indexicality is not that of a one-­point or one-­moment contact with an
object. Rather, in a manner reminiscent of the prephotographic asso-
ciation of shashin with etching, sketching, and ink rubbing, shashin
in Imamura’s work implies a sort of multipoint durational capture that
is supposed to capture the temporal depth of movement rather than
merely combining discrete instants.

Thinking with the Camera

In his 1940 essay, “A Theory of Documentary Cinema,” included in his

book on documentary film published the same year, Kiroku eiga ron
(A theory of documentary film), Imamura builds to the provocative
statement “the camera is human” to sum up his stance on cinematic
documentation.25 He opens his account by stressing: “To document
something is not the same as having it mechanically recorded and uni-
laterally reflected in human consciousness.”26 This insight encourages
Imamura to emphasize that documentation is a form of subjective ex-
pression, not objective recording. His theory initially appears intent
on downplaying or even dismissing the role of the camera. As a conse-
quence, at least initially, his account appears entirely at odds with appa-
ratus theory. He writes, “The real significance of [the short documentary
film] Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon was not the birth of a
new machine. Rather, it was the birth of something new that we do not
fully understand—a more social form of human understanding or way

Cartoon Film Theory • 231

of knowing. To document via film means to express only through film, to
think things through only via film.”27 In other words, rather than posit-
ing the camera as a deterministic apparatus, Imamura finds something
akin to a new machinic consciousness deriving from the entanglement
of human consciousness with the new machine, the camera.
In his characterization of this new machinic consciousness as more
social and collective, we perhaps see echoes of a Marxist sensibility. In
his account of documentary, as in his discussion of cartoons, Imamura
associates the studio with the factory as a new form of collective en-
deavor. Yet the Marxist concern that revolutionary transformations in
modes of production have not lead to revolutionary transformation in
social relations (due to the persistence of older forms of social relations
that empower, for instance, the foreman at the expense of workers) does
not register in Imamura’s account. The idea that Japan in particular was
not modernizing or “revolutionizing” due to the persistence of “feudal”
social relations was a major concern in Marxist thought at the time.
Imamura, however, does not address the persistence of uneven social re-
lations or the exploitation of workers in factories. It is instead the social
energies implied in the factory, as new collective social endeavor, that
capture Imamura’s imagination. In “For the Sake of Japanese Cartoon
Films” he submits that the age of solitary artist is vanishing and sug-
gests: “Wouldn’t painting of greater social import [mottomo shakai teki na
kaiga] be based on the industrial system and be built on the cooperative
work of hundreds of artists, like the manufacturing studios for Disney
cartoons?”28 His account seems to assume that this new collective en-
deavor is inherently leveling or dehierarchizing in its social effects. As
such, the potential of cinema and film theory for Imamura lies partly in
their capacity to force an awareness of the new social energies implicit
in this new machinic consciousness—thinking via the camera, socially.
Already we can detect a potential source of trouble in his approach:
because contradiction and conflict are not situated within produc-
tion or within Japan (they are subsequently situated between Japan
and America), this new machinic consciousness will tend to be chan-
neled into national consciousness, into the “people,” and the refor-
mation of Japanese modes of expression. Yet such a national populist
outcome may not be inherent in or preordained by his approach.29 It is
imperative then to work through the different registers and tendencies
of Imamura’s film theory, to investigate how the social energies of this
machinic consciousness become shunted into national reformation or
“conservative revolution” via cinema.

232  • Thomas LaMarre

 Imamura places so much emphasis on the subjective side of docu-
mentation, writing for instance that “every document is an expression
of some preexisting thought,” that we are at a loss about how to take
into consideration the objective side of cinema, not to mention its ma-
teriality. The very idea of objectivity is called into question, or at least,
the priority of objectivity is. Consequently, there isn’t much machine to
Imamura’s intimations of a machinic consciousness. Not surprisingly
perhaps, he ultimately finds Dziga Vertov’s efforts to “document the
camera’s movement” in A Man with a Movie Camera to be rather dull. A
paradox arises: Imamura clearly thinks that cinema and the movie cam-
era differ from other arts and modes of expression, yet he gives such
priority to subjective expression, consciousness, and thought that his
film theory is in danger of ruling out any form of materiality, verging on
pure idealism. Indeed he is quick to conflate a de facto observation (film-
makers always have some thoughts about what they are filming) with a
de jure situation (filmmakers should always organize their thoughts in
writing before beginning to film).
It is here that Imamura turns to composition, construction, or struc-
ture (kōsei). This is also where Imamura situates the materiality of
cinema in his essay on documentary film, almost by default—kōsei. But
what sort of materiality is this kōsei, this composition or construction?
Imamura stresses the importance of writing a script before filming,
and in fact, if he finds Man with a Movie Camera dull, it is because the
film is not clearly structured or solidly composed. Generally speaking,
in this context, Imamura sees composition as a process of clarifying and
strengthening one’s thoughts, and at the end of the essay on documen-
tary film, he proposes the science film as a possible model. Although
his examples, comparisons, and general discussion initially introduce
a somewhat narrative or dramaturgical perspective, his characteriza-
tion of composition ultimately steers away from fiction (and verbiage)
toward scientific schematization, as if to compensate for the heavy em-
phasis on the subjective side of things in his critique of objectivity. In
sum, a sense of objectivity is sustained, but largely at the level of a scien-
tific mode of composition. Needless to say, such a move runs the risk of
replacing or supplementing pure idealism with pure rationalism.
It is here that Imamura’s discussion of cartoons proves interesting
alongside his documentary film theory. Although his book on documen-
tary and his book on cartoons were published nearly at the same time
(1940 and 1941, respectively), the publications hold the two approaches
apart. Yet reading between the two accounts provides a way to consider

Cartoon Film Theory • 233

what sort of materiality is at stake in the suggestions for a machinic
consciousness in Imamura’s documentary theory. For where his account
of documentary downplays the camera and lingers on the ordering ca-
pacity of (written) composition, his theory of cartoons focuses on the
decomposition and recomposition of movement afforded by photo-
graphic methods. Reading between the two accounts offers a way to ad-
dress the fundamental question posed by Imamura: what does it mean
to think via the camera?
Accounts of the effect of the movie camera on thought or subjec-
tivity, which are often grouped under the general rubric of “apparatus
theory,” thus afford some useful points of contrast with Imamura’s ap-
proach. Jean Baudry, for instance, highlights how the monocular lens
of the camera tended to make one-­point perspective into the operative
convention for the organization of visual space in cinema.30 Jean-­Louis
Comolli provides a nice summary of this stance: “The camera is what
produces the ‘visible’ in accordance with the system of ‘monocular’ per-
spective governing the representation of space: it is therefore in the
area of the camera that we should seek, for the materials of cinema as a
whole, the perpetuation of this code of representation and the ideology
it sustains or reasserts.”31
Because of its mechanistic and deterministic tendencies, apparatus
theory quickly met with a host of objections. Noël Burch, for instance,
took issue with those who “decreed that the optical properties of the
photographic lens (and hence the cinematic lens), a monocular tech-
nology arising directly from bourgeois ideology, were a kind of ‘original
sin’ of the seventh art, a historical fatality adhering to its very being and
that only disruptive practices could free it from.”32 Noël Carroll objects
to the mechanistic determinism that “appears to envision each art form
on the model of a highly specialized tool with a range of determinate
functions. A film, play, poem, or painting is thought of, it seems, analo-
gous to something like a Phillips screwdriver.”33
If something of apparatus theory has nonetheless persisted in film
theory, it is not because of its mechanistic determinism but because
of its promise to provide a way to move between material structures
and subject formations. For instance, as Martin Jay reminds us in the
context of art history, what we think of as Cartesianism is not simply a
structurally determined outcome of the use of one-­point perspective.
It is the combination of one-­point perspective with “Cartesian ideas of
subjective rationality in philosophy” that served to make Cartesianism
appear to be “the dominant, and even totally hegemonic, visual model

234  • Thomas LaMarre

of the modern era.”34 Similarly, when Laura Mulvey introduces Renais-
sance perspective into her account of the male gaze, it is part of an effort
to ground Lacanian mechanisms of identity formation in the material
structures of cinema.35 Or, when Comolli takes up Baudry’s notion of a
basic apparatus, he highlights how economic demands and scientific de-
velopments conspired to transform the basic apparatus into an “ideo-
logical instrument.”36 In other words, one of the functions of apparatus
theory has been to provide a sense of a material ground for analyses of
subjectivity or ideology in risk of becoming overly rationalist or idealist.
This is precisely the role that cartoons play in Imamura’s film theory:
they promise a material ground for the subjective emphasis of his docu-
mentary theory.
Imamura’s film theory, which is deliberately, even stubbornly, con-
trary to expectations that documentary is objective while cartoons are
fantastical, stresses subjective expression in the context of documen-
tary, while his cartoon theory lingers on the realism stemming from
photographic methods. In this respect, his cartoon theory appears not
merely alongside his documentary theory. His cartoon theory affords a
way to account for the material side of the machinic consciousness an-
nounced in, but eliminated from, the account of documentary film. In
keeping with Imamura’s reversal of received ideas about cartoons and
documentaries, the cartoon serves as the ground not only for documen-
tary but also for cinema. Animation takes the place of the basic appara-
tus, and it is in cartoons that we will find the objective side or the ma-
chine side of what it means to think via the camera.
Significantly, where A Theory of Documentary Film opens with a dis-
cussion of theatrical spaces and the relation between drama and cinema,
A Theory of Cartoon Film begins thus:
Histories of cinema usually begin in 1890 with Thomas Edison’s inven-
tion of the kinetoscope or in 1895 with the Lumière brothers’ develop-
ment of the cinematograph. But the origins of cartoon films are much
older. They go back as much as three hundred years prior to the kineto-
scope and the cinematograph. The reason that today’s very short car-
toon films have been able to become so cinematic in comparison with
live-­action cinema [shashin no eiga] can be explained by the fact that, his-
torically, making drawings move preceded making photographs move.37

Imamura’s cartoon theory, then, begins not only with the history of
cinematic apparatuses but also with the prehistory of cinema, with the
history of optical toys and other devices for making moving images. In

Cartoon Film Theory • 235

other words, there is something akin to apparatus theory in Imamura,
but that something is not the monocular lens. For Imamura, because
moving images (ugoku e) emerged in the era of Newton’s classical me-
chanics and Descartes’s mathematics, moving images entail a trans-
formation of individualized entities into quantified mechanistic series,
which is similar to the division of labor in industrial manufacturing.38
Despite this analogy between the Fordist assembly line and the series
of images in cinema, in his discussion of Disney, Imamura resolutely
separates the apparatus or techniques of animation from capitalism. For
instance, when he poses the question that he feels absolutely crucial, of
why cartoon films have developed on a large scale only in America, he
muses that Lotte Reiniger’s silhouette animations and Ladislaw Stare-
vich’s puppet films were very popular before the ascendency of Disney
cartoons. What then explains the subsequent ascendency of Disney?
Imamura acknowledges the importance of capital investment in Disney’s
success, only to conclude: “We cannot explain it only on the basis of capi-
tal investment. Clearly, at the basis of such success were techniques that
were more cinematic. Capital merely brought them to light.”39
Consequently, Imamura submits, film theory and film reform should
focus first and foremost on cinematic techniques and not on capital in-
vestment. In support of this separation of techniques and capital, he
cites the fact that, before the bank put up the necessary funds for his
production studio, Walt Disney was a poor artist living in an attic. But
Disney had grasped one principle, Imamura explains: “The principle was
that of drawing images strictly in accordance with movement as parsed
with film photography [katsudō shashin]. This is what ‘animating’ is all
about. If I may speculate a bit, it seems likely that he parsed movement
through close observation of the dynamics of the actions of various ani-
mals and humans. And film photography is the only way to show all the
stages of such actions in still images.”40
In brief, Imamura imagines Disney capturing in drawings the move-
ments of animals as captured with cinematic photography. Imamura
then drops the question of capital investment, leaving us to fill in the
blanks. Apparently, in light of his prior comments, techniques that are
more cinematic will prove more attractive to capital, precisely because
they enable greater quantification and mechanization of the production
process. As such, when Imamura gives advice for rendering Japanese
cartoons more cinematic, he apparently takes the side of capitalist de-
velopment or modernization. This makes sense in a context that he has
characterized in terms of underdevelopment. Yet the impasse of Japan’s

236  • Thomas LaMarre

underdevelopment in cartoons cannot be resolved with capital accord-
ing to Imamura. The underlying problem is that of machinic conscious-
ness—how to think with the camera.
Imamura uses terms as diverse as aesthetics (bigaku), method (hōhō),
technique (gijtusu and gikō), and principle (genzoku) to describe the tech-
nical and artistic level of filmmaking that demands attention prior to
financial investment and industrial development. I have been somewhat
insistently reading Imamura’s problematic with such terms as apparatus
and machinic consciousness rather than, say, aesthetics. This is not because
I think that aesthetics is beside the point. On the contrary, it is the fun-
damental point for Imamura. But there is nevertheless a technical in-
flection to his aesthetics, a profound concern for technical development,
which I aim to highlight by recourse to such terms.
Imamura ends the first section of “For the Sake of Japanese Cartoon
Films” with this advice: “All in all, the lack of creativity in Japanese car-
toon films is a befuddled reflection of the contradictions of contempo-
rary Japanese painting. It would be a mistake to set aside an examina-
tion of such aesthetic problems and to think that, if we invested as much
capital as the Americans, we could produce Japanese cartoon films. Such
an approach would only make for duplications of Mickey Mouse and
Popeye.”41
In sum, in Imamura’s theory of cartoons, the question posed in his
essay on documentary film—“how to think with the camera”—has
transformed into a question about “how to overcome the contradictions
of Japanese art,” and about which contradictions arise from the effects
of the apparatus. His confidence in clear or rational thinking to bring
order to the human use of the camera in the context of documentary
film has given way to a concern for potential dissonance or resonance
between camera and image, between photography and art. In effect, the
camera is no longer a tool for conscious manipulation or a cause-­and-­
effect mechanism under rational control. It is closer to an apparatus in
the Foucauldian sense of dispositif, a kind of ethico-­aesthetic or techno-­
discursive paradigm whose positive effects include modes of spacing
that also entail truth effects and resistance—prior to the division of
labor and capital unevenness but potentially complicit with them. In
Imamura’s case, his discussion of cartoons will both acknowledge and
resist a particular set of truth effects, those of Western painting as pro-
longed in photography, commonly associated with one-­point perspec-
tive and Cartesianism.

Cartoon Film Theory • 237

Temporal Depth

For Imamura, photography defines the modern regime of visuality. He

frequently reminds us of the challenge presented by the ubiquity of pho-
tography in contemporary Japan: “All around us mechanical techniques,
not at all different from those in America, are developing; photogra-
phy is flourishing, and everyone is learning to see things via photog-
raphy [shashin ni yoru mono no mikata].”42 Photography is for Imamura
the inevitable standard for producing modern visuality or perception.
As such, photography in his film theory confronts the two fundamen-
tal problematics of modernity: modernization (developmental progress)
and the modern (the experience of a temporal lag or rupture, of time
out of joint). Modernity is above all a temporal problematic, positing a
break between past and present, between tradition and modernity. But
it is a tricky temporal problematic because modernity at once names the
goal and the break. Modernization is a matter of progressive movement
toward modernity as the goal, while the modern or modernist experi-
ence dwells on modernity as temporal rupture, as a relation between
past and present that does not go away. As such, because it conjoins
two different temporal paradigms (progress and rupture), modernity is
always impossible, and always already here.
Imamura struggles with the tricky temporality of modernity in the
context of photography. His account strives to resolve the problem of
modernity in a fairly familiar, and in retrospect, rather predictable man-
ner. While Imamura sees technological progress and industrial develop-
ment as necessary and inevitable, he discusses them in terms of differ-
ent national techno-­aesthetic regimes. In other words, he lays out or
redistributes the temporal problem of modernity in spatial, geopoliti-
cal terms. He writes, for instance: “The success of American cartoons
is rooted above all in the characteristics of this country, where there
are no long established traditions of art, and mechanical techniques are
the mostly highly advanced. Due to the lack of constraining traditions,
drawings are most confidently combined with photography.” In con-
trast, even though impressionist artists in France have moved painting
closer to capturing the temporality of movement, Imamura concludes:
“Nevertheless, insofar as not a single creator of cartoon films has ap-
peared in France, we have to acknowledge the considerable and heavy
constraints of its artistic traditions.”43
This passing comment on the difference between America and France
merits attention, because the essay otherwise gives the impression that

238  • Thomas LaMarre

photography follows naturally and inevitably from Western oil painting.
For instance, immediately after he suggests that there are limitations
to French traditions of oil painting, Imamura shifts his attention to the
realism of oil painting, which he feels verges on photography. He writes,
“In the history of development of oil painting techniques, as we enter
into modern painting, it became so realistic [genjitsushugi teki] and ma-
terialist [machiriaru teki] that it seems to possess a tendency toward re-
lief carving [ukibori]. In other words, oil painting is the formative matrix
[botai] of photography. Rubens and Rembrandt come to mind in this
context. Oil painting itself steadily advanced, verging on photography of
things [ jibutsu no shashin].”44 To summarize, modern Western oil paint-
ing tends toward or verges on photography, and yet, if we take seriously
Imamura’s caveat about the lack of cartoonists in France being due to
the constraints of its art traditions, oil painting does not automatically
result in, or guarantee the advent of, photography. In other words, for
Imamura, techno-­aesthetic progress is a matter of tendency or potenti-
ality rather than teleology or determinism.
It is interesting that Imamura describes this potentiality with the
term ukibori, which refers to relief carving, embossing, or other tech-
niques for raising the surface of the image to add a sense of dimension-
ality to it. This notion that shashin is able to capture something of the
depth of things recalls Fukuoka’s discussion of practices and discourses
related to shashin prior to the introduction of photography into Japan,
whereby techniques of copper etching, sketching, and ink rubbing came
to assure the fidelity of the relation between object and image. But Ima-
mura makes no reference to such prephotographic shashin practices.
Either Imamura is not aware of them or he is so intent on the contradic-
tion between Western and Japanese artistic techniques that he omits
such practices. In any event, even as he posits a contradiction between
Western photography and traditional Japanese arts, his usage of the
term shashin potentially implies a zone of noncontradiction to be dis-
covered, which will be realized in the multipoint indexical capture dis-
cussed earlier.
In conjunction with the term ukibori, Imamura’s other examples give
us a better sense of what kind of apparatus Imamura has in mind. In his
evocation of impressionist art, for instance, Imamura calls attention to
the capture of the transformations of an object over time: “It was surely
Impressionism that first attempted a serious treatment of time within
art. We may think of the Impressionist artist who tried to capture the
essence of a haystack as it ceaselessly transformed with the changing

Cartoon Film Theory • 239

light as one who investigated time with images. An artist like Degas who
strove to grasp the pose of a ballerina in an instant was also an investi-
gator of movement-­time [undō—jikan] in painting.”45
In this instance as well, Imamura misses a potential connection be-
tween Western and Japanese art. After all, one important source for De-
gas’s posed ballerinas was the poses of dancers in Hokusai’s collection
of block-­printed sketches (manga); the first volume appeared in 1814.46
Volumes of Hokusai’s manga sketches and various nishikie (multicolored
woodblock printing) circulated widely among European artists by the
second half of the century, and the impressionists in particular made
frequent reference to the photographic qualities of such art.47 Of course,
the particulars of these intersections and convergences, such as De-
gas’s ballerinas being inspired by Hokusai’s sparrow dancers, were prob-
ably not known to Imamura. Yet neither prehistory of photography in
Japan—neither Edo shashin nor Edo nishikie—would serve Imamura’s
purposes, for his argument depends on establishing a contradiction be-
tween (Western) photography and Japanese arts—a contradiction that
is to be overcome in cartoons. He is intent on the potential for the emer-
gence of something entirely new from cartoons in Japan, which requires
grappling with the effects of this cine-­photographic apparatus.
Already in his brief account of impressionism, Imamura suggests
that the photographic capturing of the temporal depth of something (or
someone) entails a twofold procedure: it is not only a process of captur-
ing something in the instant but also a process of capturing something
instant by instant, as with Monet’s series of haystacks. Imamura’s sense
of the photographic apparatus jives with Gilles Deleuze’s conceptual-
ization of cinema as a mode based on “any-­instant-­whatsoever.”48 And
like Deleuze, Imamura is concerned with temporal depth. But because
Deleuze is interested in an experience of duration through and beyond
the organizing of any-­instants-­whatsoever into a consistent cinematic
body (the movement-­image), he introduces another wrinkle—making
for a threefold process, as it were—wherein stopping on the image re-
leases or explicates the temporal potentiality folded into the cinemati-
cally organized twofold process of capturing instants and arraying them
in series. For Imamura, however, the pressing concern is the produc-
tion of clear, solid films whose consistency derives from the photo-
graphic apparatus. In effect, despite its reference to time, Imamura’s
theory of “movement-­time” is an effort to produce what Deleuze calls
the movement-­image, which happens in the form of national or “classi-
cal” cinema. It makes sense of course that Imamura, writing in the late

240  • Thomas LaMarre

1930s in Japan, would be more concerned with the production of the
movement-­image and the politics of finding the people, while Deleuze,
writing in the early 1980s in France, would be attentive to the emergence
of the time-­image and the politics arising when “the people are missing.”
Consequently, Imamura lingers on the rupture between tradition and
modernity, between Japanese art and American cartoons. America is
now defined as a land where nothing has troubled the full and confident
use of photographic methods, while Japan is emerging as a site where
photography stands in contradiction to received pictorial practices. As
implied in Imamura’s constant use of the term ketsugō (combination or
unification), his film theory is intent on a synthesis that promises to re-
solve, overcome, or perhaps sublate the contradiction between painting
and photography, between traditional Japanese artistic practices and
modern American industrial cartoons. To ground such a synthesis, Ima-
mura has to find within Japanese arts something analogous to, or con-
sonant with, modern photographic methods, which will allow them to
communicate. Insofar as he defines cartoons as “temporal painting,” he
naturally turns to Japan’s traditions of temporal painting. As we have
seen, he must rule out prephotographic shashin and nishikie or ukiyoe,
for there is already too much intercourse with the West implicit in these
arts. And so, to find materials appropriate for Japanese cartoons, Ima-
mura turns to picture scrolls (emaki) dating as far back as the twelfth
century, pictorial maps of Kyoto (Kyōto zue) on folding screens from
the Edo period, and acting techniques found in the nō theater, as de-
scribed by Zeami Motokiyo in the late fourteenth century. His range of
examples is exceedingly eclectic—bringing them together entails a good
deal of historical decontextualization and media deterritorialization, as
does the resultant sense of Japaneseness implied in articulating their
commonality.
To understand why and how Imamura chooses such examples, we
must first note that his cartoon theory addresses two different aspects
of animation under the aegis of “temporal painting.” On the one hand,
he begins and ends with character animation, and his cartoon theory
initially focuses on how to produce realistic movement of figures, ob-
jects, and characters. Indeed, as we have seen, his ideal for character
animation is akin to rotoscoping. On the other hand, as the term uki-
bori succinctly indicates, Imamura is concerned with the overall sense
of depth to the image, with an emphasis on dimensionality. Although
he does not refer to the multiplane-­camera system per se, his examples
make clear that he is addressing effects that came to be associated with

Cartoon Film Theory • 241

it. The second part of his essay opens with examples of American car-
toons in which the images verge on photography:
In the recent cartoons of Disney and Fleischer, shading has been en-
hanced, imparting a sense of dimensionality, and coloring has become
more nuanced, aiming for photographic reality. Take, for instance, the
background for the ocean in the opening sequence of Sinbad the Sailor
or the first scene of the desert in Forty Thieves (1937). The latter picture
in particular might well be mistaken for photography. The silhouettes of
the forty thieves appear running across the distant horizon. In the fore-
ground are the scattered remains of a skeleton, and the depths of the
undulating dunes, rendered with soft shading, are close to color cinema
[see figure 13.5]. Such aspects are on par with The Old Mill.49

Imamura here refers to a series of recent cartoons, which were met with
popular and critical acclaim: Disney’s The Old Mill (1937), Fleischer’s Pop-
eye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor (1936), and Fleischer’s Popeye the
Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves (1937). He then refers us to Disney’s
Lonesome Ghosts (1937) and Hawaiian Holiday (1937).
Disney’s The Old Mill is commonly credited as the first cartoon to use
the multiplane-­camera system, and Fleischer quickly followed suit with
Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves, released just weeks be-
fore Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). These films were
touted for the realism and dimensionality of their images due to the
multiplane-­camera system. Yet, as Imamura’s citations of other car-
toons not directly associated with the multiplane system imply, efforts
to produce such depth effects had long been under way, and the effects
were palpable prior to the buzz about Disney’s multiplane-­camera sys-
tem. As such, Disney’s multiplane-­camera system itself might be seen as
an innovation upon the basic apparatus or invention of the animation
stand used for cel animation, in which a camera fixed on a rostrum looks
down through layers of painted celluloid.50 The animation stand, like
rotoscoping, had come into usage much earlier and had already under-
gone a great deal of experimentation.
Indeed, Imamura’s account reminds us that these new effects of
depth were not simply due to photographing through multiple celluloid
layers or the use of the multiplane-­camera system alone. The new effects
were actually a result of sustained attempts to eliminate the sense of
gaps between the celluloid layers, which is to say that the “artifacts” of
the animation stand tended to disrupt the sense of a closed volumet-
ric three-­dimensional world. Eliminating such effects entailed a num-

242  • Thomas LaMarre

Fi g u re 13 . 5 Still from Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves (1937).

ber of techniques for regulating the relation between layers, such as the
differential shading and coloring of backgrounds, characters, and fore-
grounds; cinema-­inspired effects of focal depth; and recalibration of re-
lations between layers between shots. While Imamura draws attention
primarily to artwork (shading and coloring), he also shows awareness of
how American cartoons rely on one-­point perspective and scalar propor-
tions, for, when he contrasts these cartoons with Japanese emaki (pic-
ture scrolls), he comments that emaki “do not depict all parts equally as
in Western painting.”51
Imamura addresses the effects of photography at two levels in car-
toons: character animation (decomposition and recomposition of move-
ment) and dimensionality (the overall depth effect of the image in volu-
metric terms). The realism of cartoons has to be realized at both levels
at once. Part of what makes Imamura’s account challenging comes from
the fact that he does not explicitly or operatively separate these two
levels, but instead treats them as two faces of the same problematic of
photography. It is as if rotoscoping and the multiplane-­camera system,
for instance, were but two faces of the same photographic realism. This
assumption is what ultimately pushes him toward a theory of tempo-
ral depth: photography in cinema is a matter of both temporality and

Cartoon Film Theory • 243

dimensionality, which are becoming more mechanized, scientific, and
ubiquitous due to technical development and expansion.
Why then can’t Japanese cartoonists just use photography as the
Americans do? Imamura does not provide any theorization of sociohis-
torical conditions, but, to understand his concerns, we have to think in
terms of underlying persistent material conditions. While his account
of documentary gives the impression that the problem of Japan’s tem-
poral lag is largely a matter of subjectivity, Imamura doesn’t think that
ideological awareness alone will resolve the problem. Subjective expres-
sion has to pass through the camera, through photography. In effect, his
account encourages us to think in terms of sociohistorical development
and material conditions, but these conditions are posited in a techno-­
aesthetic, perceptual register rather than in socioeconomic terms. As
we have seen, Imamura suggests that treating the problem of Japan in
purely economic terms will not resolve anything: Japan would merely
replicate American forms of expression. The problem for him is deeper
than or prior to the purely economic, the limited economy. Such a stance
is not entirely at odds with Marxism, or at least, certain currents of
Marxism, since Marx formulated a critique of political economy that
comprised the social beyond the purely economic.
At the same time, because Imamura makes no distinction between
the social and the national, the overall tendency of his cartoon theory is
toward the naturalization of the Japanese nation. Japan tends to appear
homogeneous, self-­identical, and immutable. In this respect, Imamura’s
film theory invites a variation on psychoanalytic, self-­other dialecti-
cal reading in the manner of Slavoj Žižek: Imamura’s account projects
even development, that is, untroubled, unfettered techno-­economic
progress, onto America, which guarantees the temporal unevenness of
Japan. Why is temporal unevenness desirable? It is desirable because
modernity itself is organized around temporal progress and tempo-
ral rupture, that is, temporal unevenness. By imputing developmental
evenness to America, Imamura assures that Japan is a site of temporal
unevenness, and thus of modernity itself—and maybe the site of moder-
nity, beyond received configurations of modernity. America then is the
past of modernity, and Japan the future.
Interesting enough, in this case, the excess that is imputed to the
other in order to disavow it is temporal evenness, or what Walter
Benjamin called empty, homogeneous time. Therein lies the challenge of
Imamura’s cartoon theory: although it posits photography in American
cartoons as the ideal apparatus for the production of temporal depth,

244  • Thomas LaMarre

the theory simultaneously resists that temporal depth (as if aware that
it is ultimately nothing more than empty homogeneous time), seeking
a deeper temporal depth, as it were—a twisted, distorted, weird tempo-
ral depth. And the temporal unevenness of modernity suddenly appears
materialized in ancient picture scrolls and drama, transmuted, cinema-
tized.
When Imamura turns to picture scrolls, for instance, he first com-
ments: “I said that cartoons are temporal paintings. Japanese emaki are
probably the oldest, most refined form of art striving for temporality
in painting. Like contemporary cartoons, emaki develop a story with
images. It is surprising how close they come to the temporal techniques
of cinema.”52 In other words, Imamura begins by establishing the aes-
thetic parity of cartoons and emaki. The source for this argument about
emaki is probably Hosokibara Seiki’s general history of manga from
1924, A History of Japanese Manga (Nihon manga-­shi), and as Ōtsuka Eiji
points out, such a view of emaki only becomes possible once the con-
ventions of modern cinema have been established and normalized.53 In
Ōtsuka’s opinion, emaki are not the origin for modern manga. He argues
instead that the cinematic sensibility established in the 1930s in Japan
allowed critics and artists to project a sense of parity onto emaki and
manga. The same may be said of Imamura’s account of emaki: if he sees
emaki as analogous to cartoon films, it is because he is already reading
emaki in cinematic terms.
Imamura also finds some points of difference between modern pho-
tography and emaki: “Seen from the standpoint of Western painting,
many of the pictures appear utterly chaotic in terms of perspective. One
scroll of a warship loaded with warriors, for instance, shows not just the
side facing us but the side facing away as well. As a result, the ship looks
oddly twisted. To borrow from Hinago Motoo’s discussion, it is exactly as
if the artist had done a pan with a camera to show us both sides simul-
taneously.”54 Imamura concludes that showing two sides of an object on
one surface, or upon a single plane, is exactly like the “mobile camera of
cinema” (idō satsuei). Naturally, in keeping with Ōtsuka’s point, this is
precisely what we might question: do emaki really strive to make differ-
ent views and different realities commensurable within a single plane of
expression? Usually, as in Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of the novel, bring-
ing divergent realities into a single plane of expression is considered the
hallmark of the modern.55 Here again we clearly see that Imamura’s film
theory is resolutely modern and geared toward the present: he seeks
divergence within the modern, not from it. As such, we need to think

Cartoon Film Theory • 245

of his examples of traditional arts as temporal oddities existing in the
present, producing spatio-­temporal warps upon the single plane of the
contemporary.
Imamura’s account of pictorial maps of Kyoto agrees with that of
emaki. In emaki he also finds temporal depth in discrepancies of the
scalar or homogenous proportioning of space. The use of clouds to con-
ceal insignificant parts of a building, for instance, is likened to temporal
techniques in cinema such as fade-­in, fade-­out, and overlap.56 Regarding
pictorial maps of Kyoto painted on large folding screens during the Edo
period, he speculates that their tendency to run counter to perspective
is related to the temporal styles of emaki:
Instead of overall spatial balance and proportion, the artists’ goal was to
present distant sites in the same manner as nearby ones. A small theater in
Sanjō Kawara, for instance, had to be drawn as large as the Shimizudera
temple complex. What was distant and what was close had to be shown
in the same way. As a result, techniques of perspective run haywire. A
path may become wider and wider as it goes from foreground into the
distance. The image is clearly not drawn from the standpoint of equaliz-
ing spatial proportions; rather such techniques are designed to allow for
temporal progress related to narrating—and explaining—things here
and there in Kyoto. The picture scroll form seems to be one that rejects
pictorial space in favor of narrative time.57

Imamura reads what diverges from one-­point perspective in tradi-

tional Japanese arts as evidence of a form of temporal depth that is
analogous to the photography of cinema. In the end, the temporal depth
of art is transformed into a narrative force, and his cartoon film theory
finally joins his documentary film theory. Cartoon theory has allowed
Imamura to ground his documentary theory in the material apparatus
of photography. The documentary theory approached cinema from the
subjective side, proposing a solid script (scientific or schematized) in
the place of an apparatus. Cartoon theory, approaching cinema from the
materialist or objective side, finds the ground for schematized writing
in the material effects of the photographic apparatus. Cartoon theory
and documentary theory meet at the level of narrative, but narrative is
now an effect of temporality and dimensionality of cinema, rather than
a subjective structure imposed upon reality with the camera.
Imamura’s attention to the temporality and dimensionality deriving
from the use of photography in cartoon films has enlarged the appara-
tus of film beyond the deterministic mechanism of the camera and into

246  • Thomas LaMarre

a dispositif, that is, an apparatus-­paradigm or diagram: the transcrip-
tive apparatus. Photography does not commit cinema to objective docu-
mentation due to linear indexicality or referentiality. Photography in-
stead suggests modes of transcription, in which multipoint indexicality
allows for a form of realism. What is new or novel about Imamura’s form
of photography-­centered realism is that, because it has passed through
the crucible of cartoons, it entails plastic, elastic, and vitalist realism.
Consequently, in Imamura the deformative potentiality of animation
is not the antithesis of realism, nor is it a fantastical compensation for
what Eisenstein called the “heartless geometrizing” and “formal logic
of standardization” of capitalist modernity.58 Cartoons become the past
and future of realism for moving images.

