Animation Studies Vol. 3

Animation Studies
Volume 3
2008
Animation Studies
Editor
Nichola Dobson
Independent Scholar
Managing Editor
Timo Linsenmaier
Staatliche Hochschule fr Gestaltung Karlsruhe
Editorial Board
Charles da Costa
Savannah College of Art and Design
Caroline Ruddell
St. Marys College, University of Surrey
Ethan de Seife
Gettysburg College
Paul Ward
Bournemouth Arts Institute
Pierre Floquet
ENSEIRB, Universit de Bordeaux
Karin Wehn
Universitt Leipzig
Maureen Furniss
California Institute of the Arts
Paul Wells
Loughborough University
Amy Ratelle
Ryerson University/York University
Animation Studies is published by the Society for Animation Studies,

c/o Dr. Maureen Furniss (President), Department of Film and Video,
California Institute of the Arts, 24700 McBean Parkway
Valencia, CA 91355 USA.
This journal publishes proceedings of the Society for Animation Studies conferences. For more
information on the Society, visit http://www.animationstudies.org.
Submission guidelines are available online at http://journal.animationstudies.org.
All articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivs 3.0 license. For a full text of this licence, please visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
For purposes exceeding this license, please contact the author concerned at the editors address.
Cover illustration: Birgitta Hosea
ISSN 1930-1928
Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Contents
iii Letter from the Editor
by Nichola Dobson
1 Half-breed Dog, Half-breed Film:
Balto as Animelodrama
by Amy Ratelle
6 The Newly Developed Form of
Ganime and its Relation to Selective
Animation for Adults in Japan
by Sheuo Hui Gan
18 Steadier, happier, and quicker at
the work? Women in Canadian
Animation
by Caroline Ruddell
24 TV 2.0: Animation Readership/
Authorship on the Internet
by Birgitta Hosea
33 Visions of a Future Past: Ulysses 31,
a Televised Re-interpretation of
Homers Classic Myth
by Mara Lorenzo Hernndez
42 The Spectre in the Screen
by Alan Cholodenko
Letter from the Editor

Welcome to Volume 3 of Animation Studies.
This years conference was held at the Arts Institute at Bournemouth and was a great success
by all accounts. We had the largest number of
presentations since I started attending a few
years ago and as always the generation of some
excellent and thought-provoking papers.
This volume begins with past papers from
previous SAS conferences. In Half-breed Dog,
Half-breed Film: Balto as Animelodrama Amy
Ratelle examines the use of melodrama as a narrative tool in the anthropomorphic feature
Balto (1995) and the extent to which it exaggerated, or heightened the true life aspects of the
story. Sheuo Hui Gan describes The Newly
Developed form of Ganime and its Relation to
Selective Animation for Adults in Japan introducing a new type of animation which many
Japanese artists are embracing, and why the
phrase limited animation is not a useful term.
Both of these papers were presented at the 2007
SAS annual conference in Portland, Oregon.
Lynne Perras added to our archive with her
2006 SAS paper Steadier, happier, and quicker
at work? Women in Canadian Animation
providing us with another perspective on working practises and traditions (and perceptions) in
North America.
51 Why animation historiography?

by Timo Linsenmaier
By widening the call to other animation subject papers we were able to include two papers
60 The Ontology of Performance in Stop which were presented at the PCA/ACA conferAnimation
ence held in San Francisco in 2008, which for
by Laura Ivins-Hulley
the first time, included an animation subject
area. Birgitta Hosea considers the potential im67 Taking an Appropriate Line
pact of technology in TV 2.0: Animation Readby Van Norris
ership/Authorship on the Internet, not only in
terms of audience consumption, but in a useful
77 Submission Guidelines &
case study, demonstrates the scope of new web
Creative Commons
technologies for animation students. After looking to the future of animation Maria Lorenzo
Hernandez looked back, with Visions of a Fu-
iii

ture Past. Ulysses 31: A Televised ReInterpretation of Homers Classic Myth which
examines the 1980s television series. The paper
considers the series use of contemporary
imagery to echo the past, and how it informs
the audiences nostalgia. Presented at Screenscapes: Past, Present, Future, Alan Cholodenkos The Spectre in the Screen, seeks to
elaborate a theory of spectatorship proper to
animation, and film as a form of animation.
This builds on his earlier work (including The
Death of the Animator published in this journal last year) to bring to the fore the crucial
nature of animation for the thinking of not only
all forms but all aspects of cinema, of film, as a
form of animation.
I think you will agree that each paper here is

quite different in its subject and approach and
once more representative of the great wealth of
work being carried out in the animation studies
community. The next edition will hopefully
build on this and will anticipate the 2009 conference to be held in Atlanta, Georgia in July.
Hope to see you all there.
From this years Bournemouth conference

we had several papers submitted and accepted,
though not all ready for publication in this edition. Timo Linsenmaiers Why Animation Historiography? Or: Why the commissar shouldnt
vanish suggests that the continued examination of animation history is an important aspect
of animation studies, but we must be careful to
consider what assumptions (or indeed agenda)
may have been made or inserted by the historian. In The Ontology of Performance in Stop
Animation: Kawamotos House of Flame and
Svankmajers The Fall of the House of Usher,
Laura Ivins-Hulley examines the nature of the
performance in puppet animation and the role
of the audience in the perception of the performer, by considering two distinctly different
films. Van Norris looks at the use of comic incongruity in the representation of disability in
animation and in particular the Aardman
Creature Discomforts in his paper, Taking
an Appropriate Line: Exploring Representations of Disability within British Mainstream
Animation and suggests that this type of comedy, paired with the documentary style and stop
motion technique presents disability in a more
positive way than is often seen elsewhere.
iv
Nichola Dobson

Amy Ratelle
Half-breed Dog, Half-breed Film

Balto as Animelodrama
Linda Willams (1998) defines melodrama as a peculiarly democratic and American form that
seeks dramatic revelation of moral and emotional truths through a dialectic of pathos and action
(p. 42). This emphasis on moral and emotional truth, as opposed to cinematic realism or
adherence to historical fact positions the figure of the suffering innocent (p. 43) as a dividing
line between the oppositions of (cinematic) good and evil. Balto (1995) takes several liberties
with history. The nature of these liberties is of great interest, especially as the film is promoted as
a true story (on its movie poster), and more particularly if we are to understand the film is
operating specifically as melodrama. This paper examines Balto in terms of its melodramatic
structure, and how the liberties taken with actual history serve to enhance the visceral impact of
the film.
Melodrama is most often (pejoratively) deemed a genre of excess. Nearly all the writings on
melodrama focus on its excessive qualities as properties of the womans film (Williams, 1998;
Gledhill 2000), and are framed in terms of issues of violations of good taste, in that they are
overly, often uncomfortably, sentimental. Childrens cinema is also often framed in terms of
violations of good taste too loud, too bright, too nonsensical. The similarity in negative views of
these marginalized genres has yet to be noted in writings on melodrama or childrens cinema. It
seems only logical, then, to examine Balto in terms of its excessive pathos, sentimentality and
action-packed third act, especially in that the film undermines historical fact in order to drive
home a larger point on suffering and the rewards of virtue, and because it implicitly maintains a
tie to history, inherent in the live-action opening and closing brackets. Though most, if not all,
childrens animation is melodramatic, Balto in particular is deserving of special attention by virtue
of the tensions of pathos/action in the animated narrative, and the implicit real-life history in
the live-action, which requires an anchor to an actual lived experience, as provided by the liveaction bookends. While other animated films may have this explicit division between live-action
and animation, in the case of Balto, the shift in medium is more than simply indicative of a
flashback. As the human grandmother is revealed as Rosie, the little girl in the animated core
text, this lends greater historical credence to the emotional journey of Balto in the animated
portion of the film.
This troubled relationship to history is heightened by the division of the film into two parts a
brief live-action opening sequence, the animated core text, and a return to the live-action space
at the end. Christine Gledhill (2000) further observes that melodramas heightened contrasts and
polar oppositions aim to make the world morally legible (2000, p. 234) pure/impure,
rural/urban, wild/domestic, and nostalgia/history. The division of the narrative into two separate
parts highlights the grey areas between historical fact and emotional truth. The interdependence
of these two modes of representation as separate, yet inseparable parts of the same narrative is
crucial to understanding the film as melodrama.
In the animated portion of the film, Balto is an outcast wolf-husky cross breed, yearning at first
to be included as part of a dogsled racing team, then, after he meets purebred husky Jenna, to be
domesticated as a family pet, preferably within her family unit. Baltos chance for greatness comes
in the form of a diphtheria epidemic in his hometown of Nome, Alaska. Through his tentative

friendship with Jenna, whose human owner, Rosie, a little girl, is struck down with the illness, he
is exposed to a cozy family intimacy he has never been part of. Jenna, who loves her little-girl
owner, is worried for her. Balto becomes worried, on Jennas behalf.
The first act of the film goes out of its way to create standard melodramatic oppositions of
good/evil, pure/impure, domestic/savage, and civilization/wilderness, in order to position Balto
as a suffering innocent, beset by the injustices and indignities of being a misunderstood social
outcast. He is distrusted by the humans of the town for his (allegedly) savage, unpredictable,
wolfy nature; the canine residents mock him for the impurity of his bloodline. He is a loner of
sorts his only companion is Boris, a snow goose, who stubbornly refuses to fly south with his
own kind. Steel, the only other purebred husky, is Baltos chief antagonist. He repeatedly bullies
him, and takes pains to ensure that Balto continues to be misunderstood and distrusted by the
humans of Nome. Steel and his gang, the other dogs on the winning sled team, call Balto names,
threaten him, and beat him up. The length of screen-time and narrative focus on these incidents
results in a pathos-heavy first act. Clearly, apart from Jenna, and by extension, Rosie, Balto is not
wanted in the town. His mixed heritage makes him a liability, which tugs at our heartstrings.
However, he is just as uncomfortable with wolves. Early in the film, after being set-upon by
Steel, Balto slinks away, and encounters a wolf pack on his way home. High on a ridge, they call
to him, howling out mournfully. He looks a lot more like them than he resembles even the other
(non-Siberian) huskies in town, and they seem willing to have him as a part of their pack, but
Balto yearns for Jenna, and civilization. He slinks home, filled with shame over his impure
bloodline. As this is (ostensibly) Baltos story, the viewer is concretely aligned with Balto,
suffering every indignity right along with him. We want him to win Jenna; we need him to
overcome the stigma of his mixed blood origins. He is as much a victim of circumstance as he is
of Steels bullying. As Williams (1998) puts it, in melodrama, there is a moral, wish-fulfilling
impulse towards the achievement of justice as the powerless yet virtuous seek to return to the
innocence of their origins (p. 48). In Baltos case, this is a little complicated, as he is half-wolf,
and thus already sullied at birth. As spectators, we need there to be a way for Balto to overcome
the stigma, to win Jenna, and a place within her family unit.
Baltos affection for Jenna and his need to both impress her and save Rosie is his impetus to
rescue the sled team, which has become lost in the blizzard conditions. Balto is determined to get
the antitoxin serum from Nenana to Nome, even though the town has made it abundantly clear
that they have no use for him. Cut-aways to the lost team reveal, however, that it is not the
weather that has undone them, but Steels megalomania. At the beginning of the film, Steel is
portrayed as merely high on himself. By the time the antitoxins have begun their Nome-ward
journey, Steel is very obviously insane. He has lost the trail, causing the sled to tip and the driver
to pitch forward, rendering him unconscious, thus losing any human decision-making authority.
Steel forbids the other dogs from attempting to regain the trail without him.
It is at this point that Balto (the film) becomes far less interested in pathos than it does in
action. Balto (the dog) braves every conceivable winter-related obstacle on his quest to save the
sled team and the antitoxins. Setting out with Boris, he soon runs into trouble in the form of an
enormous black bear, roused from winter hibernation. The bear is depicted as pure grizzly evil.
Balto must fight the bear, but it is a losing battle until the bear is distracted by Jenna, who has
followed Balto, thinking to aid him on his journey. With her assistance he defeats the bear, but
Jenna has been injured, and Boris must escort her back into town for medical attention. Boris
offers Balto some parting advice: A dog cannot make this journey alone. But, maybe, a wolf
can.

Thus Baltos quest becomes not so much about helping Nome, but about finding his inner
wolf and reconciling it with his outer dog.
Balto sniffs out the team on the winter wind. Setting off to find them, Balto marks his trail
back to Nome. He finds the lost team quickly enough, but must contend with Steels madness.
Each time Balto goes near the crate of medication, Steel runs him off. Balto demonstrates his
quality through passive-resistance. Each time he is thrown by Steel, he gets back up, and tells
him, I dont want to fight you. Unfortunately, Steel feels otherwise, and they do fight, ending
with (predictably) Steel falling off a cliff. In the meantime, Baltos character has so impressed the
other dogs, that they offer him Steels place as lead in the harness. In the spirit of non-stop action,
Baltos trials are hardly over. Steel survives his fall, and obliterates Baltos trail by marking every
tree. Balto is left with no alternative but to guess the way home, and fails miserably. He nearly
takes the team off (yet another) cliff. He saves the team from falling, but both he and the precious
antitoxin go over instead. He has an encounter with a wolf unlike any he, and by extension, we,
have ever seen before.
This sequence is essentially the pivot on which the film turns. It is a quiet, spiritual moment in
what is, up to that point, and for the rest of the third act, a dialogue- and action-heavy film. Balto
and the wolf howl together against a backdrop of blizzard and mountains. This mountainous
winter landscape takes on great symbolic importance, as does the whiteness of the spirit wolf, in
this specific moment and the film as a whole. Richard Dyer (1997) notes, about the stark, white
mountain landscape that
such places had a number of virtues: the clarity and cleanness of the air, the vigor demanded
by the cold, the enterprise required by the harshness of the terrain and climate, the sublime,
soul-elevating beauty of the mountain vistas, even the greater nearness to God above and the
presence of the whitest thing on earth, snow. (p. 21).
Or, at the very least, the snow is the second-whitest presence in the scene. The spirit-wolf
(perhaps even the god of wolves) is the whitest thing set in a landscape of white things. Balto,
searching for origin, finds that it is as lily-white, if not more so, as Jennas or Steels. His is a noble
origin, far outreaching the mangy grey wolves he declined to join at the beginning of the film.
Animation beautifully renders both the unusual appearance of the spirit-wolf tall, slender, with
a lovely, tapering snout, and yellow eyes with concentric pupils as well as controls the blizzard
background of delicate blue and green shades, warmed up by the presence of the wolf, emitting a
very faint pink and yellow-tinged glow. The staggering revelation of Baltos purity and inherent
worth is accomplished with little movement and no dialogue at all the calm of centre of literal
blizzard conditions, and the storm in Baltos heart. As Williams (1998) points out, [t]he
revelation occurs as a spectacular, moving sensation that is, it is felt as sensation, and not simply
registered as ratiocination in the cause-effect logic of narrative because it shifts to a different
register of signification, often bypassing language altogether (p. 52). In a third act crammed with
action and spectacle, the quiet beauty of this communion stands as a moment out of the time of
the narrative.
Balto then proceeds to climb back up the cliff, dragging the precious antitoxin with him, and
leads the team back to Nome, foiling a broken bridge, treacherous ice caves, and other such
clichd winter dangers to become the hero of the day, and Jennas chosen mate. He is accepted
into the town with honours, reaping integritys rewards - the recognition of virtue by the less
virtuous (Williams, 1998, p. 52).

But the film doesnt end here - it ends as it begins, with a live-action grandmother and
granddaughter paying tribute to the statue of Balto in Central Park, New York City. The complete
film opens with the grandmother and granddaughter, dragging a purebred Siberian husky puppy
around the park, as they search for a place the grandmother knows, but is unable to easily find.
Granddaughter: Grandma, what are we looking for?
Grandmother: A statue
The grandmother launches into the story, which spawns a dissolve from a pan across brightlycoloured fall maples into the snowy forest-space of the animated core text. By the end of the
animated portion of the story, in the return to the closing bookend, they have found the statue of
Balto, dedicated to the indomitable spirit of the sled dog.
Granddaughter: Did Balto really do all that?
To the grandmother, the answer is yes, but history itself tells a different, shorter, and
ultimately less exciting tale. The diphtheria epidemic was real, and so was Balto. The real Balto
was a dog on racing great Leonard Seppalas second-string team, but Seppala didnt think hed
make a particularly effective lead dog. Seppalas assistant disagreed, and hitched Balto up as the
lead for his team for the last leg of the serum relay. Balto performed admirably, saving the team
from becoming lost on several occasions. Clearly, Balto (the film) ignores facts and embellishes
others to serve a greater emotional truth. The inclusion of the indexical relationship of live actors
to the camera indicates that more is at work than simply the embroidered recounting of one dogs
tale. The live action sequences provide a symbolic anchor to history, lending greater weight and
credibility to the melodramatic animated bulk of the film. Baltos achievement, in terms of the
animated text, as illustrated by the statue in Central Park, is a most public, and, in terms of the
live action, tangible, recognition of his inherent virtue, which transcends his shady background.
The fictional Balto raises his social standing and reinforces the civilizing properties of the nuclear
family, returning to an origin he has been denied; the real Balto saves some Inuit children from
certain death. Both are memorialized in the single figure of the statue in Central Park, in all its
inscribed glory. Because Balto is melodrama, its core tenet is that anyone, whose heart and
intentions are pure enough, can overcome the taint of their origins, and achieve public (and
sometimes bronze) recognition of virtue. The dialectic of pathos and action played out in the
animated part of the film opens and closes in this quiet, real world corner of New York City.
Because the melodramatic structure subverts actual history to provide a greater moral truth, the
bookends serve not only as a means to access the past, but also the future. The live action closing
sequence carries Baltos legacy of virtue into not only our real, urban world, but, as embodied
in Rosies granddaughter and her puppy, into the (filmed) bodies of generations to come.
Though by no means a comprehensive study of melodrama or childrens cinema, this paper
does provide an inroad to further discourse in terms of how these two marginalized genres can be
woven together on their own terms, as well as offering potential avenues for future studies in
^
animation theory.
Amy Ratelle is currently a PhD student in the Joint Program in Communication and Culture at Ryerson
University and York University. Her research focuses on animal issues and animality in childrens film and television.
She holds a BFA in Film Studies from Ryerson University and a MA in Film Studies from Carleton University.

References
Balto (1995). Directed by Simon Wells. Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures and Amblin
Entertainment, 2001 [Video: DVD].
Dyer, Richard (1997). White. London, Routledge.
Gledhill, Christine (2000). Rethinking Genre, in: Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (eds.).
Reinventing Film Studies. New York, Oxford University Press, pp. 221-243.
Williams, Linda (1998). Melodrama Revised. Refiguring American Film Genres. Nick Browne,
ed. Berkeley, University of California Press, pp. 42-88.
Amy Ratelle
Edited by Nichola Dobson

Sheuo Hui Gan
The Newly Developed Form of Ganime and its Relation to Selective Animation1
for Adults in Japan
Ganime is a new corporate project to develop the features of selective animation to provide a
more flexible category of anime. Ganime was created jointly by Toei Animation and the publisher
Gentosha. The overall project is to promote auteurism in animation by encouraging creators to
have the freedom to exercise their imagination instead of conforming to the predetermined norms
of the anime industry. The Ganime project also intends to liberate the artists creativity through
collaboration among painters, novelists, musicians and film directors.
Ga is written with a character meaning painting, in their usage it is not restricted to any
particular method but could be oil painting, ink painting, wood block printing, photography or
even clay models; nime is written with katakana as a shortened form of anime. As the project
name indicates, Ganime stresses the value of the drawing by the artists, treating them as
establishing the core to which words and music are integrated to create a new form of expression.
At time of writing, fourteen Ganime titles have been released since the project was launched at
the end of May 2006. Each work exhibits a different drawing technique, visual style and
represents various genres. The Ganime Project also aims to incorporate works that employ
different materials besides drawn animation. Most works have adapted noted examples of classic
and contemporary literature and music to enrich the narrative element.2 Ganime tends to be
character-based, slower in pace and rendered with less motion than usually found in anime.
Ganime has been introduced to the public as the art of slow animation. 3 The works are being
released directly on DVDs without prior showing on television or in theatres. Ganime works vary
in length; the shortest being seventeen minutes, and the longest forty minutes, while most are
between twenty to thirty minutes.
Tezukas Mushi Productions and Ganime Project
My interest in the Ganime project was triggered by the resemblance of their basic concept to
what Tezuka Osamu envisioned in his works with Mushi Productions in the 1960s and early
1970s. Tezuka is widely known for his early animated television series such as Tetsuwan Atomu
(Astro Boy). Yet, he and the Mushi Productions staff also released a handful of short
experimental animated films and three adult-oriented theatrical released animated films in Japan
One Thousand and One Nights (1969), Cleopatra (1971) and Kanashimi no Belladonna (1973),
which pioneered the possibility of animation as an entertainment for adult audiences in the early
1970s. Although not all of these works gathered attention, or achieved great commercial success,
(indeed they have often been overlooked), their artistic creativity and the method of marketing
are historically significant. As Japanese animation scholar Tsugata Nobuyuki points out, Tezuka
1
Selective Animation is a new term intended to replace the older expression limited animation. I present the idea of selective animation in the
context of a spectrum of animation techniques in my dissertation The Concept of Selective Animation: Dropping the Limited in Limited
Animation. It is also discussed in my forthcoming article The Concept of Selective Animation and Its Relation to Anime in Animeeshon eiga no
atarashii riron to rekishi (The New Theory and History in Animated Film)
2
The famous texts include works by Dazai Osamu (1909-1948), Hagiwara Sakutaro (1886-1942), Mori Ogai (1862-1922), Koizumi Yakumo (also
known as Lafcadio Hearn, 1850-1904), Honor de Balzac (1799-1850) and H.P Lovecraft (1890-1937). Noted contemporaries include manga by
Hayashi Seiichi (1945 ~) and Koga Shiichi (1936 ~), photographs of Ueda Shoji (1913-2000), paintings of Yoh Shomei (1946?), Amano Yoshitaka
and so forth.
3
Ganime: The Art of Slow Animation is an article that appeared in the Arts Weekends column in the Daily Yomiuri, September 16, 2006.

and Mushi Productions have had an indispensable influence on shaping the fundamental
characteristics of todays Japanese anime. Tsugata even suggests that Miyazaki Hayao and Oshii
Mamoru, leading figures in Japanese animation today, built their styles and formats on the
foundation of the commercial anime that Mushi Pro inaugurated.4
Even though he died two decades ago, Tezuka is still a highly celebrated figure in Japan today.
Many animation text books and articles continue to emphasize how he and Mushi Productions
matured the use of simplified expression (limited-cel animation) and complex narrative structures
in manga and in animated films. These developments helped pave the way for Japanese anime to
flourish in the succeeding decades. Ironically, it is not uncommon to find Tezuka and Mushi
Productions blamed for the very same reasons, especially by animators from orthodox studios
who had been trained to emulate animation from the Disney Studio. They considered Tezukas
animation to be poorly done, as the job of an animator was supposedly to employ a large number
of cels to depict motion but not to move the drawings themselves. 5 Moreover, these critics often
complained that Tezuka and his studio have established a low parameter for wages and aesthetics
which still sabotage the Japanese animation industry.6
Today, however, such simplified expressions are common in Japan, as several generations have
grown up with animated series on television where simplified expressions are standard. In
addition, the international commercial success of anime in recent years has also increased their
confidence that these expressions are effective, possessing a different aesthetic from the so-called
full animation. It is this particular environment of Japanese anime that allows Toei AnimationGentosha to come up with the Ganime project. It foregrounds the beauty found in the restriction
of motion, suggesting it can be viewed as a modern version of kamishibai (paper drama).
Both Tezuka and the Ganime creators share the similar idea of assembling a group of artists to
experiment with new techniques in order to establish a platform to restore auteurism for creators.
Additionally, Tezuka and Ganime creators chose a similar approach to producing their works.
The need to economize motion for Tezuka and Mushi Productions was mainly driven by their
economic constraints that forced them to develop an aesthetics approach to this new mode of
animation. Ganime creators view the engagement of stillness or focused motion as a stylistic
choice that is made possible by the comparatively inexpensive techniques they employ. These
creators explicitly express their confidence in the usage of minimal motion in their animated films
as a means of enriching their visual performance. This attitude is very different from the
apologetic tone which was so often found in Tezukas statements regarding the use of the
restricted movement in their early animated series. Nonetheless, both were highly motivated to
produce works that emphasize creative freedom, artistic individuality and regard animation as a
complex entertainment medium for an adult audience that enjoys emotionally serious and
thoughtful works.
4
I agree with Tsugata that there has been very little serious study of Mushi Pro and Tezukas animation, as most research focused on Tezukas
manga with its wide range of themes, visual styles and influence on subsequent manga. Most current discussions of Tezukas animation tend to be
introductory and placed as supplementary to his manga. There is another significant breakthrough that is often overlooked. Tezuka and Mushi
Productions serious attitude to make animation was not limited to introducing animation for adults; they also inspired the use of more complex
and meaningful subject matter in animation for children. Childrens expressions and unsophisticated language were used to communicate a deeper
content. Therefore, their significant contribution to the popularization manga adaptations in to anime should be reconsidered in light of a key
feature the introduction of more serious issues and mature qualities into a stereotyped childrens genre.
5
I am borrowing the phrase moving drawings from Thomas Lamarres paper titled From Animation to Anime: Drawing Movements and
Moving Drawings in Japan Forum 14(2), 2002. Lamarre used the phrase moving drawings to describe the technique commonly found in anime.
6
Recently there have been a few efforts to re-evaluate Tezukas achievements in animated films. Tsugata Nobuyukis new book, Anime sakka
toshite no Tezuka Osamu sono kiseki to honsitsu (Tezuka Osamu as Anime Auteur: His Record and Essence, NTT Shuppan, 2007), is the first
such book, and is a useful reference work on these aspect of Tezuka Osamu.

