Reviews 213

References
Cassell, J. and Jenkins, H. (eds) (1998) From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender
and Computer Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Haddon, L. (1988) ‘Electronic and Computer Games’, Screen 29(2): 52–73.
Maxis: The Sims. Electronic Arts Inc. (2000).
Pilling, J. (1992) Women & Animation: A Compendium. London: British Film
Institute.
Taylor, T.L. (2006) Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Emma Westecott is currently Games Research Fellow at the

University of Wales Newport, and has worked in the game industry for
over 10 years, producing and programming games. She achieved
international recognition for working closely with Douglas Adams as
producer for the best-selling CD-ROM adventure game, Starship
Titanic (1998, Simon & Schuster). She has established herself as a
figurehead and spokeswoman for a more emotional approach to
gaming, and is currently consulting as a Skillset Evaluator on the vali-
dation of computer games undergraduate degrees in the UK, as well
as being a core contributor to the Synergy games research group at
Newport. [email: [email protected]]

Suzanne Buchan (ed.), with David Surman and Paul Ward (associate
eds), Animated ‘Worlds’. Bloomington/Eastleigh: Indiana University
Press/John Libbey, 2006. 207 pp. ISBN 0–86196–661–9

Animated ‘Worlds’ is a collection of essays that evolved from a series

of papers given at a conference of the same name. In a quite literal
sense, the essays take the reader towards the worlds created within a
diverse range of animations, crossing between figures inhabiting 2-D
and 3-D spaces, as well as more abstract works playing on transform-
ation and movement. Through these essays we encounter the puppets
of the Quay Brothers, the digitally constructed environments of the
game Fable as well as the motion captured figures of Final Fantasy:
The Spirits Within (2001), and the television series The Simpsons
(1989– ) and King of the Hill (1997– ). We also find ourselves
engaging with the mutable words and imagery of Len Lye’s Trade
Tattoo (1937) in which live-action elements are transformed through
the varied practices of animation, a tactic also evident in the later
animated documents of Going Equipped (1989) and Snack and Drink
(1999). Aiming to provide insights into the rich and complex worlds
of animation, we end in digital archives with Karin Wehn’s essay on
the internet as a resource for animation research.

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214 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 2(2)

As a collection that seeks to tease out the complex connections

between animation and other media, it is appropriate that the essays
draw their theoretical insights from a number of disciplines, including
dance, literature and cinema studies, as well as larger movements
including Romanticism and Modernism. This mixture of influences is
a virtue of the work, as I discuss further later, but also throws up the
occasional pitfall. A few of the essays suffer slightly from the feel of
being a work-in-progress, provoking a response of ‘yes, but what
about . . .’, and in such moments it is all too easy to become frustrated.
However, a more productive tactic is to take the collection in the spirit
in which it was meant, as an opening up of sites of debate. Inevitably,
some of these openings are less developed, but they nevertheless
suggest stimulating possibilities to whose more full exploration we can
look forward.
My comments have so far highlighted the diversities of the collec-
tion, both in terms of the kinds of animation discussed and the
approaches used to inform these discussions, and this might in turn
lead to the conclusion that the collection brings together a rather
disparate selection of ideas. However, as it turns out, this is far from
the case. Although an understated aspect of the collection, almost all
the essays share a concern with the status of being ‘in-between’, and
it is encouraging to see the multiplicity of debates that emerge from
this connection.
Such multiplicity is evident in three essays – written by Suzanne
Buchan, Richard Weihe and Heather Crow respectively – each of
which considers the animations of the Quay Brothers. In the first of
these, Buchan seeks out an explanation of a viewer’s experience of
these frequently oblique puppet animations. Drawing on discussions
about the realism inherent in the relation between objects and their
representation in cinema, Buchan makes a distinction between the
peculiar in-between status of set-based puppet animations and drawn
animation. In set-based animation, unlike drawn animation which
relies on an interpretation of objects, the animated world does exist,
in the sense that puppets are filmed in situ. The representational image
here has a direct relation to objects in the actual world, but this is
distorted as objects are enlivened as they are taken into another world
via animation, and the in-between resides in an experience of an object
whose realist aspect is so reconfigured.
The quality of in-between informs the other two essays on the
Quays, but the approaches taken are quite different. The starting point
of Weihe’s essay is an evocation of E.T.A. Hoffman’s 1817 story The
Sandman, but he moves beyond our fascination with the ability of
animation to give an inanimate object motion by arguing that a mean-
ingful engagement occurs through our pleasure in the ‘aesthetic liber-
ation’ of objects (p. 44). When an inert object comes into being in The
Street of Crocodiles (1986), it accumulates emotional resonances, and
it is this in-between to which Weihe asks us to attend. Crow’s essay