Coda: Imamura Today

If many aspects of Imamura’s film theory feel conservative, restrictive,

or plainly fascist today, we should recall that his film theory was never
intended to be revolutionizing, disruptive, or anarchic. It was refor-
mative in impulse. Whatever revolutionary potential it discovered, it
tended to harness to the national cause, in the service of national refor-
mation geared to international rivalry. Imamura’s film theory aimed to
make Japanese cartoons that would compete with American cartoons
in the international market. Not surprisingly then, after the start of the
Pacific War, Imamura would frame that rivalry in fully militarist terms:
“The former superiority of Disney cartoons as art lay in their superiority
as weapons for propaganda warfare. In them we can see how fine art
may play a powerful role in enlightening the public. If we are unable to
produce cartoons like those of Disney, we will be overpowered.”59
In his recent discussions on Imamura’s film theory, Ōtsuka Eiji char-
acterizes it in terms of fascism and reminds us that this impulse of film
theory cannot be comfortably relegated to the past. Ōtsuka situates
contemporary otaku culture as the direct heir to 1930s fascism, cast-
ing his net wide while singling out the films of Studio Ghibli as direct
heirs. After all, Studio Ghibli was responsible for the republication of
Imamura’s Theory of Cartoon Film in 2005, and the Ghibli director and
producer Takahata Isao builds directly on Imamura’s discussion of car-
toons and emaki in his book on twelfth-­century Japanese picture scrolls
as the origin on Japanese animation.60 Ghibli’s aesthetics is clearly a bid
to establish a national aesthetic.
Yet Imamura’s film theory is not nationalist or fascist in tendency

Cartoon Film Theory • 247

simply because it explicitly aims to produce a national cinema. Nor
can we effectively resist such fascist aesthetics by focusing attention
on those thinkers or artists who adopt nationalist discourse, localizing
the problem in specific individuals. Rather, as Imamura’s theory attests,
even if the theories or practices of specific individuals provide a point of
departure for raising questions, the problem of resisting fascism entails
more than identifying who adopts national allegiance or militarist dis-
course. The political challenge of Imamura’s cartoon theory lies in how
it opens the question of the production of cinema beyond the purely
economic and into the social, and then strives to ground the production
of the social in techno-­aesthetic paradigms, that is, in the production
of bodies rather than subjects. In effect, he is opening a physiology or
“somatics” of power prior to ideology and subjectivity. “For the Sake of
Japanese Cartoon Films,” for instance, offers this odd and potentially
disruptive analogy:
Among the techniques of nō drama and puppet theater that had a pro-
found impact on kabuki performance, there are also a couple of signifi-
cant principles that Japanese cartoons films must adopt. As Watsuji
Tetsurō has pointed out, in puppet theater, substantial reality lies in
the material body of the puppet.61 Because the puppeteer manipulates
the puppet only with his fingers, the performance is exceedingly lim-
ited, largely directed into movements of the head and shoulders. The
principle of the cartoon film is precisely the principle of puppet theater.
Like the puppet, the image that is drawn sheet by sheet is but the ma-
terial body. If manipulation of this material body is to impart the feel-
ing that it is alive, one must select only the most distinctive actions. As
in photography, in cartoons it is not possible to capture all movements
equally, so it is necessary to draw the viewers’ eyes only to the most sig-
nificant movements of the actor. Close observation of Disney’s animals
confirm that the repetition of simple operations similarly has compli-
cated effects on us. If you look at that Donald’s action, for instance, the
operation consists almost entirely of him wagging his rump back and
forth.62

Ultimately, however, it is at this level that his theory shows its tendency
toward corporatism. For Imamura shows absolutely no interest in non-
localized movement in animation.63 He consistently ignores any move-
ment, temporal or dimensional, that cannot be localized in a body. Prior
to his bid for enlightening the masses with animation, Imamura effec-
tively pushed the transcriptive apparatus of cartoons into the produc-

248  • Thomas LaMarre

tion and mobilization of operative bodies. Indeed there can be no na-
tional propaganda or militarist propagation without such bodies.
Yet, in pushing the theory of cartoons toward the formation of bodies
before subjects, Imamura highlights a central problematic for the study
of animation today, perhaps inadvertently: insofar as the transcriptive
apparatus of cartoon film entails multipoint capture, we begin to see
how cinema indexes its own movement. This is what makes for the self-­
indexical worlds of cinema, whose generation and propagation become
so salient in cartoons. If we do not constrain the use of the transcrip-
tive apparatus to the localization of movement in operative, cooperative
bodies, other cartoon worlds are still possible.

Notes

1. See Hansen, “Of Ducks and Mice,” for a discussion of Benjamin’s and Adorno’s
very different takes on Disney cartoons.
2. Imamura, “Nihon manga eiga no tame ni,” 137. All translations mine unless
otherwise indicated.
3. On the pure film movement, see Bernardi, Writing in Light; Gerow, Visions of
Japanese Modernity; and LaMarre, Shadows on the Screen.
4. On “overcoming modernity,” see Richard Calichman’s introduction to, and
translation of, the wartime conference entitled Overcoming Modernity at which
Japanese scholars and writers addressed the impasses of modernity in Japan.
5. Irie, “Approaching Imamura Taihei.”
6. Ōtsuka, “An Unholy Alliance of Eisenstein and Disney.”
7. For instance, some of the points made in “For the Sake of Japanese Cartoon
Films” appear in the final section of A Theory of Cartoon Film called “Cartoons
and Japanese Art,” while other parts of the argument appear in his sections on
painting and on cartoons in general. A translation of the final section in the re-
vised edition of A Theory of Cartoon Film was published as “Japanese Art and the
Animated Cartoon.” This is not only one of the rare translations of Imamura but
also (as far as I know) the first into English. Michael Baskett recently published
two translations, an essay on documentary film and a section on sound in car-
toons, both of which I cite here. Nonetheless, I rely primarily on “For the Sake
of Japanese Cartoon Films” because this essay, in its brevity, makes Imamura’s
basic arguments about cartoons and connections between them more lucidly
and concisely than the book, which is after all a compilation of essays.
8. The Project on Toy Films website lists a cartoon film entitled Kaeru kenpō (Iwao
Ashida, dir., 1933), which is probably the film that Imamura cites as Kaeru no
kenpō.
9. Imamura uses a series of different terms that can be translated as “picture” or
“image,” “drawing” or “painting.” I have chosen sometimes to translate kaiga
as “drawing” and sometimes as “painting” (although in some contexts it might

Cartoon Film Theory • 249

 equally well be glossed “art”) in order to convey the nuance of his argument. I
translate e sometimes as “drawing” and sometimes as “image.” He later intro-
duces the term eizō, which refers more specifically to images associated with
mechanical reproduction, but which I translate simply as “image.” Because of
the potential difference in nuance in different contexts and my shifts in trans-
lation, I often include the Japanese term.
10. Imamura, “Nihon manga eiga no tame ni,” 139–40.
11. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney (1988).
12. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney (1988), 43, 83–84.
13. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney (1988), 41, 44.
14. Imamura, “Nihon manga eiga no tame ni,” 138.
15. Imamura, “Nihon manga eiga no tame ni,” 140.
16. Imamura, “Nihon manga eiga no tame ni,” 140.
17. Imamura, “Nihon manga eiga no tame ni,” 141.
18. Rosen, Change Mummified, 20.
19. Crafton, Before Mickey (1982), 158.
20. Rosen, Change Mummified, 302.
21. Imamura, “Nihon manga eiga no tame ni,” 140–41.
22. Fukuoka, “Toward a Synthesized History of Photography,” 571.
23. Fukuoka, “Toward a Synthesized History of Photography,” 591–92.
24. Fukuoka, “Toward a Synthesized History of Photography,” 592.
25. Imamura, “A Theory of Film Documentary,” 56.
26. Imamura, “A Theory of Film Documentary,” 52.
27. Imamura, “A Theory of Film Documentary,” 56.
28. Imamura, “Nihon manga eiga no tame ni,” 146.
29. See Driscoll, “From Kino-­Eye to Anime-­Eye / Ai”; and Furuhata, “Rethinking
Plasticity,” for additional accounts of the politics of production in Imamura’s
film theory.
30. Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.”
31. Comolli, “Technique and Ideology,” 44.
32. Burch, Life to Those Shadows, 162.
33. Carroll, “The Specificity Thesis,” 336.
34. Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” 4.
35. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”
36. Comolli, “Technique and Ideology,” 55.
37. Imamura, Imamura Taihei eizō hyōron 5, 3. The 1991 edition of Imamura’s col-
lected works includes the 1941 edition of Manga eigaron. The revised 1965 edi-
tion was republished in 2005 as Imamura Taihei, Manga eigaron.
38. Imamura Taihei, Imamura Taihei eizō hyōron 5, 5.
39. Imamura, “Nihon manga eiga no tame ni,” 142.
40. Imamura, “Nihon manga eiga no tame ni,” 143.
41. Imamura, “Nihon manga eiga no tame ni,” 147.
42. Imamura, “Nihon manga eiga no tame ni,” 146.
43. Imamura, “Nihon manga eiga no tame ni,” 144.
44. Imamura, “Nihon manga eiga no tame ni,” 145.

250  • Thomas LaMarre

45. Imamura, “Nihon manga eiga no tame ni,” 144.
46. See Wichmann, “Degas,” in Japonisme, 26–33.
47. Evett, “The Critical Response: A Survey of General Reactions to Japanese Art,”
in The Critical Reception of Japanese Art in Late Nineteenth Century Europe, 27–59.
48. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-­Image, 6.
49. Imamura, “Nihon manga eiga no tame ni,” 148.
50. See LaMarre, “Animation Stand,” in The Anime Machine, 12–25. The distinction
between innovation and invention comes from James Utterbeck, as discussed
by David Nye in Technology Matters, 33.
51. Imamura, “Nihon manga eiga no tame ni,” 151.
52. Imamura, “Nihon manga eiga no tame ni,” 150.
53. Ōtsuka, “An Unholy Alliance of Eisenstein and Disney.”
54. Imamura, “Nihon manga eiga no tame ni,” 150. In adapting his discussion of
emaki in the book A Theory of Cartoon Film, Imamura omits this reference to
Hinago Motoo and associates this technique with double exposure rather than
panning.
55. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, 291–92. In addi-
tion, in “Superflat and the Layers of Image and History in 1990s Japan,” Thomas
Looser directly addresses the question of whether multiple perspectives within
an image should be considered as evidence of different layers of realities or dif-
ferent realities. A similar question emerges in the context of magic lanterns and
nishikie. See LaMarre, “Magic Lantern, Dark Precursor of Animation.”
56. Imamura, “Nihon manga eiga no tame ni,” 151.
57. Imamura, “Nihon manga eiga no tame ni,” 151–52.
58. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney (1988), 35, 42.
59. Imamura, Imamura Taihei eizō hyōron 9; cited in Ōtsuka, “An Unholy Alliance of
Eisenstein and Disney.” Originally published as Sensō to eiga (Tokyo: Geibun-
sha, 1942).
60. Takahata, Jūni seki no animeeshon.
61. Imamura appears to be drawing on Watsuji Tetsurō’s essay “Bunrakuza no
ningyō shibai,” Shisō (August 1935), which is reprinted in Watsuji Tetsurō zenshū
17, 309–15. The term keigai is used to stress the materiality of the doll or puppet
body, and jittai to indicate its substance or reality.
62. Imamura, “Nihon manga eiga no tame ni,” 154–55.
63. Put another way, building on my ideas for how we might open the analysis
of animation, Imamura is only interested in “closing” compositing, avoiding
the issue of the nonlocalized movement related to compositing. See LaMarre,
“Compositing,” in The Anime Machine, 26–44.

Cartoon Film Theory • 251

14 : : African American Representation through
the Combination of Live Action and Animation
C h ristoph e r P. L e h ma n

African American animated caricature has a relationship with live-­

action African American images that is unique among depictions of
ethnic groups in cartoon films. No other ethnic group appears in films
that use both animation and live action to construct identity and cul-
ture as much as African Americans do. Animation studios used live-­
action footage to accurately illustrate popular and profitable images of
African American performance, so that the studios could cash in on the
established appeal of those images. In addition, between 1929 and 1974,
commercial studios created several styles of African American filmed
representation by combining animation and live action. Each style of
representation is not unique to African Americans alone. On the other
hand, the techniques of drawings “coming to life,” live-­action footage
traced by animators for cartoon figures, live-­action characters narrating
animated stories, and interplay between live-­action and animated char-
acters collectively compose a significant portion of the history of African
American animated images in the first forty-­five years of sound in U.S.
animated cartoons. Moreover, the uses of these techniques by studios
did not remain static but instead evolved in tandem with advancements
of African Americans in both the quality of actors’ roles and the access to
production of their own images. Because of the special relationship that
African American imagery has to both kinds of film, any endeavor to
study the ethnic group’s appearances in the first sound films requires the
inclusion of cartoons alongside live-­action films as the primary sources.
When animation began in the United States in the first decade of
the twentieth century, it was not only a film novelty but an exercise in
vanity too. Animators themselves were stars of the earliest cartoons.
They filmed themselves for live-­action sequences, playing the role of the
boss of the characters they drew. In many cartoons of the silent era, a
live-­action hand appears on screen to sketch a character and all of the
character’s props. Although the figure comes to life, it does not become
independent of the animator. Instead, the figure conducts all of its ac-
tions on the paper on which it is drawn. In addition, it does whatever the
animator tells it to do. The artists were like the ventriloquists of vaude-
ville; although their puppets were made of sketches instead of wood, the
drawings still functioned as extroverted extensions of the animators.
No studios employed African Americans as animators at the time.
As a result, the only animators on camera were European Americans.
Moreover, the African American figures were extensions of the Euro-
pean Americans who drew them. Many animators were European im-
migrants or children of immigrants. The cartoon became a vehicle by
which the artists became Americanized. They used visual and verbal
ethnic stereotypes for jokes as a means of familiarizing themselves with
all the different nationalities they had not seen in their countries of ori-
gin. Several of their gags poked fun at African Americans, which meant
that African American representation in animated form had little to do
with the ethnic group’s experiences and more to do with how European
Americans responded to them.
African American caricature, especially blackface, was a necessity to
the early commercial cartoon studio. A studio contracted to animate a
cartoon on a weekly basis had to simplify character designs as much as
possible in order for artists to draw multiple pictures of figures and their
“movements.” As a result, many animators drew their characters with
jet-­black bodies, large eyeballs to more easily animate expression, and
large mouths to more easily animate dialogue. To be sure, the medium of
animation has a foundation of caricature. An animator has to stylize the
appearance of any living being to an extent when sketching it in order to
be able to make an animated figure. If an artist adds details to a figure,
then the artist has to animate all the details associated with the charac-
ter’s movement. Animators of the 1910s and 1920s, therefore, stuck to
basic character designs to produce as many cartoons for a given sched-
ule as possible.
What differentiates cartoons from live-­action movies at this time is
that cartoons show the minstrel without makeup (the live-­action anima-
tors) and the blackface figure (the cartoon character) at the same time.
In live-­action movies, a European American character demonstrates his
authorship of an African American performance when he blackens his
face, transforming into the blackface figure in front of the audience.
The animator, however, has a different goal in presenting ownership of

African American Representation • 253

a drawing of an African American performance. Drawing the figure in
front of the camera only partly accomplishes the task, because the figure
is still stationary. To show control of the movements of the figure, he has
to simultaneously appear with his figure and give it commands.
The California-­based cartoonist Hugh Harman plays the role of the
animating minstrel in The Talk-­Ink Kid—the cartoon he and Rudolf Ising
produced in 1929 to convince Warner Brothers to hire them. Harman
sits at a desk and draws a picture of a blackface figure he names Bosko.
The drawing then comes to life. As the artist proceeds to ask Bosko ques-
tions, the character answers them in a stereotyped “Negro dialect.” The
animator draws various props for Bosko to use, but the figure never
leaves the paper on which it was drawn. At the end of the film, Harman
reinforces his dominance over his character by sucking Bosko and the
props back into his ink pen.
This test film proved successful for Harman and Ising, and Warner
Brothers hired them to direct a new cartoon series starring Bosko—
Looney Tunes. However, the partners disregarded the format of combin-
ing live-­action and animation and made all-­animated cartoons with the
character over the next eight years. The lone exception was the install-
ment Ride Him, Bosko from 1933, which features a scene that, although
short, effectively shows that Bosko remained the product of the film-
makers’ imagination four years later. The film largely consists of Bosko’s
adventures as a cowboy. In the final twenty seconds of the film, the shot
of Bosko riding on a horse pans out to reveal a group of men watch-
ing the character on a small screen. One of the men establishes that
the group is in control of the figures by slapping his thighs to make the
horse’s galloping sound. They discuss among themselves how to end the
film before deciding to go home. Bosko watches in horror as the artists
leave. He briefly continues to ride but then stops in his tracks, because
the animators have not given him direction on what to do next.
The staff members of the cartoon producer Max Fleischer in New
York also served as minstrels, but unlike Harman and Ising, they sought
to appropriate African American performance as accurately as possible.
The artists filmed entertainers and then traced over the footage to ani-
mate characters doing those movements—an animation process known
as rotoscoping. Also, for the cartoons the studio featured live-­action
footage of the African Americans whom the artists tried to approximate
in order to show how similar the animation of the performance was to
the live-­action version. Therefore, the animators themselves are not
the stars, because they are not on camera; instead, the animated imita-

254  • Christopher P. Lehman

tion of the performance is the main attraction. Fleischer’s films of the
1930s with African American stars are cartoon short-­subject versions of
the “Negro talking pictures,” as defined by the film historian Ryan Jay
Friedman. In this genre African Americans performed the same acts in
movies that they had done on records and on the stages of nightclubs.
Studios produced these movies in the early years of sound, because they
saw an audience for musical films starring African Americans. The genre
petered out in 1931, when sound was no longer a novelty in live-­action
movies. On the other hand, cartoon studios continued to use famous
voices as attractions, and African American acts were among the draw-
ing cards selected. Plenty of studios used audio of African Americans to
strengthen the cartoons in terms of humor and music. But only Fleis-
cher let audiences see the African Americans whose talents the studio
allowed.1
In a few of the studio’s Betty Boop cartoons from 1932 to 1934, the
caricatures cross social boundaries that are taboo for the live-­action
African Americans. African American culture is cartoon humor in this
series, and the scenes featuring caricatures of African Americans not
only dominate the length of each film but also compose most of the
humor of each installment. The European American female character
Betty Boop shares scenes with caricatures of the African American per-
formers, who play various roles ranging from a ghost walrus to an Afri-
can cannibal. As a result, the films dangerously flirt with the movie in-
dustry’s banning of male-­female relationships of different skin colors.
More important, such closeness of European American women and Afri-
can American men violated social customs of color-­based segregation in
the United States at the time. However, when the beginning of each in-
stallment shows a live-­action scene of the African Americans to be cari-
catured later, the entertainers are on a stage by themselves. They appear
to be separated from all other people and are entertaining either them-
selves or the people behind the camera filming. In addition, the enter-
tainers’ scenes are not part of the cartoons’ narratives but rather consist
of part of the opening’s title sequence.
In the films starring the jazz singer Cab Calloway, live action and ani-
mation do not intermingle. The opening of each film shows a live-­action
Calloway performing his unique dance steps. When those same steps re-
appear later in the cartoon, a caricature of Calloway performs them for
his fellow animated characters. In each of his Betty Boop installments,
Calloway’s caricatures do not resemble him. However, by having estab-
lished Calloway’s uniqueness as a dancer with the live-­action opening,

African American Representation • 255

the cartoon presents a recognizable caricature not through the depic-
tion of physical features but through the invocation of signature move-
ments.
In I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You (1932), the juxtapos-
ing of live action and animation is the most obvious of all the Betty
Boop films. It is the only installment of the series to feature live-­action
African Americans and cartoon characters in the same scenes. Conse-
quently, the film flaunts the industry’s cross-­color boundary the most
boldly. The jazz musician Louis Armstrong appears in animated form
as a big-­lipped, dark-­skinned cannibal—thus associating the cannibal’s
African heritage with that of Armstrong—and chases Betty through
the rain forest. The studio constantly reminds the viewers of the car-
toon that they are seeing caricatures of Armstrong and his orchestra.
As the cannibal pursues Betty, his head separates from the body, grows,
and floats, so that the studio can switch the cartoon head with Arm-
strong’s live-­action head. After this scene, the cartoon establishes live
action and animation as separate entities. The studio drops the pretense
that the live-­action musician and the cannibal are one and the same.
Near the end of the film, a scene with a cannibal precedes a live-­action
shot of one of Armstrong’s musicians performing the same gestures as
his caricature. In this film the studio tries too hard to show its mastery
of African American cultural appropriation. Live-­action film is an over-
used crutch for animated characterization, perhaps because Armstrong
lacked Calloway’s unique movements and because the cannibal carica-
ture looks nothing like Armstrong.
Installments from Fleischer’s Screen Songs series that have the
Mills Brothers as the stars do not feature animated imitations of Afri-
can American culture; instead the installments sell live-­action African
Americans on their own terms—the “Negro talking pictures” in their
truest form. These entries of the series, released in 1932 and 1933, are
the only cartoons of the 1930s to have live-­action African Americans
address the audience and sing directly to the viewers. By doing this, the
studio implied that there was a familiarity or comfort that the film’s
spectators would have had with engaging the African Americans who
appeared on screen. It is as close to a flirtation with cross-­color bound-
aries as the Betty Boop cartoons. But unlike the Betty Boop series, the
live-­action African American sequence is the centerpiece of each Screen
Song installment, and African American performance without Euro-
pean American alterations through caricature or rotoscoping is com-
pletely segregated from the animation except for the superimposed

256  • Christopher P. Lehman

bouncing ball and the text of the lyrics of the song that the group sings.
Each film consists of assorted animated characters and their gags. Then
halfway through the films, the Mills Brothers appear in live action to tell
the audience to follow the bouncing ball that moves to each word of the
on-­screen lyrics as the group sings it. The song lasts for the second half
of the installment. Unlike the caricatures of Calloway and Armstrong,
the ball has no interaction with any characters sharing the screen with
it. The ball is expressionless and completely divorced from the actions
of the figures. It merely exists as a tool to guide willing viewers to sing.
The Screen Songs are not about European Americans showing mas-
tery of the African American image, although some animation scenes
do have characters voiced by the singing Mills Brothers. In addition, the
Mills Brothers are not animated. Unlike Cab Calloway and Louis Arm-
strong, they incorporate no humorous gestures into their act for ani-
mators to caricature, with the exception of the member who replicates
a trumpet sound by blowing into his cupped hands. They are notable for
their voices, but the studio realized that it did not have to go through
the expense of animating entertainers just for the sake of exhibiting
their vocal talents. Just filming them and inserting the live-­action shot
in the cartoon sufficed.
When Fleischer stopped using African American entertainers after
1933, the first phase of the interaction between live action and anima-
tion ended. Paramount Pictures distributed Fleischer’s films and wanted
his studio to produce cartoons that resembled the Academy Award–win-
ning films that Walt Disney was making for United Artists, and Disney
did not use African American talent. Also, the industry had begun to en-
force its production code more strictly, which meant that the cross-­color
flirtations had to go. Neither Fleischer nor other studios knew how to
devise interactions between live action and animation featuring African
American characters in the industry’s new climate. For more than a de-
cade such content simply disappeared.
Only Walter Lantz’s Voodoo in Harlem in 1938 broke the hiatus for
the rest of the 1930s, marking a return to the practice of highlighting
the African American character as a product of European American cre-
ativity. Also, it is one of the few films to use both live action and ani-
mation to reinforce African Americans’ secondary status to European
Americans. In a live-­action animation studio late at night, a toppled jar
drips ink that transforms into animated cannibals. They proceed to sing
“Voodoo in Harlem” while moving all over the live-­action studio. This
marks a technological advancement, because the figures, although still

African American Representation • 257

existing only in the world of the animator, are not restricted solely to
the paper on which they are drawn. The film ends when the characters
retreat to their papers as a live-­action African American maid turns on
the light. She sees the papers scattered on the floor and burns them as
she cleans the studio, muttering in “Negro dialect” and shuffling while
she does. By treating the art as garbage, she rejects the figures as valid
representations of her ethnicity. Her discarding of the caricatures re-
veals that she sees them as worthless European American interpreta-
tions of her heritage.
When Disney used live-­action and animated film to illustrate Afri-
can American culture in 1946, he broke new ground. Song of the South
is similar to the Bosko films, because live-­action people are creating
imaginary African American worlds. Just as Harman introduces Bosko,
the fictional live-­action ex-­slave Uncle Remus introduces the animated
“Br’er” animals when telling stories to the children of the plantation
where he lives. The Br’er animals act out Remus’s imagination in sepa-
rate animated segments, just as Bosko is a product of the animator’s
imagination. However, the film marks the first occasion in which ani-
mation serves to illustrate the creativity of a live-­action African Ameri-
can. The animated figures do what Remus says they do, because the ex-­
slave created the characters to act out his tales of morality. To be sure,
the cartoon scenes are collectively a European American adaptation of
a European American adaptation of African American culture, because
Disney had based Remus’s stories on the character’s appearances in
short stories by Joel Chandler Harris, who in turn had appropriated the
folktales from African American ex-­slaves. Still, the studio did not have
the goal of boasting its mastery of animating African American folk-
tales but instead of placing the folktales in a narrative about an African
American character.
However, Disney uses live action to reinforce the African American’s
secondary social status during segregation. In contrast to the flirting
with industry guidelines regarding male-­female cross-­color contact in
Fleischer’s cartoons, Song of the South depicts relations between the
colors in manners that did not challenge the status quo. The movie
shows Remus as a friendly, docile babysitter for European American and
African American children. He only has authority in his ability to impart
moral lessons to the children. Otherwise he remains resigned to his po-
litical and economic deprivation, and he comes nowhere nearly as close
to a European American woman as various caricatures did to Betty Boop.
Song of the South was a commercial success upon its release, but it did