Ganime presents a striking contrast with its understanding of the possibilities that lie in
selective animation. The Ganime project emphasizes the expression of a unique personal style
with a quiet atmosphere, generated by its slower pace. Some Ganime works do employ computer
generated techniques to ease the production process, but they are mainly employed as a tool
rather than an attempt to copy popular computer graphic styles. All these qualities have made
Ganime an interesting sample to investigate the current alternative state of selective animation in
Japan.
The Analysis of Ganime Works
In the following section, I identify the characteristics, current status and future potential found
in three Ganime works. I have chosen two examples, Fantascope ~ tylostoma and Tori no uta (The
Bird Song) by the illustrator Amano Yoshitaka, well known for his connection with Oshii
Mamorus Tenshi no tamago (Angels Egg, 1985), the character design for the anime Vampire
Hunter D (1985), and the image design for the Final Fantasy game among others. As Ganime
advertising employs Amanos illustrations, looking at his works forms a good introduction to the
overall ambition of the Ganime project. The third work examined here, The Dunwich Horror and
Other Stories, is directed by Shinagawa Ryo, the editor of Studio Voice magazine and a film
director with character design and artworks by Yamashita Shohei. This work illustrates the
diversity of Ganime with its use of three-dimensional mixed materials which differentiates it from
other drawn animations and computer-generated imagery. Furthermore, the main creators of The
Dunwich Horror and Other Stories are still in their 30s, revealing how this new generation handles
focused motion and stillness in this unconventional format.
Fantascope ~ tylostoma
Fantascope ~ tylostoma (2006) is a fantasy narrative about a man who has been condemned to
wander in nothingness, only being allowed to come back to earth once every seven hundred
years. During his current visit, he finds that the prosperous town he had known well had been
replaced by a depressing vista of destruction. In these ruins, he encounters the only surviving
person, a woman who looks like a prostitute. At her request, he starts telling his story. Very soon,
the woman invites him to bed. Later, a shell he found under the womans bed awakens a memory.
She is actually the goddess whom he had fallen in love with long ago. She had agreed to let him
murder her in order for him to obtain eternal life. He had attempted to kill her, yet in a few
moments it had become clear that she could not be killed. Although both were disappointed, the
goddess gave him eternal life and disappeared with the sea shell. Back in the
present, the woman tells him that she is the
one responsible for arbitrarily destroying the
world and she has long been waiting for him
to come back for her. The man is shocked
and once again attempts to take her life. He
winds her hair around her neck and tries to
kill her again, and yet, she reminds him that
this will not work. Finally the man asks the
woman to take his life, in order to liberate
him from his tortured existence. She kisses
the man and slowly inhales his breath,

gradually switching back to her youthful goddess appearance. She commits suicide after
taking his life. In the end, we see the man being born again as a baby calling out mother
to a woman that looks like the goddess.
Amano Yoshitaka is the key creator in
Fantascope. He takes charge of all the sumi-e
(traditional ink-and-brush painting in East
Asia) style drawings and the original story,
although it is directed by Kimura Soichi,
known for creating commercials. This work is
impressive with its black-and-white sumi-e
style drawings, continual narrating voices,
Fig. 1 & 2 Fantascope ~ tylostoma Sumi-e drawings are
and the musical soundtrack that accompanies
mixed with live-action footage. Image courtesy of Yoshitaka
the still drawings.
Amano, 2005/Toei Animation Co., Ltd.
The opening scene shows the creator
Amano Yoshitaka sitting in front of his desk narrating a fantasy about a shell that he has had
since childhood. Through his monologue the viewer learns that there have been many stories told
about this type of shell, dealing mostly with death and eternity. These other stories, including
The Flying Dutchman, inspired him to create Fantascope, a narrative about a phantom ship
coming and going between death and eternity.
Showing the actual creator in live-action footage, including several close-ups of his hand in the
act of drawing before the narrative unfolds, creates an intriguing introduction that is reminiscent
of some early animations. The famous opening sequence of Winsor McCays Little Nemo (1911) is
a good example. McCay is first shown in live-action footage talking with his friends in a club
before the camera cuts to the performance of his animated characters. This comparison to an
early animation draws attention to its different attitude towards the rendering of motion. In Little
Nemo, the creation of fluid motion and metamorphosis of line drawings are the eye-catcher, as
shown by the phrase watch me move.
In Fantascope, on the contrary, stillness is used to increase the suggestiveness of the occasional
motion. Most of the time, still drawings dominate each sequence. Occasionally, selected elements
within these drawings such as hair, clothing or curtains in the background are animated in a
subtle manner. In most cases, the audience
might not consciously notice these motions,
yet they may sense their existence while
attentively scanning the images. Even though
these creators have the technology to portray
more complex action, they chose to be subtle.
Indeed, besides the minimal motion, the only
distinct visual effect we see is the integration
of smoke and fog with life-action footage and
two dimensional sumi-e paintings. This combination creates a dreamlike state located between fantasy and reality. This visual design
fits the nature of the narrative. The subtle
motion amid stillness seduces the viewer into

enter a world opposite our everyday life that
is filled with constant motion shown on the
screens of computers, televisions, hand
phones and many others.
The use of imagery in Fantascope is
distinctly different from the common pattern
in anime, which tends to shorten the length
of each shot generating a sense of rhythm
through fast cutting. There is no sign of
motion lines often used to suggest speed or
motion. Most of the camera angles are from
eye level, framed with a mixture of full shots,
medium shots and close-ups. Occasionally, Fig. 3 & 4 Fantascope ~ tylostoma Hair movement is
there are limited panning and zooming in the only motion found in these shots. Image courtesy of
camera movements. These camera move- Yoshitaka Amano, 2005/Toei Animation Co., Ltd.
ments too were also rendered in a slower
pace. In other words, the viewer often gazes at a still drawing of characters while hearing a lively
conversation between them. This reduction of movement is more extreme than the common
anime practice of only animating the lips when a character is talking. In short, the depiction of
motion in Fantascope is developed from stillness, where following the low voice of the narration
with the help of music, the viewer starts to see the still image as a smooth depiction through the
viewers imagination instead of focusing on literal action. In other words, the viewer is
encouraged to dive into the narrative and imagine elements suggested by the imagery. Viewing
Ganime is similar to the process of reading a manga, where active involvement and imagination
play an important part in the whole process. There is an absence of conventional comical
exaggeration as well as the festive atmosphere found in many anime. Overall, quiet mood and
atmosphere pervade Fantascope from beginning to end.
Alterations of the contrast, lighting and other techniques guide the audience to focus on
certain details of the drawing or stimulate the viewing process. For instance, the key color of
Fantascope is grey. In the sequence where the man discovers the woman is actually the goddess he
had once attempted to kill, he is showered with complex feelings. Through manipulation of the
hues of the drawings, the author not only generates a subtle illusion of motion, but also
successfully emphasizes the turbulent emotions of the man at this critical point. Generally, this
approach is quite different from the typical image of anime where the character and scene are
presented in consistent lighting and colour toning.
Regarding the aspect of depth, Fantascope lacks of a geometric perspective to suggest a realistic
three dimension space, like many of those recent alternative anime.7 The sense of depth is
constructed through a compilation of a few different layers where the audience actually sees and
feels the gap between these layers.8 Even though this openness between layers does not
contribute to the verisimilitude of the image, it still effectively invites the audience to an
interesting visual perspective.
7
A good example that utilized this attitude is demonstrated by Gankutsuou The Count of Mont Cristo, a series of anime episodes produced by
Gonzo, directed by Maeda Mahiro which originally ran from October 5, 2004 to March 29, 2005. There is an unusual sense of flatness in
Gankutsuous visual effects, even though the characters and backgrounds are all rendered in three dimensions. Furthermore, Gankutsuou employs
an unusual visual style that employs layers of texture patterns in the characters clothing, instead of standard coloring and shadowing.
8
For further interesting and detail discussion of flatness in anime and animetism, see The Multiplanar Image (120-143) by Thomas Lamarre
in Mechademia: Emerging Worlds of Anime and Manga. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
10

The soundtrack also has a major impact on the narrative. Although the third person narration
of the artist provides the audience information necessary to comprehend developments and is
supported by conversation among the characters, music is used to enhance the key sentiments.
Moreover, sound is also the key element in providing a lively flow to the overall narrative.
Additional sound effects are used to suggest activity within the still drawing. The tone of the
voices is rather different from those common in anime. The high pitch and child-like cuteness are
replaced by a lower tone and a more inwardly poetic sensibility. Though, similar to many anime,
Fantascope is heavily narrated and gives an impression that the work relies too much on the audio
element to explain the narrative. Actually, the narrations could be further reduced and the story
would still be conveyed through the stunning images.
In short, the character figure design and background design, both distinct from the so-called
anime style, are the attractive features of Fantascope. The kawaii (cute) aspects are replaced by
a more adult and artistic touch which emphasize personal style rather than copying existing
anime visual norms. Thus, the use of the cyclic motion and stillness in Fantascope, while quite
similar to other anime, unexpectedly generate a new impression and visual experience.
Fantascope is a good example to demonstrate how old techniques were used for new effects, a
creative example of selective animation.
Tori no uta
Tori no uta is an erotic fantasy of a boys love for a girl he met in Shizuoka, Japan, around the
late 1950s and early 1960s. It begins with a boy describing a sudden downpour. He meets a very
beautiful girl in an eye-catching scarlet kimono, with a little green bird standing on her shoulder,
while taking shelter from the rain at her home. Even though the girl promises him they will see
each other again, he fails to locate her and finally leaves the town as an adult. Fifty years pass and
the man goes back to his home town. There, he meets the girl again, unchanged despite the
passage of years. The man returns to his youthful appearance, telling the girl that he wishes that
they can always spend time together like this. Responding to his wish, the girl shows him a glass
where there is miniature rainbow. This rainbow represents the dream of the boy. If he can tell her
his thoughts, and if he is sincere, the colours
of the rainbow will be released back into the
sky. When all of the colours are released, the
two of them will be together forever. At times,
during this long narration, their imagination
seems to invade reality, and reality becomes
their imagination. In the end, we see the boy
walking hand in hand with the girl towards an
unknown future.
In this work Amano created both the
original story and illustrations and did the
direction. The first impression of this work is
its selective animation and the use of striking
colours against an off-white background, the
dominant monologue, lyrical music and the careful placement of the narrative between fantasy
and reality. The style of these illustrations shifted from his more western influenced earlier style
to a more explicitly Japanese style of drawing figures and settings.
11

The monologue again plays a vital role providing necessary information. The framing of the
birds-eye view moving slowly through live-action footage of smoke and zooming into the town
where the boy lives provides an establishing shot similar to Fantascope, inviting the audience to
enter this imaginary world. Again, the voice
here is not the typical anime voice but something more realistic as found in Oshii Mamorus
animated films.
Colour is used to differentiate the characters. For example, the boy and his surroundings are usually depicted in grey. Yet, the
girl and her surroundings are shown in gaudy
colours, especially her appearance in his imagination. Also, colour is used to express the
characters inner emotion. For instance, when
the boy relates that his memory of the girl has
slowly faded from his mind, she is depicted in
an icy blue. Depictions of them together are
Fig. 5 & 6 Tori no uta. Image courtesy of Yoshitaka
usually done in off-white tones. Amano also
Amano, 2005/Toei Animation Co., Ltd.
experiments with distorted perspectives to depict dreamlike and surreal imagery. The distorted imagery resembles Salvador Dalis style and the
shifting images of real and surreal drawing quite successfully catch the viewers attention. This
type of visualization of emotions is different from most anime. Even though there is no lack of
surreal or dreamlike sequences in anime, Amano has interestingly designed and rendered his sequence with references to other artists.
Compared to Fantascope, there is more diverse camera work, including pans, tilts and dissolves
instead of simple straight cutting. This element has added a more cinematic momentum and lively
atmosphere yet it also draws Tori no uta back to a more mainstream construction of the images,
like many other anime. Nonetheless, with its highly selective movement and relatively heavy usage
of still images, the overall rhythm can still be considered slow, and the low monologue tone and
soft conversation among the characters still contribute to its unusually quiet atmosphere.
The rendering of depth in Tori no uta is similar to Fantascope. We can easily distinguish the
different layers which have been superimposed on each other in one image. The images do not
look real. However, the exposure of the construction of depth between the layers is interesting as
it invite us to explore the possibility of depth in a new cinematic manner.
The Dunwich Horror and Other Stories
There are three short stories in this title, an adaptation of H.P. Lovecrafts short story with the
same title. The first story, The Picture in the House starts with a traveller seeking shelter from the
storm in an apparently abandoned wooden house. Later, the traveller meets the owner, an old
white-bearded man. The old man shows an unusual fascination for an engraving in an old book
depicting a butcher shop of the cannibal Anziques. The old man speaks in such an uncanny
manner that it strongly suggests that he hungers for a similar sensation and the taste of human
flesh. The traveller grows more and more uneasy with the old man. Before the old man could
finish his talk, blood starts leaking from the ceiling onto the book they are looking at. The story
ends abruptly when lightning strikes the house and everything falls into darkness.
12

As mentioned earlier, this work is the only three-dimensional work in the Ganime project that
employs mixed materials. This work exhibits a more cinematic feel due to its use of extensive
camera work such as a faster pace of pans, zooms and transitions. There is a greater variety of
camera angles and changes between the subjective viewpoints of the traveller and the old man.
The figures in The Picture in the House are designed to resemble human forms yet are less
flexible. This aspect helps in developing the uncanny atmosphere that surrounds the characters.
Mixed material and puppets/models have never become mainstream in anime. Indeed, they are
seldom categorized as anime but more often been labelled as animation.
In most scenes, changes are found in the
characters facial expressions. Yet, these
changes are rendered subtly and selectively,
and sometimes are rather hard to distinguish
in the dim surroundings. Although the gestures and facial expressions of these models
could have been rendered smoothly with the
stop-motion technique, it was clearly not
desired. The creator only selectively animated
certain elements such as the eyebrows and
some other small details of his models. For
instance, in the scene where the traveller first
enters the house, his eyebrows are animated
to rise slightly due to the dusty and ghostly
atmosphere of the house. However, there are
few distinctive facial expressions of the traveller in the following shots.
The next observable changes are when the
traveller raises his eyebrows higher while listening to the old mans uncanny fascination
for the butcher shop. The most dramatic
change in the travellers facial expression is
towards the end of the narrative when he tilts
his head down and his eyebrows are intensely
wrinkled, reflecting his uneasy feelings towards the old man while he watches blood
leaking from the ceiling. It is true that the Fig. 7 & 8 The Picture of the House. Image courtesy of
changes of the eyebrows are minute, but due Spleen Films/Air Inc./Toei Animation Co., Ltd.
to the focused attention on the slight movements of the eyebrows, the impact is strong. The restriction of facial expression is common in
puppet animation. However, the director has further minimized the motion of his figures and,
unlike the common pattern in Japanese puppet animation, he painted the clothes instead of
dressing the figures with fabric. As a result of this process of reduction, the rigidity of the figures
has effectively emphasized the alarming emotions of the character.
There is a mixture of reality and fantasy found in the overall construction of the models. The
landscape details, including the muddy roads, rocks and sand, are all constructed realistically as
are the wooden house and its interior. However, these realistic three-dimensional settings are
placed against a flat-painted sky where the paintbrush strokes clearly expose the unreality of the
13

set up. This generates an interesting contrast between the lifelike surroundings with their ambient
atmosphere (such as the effect of the foggy weather, rain or the dusty room) and the artificiality of
the brushwork. This contrast is enhanced by the difference in the human forms with their freely
hand-drawn hair, beards and facial expressions; the unnatural whitishness of the characters skin
color, as well as the texture of their skin suggested by the texture of the materials employed.
The design of the sound corresponds to the context in which it appears, for instance the sound
effect of the rain, the footsteps, and the cracking sound of the door. The design of the diegetic
and non-diegetic sound is similar to those in live-action films. However, the old mans voice is the
only voice in the later part of the film. Although the majority of scenes are of the old mans
conversation with the traveler, only the old mans voice is presented to the audience, hinting at
his survival. These mixed realistic and unrealistic presentations intrigue the audience leading
them into this unconventional space.
Ganime and Selective Animation
Okada Toshio,9 anime producer, author, co-founder and former president of the production
company Gainax, comments that Ganime is a movement that emphasizes a return to the
individualism of the creator. He comments that although Tezuka Osamu started limited
animation and the cel bank system to limit the cost of producing animated television series,
complex narratives and unique styles of directing were used to balance the stillness of the
imagery. The finished animations were exported to foreign countries, emphasizing profits gained
by controlling the copyright.
Continuing this trend in the 1980s and 1990s, the construction of anime marketing through the
categorization of works directed towards different age and interest groups is still intensifying
today. Current anime creators are still constrained by marketing restrictions where the main rule
is to make profit and auteurism is no longer an important element. Okada went on to contrast the
career of Tomino Yoshiyuki, a talented anime director, who has been restricted to Mobile Suit
Gundam series, with the internationally famous Oshii Mamoru who was able to direct The
Amazing Lives of the Food Grifters (Tachiguishi Retsuden, 2006),10 even though it was not
financially successful.11
Okada says the Ganime project can be seen as an extension of the new trend represented by
Shinkai Makoto. In 2002, Shinkais Hoshi no koe (The Voices of a Distant Star) attracted
attention by proving that it is possible to create anime by oneself, presenting an alternative to the
existing anime production system in Japan. Shinkai adopted animes typical visual norms
(particularly the drawing style), combining them with his atypical narrative setting to produce a
love story. Even though his story involves a lot of fighting scenes, the emphasis is placed on the
sensitive depiction of the inner emotions of the protagonist. This gives more depth and enjoyment
through identification with the characters and poetic environment instead of the conventional fast
pacing and flashing explosions typical of this genre. Besides its anime norms, the beauty of
Shinkais Hoshi no koe is derived from careful observations and photographic-like details
Okada Toshio is considered a leading authority on otaku culture. He lectured on the topic at Tokyo University from 1992 to 1997. His books
include Bokutachi no sennou shakai (Our Brainwashed Society) published in 1995 and Otaku-gaku nyuumon (The Introduction to Otakuology)
published in 1996.
1 0
Despite what the official English title is, I think Biographies of the Distinguished Masters of Noodle Eating might be an attentive translation
nearer to the meaning in the Japanese title. In this recent film, Oshii employs photography and CG to produce the effect of selective animation.
1 1
See Okada Toshios article in New Media Creation Jisedai kurietaa no tame no shinmedea ganime (New Media Ganime for the Creator of the
Next Generation), published by Gentosha, 2006: 10-17.
14

depicting the common sights and sounds of everyday life; for example, the signal of a railroad
crossing, a signboard in front of a convenience store, advertisements found in the bus station and
train, hand phones and the sound of cicadas.
Ganimes expression takes simplification farther than Shinkais, as an exploration of the nature
of the anime medium. Okada also thinks the mission of Ganime is to shorten the distance
between creator and audience, similar to the function of the special comic market for doujinshi
manga fanzines. For example, Ganime is a platform for established artists to experiment beyond
their usual style, or simply display their interests without much interference. On the other hand,
for those who have yet to establish their own name, Ganime can be an excellent medium to
exhibit their talent and gain attention. They can try to achieve genuine expression and an
auteurist viewpoint rather than focus on the perfectionism of animation professionals.12
Okadas sharp observations recognize the distinctive quality and possibilities of Ganime as an
excellent platform for the creators to explore and to experiment with a visual world that does not
need to conform to any set of rules. Amano also expressed the same opinion in an interview,
with Ga-Nime, Im the only artist involved. Furthermore, by disregarding what is known as the
standard, and drawing unrequired imageries, I was able to discover new things from this
process.13
Setting aside the marketing and commercial intention of Toei-Gentosha, the launching of the
Ganime project is extremely interesting. The Ganime project as a whole is trying to avoid many of
the popular clichs in anime in order to explore new models of expression and visualization. That
cyclic motion can be eye-catching if used creatively was shown in Fantascope and Tori no uta. The
intense personal style such as the sumi-e style drawing in Fantascope and strong Japanese style
imagery in Tori no uta has become a selling point. The integration of two-dimensional drawings
and three-dimensional visual effects powerfully construct a quiet dreamlike atmosphere which is
not based on the fluidity of the mediatory drawings found in full animation.
Similar treatment can also found in The Picture in the House despite its unusual mixed
materials instead of drawn animation. The character figure designs for The Picture in the House
generated a style that is significantly different from the usual anime and successfully created an
interesting approach. Furthermore, the selective approach which usually animates facial
expressions and poses other body parts in still gestures skillfully incorporates metaphors of the
characters inner state. This technique generates a stronger impact by focusing the viewers
attention when they are moved at the right moment, as in the above example of the old mans
eyes.
Ganime looks like a mixture of television anime series and feature-length animation, a
combination of selective animation with the detail and higher quality of drawings found in the
best theatrically released animation. However, Ganime targets an older, mature audience who
wants something beyond the stereotyped formulas of anime. This audience enjoys film, literature
and music, with their complicated imagery and mature narratives.14
1 2
Okada 2006 p.17.