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 Reviews 215

shares The Sandman as a starting point, but its argument is led by

questions about a choreography of embodiment through gesture and
movement. Accordingly, Crow develops a view of the uncanny quali-
ties of the Quay puppets whose heterogeneous state of jerky action
makes something unreal become real, yet is ever gesturing towards its
original state of being inanimate.
Where the cluster of essays on the Quays explore experiences of
animations that exploit the in-between, those of David Surman and
Vivian Sobchack consider how a viewer’s experience is also mediated
by attempts at its eradication. Sobchack’s essay on Final Fantasy
argues that a consequence of too closely approaching the representa-
tional look of ‘real’ human figures is to provoke disappointment at that
absence, while Surman’s work on the digital game Fable (2004)
suggests that a gamer’s pleasure relies on imagery that evokes a plaus-
ible and stylistically consistent gameworld that has to negotiate the
conflicting demands of play based on rules and freedoms.
Though the experience of a viewer is important to many of the
essays, others are more concerned with the in-between in the practice
of animation. Rachel Kearney’s essay draws on the concepts of
synthetic imagination and dialectical synthesis to consider Disney
animation and the digital imagery of The Matrix (1999). She argues
that the merging of the disparate categories of indexical imagery with
software-based data reflects an equivalent of the Romanticist notion of
joy provoked by the uniting of opposites. For Paul Wells, the in-
between emerges through the process of adaptation. Since animation
allows its spaces to emerge as a primary site of aesthetic work, the
ambivalences of literary works can be manifest not only in the narra-
tive, but also in the shifting textures and textualities of animated space.
Picking up on T.S. Eliot’s use of the objective correlative, Wells posits
in his essay a ‘subjective correlative’ as central to the animated adap-
tation of literary works. Miriam Harris’s essay also develops the theme
of Modernism by locating Len Lye’s work through his encounters with
a group of Modernist authors based in London in the 1930s. Her essay
excavates the literary environment of Lye’s practice, developing
connections with his explorations of the relationship between image
and text.
Len Lye’s work is perhaps better known for his use of documentary
footage, and though Harris does consider this aspect of his work, the
impact of animation on the documentary form is directly considered
by Paul Ward through the more recent Going Equipped and Snack
and Drink. His essay questions how our understanding of what we
might mean by reality is altered when the authenticity of a person is
reconfigured by the artificiality of animation. This allows another turn
in the collection to become more visible: an interrogation of how we
think about moving image media. The effect of the in-between quality
of animation on theories of documentary is interrogated by Ward, but
theories of realism come into question, as do new media concerns

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216 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 2(2)

with origins in Thomas Lamarre’s essay on Final Fantasy and

Metropolis (2001). Suzanne Williams-Rautiola also uses the mutability
of animation to compare the different ways The Simpsons and King
of the Hill reflect on masculinity.
Animated ‘Worlds’ covers a diverse range of animations and
approaches, and it is striking how the collection more frequently than
not circles around questions of the in-between. This is not to suggest
that the collection is in any way limited, rather that the state of being
in-between is a generative ground for both animated practice and criti-
cism. The vibrant multiplicity of essays that have emerged can only be
good for the developing worlds of animation studies by provoking
debate and further iterations on the thinking that has begun.

Aylish Wood has published articles (Screen, New Review of Film and
Video, animation: an interdisciplinary journal) and book chapters on
the impact of digital technologies on narrative space. Her monograph
Digital Encounters, which gives an account of digital technologies
across a range of media, is forthcoming from Routledge in 2007. Her
previous work, Technoscience in Contemporary American Cinema
(Manchester University Press, 2002), looked at images of science
and technology through the perspective of technoscience. [email:
[email protected]]

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