258  • Christopher P. Lehman

not inspire imitations. Civil rights groups protested the continuation of
the old Southern ethnic relations, and musicals that combined anima-
tion and live action were declining in popularity. The closest competitor
to the movie was George Pal’s short cartoon Date with Duke (1947). Like
Song of the South, Pal’s film uses animation to illustrate a live-­action Afri-
can American’s creativity. The film stars the jazz musician Duke Elling-
ton, who plays the song “Perfume Suite” on his piano on a stage as per-
fume bottles come to life as they hear the song. The bottles transform
into animated figures and disrupt his performance.
Date with Duke is similar to the early, silent cartoons but with an
ethnic twist. Ellington, just as the animators who served as stars of their
own films, exhibits control of the animated figures. Unlike the early car-
toons that showed animators controlling characters with their pens, the
musician makes the bottles come to life by touching piano keys. In con-
trast to the early animators trying to prove that they knew how to illus-
trate African Americans and their culture, Ellington here does not at-
tempt to show mastery of another ethnic group’s culture by dominating
bottles; he merely shows the fictional power of his musicianship over
inanimate objects.
Over the next two decades, live-­action sequences in cartoons were
few and far between, due not only to the continued enforcement of in-
dustry standards but also to the decline of the theatrical cartoon itself.
Then, starting in 1971, African Americans became involved in the pro-
duction of African American animated caricature. European Americans
still composed the ethnic majority of the employees of the animation
studios. European Americans still animated, directed, and produced
the cartoons. However, since 1970 the studios had refrained from using
European American actors to voice African American characters. In addi-
tion, African American performers allowed studios to caricature them
in exchange for control over how the animators depicted them. The per-
formers made the greatest inroads in cartoons produced for television,
especially the half-­hour Saturday-­morning programs. These series, in-
cluding The Jackson 5ive and Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, were the first
cartoons coproduced by African Americans and among the few shows
produced by African Americans at the time—live action or animated.
The input from African Americans in cartoons mattered greatly
to studios in the 1970s. Protests from the civil rights movement dur-
ing the previous two decades had turned cultural appropriation into a
taboo, and television networks refused to broadcast cartoons with Afri-
can American stereotypes, especially those derived from blackface min-

African American Representation • 259

strelsy. The banning of these films led studios to avoid drawing Afri-
can Americans altogether, because they saw no other context for the
ethnic group beyond that of broad caricature. However, as specific Afri-
can American entertainers gained followings among children, studios
wanted to capitalize on the performers’ fame without insulting them
with the caricatures. The involvement of the stars helped minimize the
studios’ risk of developing any demeaning images.
From the Rankin / Bass studio in 1971, The Jackson 5ive offered no
original treatment of live-­action African American footage. The series
used live action very minimally in each episode and in ways having little
to do with the plot, not unlike the Screen Songs. On the other hand, the
aesthetic means by which the series integrates live action into the car-
toon resembles the Betty Boop cartoons. The opening and closing of each
episode merely identify band members by juxtaposing the live-­action
photograph of each one with particular caricatures—a trick from I’ll Be
Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You. In a few episodes, the live-­action
footage is of film negatives with animation superimposed whenever a
recording of a song by the group plays. Such scenes are similar to the
live-­action shots of Calloway’s dancing that appear before his animated
caricature duplicates the moves in Minnie the Moocher, except that the
live-­action negatives are on screen at the same time that the cartoon
Jacksons dance.
The main difference between the Betty Boop cartoons and The Jackson
5ive lies in the explanation of why each series contains both live action
and animation. For the former, because the animators tried to approxi-
mate only the movements and gestures of the live-­action performers,
accuracy in terms of how the figures resembled the entertainers was not
an issue. The Fleischer Studio never implied that Betty Boop was cavort-
ing with Cab Calloway or Louis Armstrong but with cartoon characters
looking and sounding like them. In contrast, for the latter, the anima-
tors precisely illustrated not only the Jacksons’ movements but also the
Jacksons themselves. Each live-­action photograph in the opening intro-
duces the performer to the audience, and the corresponding caricature
informs the viewer that the image will represent the photographed per-
son in the cartoon to follow. The program promised the Jacksons as the
stars, which necessitated that the figures represent the group in anima-
tion. The series was part of a current wave of television cartoons starring
animated versions of famous entertainers, ranging from the Beatles to
the Harlem Globetrotters. In addition, with television networks moni-
toring the content they aired and Motown Records coproducing The

260  • Christopher P. Lehman

Jackson 5ive, the studio did not dare to make crude, broad caricatures
of the singers. Rather, the Jacksons’ caricatures lack the huge lips and
bugged eyes that had plagued the caricatures of African American enter-
tainers from before the 1950s.
In 1972 the television cartoon series Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids
blurred boundaries between live action and animation in ways that
previous cartoons starring African Americans had not. Bill Cosby co-
produced the program with Filmation Associates, giving him control
over the African American cartoon characters. The figures are charac-
ters from Cosby’s stand-­up comedy routines about his childhood friends
from urban Philadelphia, and one of the protagonists is a caricature
of him as a child. As a result, the show follows the lead of Song of the
South in having animation represent an African American’s thoughts
or memories. However, in Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, the live-­action
Cosby comments on the cartoon action while simultaneously acting as if
he occupied the same junkyard as the cartoon characters. He is filmed on
a “cartoony” junkyard set, with fences designed to resemble the scenery
in the cartoon, and a variety of familiar continuity techniques are used
to break down the distinctions between live-action and cartoon worlds.
Cosby looks offscreen to the side in order to seem as if he is viewing
what the cartoon characters are doing. He throws objects to that side,
and the characters catch animated versions of those objects in the car-
toon. Sometime they throw back the objects, and Cosby catches live-­
action versions of them. He is part of the cartoon world, unlike Bosko,
who belongs to the human world. Cosby interacts with his “memories,”
which Uncle Remus did not do in Song of the South; indeed, Cosby’s per-
formance suggests that Remus may well be one of the memories with
which Cosby interacts and to which he responds.
The show is also a throwback to the Screen Songs of four decades
earlier, because the live-­action Cosby addresses the audience. He tells
the spectators what to do, which made him one of the most authorita-
tive African Americans to appear in a live-­action sequence of a film for
children. He invites them to listen to his stories and hear Fat Albert’s
musical ensemble (the Junkyard Band) play songs that summarize
the episodes. However, Cosby’s instructions extend beyond the Mills
Brothers’ request for viewers to “follow the bouncing ball.” He plays the
role of a teacher, reminding the audience of the lesson he tries to instill
in them through his childhood story.
Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids presents the most ambiguous integra-
tion of live action and animation of all the aforementioned works. The

African American Representation • 261

cartoon series leaves several questions unanswered. Cosby never intro-
duces himself by name to viewers, nor does he specifically say that the
characters in the cartoon are from his childhood. The opening sequence
of the program mentions that it is “starring Bill Cosby,” and Filmation
calls the animated main figures the “Cosby Kids.” But is the comedian
starring as himself? If so, is he pretending not to be the adult, live-­
action version of one of the cartoon’s cast members? Does the cartoon
take place in the present with the live-­action Cosby? Or does he exist in
the past with his childhood friends’ caricatures? Do the present and the
past coexist, allowing the adult live-­action Cosby to interact with his
animated juvenile self? If Cosby is not playing himself, then is his live-­
action character an anonymous commentator on each episode?
Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids aired on Saturday mornings for twelve
consecutive years and spawned many imitators, more for the blending
of morality and humor than for the exclusive starring of African Ameri-
can figures. One of its first derivative competitors aired only months
after the debut of Cosby’s show. However, Flip Wilson, a fellow African
American comedian, coproduced and starred in a holiday-­season special
telecast instead of a weekly program. From the DePatie-­Freleng cartoon
studio, Clerow Wilson and the Miracle of ps 14 features characters from
Wilson’s stand-­up routines appearing as animated characters. As with
Remus and Cosby, the live-­action Wilson serves as a storyteller in scenes
separate from the animated stories he tells.
There the similarities end between Cosby and Wilson. The latter does
not pretend to appear in the same setting as his story, unlike Cosby in
his cartoony junkyard. Rather, Wilson stands on the stage of his weekly
live-­action television series The Flip Wilson Show to introduce the story
to viewers. He appears as himself and identifies the cartoon characters
as part of his childhood. A sequel special aired in 1974, with the same
format.
By this time studios had run out of novel approaches to African
American imaging by integrating both live-­action footage and anima-
tion. Ralph Bakshi’s 1975 movie Coonskin merely updated Song of the
South by animating a live-­action African American character’s stories
and featuring profanity and nudity while doing so. The experiment had
simply run its course. For decades European Americans used live action
to prove that they could conquer African American animated appropria-
tion until the demand for such talent decreased. African Americans then
took control of their own caricatures and starred in their own live-­action
clips to validate their creative stamps on the characters, whose anima-

262  • Christopher P. Lehman

tors were still largely European Americans. Live action in cartoons now
is exclusively a gimmick, but it was once an extremely political means of
illustrating and sometimes reinforcing ethnic relations.2

Notes

1. Friedman, Hollywood’s African American Films, 7.

2. Several of the cartoons mentioned in this writing are also mentioned in
Lehman, The Colored Cartoon, but the relationship in each film of live action to
animation is not discussed.

African American Representation • 263

15 : : Animating Uncommon Life: U.S. Military
Malaria Films (1942–1945) and the Pacific
Theater
B is h nupri ya G ho s h

But malarial fever is important not only because of the misery it inflicts on man-
kind, but the serious opposition that it has given to the march of civilization in the
tropics. Unlike many diseases, it is essentially an endemic, a local, malady; and one
which unfortunately haunts more especially the fertile, well-­watered and luxuriant,
tracts—precisely those which are of the greatest value to mankind. There it strikes
down, not only the indigenous barbaric population, but, with still greater certainty,
the pioneers of civilization, the planter, the trader, the missionary, the soldier. It is
therefore the principal and greatest ally of barbarism.
Ronald Ross, Researches on Malaria: Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1902

Malaria (1898)

At the dawn of the twentieth century, a new actor arrives on the global
stage. Its agency seems planetary, here before us, and perhaps . . . after
us. Human history, civilization, is but a phase in the longue durée of the
malarial parasite. Not so long ago, nineteenth-­century miasma theories
named the disease after “bad air,” mal aria, before germ theory estab-
lished the primacy of biological agents in states of infection. Bad air
over in India, over in North Africa, yes; but then, the British and French
colonial forces were there, exposed to a resilient nonhuman Other in the
tropics. In 1878 Alphonse Laveran had identified plasmodium or spo-
rozoites, little curved creatures swimming in the bloodstream of 148
out of 192 patients struck with cyclic fevers, and in 1897–98, Ronald
Ross, studying bird malaria, had located the carrier, an agent percep-
tible to the naked human eye, in the anopheles mosquito.1 In his accep-
tance speech for the subsequent Nobel Prize that he received for this re-
search,2 the specter of bad air reappeared: it was not just the nonhuman
agents, plasmodium, and the anopheles that were responsible for the
Fi g u re 15 . 1 The first animated mosquito. Frame from How a Mosquito Operates
(1912). Courtesy of Winsor McCay.

disease, but water, lush vegetation trapping water, humid air, the dim
cool of the twilight—in fact, all of nature over there in malarial climes.
Hence, the scale on which Ross articulates malarial infection astonishes:
a planet where humans, the nineteenth-­century premiere agents of his-
tory, find themselves in an agonistic struggle with nonhuman micro-
bial life, “uncommon” in the sense of life forms antithetical to human
­survival.3

Animating Anopheles (1912)

A giant mosquito wearing a top hat flies through the open window.
The outside infiltrates a domestic space suddenly vulnerable to tiny in-
truders. Casting knowing glances at the audience the anopheles feasts
until he explodes. So goes the transformation of the mosquito, the non-
human enemy par excellence in Winsor McCay’s six-­minute line-­drawn
animation How a Mosquito Operates (1912) (see figure 15.1).4 A first in
reverse animation (running the animated sketches backward in the
latter part of the film), the film preceded McCay’s better-­known feature-­
length animation Gertie the Dinosaur, placing the mosquito within an

Animating Uncommon Life • 265

iconography of marvelous creatures—dinosaurs, certainly, but also the
winged lizards and sea serpents of McCay’s running comic strip The Land
of Wonderful Dreams. In fact, Gertie first appeared in the comic strip on
September 13, 1913, before his appearance on film; and when the film
was released, McCay combined live performance with the screening,
talking to Gertie on stage before a wide-­eyed audience when the film
first screened at Chicago’s Palace Theater on February 8, 1914. As we
shall see, McCay’s combinatory praxis of juxtaposing graphics, live per-
formance, line-­drawn, and, later, cel animation would persist in medical
and scientific documentaries on life explicitly marked as nonhuman. In
turn, the thoroughfare between modes of animating nonhuman life im-
pacts animation as a political technology.
These two scenes from the early twentieth century serve as a link be-
tween two seemingly unrelated domains that I hope to engage: (1) scien-
tific animations of infection, a flourishing industry that sells pedagogic
films to laboratories, educational institutions, and corporate media
platforms at the present juncture; and (2) contemporary globalizing
protocols, agreements, and treaties that seek to secure human popu-
lations against infection. Scientific animations, plunging us in cellu-
lar worlds, nurture the cellular agon of infection, the unending cellu-
lar hostilities, as a common human condition. Here the artifice of the
self-­contained universe, sketched, photographed, or digitized from the
advent of single-­cel animation (perfected by Earl Hurd in 1914), against
which animated actors move, facilitates the act of enclosing us within
a single scale of action. We wander in the cellular world, for instance,
a marvelous autonomous universe with its own set of rules. We play
according to rules of the game that simplify, classify, and differentiate
our real enemy as the parasite—and only that. Gone are self-­serving
human interests that shape the biopolitical distributions of health that
we know well from horrifying stories of clinical trials gone bad, over
there, or indeed from reports on the Trade-­Related Aspects of Intellec-
tual Property Rights agreement of 1995 to limit the dissemination of
cheap generic drugs for aids-­related therapies.5 Consequently, anima-
tion can come to constitute a cultural ethos that rationalizes globalizing
biosecurity imperatives as benign collective projects. If we reinsert the
global as a myth of totality back into the cellular-­planetary axis, then
the limitations of rules that serve the specific interests of corporations,
institutions, and states become clear.
If the epistemology of infection, with its founding cellular agon,
makes “worlds” in the name of science, animation media technologies,

266  • Bishnupriya Ghosh

in particular, offer ample arsenal. From the moment of inception, the
labor-­intensive production process (McCay was reputed to draw four
thousand sketches a month for his line-­drawn work) modeled proce-
dures for visualizing cellular life in the laboratory: for instance, while
animation techniques layered image and background in a composite,
scientists marked cells under scrutiny with dyes of cells to foreground
them against the extracellular environment. More important, both sci-
entist and animator obsessively focused on a microunit, a single cel
image or an organic cell, stilled in action, attending to the minutiae of
changes, modifications, and reconfigurations to the unit. McCay’s “split
system” of using “key frames” in his storyboards, before sketching in the
transitional frames, exemplified the scientific effort to isolate snapshots
in the life cycle of microbes. Certainly the microunit, copied and multi-
plied, proliferating and moving between discrete worlds, preoccupied
both scientists and animators. In cel animation an image drawn on cel-
lulose acetate could speed across painted or photographed backgrounds,
from the tropics to the North Pole in a second. What better technology
could one have to vivify uncontrolled infection sweeping across the
hitherto discrete global environments? No wonder animation came to
play a central role in the epistemology of infection by the second decade
of the twentieth century. But that was a time of escalating human hos-
tilities. Hence, animating infection would irrevocably become a milita-
rized scientific enterprise at this historical juncture, and therefore in-
structive for present obsessions with biosecurity.
A fundamental part of the visualization of “life itself” (the prevailing
critical shorthand for our biological existence) was cinematic malaria
animations made for scientific research (mostly lab microcinematog-
raphy in the early years) and for public health (military-­training films
during the Second World War). My underlying claim is that the episte-
mology of infection in mid-­twentieth-­century film animation was forma-
tive to the militarization of biosecurity regimes on a global scale, evolv-
ing as they did into “vital systems preparedness” for all catastrophes
that are widely prevalent today.6 If we live in constant terror of the next
bioterrorist infraction, as the recent flap over lab-­engineered flu viruses
for research indicates, a return to the Pacific theater of war, where we
see a consolidation of the first infrastructures of preparedness, is timely
indeed. There the tropics, those infamous hot zones of rampant infec-
tions that haunt global public-­health initiatives, appear as a dehuman-
ized milieu that lays asunder human life. There both human hostilities
and ecological disequilibria play a role in exacerbating our cellular agon.

Animating Uncommon Life • 267

 My main argument concerns the animation of “life itself” at a mo-
ment of crisis, when life faces the possibility of catastrophic annihila-
tion, and the corollary infection topologies constitutive of biosecurity
as we understand it today. Animation turns infection, in its double ar-
ticulation as ontological condition and scientific theory, into a concrete
epistemological object, as Hans-­Jörg Rheinberger has argued vis-­à-­vis
the gene.7 The object is concrete because the epistemology of infection
is as dependent on laboratory techniques and procedures (e.g., changes
in staining, dyeing, or freezing cells), advanced bioimaging technologies
(e.g., new microscopes capable of amplifying protein fluorescence), and
innovative software (e.g., three-­dimensional reconstructions of the cell
from sectional images) as it is on shifting scientific protocols and meth-
ods, adaptive public-­health regulations, and a dynamic popular culture
on human and nonhuman collectivities. Yet most scholarship on medi-
ating life itself remains focused on exciting technologies and booming
informatics, lightly skirting the governance of vital circulations through
media technologies. There are complex analyses of molecular and cel-
lular imaging that meticulously elaborate new possibilities offered by
fluorescent microscopy, X-­ray tomography, and confocal microscopy
(mostly in laboratory pedagogy of the life sciences).8 There is flourishing
research on bioimaging as theory and practice (e.g., Christopher Kelty
and Hannah Landecker’s engagements with the material processes of
capturing cellular life over the span of the twentieth century) and on the
truth effects of the bioinformatic turn (e.g., Kirsten Ostherr’s scrutiny
of medical animation as documentary).9 And there is rigorous interro-
gation of the globalizing force of prophylaxis, which includes collusions
between big pharma, university laboratories, research institutes, local
and supranational public-­health agencies, policy wonks, and financial
investors, in maintaining infection equilibriums (e.g., Melinda Cooper,
Joe Dumit, and Kaushik Sunder Rajan’s ongoing projects on biocapi-
tal).10 Only on few occasions do theorists of global capital work along-
side theorists of science and media technologies ask how imaging and
informatics technologies produce value, in order to govern life within
ecological networks. Such governance through biosecurity regimes is in-
extricable from the integrative processes of global capitalism.
The story of malaria, eclipsed when parasites receded before the
march of illustrious and resilient viruses, elaborates this hitherto unex-
plored dimension: a cellular agon, with its specific modalities (its formal
grammar, its techniques, and even its genres) manifesting as biosecurity.
If war has been the touchstone for the expansion of industrial capital,

268  • Bishnupriya Ghosh

what role does the mediation, and specifically the animation, of life itself
play in this global history? I offer a theory of the cellular agon as a provi-
sional starting point to make the theoretical connections between tech-
nological and political projects of securing life against unseen hostile
forces within the ecological network. Imaging infection entails the vivi-
fication of what was once supplementary to the cell (the customary focal
point): its milieu (conventionally construed as the extracellular environ-
ment). In cellular animations of microbial forms hostile to value-­laden
cells that are critical for human survival, such as red blood cells (micro-
bial forms infiltrate, reconfigure, and finally kill these cells), the milieu
bites back. A topology—a mathematical structure allowing for articu-
lations of convergence, connectedness, and continuities—of infection
emerges, galvanizing medical prophylactics aimed at restoring cellular
and extracellular equilibrium. If, as in the case of malaria, that topology
extends well beyond the human body and into the world, then we are
faced with the politics of “to make live and let die,” as Michel Foucault
puts it—the backbone of biosecurity. It is thus critical to look at exactly
how these cellular wars are vivified, because of what those processes illu-
minate about the contemporary shadows of biological warfare.
The roots of imaging infection as a state of war are firmly yoked to the
history of film animation. It is in malaria film that a third layer of anima-
tion becomes readily apparent: not the bioengineered “making live” of
dead matter, not bioimaging and consequent computational reconstruc-
tion, but the animation of dying human cells struggling to live (to re-
pair and regenerate) against existing ecological hostilities. That dimen-
sion manifest as a cinematic cellular agon stabilized during the Second
World War when U.S. forces found themselves over there, in the Pacific,
where a nonhuman enemy proved to be their greatest threat. In 1943 for
every wounded British and American soldier evacuated from the Pacific
theater, there were 128 sick with malaria. Given this subliminal war that
redrew battle lines between human and nonhuman armies, I focus on
military training films made between 1942 and 1945 that contextualize
the flourishing cellular agon we find in spectacular scientific edutain-
ment today.

The Cellular Agon; or, When the Milieu Bit Back

Malaria animation has an unforgettable, iconic image: the delicate

female anopheles mosquito poised on human skin, pointed proboscis
penetrating the surface. Almost every malaria film from the 1940s to

Animating Uncommon Life • 269

the present visualizes this moment of entry, the bite, as the opening se-
quence to human infection. Unlike the sporozoites that are only percep-
tible under the microscope, the anopheles is visible evidence of endemic
hostilities. This cel-­animated image from The Winged Scourge (1943) (see
figure 15.2), the first among the educational shorts produced by Disney
Studios under the aegis of the Office of Coordinator of Inter-­American
Affairs,11 is followed by a series of diagrammatic sketches illustrating
plasmodium passages (figure 15.3), static images of potential victims,
and then the well-­loved seven dwarfs heartily engaged in ddt spray-
ing, assembling door screens, and eliminating pools of stagnant water.
The combination of graphic forms and cel animation in this classic ex-
emplifies the repertoire we find in most malaria animations. There are
graphs, curves, and diagrams, the language of scientific instruction.
There are well-­loved cartoon figures, iconic humans as agents within
the controlled, playful, cartoon universe. There are cel-­animated mov-
ing images, as we see in the superimposed frame in figure 15.2, where
the shot of the exposed human arm of a sleeping man fades into a close-­
up of anopheles on skin. There are static images of diagrams explained
by the voice-­of-­god male narrator. There is cinematographic footage of
swamps, of coming twilight, of plant-­crowded water pools. And there is
the inexorable sonic buzz of the coming mosquito before any close-­up
of the carrier. Such a combination of visual and sonic elements not just
vivifies dynamic cellular processes but also codifies observation.12 Con-
sequently, these combinatory praxes effectively animate theories of the
life, rendering them perceptible and intelligible.13 Even as the sketches
and diagrams slow down the processes of infection, reducing movement
so we may better understand and calculate incidence, the second layer
(the backdrop to the mosquito’s antics) changes swiftly, generating the
composite effect of speed. The animated mosquito zips across multiple
global zones in a minute, conveying uncontrollable spreading infection.
The viewer is caught in an experience of slowness and momentum that
underscores the mammoth task of infection control that faces scien-
tists, administrators, and the common man.
The combinations that Kelty and Landecker track in early twentieth-­
century films—time-­lapse sequences of live cells writhing in prepara-
tions, hand-­drawn images, line-­drawn and cel-­animated cartoons, and
diagrams—recur in the military-­training films, but with the one impor-
tant difference.14 These training films, “prophylactic media” as Kirsten
Ostherr characterizes them, heavily rely on popular, culturally famil-
iar cartoon figures to close the deal.15 As a result, the films socialize us,

270  • Bishnupriya Ghosh

Fi g u re 15 . 2 Cel animation of mosquito on human skin. Frame from The Winged
Scourge (1943). Courtesy of Walt Disney Studios.

F i g u re 15 . 3 Diagram of mosquito bite. Frame from The Winged Scourge (1943).

Courtesy of Walt Disney Studios.
teaching procedures and regulations for securing human life against
infectious agents. Most of these films commence with codified scien-
tific observation or realistic footage of the South Pacific, and then they
introduce the cognitively estranging cartoon characters to animate what
remains imperceptible to the eye: the larvae under water, the single
hungry female anopheles too mobile to be visually captured, and the
sporozoites within the bloodstream and liver. Ultimately, the cartoons
codify the nonhuman world within and around us where the human is
no longer the agent of change, of modifying life, even as the cartoon uni-
verse simplifies the complex topologies of infection.
But how do these films animate a cellular agon? Here it is construc-
tive to return to Kelty and Landecker’s argument regarding the status of
bioimages in relation to knowledge. Less concerned with the ontologi-
cal status of bioimages, the scholars sketch the scientific debates over
the accuracy of capturing life in its dynamism that erupted after Julius
Ries’s famous film on the sea urchin in 1909: arguments over histologi-
cal dyes that “killed” living cells; over the problem of fixing preparations
that could sustain a cell through all its cycles; over the stitching of sev-
eral different cells, shot at different moments of cell cycles, to represent
one cell cycle; and over the compression of the life cycle in time-­lapse
photography. It is more important that such conversations testify to the
denaturing of life itself under the microscopic gaze. Hence, argue Kelty
and Landecker, there is greater continuity than we think between early
twentieth-­ century microcinematographic manipulations of cellular
imaging and the seemingly more artificial algorithmic reconstructions
of cellular life at the close of the century. My interest is in articulating
these perspectives on cellular life in terms of the imaging of infection
or the colonization of a host organism by a parasite. If cellularity is the
epistemology of an organism as the sum of discrete, repetitive parts, as
Aristid Lindenmayer theorized it in 1968, what is the impact of imaging
infection on animating cellularity?16
After all, the microcinematography of infection emerges over the
same span of time, dating as far back as 1912, when commercial houses
such as Pathé, Edison, Gaumont, and British Instructional Films, as
well as laboratories at the University of California, Berkeley, and the
University of Rochester in New York, produced scientific animations
of malaria. The 1928 Life History of Mosquito Aëdes Aegypti, an Eastman
classroom film made at the Kodak Research Lab, for instance, deploys
time-­lapse photography to track the life of the mosquito and shuttles
between static and mobile images to make a case for the necessary res-

272  • Bishnupriya Ghosh

toration of ecological equilibrium. In this regard, unlike cel animations,
an urgency pervades these projects of securing human life against the
vicious carrier of malaria. There is already a strong perception of an
elemental agonistic war, necessitated by malaria and yellow fever out-
breaks among U.S. and British military units during the first two decades
of the twentieth century. And we already see the beginnings of a cellu-
lar agon, the war within the cell, planetary in proportion, demanding
public-­health interventions. By 1927 W. Allen Daley, a British medical
officer, coauthored a book on the efficacy of film as a public-­health tool.17
By 1933 President Roosevelt had funded the Tennessee Valley Authority
and charged it with controlling malaria, which was impeding regional
economic development; and between 1934 and 1940, corporations such
as the German Bayer ag pharmaceuticals company (which developed
the antimalarial chloroquine in 1934) and the British Shell Corporation
had begun to produce malaria animations. The forces marshaled against
the parasite were on the upswing when the war in the Pacific broke out.
I will turn to the public-­health documentaries during the Second
World War shortly. But what does this history of malaria animation re-
veal? Certainly it makes the unfolding of a cellular agon constitutive
of cellular epistemology. Originally understood as a struggle for victory
in the Olympic Games, the Greek term agonia underwrites the notion
of the cellular agon that I theorize here, a war that unfolds in states
of infection. If one confines oneself to biophysical or biochemical ana-
lyses of cellular processes, the term might seem a stretch. After all,
cells are irrevocably porous and changeful; they routinely divide, sepa-
rate, multiply, reconfigure, and die. But I am after an epistemological
moment when the scientific gaze differentiates unicellular and multi-
cellular biological organisms that live off human cells from value-­laden
human cells, and externalizes them as enemies engaged in hostile take-
overs of a human host. Such a gaze is called forth by the frenetic activity
of living organisms that catalyze mass human-­cellular death. Anima-
tion not only theoretically reanimates the state of affairs before death
but also remains integral for the mediation of this external object. The
production of a composite layered image central to animation, multiply-
ing and superimposing a single microunit (say, a mosquito) upon differ-
ent background layers, enhances the possibilities of creating the sharp
foreground-­background distinctions attractive to scientists interested
in differentiating, freezing, and then calculating cellular processes. The
composite image further enables visualizing infection as a topographical
assemblage, as cellular exchanges transpire between insect, human, and

Animating Uncommon Life • 273

parasite. The nonhuman agent (parasite and mosquito) is differentiated
and jettisoned as belonging outside the human cell but still threaten-
ingly close, in the milieu intérieur (as Claude Bernard named it) or in the
extracellular environment that ensures stability for multicellular living
organisms. Of course, we have been long disabused of the notion of the
human body as a separable “organic edifice,” because contemporary sci-
ence routinely positions the human within a network of organic and in-
organic matter.18 The idea of a dynamic network is resonant in Georges
Canguilhem’s elaboration of the milieu as the dynamic medium within
which living organisms exist—an ensemble of actions rather than a pas-
sive environment.19 Hence, the moment of the cellular agon is also when
the milieu comes alive. It reveals itself in combinations of interacting
agents: parasites and carriers but also water, plants, temperature, hu-
midity, and bad airs.
In the recursive and highly symbolic icon of the hungry pregnant
anopheles of the mid-­twentieth-­century malaria films, the milieu bites
back. The instructional animations vivify the struggle between human
and nonhuman cells that have irreconcilable differences, even as scien-
tists, doctors, public-­health specialists, and medical officers theorize the
potentiality of cells to repair and regenerate against uncommon micro-
bial life. In this regard, these animations are speculative technologies,
warnings and predictions of rising infection. Calculations arise: What
are the levels of the external agent within the milieu intérieur? How
does the agent penetrate and reconfigure the cell? What is its lifespan?
How can we secure its multiplication in order to stave off human-­cell
catastrophe? Interventions follow: What panacea is at hand? And, in
the absence of a panacea, what medical prophylactics can be advanced?
These questions jettison us back to the mid-­twentieth century when in-
fection topologies and security measures became inextricable, the one
unthinkable without the specter of the other.