An online interview with Amano conducted at August 20, 2007 by Sawakama Keiichiro. Phofa.net (Phenomena for art);
http://www.phofa.net/feature/2007/07/0707eng.html
1 4
Comparing a Ganime DVD priced 3129 yen to a thirty-minute DVD anime series, which usually ranges from 6300 to 8190 yen (occasionally
discounted) per episode, the price of Ganime is actually much cheaper. Whether there is a sufficient audience for this new mode remains to be
seen.
1 3
15

There has not been much discussion centred on Ganime in animation-related magazines.15
This lack of media coverage leads to the question of who is associated with this project. Looking
at the essays in the 2006 book about Ganime New Media Creation published by Gentosha, most
contributors are from the fields of media, art criticism, literature, and popular culture. There is an
unusual absence of film and animation-related specialists. A similar tendency can also be found in
Ganime works. For instance, there are only a handful of anime people as most creators are from
fields such as commercial directors, MTV directors, movie directors and artists. This unusual
absence of anime regulars shifts attention to some other aspects of Ganime. Almost all Ganime
titles have very high quality imagery whether they are drawings, engravings, photographs or CGI
images. However, it is true to say that not all of them are presented in an interesting manner nor
fully experimented upon in stretching the possibilities of the medium. Some of these great images
were simply edited together, without deeply considering the purpose of employing stillness or
motion, or their relation to the audio element. Therefore, these weaker examples do not break
free from an amateurish look.
In the late sixties, Tezuka and Mushi Pro had employed comic gags and eroticism, and later
employed a combination of avant-garde art and literature in order to attract an adult audience.
Ganime in the twenty-first century tries to incorporate artists from different fields while also
stressing elements of literature and music applied to high quality imagery with selective
animation. Although the Ganime project has yet to achieve its goal, which is to break free from
the current established anime pattern of industry and aesthetics, there is no doubt about its
potential to attract creators who are interested in experimenting with the medium. In addition,
the recent call for entries announcement on the Ganime project website16 opens up the
possibility for new artists to create work with the financial backing of Toei Animation and with its
powerful distribution network.17 This project is unique as an experimental venue financed by a
major production company. It has the potential to extend the existing boundaries of animation,
reaching a new audience through mainstream distribution channels.18 At the same time, it may
also stimulate viewers to explore the new territories of animation. Ganime may not be the immediate answer to the current problem of the anime industry and it is also true that many
Ganime creators are still influenced by the existing anime formats. Yet, these contemporary
creators are once again trying to break free from the traditional pattern found in anime
production, much like Tezukas attempt in the late 1960s. It remains to be seen whether they will
finally be able to create an enduring creative future and spur new developments in anime.
The use of selective animation is not an uncommon visual expression in the contemporary
anime product. Indeed, there is no lack of quality works that have employed this visual
expression creatively. Anno Hideakis (the creator famous for his Neo Genesis Evangelion)
popular anime series Kareshi kanojo no jijo (His and Her Circumstances, 1998) is one of the good
examples. The recently well received anime series by Mitsuo Iso, Dennou coiru (Coil A Circle of
Children. 2007) is another such work. However, it is easy to observe that the creative usage of
selective animation is not a common standard in anime.
1 5
Nevertheless, the July 2007 issue of Animeeshon nooto How to Make Animation Featuring Top Creators & Workflows featured a special
interview with Amano Yoshitaka. They also used Amanos female protagonist from Tori no uta for the front cover image.
1 6
Retrieved on June 18, 2007 from http://www.Ganime.jp/apply.html. It is obvious that Toei-Gentosha tries to explore new approaches and new
market by recruiting of new talents with the Ganime project, with a minimum investment risk.
1 7
So far, the crucial financial aspect has yet to be clearly described by Toei-Gentosha.
1 8
On the Toei Animation official website, they advertise the Ganime project advertisement with eye-catching imagery that portrays styles
different from other Toeis productions. See http://www.toei-anim.co.jp, retrieved on June 19, 2007.
16

The importance of the Ganime project is its intent to reject existing anime norms by
encouraging individuality and creative use of selective animation. Even though it has proven
difficult to fully realize this statement, the Ganime project has demonstrated some of the many
possibilities of selective animation. Ganime creators have not only created new techniques, but
have successfully experimented with existing techniques by reusing them in a creative ways. In
short, Ganime project has stimulated a new angle to look at selective animation, as a powerful
creative tool instead of a mere production shortcut.
^
Sheuo Hui Gan is a postdoc fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) at
Kyoto University. This paper was presented at Animation Universe, the 19th Society of
Animation Studies Conference, Portland; June 29th July 1st, 2007.
References
Ga-nime Project. ed. (2006). New Media Creation Jisedai kurietaa no tame no shinmedya ganime
(New Media Ga-nime for the Creator of the Next Generation). Tokyo, Gentosha Media
Consulting.
Gan, Sheuo Hui. (2006). Prefiguring the Future: Tezuka Osamus adult Animation and its
Influence on Later Animation in Japan Proceedings of the Asia Culture Forum 2006 A
Preliminary Project, October 26-29, 2006, Cinema In/On Asia. Ed. Shin Dong Kim & Joel
David. Korea, Asia Future Initiative, pp.189-200.
Lamarre, T. (2002), From animation to anime: drawing movements and moving drawings, Japan
Forum, Vol. 14 (2), pp. 329-367.
Tsuki Mina, Ga-nime: The Art of Slow Animation. The Daily Yomiuri, September 16, 2006.
Watanabe Tomohiro and Tanaka Kei (2007). Animeeshon he no kaiki (The Return to
Animation). in Animeeshon nooto How to make animation, featuring top creators &
workflows, June, pp. 6-25.
Wells, P. (2002). Animation: Genre and Authorship. Wallflower Press: London & New York.
Sheuo Hui Gan
17

Lynne Perras
Steadier, happier, and quicker at the work?

Women in Canadian Animation
In the film industry, historically it seems to be a truism that women have not occupied major
positions. Although they have participated in the profession, there has been a relatively small
number of female producers, directors, and head writers for many years. A similarly small
number of women have held positions of influence in the animation industry.
A variety of reasons might be suggested for the scarcity of women animators: these might
include systemic discrimination, institutional bias, and the fact that traditional animation and its
focus on violence and physicality appealed to very few women. The relative dearth of females in
the industry notwithstanding, the status of women in animation in Canada is anything but
discouraging. From a cultural and historic perspective, this discussion will focus upon Canadian
female animators and their experiences and suggest that at least some of the pessimism regarding
womens contributions to animation may have been overstated. Through examination of the
challenges faced by female animators as well as strategies discovered that sustain their work, it
becomes apparent that there is clearly a reason to celebrate the efforts and progress of women in
Canadian animation, past and present.
That women have not had an easy path in animation in general must not be forgotten. Sharon
Couzin remarks that with few exceptions, Historically a woman had no voice at all in animation.
The field was occupied by men in the conception, rendering and distribution (Pilling, 1992, p.
72). Karen Mazurkewich has called animation studios boys clubs, noting that there were no
girls allowed except in the paint and ink departments (1999, p. 5). Jayne Pilling confirms
womens somewhat lesser status when she notes that [w]omen have always comprised a large
part of the animation workforce as paintntracers, or inknpainters, or in-betweeners, colourists or designers (1992, p. 5).
In 1951, Canadian animator Colin Low observed that that people best suited for [organization of a cel cartoon film] are skillful at lettering. Girls are usually steadier, happier, and
quicker at the work they are neater and more methodical (Mazurkewich, 1999, p. 185). While
Lows comments suggest that women indeed performed very useful functions in one form of
animation, in this statement he seems to have relegated them to secondary, less significant, and
perhaps less creative roles. Even almost a half a century later, Linda Simensky, Cartoon Networks
Director of Programming, is only slightly more positive:
First there is the history of the industry. While there have always been women in animation, historically the
more important jobs have gone to men. This is much a function of the eras involved and of the history of the
business. When you consider that the entire animation industry has been around for less than a century, and that
for years women were systematically relegated to such lesser jobs as ink and paint, women have actually done
fairly well even getting into any positions over the last twenty years. (Simensky, 1996)
Nevertheless, a definite change for the better has been occurring for the female in animation
more recently. Maureen Furniss observes that there is an effort to hire and promote females as
creators and producers (as well as in various other capacities) in order to rectify an imbalance
created in the past by institutionalized policies of sexual discrimination in part because women
have made it to the top and are now looking out for the future of other women (1998, p.
234). In Canada, the number of female animators has increased, both at the National Film Board
18

and at independent film companies. Women have had and continue to have an increasingly
strong voice in animation. They enjoy many opportunities to practice in the field and are
generally given considerable encouragement to do so. While in the commercial sector of the
industry women seem to have less of a presence, in other areas womens work flourishes and adds
new perspectives, themes, and techniques, thereby immensely enriching Canadian animation as a
whole.
Whether there are discernible gender differences between animation created by men and
women has been a matter of some debate. Marian Quigley has noted that Australian Antoinette
Starkiewicz feels animation is particularly suited to women because it requires infinite patience
(2005, p. 16). Ann Shenfield (who names Canadian animator Caroline Leaf one of her influences)
sees a relationship between animation and gender, as she notes that animation itself is like a
gender issue. Animation is marginal, without any doubt .Being a woman animator is a bit like
being against the margin of the margin not that you cant succeed, but its tricky (2005, p.
93). Animator Carol Beecher perceives few significant differences in themes and approaches;
however, she adds that if violence occurs in womens films, there is often a more obvious and
concrete psychological or sociological reason for it, whereas in animation created by men, the
violence sometimes exists for its own sake or for pure effect (Beecher interview, June 26, 2006,
Calgary, Alberta). Jayne Pilling has noted that [t]here is no overriding thesis about the specificity
of womens animation, but concedes that persuasive theories exist (1992, p. 6). She believes that
womens early experiences while growing up may account for their ability to express more easily
personal emotions than their male counterparts: men and women are socialized as children in
different ways, with the result that women tend to be more able to explore and share personal
experience in their work (1992, p. 6).
Not surprisingly, then, womens animation has also explored and expressed feminist issues and
concerns specific to the female experience. In Women and Animation, Pilling als discusses
animator Susan Youngs belief that the fact that the socialization of boys emphasizes hierarchical
play might help to explain mens domination of character animation; the latter also thinks that
this can account for womens increased development of new styles and techniques of animation
(1992, p. 6).
There is no question that women in Canada have made and continue to make their mark in the
countrys animation, and one of Canadas earliest and most talented animators was Evelyn
Lambart. Most closely associated with Norman McLaren, Lambarts early career was spent as the
assistant to the Scottish animator, but Lambart played a role in helping McLaren achieve the
recognition and respect that he did. Karen Mazurkewich specifically notes colour correction, the
incorporation of dust into an artistic image, and the enhancement of the personification of the
chair in films such as Begone Dull Care (1949), Mosaic (1965), and A Chairy Tale (1957)
respectively as aspects added by Lambart to McLarens films. Mazurkewich is appalled that
Lambarts name was left off the credits of Chairy Tale (supposedly the films producer wanted to
maintain the illusion that the chair in the film was actually alive!) (Mazurkewich, 1999, p. 188).
Nonetheless, in the end it was both Lambarts technological knowledge and imaginative
sensibilities that refined and improved the films on which the two worked (Ibid). Lambart herself
seemed less bothered by the treatment she received and always felt grateful for the experience she
amassed in the years with McLaren. An independent spirit for the most part, Lambart said, The
way I was brought up was to think of yourself as a person who had an obligation to use your
talents in any way you could. Whether you were a man or a woman didnt make any difference.
(Munn, 1982, p. 64) In a 1988 interview, she described her early experiences as an animator:
19

I must say that in those early days everybody was always highly cooperative. There was never any question of
discrimination. I didnt feel any differences displayed between the men and the women. This was partly due to my
own background. My father had taught us that certain behaviour was expected of women and certain behaviour
of men, but that we all had the same intellectual capacity. (Pilling, 1992, p. 30)
Despite the fact that one might argue that Lambart spent much of her time in McLarens
shadow, much to her detriment, and was recognized for her work far too late, that Lambart
refused to see herself as a kind of second class animator is telling. Lambart not only enriched
McLarens work but she also benefited from his tutelage both with regards to technique and
theme. Gradually she came to learn what intrigued her and what no longer held her interest.
Instead of simply taking McLarens lead, she kept pace with him despite the fact that the public
saw only him for a large part of the time. Sociologist Seymour Lipsett has long compared
American and Canadian values, and he maintains that Canadians typically are more collectivityoriented than their southern neighbours. The belief that group effort and success is more important than individual glory has pervaded the Canadian psyche, and the dynamics of the partnership of Lambart and McLaren might have fit into this paradigm rather than a more hierarchical
model. (Lipsett, 1992).
Once her work with McLaren had slowed down, Lambart began to pursue her own style of
film. She used wholly different techniques and content, leaving behind abstraction and pastels
and focusing on linear stories with animated cut-outs and bright blues and reds. Her films often
centred on concrete stories, frequently fables incorporating animals as characters; for example,
she made The story of Christmas (1973), Mr. Frog Went A-courting (1974), The Lion and the
Mouse (1976), and The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse (1980). She continued to make films
for both the National Film Board and independently for a great number of years.
Another renowned and highly gifted female animator, Caroline Leaf, also began her career
under the tutelage of a male artist, Derek Lamb. Leafs films have garnered much attention and
received fulsome praise for their compassionate sensibility to the lyricism and a humanity which
one finds all too rare in animation (Talia Schenkel in Pilling, 1992, p. 41). Like Lambart, Leaf
sees the value in working with and learning from others; in the many interviews she has given, she
speaks of her inexperience and her own uncertainty about her artistic ability rather than any
overtly sexist attitudes or behaviour as obstacles to overcome. Derek Lamb was not Leafs only
mentor; although he tried to get the National Film Boards English Programme Unit to hire her,
it was Co Hoedeman from the NFBs French animation studio that ultimately hired her in 1972.
The French office of the NFB in fact actively promoted the hiring of women in its department,
and it was most notably Rene Jodoin who supported female animators. In order to produce
highly original films, Jodoin not only encouraged young artists, but mentored women artists in
particular. French-Canadian animator Francine Desbiens speaks fondly of her work with Jodoin:
At one time there were more women than men. After he left the department, there were ten
years where not one woman was employed as a freelancer or as a permanent [Jodoin] was way
out in front of everybody (Robinson, 2000, p.2).
Like Lambart, Leaf strives for the merging of innovative techniques and compelling stories.
Interestingly, Leaf began her career animating films using animals and legends similar to
Lambarts later work. Perhaps Leafs most famous technique to date involves her use of glass with
sand or ink. Its originality and potential impressed even Norman McLaren who exclaimed, This
is wonderful! In all my years of animation, Ive never thought of this! (Talia Schenkel in Pilling
1992, p. 41). In The Street (1976), the animated adaptation of Mordecai Richlers touching story
of a childs first experience with death, Leafs ink and glass brilliantly illustrate the use of
20

metamorphosis, which evokes the passage of time and memory (Wells, 1998, p. 69). A more
recent film, Two Sisters (1990), reveals yet another technique involving etchings that transmits
both the fragility and power underlying codependent sibling relationships as well as the darkness
and stifling atmosphere that can pervade these relationships. Irrespective of the techniques, Leaf
consistently conveys a sense of pathos and authentic emotion. As Caryn James has observed, At
her best Leaf combines visual elegance with a deep humane narrative (1992, p.1).
Animators following in Lambarts and Leafs footsteps include Janet Perlman, Wendy Tilby,
and Amanda Forbis. Like their predecessors, they focus on and value collaboration and the
development of new techniques. Perlman, an independent animator for most of her career, has
successfully used cel animation in her acclaimed Lady Fishbournes Complete Guide to Better
Tablele Manners (1978), Why Me (1978) (co-directed with Derek Lamb), The Tender Tale of
Cinderella Penguin (1981), and Invasion of the Space Lobsters (2005), to name a few. Themes in
her work range from the very silly to the very serious: Lady Fishbourne pokes fun at social
conventions while Why Me explores the nature of terminal illness.
Both from western Canada, Tilby and Forbis have been inspired by Caroline Leaf, but have
attempted to create their own individual techniques and narrative structures. Their awardwinning When the Day Breaks (1999) stands out for its complex technical execution; the
animators use Hi-8 film with live actors, photocopied frames, and re-drawings. The theme of the
film examines the inter-relatedness of all people as it portrays how a chance encounter between
two strangers changes both of them forever. Although Tilby and Forbis each make their own
films, they value collaboration. Forbis says that their partnership, allowed us to air and explore
ideas in a way that we couldnt have done alone (Siegel, 1999, p. 4). She also commends the
NFB for its unqualified support when she notes that she and Tilby were supported, encouraged,
and paid. We had excellent technical assistance, and our David Verrall not only championed the
project from beginning to end, but he also provided excellent insight in the editing room.
(Siegel, 1999, p. 9)
It is perhaps in the independent sector where the greatest number of female Canadian
animated artists can be found. As Harvey Deneroff points out, it is important to be aware of the
dominant role [women] play among independent animators, whose films often constitute half the
offerings at major international animation festivals (1996, p. 1). One organization specifically for
women animators is Women in Animation an international support and resource system whose
members mainly hail from the United States and Canada. Its mandate is to foster the dignity,
concerns and advancement of women who are involved in any and all aspects of the art and
industry of animation (www.womeninanimation.org).
Open to both genders but no less supportive is the Quickdraw Animation Society (QAS) in
Calgary, Alberta. Situated in a prairie city whose focus is on oil and gas and the corporate sector,
QAS remains a strong and flourishing enterprise. Its official description calls it a unique
organization operated by animation artists dedicated to the production, education, and
appreciation of animation (QAS pamphlet, 2005). Located in a set of rooms on the floor above
an ethnic restaurant in downtown Calgary, QAS contains all manner of equipment designed to
create and enhance various forms of animation. Both traditional and computer animation can be
produced effectively at Quickdraw. The society boasts an impressive library of books on
animation as well as a huge array of tapes, disks, and other animation paraphernalia.
What is most striking about Quickdraw, however, is the artistic and emotional support given
to animators and would-be animators. Classes, workshops, and less structured events are offered
to both the aspiring and the more seasoned artist. Animator Richard Reeves maintains that the
21

society consciously strives to make the atmosphere welcoming to animators of both genders, and
women who have been associated with the society concur (Reeves interview, October 10, 2005,
Calgary, Alberta). Carol Beecher is one such animator who has branched out on her own and now
is co-owner of Fifteen Pound Pink Productions, a small animation company. Her influences
include Norman McLaren, Caroline Leaf, Wendy Tilby, and Amanda Forbis (the latter two also
spent time at Quickdraw themselves). Another favourite animator of Beechers is Gail Noonan,
an animator living in British Columbia. Noonans work often centers on issues more geared
towards womens interests: two of her most comical films are The Menopause Song (1995) and
Your Name in Cellulite (1995). It is Beechers opinion that it might be easier for female animators
to produce films in Canada than in the U.S. because the former provides more grants to auteurs
than the latter. She also states that she perceives sexism in the industry to be far less prevalent in
Canada than in other countries, most notably Japan and the U.K. (Beecher interview, June 26,
2006, Calgary, Alberta) Her work (often done in collaboration with Kevin Kurytnik) includes
satire or parody rather than introspection or social commentary. The Wind between my Ears
(2000) comments on the vacuous nature of television, while the cel-animated Mr. Reapers Really
Bad Morning (2004) pokes fun at death itself. Her most current project is Intergallactical Whos
Who (2006), which parodies Hinterlands Whos Who, CBCs short fillers that spotlight Canadian
wilderness animals.
Keltie Duncan and Anne Koizumi are Calgary animators whose enthusiasm for their work is
infectious. Duncan has spent time at Quickdraw, and like Beecher, she feels that women and men
are treated equally by the organization, and she sees few obvious or significant differences in
animation done by men and women. Nonetheless, she adds that male and female animators often
can contribute different strengths to each film and is not surprising that some of the finest
animation has both men and women working along side each other. Men and women view the
world differently in many respects, and each perspective complements each other (Duncan
interview, June 26, 2006, Calgary, Alberta). Koizumi recently returned from the National Film
Boards Hothouse Project in Montreal, where she made a short film using plasticine on glass with
paper cutouts. She believes that gender differences in animation may exist, but she feels more
comfortable saying that every animator is different regardless of his or her gender. Because she is
an independent animator, like Carol Beecher, she sees little sexism in the industry. Like other
independent animators, she strongly encourages others to continue actively pursuing their
interests (Koizumi interview, June 26, 2006, Calgary, Alberta).
To conclude, the fact that female animators in general have not been afforded the same
opportunities as men throughout history should not be ignored. However, in Canada women
artists have done very well in the field despite their lesser numbers. More importantly, women
animators seem to have found ways to remain optimistic and creative, and when discussing
women animators, perhaps more emphasis should be placed on their success than has previously
been done. Colin Low may have been unknowingly prophetic when he used the words steadier,
happier, and quicker at the work, in his discussion of women in Canadian animation. They have
been participating in the field since its inception, and show no signs of slowing down. As
evidenced in this discussion, female animators enjoy their work immensely and discuss it enthusiastically. Indeed, women seem to be thriving in the profession and are being recognized for
their art, whether it is done at the National Film Board, in independent companies, or on its own.
Positive self-perceptions, a supportive environment, and a focus on collaborative efforts have
helped to secure a permanent and significant place for women in animation.
^
22

Lynne Perras is Senior Instructor and Assistant Dean, Undergraduate Programs Office, Faculty
of Communication and Culture, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Originally

presented at 18th Annual Society for Animation Studies conference, Animation at the Crossroads,
Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, July 7-10, 2006.
References
Deneroff, H. (1996). Women in Animation and Bill Everson. Animation World Magazine,
Volume 1, No. 2.
Furniss, M. (1998). Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics. Sydney: John Libbey & Company Ltd.
James, C. (1992). Multi-Faceted Animators Retrospective, The New York Times.
Lipsett, S. (1992). The Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and
Canada. New York: Routledge.
Mazurkewich, K. (1999). Cartoon Capers. Toronto: McArthur & Company.
Munn, F. (1982). Creativity Heightened by Change in Career, Ottawa Citizen.
Pilling, J., ed., (1992). Women and Animation. London: St Edmundsbury Press Ltd.
Quigley, M. (2005). Women Do Animate. Australia: Insight Publications.
Robinson, C. (2000). When I grow up I want to be Rene Jodoin, Animation World Magazine,
Issue 5.7.
Siegel, L. (1999). www.seigelproductions.ca/filmfanatics/daybreaks.htm
Simensky, L. (1996). Women in the Animation Industry: Some Thoughts, Animation World
Magazine, Volume 1, No.2.
Wells, P. (1998). Understanding Animation. London: Routledge.
Lynne Perras
23

Birgitta Hosea
TV 2.0
Animation Readership/Authorship on the Internet
Introduction
Traditional platforms for animation, such as broadcast television or cinema, are rapidly
becoming obsolete as a new type of spectator demands more choice, the ability to interact with
animated content and access to global distribution for their own user-generated work. Audiences
are no longer satisfied with receiving a top down distribution of content from traditional cinema
or broadcasters. Internet technologies are emerging to address this demand for active
spectatorship and enable communities of interest to evolve their own alternative distribution
methods.
Viewing animation online has become increasingly accessible with the mass adoption of
broadband and the emergence of new file formats. TV 2.0 is an amalgamation of Internet
technologies that combine video on demand with the social networking capabilities of Web 2.0.
In the age of TV 2.0, the role of the viewer has increased in complexity with new possibilities for
active interaction and intervention with the content displayed. This new audience seeks a form of
spectatorship that can extend beyond the passive recipience of programming distributed by elite
broadcasters. TV 2.0 on the Internet has changed both methods of distribution and traditional
patterns for the viewing of animation. However, any potential for democratic participation in the
visual culture of moving images that this could entail may be a brief historic moment before the
assimilation and control of active readership by mainstream corporate culture.
This paper examines case studies of animated TV 2.0, specifically the use of the technology at
Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. By examining the nature of the spectator
experience, the outcomes of TV 2.0 and its potential developments, this paper will demonstrate
the scope for animation beyond traditional broadcasting.
TV 2.0 and patterns of spectatorship
For the last few years, bandwidth issues

and the confusing proliferation of file formats
have constrained the growth of animation on
the Internet (Wehn 2005 p.13). However, the
development of digital technology such as the
relentless annual increase in computer processing power, the mass adoption of broadband, greater efficiency in video compression
algorithms and the near-universality of the
Flash player have all combined to facilitate
the viewing of animation on the Internet. TV
Fig. 1 Birgitta Hosea 2008
2.0 is a set of Internet technologies that are
emerging to meet new demands from consumers for greater choice and interactivity. TV 2.0
refers to a hybrid of conventional broadcast television, the ubiquitous Flash video format and the
24

Web 2.0 standards, which enable increased interactivity such as social networking, blogging and
streamlined processes to post user generated content. TV 2.0 is changing traditional patterns of
viewing and distributing animation.
Historically, in the West major film studios and broadcasters performed the role of
gatekeepers, controlling access to the production and distribution of most mainstream animated
content. In other parts of the world, access to the means of production and distribution has been
controlled by ruling political parties (Wu & Fore 2005, Mjolsness 2005). The complex and
expensive technical processes involved in animation were not traditionally available to the general
public, being only accessible to a limited number of skilled practitioners. Global cinema or
television distribution is expensive and, therefore, distribution is usually offered to safe products
that can guarantee a return on investments. The independent festival circuit, while opening its
doors to a wider pool of practitioners than the mainstream, still has its gatekeepers in the form of
funders, curators and programmers. These factors have combined to restrict access to both the
means of animation production and the means of distribution.
Traditional mainstream classic narrative animation texts sought to involve the spectator
through a process of identification with the animated character portrayed on screen. Often
criticised as a passive position, it could be argued that the identification process requires
spectator involvement in the production of meaning. Writing on performance in the Poetics,
Aristotle states that an actor portrays a character through an imitation of actions and of life. In
the performance of tragedy this imitation arouses in the audience empathy and strong feelings of
fear and pity. These feelings that are aroused purge the spectator of excess emotions and, thus,
engender a state of pleasurable relief or catharsis. Naturalistic animation aims for emotional
engagement with the character, whereas comic animation involves different processes. Aristotle
saw comedy as an imitation of inferior people, indeed the laughable is a species of what is
disgraceful (Aristotle 1996). Therefore, in Aristotelian terms, comedy can be seen as an
encounter with the taboo that reinforces the moral codes of the spectator.
In order to be engaged, to feel these emotions of fear, pity or moral superiority, the viewer is
required to evaluate the character being portrayed through the lens of her own lived experience;
to compare what is seen performed with what she already knows. In other words, that which is
seen on stage or screen is a projection of the self.
This concept of the viewer animating the viewed through a projection of her own embodied
experience is developed by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida. In attempt to analyse the unique
ontology of photography, he adopted a phenomenological methodology in the observation of his
own direct experience as a viewer. Rather than being a passive recipient of the photographs
essential meaning, he concluded that the photographs that moved him where those in which he
participated, suddenly a specific photograph reaches me: it animates me, and I animate it. So
that is how I must name the attraction which makes it exist: animation. (Barthes, 2000 p.20).
The photograph was brought to life by his viewing. Similarly, an animated character is only
brought to life in the eye of the beholder.
Although there is clearly some contribution from the individual viewer to the identification
process, traditional forms of narrative have often been considered a passive experience of escapist
pleasure and strategies developed to create active spectators. Bertolt Brecht, for example, sought
to create a new type of theatre in which the spectator would not be manipulated by emotion, but
roused to action through critical reason. Following on from Brecht, strategies of distanciation
have long been a feature of experimental film practice. Intriguing and complex characters, such
as those created by the Quays, defy linear comparison with lived experience. Yet however avant-
25

garde the film and however critical the range of mental processes that the viewer experiences,
from their seat in a darkened cinema they cannot directly physically intervene with or change the
images on the screen before them.
Post-cinema, new audio-visual technologies have changed our relationship to moving images.
The introduction of television introduced a degree of control over the viewing experience. It
became possible to change channels or select the on/off button. With the advent of VHS it
became possible to pause, rewind and fast-forward the viewing experience. The introduction of
DVD led to a further enhancement of image quality, in particular the quality of the pause, which,
in VHS technology, had stuttered between video fields.
Laura Mulvey (2007) argues that this technologically enhanced pause has created a new form
of possessive or pensive spectatorship in which the frame can be contemplated in detail and
endlessly held as the spectator desires to consume and possess the ephemeral image. DVD has
introduced a degree of control in which to hold, caress or scrutinise the image, but this remains a
playback technology in which direct intervention with the animation is not possible through the
controls of the DVD player.
The arrival of VHS and new edit suites in the 1980s allowed artists to build on traditions of
political collage and directly intervene with broadcast material. Scratch video was a new edit
based form of practice at the borderline between artists film and an area rapidly being reclaimed
as expanded animation. Although Nam June Paik had been experimenting with video technology
since the 1960s, it wasnt until the arrival of new equipment like the Sony Series V in the mid
1980s that British artists began to develop an aesthetic movement based on the video edit.
According to George Barber (1990), the term scratch video was coined in 1984 by Pat Sweeney
influenced by New York hip-hop artists like Grandmaster Flash.
Scratch video artists like Barber recorded source material from broadcast television and
rhythmically edited multiple copies of the images to produce video art resonating with political
satire. In his film Branson (1984), for example, Barber rhythmically edited together a series of
ums and ers: those speech impediments usually omitted from broadcast interviews.
Reminiscent of modernist photomontage such as that by the Dadaist, Hannah Hch, who reappropriated and re-assembled images from mainstream media such as illustrated newspapers,
books and magazines; in scratch video image sources were appropriated and re-assembled in a
direct intervention with material that had been broadcast. These rhythmic visuals were more at
home in the nightclub than the art establishment.
The development of digital technology has allowed consumers to access edit suite tools that
were once the preserve of a small group of skilled technicians. Digital non-linear editing has
profoundly changed the relationship of the viewer to the animation or film that they are viewing.
The experience of spectatorship is no longer that of consumption. Through ripping DVDs and
downloading clips from the Internet, the viewer can finally possess the image and can also alter
the image, re-edit and re-distribute it in new forms and combinations.
Traditions of re-appropriation that can be traced from film montage and political collage
through to scratch video continue online on sites such as Jib Jab. Internet users also directly
intervene with official video and animation content in the form of mashups. Reminiscent of
scratch video, the user will take broadcast, cinematic or games content out of its original context
and re-edit it. Examples online include footage from the Final Fantasy game re-animated and
edited into a parody of Michael Jacksons Thriller video (moondawg 2007) and Finding Nemo
footage re-cut to the soundtrack of the Crash trailer (Knight 2007). Another usage of re-
26

appropriated and re-animated footage occurs with the phenomenon of visual pitching in which
filmmakers cut up old films and re-present them as an illustration of a new film that they would
like to make (myvisualpitch.com 2008). Online viewers are able to download, re-appropriate and
re-distribute images, hacking and re-assembling the imagery of corporate culture, altering its
context and disrupting the original meaning.
Online animation consumers also obsessively collect and share their knowledge about
animation. YouTube, one of the most popular
websites in the world, is an ever expanding
archive holding out a promise of endless fulfilment in bite sized chunks. Animation fans
upload rare and censored material such as
banned Betty Boop cartoons or scenes from
the stop motion doll epic Superstar: The
Karen Carpenter Story (Todd Haynes, 1987).
Large institutions are follow-ing suit. The BFI
and the National Gallery are both putting
parts of their archives on YouTube.
The citizen journalist has become a fa- Fig. 2 Birgitta Hosea 2008
miliar feature of mainstream TV news coverage,
contributing mobile phone and home video footage of breaking news stories. The riots at the
opening of a new IKEA store in North London in 2005 happened so spontaneously that they
were exclusively captured on the mobile phones of onlookers and this footage was used in the TV
news coverage. The advent of TV 2.0, however, means more than broadcasters accepting nonbroadcast standard media that is created by the general public. Bloggers, vloggers and You Tube
users are able to post their own political stories that are neither covered nor sanctioned by the
mainstream media such as the homophobic murder of Lawrence King (Hudson, 2008). The
general public have been enabled to show their own films directly to a global audience on the
Internet without the permission of a broadcasting authority. Thus, the means of production and
distribution are taken into the hands of the audience.
An earlier usage of animation online was for marketing purposes to create an audience for
cinema and television releases (Wehn 2005 p.24). Contemporary technology, however, is
engendering an active viewer able to generate and distribute her own content for an online
audience. The means of ani-mation production itself is now more ac-cessible. Software such as
Flash, stop-motion freeware and consumer DV cameras have enabled a wave of lo-fi animation
created on home computers and distributed via Internet based networks. Online culture and the
ac-cessibility of Flash software have coincided with generational movements of cultural redefinition to create mass interest in Internet animation in countries such as China (Wu & Fore
2005). As well as contributing to the development of new visual aesthetics, new methods of
creating animation have also led to the development of hybrid forms such as algorithmic
animation, interactive animation, machinima and mashup.
In addition to creating their own content, hacking images from the mainstream and setting up
their own distribution networks, these new active online spectators are also building their own
critical communities. Communities of viewers are created on You Tube channels through lists of
friends that subscribe to them and can offer feedback through comments and ratings. Being a
friend registers an ongoing personal interest in an Internet TV channel, blog or web page. It
27

makes the viewer visible, albeit obscured by a pseudonym or avatar. The process of being
friends demonstrates commitment in a field dominated by the short attention span. It also
enables peer review and feedback. Other sites allow subscription by RSS feed, which
automatically relays new developments on a site.
The citizen broadcaster is also the citizen critic blogging about, commenting on and rating
items seen. This communal criticism results in judgement by wiki, by the mass audience. The level
of criticism may tend to be shallow, yet this fundamentally challenges the traditional notion of
broadcaster or film studio as gatekeeper of distribution and the traditional critic as gatekeeper of
quality.
This new audience does not only interact with animation in order to play games online, but
also distributes their own user-generated material, creates archives and reference libraries of
bookmarks on del.ici.ous, peer reviews, subscribes and criticises. Reminiscent of the 1970s do-ityourself punk aesthetic, TV 2.0 allows viewers to distribute their own content for free, to build
alternative distribution models based on networks between communities of interest and to
critically interact with the content viewed.
Case studies at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London
Central Saint Martins has striven to utilise social networking and TV 2.0 to facilitate reflective
practice and to develop virtual communities of creative practitioners who peer review and
comment on each others work.
Blogging is a reflective process used on the Character Animation course at Central Saint
Martins as a pedagogical strategy. An alternative to sketchbooks, blogging provides a method to
document the development process involved in the creation of animation. Originally, the students
were asked to keep reflective sketchbooks, because the course philosophy is to assess students on
their progress and development as well as the final product in the form of a finished animation.
The blogs were originally intended to document the process behind their final films that were
created in conjunction with the National Gallerys Transcriptions project. The initiative behind
the use of blogging came from the students as many of them were already keeping blogs. Students
post works in progress on their blogs: animatics, sketches, mood boards, versions of character
designs, storyboards, rough drafts and other animation development work. Their blogs display
linked animations that they have posted on sites such as Vimeo or You Tube.
Re-mediating the sketchbook, the blog becomes more than a digital archive of personal and
creative development. Networks of friends that have subscribed to the blogs progressively add
comments and these networks have grown from personal contacts to include interested
professionals providing detailed technical feedback. The National Gallery created an online
portal to both the films and the blogs, which has ensured an audience beyond the classroom.
Another web based initiative originating from the Innovation Centre at Central Saint Martins is
Fifzine. The name derives from an amalgamation of Andy Warhols fifteen minutes of fame and
the word magazine. It is a social networking site for the creative community, yet unlike a site
such as Facebook, this is not a place for holiday photographs, but for creative practice in the
form of a portfolio. It is free to join and open to all creatives, who can each have their own
portfolio page featuring examples of writing, audio, still or moving image work, illustrations and
animations. These portfolios can have friends and comments and feedback are invited.
28

The Fifzine Minutes section is a showcase
gallery with exposure time determined by
users of the site. All the work is guaranteed
exposure for twenty-four hours, and in a
homage to Andy Warhol, after then each
users vote gives fifteen minutes more exposure for a piece of work. Sticky content in
the form of a changing magazine section and
regular competitions attracts users to the site.
Although it is still in BETA, it has already
attracted thousands of people, including the
animation company Bermuda Shorts, to set
up a portfolio page and recruitment agencies
use it to source new talent.
Fig. 3 www.fifzine.com 2007
These case studies demonstrate how Internet users are posting their own work, exercising
choice over their viewing and inviting peer review. Utilising social networking as a pedagogical
strategy allows the work of animation students to reach a potential global audience beyond the
physical boundaries of the classroom.
Active readership and assimilation
According to the theory of remediation, an emerging form will incorporate forms that
preceded it. As the Internet evolves a unique identity, web designers have used a series of
metaphors from older media to display animated content. The new is understood through the
lens of the past. User interface metaphors include the gallery, the sketchbook, the newspaper, the
zine, the portfolio and, now, the TV channel. As people turn away from watching television
towards the Internet, a change in advertising is also becoming apparent. There are confident
predictions that within one year online advertising will have overtaken the market share currently
occupied by broadcast (McCashey, 2008). Online companies such as Blip TV use the language of
democracy and accessibility in order to generate advertising revenue from the citizen
broadcasters.
A new class of entertainment is emerging that is being made by the people without the support of billion-dollar
multinationals. Our mission is to support these people by taking care of all the problems a budding videoblogger,
podcaster or Internet TV producer tends to run into. Well take care of the servers, the software, the workflow,
the advertising and the distribution. We leave you free to focus on creativity You deserve to make money from
your hard work. Thats why blip.tv works with as many video ad networks as possible to make you money. If you
have a hit show well use our own sales force to sell a sponsorship. We share everything we make for you 50/50.
(Blip TV 2008)
Although there are currently hundreds of sites competing for our attention as Internet TV
viewers or creators, a comparison with the history of film or animation, in which many small
studios and companies were taken over and incorporated into a few major corporations; could
indicate that a few major corporations will end up dominating the Internet. Another parallel is
with the plethora of small independent record labels set up during the punk era of the 1970s and
early 1980s that were gradually assimilated into a few major record labels. In a climate of
corporate take-over, restricting the amount of creators and distributors ensures maximised profit
margins for the few that survive. Advertisers are continually seeking new methods of capturing
and controlling our viewing and shopping patterns. The restriction of our viewing to fewer
29

portals would enable a more effective distribution of advertising messages. Consumers are
reassured by a gatekeeper associated with an established brand such as the BBCs iPlayer as
opposed to confronting the vastness of choice thrown up by the seemingly limitless territories of a
Google search. Lev Manovich states that the next stage in the evolution of digital media is the
need for new technologies to store, organize, and efficiently access the unprecedented amount of
information now available to us (2001 p.35). Could a desire for ease of access to content lead to a
monopoly by portals that make choices on our behalf, that become the new gatekeepers?
Next generation software, like Adobe
Media Player, which is currently in BETA,
aim to become the primary method of viewing
Internet TV. This software will allow the user
increased choice and customization of their
own viewing experience with fully integrated
advertising. Free to download and using the
same peer-to-peer technology pioneered by
Internet pirates, the software will show high
quality legal content for free. As the content
will be free, it will be financed by transparent
adverts that can float above the video content.
Advertising can also take the form of clickable hotspots embedded in the video files that
Fig. 4 Adobe Media Player BETA 2007
could link to advertisers information. A vast
catalogue of content is available for download or viewing online in full screen and the software
can make recommendations about programmes that it thinks you might want to watch. Although
content from traditional broadcasters will be shown, it will be possible for the general public to
submit user generated content to the catalogue for free, if it does not contain advertising.
The response of traditional broadcasters to changes in viewing patterns has been to seek to
accommodate them. Advertisers, in particular, have always appropriated new forms of expression
in the rapacious search for the latest youth trends. George Barber (1990) described the
appropriation of the style and grammar of artists scratch art video by the commercial sector in
the 1980s for a renewal of broadcast television. Youth and Music programming, in particular,
adopted the visual language and editing style of the scratch video scene using artists as the
unpaid R & D department of big business (Barber, 1990 p.120). Since then, pop videos, idents
and opening title sequences are now the site of experimental moving image practice once limited
to the avant-garde.
Similarly, contemporary broadcast and cinema content providers the traditional gatekeepers
of the moving image - seek to incorporate the new active forms of spectatorship in order to renew
their models of broadcast and distribution. The BBC has launched the iPlayer, which allows
Internet users to access broadcast content from the last seven days on demand for free. In
addition, they aim to harness the potential of user-generated content and discover new talent
through their web site.
Warner Bros have a cartoon mashup competition website where you are permitted to re-edit
their footage, giving them even more mileage from classic cartoons. Radical forms of reappropriation, such as mash-up, are themselves re-appropriated for marketing purposes.
Addictive TV, the VJ artists, was officially sanctioned by the film studio to distribute their
Antonio Banderas mashup due to its value as viral advertising.
30

Television itself has adopted the use and language of user-generated content. Broadcast
television channels now feature You Tube inspired youth programmes showing the most
popular video clips from the Internet and undermining any possibility for a counter culture in
opposition to the mainstream.
Conclusion
New Internet technology has resulted in an active form of spectatorship. As patterns of

viewing change, the online spectator now combines the roles of reader, author, archivist,
distributor and critic. This active engagement with the text extends Brechts notion of creating a
spectator who would be roused to action rather than pacified by emotion. No longer a passive
recipient or fan, through the use of digital technology on the Internet, the audience have taken
over the means of production, criticism and distribution.
The case study of the projects at Central Saint Martins has demonstrated how animation and
TV 2.0 can be used to enhance not only the teaching experience but also the creative processes.
Whereas in the past animation students would only have had limited access to distribution
through the festival circuit, they are now able to distribute their films globally online. They post
not only finished projects, but also their working processes through reflective blogs that invite
feedback and peer review through social networking. This can aid their educational development
and at the same time widens their potential audience.
Online culture and the mass consumption of digital technology are frequently referred to as
part of a democratisation of visual culture (Wehn 2005 p.5). A familiar counter argument asserts
that this is not the case, because access to digital culture is not universal. A technocracy is seen to
be emerging in which a digital divide exists between those with access to computers and the
knowledge of how to use them and those who do not. Indeed, technology is far from neutral and
evolves in ways that privilege a quick profit rather than a commitment to a democratic equality of
access. In the future, it could be more profitable to restrict choice and access than to continue
with the freedoms that are currently enjoyed. Indeed, any radical or truly democratic possibilities
for active reader/authors could be seen as being slowly eroded by the emergence of new
gatekeepers from mainstream corporate culture.
It is important then to study and document, not only the aesthetics of new forms of animation
that are distributed on the Internet (Wehn 2005, Wu & Fore 2005, Mjolsness 2005), but also the
fundamental changes in patterns of spectatorship as evidenced in fan communities, social
networking, alternative patterns of distribution, pedagogic models and wiki criticism, before the
freedoms and accessibility that are currently afforded on the Internet are restricted by the
^
emergence of technological cartels.
Birgitta Hosea is Course Director of Character Animation at Central Saint Martins College of Art
and Design, University of the Arts London. This paper was presented at the PCA/ACA Annual
Conference, San Francisco, March 2008.
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Birgitta Hosea
32

Mara Lorenzo Hernndez
Visions of a Future Past

Ulysses 31, a Televised Re-interpretation of Homers Classic Myth
This paper gives an overview of the animated series Ulysses 31 (1981), a French-Japanese coproduction based on the epic poem The Odyssey, which introduced children and young
audiences to Greek myths, relocating the original narratives into futuristic contexts such as the
31st century.
Twenty-five years later Ulysses 31 remains a cult series, however it is also largely unknown
since the images it invokes are buried in the memories of childhood. Although the series
substitutes the wooden ships with spacecrafts crossing the universe of Olympus, Ulysses 31
manages to capture some of the original relationships within Homers thesis, in spite of their
eccentric portrait. The heavy use of pastiche takes us back to the 1980s and the emergence of the
new fantasy-driven science fiction cinema; thus it is important to examine and discuss the series
employment of futurist aesthetics and technology in its expos of classic mythology.
Ulysses 31 is a good example of a successful series from that period. Employing traditional
animation throughout such as painting on cells, cut-outs and the use of the multiplane camera
the art of the series offers a distinctive style that would be virtually impossible to reproduce
through more recent technology. This paper will examine this aesthetic and compare it to similar
shows from that period in order to locate its place in the future past.
Ulysses as a Cosmic Adventurer
One of the characteristics of the series that becomes apparent initially is the noticeable
coherence of the series concept. Different to Achilles or Heracles, who looked for glory and
immortality, Ulysses was not the son of a God; he was just a man whose misfortunes became
timeless. The mention of Ulysses conjures up thoughts of adventure, bravery, astuteness and
challenging forces.
Before Ulysses 31 creators Nina Wolmark and producer Jean Chalopin developed their project,
writers from all ages have approached Ulysses as an archetype of human existence: Dante,
Tennyson, Joyce, Cavafis For the purposes of this paper I will only consider Dantes depiction
of Ulysses in the Divine Comedys eighth circle of Hell, doomed for his crazy attempt his will
to surpass Hercules Columns, no other line than the edge of the known world. For Piero Boitani,
Dantes visionary approach to navigation makes the Greek hero a pre-figuration of upcoming
discoverers as Columbus, Vespucio or Elcano (Boitani 1992 p.15). Likewise, during the 20 th
century the spirit of geographical explorers is transferred to space pioneers, astronauts and
scientists, as Carl Sagan pointed in his memorable series, Cosmos (Adrian Malone, 1980), saying:
We are at the shore of a cosmic ocean, summing up all aspirations of space missions and
anticipating the birth of a new Christopher Columbus or a new Ulysses, crossing the universe to
come back to Earth.
Ulysses 31 was not an isolated phenomenon: exchanging the Mediterranean islands for lost
planets suitable for all fantastic events, the series displayed a potential mix of magic and
technology that kept fresh the intensity of the Greek heros adventures, re-elaborating the myth
in a way that could only be imagined in that specific decade. If we ever lived in the future, it was
in the 1980s. NASA had launched the two Voyager ships, as well as Europe and other continents
33

which progressively joined the renewed space expeditions. Equally Star Wars (George Lucas,
1977) and Star Trek (Gene Roddenberry, 1966-69) were projecting a vast influence in the notion
of the future in entertainment, pervading the plots of many cinema and television movies like V:
The Series (Kenneth Johnson, 1984), a metaphor of WWII staged as an Alien invasion on Earth.
Other animated series such as Once Upon a Time Space (Il tait une fois lespace, Albert
Barill, 1982) demonstrated how all great themes, such as the fight between Good and Evil, are
transposable into scenery as far as the stars.
The Episodes of a Mythological Summa
This section will examine the existing concordances among the Homeric text and the series
plot, as well as those episodes which significantly diverge from The Odyssey. Paying attention to
its structure, the series gives some linearity to Ulysses journeys like previous cinematographic
versions such as Ulysse (Mario Camerini, 1955). The curse of Gods starts in the opening episode
and is not resolved until the last program, returning the dormant crew to life and restoring the
route to Earth to the spacecraft memory. However, the rest of episodes can be followed at
random, since they are self-conclusive and always reproduce the same basic outline: Shirka, the
computer on board, locates a potential danger or problem, whose resolution opens the door for
finding the route back home; the Gods or any other evil influence interfere in preventing the hero
succeeding, but he finally settles the most immediate need, saving his life or any others.
All Homeric poems are reproduced using this outline as a figure in a mould. The futuristic
scenery provides the pretext to re-invent the original premises in The Odyssey, but always staying
with the spirit of each poem. If the struggle between Ulysses and the Cyclops symbolized the clash
of civilization against a barbarian past as Polyphemus breaks all the rules of hospitality we can
also read the fight of logos wanting to defeat the myth the blind belief on old cruel Gods.
Ulysses 31 recreates this specific conflict, when the hero defeats the Cyclops now a Giant robot
adored by blind servers who want to satisfy him by sacrificing young Telemachus attracting the
curse of ancient Gods against himself and his companions.
The secondary chapters from The Odyssey are liberally told, readdressing their subtext to meet
contemporary worries. We can read an anti-drug manifesto in The Lotus-Eaters, bringing up to
date the original premise to appeal to different age groups. On other occasions it becomes
necessary to transform the literal foundations to make sense in the new spatial context: being in
the poem aquatic monsters that cause shipwreck, Scylla and Charybdis become now gravitating
forces that trap wandering spaceships into their magnetic field.
Likewise the episode The Sirens introduces space pirates searching for a hidden treasure,
although the seminal image of the poem remains intact Ulysses tied up to the mast while
listening to the sirens song. Probably the secret to Ulysses 31 everlasting charm is the
transmission of Homers tragic essence through a genuine sense of entertainment.
Due to an overarching educational purpose, the series exceeds the limits of The Odyssey to
become a summa of Greek mythology. Ulysses meets characters like Sisyphus, Herathos or
Theseus, who plead for Ulysses help to defeat a common opponent, or set him a trap under the
influence of the Gods. Other times the interaction is not necessary since Ulysses, as a universal
hero, replaces the classic figure for instance, solving as Aedipus the Sphinx riddle.
Exceptionally, some of these characters are subtlety connected to The Odyssey universe, as
Sisyphus considered as Ulysses ancestor (Graves 1955 p.73) or Atlas father of Calypso
although these relationships are not mentioned and each of the episodes is strictly focused on
their inherent symbolism. Moreover, the apocryphal encounter with the Olympic Gods evoke
34

meaningful values that deities personified in Greek mythology, staging abstract concepts such as
the infinitude of time Chronos the fragility of cosmic equilibrium Atlas or the triumph
of human will over destiny The Chair of Oblivion.
Eventually, other episodes stop using the Greek culture as a referent since they follow a more
recent mythology, paying tribute to the prolific science-fiction and even horror cinema of the
1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Traces from Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968) can be
recognized in The insurrection of the companions, where the lifeless crew is suddenly
reanimated to attack Ulysses. Similarly, The Gap in the Doubles recalls the film Invasion of the
Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1978), or The Black Magician evokes Logans Run (Michael
Anderson, 1976). Being a key title in the renovation of a whole genre, the influence of Ridley
Scotts Alien (1979) is noticeable in several storylines. But Ulysses 31 does not only condense the
previous legacy of futuristic cinema; developed in the early 1980s, the series acts as a hinge
between two decades, anticipating later issues. Thus The City of Cortex introduces a potential
conflict between humans and an Artificial Intelligence, enacting the worries aroused by robotics
and computing before this premise appeared in emblematic films such as Tron (Steven
Lidsberger, 1982) or Electric Dreams (Steve Barron, 1984).
The Archetype of Hero
Following Plato in The Republic, the Greek heroes from the Trojan War were reincarnated as
diverse animals: Agamemnon as an eagle, or Ajax as a lion; but only Ulysses would choose a
human form to be born again (Choza, Choza 1996 p.186). This fable condenses the epic
dimension of a character that rejected immortality and eternal youth, since only as a mortal man
he could return home and meet Penelope again.
Known as Ulysses the Cunning, his eloquence and inventiveness are stimulated by the Goddess
Athena. The modern Ulysses inherits such gifts, while tempered by certain ingenuity as he often
falls into his enemys traps. Some iconographic aspects connect Ulysses to more modern times:
since technology allows him to fly as a bird, his approach is something similar to Marvel
superheroes, endowed with superpowers or the restless dream to go beyond their human limits
applying complex devices. However, Ulysses profile is substantially different to those
bermenschen as he does not become a hero of his own volition, but rather because he is driven
by circumstances.
In both series and text, Ulysses is portrayed as superior and yet ordinary man, displaying his
different facets of athlete, engineer and artisan. Many episodes demand these special features
from the hero: in Aeolus, the God of winds subjects Ulysses to pitiless games, but the hero
prevails due to his agility and strength. Ulysses also performs by himself technological work for
instance, repairing the spacecraft engine and not so sophisticated tasks collecting minerals
from the planets, instead of forcing these tasks onto his robots.
Another of classical Ulysses qualities is his physical appeal. Even in his forties, princess
Nausicaa falls in love with him when he arrives to Scheria as a victim of a shipwreck. Equally
women from all over the galaxy find the futuristic Ulysses very attractive, and most surprisingly
he returns their affection. He decides to stay with Circe for ever when the magician reanimates his
companions. Likewise he wants to keep Calypso away from doom, crying: I will save you
whether you want it or not!! At this point the screenwriters take a risk by staying faithful to the
poem and yet not offend a family audience; therefore these episodes end with the sacrifice of the
female partner, thus restoring the initial balance to make each program always self-conclusive.
35