Securing Life; or, Once upon a Time in the Pacific, 1942–1945

The images still transfix. The sultry, blowsy Annie, the most danger-
ous criminal at large and on the lookout for lonesome U.S. soldiers on
their patriotic sojourn over in the Pacific. In 1943 the U.S. armed forces
commissioned Ted Geisel (Dr. Seuss) to do an educational pamphlet for
American troops serving in the Pacific theater. The result was the “This Is
Ann!” pamphlet, which introduced the cartoon femme fatale just dying
to drink “your” blood in her sojourn over there: “She’s at home in Africa,

274  • Bishnupriya Ghosh

the Caribbean, India, the South and Southwest Pacific, and other hot
spots!” ran the accompanying caption, at once binding “Enemy Num-
ber Two” to the tropics. The cultural codification of an experienced, even
rapacious, sex worker salaciously eyeing young American men would
stick, making its way into animated medical instructional films for mili-
tary training. In 1942 Colonel Frank Capra was already at the helm of
the Armed Forces Motion Picture Unit, with Geisel in charge of the ani-
mation branch. The upshot was the memorable Private Snafu animated
instructional films, featuring a boyish, hapless soldier bumbling along
(through multiple snafus) in forgivable ways. Shortly after Capra created
Private Snafu, mainly for a biweekly newsreel just for the armed forces,
the Armed Forces Motion Picture Unit decided to let Disney Studios
have the first crack. The results are unforgettable, especially with re-
gard to developing a formal grammar, the langue of the cellular agon.
With a “trail of broken men” in her wake, Ann / Annie surfaced in Private
Snafu: “Its Murder She Says” (1945), educating younger sex workers by re-
counting her glorious sexual past (see figure 15.4). The campy voice-­over
turned nonhuman biological drives into human motives, even as the
humor of the cartoon form defanged the hostility; moreover, the cus-
tomary fun of violent clashes, chases, crashes, explosions of the toon
universe absorbed the ur-­trauma of the mosquito penetrating human
skin. Even in scientific animations of anopheles, the voice-­over often
underscores a voracious female appetite, as the pregnant mosquito goes
for a “blood meal” before laying eggs. Life itself, unleashed biological
drives, becomes the motivation for the hostile act; hence, both repro-
duction and the sexual drive provide culturally recognizable rationales
for nonhuman action. The human figure, embodied in the raw, young
soldier, also has a healthy sex drive, an ungovernable youthful vitality
that “opens” him, as the mosquitoes often murmur while licking their
chops, to nonhuman penetration. The female anopheles seduces Snafu,
while Malaria Mike (see figure 15.5), an older man who eyes Snafu’s
baby butt (calling it his “filet mignon”) in Private Snafu and Malaria Mike
(1944), penetrates the unsuspecting soldier as he takes a dip. Both the
seduction and rape are featured as acts of sexual hostility, personaliz-
ing infection trauma and localizing threat to the prostitute and the war
profiteer; and yet, in this characteristically homophobic codification, it
is suggested that while Annie might snare a willing Snafu, Mike’s imag-
ined rape is unalterably sex without consent.
Dreaming of scuttling American victories in the Pacific, Malaria Mike
fantasizes the appropriate answer to his son’s plaintive question “what

Animating Uncommon Life • 275

F i g u re 15 . 4 Annie recounting her sexual adventures to younger colleagues.
Frame from Private Snafu: “It’s Murder She Says” (1945). Courtesy of Warner Bros.

Fi g u re 15 . 5 Malaria Mike targeting Snafu’s butt. Frame from Private Snafu and
Malaria Mike (1944). Courtesy of Warner Bros.
did you do in the great war, Daddy?” to be “I did my share!” Here the
iconic sexually threatening figure becomes a saboteur who lays Ameri-
can bravery to waste, preying on the young, the future of the nation. This
mobilization against America associatively grows across the ensemble
of the animated cartoon films, with The Six-­Legged Saboteurs (1940), an
early short made by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, first introduc-
ing the idea. The spectator is privy to a secret meeting of the “Insect
Axis,” made up of mosquitoes, boll weevils, and fruit flies that hope to
inflict $150,000 in economic damage to America; at the head, of course,
is the anopheles as Hitler, complete with his Mein Malaria. With these
warnings, mosquitoes are perceived as heralding not just military de-
feat but massive economic catastrophe (from crop failures to the shut-
ting down of factories), solidifying links between disease, capital, and
war. By the close of the war, in films such as Criminal at Large (1945), the
blowsy Annie has morphed into a global female terrorist hunted by a
young foreign correspondent on the lookout for new battle zones.
The cultural iconography around the mosquito as the visible, if
minute, malarial agent is critical to the orientation of infection as ago-
nistic struggle. I begin with these symbolic codifications, intentionally,
in order to critique the assumption that the study of media materi-
ality—media technologies, instruments, institutions, and infrastruc-
tures—need not involve a rigorous scrutiny of representation. Cellular
materiality is to be found in preparations, tissue cultures, technologi-
cal instruments, and software programs, as well as in signifiers (images,
sounds, and words). All these media practices contribute to animating
the cellular agon as the epistemology of infection.
The cartoons codify in order to socialize, strategically securing Ameri-
can bodies against the abnormal as nonhuman. The cartoons form a
part of a vast audiovisual repertoire of the cellular agon that includes
instructional films for clinical training and for preparedness drills, such
as Malaria: Cause and Control (1942) and three documentaries from 1944:
Malaria, Personal Health in the Jungle, and Clinical Malaria.20 Of these,
Clinical Malaria offers the widest range of animation techniques and
strategies and serves as the paradigmatic instance. Made for medical in-
struction on identifying malaria symptoms, the film commences with a
live-­action shot of a scientist peering through a microscope as the voice-­
over introduces malaria as the “greatest invader in history.” Then there
is a cut from the observing scientist (an image that makes us antici-
pate a cut to what he sees, the slide under the microscope) to a rotating

Animating Uncommon Life • 277

globe, while the narration catalogs all the regions (Asia, Latin America,
Africa) that fall under the shadow of the anopheles. Cut to the iconic
mosquito on skin, a line-­drawn image, before moving to static sketches
of a patient infected with malaria; then a zoom under the skin, cutting
to a line-­drawn animated diagram of the artery’s interior where spo-
rozoites swim. For the next fifteen minutes of this documentary, with a
total running time of twenty-­five minutes and thirty seconds, a “slide” of
mobile sporozoites coursing through infected blood shot in time-­lapse
photography runs along the bottom of the screen. In the meantime, a
part on the top of the screen features several other animated forms: a
rising and falling temperature graph (the primary image), a line-­drawn
static cartoon of a patient, the diagram of the human body with arrows
marking the liver (where the merozoites develop), and sometimes cel-­
animated enlarged versions of the parasite in its many avatars (sporozo-
ites, merozoites, and gametocytes). The combination effectively explains
malaria to the common viewer, with the laboratory microcinematog-
raphy acting as an authenticating trace despite everything we know
about sectioning, preparations, imaging, and motion capture. The run-
ning slide at the bottom of the screen further signals the motility of the
nonhuman agent, its silent movement through vectors of transmission
(open drains, mosquito saliva, human bloodstream). All this is mixed in
with cinematographic footage of tents, landscapes, doctors, and medical
assistance, mixtures of live action and animation that we see in almost
all the instructional documentaries. The image production of malaria,
then, arises at the intersection of live action and animation, and there-
fore prompts the question: do these modes act in concert to enact the
calculative rationality behind militarized biosecurity? Or are the rela-
tions between them more complex? It would be difficult to generalize,
given the diversity of the combinations we encounter in these instruc-
tional documentaries. But, by and large, graphic, line-­drawn, and cel-­
animated forms, together with indexical microcinematographic footage
in these documentaries, tend to reduce movement, slowing and stilling
action, even freezing moments for further analysis. Against such efforts,
cinematic live-­action footage and a soundscape tailored for each milieu
produce a sense of flux: of perceptions of speed, of changing scales
(switching between body, social space, and environment), and of me-
teorological and geological differences. The world is not the same every-
where, and what happens elsewhere will inexorably come home to roost,
goes the story of uncontrollable flux. Hence, quixotically, in these scien-

278  • Bishnupriya Ghosh

tific animations of life itself, live action implicitly emerges as a benefi-
cent media.21
But there is another significant effect of this combinatory praxis
worth noting in these efforts to create an image of life itself: the curi-
ous emergence of an insect vision, to see as the mosquito does in order
to know it better. This is profoundly present in the complex observa-
tional mode of the documentaries. If we take Clinical Malaria as our ex-
ample, observation is one of the four procedures (techniques and pro-
tocols) for animating life; codification, vivification, and translation are
the others. Observation includes microcinematographic footage of the
mosquito and parasite life cycles. Sequences of the cellular change are
foreshortened in time-­lapse photography in order to artificially pro-
duce these life cycles for running durations of three to six minutes; the
temporality of life, in this instance, requires artificial splicing for sci-
entific intelligibility. In virtually all the films, the visual temporality
is recast as prediction: while the voice-­over prolepses constantly look
ahead to what is to come (“these tiny sporozoites will one day . . .”),
the indexical images anchor predictions to an authoritative scientific
calculus. On the other hand, there is live-­action footage in wide pans
of marshes, swamps, puddles, ponds, and pools; of troops marching; of
planes swooping down; and of verdant trees, bushes, and water plants.
The back-­and-­forth cuts, within this observational mode, assemble this
tropical geography into the field of the microscopic gaze, and the scale
switching turns cellular infection into an ever-­widening gyre. A criti-
cal part of this observation is what cannot be seen—“the jungle you
can’t see,” as one film remarks—but what registers as the sonic trace of
the enemy, an unrelenting buzz. The mosquito approaches, unseen but
heard. A roaming speculative eye, poised against abstracted indexical
images of life itself, can only inductively calibrate an image of the mos-
quito. The ensuing image is a composite culled from multiple images and
sounds, a calibration that makes the viewer see like an insect. Insects
register multiple images of a single source in the compound eye, and
these are subsequently neurologically processed into one image for the
brain; the multiplicity of images characteristically enhance the sense of
motion important to perceiving danger. The combinatory praxis of these
instructional films effectively induces such insect vision, even as other
graphic elements attempt to arrest speculative processing through codi-
fication. This observational mode is complemented by the signaling of
a social and scientific theory of infection. Arrows, graphs, curves, and

Animating Uncommon Life • 279

other scientific markings indicate what our focal point should be (often
the tiny parasite differentiated as the catalyst for catastrophic cellular
decay), while the cultural iconography of the cartoons spurs us to hold
common human interests dear against uncommon life.
While observation and codification work toward intelligibility, un-
common life (mosquito and parasite) becomes perceptible (sensory
and affective) in a series of vivifications that “bring to life” the imper-
ceptible. Vivifications enlarge, magnify, zoom in, distend, and amplify:
there are close-­ups of hand-­drawn images that superimpose the specter
of the mosquito over realist footage; shots of massive physical models
of the mosquito towering among trees; amplified images of parasites
under the microscope; and the magnified buzz of the mosquito indis-
tinguishable from the drone of attacking airplanes. More than any other
technique, vivified sounds and images are most successful in the affect-
ing agon in these audiovisual transcriptions of an identifiable enemy.
Finally, the instructional films recursively translate a set of key mes-
sages—enemy, danger, preventive action—through flexible translations
of content in multiple formats: the cinematic image is vivified in static
hand-­drawn images, then sketched on a blackboard, and, sometimes,
transcribed into a cartoon character. The iterative structure turns mos-
quito and parasite into a multiheaded hydra: the enemy is a cellular ter-
rorist, an economic drain, a military saboteur, and a social deviant. The
attack comes at many levels, on multiple scales. In this way, these pro-
cesses animate the cellular agon, mobilizing sight, sound, slide, footage,
artwork, models, camera speeds and apertures, dyes and stains, and bio-
logical preparations. By the close of the films, Enemy Number Two has
become intelligible, legitimizing the move toward biosecurity.
That move is accomplished by a topological articulation of malaria,
which establishes an enduring link between the preservation of human
life and the military control of territory made urgent during the Pacific
War. Malaria outbreaks were already a recognizable security threat dur-
ing the U.S. actions in Panama, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, and
with the acquisition of new military bases in the Caribbean. By the time
the Tropical Disease Control Section was established in 1942, malaria
had become the premiere threat to the U.S. military. Consequently, the
Malaria Control in War Areas was formed to prevent malaria infection
in wartime areas, and later to prevent civilian infection as the troops
demobilized. After the war, the U.S. Public Health Service saw the need
to create an organization whose primary charge would be biosecurity,
leading to the formation of the Communicable Diseases Center in 1946

280  • Bishnupriya Ghosh

(renamed the Centers for Disease Control in 1980). By 1950 the cen-
ter had developed the Epidemic Intelligence Service, and the wartime
scientific films became valuable archival material for further strategic
interventions. Between 1947 and 1951, malaria was eradicated in the
United States after the successful mass manufacture of ddt and less
toxic antimalarial drugs.22 The eradication was so successful, in fact, that
U.S. models for malaria prevention, including audiovisual pedagogy, be-
came transposable interventions across the world, and the World Health
Organization launched a global campaign against malaria in 1955. The
history tells us that the struggle over malaria, cellular or otherwise,
is inextricable from the rhetoric of war. A war that, in the 1960s, had
been won—at least, so it was thought in the historical West. That myth
would persist, as Melinda Cooper has shown, until the eruption of un-
governable viruses (e.g., Ebola, hiv, West Nile) in the late 1970s to the
early 1980s.23
The Pacific War theater was one of the historical junctures when the
scientific and the popular intelligibility of life itself became bound to
its ontological preservation through what Foucault characterizes as the
“apparatuses of security.” Much has been said regarding the famous Fou-
cauldian formulation in his Collège de France lectures, so my allusion to
that genealogy will be rather cursory.24 In those lectures, Foucault offers
a third articulation of power, the apparatus of security, which does not
punish or kill (as sovereign juridical power does) or correct, survey, or
observe (as the law dies) but calculates and intervenes in the vital cir-
culations of human life. Security apparatuses adjust balances and check
overflows, quantifying the risk distributions in a population. The target
is not this body or that population but a form of life itself, our very bio-
logical existence without which there would no longer be any human
societies; the target is a modification of the biological destiny of the
species. Looking at smallpox-­inoculation campaigns of the eighteenth
century, Foucault argues that security is manifest in the logic of inocu-
lation where the pathogen is not eradicated but its levels in the body
are maintained at a minimum. Security is a calculative rationality that
speculates on probable infections in the near future. A part of the cal-
culation is estimating internal borders within populations and sepa-
rating certain social aggregates (high-­risk cases, such as the elderly)
from others (low-­risk, healthy individuals). The latter, as productive
subjects, are central to our biological destiny, to social reproduction. In
the cartoon animations discussed here, we see the recursive figures of
the young soldier, the teenage girl (her neck exposed to the mosquito),

Animating Uncommon Life • 281

and the hard-­working father as the potential victims; no middle-­aged
woman past her child-­bearing years or elderly citizens make an appear-
ance. In this way, the cartoons effortlessly link economic productivity,
social reproduction, and biological equilibrium.
More important perhaps is that security always territorializes, Fou-
cault insists, and we see such a move across the mid-­twentieth-­century
military-­training films. The topology of infection becomes culturally
codified as a particular topography of (malarial) infection. The cellular
agon is unmistakably territorialized: the organic edifice of the body ini-
tially violated by the mosquito on skin is immediately secured through
a series of boundaries visualized in close-­ups of protective clothing
(socks, uniforms), mosquito nets, tents, and screen doors. These pro-
phylactic surfaces act as deterrents, lines of militarized control, against
a perversely porous natural landscape booming with sonic disturbances
of unseen presences. Sometimes diagrammatic idioms such as arrows
and circles highlight imperceptible flows and flights, directing our gaze
to hidden vectors of disease transmission. The difference between live-­
action footage and graphic forms creates a disjunctively layered visual
space, making a quotidian milieu palimpsestically live, in active fer-
ment. The live-­action sequences are where we find a nonhuman world
as changeful, mutable, and impossible to contain; the graphic elements
and cel-­animated forms freeze particular moments, such as entry into
the body or the movement into the liver. We can only access the non-
human enemy (mosquito and parasite) if we inductively calibrate a com-
posite image, carefully directed by diagrammatic forms. In several films,
live-­action footage also features men or machines at war against the
nonhuman enemy, painstakingly dousing the hostile milieu with chemi-
cals (aerosol cans and equipment for spraying ddt) as if to keep nature
at bay. Voice-­overs underscore these agonistic acts as necessary calcu-
lative measures intervening in the balance of life itself, which is now
a vast ecological network of nonhuman agents. We are told how much
ddt should be sprayed, what grade of mosquito net is best, how many
tablets to take, how much insect repellent to rub, how high the fevers
can get, how often the sweat breaks—a calculative rationality at the
heart of security measures. Security does not kill, to echo Foucault, but
strives to restore equilibrium; security divides, contains, and territori-
alizes to distribute quantified risks—this time, across global regions.
Globes, maps, and shots of newspaper headlines (reporting malaria in
India and China) territorialize the natural world into global zones ready
for biosecurity interventions, even as the films reinforce incommensu-

282  • Bishnupriya Ghosh

Fi g u re 15 . 6 The malaria parasite identified as luminescent microbe. Frame from
Life Cycle of Malaria: The Human Host (2011). Courtesy of Howard Hughes Medical
Institute.

rable differences between the “godforsaken hole” of the outpost (as Pri-
vate Snafu puts it) and the home front. The hot spots where “Anophe-
les Annie” rules the roost, slugging back her martinis, recede into the
jungles, into the verdant tropics. Within the narrative of security, cal-
culations and intervention pay off as those wild regions, the sketched
or photographed backdrops to the antics of the animated mosquito, are
steadily brought to order by the onward march of the U.S. armed forces.
And so the cellular agon becomes expressive as topography marked by
division, segregation, and containment. The cellular agon unfolds as un-
ending antagonism, immortalized in the recursive image of the anophe-
les treading human skin.
And yet our knowledge of the mosquito remains partly speculative,
always a composite projection cobbled together from multiple sources
that signal an unseen enemy. Animation freezes, stills; but its artifice—
its multiple forms and its radical estrangement from realistic footage—
also brings home the impossibility of capturing life itself.

Coda: The Coming of the Cellular Fantastic

If in mid-­twentieth-­century films, a strong sense of incommensurable

differences between the vital interests of parasites, mosquitoes, and
humans endures (and with it the unhomely topos of hostile nature)
past the late twentieth-­century ecological movements, then that cellu-

Animating Uncommon Life • 283

lar agon is now recast as inevitable, even pleasurable, incommensura-
bility. We live with viruses; we depend on synthetic technologies to play
the game within our cellular systems. The cellular agon now manifests
not as spectral terror but as a domain of the marvelous: the cellular fan-
tastic (to echo Akira Lippit’s “optical fantastic” in the first half of the
twentieth century) emergent in present-­day scientific edutainment.25
Advanced imaging technologies and software enable immersive 3-­D ani-
mations of cellular and extracellular environments in film shorts that
take us on voyages reminiscent of intergalactic passages. Malaria ani-
mations still commence with eschatological narrations of parasites that
once brought the world’s most valorous (Genghis Khan, Alexander the
Great, and George Washington) to their knees; the imaging techniques
and software for image transcriptions are, however, radically different.26
Cells glow while lit with luminescent proteins, sectional images become
three-­dimensional, and a mobile camera surfs the cellular galaxies. Still,
the focal point in the immersive field remains the nonhuman (see figure
15.6; the tiny sporozoite is diagrammatically circled), the dark passen-
ger of our extracellular environment. The cellular agon arrives zoning
the fluid 3-­D universe. Incommensurable differentials appear in our
field of vision, and epic journeys turn into war games. The film’s abiding
pull “worlds” once more, securing the human as the premiere subject of
­history.27

Notes

1. Malaria infection has double articulation in the human host (which experi-
ences cellular catastrophe) and an infected mosquito, the carrier. The bite of
an infected mosquito passes the plasmodium in the mosquito’s saliva into the
human bloodstream; there the plasmodium travels to the liver, where it multi-
plies and differentiates into merozoites in human liver cells. These leave the
liver to reenter the bloodstream and enter and explode red blood cells, replicat-
ing and multiplying in the process. They eventually develop into male or female
gametocytes. When a mosquito bites an infected human, a blood meal neces-
sary for the pregnant female anopheles, the mosquito absorbs the gametocytes
from the infected human; these further develop into gametes (new plasmo-
dium) within the mosquito. When the infected mosquito bites again, the cycle
begins anew.
2. There is a great deal of controversy over the patrimony of malaria research:
Alphonse Lavern certainly, but also Patrick Manson and Italian malariologists,
led by Giovanni Battista Grassi, described in the 1890s how human malaria was
transmitted by the anopheles mosquito. Because Ross was a colonial admin-
istrator, malaria was an endemic problem in his view, a genocidal force in the

284  • Bishnupriya Ghosh

 tropics (as early as 1852, a malaria epidemic had wiped out the entire village of
Ula in Bengal, where Ross conducted much of his research).
3. In his provocative essay “Uncommon Life,” Eugene Thacker pursues the new
ecological collectives where microbial and human organisms are placed in
equivalence.
4. The short is also known as The Story of the Mosquito and comprised of six thou-
sand cel drawings. An early innovator, Winsor McCay’s contributions have
been eclipsed by cultural figures such as Max Fleischer and Walt Disney. Be-
fore his animated films, McCay published comic strips in the Sunday section of
newspapers: Little Nemo in Slumberland in 1905 and, later, “Dreams of a Rare-
bit Fiend” (both were published under a pseudonym, Silas); he later gained
renown for traveling with his animated shorts and accompanying screenings
with vaudeville acts in which he held out his hand to his animated creations.
5. For details on the agreement, see “wto and the Trips Agreement,” World Health
Organization, accessed February 12, 2012, http://www.who.int/medicines/areas
/policy/wto_trips/en/index.html.
6. See Lakoff, “Preparing for the Next Emergency.”
7. Rheinberger, An Epistemology of the Concrete.
8. Rogerio Amino et al., “Imaging Parasites in Vivo,” in Shorte and Frischknecht,
Imaging Cellular and Molecular Biological Functions, 345–64.
9. See Kelty and Landecker, “A Theory of Animation.” For more on epistemologies
of life itself, see Landecker, Culturing Life; and Rheinberger, An Epistemology of
the Concrete. Regarding Ostherr, I am referring to an unpublished essay that
she is crafting for The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Documentary Studies
(forthcoming in 2014), titled “Animating Informatics: Scientific Discovery
through Documentary Film,” as well as her monograph Cinematic Prophylaxis.
10. The cluster of works include Cooper, Life as Surplus; Dumit, Picturing Person-
hood; and Sunder Rajan, Biocapital.
11. The Office of the Coordinator of Inter-­American Affairs, a U.S. agency appointed
by Roosevelt with Nelson Rockefeller at its head, was formed to promote inter-­
American cooperation during the 1940s, especially in commercial and eco-
nomic areas.
12. Kelty and Landecker, “A Theory of Animation,” 38.
13. Kelty and Landecker, “A Theory of Animation,” 33.
14. Kelty and Landecker, “A Theory of Animation,” 40.
15. Ostherr, Cinematic Prophylaxis.
16. The biologist Aristid Lindenmayer developed the formal grammar of plants
that came to be known as L-­systems: see “Mathematical Models for Cellular
Interaction in Development,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 18 (1968): 280–315.
17. Daley and Viney, Popular Education in Public Health.
18. Landecker, Culturing Life, 62–63.
19. Canguilhelm, Knowledge of Life.
20. Right after the war, a few prophylactic films continued to be made to prevent
malaria infection in the U.S. South, particularly in humid Tennessee (e.g., Mos-
quito Proofing for Malaria from 1949, a documentary that ran for ten minutes

Animating Uncommon Life • 285

 and eighteen seconds and was made by the Tennessee Valley, Malaria Control
in War Areas, and the U.S. Public Health Services). When malaria was eradicated
in the United States, similar documentaries were made for dissemination all
over the world (for example, India’s War against Malaria and Malaria Prevention
in the late 1960s).
21. I am indebted to Karen Beckman for encouraging me to attend closely to the
cultural work of live action in these documentaries.
22. ddt (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) is a pesticide once widely used to con-
trol insects in agriculture, especially insects that carry diseases such as malaria.
Its use in the United States was banned in 1972 because of damage to wildlife,
but it is still used in some countries.
23. Cooper, Life as Surplus.
24. See Foucault, Security, Territory, Population.
25. Akira Lippit’s account in Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) of the “optical fantastic”
triangulates the development of X-­ray technologies, the splitting of the atom,
and psychoanalysis.
26. For more on new imaging technologies, and therein a newly transparent body,
see Dijck, The Transparent Body.
27. A recent diptych of malaria documentaries—the Life Cycle of Malaria: The
Human Host (four minutes and seventeen seconds) and Mosquito Host (three
minutes and fifty-­nine seconds)—was funded by the Howard Hughes Medical
Institute, a nonprofit organization advancing biomedical research. The insti-
tute spent as much as $825 million on research in 2011, which included $60 mil-
lion for a film-­production unit.

286  • Bishnupriya Ghosh

16 : : Realism in the Animation Media
Environment: Animation Theory from Japan
M a rc Ste i nb e rg

Realism and animation? Realism in animation? The association of the

two terms may seem incongruous to those more familiar with notions
of filmic realism. Realism is undoubtedly a term much more closely asso-
ciated with film than with animation.1 In part we can understand this to
be a product of film’s relationship with profilmic reality; film offers an
image and style of movement that is an iconically and indexically faith-
ful portrait of the profilmic events that occurred in front of the camera.
This also comes in part from the greater prominence of debates around
realism at various stages within film discourse, criticism, and theory.
Film’s phenomenological reproduction of reality, or its artificial or semi-
otic construction of realism (depending on whom you ask), was one of
the key dividing lines between the supposed naive phenomenological
approach of André Bazin and the more critical approach of writers asso-
ciated with 1970s screen theory. Finally, the link between film and real-
ism is made all the stronger by the multiple film movements that have
evoked concepts of realism—from Italian neorealism to the kitchen-­sink
realism of the British new wave to the long-­take, long-­shot aesthetic of
what is sometimes called slow cinema or contemporary contemplative
cinema that informs contemporary transnational art cinemas.
Animation has traditionally had a far more tenuous relationship to
realism. It is not in any obvious way a realist form. While there is no in-
herent contradiction between drawing and realism—indeed realism as
a concept emerges from both literary studies and painting in the nine-
teenth century—animators have tended to embrace nonrealistic styles
of drawing and movement in their creations.2 Similarly, realism has his-
torically not been a key component to animation criticism or theory.
What theoretical works on animation there were tended to emphasize
the nonrealistic quality of animation—one need only think of Sergei
Eisenstein’s fragments on Disney, wherein the theorist-­filmmaker finds
the plasmaticness of animation of the greatest interest.3
One site where theoretical, critical, and practical interest in realism
in animation first comes together is around the work of Disney. Walt
Disney famously pushed his animators toward a greater verisimilitude
of movement and weight displacement in the drawing of their charac-
ters. Disney’s drive toward realism was also taken to new levels in his
attempt to reproduce the filmic production of depth in the form of the
multiplane camera, a camera with multiple levels of glass separated spa-
tially, allowing animators to produce a cinematic illusion of depth (from
differentiation between foreground, middle ground, and background to
the simulation of racking focus and the creation of out-­of-­focus parts
of the shot). Disney aimed for the production of what Paul Wells, bor-
rowing a term from Umberto Eco, calls “hyper-­realism.”4 Hyperrealism is
an appropriate term because it implicitly traces a lineage of animation
from Disney to the three-­dimensional computer-­generated imagery
(3-­D cgi), a more recent development in animation wherein we en-
counter the problematic of realism. This heightened form of realism is
often known as hyperrealism, or, in Andrew Darley’s coinage, “second
order realism.”5
What makes Darley’s term second-­order realism so useful is that it
clearly states what is sometimes ambiguous: that the referent for cgi’s
realism is not “the real world” or the profilmic but rather cinematic con-
ventions of realist representation: the perspective of objects recorded
by a monocular camera lens, lens flare, perspectival depth, motion blur,
and so on. This distinguishes Darley’s work from that, say, of Stephen
Prince, whose seemingly similar term, “perceptual realism,” ultimately
refers to what the referent of the image, if it had existed, would have
looked like to the perceiver. Prince’s interest lies in how “even unreal
[i.e., animated] images can be perceptually realistic”—how nonindexi-
cal, nonphotographic images could still seem to us to be perceptually
real.6 When Darley defines second-­order realism as “an attempt to pro-
duce old ways of seeing or representing by other means,” he ultimately
takes one step further and forward by suggesting that animated real-
ism—in Disney as in contemporary cgi—is in fact a representation of
an older form of representation: the animated reproduction of standard
photographic techniques.7

288  • Marc Steinberg

Realism and Animation: Japanese Debates

This brief sketch of the state of debates on realism in animation studies

provides us with a ground from which to approach the place of real-
ism and animation within Japanese critical discourse of the 2000s. Two
of Japan’s main animation critics and public intellectuals, Ōtsuka Eiji
and Azuma Hiroki, have organized part of their critical work around
the question of realism in animation.8 However, the principal manner
in which these writers engage with realism resembles (and exceeds)
Darley’s conception of second-­order realism. Animation, for these
writers, is not a medium capable of reproducing realism as much as it is
a medium that itself provides the basis for “animation-­like” work within
a different media form. Realism is first and foremost a set of conven-
tions proper to a historically produced configuration of a given medium,
rather than a visual resemblance to a given reality. Moreover, Ōtsuka
and Azuma push the debate one step further by suggesting that realism
applies not to animation’s imitation of another medium (cinema) but
rather another medium’s imitation of animation styles and problems.
In addition to providing this different take on the relation between
animation and realism, my discussion of Ōtsuka and Azuma’s writings
also provides a gateway into the ways that animation has been engaged
with and theorized within recent Japanese critical discourse. Beginning
in the late 1990s and really taking off in the early 2000s, public intellec-
tuals such as Ōtsuka and Azuma, as well as Saitō Tamaki, Kasai Kiyoshi,
Uno Tsunehiro, Itō Gō, and others, organized their critical activities in
part around commentary on Japanese animation, its associated forms
of media (comics, novels, and games), its cultures of consumption, and
the critical terminology that often develops out of its fan cultures.9 In
this sense the trend in critical thought known as zeronendai no shisō
(thought of the oughts) has seen the unprecedented prominence of ani-
mation as a critical node around which much criticism, commentary,
and theorization were organized. Granted, one may argue that some-
thing similar occurred in the Anglophone world as well around the be-
ginning of the millennium. This trend is embodied in Lev Manovich’s
famous claim that animation, previously cinema’s maligned twin, would
become the moving-­image category par excellence, with live-­action
cinema becoming a mere subset of animation.10 The appearance of jour-
nals such as animation: an interdisciplinary journal and the increasing
number of scholars working on some aspect of animation are certainly

Animation Media Environment: • 289

proof of a rise in the extent and purview of animation scholarship in the
Anglophone world.
Yet the parallels also offer some instructive contrasts. While Mano-
vich and many of the contributors to debates around animation in
the Anglophone world come from the field of film and media studies,
the Japanese critics I have mentioned come from the fields of literary
studies, critical theory, and criticism. While many now have academic
positions, they come as much from the world of criticism as from aca-
demia, a positionality that is reflected in their writing.11 They write for a
broad public readership and frame their discussions of animation very
much within wider debates around contemporary “expressive cultures,”
as they are often called. To be sure there are also a growing number of
more academic animation scholars in Japan, often with close ties to film
studies, such as the film and animation scholar Katō Mikiro and the
animation historian Tsugata Nobuyuki (both, interestingly, based in
Kyoto, while Azuma, Ōtsuka, and others are based in Tokyo—­leading
to the suggestion that the latter group’s work should be called Tokyo
criticism rather than Japanese criticism). Here I would like to focus on
the Ōtsuka-­Azuma debate around realism in order to provide a clearer
sense of the approach to animation adopted by these writers and to
highlight the prominent place of animation within Japanese cultural
criticism since the late 1990s. Indeed, the significance of these debates
lies both in their theory of realism and in their manner of situating ani-
mation within wider cultural and media spheres—in their manner, that
is, of situating animation as the environment for a wider media culture.
This work on animation debates in Japan will not undertake the reread-
ing of the existing film theory canon for traces of animation criticism,
but it will create a portrait of other spaces, milieus, and media ecolo-
gies in which animation criticism is being developed, and from which
film theory may itself learn. Let us turn then to an examination of the
animation criticism in Japan since the late 1990s, with an eye to what
it may teach us about the specificity of animation’s media ecologies and
the critical discourses developed around them.