Inversely to the heros tragic loneliness in The Odyssey, the futuristic Ulysses does not cross
this unfriendly universe on his own. He is represented as a Pater Familias, travelling alongside
Telemachus, his son; Yumi, the alien girl; and Nono, a kind of pet-robot. This family cell
somehow includes Shirka, the computer on board, whose female voice makes the spacecraft a
character a mechanical mother, in the absence of the human mother, Penelope. Although
eccentric, this family is not dysfunctional and they work perfectly as a team, transmitting the
values of cooperation and respect to a brave and wise leader.
In all his aspects, the modern Ulysses is a faithful character. Different to his ancestor, he rarely
invents stories. Physically Christ-like, the blue of his eyes reflects the pureness of his heart,
recovering the deep essence of the Greek archetype, irreproachable and magnanimous in the
etymological sense of the word, with a great soul after centuries of being considered a negative
character by the Roman and Christian tradition.1 Perhaps the episode that sums up this evolution
is Ulysses Located Ulysses, where the futuristic hero travels to the past to help his precursor to
defeat Penelopes suitors: the program sums up the fight, saving the bloodthirsty killing that takes
places in the poem, and inviting reconciliation when the modern Ulysses flies into the air before
the suitors, who fall down on their knees mistaking him for a God in the poem, it is Athena
who addresses herself to the suitors relatives to prevent their revenge.
The Religious Dimension
While immortal, Greek mythology invested the Olympic Gods with human attributes, making
them as capricious, unsteady and unforgiving as human beings. Since Ulysses attracts the anger of
Poseidon when he arrogantly reveals his true name to Polyphemus, the original legend contains a
moral preventing overconfidence as the most frequent human failure. But we can perceive in the
series a significant difference between these divinities and all virtues that make Ulysses soul
splendid, underlining his humanity: he fights for his childs life but kindly avoids harming the
Cyclops blind servers, who ironically pray to Zeus asking for revenge. Therefore it is the
humanity of Ulysses which draws the anger of the Gods against himself, reinforcing the
identification of the audience with the hero and intensifying the Gods role as malevolent villains.
Despite the obvious references to Christian values, we can hardly identify any kind of
judgement on early religions in the series, as this futuristic Ulysses does not embrace any belief
and only swears by the Great Galaxy. Close to the Vulcan officers motto in Star Trek the
welfare of the majority is the welfare of the minority Ulysses dispositions to self-sacrifice will
eventually save him and his companions in the Kingdom of Hades, satisfying Zeus expectations.
In spite of their malice, the portrait of the Gods evolves throughout the episodes to cushion
Zeus eventual adjustment in attitude. Initially Zeus emerges from the infinite as the face of an old
sculpture, intimidating Ulysses or blackmailing other characters to impede his success. In the
middle of the series this anthropomorphic representation of the Gods is replaced by a rather
abstract menace: the tridents, detached from Poseidons iconography and an evil symbol in
Christian culture mostly appear as spacecrafts attacking the Odysseus, but other times become a
voiceless signal of danger that identifies the Gods belongings or loyal servers. This iconographic
oscillation might depend on the three directors that ruled the series, but ultimately facilitates an
outcome alike to The Odysseys since Zeus first drowns Ulysses crew but later facilitates the
heros return to Ithaca.
1
Due to his innate tendency to curiosity and ambition, which made him develop the Trojan horse, Ulysses enclosed some negative nuances for
Roman people -as they considered themselves scions of Aeneas, the last of Trojans.
36

Another significant contribution of the series in updating Greek mythology is the re-invention
of Goddess Athena, Ulysses guardian, who played a decisive role in resolving his sorrows. She is
represented by Yumi, the alien girl that joins Ulysses adventures from the first episode, as the
concordance among both characters is justified from the iconographic and narrative point of
view. Yumi, as Athena also denominated the Goddess with owls eyes (Vidal-Naquet 2000
p.116), has brilliant yellow eyes, and she employs her nearby divine capabilities to protect her
friends, exercising mental powers such as telepathy and telekinesis, or even elaborating
predictions in the same way as Delphos Sybille. Yumis special features and powers inherit the
magic from ancient times, transforming it into the most similar option for a futuristic age, adding
new nuances to the series dialog between the future and the past.
The Pastiche Aesthetics: Visions of a Future Past
Only revisiting Ulysses 31 from present day can be perceive the visions of the future past
outlined on the title of this paper. The art direction not only transposed ancient elements to the
31st Century, but also included contemporary technology and fashionable items from the 1980s,
generating a heterogeneous and sometimes unlikely image of the world of tomorrow.
Initially, the aesthetics follow the main premise of the series, harmonizing the costumes and
characterisation of the main characters with echoes of the Greek culture: geometric patterns,
short capes and tunics, metallic headdress that recall a laurel crown, and so forth. At times these
references are apocryphal, as Ulysses lion head-like space helmet belongs to Heracles
iconography. Likewise the recreation of Olympus takes on classic architectural elements, mixing
and alternating genuine ways to depict an uncanny dimension but coherent with the series
premise.
However, the presence of other historic influences in scenery and characterization seems
casual, as we can see in distant environments reproducing more recent artistic styles: Nereo
takes place in a planet with powerful resonances of Italian Renaissance actually a Venice-like
city. The pressures of a commercial production did not allow the directors to develop a genuine
aesthetic for each new environment, being necessary to imitate other successful models. As a
consequence, cross references between the ancient and the science fiction meet in the same
cinematic context: as an illustration, the galactic station of Troy resembles a Greek helmet and,
simultaneously, it brings to mind the 174 station of Star Trek.
These references reveal the strong influence of popular culture on the art for the series, paying
also an important tribute to the fantasy and science fiction French comic Utopias, like Moebius &
Jodorowskys Incal. Paradoxically, the futuristic imagination of the 1970s and the 1980s had more
in common with ancient legends than with contemporary reality, as can be noticed in the
conception of technology. For instance, Ulysses favourite weapon is a light-sabre, similar to Jedi
swords, because both sagas conceive the battles of the future as medieval hand-to-hand combat.
Moreover, Ulysses weapon is dual because it can be used as a gun, although this concept is not
properly futuristic since it borrows from the 16th and 17th centuries sword-guns.
One of the most endearing aspects of Ulysses 31 is the exhibition of technology consistent with
the early Eighties. For instance, Circe keeps all the knowledge of the universe in a library
composed of cassettes. Equally, when the Black Magician introduces Ulysses into a virtual
environment, the landscape is dotted with square pixels that recall the Atari computers graphics.
Nevertheless we must consider that the series did not attempt to anticipate a credible technology
for the future, but rather established an understandable code for the audience of that time.
37

However, Ulysses 31 was one of the first series to combine computer animation with more
traditional processes. The interaction of both, results in a daring use of visuals to describe the
travels through this parallel universe, as well as specific details from the machines like Shirkas
talking screen that could be consistently depicted through the newest animation techniques. On
the other hand, the use of standard techniques painting on cells, cut-outs and multiplane
camera anticipates the aesthetic of following Anime series, prevailing movement and colour
over representation and sometimes appearing close to artistic abstraction, as in the episode
Atlas when the universe collapse is represented through a clash of colour waves and light
flashes.
When Yesterday Becomes Today and Today Becomes Tomorrow
Eventually, two alternative visions of the future past coexist in Ulysses 31. On one hand, a
whole cultural tradition that revives in the present for the audience from whatever present, even
decades after the series first release, thanks to a correct re-actualization of the context. On the
other hand, since this fictional context necessarily quotes elements from the present, soon they
are regarded as a retro portrayal.
In the first vision, Ulysses has been considered as a universal model of hero for subsequent
periods and even latitudes, surpassing the Mediterranean region to cast its influence on other
cultural traditions, as the echoes on The Albatross legend, Beowulfs Song or Medieval Poem of
Mio Cid demonstrate. Throughout history, the champion falling from grace, living in exile and
not returning home until having completed a number of works to eventually find love and
redemption has moulded the archetypal image of the hero independently of the persons
authentic biography.
As an archetype, Ulysses image is polymorphic because it absorbs the essence of upcoming
ages, evolving from his epic portrayal to his deconstruction, as in James Joyces daring
experiment. Since Ulysses travel represents life itself, every man from every time is Ulysses,
remaining an everlasting model of man. Like the shipwrecked person, deprived of technology and
other facilities, every human being behaves in similar ways, revealing the paradox of social
evolution: although our way of life and environment have evolved enormously, the most
profound wishes of humankind remain equal. This explains Homers poem in context as far as
the stars, keeping alive the intensity of the heros misfortunes as well as the deepest symbolism of
his travel, renewed for a platform intimately involved with the production of modern myths: the
television series.
Inversely, in the second vision, contemporary elements like fashion and technology appearing
on futuristic contexts are condemned to obsolescence, as they can hardly resist the critical eye
from later audiences. And more drastically, technology inherent to cinematographic production,
like visual effects from stop-motion to computer graphics experience the same retro effect
when their manifestation unavoidably takes us back to their years of development.
Whatever we call modernity shortly becomes a legacy from the past. This is noticeable not only
in science-fiction movies often perceived as metaphors of current worries but also in the
historical genre, when the contemporary signs of identity pervade the fictional recreation of any
historical age: as an illustration, young fancy blonde starlets inhabit Cleopatras palace in Cecil B.
DeMilles movie (Cleopatra, 1934), making an icon of 1930s American popular culture from such
a stylized vision of Ancient Egypt. Moreover, since the futuristic genre demands an entire context
to be invented, the projection of the world of tomorrow not only takes from contemporary
aesthetics, technology and architecture, but also imitates other periods that can be considered
38

futuristic or, at least, eccentric, as observed in almost every science-fiction and fantasy series for
instance, the quotation of cultures in Stargate SG-1 series (Jonathan Glassner, Brad Wright,
1997).
This easygoing mixture is the cause of amalgamation, the addition of messages and symbols as
transparent layers that do not obstruct each other, but rather compose the polyphonic
sometimes even atonal discourse that characterizes Modernity. Amalgamation and eclecticism
configure a regular phenomenon in contemporary art and culture, which grows to be
extraordinarily widespread in commercial productions series for children and youngsters, since
these audiences scarcely question the liberal reinterpretation of historic references like the
combination of Egyptian and Greek sphinxes in Ulysses 31s respective episode, or Jewish and
Maya legends in The Second Arc.
And the more audacious is this combination, the more breathtaking the effect becomes.
Ulysses 31 played a lead role in the revitalization of the epic genre by taking the risk of reinventing the entire context, while other conservative bets, such as Clash of the Titans (Desmond
Davis, 1981), did not succeed in the updating of mythology: although this film dared to evoke
some modern approaches as the inclusion of a mechanical owl, akin to R2D2 it achieved a
weird collage effect rather than the French series brave synthesis.
Today Ulysses 31 remains an icon of the 1980s. It is an astonishing sign of modernity especially
because fashion of that era frequently demonstrated a yearning an infatuation with couture
from an idyllic past like the 18th century. Surely all of us still remember Prince, Adam Ant or
Michael Jackson, wearing eccentric hacking jackets, or Elton John dressed like Mozart. In the
1980s, being antique meant being modern. Antiquity and medieval chic permeated popular
culture, mainly replicating itself in comics, cinema and TV. The allure of nostalgia explains the
upsurge of fantasy cinema in that decade; a time when fuelled by fertile imagination producers
employed emerging technologies to birth some of the most uncanny cinematic creatures.
The U.S. comic book Camelot 3000 (DC 1984) can be included, as Ulysses 31, in this stream of
futuristic storytelling that borrows from Ancient and Medieval ages: King Arthur himself revives
in the future to combat dark potencies embedded in evil magic and technology, commanded
again by Morgana and Mordred. Equally Ulysses 31 represents that inversion of history, since the
main character is condemned to the same course as his ancestor. These future worlds also assume
philosophical and even politic aspects from the past, such as Imperial governments or chivalry
codes. In the series, Ulysses is introduced as the king of Earth; Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert
also imagined a future Galactic empire administered by aristocratic figures. Moreover, Jedi
knights honour code is like traditional Samurai rules not in vain, Star Wars did not take place in
the future but a long time ago in a Galaxy far, far away Historicism is absent from this
modus operandi, since futuristic genre from the 1980s approaches more to fantasy the depiction
of an fictional universe than to science-fiction the feasible projection of current issues on
upcoming ages.
Despite their obviously kitsch aspect, the view on the future, as well as on the past, help us to
understand better the current philosophy and expectations of the specific age that imagined
them. If we compare the futuristic cinema of the 1950s and the 1960s with its homologous during
the 1980s, a profound fear and distress crosses the first one, while the second is characterized by
a strong sense of evasion. While there existed a social and political frame that explained the sense
of anguish in the first case, Ulysses 31s naf and progressive view on the future was the product of
a hopeful and confident atmosphere.
39
Ulysses returns to Earth?
Nowadays, vintage culture prevails as a central model for design and fashion. Likewise,
Ulysses 31 emerges from oblivion due to its retro aspects rather than by its futuristic will,
although the series general treatment remains more consistent than subsequent reinventions of
Classic mythology, such as Hercules. The Legendary Journeys (Sam Raimi, 1994) or the Disney
production for TV Hercules: The Animated Series (Phil Weinstein, 1998-99), which freely took
the legend of that other hero as source of inspiration. Ulysses 31s theme music, vintage aesthetic,
sense of epic adventure and genuine innocence awakes fascination and melancholy in todays
adult audiences.
Ulysses 31 was originally created to satisfy a double need: entertainment and education in
cultural values. The interaction of European and Japanese studios, like DiC Entertainment and
Tokyo Movie Shinsha, or BRB Internacional and Nippon Animation, was crucial to popularize
these literary shows for children: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Tomu Sy no bken, Hiroshi
Sait, 1980), Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds (Luis Ballester, Shigeo Koshi, 1981) and
Around the World with Willy Fog (Luis Ballester, Fumio Kurokawa, 1981) were also noteworthy
productions. The series developed by Ghibli Sherlock Hound (Meitantei Holmes, Hayao
Miyazaki, Kiosuke Mikurija, 1984-85), which liberally borrowed from Sir Arthur Conan Doyles
writings, could be regarded as the end firecracker of this Golden Age.
However, the animated adaptation of literary works is a nearly extinct genre in present day TV.
Among all factors that contributed to its expiration, the multiplication of TV channels has given
prevalence to other kind of animated shows, as Japanese animated science-fiction and fantasy
series such as Akira Toriyamas Dragon Ball (Doragon Bru, Daisuke Nishio, 1986), which format
approaches to soap opera; or the animated sitcoms re-emerging in 1988 as a successful model of
prime time series with The Simpsons (Matt Groening). Ironically, DVD, Wire TV and Digital TV
channels have created new spaces for old series, a diversified cultural offering that appeals again
to youngsters, but especially to adult audiences that want to re-visit the myths from their
^
childhood. Only thus can Ulysses 31 return from the Hades to Earth.
Mara Lorenzo Hernndez is a filmmaker and Animation Teacher at the Faculty of Fine Arts,
Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain. Contact: Departamento de Dibujo, Camino de Vera
s/n, 46022 Valencia (Spain). A version of this paper was originally presented at the 2008 Popular
Culture and American Culture Association Conference, Animation Panels, San Francisco; March
19th 22nd.
Index Card
Ulysse 31 (Uch densetsu)

France, Japan (DiC Entertainment, Tokyo Movie Shinsha), 1981
Directed by: Bernard Deyris, Kyosuke Mikuriya, Nagahama Tadao
Written by: Jean Chalopin, Nina Wolmark, Homer (poem)
TV-Series, 26 episodes of 30.
Edited in Spain by Divimagic, 2003 (5 DVD).
40

References
Boitani, P. (1992) Lombra di Ulisse, Roma: Societ Editrice Il Mulino (La sombra de Ulises.
Imgenes de un mito en la literatura occidental, Spanish translation by Bernardo Moreno
Carrillo, Barcelona: Pennsula, 2001).
Choza, J. & Choza, P.(1996) Ulises, un arquetipo de la existencia humana, Barcelona: Ariel.
Grace, D. (2008) The Future King: Camelot 3000, in The Journal of Popular Culture, February
2008, vol. 41, n. 1, US: Blackwell Publishing, 21-36.
Graves, R. (1955) Greek Myths, Cassell Limited (Los mitos griegos, Spanish translation by Luca
Graves, Barcelona: Ariel, 2001).
Harrison, M. & Stabile, Carol A. (2003) Prime Time Animation. Television Animation and
American Culture, London: Routledge.
Homer. Ca. 900-850 BC. La Odisea, Madrid: M. E. Editores, 1994.
Vidal-Naquet, P. (2000). Le monde dHomre, Paris: Librarie Acadmique Perrin (El mundo de
Homero. Breve historia de mitologa griega, Spanish translation by Mara Jos Aubet,
Barcelona: Pennsula, 2002).
Mara Lorenzo Hernndez
Thanks to Encarnacin and M Teresa Lorenzo, Clive Nicholas and Dr. Charles daCosta for
their corrections and contributions to this paper.
41

Alan Cholodenko
The Spectre in the Screen

Theories of spectatorship and cinema are nothing new. In fact, they abound. On the other
hand, theories of spectatorship and animation are still rare. Rarer still are theories that implicate
animation and cinema, including in the area of spectatorship.
For us, beyond as well as between theories of cinema spectatorship that attribute a pure
passivity to the spectator and those that grant him a pure mastery, and beyond as well as between
those that present themselves as purely text based and those that present themselves as purely
context based, lies something, something missing from consideration that calls for
acknowledgement, something integral to cinema spectatorship as it is to cinema as such, as it is
to film spectatorship and to film as such animation, film and media studies blind spot.
In accord with my larger project to bring to the fore the crucial nature of animation for the
thinking of not only all forms but all aspects of cinema, of film, of film as such, this paper seeks
to elaborate a theory of spectatorship proper to animation, to film as such as a form of
animation.
Not that I have not broached such a theory already.
This paper is ghosted, like all papers.
Ghosted especially by my The Crypt, the Haunted House, of Cinema (Cholodenko 2004). At
its end, I call for the rethinking of all aspects of cinema as form of animation as form of the
animatic through the spectre, through what I there elaborate as the Cryptic Complex, composed
of the uncanny, the return of death as spectre, endless mourning and melancholia and cryptic
incorporation. I propose that the elements of the Cryptic Complex offer a way of conceptualising
film rich in implication, including for the thinking of the sense(s) of cinema and for the
rethinking of received theories of cinema, including those of ideology, the imaginary, fetishism,
narrative, spectatorship, identification, etc. From this point of view, that of the necrospective,
that of the vanishing point of view, every film and every analysis is a tale from and of the
crypt, making it necessary to conceive of cinema, of film, as spectrography (the writing of the
spectre ghost writing), as cryptography (the writing of the crypt), as thanatography (the writing
of death). To conceive of spectatorship, as of analysis, as spectreship, as haunting and being
haunted, as encrypting, as mourning and melancholia in perpetuity, no matter what other affects
might be generated to cover them over. From this point of view, there is always a spectre and a
speculator in the spectator-analyst, always a corpse and a crypt. In fact, the spectres are always in
the plural; and they are never laid to rest, never resolved, never reconciled. So, too, the analysis of
the crypt, itself the crypt of an analysis, as Jacques Derrida declares (Derrida 1986, p. xxiv).
Ghosted too by my more recent (The) Death (of) the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix
(Cholodenko 2007),1 a text following on from The Crypt, the Haunted House, of Cinema. In this
text I elaborate that spectre not simply as psyche but as psuch. Psuch is the Homeric simulacral
figure, the spectre, that leaves the body of the dead one to wander as flitting shade in Hades,
which is, not insignificantly for us, Maxim Gorkys Kingdom of Shadows, his (for us) Kingdom of
Cinema, of Animation. No matter that Plato turned psuch the spectre into psyche the soul, he
Part II of the paper is in Animation Studies, vol. 2, 2007, on the Society for Animation Studies website. Part I will soon be joining it there.
42

for us was never able to master the spectre who could?! a failure reanimated in every attempt
by all his avatars to be master of the games played by the world and its objects, including master
of cinema, of film animation be it maker, analyst, theorist, spectator.
Platos reversal and ontologizing of the Homeric psuch as soul is inherited in the Latin anima
(air, breath, soul, spirit, mind) and in the soul of Christianity. And in animation thought as
ontological, that is, of the order of presence, essence, the Platonic psyche, the Latin anima, the
soul of Christianity. Which is to say that psuch, for me what Derrida calls the hauntological,
spectres psyche, the ontological pure soul, spirit, mind as it does all rooted in psyche and the
ontological, making them the special case, the reduced, conditional form, of psuch, of the
hauntological.
Spectring the mind, psuch makes of thoughts ghosts.
And I would add: as in-betweener, to use a term of animation, psuch in like manner spectres
the body and all associated with it, with materiality.
Lying at the origin of both cinema and mind, animation as psuch cryptically incorporates
cinema in and as mind and mind in and as cinema, as psuch (and/as animus) likewise lies at the
origin of both cinema and body, of cinema in and as body and body in and as cinema. And
psuch as knot, as we see in the hair of Madeleine/Judy and Carlotta Valdez in Vertigo that
spiral/twist called a Psyche not inextricably knots (such) binary oppositions, creating knotty
problems, problems incapable of resolution, definitiveness, finality, even as the always already
doubled nature of the spectre makes definition impossible, including of animation itself.
Animation as what we call the animatic (the very singularity of animation, anterior and
superior to animation, the condition of possibility and at the same time impossibility of
animation, at once the inanimation in and of animation and animation in and of inanimation, that
nonessence at once enabling and disenabling animation as essence, at once the life of death and
death of life) is of the order of the hauntological, of psuch, the Homeric eidolon of at once
this world and an inaccessible elsewhere (Vernant 1991, p.187).
In (The) Death (of) the Animator I declare that cinema as form of animation, as form of the
animatic calls not simply for a psychoanalysis but a psuch-analysis, an analysis by definition
impossible of resolution, for psuch, even as it enables such a possibility, at the same time spells
its death, as it does that of a science of the psyche, that is, psycho-logy, which would be an
impossible science of the double, of spectres, psuch turning that science into a sance. I would
add: even as it makes a science of cinema and of animation impossible. Such a psuch-analysis
encrypts the analyst and spectator within it, at once turning analyst into spectator and spectator
into analyst, making it impossible to say which is which, commingling them inextricably, turning
spectator and analyst into what they were never not speculators, theorists (from the Greek
theoria, meaning a looking at, contemplation, speculation, from theoros, spectator).
Irretrievably speculative, not only ghosted by but ghosting them in turn, this paper draws forth
from these texts and their calls, in this case to extend in particular the theory of spectatorship
already broached in those texts, considering the spectator and the screen.
In so doing, it is immediately confronted with the question: is my call for a psuch-analysis of
cinema, of film of film as a form of animation one not already responded to to a significant
degree in the application to film since the 1990s of Jacques Lacans psychoanalytics of vision in
the work of Joan Copjec, Slavoj iek and Todd McGowan work serving as a corrective to the
1970s French and English Marxist film theorisations that brought Lacans article The Mirror
Phase as Formative of the Function of the I to the theorising of the cinematic apparatus (even
43