Ōtsuka Eiji’s Three Realisms

Ōtsuka’s importance lies in his intervention in two fields: manga criti-

cism and the development of a theory and practice of what he dubbed
“narrative consumption.” I have introduced and discussed the latter as-
pect of his work elsewhere, but to sum up briefly: Ōtsuka worked as

290  • Marc Steinberg

an editor since the late 1980s for one of the main producers of books,
comics, magazines, and animation programs for the hard-­core fans
known as otaku, Kadokawa Books. During this time he also formulated a
theory of narrative consumption that has been a constant reference for
Azuma and others within the zeronendai group.12 The second principal
field of his critical work lies in his manga criticism, and in his reinterpre-
tation of the development of postwar Japanese manga (comics), anime
(animation), and otaku culture. From his award-­winning early book
Sengo manga no hyōgen kūkan: Kigōteki shintai no jubaku (The expressive
space of postwar manga: The spell of the semiotic body) through his
seminal Atomu no meidai: Tezuka Osamu to sengo manga no shudai (The
Atomu thesis: Tezuka Osamu and the main theme of postwar manga)
to his most recent project on the importance of the prewar and wartime
periods on the aesthetics, cinematic style of montage, and themes of
postwar manga, found in his Eiga shiki mangaka nyūmon (An introduc-
tion to cinematic manga artists), Ōtsuka aims to bring to light the his-
torical conditions for the development of manga style and themes that,
along with anime as its offshoot, constitute the principal media of otaku
culture.
Within this work on the aesthetic and conceptual parameters of post-
war manga and anime—the two are often treated as interchangeable
and possessing a common expressive base—Ōtsuka develops three con-
ceptions of realism. The first is most fully developed in Atomu no mei-
dai and is what we may, for lack of a better term, call biological realism.
Ōtsuka had long been dealing with a particular tension in postwar
manga between the generic, nonrealistic, semiotic drawing style and the
importance of interiority within much postwar manga, and shōjo (girls’
manga) in particular. The “semiotic theory of manga” was first elabo-
rated by Tezuka Osamu, in an interview in the magazine Pafu where
he describes his drawings as mere signs or patterns.13 According to Te-
zuka, his drawings are completely detached from any referent or exter-
nal reality, and insofar as they refer to anything, merely refer to drawing
styles developed within Disney animation or Tagawa Suihō’s wartime
manga (both major influences on a young Tezuka).
The twist that Tezuka gives to these signs is to be found in what is for
Ōtsuka a representative scene from an unpublished manga that a young
Tezuka wrote in 1945, wherein the so-­called semiotic body of a charac-
ter is shot—and actually bleeds. For Ōtsuka this single comic frame,
wherein a sign bleeds, becomes the defining moment of postwar manga
and anime. What is born here is the tension between semiotic abstrac-

Animation Media Environment: • 291

tion “completely cut off from a referent” and “a fleshly body that bleeds
if shot.”14 This tension between a character that is a semiotic drawing
that has no relation to a real-­world referent and yet somehow also pos-
sesses a fleshly, physical body that can bleed, die, and have sexual re-
lations with other characters forms the expressive basis for postwar
manga and anime.15 This is the “main topic of postwar manga,” which is
also the birth of “a new kind of realistic [riarizumu teki] expression that
is not dependent on realistic [shajitsu] illustrations.”16
The second conception of realism that Ōtsuka develops is a much
more conventional one: the realism of mechanical objects, particularly
vehicles and weapons, that Ōtsuka refers to as “scientific realism,” “the
realism of the depiction of weapons,” and “graphical realism.”17 If the
first form of realism is a nonpictorial realism—a realism of bodies or
biological realism whose referent is the real-­world body that can die—
the second form of realism is a pictorial realism, or photo-­realism; this
is a drawing style that deploys linear perspective to generate a sense
of visual resemblance to real-­world objects, or their photographic rep-
resentations. This latter form of realism is deployed most often in the
drawing of technical objects such as fighter planes, guns, and military
gear. In keeping with his thesis that the roots of the otaku arts of anima-
tion and manga are to be found in fascist, wartime Japan, Ōtsuka traces
this realistic depiction of machines to the photography and technical
drawings of the wartime period, a style quickly imitated by animation
and comics of the time and adopted by postwar manga and animation
artists like Tezuka. Indeed, there continues to be a tendency toward the
realistic depiction of guns, weapons, and military gear in contemporary
animation, which often uses 3-­D cgi selectively to represent warships,
planes, and the like, while cel-­style animation is used for characters.18
The distinction Ōtsuka notes between the semiotic realism of charac-
ters and the graphical realism of machines is alive and well to this day.
The third form of realism that Ōtsuka identifies fundamentally differs
from the first two: it is neither a realism whose referent is the biological
body nor a realism whose referent is the machinic or its photorealistic
depiction. It is, rather, a realism whose premise is the environmental
ubiquity of animation and manga; a realism whose referent is anime and
manga: “manga-­anime realism.” Ōtsuka first introduces the term at the
end of his Monogatari no taisō (Narrative exercises), published in 2000,
and further develops the concept in his 2003 book, Kyarakutā shōsetsu no
tsukurikata (How to make character novels).19
Ōtsuka first develops this concept as a way of grappling with the

292  • Marc Steinberg

specificity of what he calls “character novels” but which have since be-
come known as “light novels” (raito noberu, or ranobe for short). Light
novels are a new genre or supergenre of pulp fiction that takes the worlds
and characters of manga, anime, and video games as their objects. These
novels are generally breezily written, have covers with drawings in the
style of manga or anime characters, and include periodic illustrations of
these characters throughout the books. They are an extension of young-­
adult literature, but have, since the 2000s, become widely read and an
integral part of the expressive universe of manga-­anime and their otaku
consumers. These novels’ form is also related to the main form of high
literature in Japan, known as the “I-­novel” (shishōsetsu), called such for
its first-­person narration and characterized by its naturalism or realism.
Whereas the I-­novel was based on the naturalistic mode of copying
or sketching the world of the author-­as-­I (with a presumed transparent
relationship between the two worlds within critical commentary), the
character novel is based on the “copying” of the fictional world of (actual
or potential) anime, manga, or video games. As Ōtsuka writes: “Charac-
ter novels are novels that adopt ‘characters’ instead of the I-­novel’s ‘I’
and use anime-­manga realism instead of naturalistic realism.”20 I-­novels
and the naturalistic form of literature associated with them are “ways
of writing prose that transcribe the reality that we live in as a sketch
[shasei].”21 Light novels deploy the techniques of capturing reality—­
sketching, transcribing, copying—proper to the I-­novel yet turn them
on the worlds of anime and manga; they are novels that sketch the fic-
tional world of anime rather than that of reality, “applying the tech-
niques of naturalism not to ‘reality’ but rather to ‘anime.’ ”22 Unlike
I-­novels, which assume a relation between the real world and the world
of fiction as mediated by the interiority of the first-­person protagonist,
light novels based on the principles of anime-­manga realism assume
that the world of fiction has a relation to the world of anime or manga
and that the “I” is in fact an anime or manga character.23
The realism of anime-­manga realism is then not a matter of fidelity to
a real-­world referent—the perceptual realism that Prince sees operating
within 3-­D cgi, for instance. Rather, it is a style of writing that imports
the nonnaturalistic, nonrealist media of Japanese animation and comics
into a literary form that operates according to principles of naturalism.
It is an operational realism that, in writing anime-­manga characters into
the naturalistic style of the I-­novel, produces a sense that the charac-
ter itself—a mere conglomeration of codes or patterns, as Tezuka first
suggested—has an “I” and hence possesses interiority. This manner of

Animation Media Environment: • 293

writing characters as if they had interiority is then an interesting evo-
lution of the first form of realism that Ōtsuka identifies as the legacy
of Tezuka: the intersection of the semiotic body with the fleshly body.
However, it is also the product of a particular form of medial transposi-
tion whose effects become most apparent through the theoretical work
of Azuma.

Azuma Hiroki’s Transmedial Realism

Anime-­manga realism is a realism produced by the intersection of a par-

ticular expressive milieu (anime and manga and their production of a
specific media environment) and the naturalistic formal devices asso-
ciated with the I-­novel. With the ascendency of the light novel in the
first decades of the 2000s, a set of highly stylized media forms seem-
ingly quite distant from realistic depiction—animation and comics—­
becomes the ground for a realism that depends less on these forms’
visual proximity to a real-­world referent and more on their constitution
of a consistent and self-­contained media milieu. The environmental per-
vasiveness of anime and manga styles throughout at least one segment
of the Japanese media ecology gives rise to the sensation of realism. That
codes can become naturalized and are subsequently experienced as real
is a lesson we have known at least since Roland Barthes’s Mythologies;
the twist here is that the naturalization takes place through a particu-
lar subgroup of closely interlinked media forms: animation and comics.
Hence, what we have is a distinctly transmedial realism: a realism that
depends on, first, the aesthetic consistency of anime and manga styles,
and, second, the migration to a form of literature whose presumption is
a naturalistic relation to the real world.
What about video games, that other medium so closely linked to the
media ecologies of manga and anime? Are games also open to the real-
ism associated with anime and manga? For Ōtsuka the answer is clear:
no. Video games have a reset button, which goes against the importance
of flesh and blood and the possibility of death that is at the heart of the
anime-­manga expressive world and is the basis for its realism.24 This is
the point at which Azuma Hiroki enters the debate.
Azuma, a relatively younger scholar in a critical milieu where inter-
ventions are often defined around generational divides, rose to promi-
nence after publishing Dōbutsuka suru posutomodan (The animalizing
postmodern; translated into English as Otaku: Japan’s Database Ani-
mals). Azuma’s importance comes in part from his mentoring of younger

294  • Marc Steinberg

scholars, and from his creation of journals and book series that publish
critical debates relating to anime, manga, games, light novels, and the
consumer group—otaku—that has become the privileged focus of their
analyses.25 But his importance also comes from his own critical inter-
ventions into and creation of debates around areas ranging from anime
consumer cultures to Internet architecture and the security state post-
­9 / 11. His critical work has, as Endō Toshiaki has written in an over-
view of Japanese critical debates of the 2000s, become “the very ‘envi-
ronment’ within a particular sphere of the world of criticism.”26 One of
Azuma’s most important contributions in this regard was his Gēmu-­teki
riarizumu no tanjō: Dōbutsukasuru posutomodan 2 (The birth of game-­ic
realism: The animalizing postmodern 2).
As the title suggests, the core of this work revolves around an engage-
ment with Ōtsuka’s concept of anime-­manga realism. Against Ōtsuka,
Azuma argues that there is such a thing as “game-­ic realism.”27 Video
games, and the logic of the “replay” that informs them, have completely
permeated light novels and so-­called novel games (text-­heavy computer
games with a minimum of branching and a limited degree of user input).
The most noticeable manifestation of this is the prevalence of the trope
of the loop in light novels throughout the 2000s, though the transfor-
mation of the position of the reader, brought in line with the point of
view of the player, is also another place that the game-­ic is observed
within the light novel. If anime-­manga realism deals with the “para-
doxical theme of expressing the fleshly body through the use of signs,”
then game-­ic realism deals with the paradoxical feat of using a content
or meaning-­oriented medium such as the novel to express the experi-
ence of games—an experience whose primary feature is, according to
Azuma, two-­way communication, or communication for communica-
tion’s sake.28
Exploring Azuma’s theory of game-­ic realism would lead us too far
astray from the topic of animation and realism. What I would like to
hone in on here is the theoretical framework that Azuma develops for
understanding how trends such as anime-­manga realism and game-­ic
realism can come into being. For while Ōtsuka develops a theory of what
anime-­manga realism is, he does not offer a sense of the media processes
at work in this transformation. And it is precisely here that Azuma’s sig-
nificant contribution is to be found. The very condition for the devel-
opment of anime-­manga realism or game-­ic realism is the permeation
of the imagination by the logic of these media forms. The imagination
these media inspire has been environmentalized to such a degree that

Animation Media Environment: • 295

the media’s defining traits become the basis for the operation of other
media forms. Azuma writes:
We all live in a specific environment of the imagination. In premodern
societies people lived among the accumulation of myths and folktales
told by storytellers, the modern author or reader or citizen lived within
naturalism, and the postmodern otaku live within the database of char-
acters. These various environments determine the author’s forms of ex-
pression, as well as the form of consumption of the works.
Moreover, what is important here is that this environment functions
across works and across genres.29

This environment also functions across media forms. In a move evoca-

tive of debates around realism in animation, and particularly of the term
second-­order realism, Azuma suggests that what we encounter in post-
modern works grounded in the animation cultures of Japan is “the real-
ism of an artificial environment.”30
This move is not only of interest in the context of the Japanese de-
bates. It also promises to take us one step beyond debates around real-
ism in much Anglophone scholarship on animation and realism insofar
as the basis for this realism is not to be found in an adherence either to
the perceptually real (with its insistence on the fidelity of the represen-
tation to “our” phenomenological perception of real things) or to the
filmic real (a second-­order realism or photo-­realism that insists on filmic
representation as the ground, or as the first-­order realism). In part be-
cause they are far removed from any imperative to portray people or
things with fidelity to phenomenological reality or photographic rep-
resentations, the vibrant worlds of Japanese anime, manga, and games
form the basis for an alternative sphere of expression. Anime, manga,
and game-­ic realisms develop as forms of fidelity to nonrealist modes
of representation. This is not the hyperreal, in the sense of a realm of
representation that replaces the real. Nor is it of necessity an unreal
world, going with the popular and critical assumption that animation
must be about the fantastical or the nonexistent. It is a different realm
of expression that, as Azuma properly emphasizes, is real, that is, has a
reality of its own, as well as a form of causality proper to it (here we may
recall Azuma’s comment to the effect that imaginative environments de-
termine the forms of expression and consumption of works).31 Realism,
then, designates the operation of transcription or transposition from
one medium to another, and references the existence of the consistent
yet nonrealist realm of expression of anime and manga.

296  • Marc Steinberg

Conclusion

The work around animation and realism in recent Japanese criticism

is of interest for two reasons. The first is for the ways the work differs
from common discussions of animation and realism that start with the
premise that animation can realistically depict the world (whether in
terms of the visual level through movement style and 3-­D cgi or, as is
also claimed for animation, on the emotional level). These discussions
instead presume that the environmental pervasiveness of animation’s
style or theme within a given expressive media ecology can, when its
principles or problematics are translated through a different regime of
expression (the naturalist novel), lead to a form of expression (the light
novel) whose style can be called anime-­manga realism, or, under differ-
ent conditions, game-­ic realism.
Second, this work is of interest for the way it takes up an issue—
realism—that has played a central role in film theory, and in animation
studies in the Anglophone world, and shifts the register at which the
issue is considered. Film studies started from and, in some respects, has
recently returned to questions of realism from the premise that cinema’s
force comes from the automaticity of film’s recording of reality.32 The
primary engagements of animation studies with realism have been
equally organized around issues of second-­order realism and photo-­
realism in the consideration of cgi. Azuma’s and Ōtsuka’s writings shift
the ground from a question of fidelity of representation to realism as a
technique of transmedia transcription that assumes anime-­manga as
an expressive regime or referent that is autonomous (not referentially
bound to the real) yet visually and thematically consistent. If one of the
problems with this Japanese criticism is its emphasis on literature and
other media instead of dealing with the specificity of animation, then
this is also the criticism’s greatest contribution: to put animation (and
its cultures of consumption) in dialogue with a wider media ecology,
one that includes literature, comics, and games more than film. Per-
haps the end result is that these theories animate media theory more
than they do film theory. But these critics should not be faulted for end-
ing up in a different place (a transmedia theory of animation environ-
ments) after starting from a different problem (an examination of the
impact of anime and manga on literature): both animation studies and
film studies can benefit from this transmedia approach to realism. In-
deed, this group of writers and the problematics they develop in their
debates shows the value of expanding the canons of film and animation

Animation Media Environment: • 297

theory to include writers from as yet underexplored critical milieus. For
it is in these milieus that we may find the potential to overturn some of
the most naturalized assumptions in the canons of film and animation
theory—such as the continued presumption that realism has to relate
to the perceptually “real.”

Notes

All translations from Japanese sources are my own, unless otherwise indicated.

1. At this point I am content to assume the common understandings of animation

and cinema. Animation will hence be understood to be frame-­by-­frame work,
most commonly encountered as cel, puppet, or cgi animation; cinema will be
the automatic recording of some profilmic real. It is the existence of this real,
in some form, that marks the common understanding of cinema as bound (by
ethics if not by nature) to some form of realism. For a classic display of this as-
sociation of animation with the unreal and cinema with the real (or a particu-
lar form of “rapport with the real”), see Andrew, What Cinema Is! I do not share
this view; indeed this chapter is about thinking through the particular forms of
realism that animation develops, and asks us to theorize.
2. Hayward, Cinema Studies, 311.
3. Eisenstein, The Eisenstein Collection.
4. Wells, Understanding Animation, 25. Wells’s discussion of realism and animation
in Understanding Animation is both thorough and wide-­ranging, and this chap-
ter is indebted to it.
5. Darley explicitly sees the realistic cgi animation of Pixar as “continuing a tra-
dition of cartoon realism stretching back to the early efforts of Disney and his
animators.” Darley, Visual Digital Culture, 83. Debates about the stakes and im-
plications of the extension of filmic realism (or photorealism) into animation
gained fruitful food for thought in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (Hironobu
Sakaguchi, 2001), an early attempt at a full-­length, full-­c gi animated film that
attempts to replicate filmic realism. It was an instructive failure (critical, box-­
office, and aesthetic) that also formed the basis for several important critical
interventions into questions of cgi realism. See LaMarre, “New Media Worlds”;
Monnet, “A-­Life and the Uncanny in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within”; and Sob-
chack, “Final Fantasies.”
6. Prince, “True Lies,” 32.
7. Darley, Visual Digital Culture, 83.
8. While I call Ōtsuka and Azuma “animation critics,” they are perhaps better de-
scribed as “subculture media critics”—animation being one of the principal
media forms around which the subculture of anime-­manga-­game fandom is
organized.
9. For instance, the term sekai-­kei (world style), which describes a particular genre
of animation and became a flashpoint for critical debate in the mid-­2000s, first

298  • Marc Steinberg

 developed out of web-­based fan discussions in 2002. See Maejima, Sekai-­kei to
wa nanika, 27–28.
10. Manovich, “What Is Digital Cinema?”; a revised and extended version of this
essay was included in Manovich, The Language of New Media.
11. By “criticism” (hihyō) I refer to the general category of critical writing aimed
toward a general public by authors who are as likely to be unaffiliated freelance
writers as they are to be academics. In the case of this subculture criticism in
particular, it must be kept in mind that the forums of discussion are monthly
magazines, collections of debates and essays, and paperback books aimed at an
interested general audience, rather than an academic audience. Moreover, one
of the features of criticism in Japan at least since the 1980s is what we might
call its market orientation. Azuma, for instance, has explicitly made “winning”
at the marketplace the measure of good criticism. By this measure a bestseller
becomes the sign of good criticism. While certainly more critics would decry
this position than accept it, Azuma is not alone in taking this stance. On criti-
cism and the market, see Endō, Zeronendai no ronten, 53. See also Marilyn Ivy’s
“Critical Texts, Mass Artifacts”—an analysis of the consumption of theory in
the 1980s, which continues to be of critical importance to this day.
12. For a brief introduction to this aspect of Ōtsuka’s work, see my “Translator’s
Introduction” to his “World and Variation,” 99–104; I give a fuller account of his
work at Kadokawa in chapter 5 of Anime’s Media Mix.
13. Tezuka uses the words kigō (sign) and patān (pattern). Cited in Ōtsuka, Sengo
manga no hyōgen kūkan, 6.
14. Ōtsuka, Atomu no meidai, 63, 158.
15. The question of sex is an important one for Ōtsuka for two reasons, which be-
come most clear in a later work, coauthored with Ôsawa Nobuaki, “Japanimē-
shon” wa naze yabureru ka. First, Ōtsuka sees the problem of the relation be-
tween the semiotic and the corporeal or biological body playing itself out in the
development of shōjo girls’ manga in the 1970s with the “1949er” (24 nen gumi)
generation of women manga artists, whom Ōtsuka understands to be artists
who both “inherit and develop” Tezuka’s problematic. Second, the doubled
semiotic-­corporeal body is at the heart of the moe phenomenon of so-­called
two-­dimensional love—the sexualization of and attraction to manga, anime,
game, and other drawn characters within contemporary male otaku culture.
See Ōtsuka and Ōsawa, “Japanimēshon” wa naze yabureru ka, 157, 169. For a theo-
retical treatment of moe that situates it as a postmodern phenomenon (and
against which Ōtsuka is writing) see Azuma, Otaku.
16. Ōtsuka, Atomu no meidai, 171.
17. Ōtsuka, Atomu no meidai, 144–48; Ōtsuka and Ōsawa, “Japanimēshon” wa naze
yabureru ka, 54. The last term, graphical realism, is a translation of shajitsuteki
riarizumu, which could also be rendered “realistic realism”—here mobilizing
the two senses of the term realism: the convention of realism (the translitera-
tion riarizumu) as produced by the tradition of realistic (shajitsuteki) depiction,
most notably through the technique of linear perspective.

Animation Media Environment: • 299

18. On the politics and geopolitics of the use of 3-­D cgi in otherwise cel-­style ani-
mation, see Bolton, “The Quick and the Undead.”
19. Ōtsuka, Monogatari no taisō, 210; Ōtsuka, Kyarakutā shōsetsu no tsukurikata.
Ōtsuka is a peculiar writer in the sense that much of his theory is presented in
the form of how-­to books, reflecting his belief in the need for a close relation-
ship between theory and practice.
20. Ōtsuka, Monogatari no taisō, 210.
21. Ōtsuka, Kyarakutā shōsetsu no tsukurikata, 22.
22. Ōtsuka, Monogatari no taisō, 209–10.
23. Ōtsuka, Kyarakutā shōsetsu no tsukurikata, 27.
24. Ōtsuka, Kyarakutā shōsetsu no tsukurikata, 142–43.
25. This focus on the male otaku and the exclusively male group of academics and
commentators organized around Azuma have fostered a sense that gender cri-
tique is unnecessary, or irrelevant. Not surprisingly, this stance has provoked
some outrage, as well as also a countertrend that focuses on the female otaku
(fujoshi) instead. See, for instance, Sugiura, Fujoshika suru sekai.
26. Endō, Zeronendai no ronten, 22.
27. While the term ludic realism may be a smoother translation of the term geemu-­
teki, I opt for game-­ic to keep the resonances with the term (video or computer)
game that Azuma is unambiguously referring to.
28. Azuma, Gēmu-­teki riarizumu no tanjō, 175.
29. Azuma, Gēmu-­teki riarizumu no tanjō, 64.
30. Azuma, Gēmu-­teki riarizumu no tanjō, 72.
31. Azuma suggests that while the character database is a “virtual existence that
may only exist within the minds of otaku,” its economic effects in terms of the
sales of hit light novels mean that “it is unmistakably a real existence.” Azuma,
Gēmu-­teki riarizumu no tanjō, 44–45.
32. Andrew’s What Cinema Is! and Rodowick’s The Virtual Life of Film rather remark-
ably agree on the fact of film’s digital transformation, all the while reaffirming
cinema’s relation to the real—through the mediation of Bazin, in the former,
and Stanley Cavell, in the latter.

300  • Marc Steinberg

17 : : Some Observations Pertaining to Cartoon
Physics; or, The Cartoon Cat in the Machine
S co t t Buk at ma n

From Stephen Millhauser’s short story “Cat ’n’ Mouse,” published in the
New Yorker in 2004:
The cat is chasing the mouse through the kitchen: between the blue
chair legs, over the tabletop with its red-­and-­white checkered table-
cloth that is already sliding in great waves, past the sugar bowl falling to
the left and the cream jug falling to the right, over the blue chair back,
down the chair legs, across the waxed and butter-­yellow floor. The cat
and the mouse lean backward and try to stop on the slippery wax, which
shows their flawless reflections. Sparks shoot from their heels, but it’s
much too late: the big door looms. The mouse crashes through, leaving
a mouse-­shaped hole. The cat crashes through, replacing the mouse-­
shaped hole with a larger, cat-­shaped hole.1

Alain Robbe-­Grillet meets Tom and Jerry. Millhauser meticulously maps

the illogics of a typical funny animal cartoon, producing a calm, dispas-
sionate appraisal of what is usually experienced as seven minutes of fre-
netic anarchy. The brilliance of the piece lies in its lack of distortion,
its accuracy in detailing the causal chains that constitute the gags in
a typical chase cartoon. Millhauser’s cool, detached prose also has the
salutary effect in pointing out just how strange those cartoons actually
were. Does the surprise lie in Millhauser’s act of making them strange,
or is it stranger that these cartoons didn’t seem all that strange in the
first place?
Anything can happen in a cartoon, as cartoon characters frequently
remind us as they blithely ignore the fourth wall and a rather significant
ontological gap to address us directly (as, for example, Sylvester the Cat
does in 1945’s Peck Up Your Troubles). But Hollywood cartoons do not give
us an entirely disordered universe of chaos and entropy. They give us a
world that is ordered, but ordered differently: hence, cartoon physics. The
term, though not the concept, was introduced in an Esquire magazine
article in 1980, which formalized a series of laws that would be recog-
nized and accepted by anyone who’d ever spent their formative years
watching cartoons. Further amendments have been added along the
way, aided by the crowdsourcing made possible by the Internet (not to
mention fan cultures: there are laws of cartoon physics that are specific
to manga, for example). Some examples, many of which are exemplified
by the scenes described by Millhauser:
• Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware
of its situation.
• Any body in motion will tend to remain in motion until solid matter
intervenes suddenly.
• Any body passing through solid matter will leave a perforation con-
forming to its perimeter.
• Certain bodies can pass through solid walls painted to resemble tun-
nel entrances; others cannot.
• Any violent rearrangement of feline matter is impermanent.
• A cat will assume the shape of its container.
There is also something that has come to be called “hammerspace,” which
is the realm behind a character’s back from which any object (often an
oversized hammer) can be pulled.
Cartoon physics may have its genesis in the animation principle of
“squash and stretch”—a phenomenon at least as old as phenakisto-
scopes. A bouncing ball will squash along the vertical axis and stretch
along the horizontal. Overall mass is preserved, and movement can be
rendered more realistically and with more fluidity. But this realist prin-
ciple, exaggerated, produced a comedic effect, and voilà, the Hollywood
cartoon was born. Winsor McCay put two of his characters from Little
Nemo in Slumberland through their squashing and stretching paces in his
first animated film, produced in 1911.
So cartoon physics has been with us for nearly as long as cartoons
have existed, but it becomes important to write about now because its
alternative universe of unnatural laws is threatened by the encroach-
ments of the physics of the real world into the realm of animation in the
digital age, a shift I’ll address toward the end of this chapter.