while those theorisations at times misunderstood and misrepresented it)? Such theorisations were
at best partial applications, ignoring, or in the case of Christian Metz undervaluing, Lacans
complex elaboration of the scopic field in his
The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoAnalysis, an ignoring that included Lacans
focus there on the term that became
increasingly significant for him the Real.
Here I turn to Holbeins The Ambassadors.
Lacan makes it the centrepiece of his model
of vision (Lacan 1979, p. 91 and p. 106), the
overlapping triangles diagramming the
irreducible split, the antinomy, between the
eye and the gaze of the irreconcilably split
subject for him the subject seeing the object
as image and the object gazing at the subject
as screen, turning the subject thereby into the
object of the object, into, Lacan says, a
picture, a photo-graph (Lacan 1979, p. 106),
that is, a drawing/writing with light2 what is
the determination of the subject in the field of
the other by the gaze, which is objet petit a (in
English little object a, a for autre, other) in the scopic field.
For Lacan, the scopic field is one where the subject seeing is always already given to-be-seen
by what is for Lacan privileged the object the object petit a, object-cause of desire. Its effect is
not only to keep desire desire by keeping it unfulfilled, but also to undermine the Imaginary
illusion of the mastery of the subject over all he surveys, as well as to introduce constitutive lack
into the field of signification known as the Symbolic-objet petit a the void, emptiness, abyss,
around which the symbolic order is structured (iek 1989, p. 170). Object petit a stands in for
Lacan for and as the Real, his third term in the trio Imaginary, Symbolic and Real. The Real is
what is excluded from reality, including the Imaginary and the Symbolic, for reality to be reality.
It is a hole in reality, an ungraspable, undeterminable, non-signifying traumatic kernel of nonsense at the heart of reality, at the heart of the subject, at once their very condition of possibility
and impossibility.
Obviously, it cannot be totally excluded from reality, rather it is traced within it, it even erupts
within it, even constitutively so, Joan Copjec tells us (Copjec 2002, p. 184), which makes it for me
like Derridas repressed but irrepressible trace of the radically other operating within, and at once
enabling and disenabling, the structure of difference that is the sign. Indeed, Lacan declares that
the trace of the Real as stain of the gaze is marked at every stage of the constitution of the world,
in the scopic field (Lacan 1979, p. 74), as the trace is likewise for Derrida, who, calling the
spectre perhaps the hidden figure of all figures (Derrida 1994, p. 120), turns the trace into a
form of the spectre.
The Holbein, a vanitas painting, a memento mori (a reminder of death), exemplifies Lacans
animated, indeed animatic, modelling of vision. He declares:
2
On the relation of drawing and animation, see my Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or the Framing of Animation, The Illusion of the Beginning: A
Theory of Drawing and Animation, Still Photography? and the forthcoming The Animation of Cinema.
44

the secret of this picture is given at the moment when, moving slightly away, little by little, to the left, then
turning around, we see what the magical floating object signifies. It reflects our own nothingness, in the figure of
the deaths head. It is a use, therefore, of the geometral dimension of vision in order to capture the subject, an
obvious relation with desire which, nevertheless, remains enigmatic. (Lacan 1979, p. 92)
Lacan identifies the anamorphotic skull in the foreground as la tache, which means stain, spot
a stain, spot, that is not only, he states, the phallic symbol, the anamorphic ghost, of the
Symbolic but that which is superior to it, exemplifying the very function of vision as trap for the
subject of desire: the gaze as such, in its
pulsatile, dazzling and spread out function
(Lacan 1979, p. 89). What would be second
spectre iek calls it Lacans fantasmatic
spectre (iek 2005, 2006, p. 239) of the Real
that of objet petit a, the primordially lost
object, seen only by looking awry, that
oblique look marking the thing that forever
eludes the grasp of the subject, that look that
turns, that is, metamorphoses, anamorphoses reanimates the signifier of lack of the Symbolic
order into the lack of the signifier of the Real.
So Lacan had found the spectres traced in the Holbein long before I had,3 the psuch and the
psuch of the psuch, the psuch as such. His psychoanalysis is psuch-analysis.
Now, another word Lacan uses for the stain, the spot, is the screen, stating: if I am anything
in the picture, it is always in the form of the screen, which I earlier called the stain, the spot
(Lacan 1979, p. 97).
So the stain, spot, spectre, is the screen, the screen of the gaze of objet petit a. It is the point of
vanishing being of the subject. The dead point, the point where the picture looks back, telling
the subject it is always already accounted for, inscribed within, enframed and determined by, it.
The screen is, we would say, the crypt of the subject, the place of cryptic incorporation, where
the subject is encrypted as its own impossibility. It is the place where the subject is always
already turned into a spectre, into spectres.
Indeed, one day, looking awry at the Oxford English Dictionary definition of the word screen,
I saw these words: The form has probably been influenced by confusion with screne = SCRINE,
chest, coffer.
A check then disclosed that the words chest, coffer, are etymologically and semantically related
to the word coffin!
The screen as coffin.
Crucially, Todd McGowan, treating of the Holbein, says, Even when a manifestation of the
gaze does not make death evident directly like this, it nonetheless carries the association insofar as
the gaze itself marks the point in the image at which the subject is completely subjected to it
(McGowan 2007, p. 7), to the gaze.
And the stain, spot, spectre, screen is scotoma, another term Lacan uses, which means a
dimming of sight accompanied by dizziness, vertigo, and is term for the blind spot in our normal
field of vision. For Lacan, the consciousness of the subject is scotoma, a blind spot blind to its
lack of mastery, including of the visual field, dependent as that field is on the gaze, itself blind,
3
See (The) Death (of) the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix, Part II, Animation Studies, vol. 2, 2007, p. 10, note 3.
45

indeed indifferent to, but nonetheless animating of, the subject, the subject blind to the blind
spot as such that is the objet petit a, blind to that point of vanishing being of itself (Lacan 1979,
p. 83), except when that spot is looked at awry. It is a spot that is at once traumatizing,
wounding, pricking and eluding, a punctum (petite tache for Roland Barthes, as Margaret Iversen
tells us4) and darkness that can never be brought to the light of understanding, of grasping, and
that at once organises and disorganises the visual field.
In other words, the tache (spot) is blind spot ((tache aveugle) is screen at once barrier and
passage, at once the barrier of the passage and the passage of the barrier like Derridas notion
of hymen.5 It is that entity that is at once unseen, in fact is never seen as such, but that allows
one to see, is the very condition of possibility of sight the blindness that make sight at once
possible and impossible.6
The tache, stain, spot, blind spot, spectre, scotoma marks the point of the turn, where the
image turns on itself, uncannily turning into screen, turning the subject from illusory mastery to
nothingness, an effect of not only metamorphosis but anamorphosis, not only an animation but
an animatic effect. Ana-, as in anamorphosis, meaning back, again, reminds us of the turn, the
return, including of death, including of Freuds death drive, for which all uncanny returns are
stand-ins, the return of death to the subject and the subject to it, which the subject had never left
nor death it. And of the phantasm, the spectre, of immortality beyond the cycle of life and death
that the death drive urges upon the subject. It reminds us too of the deformation in every
reformation, and vice versa, of the difference in every repetition, and vice versa, and of the
destitution in every restitution, and vice versa. Mourning and melancholia are its affects.
So the blind spot of the gaze, equivalent to the blind spot of the mind the psyche is for me
psuch the spectre not only in but as the screen and the screen not only in but as the spectre, the
screen as such, the spectre as such. In spectring the subject, the gaze turns the subject into
spectre(s).
Copjec writes: the field of vision is haunted by what remains invisible in it, by the impossible
to see (Copjec 2002, p. 94). This is the effect on Lacan of the fantasmatic, that is, spectral, object
he calls objet petit a, the object-cause of desire, the object that, like that famous floating sardine
can, looks back at him, an object therefore with a life of its own, lifedeath, animate(d) and
animating, indeed animatic, an object that not merely attracts but seduces him, as I discovered
when I caught Alan Sheridan badly mistranslating seduces as attracts! (Lacan 1979, p. 112).
Here Lacan crosses paths with Jean Baudrillard, with whom he has in my articulation already
met, without my having the space to divulge it to you, but let us at least note their common
assertion of the superior life of the object and its games over the subject and his desires, the
quantum object even, horizon of the subjects disappearance (Baudrillard 2000, pp. 76-77),
object which seduces the subject, plays with the subject, who for Lacan can return the favour and
4
Not only does Margaret Iversen point out how Roland Barthes thinking of the punctum takes up Lacans tache, Barthes even using the term
petite tache to characterise punctum (Iversen 1994, p. 457), she indicates the relevance to both Lacans and Barthes tache of Georges Batailles
notion of la tache aveugle, the blind spot (Iversen 1994, p. 463, note 29). See my treatment of Baudrillards photograph, Punto Final, in terms of
the punctum in Still Photography?.
5
As I treat of it in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Hymen is one of Derridas many undecidable, deconstructing figures, in this case meaning both
virgin and consummated, neither simply virgin nor simply consummated, at the same time (along with such likewise deconstructed oppositions as
confusion/distinction, identity/difference, veil/unveiling, inside/outside, etc.) In that essay, I link the figure of the hymen to that of the eye of the
spectator, to the self, to the cinema screen and to film as such, the hymen of the eye/ Idisseminating the unity of meaning, of presence and
self-presence as identity (p. 233), including the identity of film as such, not only penetrated but never penetrated at the same time.
6
Parenthetically, Derridas treatment of the parergon, the tain, the supplement, is relevant to the degree that the screen is and has been regarded
as supporting act to the star, the image. The screen as repressed but irrepressible trace of the other would never not be returning to the image as
what at once enables and disenables it.
46

play with the object as a mask (to its mask, I would add), who for Baudrillard can return the
challenge. And they seem to share the simulacrum hiding (the) nothing the nothing which
haunts reality the question: why is there nothing rather than something?, and the secret.
Here let me simply propose: Lacans Real is to reality as Baudrillards Seduction is to his
second order of simulacra, that of production and simulation, which order he too calls reality,
making reality the special case, the reduced conditional form, of both Lacans Real and
Baudrillards Seduction.7 Which is to say that the objet petit a as gaze lures, seduces, the subject,
leads it astray, annihilates it and the putative mastery that the Imaginary, that production,
reproduction and simulation, installed in the psyche.
I call objet petit a objet petit animatique, at once animating and deanimating reality and the
subject.
I call it psuch.
The animating, indeed animatic, spectre of Death the animator, Death which, as formless
form, as Lacans informe, gives all form, but is itself never given as such, just like Eisensteins
plasmaticness, which for him is essence of animation and for me non-essence of animation as the
animatic. Like the Thing in John Carpenters The Thing from Another World, which is for me the
very figure of Freuds death drive as organic elasticity of protozoa (Freud 1984, p. 309).
Indeed, insofar as Lacans tuch, the encounter with the real (Lacan 1979, p. 53), is for me an
animating encounter with his amoeba like, for me plasmatic, lamella (Lacan 1979, pp. 197-199),
it is an encounter with the Thing in the Carpenter film. iek in fact links the alien Thing in the
Carpenter film to Lacans lamella, marking its uncanny, morphing, infinitely plastic, simulacral,
undead nature, declaring the alien is libido as pure life, indestructible and immortal (iek 2006,
p. 63), and describing it as standing for the Real in its most terrifying imaginary dimension, as the
primordial abyss that swallows everything, dissolving all identities (iek 2006, p. 64). An
encounter with Lacans lamella, with his Thing, is therefore for me an encounter with psuch, the
animatic.
The Things capacity to seduce by simulating, making whatever it simulates enter its realm of
metamorphosis, even despite itself, turning it from its destination to its destiny, cannot but recall
for me the way in which Baudrillard turns Freuds death drive on Freud, making Freud enter
Baudrillards realm of metamorphosis, turning death into reversion, reversal, the very turn of
Seduction, the turn that for Baudrillard is Seduction the reversibility of anything and everything
and into challenge. In such a light, psuch, the animatic, is not only fatal to reconcilation as
such, it is never not fatal to itself.
But here we must ask: Is all this not Maxim Gorkys experience of cinema as form of
animation as form of the animatic as he relates it in his for me account of the unaccountable, of
what will not, can never, compute? And as I treat of it in The Crypt, the Haunted House, of
Cinema and (The) Death (of) the Animator?
Can we not read Gorkys response through Lacan, through his seductive, animatic model of
vision as he exemplifies it with Holbeins The Ambassadors and as we have elaborated it? In
Lacanian terms, would it not be fair to say that Gorky was traumatised, wounded, by his
encounter with the gaze as objet petit a? Gorky saw the stain, the spot, the scotoma, the blind
spot the screen as apparition, his own apparition as spectre and the blind spot of the blind
7
And as Derridas diffrance is to presence, making presence the special case, the reduced conditional form, of diffrance. I must note here: the
thinkers whose work I privilege, Baudrillard, Derrida, Lacan et al., are not only thinkers of animation and the animatic but animatic thinkers of it.
Please consult my Introduction to The Illusion of Life 2: More Essays on Animation for an elaboration of this point.
47

spot death, his own death, his own lifedeath, his condition as undead, (his) reality put on the
spot by the Real, by psuch, the spectre that screens that is, at once installs, reveals, conceals
(re-veils), and retracts-(the) nothing.8
In fact, Gorkys description of his experience of cinema makes of the image as well as what it
images spectres, to which he adds more spectres with his famous declaration: Suddenly a strange
flicker passes through the screen and the picture stirs to life, metamorphosing from still
photographic image to mobile cinematographic image, passing from virtual animation to actual
animation.
He saw the spectre that is this uncannily animating flicker stirring the image and what it
images to life, turning still image into mobile image, and turning that mobile image (back) on
itself, turning image into screen, at once drawing that life, or rather lifedeath, forward and
withdrawing it, indeed drawing it forward in withdrawing it and withdrawing it in drawing it
forward at the same time.
And he adds another spectre yet: the spectator. Cinema spectres the spectator even as the
spectator spectres it, each having the other as its spectre, its haunted house, its corpse and its
crypt.
And more yet: the maker and the analyst-theorist.
And all are in the plural.
These spectres, screens, haunted houses and crypts not only multiply but concatenate, at once
spectring, screening, housing and encrypting and in turn being spectred, screened, housed and
encrypted in and by each other.
The Cryptic Complex.
Animation as the animatic turns the spectator into what it always already was, a spectre, a
spectre of the other, ghosted by and ghosting it, including ghosted by and ghosting the cinema
and the cinematic apparatus, its characters and its author/maker, even as the cinema and its
apparatus are ghosted by animation and its apparatus, as all these are ghosted by and ghosting the
animatic apparatus. As well, the animatic (and its apparatus) ghosts all models theorising the
spectator as simply a fully living human being (as form of presence, soul, spirit), including those
models figuring that spectator as either merely passive or merely active.
The life of cinema, of film, as form of animation is psuch, the animatic, lifedeath, making the
subjects sight and the image the special case, the reduced conditional form, of the gaze and the
screen, making the subject the special case, the reduced conditional form, of the object, objet
petit a, making life for me, as Nietzsche put it, the special case of death.
As for the hyperreality, the virtual reality, of todays world, let me repeat this thought of
Baudrillard, a thought marking the passage from the mirror stage of reality, where the self was
accompanied by a shadow which paradoxically made the self a self, a self as constitutively always
divided from itself, always spectred by its shadow even as it spectred its shadow, to the screen
stage of hyperreality, the stage of the clone, the revenge of the mirror people who break the
mirror and enter into reality.
As Baudrillard says, He who has no shadow is merely the shadow of himself (Baudrillard
2004, p. 103).
Or as we would say: He who has no psuch is merely the psuch of himself.
8
I would add: Gorky experienced Barthes punctum, he experienced Batailles blind spot.
48

The crypt of him-self.
His own coffin.
His own Kingdom of Shadows, not the old Hades, the old spectre, of the Other but the
Hell, the spectre, of the Same.
He is the man of but screens.
He is only screen.
He is Total Screen.
Denis Nedry of Jurassic Park, not only surrounded by but surrounding and indistinguishable
from screens.
He is Baudrillards Telematic Man, his Tele-Computer Man.
And he is Paul Virilios Man of the Three Bombs (atomic bomb, cyber/information bomb and
genetic bomb), after Einstein, and as well figure of Virilios Total Accident of science (Virilio and
Lotringer, 2002, pp. 135-137, 142, 153-155), as testified to by Nedrys computer, with the
fascinating images attached to it a photo of J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic
bomb, with two papers stuck on top of it: a drawing with a mushroom-shaped cloud of the
atomic bomb imaged within and doubling a thought balloon; and the words Beginning of Baby
Boom on the paper next to it.9
He is Baudrillards and Virilios Man the extension, the prosthesis, of his machines, his vision
machines, as exemplified by Deckard, with his Voight-Kampff machine, testing Rachael, in Blade
Runner.
He is Terminal Man, too, exemplified by Miles Dyson of the Cyberdyne Corporation and
Major General Robert Brewster, USAF, who arguably have put Skynet onlineas them-selves.
They are it and it is they.
He that is all these Men is for me avatar of that shadow, that crypt of him-self, that is Dr
Strangelove.
He is hyperanimated, hyperanimatic, hyperlifedeath: at once a life more death than death,
more dead than dead, and a death more life than life, more alive than alive.
He is Baudrillards ecstatic, Lacans Real, in their metastatic, viral, fractal, clonal expression:
hyper-psuch, figured for me most compellingly in the skull of the Terminator.
He is hyperspectre.
The Death of Death.
^
The end of the end
Alan Cholodenko is former Head of Department and Senior Lecturer in Film and Animation
Studies in the Department of Art History and Film Studies at the University of Sydney, where he
now holds the title of Honorary Associate. This paper was presented at the SCREENSCAPES PAST
PRESENT FUTURE conference at the University of Sydney, 29 November-1 December, 2007.
On those attachments to Nedrys computer, see my The Nutty Universe of Animation, the Discipline of All Disciplines, And Thats Not
All, Folks!.
49

References
Baudrillard, J. (2000), The Vital Illusion, Columbia University Press, New York.
Baudrillard, J. (2004), Fragments, Routledge, London.
Cholodenko, A. (1991), Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or the Framing of Animation, in A
Cholodenko (ed), The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation, Power Publications in
association with the Australian Film Commission, Sydney.
Cholodenko, A. (2000), The Illusion of the Beginning: A Theory of Drawing and Animation,
Afterimage, vol. 28, no. 1, July/August.
Cholodenko, A. (2004), The Crypt, the Haunted House, of Cinema, Cultural Studies Review, vol.
10, no. 2, September.
Cholodenko, A. (2005), Still Photography?, Afterimage, vol. 32, no. 5, March/April, reprinted
2008 in International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, January, Bishops
University, Canada (http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/).
Cholodenko, A. (2006), The Nutty Universe of Animation, the Discipline of All Disciplines,
And Thats Not All, Folks!, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, vol. 3, no. 1,
January, Bishops University, Canada (www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies).
Cholodenko, A. (2007), (ed) The Illusion of Life 2: More Essays on Animation, Power
Publications, Sydney.
Cholodenko, A. (2007, 2008), (The) Death (of) the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix, Parts I
and II. Part II is in Animation Studies, vol. 2, on the Society for Animation Studies website.
Part I is forthcoming there.
Copjec, J. (2002), The Strut of Vision: Seeings Corporeal Support, Imagine Theres No Woman:
Ethics and Sublimation, MIT Press, Cambridge.
Derrida, J. (1986), Fors, in N Abraham & M Torok, The Wolf Mans Magic Word: A
Cryptonomy, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
Derrida, J. (1994), Spectres of Marx, Routledge, New York.
Freud, S. (1984), Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in Freud, S., The Pelican Freud Library, vol.
11: On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth,
Middlesex, England.
Iversen, M. (1994), What is a Photograph?, Art History, vol. 17, no. 3, September.
Lacan, J. (1979), The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Penguin Books,
Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England.
McGowan, T. (2007), The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan, State University of New York
Press, Albany.
Vernant, J.-P. (1991), Mortals and Immortals, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Virilio, P., and Lotringer, S. (2002), Crepuscular Dawn, Semiotext(e), New York.
iek, S. (1989), The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, London.
iek, S. (2005, 2006), Interrogating the Real, Continuum, London.
iek, S. (2006), How to Read Lacan, Granta Books, London.
Alan Cholodenko
50

Timo Linsenmaier
Why animation historiography?

Or: Why the commissar shouldnt vanish
Truth is strange, stranger than fiction.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, THE TREMENDOUS ADVENTURES OF MAJOR GAHAGAN
(THACKERAY 1921, 1)
In spring 2008, a vociferous discussion erupted on the Society for Animation Studies mailing
list on the subject of an extensive definition of animation. More technically-oriented explanations
clashed with highly theoretical ones, scarcely finding a common ground between the variety of
arguments brought forward. Strangely absent from the discussions, however, was the question of
animation historiography, of an analysis of the processes by which our historical knowledge of
animation is obtained and transmitted, helping in the definition of the object of inquiry.
And indeed, while there have been rather many histories of animation, so far only a few
animation scholars have thoroughly undertaken to explore how historical developments relating
to their study of animation are registered and chronicled. There are certainly well-worn, often
formative paths of narration that so far characterise how history has been viewed and written in
Animation Studies. Several examples come to mind: Giannalberto Bendazzis gargantuan, yet
curiously Vasarian canonical work Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation (Bendazzi
1994); Michael Barriers landmark, but deliberately re-narrating Hollywood Cartoons: American
Animation in Its Golden Age (Barrier 1999); John Halas influential, but very productionorientated framework Masters of Animation (Halas 1987); or Sergey Asenins Walt Disney: Secrets
of a Drawn World (Asenin 1995), which, while in many ways insightful, is peculiarly unsuspecting
of the difficulties of oral history.
These works, while all of them milestones in Animation Studies, to a certain extent miss the
possibility of reflecting on the ways in which intrinsic as well as extrinsic factors influence the way
historical conceptions are developed. However, this is certainly attempted in works like, for
example, David MacFadyens book Yellow Crocodiles and Blue Oranges (MacFadyen 2005) that
draws on a large variety of sources and their analysis; it can also be encountered in Robin Allans
Walt Disney and Europe (Allan 1999) that undertakes a laborious verification of sources to
establish its main arguments.
This paper will endeavour to examine some aspects of this heterogeneous initial situation,
posing the question of how history has been and how it is written (Breisach 2004, 4). A
discussion that has been conducted in the discipline of history itself since in the 19 th century,
Leopold von Ranke asked the question of wie es eigentlich gewesen (a question well-nigh
untranslatable, as it not only asks for what has actually happened, but also for the metaphysical
implications of what has happened) especially as, thinking of Hans Beltings The End of the
History of Art? (Belting 1987), similar discussions have been launched profitably in other
disciplines.
However, a first stocktaking of views on the process and implications of the writing of history
hardly seems favourable: One of the first thinkers to tackle the question was Aristotle, who in his
Poetics clearly states which side he has sympathy for when comparing history and poetry:
51