302  • Scott Bukatman

Cartoon Physics and Cartoon Bodies

There is something uncanny going on in Millhauser’s story: a part of

our childhood experience is being returned to us in a way that makes
the cartoon’s homey familiarity most unhomey. It’s a bit disturbing. It’s
also hilarious, and reminiscent, in a way, of that other act of cartoon-
ish estrangement—the opening of Robert Zemeckis’s Who Framed Roger
Rabbit (1988). Recall (for I can’t imagine that anyone reading this vol-
ume hasn’t seen it) that the film begins with a Baby Herman and Roger
Rabbit cartoon, replete with flying knives, preternaturally slippery soap,
eyeballs popping from heads, and all the rest, until a director’s yell of
“cut!” reveals to us that these actions were actually happening in real
space and time, performed by a cast of “Toons” who coexist, uncomfort-
ably, with humans and in human space. Both Millhauser’s story and Ze-
meckis’s film return us to the cartoons of our childhood, their strange-
ness newly highlighted for our contemplation.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit thematizes what usually goes unremarked
on within the works themselves, which is that the diegesis of the Holly-
wood cartoon is governed by its own set of physical laws, a new set of re-
strictions that operate in the service of humor. When the private detec-
tive Eddie Valiant tries to saw off the handcuffs that bind him to Roger
Rabbit, Roger easily slips out of his cuff to help steady things. A predict-
able (and I mean that in a good way) double take ensues: “Do you mean
to tell me you could’ve taken your hand out of that cuff at any time?” To
which Roger replies, “Not at any time! Only when it was ­funny!”
There are a few laws that I want to add—fondly remembered tropes
from my childhood, adolescent, and adult viewing experience(s):
• Pepper will always make one sneeze.
• Billy goats eat anything and have a special fondness for tin cans.
• Eyeballs are detachable.
• Heads are empty, and smaller creatures can run around inside of
them.
• Any explosion will turn a face into an African American caricature.
All of these perhaps belong more properly to the realm of what could be
called cartoon biology, but, when you get right down to it, all of cartoon
physics is ultimately about the body. The laws propose an alternative
set of means by which bodies navigate space: momentum trumps in-
ertia, gravity is a sometime thing, solid matter often isn’t. And cartoon
bodies are possessed of a nearly infinite pliability, which allows them to

Cartoon Physics • 303
weather the vicissitudes of cartoon physics (this idea of cartoon charac-
ters as differently, miraculously, abled is wonderfully articulated by Who
Framed Roger Rabbit).
If there is a privileged body within the universe governed by cartoon
physics, it undoubtedly belongs to Goofy. Indeterminate biology (what
kind of an animal is Goofy?) has yielded an infinitely pliable body that
seems constantly subject to operations of physical law, both actual and
cartoony. He becomes the exemplar of the industrial body that David
Kunzle has called “machined almost beyond recognition.”2 Squashed
and stretched by gymnastic equipment, or by the act of pitching a base-
ball (an act that stretches his body nearly to home plate),3 Goofy dem-
onstrates that what is really at work in the world of cartoon physics
is a reimagining of the body and its relation to the world. If my work
has centered on such reimaginings (cyberspace, Jerry Lewis movies—
The Nutty Professor even features another battle with gymnastics equip-
ment—Winsor McCay comics, morphing), then it should be said that
cartoon physics is the ur-­phenomenon that undergirds them all.
But the Disney sensibility of the 1940s—Goofy’s heyday—was a far
cry from the animistic wonderland that Sergei Eisenstein celebrated in
the earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons. Cartoon physics cannot be allowed
free reign in Disney’s cartooniverse, and so the laws of physical reality
are gently teased rather than mercilessly mocked or overturned. Tom
and Jerry cartoons, produced for mgm by William Hanna and Joseph
Barbera, blend some of the realism of Disney’s technique with a healthy
indulgence in the principles of cartoon physics. The world depicted is
appealingly solid, making the transgressions of physical law that much
more . . . I can’t decide whether to write profound or funny. The suburban
decor of the house in which Tom and Jerry dwell and do battle provides
an important quotidian backdrop. That bourgeois domesticity (Mill-
hauser is right about the gleaming linoleum floors and polished sur-
faces) emphasizes the uncanniness of the goings-­on—an effect already
partly achieved through defamiliarizing perspectives (mouse-­eye views
from floorboard level or magisterial gazes from atop grandfather clocks)
(see figure 17.1).4
Cartoon physics is fundamental to the world of Tom and Jerry and in-
forms what happens to both cat and mouse in equal measures. An undu-
lating tablecloth will carry a luscious-­looking sundae directly to Jerry’s
mouth without spilling a drop. Tom’s eyebrows, pupils, and the whites
of his eyes will pop from his head and float in midair.5 But the Road-
runner series presents something quite different, and we should pause

304  • Scott Bukatman

Fi g u re 17. 1 Bourgeois estrangement.
to acknowledge the tragic figure of Wile E. Coyote, who always gets the
lit end of the dynamite stick in his struggle to catch that nameless road-
runner. Wile E. has a particularly tortured relation to physics, which be-
gins with his unshakeable faith in its predictability. His is an eminently
rational mind, and he knows it. In his one guest-­starring role in a Bugs
Bunny cartoon, Operation Rabbit (1952), he announces himself with his
card, which reads, “Wile E. Coyote. Genius.” Declaring his intention to
eat Bugs, he cautions, “Now don’t try to get away! I am more muscular,
more cunning, faster and larger than you are—aaaaand, I’m a genius!”
A bit later in the proceedings he considers a promotion. “Wile E. Coy-
ote—SUPER genius! I like the way that rolls out. Wile E. Coyote, Super-­
Genius.” (He then proceeds to be blown to smithereens.) His plans are
meticulous, often carefully mapped and blueprinted, and their reliance
on basic principles of physics makes their success seem inevitable. At-
tach a boxing glove to a massive rock with a giant spring. Lock in place.
Release spring. Aaaaaand, in contravention of all the laws governing the
properties of mass, the glove remains in place as the rock springs back-
ward, right where a certain coyote has been confidently lurking (figure
17.2). (The coyote’s faith in causal relations and step-­by-­step planning
lends itself to the kind of precise descriptive mapping that marked Mill-
hauser’s narrative voice in “Cat ’n’ Mouse.”)
Physics is not his only betrayer, however. In advance of Duck Amuck,
by the same writer and director team, the very makers of the cartoon
itself seem allied against him. Screen space is made complicit with the
slipperiness of cartoon physics. In the first Roadrunner cartoon, Fast
and Furry-­ous (1949), Wile E. pulls the old “fake tunnel” trick. Painting a
deceptive white line up to a cliff face, he then paints a perfect perspec-
tival painting of a long tunnel, the white line continuing to its ultimate
vanishing point, a hint of blue sky marking the tunnel’s end in the seem-
ing distance. The camera is placed behind him, giving us a lovely view
of what the Roadrunner will see as he approaches, and it’s obvious that
he’ll be fooled. The coyote clears out of sight, taking his painting para-
phernalia with him, and an offscreen “beep beep” denotes the bird’s ap-
proach. The shot continues as the Roadrunner sails onscreen from be-
hind the camera and blithely continues on into the tunnel’s simulacral
space. The coyote has done his job too well. Cut to a lateral view of the
coyote, his face stretched in dismay and disbelief. But he is nothing if
not adaptable. Emerging with a look of fierce determination, he rears
back and launches himself in pursuit, only to smash up against that all-­
too-­physical rock wall (as it sometimes says on Wile E. Coyote’s own

306  • Scott Bukatman

Fi g u re 17. 2 Spring-­loaded.

blueprints, “Ha ha!”). But the coyote’s failure has been anticipated, in-
deed, preordained, by the cut from an axial to a lateral view that de-
molishes the trompe l’oeil effect, the image’s two-­dimensionality now
evident to us all (figure 17.3). Similarly, in Beep Beep (1952), Wile E. lays
a short stretch of track laterally across the highway to fake a railroad
crossing, but then makes the mistake of camouflaging both ends with
some shrubbery to create the illusion of the tracks extending, not just
beyond the road, but beyond the boundaries of the screen. Cue the train.

Topsy-­Turvydom Redux

If I were the kind of person who did research, I’d be interested in learn-
ing how frequently kids tried to mimic the behavior that they witnessed
in cartoons. Apparently television’s Superman, George Reeve, became
distraught over stories of children trying to replicate Superman’s ability
to fly out of windows. But I’ve yet to hear about kids trying to blow up
roadrunners with dynamite (much less with any of the more esoteric
products sold by the Acme Company). I suspect that children under-
stand that they are watching something from a world apart, something
not mimetic of reality, and therefore not something that they would

Cartoon Physics • 307
Fi g u re 17. 3 Betrayed by screen space.
seek to mimic in turn. Cowboys and Indians was a popular game. Playing
superheroes—of course! But Roadrunner and Coyote, Tom and Jerry,
Bugs and Elmer—not so much.
But I wonder what, more specifically, children “get” from cartoon
physics. It’s tempting to think that it speaks to an anxiety over bodily
development and control (what doesn’t?), but let’s remember that kids
think next to nothing of falling—skinned knees and elbows are the
body art of childhood. Perhaps cartoon physics speaks to a utopian con-
dition of bodily invulnerability then, and all the coyotes, cats, and ducks
represent more of an attempt to hold on to (for kids) or return to (for
adults) the body that could take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’. While I
think there’s something to this, I’m more tempted to find the utopi-
anism of cartoon physics in the state of licensed topsy-­turvydom that
it instantiates. The cartoon represents an other space—the screen al-
ready separates it from our reality, and its animated status positions
it as “other” to the more dominant live-­action cinema—in which other
rules apply, in which the seemingly immutable laws of the here and now
are no longer so determinate. This shares many of the conditions recog-
nized as endemic to the world of play, an activity that often takes place
in a magic circle with its own rules and codes of behavior.6
In The Poetics of Slumberland, I argue that cartoon physics speaks to
the key ontological difference between live-­action film and animation:
a shot in the former is filmed in real time, with the camera recording
the movement that occurs before it, while in the latter, the camera only
records a series of still images, with the suppression of the real-­time
movement of switching images as the caesura on which the illusion de-
pends.7 Projecting live-­action cinema reconstitutes the movement that
occurred in profilmic space, while projecting filmed animation gener-
ates an illusion of movement where there was none. This inversion of
the filmic process has, I think, its sly analogue in cartoon physics. If
the production of animation is a topsy-­turvy version of the production
of live-­action cinema, then the topsy-­turvydom of cartoon physics is
its onscreen equivalent, a visible sign of its otherness. And if the ani-
mated beings onscreen are marked by their disobedience and unruli-
ness—early cartoon characters seem to exist in a continuous state of
rebellion against their animator creators—then cartoon physics maps
that disobedience onto the natural world itself.
Millhauser takes up this condition in another story that I’ve cited
elsewhere in my writing, this one a fictionalized version of Winsor
McCay’s forays into animation: in the story, the artist, forced to aban-

Cartoon Physics • 309
don his innovative comic strips in favor of meticulously rendered edi-
torial cartoons, finds increasing solace in his nocturnal production of
drawings for elaborate animated films. I can’t not cite this passage again:
The animated cartoon was nothing but the poetry of the impossible—
therein lay its exhilaration and its secret melancholy. For this willful
violation of the actual, while it was an intoxicating release from the con-
striction of things, was at the same time nothing but a delusion, an at-
tempt to outwit mortality. As such it was doomed to failure. And yet
it was desperately important to smash through the constriction of the
actual, to unhinge the universe and let the impossible stream in, be-
cause otherwise—well, otherwise the world was nothing but an edito-
rial cartoon.8

There is a melancholic dimension, but presumably more pronounced for

adults. Children, I’d like to think, are simply taking it for granted that
there is a realm where all kinds of punishments can be inflicted without
consequence. A few bandages, some circling stars, then on to the next
adventure, fully restored. Or is Millhauser more correct, and do children
see in cartoons a condition to which they know they cannot aspire, and
so do not?
I have written about the licensed topsy-­turvydom represented by
special effects and their destabilizing of perceptual norms, a notion
borrowed from Terry Castle’s writing on the function of masquerade in
the eighteenth-­century British novel. These presented “a world of end-
less, enchanting metamorphosis” and introduced a touch of carnival to
a culture sorely in need of one.9 Castle argues, “In a rigidly taxonomic,
conceptually polarized society, it [masquerade] opened up a tempo-
rary space of transformation, mutability, and fluidity. It embodied, one
might say, a gratifying fantasy of change in a world that sanctioned few
changes.”10 This seems almost ridiculously appropriate to the world of
animation, and more specifically to the world of the Hollywood cartoon
with its re-­formations, or overturnings, of physical law.
I had originally pressed this into the service of theorizing how the
spectacular elements of cinema might constitute a resistance to narra-
tive’s authority—narrative, with its causal logics, containments, and
more or less tidy closures. In Hollywood cartoons, however, the narra-
tive is hardly the thing: they revolve instead around a set of situations
that will be repeated throughout the series.11 Settings might change
(Yosemite Sam might be a pirate instead of an outlaw), variations might
be rung (Bugs and Elmer might be singing opera), but the themes retain

310  • Scott Bukatman

their familiarity. Even the comparatively reflexive Duck Amuck (1953)
can be understood as belonging to the genre of the Daffy Duck cartoon,
in which Daffy will try and fail to play his assigned role (western gun-
fighter, space explorer, detective, Robin Hood). When Michael Maltese
and Chuck Jones tried to repeat the formula of Duck Amuck with Bugs
Bunny now the victim rather than the tormenting animator in Rabbit
Rampage (1955), the results fell flat; the formula did not work for the
genre of the Bugs Bunny cartoon. And whatever stability is represented
by the cartoon’s finale, the audience knows that the next cartoon will
simply reanimate the same conflict, with nothing changed, nothing
learned, nothing gained, and nothing lost.
So the topsy-­turvydom of cartoon physics represents no threat to
narrative power, since the narrative really serves to frame a set of gags
that may or may not be specific to this particular variant. No, what is
being challenged by cartoon physics, as Millhauser demonstrates in both
of the writings cited here, is the logic of the cosmos itself. Eisenstein’s
celebration of early Disney concentrated on the “rejection of once-­and-­
forever allotted form, freedom from ossification, the ability to dynami-
cally assume any form,”12 and this was a freedom, he hypothesized,
particularly attractive to those laboring in the factories of America. He
further explored the animistic attractions of the cartoon, which aligned
it with other phenomena, such as children’s literature. Everything in
the cartoon potentially possesses a life force: inanimate objects possess
life, while flowers and trees and cats and mice take on anthropomorphic
qualities. Both the cartoon’s plasmatic possibilities and its animistic ten-
dencies are reflected in cartoon physics, despite their more rule-­bound
nature: in a world where a cat will assume the shape of its container,
there is clearly a rejection of allotted form, while the capriciousness of
the very laws of nature gives those laws something of a life force of their
own, which some characters and not others can harness to their own
ends. The freedom claimed for the cartoon by Eisenstein here becomes a
freedom from traditional causality, freedom from natural law, and free-
dom from consequence (punishment, death, skinned knees).

The Cartoon Cat in the Machine

If animation is newly popular, either through entirely animated films

(Ratatouille) or through the incorporation of animated beings into real-­
world settings (The Golden Compass), or the incorporation of captured
movement into animated forms (King Kong), it is specifically digital ani-

Cartoon Physics • 311
mation that dominates. While the occasional hand-­animated films may
appear from overseas or, even more rarely, from Hollywood (Fantastic
Mr. Fox [2009], Coraline [2009]), digital technology has been largely re-
sponsible for animation’s renaissance. And digital animation has, his-
torically, had a different set of concerns—its task defined, more often
than not, by replicating (and perhaps tweaking) real-­world physics.
What Paul Wells has called “realist animation,” animation that repli-
cates the formal and stylistic structures of live-­action film, has become
so much the norm that it frequently goes unremarked.13 And digital ani-
mation extends beyond the cinema—much of the software for rendering
physics comes from the world of computer games. Playability, rather than
comedy, is the goal, and the immersive experience of console gaming is
all too easily interrupted when bodies in space fail to move properly.
The intersection of modeled physics and computer gaming stretches
all the way back to the medium’s beginnings, with Spacewar (1962).
Using crude vector graphics, two players fire at one another’s spaceships,
but a central body exerts a gravitational pull that affects the ballistics
and threatens the ships themselves. The first successful “home” video
game was Pong (1975), which was nothing more than angles and tra-
jectories of movement.14 The subsequent history of console gaming is
largely the history of simulation, and as Microsoft and Sony competed
for a lucrative market, their machines became increasingly powerful,
and this power was dedicated to the modeling of physics in real time.
Books on game design stress physics as a crucial component of
a game’s realism, and entire books are dedicated to game physics, in-
structing designers in the modeling of not only gravity and momentum
but also light refraction, air and water resistance, friction, collisions, and
wave behaviors. To generate more realistically moving bodies for proce-
dural (real-­time) animations in games, bodies were composed of rigid
body parts connected with virtual joints whose articulations were simi-
larly constrained to those in human bodies. They could thus fall believ-
ably, and improvements in programming produced increasingly realistic
simulations of human collapse. Real-­time animation is thus overwhelm-
ingly placed in the service of the real—never mind whether the world
created is historical, alien, or fantastic.
But these “ragdoll physics” simulations had their problems: if issues
such as weight, flexibility, and mass weren’t properly factored in, bodies
could bounce, flounce, and jounce in exaggerated and painfully hu-
morous ways. Machinima examples abound on YouTube of computer-­
animated characters sailing through the air, bouncing off walls, or slid-

312  • Scott Bukatman

ing head first for the length of city blocks, always to end up unscathed
and unbruised, in a heap of articulated limbs, like the ragdolls that gave
the phenomenon its name. Ragdoll physics, Gamespot’s Vocabularium
tells us, became associated with “wild flailing and exaggerated reactions
to physical forces,” and its accompanying video features actual people
mimicking those loose-­limbed, bobble-­headed pratfalls.15 What was
thus originally a programming glitch, a pothole on the road to realism,
became, on the part of gamers, a kind of détourned embrace of the re-
sulting cartooniness.
Gamers further exploit programming glitches when performing
speedruns—zipping through the levels of a game in the minimum pos-
sible time. This mode of play often depends on working against the nor-
mal sequence of events in the game (“sequence breaking”) or exploiting
glitches in the game engine that may involve using a weapon to propel
yourself through space in unexpected ways, or that may yield, for ex-
ample, a suddenly permeable wall under certain, accidentally encoun-
tered, conditions (“glitch usage”). It would be nice if any body passing
through the glitchy wall would leave a perforation conforming to its
perimeter, but you can’t have everything.
Speedruns are meticulously planned exhibitions of hacker skill, and
they are based on a combination of accidentally discovered phenomena
and meticulous analyses of the physics of the game engine. And the pos-
sibilities for cartoony fun don’t stop there. Gamers able to manipulate the
game’s programming code can modify variables such as gravity or attrac-
tion, exaggerating effects still further: manipulating the “Push­ActorAway”
script, for example, can send adversaries flying into walls with the lightest
tap. Hilarity ensues. Thus, cartoon physics still lurks within the more real-
istic physics of game engines, as its uncanny, playful double: the cartoon
cat in the machine. It could even be argued that real physics is actually a
mere subset of cartoon physics in the world of gaming—a specific set of
computational restrictions imposed on the vast variability of which the
technology is capable. I find this somehow reassuring.
It does make one wonder what a game explicitly based on cartoon
physics would be like. Would you choose your weapon with an eye toward
what shape your adversary will be after the blow is struck? Would a
change in your knowledge-state affect what happens to your body, as
you discover that your avatar is actually poised high above an abyss that
leads to an abrupt descent? After all, there actually is an equivalent to
“hammerspace”—in some games you’re allowed to carry an unlimited
number of weapons, with no consideration of their weight or bulk.

Cartoon Physics • 313
 The software that generates the physics in console games has its ana-
logs in the world of cinema. Here too the ability to convincingly animate
a body moving through space depends on a consistent physics—objects
and beings should behave in a way that makes sense. Even in the genre
that most celebrates alternative kinds of bodies—the superhero film—
physical laws must be respected, even as a few of them are being revised.
As I argue in The Poetics of Slumberland, animation in the superhero film
represents a kind of constrained plasmatic, one that speaks to the “free-
dom from allotted form” while unable to fully embrace it.16
Perhaps the difficulty arises when cartoon characters or animated fig-
ures have to share screen space with live elements. With the signal ex-
ception of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, animated characters in these films
can be seen to have left the world of pure animation, their special realm,
to exist in a hybridized reality, and in that reality their playful, inter-
nally consistent physics are trumped by those of the real world. Even
Jerry the Mouse, in his celebrated partnering with Gene Kelly in Anchors
Aweigh (1945), loses much of his elasticity, his movements now teth-
ered to those of the undeniably compelling but strictly physical body of
Kelly.17 Similarly, Spider-­Man is tethered to Peter Parker, with his frail
aunt and unrewarding day job. The emergence of a physics more like the
cartoonish becomes a more temporary thing that occurs at more or less
predictable intervals when danger threatens.18 A significant exception
to this is Brad Bird’s The Incredibles (2004), which pairs off interestingly
with Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Here again there is the existence of dif-
ferently abled bodies, superheroes now rather than Toons, and a pro-
found suspicion and dis-­ease surrounding them. But The Incredibles is
entirely animated, and so it is free to celebrate those bodies in ways that
elude most superhero films.
Strange as it sounds, speedruns and game modifications introduce
something similar to a level of play to the act of gaming. The rules of
the game are jettisoned in favor of something more improvisational and
original—the whole point is to elude or elide the rules.19 And the re-
emergence of play in the form of a return to cartoon physics makes me
wonder whether there isn’t a deeper connection between them. Might
the supersession of cartoon physics by the comparatively constrained
plasmatics of cgi and game engines have its echo in another shift with
significance to the world of children: the supersession of unregulated,
“free” play by the hyperregulated world of contemporary childhood.
Gabrielle Principe cites current neurological research and declares: “If
parents and teachers wanted to design a way of life counter to the needs

314  • Scott Bukatman

of developing human brains, they’d invent something like modern child-
hood.”20 Scheduled play dates, “Mozart effects,” prekindergartens, after-­
school activities, team practices, music lessons, chess clubs, “teaching to
the test,” abundant achievement awards—all of this mitigates against
the improvisational, the playful, the exploratory, the imaginative.21
Adults might decry the level of violence in your classic Tom and Jerry
or Roadrunner cartoons—it’s difficult to make the case that explosion,
electrocution, decapitation, defenestration, immolation, and all the rest
are the kinds of things that kids should be seeing. But this is to con-
sider the content of these cartoons on only the most blatant narrative
plane, which ignores the cartoonishness of it all, and which ignores the
bodily imagination that exists around and through these “violent” dis-
plays. Here is the body deformed and reformed—elastic in every sense
of the word, an alternative body that is itself the product of imaginative
play. Wile E. Coyote and his brethren live, breathe, and blow up in that
“magic circle” of play.22
The advent of digital animation in Hollywood has yielded films of
sometimes great beauty and humor, rich (paradoxically enough) in the
textures of the world. But their great achievements can come at the ex-
pense of what truly characterized the Hollywood cartoon in its seven-­
minute heyday—its playful remaking of the world. Of course this ten-
dency greatly predates Pixar—from the moment Disney turned its
attention to the production of feature films, the realist aesthetic came to
the fore. But Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs had its Dopey, Pinocchio its
Gideon, Dumbo its pink elephants on parade (not to mention its flying
elephant)—physical laws and bodies were transcended somewhere. Most
of the press around Disney-­Pixar’s Brave (2012) focused on new computer
algorithms that could effectively simulate the lead character’s unruly hair.
Somehow that doesn’t seem enough (although, truth to tell, it’s pretty
awesome hair). Meanwhile, in the real world, creative, unstructured, ex-
ploratory play has been supplanted by the deeply goal-­oriented telos of
computer gaming, which is more limiting even in its most “open world”
iteration. I miss the impossible. With apologies to William Burroughs,
it’s time to storm the reality studio—and unleash the cartoon cat.

Notes

1. Millhauser, “Cat ’n’ Mouse,” 175.

2. Kunzle, The History of the Comic Strip, 357.
3. Oddly, the day I wrote this, the guest on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air pro-

Cartoon Physics • 315
 gram was the major-­league pitcher Bob Ojeda, who discussed the extraordinary
amount of pain his noncartoon body experienced with each and every pitch.
4. Sometimes an African American woman intervenes in the chaos, her role pro-
vocatively ambiguous (hausfrau or maid?).
5. Both examples are from The Million Dollar Cat (1944).
6. See Huizinga, Homo Ludens.
7. Bukatman, The Poetics of Slumberland, 47, 155.
8. Millhauser, “The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne,” 107.
9. Castle, The Female Thermometer, 107.
10. Castle, The Female Thermometer, 104.
11. There is some debate about this in film studies circles. Brian Henderson down-
plays the place of narrative in the Hollywood cartoon short, while Richard
Neupert finds the shorts to have all the hallmarks of classical Hollywood nar-
rative, albeit in condensed form. I have to side with Henderson—narrative ele-
ments are present, but they hardly represent the same kind of determinant
structure as in feature films. I also can’t imagine the viewer of a Pepé Le Pew
cartoon focusing on, say, issues of closure. For the Hollywood cartoon built
around repeating characters, narrative provides an ersatz unity, one that, more
than anything else, allows the cartoon to end in its allotted seven minutes. See
Henderson, “Cartoon and Narrative in the Films of Frank Tashlin and Preston
Sturges”; and Neupert, “We’re Happy When We’re Sad.”
12. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney (1986), 21. I believe that all scholarly essays on
animation are required to cite this work.
13. See Wells, Understanding Animation, 24–28.
14. For a thoughtful history of this period, see Lowood, “Videogames in Computer
Space.” Thanks to Henry for his assistance on this essay.
15. “Vocabularium—Ragdoll Physics,” posted by gamespot, uploaded May 1, 2012,
accessed June 9, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LIhGBB3RdM.
16. Bukatman, The Poetics of Slumberland, 205.
17. Jerry’s movements are clearly rotoscoped from the footage of Kelly, and so the
sequence is actually a disguised version of Kelly partnering with himself.
18. As I’ve argued in The Poetics of Slumberland (203–4), the exception here is the
origin sequence, when the body’s new abilities are still indeterminate and sur-
prising.
19. To clarify: I’m not implying that something such as a speedrun is a real-­time
improvisation, but rather that it represents a kind of riff played against the
“score” of the game world as its designers envisioned it.
20. Principe, Your Brain on Childhood, 17.
21. Henry Jenkins has addressed the relation between computer play and outdoor
play in “ ‘Complete Freedom of Movement.’ ”
22. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 10.

316  • Scott Bukatman

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Contributors

K a re n B e ck man is the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor of Cinema and Modern
Media in the Department of the History of Art and the Program in Cinema Studies
at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Vanishing Women: Magic,
Film, and Feminism (Duke University Press, 2003) and Crash: Cinema and the Poli-
tics of Speed and Stasis (Duke University Press, 2010), and she is now working on
a new book, “Animation and the Contemporary Art of War.” She has coedited two
volumes: Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography with Jean Ma (Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2008) and On Writing with Photography (2013) with Liliane Weissberg. For
several years she served as a senior editor of the journal Grey Room.

S uz a nn e Buc h an is a professor of animation aesthetics at Middlesex Univer-

sity London. Until 2012 she was a professor and director of the Animation Research
Centre at the University for the Creative Arts in the United Kingdom. Her research
investigates interdisciplinary approaches to animation as a pervasive moving-­
image form across a range of platforms and media, and she is also active as a film
and exhibition curator. Buchan was a founding member and codirector (1994–2003)
of the Fantoche International Animation Film Festival in Switzerland. Her publi-
cations include Pervasive Animation: An afi Reader (2013), The Quay Brothers: Into a
Metaphysical Playroom (2011), and Animated “Worlds” (2006). She is the founder and
editor of animation: an interdisciplinary journal. She continues to work on her wider
“pervasive animation” project, which includes a forthcoming curated exhibition for
the Museum of Design, Zurich.

S co t t Buk atman is a professor in the Film and Media Studies Program in the
Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University and the author of Termi-
nal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Duke University Press,
1993—still in print two decades later); a monograph on Blade Runner commissioned
by the British Film Institute and recently reprinted as one of a small number of
commemorative anniversary editions; and a collection of essays, Matters of Gravity:
Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century (Duke University Press, 2003). His
latest book is The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit
(2012), which celebrates play, plasmatic possibility, and the life of images in car-
toons, comics, and cinema. The book begins with Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in
Slumberland to explore how and why the emerging media of comics and cartoons
brilliantly captured a playful, rebellious energy characterized by hyperbolic emo-
tion, physicality, and imagination. Slumberland becomes more than a marvelous
world for Nemo: it’s an aesthetic space defined through the artist’s innovations; an
animated space that opens to embrace the imaginative sensibility of a reader; and
a temporary space of play.

Al a n C hol oden ko is an Honorary Associate of the University of Sydney, and

prior to that he was a senior lecturer in film and animation studies in what is now
known as the Department of Art History and Film Studies at that university. He has
pioneered in the articulation of film theory, animation theory, and poststructural-
ist and postmodernist French thought through his publications as well as his orga-
nizing of landmark events—notably for The Illusion of Life, the world’s first inter-
national conference on animation, held in Sydney in 1988. He is the editor of The
Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation, the world’s first book of scholarly essays theoriz-
ing animation (1991); Samuel Weber’s Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (1996);
and The Illusion of Life 2: More Essays on Animation (2007).

Y u ri ko F u ru h ata is an assistant professor in the Department of East Asian

Studies and the World Cinemas Program at McGill University. She is the author of
Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Political Avant-­Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image
Politics (Duke University Press, 2013). She has also published in journals such as Ani-
mation, Screen, Semiotica, and New Cinemas.

Ale x a n de r R . G a ll oway is a writer and computer programmer working on

issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. He is a founding mem-
ber of the Radical Software Group and the creator of the Carnivore and Kriegspiel
projects. An associate professor of media, culture, and communication at New
York University, he is author or coauthor of five books on digital media and critical
theory, most recently The Interface Effect (2012) and Les nouveaux réalistes: Philoso-
phie et postfordisme (2012). In his future work he intends to focus more closely on
French philosophy and the Continental tradition.

Ol i v e r G ayc k e n is an assistant professor of English and comparative litera-

ture at the University of Maryland, College Park. He has published on aspects of
the intersections of cinema and science in the Journal of Visual Culture, Science
in Context, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, and several edited col-
lections. His monograph, Devices of Curiosity: Early Cinema and Popular Science, is
forth­coming.

B i s h nu pri ya G ho s h teaches postcolonial theory and global media studies at

the University of California, Santa Barbara. Much of her scholarly works, including
the two books When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian

338  • Contributors
Novel (2004) and Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular (Duke University Press, 2011),
investigate contemporary cultures of globalization. She is currently working on two
monographs on speculative knowledge: a book on spectral materialism in global
cinemas (“The Unhomely Sense: Spectral Cinemas of Globalization”) and a com-
parative study of pandemic media in the United States, South Africa, and India
(“The Virus Touch: Living with Epidemics”).

T om G unn ing is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Pro-
fessor in the Department on Cinema and Media at the University of Chicago. He is
the author of D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (1991) and The
Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (2000), as well as more than
a hundred articles on early cinema, film history and theory, avant-­garde film, film
genre, and cinema and modernism. With André Gaudreault he originated the influ-
ential theory of the “cinema of attractions.” In 2009 he was awarded an Andrew A.
Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award, the first film scholar to receive one, and
in 2010 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is cur-
rently working on a book on the invention of the moving image.

An dre w R . Joh n st on is a visiting assistant professor in the English Depart-

ment and the Program in Film and Media Studies at Amherst College. His forth-
coming book, Pulses of Abstraction: Episodes from a History of Animation, explores
the history of abstract animation in cinema and new media from the 1920s through
the 1970s. He has also published articles and chapters on animation, avant-­garde
film, color aesthetics, and the history of digital technology and computer graphics
in books and journals such as Color and the Moving Image (2012), Animation: Behind
the Silver Screen (forthcoming), and Discourse.

Hervé Joubert-­L aurencin is a professor of aesthetics and film history at the

University of Paris, Nanterre-­La Défense, where he directs the International Mas-
ter of Cinema Studies program. He specializes in the cinematic, political, poetic,
and theatrical works of Pier Paolo Pasolini, which he also translates into French.
He specializes in the writings of André Bazin and animation cinema as well. He is
currently directing the triennial international research program Traverser Bazin:
Ecrits suscités par le cinéma. His works on Pier Paolo Pasolini include Salò ou les 120
journées de Sodome (2012), Le dernier poète expressionniste: Ecrits sur Pasolini (2005),
Pasolini Portrait du poète en cinéaste (1995), and Théâtre (1938–1965). His works on
poetry include Le dada du sonnet (2005), and his political writings include Contre la
télévision (2003), Écrits sur la peinture (1997), and Écrits sur le cinéma (1987). Works
on André Bazin include Opening Bazin (2011) and Le sommeil paradoxal: Écrits sur
André Bazin (forthcoming). Works on animation cinema include La lettre volante:
Quatre essais sur le cinéma d’animation (1997) and Quatre films de Hayao (2012).

Gertrud Ko ch teaches cinema studies at the Free University in Berlin, where she
is also the director of a research center on aesthetic experience: Sonderforschungs-
bereich 626. She has taught at many international universities and was a research

Contributors • 339
fellow at the Getty Center, as well as at the University of Pennsylvania in 2010 and
at Brown University’s Cogut Center for Humanities in 2011. Koch has written books
on Herbert Marcuse and Siegfried Kracauer, feminist film theory, and the repre-
sentation of Jewish history. She has edited numerous volumes on aesthetics, per-
ception, and film theory. She is also a coeditor and board member of the journals
Babylon, Frauen und Film, October, Constellations, and Philosophy and Social Criticism.

T hom a s L a M a rre teaches East Asian studies and communications studies at

McGill University. His books include Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun’ichirô on
Cinema and Oriental Aesthetics (2005), Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of
Sensation and Inscription (2000), and The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Anima-
tion (2009).

C h ri st op h e r P. L e h m a n is a professor of ethnic studies at St. Cloud State

University in Minnesota and has held the position of visiting fellow at the Sum-
mer Institute of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American
Research at Harvard University. His book The Colored Cartoon: Black Representation
in American Animated Short Films won a Choice Outstanding Academic Title award.

E st h e r L e s l i e is a professor of political aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of

London. Her first book is Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (2000). She is
also the author of the biography Walter Benjamin (2007). Her book Hollywood Flat-
lands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant Garde (2002) excavates the histori-
cal relationships between critical theory, European intellectuals, and animation, in
its avant-­garde and commercial varieties. Since then she has written and lectured
extensively on all types of animation. A subsequent book, Synthetic Worlds: Art,
Nature and the Chemical Industry (2005), investigates the industrial manufacture
of color and its impact on conceptions of nature and aesthetics. She runs a website
together with Ben Watson, Militant Esthetix, www.militantesthetix.co.uk.

Joh n M acK ay is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures and film studies
and is the chair of the Film Studies Program at Yale University. He is the author of
Inscription and Modernity: From Wordsworth to Mandelstam (2006), Four Russian Serf
Narratives (2009), and True Songs of Freedom: Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Russian Culture
and Society (2013), as well as articles on Soviet film, film theory, and biography. In
2013 he completed Dziga Vertov: Life and Work (forthcoming).

M ih a el a M ihai l ova is a PhD student in the joint Film Studies and Slavic Lan-
guages and Literatures program at Yale University. Her academic interests include
animation, film theory, media studies, comic books, early Soviet cinema, Russian
cinema, and translation. Her article on Anna Melikyan’s 2007 film Mermaid—“I Am
Empty Space: A Mermaid in Hyperreal Moscow”—is published in Kino Kultura, no.
34 (October 2011). Her translation of Sergei Tretyakov’s “The Industry Production
Screenplay” is included in Cinema Journal 51, no. 4 (2012). An article titled “The

340  • Contributors
Mastery Machine: Digital Animation and Fantasies of Control” appeared in anima-
tion: an interdisciplinary journal 8, no. 2 (July 2013).

M a rc Ste in berg is assistant professor of film studies at Concordia University,

Montreal. His book Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan
(2012) chronicles the development of transmedia convergence in Japan. He has
published articles in Japan Forum, animation: an interdisciplinary journal, Journal
of Visual Culture, Theory, Culture and Society, Mechademia, and Canadian Journal of
Film Studies.

Tess Takahashi is an assistant professor in the Department of Film at York Uni-

versity in Toronto, where she teaches classes on technologies of the image, experi-
mental film, animation, and documentary cinema. She is a member of the editorial
collective of the Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies. Her writing
has appeared there, as well as in animation: an interdisciplinary journal, Millennium
Film Journal, and Cinema Journal. She is currently working on a book titled “Impure
Film: Medium Specificity in the North American Avant-­Garde (1968–2008).”

Contributors • 341
Index

NOTE: Page numbers followed by f indicate a figure.

abstract expressionism, 168–71 Harlem, 257–58; in Negro talking

Abstraction and Empathy (Worringer), pictures, 255–57
175–76 AfterEffects, 203
Abstractions and Rock Paintings (Lye), “The Age When the Reproduction Is the
177f Original” (Awazu), 187–88
Accident series (Moriyama), 192–93 Ahwesh, Peggy, 204
Adorno, Theodor W., 10, 221; on aes- Akasegawa Genpei, 200n40
thetic experiment, 137; on autono- Alberti, Walter, 88
mous works of art, 190, 199n34; allegorical version of reality, 28
on ducks on screen, 17; on music Althusser, Louis, 215
theory, 134–35 The Analysis of Beauty (Hogarth), 174–75
The Adventures of Prince Achmed Anchors Aweigh, 314, 316n17
(Reiniger), 27–28 Andrew, Dudley, 12, 117, 118–19, 122,
advertising: the commodity econ- 300n32
omy of, 196–97; political work of, anima, 101
164nn12–13, 200n41; in Soviet “animated cartoon” (as term), 87, 95n11
animation, 149–54, 164nn5–6, Animated Cartoons (Lutz), 68–69, 80n16
164nn12–13 the animatic, 103–8, 110n28
“Advertising Films” (Vertov), 150 Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons
“An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early from the Sound Era (Smoodin), 17
Film and the (In)credulous Specta- animation: definitions of, 4, 19, 20n1,
tor” (Gunning), 105 40–41, 51, 95n9, 101, 113–15, 298n1;
“Aesthetics, Obstacles, Integral Cinégra- etymology of, 101–2; interdisci-
phie” (Dulac), 8–10 plinary applications of, 125–26;
African American portrayals, 252–63; marginalization in film theory of,
by African Americans themselves, 1–2, 16–17, 19, 28, 98–101, 108n5,
259–63; black caricature in, 253–57, 114, 121; philosophizing as form of,
259–60; civil rights movement 102–8, 108n7; relationship to live-­
and, 259–60; by Disney Studios, 257, action cinema of, 11–15, 28, 98–108,
258–59; in Fleischer’s Screen Songs 109n11, 114–15, 188–89, 289, 309;
series, 256–57; in Lantz’s Voodoo in relationship to photography of,
animation (continued) Arthur, Paul, 217n8
18–19, 37–51; synonymous terms The Art of the Moving Picture (Lindsay),
for, 1–2. See also digital media; his- 4–5
tory of animation “The Art That Moves” (Lye), 177–78
animation: an interdisciplinary journal, Asenin, Sergei, 149
111–26, 127n45 Ästhetik der Lebendigkeit: Kants dritte
“animation cinema” (as term): Cohl’s Kritik (Völker), 142
contributions in, 90–92; invention Astro Boy, 198n5
of, 86–88, 95n4, 95n11; McLaren’s Atomu no meidai: Tezuka Osamu to sengo
role in, 88–89, 95–96nn12–13; Rey- manga no shudai (Ōtsuka), 291
naud’s role in, 92 The Attendant (Julien), 209
Animation Group of Three, 183 Aurio, Jean-­George, 90
animation theory, 111–26, 126n19, autoethnography. See identity-­politics
289–90; Andrew on new cinematic documentaries
worlds in, 118–19, 122; Carroll on Awazu Kiyoshi, 183, 187–88, 196–97,
physical noncompossibility in, 120– 198n4, 199n17, 200n48
21, 127n34; Cavell’s debate with Se- Azuma Hiroki, 289–90, 294–97, 298n8,
sonske in, 117–18; cultural contexts 299n11, 300n25
in, 122–23; early writings on, 86–88,
95n4, 95n11, 112–13; first principles Bachelard, Gaston, 50, 131
of, 98–108, 108n5, 108n7; Imamura Bacon, Francis, 67n20
on realism in, 221–49; on innova- Bad Day at Black Rock, 212
tion and experimentation, 131–42, Badiou, Alain, 50
223; interdisciplinary approaches Bakhtin, Mikhail, 245
in, 111–13, 123–25, 127n34; Mitry on Bakshi, Ralph, 262
figures in, 119–20; realism debates Balázs, Béla, 5–7, 117
in, 287–98; reasons for, 121–23; Sob- Barbera, Joseph, 304, 305f
chack on phenomena of experience Barbin, Pierre, 91–92
in, 119; theoretical frameworks of, Barsamian, Gregory, 124
115–21; on visual metaphors and Barthes, Roland, 171, 294
homospatiality, 121. See also Japa- Bartlett, Mark, 125
nese animation theory Baskett, Michael, 249n7
animators, 252–53 Baudrillard, Jean, 103, 106–7, 110n33
anime-­manga realism, 292–97 Baudry, Jean, 234–35
animism/anthropomorphism, 4–7, Bazin, André, 37, 117; on aesthetic of
20–21nn14–15, 78–79, 174 discovery, 12; on on-­screen agency,
Annecy festival, 88, 92 5; ontological film theory of, 101–2,
Anthology No. 1 (Yokoo), 184–85, 186 300n32; phenomenological ap-
apparatus (screen) theory, 231–32, proach of, 287; on photography,
234–36, 287 110n28
Araki Nobuyoshi, 191, 192 Beep Beep, 307
architectural modeling, 125 Beliakov, Ivan, 150f
Aristotle, 41, 49, 51, 52n11 Benjamin, Walter, 37, 117, 221; on cam-
Armed Forces Motion Picture Unit, era as scalpel, 137–38; on the dif-
274–83 ferent nature of animation, 30–31;
Armstrong, Louis, 256, 257, 260 on display, 196–97; on film history,
Arnheim, Rudolf, 117 26, 27; on graphic design, 196–97,

344  • Index
 200n48; on homogeneous time, Bromberg, Betsy, 204
244; influence of, 198n3; Japa- Brumberg, Valentina, 149
nese reception of, 181–82, 190–92, Brumberg, Zinaida, 149
197nn2–3, 200n50; on plasmatic- Buchan, Suzanne, 1–2, 20n1
ness, 18, 138; on play and innerva- Bugs Bunny, 306, 309, 311
tion, 10, 182, 195–96; on technologi- Bukatman, Scott, 6–7, 8, 14
cal reproduction, 181–83, 187–97, Burch, Noël, 234
197nn1–2, 199n34, 199n37 Burroughs, William, 315
Benning, Sadie, 201 Bushkin, Aleksandr, 13, 22n47, 149,
Berger, John, 17 163n2, 164n11
Bergman, Alan, 26 Byrne, David, 215
Bergson, Henri, 50
Bernard, Claude, 274 Calder, Alexander, 170
“Better Castles in the Sky” (Bloch), Calloway, Cab, 255–56, 257, 260
28–29 cameraless animation, 18–19; of Jodie
Betty Boop, 255–56, 258, 260 Mack, 38–39; of Len Lye, 38, 167–79
Bijutsu Techō journal, 190 camera obscura, 42–43
biological realism, 291–92, 299n15 Canales, Jimena, 44, 45
biosecurity regimes, 266–69; anima- Canguilhem, Georges, 274
tion and, 266, 268–69; epistemology Cannes festival: first public displays of
of infection in, 267–68 animation at, 86, 88, 89; Palme d’Or
Bird, Brad, 314 winners at, 89
blackface, 253–54, 259–60 “Cat ’n’ Mouse” (Millhauser), 301–3
Blade (Lye), 178 Capra, Frank, 275
Blake, Jeremy, 125 caricature. See African American
Blinkety Blank (McLaren), 3, 86, 88–89, ­portrayals
93 Carroll, Lewis, 139
Bloch, Ernst, 28–29 Carroll, Noël, 111, 117; on the activities
“Bones of Contention” (Darley), 124 of criticism, 114, 126n19; on appara-
Boorstin, Daniel, 188, 189 tus theory, 234; on homospaciality,
Bordwell, David, 12–13, 16, 22n47, 116, 121; on physical noncompossibility,
126n19 120–21, 127n34; on piecemeal theo-
Born, Gustav, 74, 75f rizing, 116
Boschet, Pierre, 91–92 cartoon physics, 6–7, 14, 301–15; of
Bosko series, 254, 258, 261 cinema superheroes, 314; in Disney
Bourdieu, Pierre, 95n4 Studio cartoons, 304; gaming
Boytler, Mikhail, 149–50 realism’s suppression of, 311–15,
Braderman, Joan, 201, 211 316nn18–19; primacy of the body
Brakhage, Stan, 38 in, 303–7, 316n4; squash and stretch
Braun, Ludwig, 71–72, 80nn12–14 principle of, 302, 304; topsy-­turvy
Braune, Christian Wilhelm, 61–66 utopian freedom in, 307–11, 315,
Brave (Disney-­Pixar), 315 316n11, 316n21
Bray Studios, 69 cartoons: Balázs on line in, 7; Ima-
“Brecht and the Politics of Self-­ mura’s theory of realism and, 221–
Reflexive Cinema” (Polan), 16–17 49; Japanese production of, 221–22,
Breer, Robert, 176 236–47; multiplane-­camera system
Brinckmann, Christine N., 120 in, 223, 251n50, 251nn54–55; stroke

Index • 345
cartoons (continued) Colour Box (Lye), 167
drawing in, 224. See also Disney Colour Flight (Lye), 167
Studios; lines and spaces Commercial War (Tanaami), 186
Cartwright, Lisa, 70, 71, 79n2 Communicable Diseases Center, 280–
Castle, Terry, 310 81
Cavalcanti, Alberto, 167 Comolli, Jean-­Louis, 113, 234, 235
Cavell, Stanley, 37, 111; on cinematic computer-­generated imagery (3-­d
reality, 117–18, 300n32; on inde- cgi), 14, 35, 56, 63–67; film’s merger
structible cartoon characters, 6, with animation in, 25–26; Martin’s
10–11 predictions of, 94n2; of Pixar, 10–11,
cel animation, 25, 266–67, 269–70 298n5, 315; realism of, 283–84, 288,
the cellular agon, 266–75, 283–84 292–93, 297; techniques of, 202, 209;
Centers for Disease Control (cdc), theory of, 107, 114
280–81 constructivist animation: of Kino-­
cgi. See computer-­generated imagery Pravda newsreels, 145–49, 164n5;
Chaderavian, Soraya de, 68–69 modular principles in, 148–49, 156–
A Chairy Tale (McLaren), 89 63; of Rodchenko’s mobile inter-
character novels, 293–94, 300n25, titles, 145–48, 163; self-­reflexivity in
300n31 work of, 151–53, 161; Vertov’s frame
Cholodenko, Alan, 11–12, 21n18, 37, 114 shooting experiments in, 145–63,
Chow, Rey, 18 164n9, 166n28
chronophotography, 45–50, 53n27, 54; Coonskin (Bacshi), 262
Braun’s model of, 71; frame shoot- Cooper, Melinda, 268, 281
ing and, 166n28; Marey’s experi- Cosby, Bill, 261–62
ments in, 61–63, 65–66, 70–71, The Country Cousin (Disney Studios),
72, 166n28; Muybridge’s work in, 225
46–47, 61–62, 66, 72; in scientific Crafton, Donald, 40, 80n21, 117, 155,
visualization, 68–74; temporal na- 228
ture of, 56, 59–60 Criminal at Large, 277
cinema. See live-­action cinema the Cryptic Complex, 105–7
The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded Cubitt, Sean, 124
(Strauven), 124 Curnow, Wystan, 168
Clarens, Bernard, 85, 94n1 Curtis, Scott, 17
Clark, T. J., 168
classical film theory. See film theory Daffy Duck, 311. See also Duck Amuck
Clero Wilson and the Miracle of ps 14, Daguerre, Louis-­Jacques-­Mandé, 42,
262 43–44
Clinical Malaria, 277–80 Daley, W. Allen, 273
Coates, Paul, 116 Darley, Andrew, 124, 288–89, 298n5
codification, 279–80 Date with Duke (Pal), 259
cognitive film theory, 108n1 Dead Horse (Macmillan), 67n17
Cohl, Emil, 39–40, 72, 80n20, 85–86, Degas, Edgar, 240
111, 176; Fantasmagorie of, 90–91; Deleuze, Gilles, 50; on comparative
Martin’s writing on, 90–94; use of theorizing, 121; film theory of, 111,
pixilation by, 89, 96n13 113, 117; on the movement image,
Cokes, Tony, 201, 208, 213–15 240–41; on time cinema, 67n20
Color Classics, 221 DeMille, Cecil B., 90

346  • Index
Deni, Viktor, 164n12 Dream of Lucid Living (Matreyek), 125
Denslow, Philip, 113 “Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend” (McCay),
depth effects, 241–44 285n4
Derrida, Jacques, 103–4, 105, 109n19 Drunkenness and Its Consequences, 154
dialectic of continuous perceptual syn- Duck Amuck (Jones), 16–17, 120, 306,
thesis, 38–42 311
Dickerman, Leah, 151 Dufoix, Stéphane, 95n4
Diebold, Bernhard, 33 Dulac, Germaine, 8–10, 22n32
digital media, 11–12, 37, 114, 300n32, Dumbo (Disney), 315
311–15; vs. analog, 229; animation Dumit, Joe, 268
as paradigm of, 99, 117, 188–89; duration, 50–51
animation theory and, 122; chrono- Durie, Robin, 50
photography and, 45, 48–50, 53n27,
54, 56, 59–60; gaming’s realist aes- early animation devices, 47–49, 53n27,
thetics in, 312–15, 316nn18–19; hy- 54, 56, 65–66, 67n18, 68; phena-
brid forms of animation in, 203–5 kistoscopes as, 47–48, 49; praxino-
Disdéri, André-­Adolphe-­Eugène, 61 scopes as, 49, 99; rotoscopes as, 18,
Disney, Walt, 69, 285n4, 288 225, 228–29, 243, 254–55, 316n17;
Disney Studios, 221; African American stereoscopes as, 65; stereoscopic
portrayals by, 257, 258–59, 261; car- zoetropes as, 70–71, 72; zoetropes
toon physics of, 304; educational as, 47, 49, 76; zoopraxiscopes as,
shorts of, 270–72; Eisenstein’s views 46–47. See also chronophotography
on, 138–42, 174, 221, 224, 288, 304, editing and rhythm, 4
311; feature cartoons of, 26, 33, 242; editing-­within-­the-­frame, 213–16,
Der Fuehrer’s Face of, 29; hyperreal- 217n19
ism of, 288, 304, 315; Imamura’s educational animation: of disease, 17,
views on, 223–26, 236, 242; The Kar- 264–84, 285n20; of scientific phe-
nival Kid of, 141; malaria films of, nomena, 69–76, 79n6, 153–55,
275–79; multiplane-­camera system 165n22
of, 242, 251n50; Snow White and the Eggeling, Viking, 120
Seven Dwarfs of, 31, 96n17, 315; The Eiga shiki mangaka nyūmon (Ōtsuka),
Winged Scourge of, 270–72 291
Doane, Mary Ann, 117 Eiga Shūdan, 222
Dōbutsuka suru posutomodan (Azuma), Eisenstein, Sergei, 10, 117; on Disney
294–95 Studio cartoons, 138–42, 174, 221,
documentaries, 125; challenges of the 224, 288, 304, 311; on “Kino-­Fist” of
indexical image in, 203, 205; experi- political cinema, 32; on plasmatic-
mental identity-­politics videos and, ness, 7, 18, 31–32, 36n16, 138–42,
201–16; Imamura on subjectivity of, 174, 288; on stroke drawing, 224; on
221, 231–37; postmodern investi- universal animism, 174
gation of, 201–2, 205–8, 217n8. See Elder, Bruce, 204
also scientific documentaries electronic engineering, 125
Dollens, Dennis, 124 11pm television program, 185–86
domestic ethnography. See identity-­ The Eleventh Year (Vertov), 156
politics documentaries Ellington, Duke, 259
Dorfman, Ariel, 17 Elmer Fudd, 309
Doyen, Eugene, 79n6 Elsaesser, Thomas, 122

Index • 347
emaki, 241, 243, 245–47, 251n54 film theory, 16–18; apparatus (screen)
embryological modeling, 73–74, 75f, theory of, 231–32, 234–36, 287; cog-
76, 79n6 nitive approaches to, 108n1; on
empathy, 48 digital transformations of cinema,
Endō Toshiaki, 295 117, 297, 300n32; documentary
Energy journal (Esso), 191, 199n34 theory of, 205–8; Eurocentrism of,
Eno, Brian, 215 208; on experimentation, 131–34;
Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass on first principles of animation in,
(Vertov), 156 98–108, 108n5, 108n7; on the his-
Enzensberger, Hans Hangnus, 199n37 torical a priori, 54–55; ideological
epistemology of infection, 267–68 concerns in, 17–18; on the instant,
Epstein, Jean, 5, 8, 14, 78–79 49–51; interdisciplinary approaches
Ermanskii, Osip, 155, 166n28 in, 111–26, 127n34; marginalization
Esso, 191, 199n34 of animation in, 1–2, 16–17, 19, 28,
evolution and change, 8 98–101, 108n5, 114, 121; materialist
“Experience and Poverty” (Benjamin), theory in, 135–42; postmodernism
30–31 in, 201–2, 205–8; on time-­lapse
experimentation, 131–42; definition photography, 77–78. See also ani-
of, 131; Eisenstein on plasmatic- mation theory; Japanese animation
ness and, 135–38; film aesthetics theory
of, 135–38; human theorizing in, Finkelstein, Lois, 168
131–34, 143n11; of identity-­politics Fischinger, Oskar, 33, 61–63, 93, 125
documentary videos, 201–16; of Flack, Roberta, 210
Japanese xerox artists, 15, 181–97; Fleisch, Thorsten, 124
of Lye’s scratch animation tech- Fleischer, Max, 33, 228, 285n4; African
niques, 167–79; of Rodchenko’s American portrayals by, 254–57;
mobile intertitles, 145–48, 163; of Screen Songs series of, 256–57
Vertov’s frame shooting, 145–63, Fleischer brothers/Fleischer Studios,
164n9, 166n28 69; Popeye cartoons of, 221, 223,
“Eye and Mind” (Merleau-­Ponty), 225–28, 242; self-­reflexivity in work
174–75 of, 40, 151
Flip and Two Twisters (Lye), 178
Fade to Black (Cokes and Trammel), The Flip Wilson Show, 262
208, 213–15 Fonoroff, Nina, 204
Fanon, Frantz, 17 Form in Gothic (Worringer), 175–76
Fantasmagorie (Cohl), 86, 90–91, 176 “For the Sake of Japanese Cartoon
Faraday, Michael, 47 Films” (Imamura), 221, 223–49,
Fast and Furry-­ous, 306 249n7; on American cartoon-
Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, 259, ing, 223–26, 238–45; on collective
261–62 social endeavor, 232; on Japan’s
Fechner, Gustav Theodor, 135, 136 underdeveloped cartoon industry,
Feldman, Seth, 217n8 236–37, 244; localized bodily focus
La fete blanche (Uno), 183 of, 248–49, 251n63; on movement-­
FIAF Index to Film Periodicals, 112 time, 240–41; on the multiplane-­
Film Art: An Introduction (Bordwell and camera system, 241–44, 251n50,
Thompson), 12–13, 22n48 251nn54–55; on photographic pars-
Filmation Associates, 261–62 ing of movement, 221, 223–31, 234,

348  • Index
 238–39, 243–44, 246–47, 249n9; on Gauthier, Christophe, 90
shashin and realism, 226–31, 233– Gautier, Théophile, 56–57, 58
36, 239; on temporal challenges of Gaycken, Oliver, 1–2, 6, 8, 14
modernity, 238–47. See also Ima- Gehman, Chris, 20n4
mura Taihei Geisel, Theodore, 274–75
Foucault, Michel: on biosecurity, 269, Gēmu-­teki riarizumu no tanjō: Dōbutsu-
281–82; on the dispositif, 237, 247; kasuru posutomodan 2 (Azuma), 295
on the historical a priori, 54–55 germs. See malaria films
found footage, 204–5 Gertie the Dinosaur (McCay), 125, 265–
Fountain (Lye), 178, 179f 66
frame-­by-­frame animation, 38 Ghosh, Bishnupriya, 17
frame-­less animation, 38 The Girl and the Giant (Vertov), 164n9
frames, 3–4, 13 Goofy, 304
frame-­within-­a-­frame, 209–11 Gorky, Maxim, 105, 139
Free Radicals (Lye), 167–70, 173, 176–79, Goskino Film Advertising, 151–53
179–80n5 Gough, Maria, 148, 164n8
Freud, Sigmund: on the drive to knowl- Graffiti Research Lab, 64
edge, 133, 143n10; on psychophysics, graphical realism, 292, 299n17
135–36; on the uncanny, 105 graphic animation, 114
Friedman, Ryan Jay, 255 “Graphic Art in the Age of Electronics”
Friedrich, Su, 204 (Hinata), 188–89
Frizot, Michel, 43, 44, 53n27 Graphication (Fuji Xerox), 182, 190–94,
From Artisanal Labor to the Mechaniza- 197, 198n4, 200n41
tion of the Silicate Industry, 154 graphism (as term), 186–90
Der Fuehrer’s Face (Disney), 29 Grass (Lye), 178
Fuentes, Marlon, 201 Grassi, Giovanni Battista, 284n2
Fuji Xerox corporation: Graphication pr Greenberg, Clement, 168, 172
journal of, 182, 190–92, 197, 198n4; Grierson, John, 88, 179n2
inaugural marketing campaign of, Griffith, D. W., 90
193, 194f, 200n41 Grimault, Paul, 91
Fukuoka, Maki, 230, 239 Gunning, Tom, 1, 8, 15, 18, 117; on
Fukusei geijutsuron (Michitarō), 189–90 cinema of narrative integration,
Furniss, Maureen, 20–21nn14–15, 106; critical responses to, 124; on
20n4, 113–14 hegemony of narrative film, 114; on
Furuhata, Yuriko, 7, 15, 19 the rhythm of the projection ma-
Fusco, Coco, 208 chine, 19; on the “ur” experience,
105–6
Gadassik, Alla, 115 Gygai, A., 154
Galloway, Alexander R., 8, 14–15
game-­ic realism, 294–96, 300n27, Halberstam, Judith, 10, 11, 20n4
300n31 Hall, Stuart, 115, 122–23, 126n13
gaming, 312–15 Hames, Peter, 20n4
Gan, Alexei, 163 hammerspace, 302
“Der Gang des Menschen” (Braune and Hanna, William, 304, 305f
Fischer), 63f Hansen, Miriam, 10–11, 20n4, 195
Gassner, Hubertus, 164n8 Harman, Hugh, 254, 258
Gaudreault, André, 106 Harris, Joel Chandler, 258