The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus
might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with meter no less than without
it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry,
therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the
universal, history the particular. (Aristotle)
Edward Halper interprets this by determining that Aristotle sees the discipline of history as a
chronicle of human events that are intrinsically particular and, consequently, never the subject of
scientific knowledge: History would seem to be well-named: it is indeed a story (Halper). It has
taken historians a rather long time to embrace the concept of the narrative aspects of their
discipline. One of the founding fathers of modern historiography, Edward Carr, remarked in
his George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge in 1961: It
used to be said that facts speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue. The facts speak only
when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what
order or context (Carr 1961 p.11).
Only when embracing this point of view and the discussions ensuing from it, historians came
to terms with a development that many had seen as perhaps the most far-reaching,
comprehensive, and explicit challenge to history as a discipline (Evans 2000 p.81): the
structuralist and deconstructivist theories that during the 1960s were developed in France by
Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, and that more or less openly called for the abolition of
history as an academic discipline. Roland Barthes had, in his 1968 essay The discourse of
history, charged that historians claim to reconstruct past reality rested on a pretence. For him
written history was an inscription of the past pretending to be a likeness of it, a parade of
signifiers masquerading as a collection of facts(Barthes 1981 p.8). Objectivity, whether it be the
objectivity of the historian himself or of his sources, was the product of what might be called the
reverential illusion (Barthes 1981 p.11). For Barthes, the illusion lays in the fact that the past is
only imagined to be out there, waiting to be discovered. In practice it is an empty space waiting to
be filled by the historian. Verbatim quotations, footnote references, and other tools of the
historians trade would simply be devices designed to produce what Barthes described as the
reality effect, an effect that should convince the reader, and the writer himself, that these
particular representations of the past were more than straightforward storytelling. Richard Evans
quotes Jacques Derrida in noting that historians own understanding of what they did remained
[...] stubbornly logocentric. (Evans 2000 p.81). Derrida indeed went much further than
Barthes and argued that the relation between signifier and signified changes each time a word is
uttered. In such a case, language becomes an infinite play of significations, all equally valid or
invalid. It is true that Derrida, as Willy Maley has put it, denies the equation of textualization
with trivialization (Maley 2008). Still, the implication of text as an essentially differential
network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, to other differential
traces (Derrida 2004 p.81) results, in Derridas interpretation, in everything becoming
discourse or text. In other words, every document, every source, becomes a mere
arrangement of words. In this view as we apprehend the world through language alone
nothing exists outside language, with all the aforementioned consequential ambiguities. From
such a conviction, it was only a small step to jar what had hitherto been regarded as the
foundations of the discipline, as e.g. Keith Jenkins did:
No discourse and therefore no contribution to, and/or comment on, aspects of an existing
discourse is of a natural kind. You cannot find a historical or geographical or scientific or
literary discourse just out there, just growing wild. Discourses are cultural, cultivated, fabricated
52

and thus ultimately arbitrary, ways of carving up what comes to constitute their field, so that like
any approach in any other discursive practice an introductory discussion about history today
could begin from innumerable starting points and be developed in various ways: in these matters
one always has to make that a start (and come to an end) somewhere. (Jenkins 1996 p.15)
Drawing on these observations, Jenkins maintains that while the past can be represented in
many modes, the only valid ones would be those that call attention to their own processes of
production, explicitly reflect their own assumptions, and indicate the constituted rather than the
found nature of their reference what Jenkins calls the historicised past (Jenkins 1996 p.10).
Indeed, Lawrence Stone found that the linguistic turn has taught us to examine texts with
far more care and caution than we did before, using new tools to disclose covered beneath overt
messages, decipher the meaning of subtle shifts of grammar and so on (Stone 1991 p.27). This
certainly is a development to be welcomed. Hayden White, one of the most ardent advocates for
a new understanding of how a historical discourse can be established, has pointed out the
growing awareness on the part of historians of the literary narrative elements in their own work
research as well as writing (White 1996 p.37).
However, for historians the past turned out not to be completely at the mercy of historical
narrativity after all. White, who besides was one of the most outspoken postmodern critics of
history as a discipline coined the term emplotment to highlight that historians, in order to make
a story intelligible and meaningful as history, told it (consciously or unconsciously) only in
conformity to their preferences. In later writings he back-pedalled on this assumption, especially
when confronted with an ongoing discussion on Holocaust denial and postmodernism (further
reading e.g. Eaglestone 2001). He maintained that in his earlier writings he was more concerned
to point out the ways in which historians used literary methods in their work and, in so doing,
inevitably imported a fictive element into it, because their written style did not simply report
what they had found but actually constructed the subject of their writing. In his later work he
came to draw a clear distinction between fiction, on the one hand, and history, on the other.
Rather than imagine the object first, then write about it in a manner that is therefore mainly
subjective, history exists only in the action of writing, involving a kind of simultaneous
production or identification of the author of the discourse and the referent or thing about which
he or she was writing (White 1996 p.49). Historical imagination, he says, calls for the imagining
of both the real world from which one has launched ones inquiry into the past and the world
that comprises ones object of interest (White 1996 p.49). In this light the action of writing
history escapes the action of writing mere fiction. An abolition of differences of meaning in texts,
especially in source material, thus cannot be upheld, as Richard Evans ascertains:
The distinction between primary and secondary sources on the whole has survived the
withering theoretical hail rained down upon it by the postmodernists. The past does speak from
sources and is recoverable through them. There is a qualitative difference between documents
written in the past, by living people, for their own purposes, and interpretations advanced about
the past by historians living at a later date. (Evans 2000 p.108)
Very much the same can be said of animation. There is a qualitative difference between
animation films made in the past, by living people, for their own purposes, and interpretations
advanced about those films by scholars living at a later date. A small deviation into Soviet history
will illustrate this further. There is scarcely an example better suited to exemplify this train of
thought than what Frederick C. Corney has called the telling of October (Corney 2004), namely
the targeted constructing of the myth of the October Revolution as a great rising of the masses of
oppressed workers in Russia as opposed to a coup dtat by a small and almost follower-less
53

political group. All revolutionary regimes seek to legitimize themselves through foundation
narratives that, told and retold, become constituent parts of the social fabric, erasing or pushing
aside alternative histories (Corney 2004 p.IX). The October Revolution which brought the
Bolshevik regime to power in 1917 resulted in a devastating civil war that continued until 1921.
Fleeing from terror, an enormous amount of emigrants left Russia after the Red Armys ultimate
victory, a process which stripped the country of its social, professional and intellectual elites.
Consistent with their aim to dominate the whole of Russian society, the new regime made no
exception from its purges and cleansing for culture, though it did not operate with the same
thoroughness in the cultural sphere as in the social and political arena. At least in the early years,
scholars and artists continued to enjoy a fair measure of intellectual freedom. With the help of a
fair amount of laissez-faire policy, the Bolsheviks hoped to regain the confidence of the
intellectuals, who did not bother to disguise their distaste for Bolshevik vulgarity and brutality
(Maes 2002 p.237). Before Stalins ascent to power, this led to an enormous output of creativity in
every department of the arts in animation, too, for that matter. The Avantgarde artists earned,
as Boris Groys has put it, admiration everywhere and deservedly so for their daring radicalism
(1996 p.9). This changed fundamentally, however, when in 1932, Stalin published a manifesto in
the Literaturnaja Gazeta which stated that the masses demand of an artist honesty, truthfulness,
and a revolutionary, socialist realism in the representation of the proletarian revolution
(Harrison 2003 p.418). This led to the advent of Socialist Realism as a dogmatic framework
during the second half of the 1930s, and the early Soviet animation pioneers crude and cruel,
but vigorous (Stephenson 1968 p.148) animation shorts as well as other Avantgarde artworks
would not be tolerated any more. Now, moral and ideological certainty was required from all
works of art in the line of duty of the Soviet Union. If, as Paul Wells puts it, animation
legitimised the social and political ambivalence of narratives by simultaneously approximating
some of the conditions of real existence whilst distancing itself from them by recourse to the
unique aspects of its own vocabulary (2002 p.21), such an approach could no longer be allowed.
What Soviet bureaucracy needed were images that are made with the purpose to help along a
desirable reality (Wyss 1997 p.57), not images that questioned this not at all perfect reality.
Indeed, it was the propaganda department that had found the most radical answer to the
question of what this reality should look like, especially in photography. David King has in
his book The commissar vanishes (King 1997) magnificently documented the efforts of Soviet
propaganda officials during Stalins reign of terror to alter history and to show that Stalin had
almost single-handedly brought about the revolution. When during the great purges somebody
had fallen out of grace or was shot, hordes of Communist party workers retouched photographs
showing him or her, thus eliminating all but Stalin from the images. The physical eradication of
Stalins political opponents at the hands of the secret police was swiftly followed by their
obliteration from all forms of pictorial existence (King 1997 p.7). King notes that so much
falsification took place during the years of terror that it became possible to tell the story of the
Soviet era through retouched photographs not the reality of the past, but the reality of the
time being.
The libraries of the former Soviet Union still bear these scars of vigilant political vandalism.
Many volumes political, cultural, or scientific published in the first two decades of Soviet rule
had whole chapters ripped out by the censors. Reproductions of photographs of future enemies
of the people were attacked with disturbing violence. In schools across the country, children
54

were actively engaged by their teachers in the creative removal of the denounced from their
textbooks. A collective paranoia stretched right through the period of Soviet rule. (King 1997
p.6)
The discussion whether photography is depicting reality is as old as the technology of
photography itself, and time and again artists have strived to undermine or contradict this
reality. Thomas Demands fascinatingly intricate cardboard worlds, Cindy Shermans film
stills, Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroes painfully obvious, yet surprisingly ambiguous masquerades,
Andreas Gurskys painstakingly composed monumental light-boxes or (art historian turned
photographer) Jeff Walls subtly arranged cityscapes all point into that direction, guiding the
beholder along towards a denouement of the underlying structures that constitute this
particular kind of reality. But none of them have succeeded as staggeringly as Soviet
propaganda.
Jan Assmann maintains that history by way of recollection becomes a myth. In this process, it
does not become unsubstantial, but on the contrary, it gathers formative and normative strength
(Assmann 2005 p.52). By shaping these recollections, the telling of October effectively
emplots the Bolshevist version of history, the foundation myths of Soviet Russia. Hans Belting
has pointed towards the ultimate necessity to go beyond these emplotted renderings of
historical events. He underlines the necessity of the historians endeavour to retrieve the historical
sources by deconstructing the processes that obliterated them: The production of the imaginary
is necessarily subject to a social process, wherefore fiction not inevitably takes up the place of the
imaginary. [...] The authority that it gains lives solely on the power we convey to it.(Belting 2000
p.82).
How effectively its prerogative of interpretation has been used by Soviet propaganda to convey
power to the Bolshevik version of the events of the October Revolution can strikingly be traced
by means of a virtually unknown film of Jurij Norshtejn, 25th The First Day. Co-authored
with Arkadij Tjurin, this is Norshtejns first attempt at directing after long years as animator with
Sojuzmultfilm. 1967 marked the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution. Although Stalins
excesses had been decried, his methods, though somewhat alleviated, were still made ample use
of by the Soviet authorities. When Norshtejn and Tjurin set out to glorify the revolution, they
were genuinely fervent and deeply inspired by the idea of a regenerated world, a destiny shaped
by the people themselves, (cit. sec. Kitson 2005 p.38) a vision that had long been at the heart of
the Communist propaganda efforts.
Now Jurij Norshtejn is as good a synonym for artistic integrity as can be found, and the
concentrated self-reflexive perspective that forms the very focus of his work Mieczylaw Walasek
quotes him in underlining this attitude: What kind of viewer do I have in mind in my work? As
paradoxical as it may seem, I have myself in mind. (Walasek 1980 p.42) elevates him above
suspicion of collaborating, of making a film without pouring his very lifeblood into the
endeavour. In fact, in drawing his inspiration and sources for this film from artists of the time of
the revolution, often fallen from grace since the advent of Socialist Realism the title is taken
from a poem by Majakovskij; the images cite artworks from Tatlin, Petrov-Vodkin, Chagall,
Malevich, Deineka; and the music is by Shostakovich he met with the wrath of the censors. The
work was blamed as being formalist meaning degenerated and was not released to the
general public.
55

While this shows the aforementioned absence of currying favour with the authorities, the film
also illustrates the way Norstejn and Tjurin approached what they saw as the revolutionary zeal of
the masses, conveyed to them as to any other Soviet citizen by the myths Soviet propaganda
created around the October Revolution: the salvo of the Cruiser Aurora, the storm of the Winter
Palace, the Workers Councils taking power and so on.
The young artists are certainly not to blame for this. Artistically, as Norshtejn later affirmed,
the reflections on artists of the time and the transformation of their creative findings into
adequate movement, taught him what animation was about the very concept of the essence of
animation (Eizenshtein 1986 p.87) that Eizenshtein speaks about in his writings about
animation. But this point illustrates very clearly that the telling of October had been done so
effectively that even an independent-minded artist like Norshtejn was unable to overcome this
to use David Beresfords somewhat worn expression: History is written by the winners
(Beresford April 27, 2003).
Without reverting to a nave realism: This is precisely the point at which a merely theoretical
approach fails: Animation that is made for propaganda purposes loses nothing of its essence in
Eisensteins sense, nothing of its intrinsic characteristics, but gains a meta-level that is only
properly understood by placing the work in its historical context. Carr in his lectures has referred
to the menace of becoming ultra-theoretical [...], the danger of losing [one]self in abstract and
meaningless generalizations, (Carr 1961, 65) and Ethan de Seife has drawn attention to the often
problematic jargonistic blurring of terms which could [...] use more clarity (Ethan de Seife,
April 07, 2008).
This is no to imply that all theoretical approaches necessarily entail problems and are of small
value, quite on the contrary. As we have seen above, properly applied theoretical models allow for
a more accurate formulation of questions. It is important that theory informs practice, but at the
same time it is important that theory does not lose sight of practice. The following quote can on
the one hand be read as a declaration that the irresolvability of a question means that the work of
research and scholarship is necessary, and needs to continue. On the other hand, the example at
the same time is not entirely unaffected by aspects of the aforementioned indefinite languagegames that we have seen to curtail research-based modes of investigation:
Oh, yes, the felicity of Felix. To the perennial question bedevilling animation scholars who
animated, authored, originated Felix? Pat Sullivan or Otto Messmer? - for us, Felix is the very
answer to the question. The felicity of Felix is that, as a figure of metamorphosis, of
plasmaticness, as Eisenstein called the essence of animation [...], he gives the lie to any attempt
to fix, arrest, isolate and thereby render inanimate (such a figure of) animation in any particular
creator/animator/author of him, in any determinate origin. (Cholodenko 2007 p.15)
Indeed, the knowledge about the authorship does not change anything about Felix animated
essence, but it does make a huge difference in what we have called the meta-level of this
question. The fact that it is difficult to ascertain who is the actual author of Felix adventures
hints, if at nothing else, at least at the approaches to authorship, copyright and distribution
practices during the time of his creation and so constitute a point of departure for an historical
investigation into these fields an investigation that can be substantiated drawing on sources and
interpreted according to the standards of historical method, eventually leading to the finding of
an historically accurate proposition about the actual authorship of Felix.
56

This historical method, meaning the techniques that condition the way in which sources are
researched and then used to write history, is based on the rules of verification laid down by von
Ranke and elaborated in numerous ways since his time. Von Rankes metaphysical considerations
about the past may today seem hopelessly nave or simply outdated, but their value as a point of
departure for a process aiming to establish a symbiotic relationship between theory and
empirical research, where one contributes to the development of the other (Hedstrm and
Swedberg 1996 p.127) remains unopposed. Regardless of theoretical modes, the vast majority of
historians efforts are devoted to ascertaining the value of sources and establishing them as firmly
as possible in the light of others. Even postmodernists use footnotes. The way history is written is
designed to enable the reader to check the sources on which a historians statement is made to
see whether or not they support it. They are not mere rhetorical devices designed to produce a
spurious reality effect (Evans 2000 p.109). The credulity of Thackerays ingenious Major
Gahagans tales may not always defy scrupulous verification, but his dictum that truth is
sometimes stranger than fiction is profoundly maintainable especially as, as Evans points out,
what counts as evidence is not determined solely by one historians perspective but is subject to
a wide measure of agreement which concerns not only individuals but also communities of
scholars (Evans 2000 p.110).
It is therefore much to be regretted if, as Geoffrey Eley and Keith Neild have observed,
theoretical hauteur instructs a redoubt of methodological conservatism, and the latter shouts
defiantly back. Between the two lies a silence, a barrier that in these tones cannot be crossed. For
progress in understanding the truth and objectivity of history, each side must attend more closely
to what the other is saying (Eley and Nield 1995 p.364). Ultimately, I am convinced that we can
re-tell history, that we can come up with a discourse that is meaningful and gives us a glimpse of
wie es eigentlich gewesen, knowing about the limitations, but also about the advantages of this
approach in other words, prevent the commissar from vanishing from our scholarly field of
vision, because we are caught up in a trench warfare between what makes an historical approach
to animation or a theoretical approach to animation superior. In a message to the
aforementioned SAS mailing list, Ethan de Seife called on scholars not to exclude any text or
field of study so long as it can bring something relevant and pertinent to the discussion (Ethan
de Seife, April 08, 2008) or as Alan Choldenko has phrased it somewhat more poetically not
to render inanimate the work of research and scholarship (Alan Cholodenko, June 29, 2008).
That is even more the case as as I have pointed out in this paper there is much to be gained
from a benevolent interdisciplinary interaction of the approaches. Siegfried Kracauers last, littleknown book deals with his findings and thoughts on historiography, and he defines a relationship
between the two spheres that seems to me very worthwhile of pursuing: Historians longing for
synthesis hanker after the consolation of philosophy, and philosophers of history devise over-all
models for use in the lower regions (Kracauer 1995 p.99). If a process of interaction and
interdisciplinary rapprochement like this would take place in the time to come, it would not only
define more clearly what we as animation scholars are doing and how we are doing it, it might
also strengthen the standing of our field in academia in general.
^
Timo Linsenmaier is currently writing his PhD thesis on Soviet animation aesthetics. He studied
Media Theory at Karlsruhe University for Arts and Design (HfG) and Animation History at the
Russian State Film School (VGIK) in Moscow. This paper was presented at Animation
Unlimited, the 20th annual SAS conference, held at the Art Institute at Bournemouth, 18-20 July,
2007.
57

References
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http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.mb.txt; Internet.
Asenin, Sergey. (1995) Uolt Disnei: Tainy risovannogo kinomira. Moskva: Iskusstvo,.
Assmann, Jan. (2005) Das kulturelle Gedchtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identitt
in frhen Hochkulturen. Becksche Reihe. Vol. 1307. Mnchen: Beck.
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Mnchen: Fink.
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Indiana: Indiana University Press.
Beresford, David. The history that winners write. The Guardian, April 27, 2003; available from
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Breisach, Ernst. (2004) Historiography: Ancient, medieval, & modern. Chicago: University of
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Carr, Edward Hallett. (1961) What is history? Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Cholodenko, Alan. (2007) (The) Death (of) the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix, Part II: A
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Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press.
Derrida, Jacques. (2004) Living On: Border Lines. In Deconstruction and criticism, ed. Harold
Bloom, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida, 79-89. London: Continuum.
Eaglestone, Robert. (2001) Postmodernism and holocaust denial. Postmodern encounters.
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Eley, Geoff, and Keith Nield. (1995) Starting over: The present, the post-modern and the
moment of social history. Social History 20 (1995): 355-364.
Evans, Richard J. (2000) In defense of history. London New York: Norton.
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Akzente. Mnchen: Hanser.
Halas, John. (1987) Masters of animation. Topsfield, Mass.: Salem House.
Halper, Edward. Poetry, History, and Dialectic; available from http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/
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Harrison, Charles. (2003)Art in theory, 1900-2000: An anthology of changing ideas. Malden Mass.:
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Hedstrm, Peter, and Richard Swedberg. Rational Choice, Empirical Research and the
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King, David. (1997) The commissar vanishes: The falsification of photographs and art in Stalins
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Timo Linsenmaier
59

Laura Ivins-Hulley
The Ontology of Performance in Stop Animation

Kawamotos House of Flame and vankmajers The Fall of the House of Usher
Judy clubs Punch with a mallet. Jack the Pumpkin King decides to take Santas place one
Christmas. Gumby foils the Blockheads plans, yet again. In each of these cases, we as the
audience focus our attention on the moving figures, finding pleasure in the characters and stories.
Yet, though we focus our imaginative attention upon Jack dancing through Halloweentown, we
are always aware of the animator and the fact that these engrossing figures are inanimate objects.
So who is the performer? When we discuss performance in an animated film, are we talking
about the animated figure? The animator? Do films without anthropomorphized characters
contain performances? In live action films, it is quite easy to center a discussion of cinematic
performance on the actor and never feel compelled to consider the role the audience plays in cocreating the performance. I do not mean to suggest that film spectatorship is not a wide and rich
field, but that very often when assessing performance, we specifically refer to actors and
dancers. However, since the animated figure does not move itself, the nature of performance
becomes more complicated. In the animated film, we must take the audience into consideration
to determine how performance is constituted.
Through a juxtaposition of two stop animated films - Kihachiro Kawamotos House of Flame
(Kataku; 1979) and Jan vankmajers The Fall of the House of Usher (Znik domu Usheru; 1981) I will explore the ontology of the puppet animation performance, especially as it relates to the
audiences understanding of the figure as character. I chose to focus on these films for a few
reasons. Firstly, both animators draw techniques and inspiration from stage puppetry, a medium
whose performance has been examined extensively, and in fact, we shall see that scholarly
writings on stage puppetry and puppet animation share many premises. Additionally, both
Kawamotos and vankmajers films are narrative shorts that adapt stories familiar to many in
their audience. Despite these similarities, though, House of Flame and The Fall of the House of
Usher differ in ways that make for useful juxtaposition. In House of Flame, Kawamoto visually
renders the story through humanesque puppets - that is, puppets with bodies and faces made to
represent human figures, though these figures are highly stylized. While on the other hand,
vankmajer retells Poes story through the performance of objects and spaces, omitting human
figures altogether.
Defining Performance
However, before delving into our study, we should begin with a preliminary definition of the
term performance. First, performance theorist Richard Bauman conceives verbal performance
in terms of responsibility to an audience for a display of communicative competence (1984, p.
11). So for him, to perform is to perform for someone, someone who recognizes the performance
to be such and might possibly pass judgment as to its competence. Further, Deborah Kapchan
writes: To perform is to carry something into effect - whether it be a story, an identity, an artistic
artifact, a historical memory, or an ethnography (1995, p. 479). The important idea here is this
carrying into effect, that performance is an action in the process of realization. Dell Hymes
would call this emergence, a term he uses to distinguish between everyday behavior and
actions recognized as performances (Hymes, 1975). Emergence combines the carrying into effect
60

of the performance with responsibility to an audience, occurring precisely when the performer
and audience come together to co-create meaning. For the cinema, this means emergence occurs
when the film and audience are co-present, or in other words, when the film is projected.
Further, films key (to borrow a term from Erving Goffman) fictional performance in a
number of different ways. First, the opening titles often contain cast-members names, cueing us
into the fact that the people in the story are characters played by people whose real names (and
thus real identities) are altogether different. For example, when we see Robert DeNiros name
in the credits of Taxi Driver, we know the character he plays, Travis, does not represent DeNiro
in his everyday life.1 Secondly, fictional films often share certain formal properties that indicate to
the audience that they are not documentaries, especially in Western filmmaking. These properties
include tightly edited shot-reverse-shot sequences, the filmic subjects apparent unawareness of
the camera, and predetermined narrative trajectories.2 Finally, extra-filmic features frame the
onscreen performance as such. With rare exception, the audience is informed what kind of film
they are going to see before they even walk into the theater or rent the DVD. Movie posters,
television advertisements, and conversations with friends tell us the genre of a movie, and as long
as the film originates within a familiar culture, we will be familiar with the genre tradition the film
is in dialogue with. For example, a television advertisement for the latest Wes Craven film might
proclaim, The scariest villain since Freddy Kruger! says Rolling Stone. By telling the audience
the villain is scary and the film originates from Wes Craven (along with any number of visual cues
contained within the ad), we can deduce it is part of the horror genre, and thus a performance
constructed for audience enjoyment.
For the animated film, this keying is even more pronounced because of the presence of the
animated figure. We know if the character is hand-drawn, the action onscreen cannot be literal.
We know the puppet is not actually alive, performing this dance. It is manipulated by a human to
give it the appearance of literal action. In many forms of stop motion animation, we watch a
three-dimensional object, so that the performance carries a paradoxical indexicality: the puppet
tangibly exists outside the film, but its movement does not.
House of Flame - Motivation and Embodiment
Adapted from a Noh play entitled The Seekers Mound (Motomezuka; see Sharp, 2007),
Kawamotos House of Flame tells the story of a male traveler in search of a mystical landmark
called the Seekers Mound. During his search, he encounters a maiden who relates a tragic
lovers tale that leads to a pious young womans imprisonment in a purgatory-esque house of
flames. Though many elements of House of Flame will necessarily be specific to the cultural
tradition within which Kawamoto worked - for example, the design of the puppets, the narration
style, and the story itself - this short film provides an entry into examining the general nature of
stop puppet animation.
In this film, as in other stop animations, the puppets mark themselves as characters primarily
through the apparent performance of motivated, expressive gestures. In one sequence, we watch
the pious young maiden fret over her choice of suitors. She looks from the poets proclamation of
love on the left to the warriors on the right, then brings a hand to her forehead, palm out,
1
Although, sometimes actors are cast for their real-life semblance to a character, blurring the lines between the identity of the actor and his
character.
2
Of course, realizing these tendencies exist, many filmmakers have actively worked to complicate definitions of fiction and documentary. Films
such as David Holzmans Diary (Jim McBride, 1967) appropriate formal conventions of documentary into their fictional films, and Werner Herzog
borrows techniques from fiction films to help achieve what he terms ecstatic truth within his documentaries.
61

expressing her worry through that small gesture. When she tilts her head forward and covers her
face with her hands, we recognize this movement as one of inner pain. Following bunraku and
noh convention, Kawamoto frequently utilizes such minimalist movements, yet the movements
his figures do make say a great deal. Moreover, gestures communicate something quite important
to the viewer, though the viewer rarely consciously acknowledges it. This is that the animated
character possesses agency. As Adam Kendon points out about bodily actions: to the extent that
they are thought not to be under voluntary control, they are not regarded as gesture (1992, p.
179). So, when the pious young maiden brings the back of her hand to her forehead, we watch
with the understanding that she intends to bring her hand to her face, thus facilitating the
audiences identification with her as a subject of the film.
Moreover, wrapped up in this idea of agency is the complimentary notion of motivation.
Movement theorist Rudolf Laban opens his book Mastery of Movement by writing: Man moves
in order to satisfy a need. He aims by his movement at something of value to him (1971, p. 1). In
other words, something motivates the action of the movement, whether that be a reaction to
internal desire or external stimuli. Generally, we are adept at interpreting the motivations behind
actions of others within our own culture because we share a code of movement. As part of
creating and maintaining the illusion of a puppets life, a puppeteer demonstrates that the puppet
shares in a code of movement, which often means dwelling on movements that are banal when
performed by human subjects in their daily lives. As A.C. Scott writes in his book about bunraku
theatre: In everyday life, no one stops to think about the dramatic significance of his ordinary
actions, but on the puppet stage they are important in providing an understanding of behavior
(1963, p. 80-81). The illusion of intention and motivation is the site where a consideration of
acting becomes important.
In his famous but puzzling essay, The Puppet Theatre, playwright Heinrich von Kleist
muses on artistry of the puppeteer, relating his skill to that of the actor. The man to whom von
Kleist speaks in the essay even proposes that a greater subtlety of movement is achievable with
the puppet than with the actor because of the limitations weight has upon the actors movements
(1997, p. 412). This characterization is mirrored by Paul Wells in writing about the animated
figure in film: The animator must essentially use the techniques employed by the actor to project
the specificities of character through the mechanistic process of the animation itself (1998, p.
104). In other words, the animator must determine the appropriate movement to express the
desired action and emotion. How does a body move when sad? What sequence of movements
does an accidental fall have? The puppeteer must be hyper-aware of the minutiae of movement in
order to effectively manipulate the figures he animates, and it is quite common for those writing
about puppetry to speak of the puppeteer as an actor.3 As we can see from the example from von
Kleist, this conception of the animator began with puppet theatre and has carried over into
animation studies.
However, the apparent intentionality of movement in the onscreen figure is the end goal of the
animators efforts. If the animator is the actor, he is one who displaces his performance to
construct the life of objects for the audiences benefit. When the camera lingers for several
seconds upon the walking feet of the male traveler during the opening and closing sequences of
House of Flame, these carefully constructed steps convey a path for the character a journey
making the artificial seem more real.
3
c.f. A. C. Scotts The Puppet Theatre of Japan (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1963) where he writes: The puppeteer is an actor, an
artist who must portray a variety of human emotions arising from a dramatic situation (p. 33).
62