Index • 349
Hasegawa Nyozekan, 199n27 How to Read Donald Duck (Dorfman
Hatoum, Mona, 201 and Mattelart), 17
Hawaiian Holiday (Disney Studios), 242 Hurd, Earl, 266
Hayashi Michio, 186–90 Hutcheon, Linda, 206–7
hd, 25 hybrid animation, 203–5
Hébert, Pierre, 85 the hyperanimatic, 106–8, 110n33
Hegel, G. W. F., 36n16, 140 hyperrealism, 288
Henderson, Brian, 316n11
Hinago Motoo, 245, 251n54 identity-­politics documentaries, 201–
Hiroki, Azuma, 15 16, 208; editing-­within-­the-­frame
History and Memory (Tajiri), 208, 211– in, 213–15, 216, 217n19; fragmented
13, 214f subjectivity of, 207–8, 215–16,
history of animation, 17–18, 25–35, 217n3; frame-­within-­a-­frame tech-
85–94; Cannes festival in, 86, 88; niques in, 209–11; hybrid animation
chronophotography in, 45, 48–50, in, 203–5; rhetorical role of special
53n27, 54, 56, 59–60; Cohl’s contri- effects in, 202–4, 216, 217n5; slow
butions to, 90–92; deontological motion, looping, and stuttering in,
nature of, 99; Martin on absence 211–13; soundtracks of, 204, 214–15
of chronological inevitability in, ideological work of animation, 16–18,
93–94; McLaren’s contributions 164nn5–6, 164nn12–13
to, 88–89; modernity as language “Ideology and Ideological State Appara-
in, 32–34, 41–42; name “anima- tuses” (Althusser), 215
tion cinema” and, 86–88; produc- I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal
tion of the instant in, 42–49; real-­ You, 256, 260
world basis for the absurd in, 28–32; Illuminations (Benjamin), 181, 198n3
Reiniger’s 1923 work in, 26–28; The Illusion of Life (Cholodenko), 98–99,
subversive utopianist goals of, 35; 114, 126n9
of 3-­d, 54–66. See also early anima- The Illusion of Life 2 (Cholodenko), 98
tion devices The Image: Or, What Happened to the
A History of Japanese Manga (Hosoki- American Dream (Boorstin), 188, 189
bara), 245 Image par image (Martin), 92, 97n24
Hitchcock, Alfred, 213 Imamura Taihei, 199n21, 221–49; on
Hodge, James, 67n17 cartoon realism, 221–31, 234, 235–
Hogarth, William, 174–75 36, 239; coarticulartion of documen-
Hokusai, Katsushika, 240 tary and animation by, 221, 233–
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 140 37; on documentary subjectivity,
Homer, 102 231–37; on Japan’s underdeveloped
homospatiality, 121 cartoon industry, 221–22, 236–37,
Hopwood, Nick, 68–69, 73–74, 76 244; Marxism and, 222–23, 232,
Horkheimer, Max, 17 244; national political context of,
horror, 105 247–49; on temporal depth, 238–47;
Hosokibara Seiki, 245 transcriptive apparatus of, 222–23,
How a Mosquito Operates (McCay), 246–49; translations of, 249n7. See
265–66, 285n4 also “For the Sake of Japanese Car-
“How to Enter the Ghetto Matrix (diy ton Films”
Bullet Time)” (Graffiti Research The Incredibles (Bird), 314
Lab), 63f the “I-­novel,” 293

350  • Index
the instant, 38–51; history of produc- tial of, 195–97; television broadcasts
tion of, 45–49; modernity’s trans- and, 185–86, 198n5
formation of time in, 41–42; percep- Jay, Martin, 234–35
tion of, 38–42 Jenkins, Henry, 316n21
the instantaneous photograph, 45–51 Jerry the Mouse, 314, 316n17
intertitles, 8, 145–48, 163 Jia Zhangke, 12
Ioganson, Karl, 148, 164n8 Joan Does Dynasty (Braderman), 211
Irie Yoshirō, 222–23 Jobard ne ve pas voir les femmes tra-
Iser, Wolfgang, 132–33 vailler (Cohl), 89
Ising, Rudolf, 254 Johnson, Andrew R., 10
Itō Gō, 289 Jones, Caroline A., 172
Ivanov-­Vano, Ivan, 149, 164n11 Jones, Chuck, 120, 311
Joubert-­Laurencin, Hervé, 12–13
Jackson, Jesse, 215 “Journées internationales du cinema
The Jackson 5ive, 259, 260–61 d’animation” (jica), 87, 88, 89, 92
Jackson Five, 260–61 Julien, Isaac, 201, 209
Jameson, Fredric, 205–6
Japanese animation, 15; fan cultures Kachi kachi yama meoto no sunimichi
of, 289, 298n9; Imamura on mod- (Yokoo), 184–85
ernist tension in, 221–23, 238–47; Kadokawa Books, 291
Imamura on underdevelopment of, Kadr za kadrom (Ivanov-­Vano), 149
221–22, 236–37, 244; in light (char- Kaeru no kenpō, 221, 223–24, 249n8
acter) novels, 293–94, 300n25, Kaji Yūsuke, 185
300n31; otaku (hard-­core fans) Kandinsky, Wassily, 33
of, 15, 293–94, 300n25, 300n31; of Kant, Immanuel, 55, 142
Studio Ghibli, 247; traditional art Kaplan, E. Ann, 205–6
forms and, 222, 238, 240–42, 245– The Karnival Kid (Disney Studios), 141
46. See also Imamura Taihei; Japa- Kasai Kiyoshi, 289
nese xerox artists Katō Mikiro, 290
Japanese animation theory, 287–98, Kaufman, Mikhail, 150f
298n8; Azuma’s game-­ic realism in, Kelly, Gene, 314, 316n17
294–98, 300n27, 300n31; of Ima- Kelty, Christopher, 17, 76, 268, 270–72
mura, 221–49; on logic of media Ken Burns effect, 217n19
forms, 295–98; Ōtsuka three types Kennedy, Robert F., 192
of realism in, 289–94, 297–98; Khanzhonkov, Aleksandr, 154
readership of, 290, 299n11; Tezuka’s Khodataev, Nikolai, 149
semiotic theory of manga in, 291– Kikan Firumu journal, 192
92, 299n13, 299n15; zeronendai no Kimura Tsunehisa, 198n4
shisō group in, 289–90, 291. See also Kinema Junpō, 222
Imamura Taihei kinesthetic engagement. See motion
Japanese Communist Party, 221 (movement)
Japanese xerox artists, 15, 181–97, King, Rodney, 211
200n40; Fuji Xerox’s Graphica- Kino-­Pravda (Vertov), 145–49, 164n5
tion and, 182, 190–94, 197, 198n4, kiss, kiss, kiss (Yokoo), 184–85
200n41; graphic design origins of, Kittler, Friedrich, 55–56, 65
183–90; imitation of American Klee, Paul, 175–76
comics in, 184–85; playful poten- Klein, Norman M., 20n4

Index • 351
Kleist, Heinrich von, 111 Lippit, Akira Mizuta, 284, 286n25
Koch, Gertrud, 7, 8, 10, 197n1; on aes- Lipps, Theodor, 48
thetic experiment, 14; on experi- Lissitzky, El, 148
ence through the membrane of “The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin
cinema, 11 Payne” (Millhauser), 309–10
Kracauer, Siegfried, 37, 110n28, 117, Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland
135–38 (McCay), 33–34, 285n4, 302
Kraepelin, Emil, 136 live-­action cinema, 18, 87, 98–100,
Krauss, Rosalind, 172, 207 109n11; in African American con-
Kubelka, Peter, 3–4, 20nn10–11 structions, 252–63; blackface per-
Kunzle, David, 304 formance in, 253; definitions of,
Kuri Yōji, 183, 186 298n1; digital transformation of,
Kyarakutā shōsetsu no tsukurikata 297, 300n32; invention of, 65; re-
(Ōtsuka), 292 lationship to animation of, 11–15,
22n48, 28, 98–108, 109n11, 114–15,
Lacanian theory, 235 188–89, 289, 309
LaMarre, Thomas, 13–14, 200n41 Living Color, 215
Landecker, Hannah, 17, 76, 268, 270–72 Lo Duca, Joseph-­Marie, 95n11
The Land of Wonderful Dreams (McCay), Londe, Albert, 54, 61, 66
266 Lonesome Ghosts (Disney Studios), 242
The Language of New Media (Manovich), Looking for Langston (Julien), 209
11–12 Looney Tunes, 254
Lantz, Walter, 257–58 looping, 211–13
Large Professor, 64f Looser, Thomas, 251n55
Last Poets, 215 ludic realism, 300n27
Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais), 183 Lumière brothers, 79n6, 105, 231–32
Latour, Bruno, 79n3 Lutz, E. G., 68–69, 79n6, 80n16
Laveran, Alphonse, 264, 284n2 Lye, Len, 10, 38, 93, 167–79, 179n2;
Lectures on the History of Philosophy audio tracks of, 169; hybrid ap-
(Hegel), 140 proaches and vibration patterns of,
LeGrice, Malcolm, 204 173; kinetic sculpture of, 177–79,
Lehman, Christopher P., 17–18 179n5; movement as medium of,
Le Prince, Augustin, 61 171–73; painted animation works
Leslie, Esther, 7, 8, 10, 18 of, 167; scratch animation works of,
Leventhal, Jacob F., 165n24 167–79, 179n5
lifedeath, 104–6
Life History of Mosquito Aëdes Aegypti Mach, Ernst, 76–78
(Eastman), 272–73 Mack, Jodie, 38–39
light novels, 293–94, 300n25, 300n31 MacKay, John, 7–8, 13
Lindenmayer, Aristid, 272, 285n16 Macmillan, Tim, 67n17
Linder, Max, 90 The Magic Feature (Mekas), 18–19
Lindsay, Vachel, 4–5, 10, 17, 20n14 Maillet, Raymond, 92
lines and spaces, 7, 10; aesthetic discus- Making It (Un)real (ed. Skoller), 125
sion of, 174–76; in Eisenstein’s plas- Malaria, 277
maticness, 174; of graphism, 186–90; malaria (as disease): course of, 284n1;
in Lye’s aesthetics of motion, 168– eradication in the U.S. of, 285n20;
79; of the trace, 187 research on, 264, 284n2

352  • Index
Malaria: Cause and Control, 277 Mattelart, Armand, 17
malaria films, 17, 264–84, 285n20; McCay, Winsor, 33–34, 40, 164n10, 309;
animated mosquitoes in, 265–66, animated mosquitoes of, 265–66,
285n4; animation techniques in, 285n4; Gertie the Dinosaur of, 125,
279–80, 283, 286n27; biosecurity 265–66; The Land of Wonderful
context of, 266–69, 280–83; the cel- Dreams of, 266; split system of, 267;
lular agon in, 266–75, 283–84; cul- squash and stretch of bodies by,
tural iconography of, 277–79; of the 302, 304
present day, 283, 286n27; of World McLaren, Norman, 3, 20n11, 85–86;
War II, 274–83 cameraless animation of, 38; on
Malaria Mike, 275–77 difference, 104; films of, 3, 13, 40,
Malcolm X, 215 88–89, 93; on the in-­between,
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 93 109m20; Martin’s writing on,
Maltese, Michael, 311 88–89, 92–93, 95–96nn12–13; Palme
Manabe Hiroshi, 183 d’Or of, 89; pixilation experiments
A Man and His Dog Out for Air (Breer), of, 20n14, 89, 96n13
176 Mechanics of the Brain (Pudovkin), 69
manga, 15. See also Japanese animation media ecology, 297–98
manga-­anime realism, 292–97 medium specificity, 171–73, 207
Manovich, Lev, 11–12, 37, 289–90; on Mekas, Jonas, 18–19
early animation devices, 47; on film Méliès, Georges, 90–92
as animation, 98–99, 115, 122; on Le Merle (McLaren), 89
hybrid forms of animation, 203–5; Merleau-­Ponty, Maurice, 174–75
on manual construction, 12, 38 metamorphosis, 109n12
Manson, Patrick, 284n2 Metaphysics (Aristotle), 52n11
manual construction, 12, 38 Metz, Christian, 113
Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov), 148, Mickey Mouse, 11, 304; Imamura’s
151, 154–63, 233 consideration of, 221; morphing
Marcuse, Herbert, 27, 132 form of, 174; utopian aspirations of,
Marey, Étienne-­Jules: chronophotog- 30–31. See also Disney Studios
raphy experiments of, 61–63, microanalysis, 116
65–66, 70–71, 72, 166n28; goal of microcinematography, 17–18
decompos­ing movement of, 54; Mihailova, Mihaela, 7–8, 13
­mobile subjects of, 45–46, 48–49 military films. See malaria films
Marks, Laura U., 20n4, 217n8 Millhauser, Stephen, 301–3, 309–10,
Martin, André, 12–13, 85–94; on 311
animation’s absence of chrono- Millowitsch, Wily, 131–32
logical inevitability, 93–94; on Mills brothers, 256–57, 261
Cohl, 90–94; on commemorative Minnie the Moocher, 260
screenings, 91–92, 96nn20–21, Mitry, Jean, 111, 113, 117
97n24; on McLaren, 88–89, 92–93, Miyazaki, Hayao, 39
95–96nn12–13; use of “animation Le moblier fidèle (Cohl), 89
cinema” as term by, 86–88, 95n4, Model 1000-­Yen Note (Akasegawa),
95n11; works of, 94n2 200n40
Marxism, 222–23, 244 modeling: by Braune and Fischer,
Matreyek, Miwa, 125 61–66; for scientific visualization,
The Matrix (Graffiti Research Lab), 64 14–15, 17–18, 68–79; in Willème’s

Index • 353
modeling (continued) Neighbours (McLaren), 13, 40, 88–89
photosculpture, 14–15, 56–61. See Neupert, Richard, 316n11
also 3-­d animation new media theory, 37
modernity, 32–34; Imamura on tempo- Newton, Isaac, 236
ral problems of, 221–23, 238–47; on Ngai, Sianne, 18
overcoming of, 222, 249n4; special Nichols, Bill, 217n8
effects and, 33–34; transformation Nicholson, Linda, 207
of time in, 41–42 Niépce, Nicéphore, 42, 43
Monet, Claude, 240 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 135, 137, 138
Monogatari no taisō (Ōtsuka), 292 Non-­indifferent Nature: Film and the
Morin, Edgar, 2 Structure of Things (Eisenstein),
Mori Takuya, 183–86 31–32, 36n16
Moriyama Daidō, 192–93 nonpolitical art, 16–17
motion (movement), 3, 8–11; anima- Norling, John A., 165n24
tion’s play with, 40–41, 52nn11–12, “A Note on Film Metaphor” (Carroll),
102, 189; cartoon physics and, 6–7, 120–21
14, 301–15, 316n21; dialectic of con- Novak, Kim, 213
tinuous synthesis in, 38–42; as N.W.A., 215
illusion, 4, 33–34, 39; Imamura’s
theories of, 221, 223–31, 234, 236; objectification, 5–7, 21n18
immobility and the instant in, object relations, 10
42–49; Lye on energy of the line in, observation, 279–80
168–79 Office of the Coordinator of Inter-­
Motion Painting No. 1 (Fischinger), 125 American Affairs, 270, 285n11
Le mouvement (Marey), 70–71 The Old Mill (Disney Studios), 223,
Mozzhukhin, Ivan, 154 242
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Capra), 96n13 “On Certain Characteristics of Photo-
mtv music videos, 202 génie” (Epstein), 78
multiplane-­camera system, 223, 241– the oncological, 106
44, 251n50, 251nn54–55 On the Farm (McLaren), 96n13
Mulvey, Laura, 117, 209, 235 ontology of cinema, 99
Münch, Ludwig, 72–73, 80n20 Operation Rabbit, 306
Münsterberg, Hugo, 117 optical printers, 204
Murder (Wada), 183–84, 186, 198nn5–6 Ōsawa Nobuaki, 299n15, 299n17
music video aesthetics, 202 Ostherr, Kirsten, 17, 268, 270, 285n9
Muybridge, Eadweard, 54; chrono- otaku (hard-­core fans), 15, 293–94,
photographic images of, 46–47, 300n25, 300n31
61–62, 66, 72, 166n28; instanta- Ōtsuka Eiji, 15, 221, 245–47, 289–94,
neous images of, 45–48 297, 298n8; on biological realism,
Myakovsky, Vladimir, 150–51 291–92, 299n15; how-­to books of,
My Life as a Poster (Talukdar), 211 300n19; on light (character) novels,
Mythologies (Barthes), 294 293; on manga-­anime realism,
292–96; on narrative consumption,
Näcke, Paul, 139 290–91; on scientific/graphical real-
Nakihira Tukama, 198n4 ism, 292, 299n17
Nead, Lynda, 52n5 “Out of the Inkwell” series (Fleischer
Negro talking pictures, 255–57 brothers), 40

354  • Index
Pal, George, 259 ecstatic non-­indifferent nature of,
Panofsky, Erwin, 39–40, 41, 51 31–32, 36n16, 138–39, 140; liberated
Paper Tiger tv, 209, 217n18 lines in, 174; spectators and, 135–42
Para leer al Pato Donald (Dorfman and Plato, 51, 52n11, 111; on psyche, 101–2;
Mattelart), 17 on time, 50; on wonder, 41, 52n11
“Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth play, 40–41, 52nn11–12, 102; Benjamin
Century” (Benjamin), 196–97 on, 10, 182, 195–96; in Japanese
Parker, Peter, 314 reproductive practices, 189, 195–97
Parmenides, 47–48, 50 Plessner, Helmut, 131
Particles in Space (Lye), 169–70, 177–78, The Poetics of Slumberland (Bukatman),
179–80n5 309, 314, 316n18
Parville, Henri de, 58 Polan, Dana B., 16–17
The Passion of Remembrance (Julien), Polanyi, Michael, 131–32
209 Pollock, Jackson, 168, 170
Peary, Danny, 20n4 polygraphic photography, 54–66
Peary, Gerald, 20n4 Pong, 312
Peggy and Fred in Hell (Thornton), 209 Popeye the Sailor, 221
perception of animation, 38–42 Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty
perceptual realism, 288 Thieves (Fleischer Studios), 223, 242,
personal documentary. See identity-­ 243f
politics documentaries Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor
Personal Health in the Jungle, 277 (Fleischer Studios), 225–28, 242
Perusona ten exhibition, 183 Portrait of a Woman (Willème), 59
Pet Shop Boys, 215 postmodern theory, 201–2, 205–8,
phenakistoscopes, 47–48, 49 217n8; alignment with identity poli-
photographic guns, 67n18 tics of, 206–7; flattening of signifi-
photography, 18–19, 110n28; in Ima- cance in, 205–6; medium specificity
mura’s parsing of movement, 221, and, 207
223–31, 234, 238–39, 243–44, 246– Potemkin (Eisenstein), 199n25
47, 249n9; introduction in Japan Pour lire entre les images (Clarens), 85
of, 230; origins of 3-­d animation Pozzo, Thierry, 48
in, 54–66, 67n18; production of the praxinoscopes, 49, 99
instant in, 38–51; the shutter in, primitive/primal forms, 102
44–45; symmetry with animation Prince, Stephen, 288
of, 37–51; traditional indexicality in, Principe, Gabrielle, 314–15
228–31. See also chronophotography Private Snafu and Malaria Mike, 275,
photosculpture, 14–15, 56–61 276f
Photoshop, 203 Private Snafu: “It’s Murder She Says”,
physical laws of cartoons. See cartoon 275, 276f
physics Process and Reality (Whitehead), 169
piecemeal theorizing, 116–17 propaganda, 16–18, 164nn5–6,
Pinocchio (Disney), 315 164nn12–13
Pixar animation, 10–11, 298n5, 315 prophylactic films. See malaria films
pixilation, 20n14, 89, 96n13 psuché, 102, 105
planar animation, 112, 114, 116 psyche, 101–2
plasmaticness, 7, 10, 18, 31–32, 288; car- Ptushko, Aleksandr, 164n13
toon physics and, 6–7, 14, 301–15; Public Enemy, 214, 215

Index • 355
public health films. See malaria films Rodchenko, Aleksander, 8, 145–48,
Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 69 150–51, 163
Rodowick, David, 37–38, 119, 300n32
Quart, Alissa, 116 Roe, Bella Honess, 20n4
queer theory, 10 Roget, Peter, 47
“Que sais-­je?” (Lo Duca), 95n11 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 273, 285n11
Rosen, Phillip, 217n8, 228
Rabbit Rampage (Jones), 311 Rosenberg, Harold, 168
Rainbow Dance (Lye), 173 Ross, Ronald, 264–65, 284n2
Rajan, Kaushik Sunder, 268 Rotating Harmonic (Lye), 178
Rankin/Bass Studio, 260 rotoscoping, 18, 225, 228–29, 243, 254–
realism, 287–88, 298n1; as basis for the 55, 316n17
absurd, 28–32; biological forms of, Ruby, Jay, 217n8
291–92, 299n15; of cinematic super- Russell, Katie, 217n8
heroes, 314; of Disney Studio films, Russett, Robert, 20n4
288, 304, 315; Imamura’s theory of, Ruttmann, Walter, 26–27, 33, 120
226–31, 233–36, 239; indexicality Rythmetic (McLaren), 89
and, 287; Japanese debates on, 289–
98; logic of media forms and, 295– Saar, Martin, 133
98; manga-­anime forms of, 292–97; Saint-­Victor, Paul de, 56, 60
scientific/graphical forms of, 292, Saitō Tamaki, 289
299n17; suppression in gaming of, Schoonover, Karl, 20n5
312–15, 316nn18–19; transmedial Science of Logic (Hegel), 36n16
contexts of, 294–96. See also Japa- scientific documentaries, 14–15,
nese animation theory 17–18, 68–79, 125, 264–84; educa-
Reassemblage (Trinh), 211 tional uses of, 69–76, 79n6, 153–55,
Reeve, George, 307 165n22, 165n24, 165n27; embryo-
Reicher, Karl, 74, 81n25 logical modeling in, 73–74, 75f, 76,
Reiniger, Lotte, 26–28, 30, 33 79n6, 81n23, 81n25; epistemology of
Reinke, Steve, 20n4 infection and, 267–68; heart model-
Renov, Michael, 217n8 ing in, 71, 80nn12–14; Marey’s gull-­
rephotography. See Japanese xerox wings as, 70–71, 72, 79n2; Münch’s
artists geometrical demonstrations as,
reproductive art, 189, 199n27 72–73, 80n20; neuroanatomical
Reynaud, Émile, 92, 97n24, 99 modeling in, 74, 75f; precursors of,
Rheinberger, Hans-­Jörg, 131, 268 68; regulation of time and space in,
Richter, Hans, 33, 38 73–74; time-­lapse photography in,
The Riddle of the Sphinx (Mulvey and 76–79, 81n30. See also malaria films
Wollen), 209 scientific experiment, 8
Ride Him, Bosko, 254 scientific realism, 292, 299n17
Riefenstahl, Leni, 28–29 screen theory. See apparatus (screen)
Ries, Julius, 76, 81n30, 272 theory
Riggs, Marlon, 201, 208, 209–11 sculpture, 14–15, 56–61
Rimmer, David, 204 second-­order realism, 288–89
Roadrunner, 304–7, 308f, 309, 315 Seidman, Steven, 207
Rockefeller, Nelson, 285n11 self-­figuration, 40

356  • Index
self-­reflexivity, 16–17, 151–53, 161 Spatial Construction 15 (Rodochenko),
semiotic theory of manga, 291–92 145, 146f
Sengo manga no hyōgen kūkan: Kigōteki special effects, 113; in experimental
shintai jo jubaku (Ōtsuka), 291 identity-­politics documentaries,
Sesonske, Alexander, 117–18 202–16; found footage and, 204–5;
“Sharing of Media and Thoughts on the language of modernity in, 33–34;
Copy,” 192 optical printers and, 204; time-­
shashin, 226–31, 239 lapse photography in, 6, 76–79,
shots, 3–4, 13 81n30. See also computer-­generated
the shutter, 44–45, 47 imagery (3-­d cgi); 3-­d animation
silent-­era animation, 252–53 spectators: Eisenstein on plasmatic-
Silly Symphonies, 221 ness and, 135–42; Lye’s focus on
Simmel, Georg, 27 senses of, 171; in Soviet construc-
single-­cel animation, 266–67 tivist strategies, 162
The Six-­Legged Saboteurs (USDA), 277 Spider-­Man, 314
Skoller, Jeffrey, 125 The Spirit of Film (Balázs), 5–7
slapstick, 6 Starevich, Vladislav, 154, 165n25
slow motion, 211–13 Starr, Cecile, 20n4
Smith, Harry, 18–19, 38 Steinberg, Marc, 15, 200n41
Smith, Percy, 69 step printers, 204
Smoodin, Eric, 17, 20n4 stereoscopes, 65
Snafu, 275, 276f stereoscopic zoetropes, 70–71, 72
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Sternberg, Barbara, 204
(Disney), 31, 242, 315 stillness, 21n15
Snyder, Joel, 42, 45 Stride, Soviet (Vertov), 155
Sobchack, Vivian, 20n4, 117, 119, 177 stroke drawing, 224
Sobieszek, Robert, 56 Studio Ghibli, 247
Society for Animation Studies, 100 Study No. 12 (Fischinger), 33
Sōgetsu Animation Festival, 183–85 stuttering, 211–13
Solhdju, Katrin, 78 Sukharebsky, Lazar, 154
Song of the South (Disney Studios), Sullivan, Pat, 6–7
258–59, 261 superhero films, 314
sound volume, 7 Suteyev, Vladimir, 149
Souriau, Étienne, 119 Swinging the Lambeth Walk (Lye), 167
Soviet animation: modular principles
of, 156–63; New Economic Policy Tada Michitarō, 189–90, 195–96,
and, 151, 165n17; political work of, 199n25, 199n27
149–54, 164nn5–6, 164nn12–13; Tagawa Suihō, 291
in Rodchenko’s mobile intertitles, Taihei, Imamura, 13–14
145–48, 163; for scientific education, Tajiri, Rea, 201, 208, 211–13, 214f
153–55, 165n22, 165n24, 165n27; on Taju Kōji, 198n4
Taylorist labor practices, 155–56; in Takahashi, Tess, 7, 10
Vertov’s frame shooting, 145–63, Talbot, Henry Fox, 42–43
164n9, 166n28 Tal Farlow (Lye), 169, 179–80n5
Soviet Toys (Vertov), 151–53 The Talk-­Ink Kid (Harman), 254
Spacewar, 312 Talukdar, Shashwati, 211

Index • 357
Tanaami Keiichi, 183, 186 tomographic photography, 79n6
Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 155 Tongues Untied (Riggs), 208, 209–11
temporal contexts, 133; of cameraless the trace, 187
animation, 38–39; of human visual Tracy, Spencer, 212
perception, 45–47; Imamura’s ac- Trammel, Donald, 208, 213–15
count of, 238–47; of the instant, translation, 279–80
49–51; modernity’s transforma- transmedial realism, 15, 294–98,
tion of, 41–42, 238–47; in scientific 300n27, 300n31
modeling, 76–79; of 3-­d animation, Trinh T. Minh-­ha, 201, 211, 216, 217n8
56–66; time-­lapse photography and, Triumph of the Will (Riefenstahl), 28–29
76–79, 81n30 Tsivian, Yuri, 145
Tennessee Valley Authority, 273 Tsugata Nobuyuki, 290
Tezuka Osamu, 291–94, 299n13, 299n15 Two Bagatelles (McLaren), 88–89
Theaetetes (Plato), 52n11
Théâtre Optique, 99 Uchebnoe kino (Sukharebsky), 154
theory. See animation theory; experi- Uncle Remus (character), 258, 261–62
mentation; film theory; Japanese Uno Akira, 183, 185, 186
animation theory Uno Tsunehiro, 289
A Theory of Cartoon Film (Imamura), the “ur” experience, 105–6, 110n28
223, 233–36, 247, 249n7 utopian theories of animation, 8, 18
“A Theory of Documentary Cinema”
(Imamura), 231–37 Valéry, Paul, 93
A Theory of Documentary Film (Ima- Vanderbeek, Stan, 40, 125
mura), 223, 233–34, 235 variable-­speed cinematgraphy, 8, 9–10
Theory of Film (Kracauer), 136–37 Vertigo (Hitchcock), 213–14
thing theory, 10 Vertov, Dziga, 7, 21n28, 22n47, 145–63;
Third Cinema, 17 animation experiments of, 148–63;
“This is Ann!,” 274–75, 276f educational animation of, 153–55,
Thompson, Kristin, 12–13, 16, 22n47 165n27; frame shooting practices of,
Thompson, Richard, 16 156–63, 164n9, 166n28; Kino-­Pravda
Thornton, Leslie, 209 newsreels of, 145–49, 164n5; self-­
“Thoughts on Total Design” (Awazu), reflexivity in work of, 151–53, 161,
187–88, 199n17 233; on Taylorist labor practices,
3-­d animation, 14, 25, 26; in Braune 155–56
and Fischer’s modeling, 61–66; in video games, 294–98
Marey’s chronophotography experi- visual change, 3
ments, 61–63, 65–66; origins of, vivification, 279–80
54–66, 67n18; for scientific visual- Völker, Jan, 142
ization, 14–15, 17–18, 68–79, 284; Voodoo in Harlem (Lantz), 257–58
in Willème’s photosculpture, 14–15,
56–61, 67n10. See also computer-­ Wada Makoto, 183–84, 186
generated imagery (3-­d cgi) walk cycles, 80n16
time-­lapse photography, 81n30; Mach’s Wall-­E, 111
observations of, 76–77; in scientific Wallon, Henri, 136–37
modeling, 76–79; in slapstick, 6 The Walt Disney Studios. See Disney
Tom and Jerry, 304, 305f, 309, 315, Studios
316n4 Ward, Paul, 20n4

358  • Index
Warhol, Andy, 192 World War II malaria films, 274–83;
Warner Brothers, 254 animation techniques in, 279–80;
Der Waterer (Hölderlin), 140 biosecurity context of, 280–83; cul-
Weber, Max, 135–36 tural iconography of, 277–79
Wegener, Paul, 30 Worringer, Wilhelm, 173, 175–76
Wells, Paul, 3, 20n4, 21n15, 288, 312 Wundt, Wilhelm, 136
Whitehead, Alfred North, 137, 169
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Zemeckis), xerox. See Japanese xerox artists
303–4, 314 Xeroxed Photo Albums (Araki), 191
“Why I Scratch, or How I Got to Par- X-­ray tomography, 79n6
ticles” (Lye), 169, 179n5
Wile E. Coyote, 304–9, 315 Yanagawa Shunsan, 230–31
Willème, François, 14–15, 56–61, 67n10 Yanaghihara Ryōhei, 183
Williams, Linda, 205–6, 217n8 “Year Zero of Design” (Awazu), 196–97,
Williamson, Colin, 20n8, 52n12 200n48
Williamson, Judith, 207–8 Yokoo Tadanori, 183–86, 195–96, 198n4
Wilson, Flip, 262
The Winged Scourge, 270–72 Zemeckis, Robert, 303
Winston, Brian, 217n8 Zeno, 47–48, 50
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 92, 132 Zielinski, Siegfried, 61–62
Wollen, Peter, 209 Žižek, Slavoj, 244
Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in zoetropes, 47, 49; Marey’s stereoscopic
Lyon, 231–32 version of, 70–71, 72; slowing of
“The Work of Art in the Age of Me- time with, 76
chanical Reproduction” (Benjamin), Zola, Émile, 141, 144n33
181–83, 187–97, 197nn1–2 zoopraxiscopes, 46–47
World Health Organization, 281 “Zur Psychophysik der industriellen
The World Viewed (Cavell), 10–11 ­Arbeit” (Weber), 135

Index • 359