This tension between artificial and real, between the puppet as an object and the puppet as
subject of a story, is a familiar conundrum in scholarship on both stop animation and puppet
theatre. For example, Steve Tillis coined the term double-vision to describe the mental process
of audiences as they viewed puppet theatre (Tillis, 1992). Similarly, animation scholar Suzanne
Buchan writes: While viewing animation, the spectator executes shifts between hypothetical, real
and interior mental worlds (2004, p. 118). Significant for the current study is that both Tillis and
Buchan assign a certain kind of agency to the audience in their theories. We, as viewers of
animated films, actively participate in the construction of onscreen events, accepting the illusion
of movement and life, and as Bordwell and others have noted mentally piecing together and
anticipating the story through visual and audio cues we have learned to decipher (Bordwell,
1986), and that we want to decipher. As Erving Goffman phrases it, We willingly sought out the
circumstances in which we could be temporarily deceived or at least kept in the dark in brief,
transformed into collaborators in unreality (1986, p. 136).
What we must remember, then, is that during the film, our behavior toward the onscreen
action implies that the puppet fully embodies the character with which we identify. The puppet
moves like the pious young maiden, so the puppet is the pious young maiden. Anthropologist
Robert Plant Armstrong notably theorized the affective power of objects while studying African
sculpture, demonstrating how our relationships to certain objects imbue them with subjecthood.
He writes: Such things are not, at base, symbols of something elsethey are whatever they are
(1981, p. 5). This embodiment comes about in part due to the reason the figures are created. As
Goffman points out in Frame Analysis, a division exists between the identity of the actor and the
identity of the character she plays (1986, p. 128), but no such division exists for the puppet. It is
created, one could say, to become itself. The tragic young maiden trapped in the house of flames
has no identity outside of that film. She simply is that maiden, brought to life through the
technological process of stop animation. Again, Armstrong notes that such an object is
distinguished among ordinary things because it is an end-in-itself, and it is for one chief integral
reason: namely, that the work is self-constituting (1981, p. 30). While he specifically refers to
objects of worship, we could easily map this idea onto the animated figure.
Narrative animation is framed similarly to other fiction films. Standard cinematic cues such as
title sequences key the world of the film as self-contained; the movements of animated figures
demand that we regard them as the performers; and we readily participate in the illusion.
However, as I mentioned in the introduction, vankmajers film, The Fall of the House of
Usher, does not tell its story through anthropomorphized figures (figures made to look more
human by giving them hands, eyes, limbs, etc.), but through objects and spaces. So now we
should ask, how do such animated objects elicit our participation in the narrative?
The Fall of the House of Usher Figured Objects as Characters
Adapted from the Poe story of the same name, The Fall of the House of Usher demonstrates a
link between the cinematic and the tactile by allowing the expressive textures of surfaces perform
the ill-fated story of Roderick Usher and his sister Madeline inside their family home. Now, if a
tension exists between object and subject in the body of the humanesque puppet, it must be
exasperated within the object qua object of vankmajers films. Can the viewer identify with a
house, chair or coffin as she identifies with a marionette?
With such a film, the creative agency of the audience becomes more apparent. The seemingly
obvious links between the cameras gaze and the protagonist, between narration and events
onscreen, are highlighted when we must rely on the formal structure of narrative depleted of
63

some of its traditional content. We know to associate the chair with the character of Roderick
Usher and the coffin with Madeline because vankmajer employs standard techniques we have
learned to understand through countless other fiction films. The most basic of these is focusing
the camera on the object being talked about in the voice over narration. For example the first
time we see the chair, the narrator speaks in detail about the changed countenance of Roderick
Usher. He tells us of his friends liquid and luminous eyes, his delicate nose, and his
pallid lips, all while the camera inspects a carved, wooden chair in tight close-up. This pairing
of word and image is so simple, so direct, and yet so effective in its suggestion for how we should
interpret the surfaces throughout the film. The chair embodies Roderick because the camera
behaves as if it is Roderick, cueing the audience to form an identification with the chair as this
character. As Murray Smith and others have noted when writing on film identification, the
camera encourages us to form alignments by following certain characters, with close-ups allowing
us access to the gestures and expressions that facilitate our bond with them (Smith, 1995). So,
when the camera pours over the chairs surface, it invites us to partake in the intimacy and
identify with the chair qua Roderick Usher.
The chair further comes to embody its character by moving in a manner that corresponds to its
role in the narrative. When the narrator tells us of Madelines return from her tomb, the chair
abruptly turns toward the door and begins swaying, mirroring the verbal description of
Rodericks reaction. Later in this sequence, the chair collapses backwards and breaks in pieces,
reiterating the simultaneous final death of the siblings. Animation gives the chair mobility, and
thus agency, further asking us to respond to it as a character acting in the film. As vankmajer
says in his own film manifesto: Animation isnt about making inanimate objects move, it is about
bringing them to life (2006, p. 72). We, the audience of the animated film, willingly accept our
role in bringing objects to life, seeking out their fantastical performances and actively decoding
the image.
Still, though The Fall of the House of Usher does work to construct objects as characters, we
also find that vankmajer inscribes himself into the film through one of the more abstract emotive
objects, the dancing clay. The clay jumps out of the swamp onto the floor of the house just as the
narrator begins reading the narrative poem, The Haunted Palace. This is a recounting of a
poem spoken by Roderick in a rare, lucid moment. The performance of the clay that accompanies
these words is quite ambiguous, with the abstractness of the changing forms leaving open the
interpretive possibilities. For our current discussion, one of the most important characteristics of
this sequence is the visible impression of the animators hand upon the clay. vankmajer animated
this particular sequence himself (Hames, 1995, p. 98), so the handprints we see represent his
physical impression upon the film. Outside the credit sequences, audiences are rarely confronted
with the existence of the animator. His existence is disavowed by a medium intent on maintaining
the illusion of reality within its worlds. This encourages the audience to identify with the
animated figures directly instead of the person imbuing them with life. This means when we
literally see the imprint of the animators hand on the screen, the identification process must
change. vankmajer inscribes himself as a performer within the film. Interestingly, though,
because the clay sequence was still animated frame-by-frame, vankmajers proxy performance
combines the ontologies outlined above for the animators and puppets performances. That is to
say, the movements of his impressions onto the clay that we see projected onscreen do not
directly correspond to the actual movements his body performed during the production process.
We see the lines of two invisible fingers tracing a path through the clay in a continuous
movement, but when this path was created, vankmajer did not perform a continuous movement.
64

He pressed upon the clay slightly; photographed a frame or two; pressed the clay again;
photographed another frame; and repeated this process about 20 more times to create a seconds
worth of that path. The film still only displays the appearance of a performance with no profilmic
existence. So even though this sequence makes us more aware of the animator as one performing,
we cannot form a direct identification with his performing body. His impression exists, but his
body must remain invisible for the sake of the fluidity of that impression. Barry Purves
formulation of the animator as performer seems particularly appropriate here. He writes, The
essential quality [for the stop animator] to have is not so much that of a performer. . .but its
having a performers sensibilities (2008, p. 194). The animator does not herself dance, but must
have the dancers understanding of movement to effectively construct the puppets performance.
Conclusion and Further Implications
When we place such weight on the audience in an analysis of performance as we have above,
the resulting implication is that in the animated film, the ontology of performance is appearance.
After all, performance is rendered frame by frame, giving it no profilmic existence, and the
audience engages most directly with the action it sees onscreen. We know that an animator
created this film through some technical process, but unless she interjects herself into the film, we
need not acknowledge it in our interaction with the narrative, just as we need not acknowledge
the material conditions of the human actors cinematic performance. The latter has implications
for cinematic performance more generally, because as we know, cinematic performance is always
mediated and constructed in various ways (from editing to the disparity between 2-D film image
and 3-D reality). For the film audience, the art object is not the studio performance we never
witness. It is not even the filmstrip itself, but the shadow of that strip cast onto a blank screen.
The viewer does not watch the film move through the projector, but instead turns her back on
the projector in favor of the intangible appearance of the object lit up in front of her.
^
Laura Ivins-Hulley is a doctoral student in Indiana Universitys Department of Communication
and Culture. This paper was presented at Animation Unlimited, the 20th annual SAS conference,
held at the Art Institute at Bournemouth, 18-20 July, 2007.
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Laban, R. (1971). The Mastery of Movement [third edition]. Boston: Plays, Inc.
Scott, A. C. (1963). The Puppet Theatre of Japan. Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle Company.
Sharp, J. (2007). Forgotten roots of JAPANIMATION: master of puppets, Film International
Volume 5, no. 1, pp. 58-65, 67-71.
Smith, M. (1995). Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion and the Cinema. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
vankmajer, J. (2006). Decalogue, Tereza Stehlikov (trans.), Vertigo Magazine Volume 3, no.
1, p. 72.
Tilles, S. (1992). Toward an Aesthetics of the Puppet: Puppetry as a Theatrical Art. New York:
Greenwood Press.
von Kleist, H. (1997). The Puppet Theatre, In: Constantine, David (ed. and trans.) Heinrich
von Kleist: Selected Writings, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., Indianapolis, IN, 411-416.
Wells, P. (1998). Understanding Animation. New York: Routledge.
Laura Ivins-Hulley
66

Van Norris
Taking an Appropriate Line

Exploring Representations of Disability within British Mainstream Animation
This article discusses how representations of disability operate within the mainstream
animation narratives of the British Creature Discomfort series (2007-8). These images are
constructed as a response to concerns about broader social perceptions of the physically disabled
and once scrutinized it is apparent that they are managed through established notions of comic
incongruity. This is a framework that not only aids a less reductive insight into the lives of those
restricted in mobility but it provides a comic contrast to the serious messages being imparted
about ignorance, stereotyping and access. Through the application of incongruity there emerges a
modification of representation here and one that builds upon and subverts extant depictions of
physical impairment within previous animated discourses. This reframing refines our
understandings around representation within contemporary media and constructs here a hybrid
of several extant discourses that services an overall more nuanced conception of day to day life
for those who are physically disabled.
Directed by Aardman Studios in-house animator, Steve Harding-Hill, Creature Discomforts
are a group of short animations that were released on-line and as print adverts in November 2007
and were shown on UK TV from January 2008. The first batch came with four shorts with a
further four released on-line in July 2008. These were initiated by the Leonard Cheshire Disability
Charity as part of their public re-launch but primarily were devised to be an open-ended on-going
series. Peter Dicken, the Leonard Cheshire Visibility Spokesman, stated in interview that the
shorts came in response to extensive market research made by the organisation which suggested
that the public had lost contact with disability as an issue and a cause worthy of note in the same
way the public views, say, the environment, cancer or animal welfare (2008). Through humour
and applications of personality animation the mission was to challenge moribund and reductive
perceptions around disability and to highlight issues of discrimination, access and representation.
The organization, which was founded in 1948, works across the UK and some 54 other
territories, (including a number of developing countries) and it functions under the official
mission statement of: providing day care, skills training and rehabilitation, independent living
and residential careto relieve the consequences of physical and/or mental well-being of
disabled people (N/A, 2007, paras 4-8). And it was after consultations with their advertising
agency, Freud, that the idea about using Aardman emerged in 2006 which led in turn to the
adaptation of the Creature Comforts series and deploying the twist of incorporating disabled
characters into the narratives. The results, promoted under the banner, Change the way you see
disability, resulted in the shorts garnering an award in the Disability Category at the Charity
Awards in 2008.
Formally Creature Discomforts remain identical to the original 1989 template, directed by Nick
Park as a one-off narrative and as part of five separate animations for Channel Fours Lip Synch
series. Constructed as edited segments, this animation presented Claymation animals talking in
monologue of their dissatisfactions with life, transposing their zoo-life experiences against the
pre-recorded voices of humans bemoaning their own real-life environments. Here this is shifted
to disabled characters expounding on their treatment from mainstream society. In each setting
they express dismay at the misconceptions perpetuated by the general public within daily social
life that contains and typecasts them. Since Parks film the concept has experienced a remarkable
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life-span in that it has spawned two series of twenty seven, ten minute episodes for ITV from
2002, a range of advertisements for British Gas and an American derivation of the format funded
by CBS in 2007.
Indeed the concept of animating to extant dialogue was hardly new, even by that point. Other
examples of this include Faith and John Hubleys The Cruise (1966) and Windy Day (1968) and,
notably, Aardmans own Peter Lord and David Sproxtons, Animated Conversations (1978) all of
which make use of grabbed conversations, animated in cel and stop motion forms after the
event. These operate within (as Kevin Macdonald observes when interviewing Park in 1996),
Alan Bennett-style celebrations of not only a specific, parochial regional bias but also in the gentle
tone and warmth found in the humour (1996, p.66), and this is backed up Paul Wells assertion
that the shorts, defers to a nostalgic belief in the common but unaddressed aspects of the
ordinary (1998, p.60). The idea of small lives defined by observational details and rendered
through direct monologue, which references British comic traditions, here gently burlesquing
what Andy Medhurst refers to as, the performity of everyday life, the codes that demarcate
conventions, the way that the English say things, the shorts are allied to a strain of humour that
defines itself as a comedy of the overlooked and the unfashionablecomedy without sneers
(2007, p. 161).
Assessing the Incongruous
In this instance we are presented with Peg the Hedgehog, Slim the Stick Insect, Flash the
Sausage Dog, Tim the Tortoise, Spud the Slug Sonny the Shrimp, Callum the Chameleon
Ozzy the Owl, Roxy the Rabbit, Cath the Cat and Brian the Bull Terrier who across both
series conform to the models who have appeared in previous Aardman narratives and all are
manipulated well within the formal boundaries expressed earlier. What is noticeable is that these
individual sketches function in relation to familiar comic tropes of incongruity. Not only is this a
mode located historically across many forms of comedy but, in the application here, incongruity
complements and enhances the discussions of disability presented and deepens the understanding
of each situation.
Key texts discussing the incongruous in comic contexts, by authors such as Michael Clark,
Roger Scruton and Murray Davis, are built on the analytical platforms offered by Schopenhauer
and Locke, which stresses this mode as being tied into assessments of wit. Clark summated
incongruity as being the point in perception within a text when: the greater is the ludicrous
effect which is produced by the contrast. All laughter is occasioned by a paradox, and therefore
by unexpected subsumption, whether this is expressed in words or in actions (1987, p.146).
Davis further reasons that the construction of a system of observations moving beyond the simple
joke or a unit of analysis into more imaginative, absurdist narrative realms was founded on the
notion of: two different ideas suddenly connected to comic effect (1993, p.21), placed in
unexpected combinations. This was, he observed, seemingly demonstrative of creative thought
and of an expansive knowledge in terms of subject/language/semantics and, described by Davis,
as a comic phenomenon resting on the shock of agreeable comparison (1993, p.21).
Michael Billig refers, in turn, to The Third Earl of Shaftsburys assessment that historically
comic incongruity arises from an inherent desire, aesthetic or otherwise, for a sense of order
and a preference for harmony and due proportion (2005, p.77). Admittedly implications of a
problematic sense of superiority permeate that particular rationale but certainly a kernel of reason
resides there, as satirist, Hogarth, shares the belief that incongruity was realized through the
subversion of symmetry, which he saw as inspiring a sense of confidence within a reader/viewer
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within art or narrative. True comic incongruity was, for him, all about the insertion of
dissonances, gaps and contrasts (1955, p.165). It is a mode assembled around destabilizations of
expectation and subversions of a desired outcome. Excluding any shifting set of culturally or
temporally-defined moral imperatives, what emerges here is that incongruity in any number of
settings can be used as a tool to rationalize that which does not conform to the current project of
reason (2005, pp. 63-64).
Bearing this in mind Davis opines that comic incongruity only really functions within an
established experiential expectation system Incongruity is a relational concept: nothing can be
incongruous in itself but only by standing out phenomenologically from an otherwise congruous
system (1993, pp.12-14). As all comedy conceits are, of course, dictated by judgment how funny
we find a situation depends very much on the balance between the quantity and quality of the
incongruities in tandem with our knowledge and connection to the expectation system under
attack. Too many in one context will confuse the issue and provide no solid ground for the
clashes to operate. The success of the project thus resides in how essential the experience system
is to us and how much investment we attach to the system that is being detonated. What emerges
from this is that assessing humorous incongruity is as much about determining boundaries and
acceptability, which is a prime component in any comic enterprise and undoubtedly serves our
purpose here in looking at how representations of disability have been organized within
animation forms.
Breaking down system expectations within Creature Discomforts
Simply in the interests of remaining within the confines of this papers word count I have
highlighted just three of these breakdowns at work in the context of Creature Discomforts. Other
notable incongruities are undoubtedly tied to our unquestioning acceptance of this comic
universe and they can be traced individually through with each gag or situation ad infinitum, thus
incongruities build on incongruities. Each setting includes disparate subjects interacting in the
same language, all acknowledging an interviewer that appears to have no issue, ideological,
physical or otherwise, with interviewing talking animals, insects etc and this in turn offers a
breach that leads us into the concept that that these fully articulate creatures lives all appear to
co-exist alongside (unseen) humans. They all, also, adhere to aspects of human lifestyles,
behaviour and use specially designed humanised props that are made to measure such as
wheelchairs, cups, flasks. A multitude of further incongruities can be traced within the
development and execution of each narratives comic moments such as with the third short in the
first series when Slim the Stick Insects crutch reveals itself to be another, (child), stick insect, as a
visual punch-line to underscore and complement his message about adapting to new situations.
The incongruous rub comes when the expectations offered around an immobile prop are
subverted by the moment when the stick grows arms and a face, which not only the expectations
around fixed, inanimate objects but deftly and subtly shifts the register from one universal
reality of expected physical laws to another. This also acknowledges the trope of metamorphosis
that stretches back to animation earliest years. However these three observations provide an entry
into this concept and demonstrate how this idea informs representation.
1. Subverting documentary form:
Despite mainstream animation today dominated by slick, fast and affordable threedimensional computer adhering to the stop-motion form, using clay figures has contributed to the
Creature Comforts series retaining its unique position within the cultural landscape. Significations
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of tradition, whimsy, continuity, stability and craftsmanship are juxtaposed here with attendant
suggestions of depth, texture and weight that benefit from using this particular mode of
animation. This provides for the viewer a sense of believability and a verisimilitude that extends
further than the abstracted (albeit generalised) cartoon-y aesthetic offered by cel animation.
This particular universe works in an immersive context. By this I mean that the
objects/characters in the frame are articulated within their own totally animated setting, one that
is compatible and corresponds to the physical laws laid out within its own stated schema.
If we accept that incongruities are intensified by undermining the documentary form then Ann
Pointons observations on how narratives around disability within documentary, helps us frame
this concept further. Using BBC TV examples Pointon notes that representation tends to be
primarily grouped around: transformation, tragedy, normalisation and spectacle (1997, p.86).
While no transformative journey is detailed in any linear fashion within Creature Discomforts, the
shorts do project a hero in one form but the only lessons imparted towards the audience is that
of, arguably, a sense of enlightenment (1997, pp.87-88). The uncomfortable aspects of
voyeuristic intrusion into disability, deformity or disfigurement, that she identifies, are absent
here (1997, p.91). These narratives refute any emphasis on the surrounding network of support,
this conforms to Pointons fourth statement in that these shorts are actually about, social skills,
personality, powers of acceptance and adaptation of the disabled person themselves, and most
importantly, the denial of victimhood (1997, p.89). Everyday life is shown as something to be
surmounted in a direct, non-sensationalistic fashion, all of which profoundly informs the intent of
Creature Discomforts.
In terms of incongruity Park had already outlined a profound breakdown of system
expectation back in 1989. The original short was inspired by Parks love of outtakes and blooper
reels and the central conceit that develops from this is that the shorts are somehow recording
within a given reality. Thus each short retains the familiar fixed camera position, (or in the sole
case of Slim the Stick Insect this is broken by a very slow left to right pan) and the insertion of
background noises and sounds that suggest a basic directional recording technique to infer
immediacy. Engagement with documentary form depends on a belief within the viewer that what
they are watching is real or at the very least constructed from recorded events. By shifting those
imperatives into a format so rigorously constructed, pre-meditated and mediated as clay
animation this of course creates an initial schism within our acceptance systems. The incongruity
deepens further here through the implication that a journalist or reporter is not only physically
able to interview a range of insects and animals but is then able to penetrate the boundaries of
language, space and communication. Incongruities continue when in achieving this they then
report that the animals experience magically mirrors many of our own anxieties. The extension
continues into yet another stage of subversion. In that the fashion by which the information is
gathered from real people giving testimonies to separate situations and then is placed beneath a
constructed, unreal animal to tell a different story or highlight a seemingly unrelated plight. The
common understanding/expectation of how this information is managed within documentary
situations is also shattered here, in a breakdown of trust where such formal devices have been
historically used to suggest an unmediated truth or imply a direct, linear reportage.
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2. Undermining expectations around the animated body:
Of the characters within the concept, Brian the Bull Terrier from the fourth short of the first
2007 run, (voiced by 45-year old Spina bifida sufferer Kevin Gillespie), offers the most potent
example and overt set of attacks on anticipation. In this case the subversions taking place are
those based around preconceptions surrounding the animated body and indeed of physical
disability itself.
Brian is rendered as a small, white talking dog and combines the expected anthropomorphic
tensions such as human uses of language, gesture and posture along with animalistic attributes
such as a dog collar, head and ear shapes etc. He is modelled with thin mobile arms, expressive
features that helpfully correlate to human facial signals, offering openness and yet given eyes that
sit wide apart and an overbite to create a more cuddly Park-ian look.1 The legs are rendered as
small, inconsequential, hanging down just below the seat of the wheelchair and tucked in
underneath the comically rounded body. This tripartite gesture simultaneously deactivates and
acknowledges the negative significations of tenacity and aggression normally attached to a dog of
this breed and also maintains brand coherence.
Admittedly Creature Comforts have always built their pleasures around anthropomorphism. As
Kevin Sandler notes, this has long been tool to foster identification within animation that also
conveniently negotiates any experiential schism for audiences (1997, p.49-50). This process of
transference and recognition of human attributes upon animal models serves the narratives
perfectly. But the already incongruous concept of animals conducting very human endeavours is
here assigned a deeper layer by presenting a sentient model that refutes expectations around the
physically challenged. The idea of a dog engaging in the pursuit of a dangerous sport, i.e. bungeejumping, functions as a deeper comic tier. The physical state of the animal itself leads us to more
clashes that informs the narratives at a profound level and plays with our expectation. In Classical
cel animation, where most of our cultural understandings around the body with mainstream
animation have been forged, the body is fluid and malleable. Reconstitution and a sense of
deathlessness is commonplace as in service to narrative requirements and/or comic effect. For
example when Tex Averys wolf character in Little Rural Riding Hood (MGM, 1949) splits
himself into different body parts registering extreme shock he is soon reassembled on and offscreen to conveniently allow the next situation to play out. In stop motion this fluidity has been
denied more often than continued. Especially when one considers this against the heritage of the
rigorously attempted verisimilitudes conjured up by Willis OBrien and Ray Harryhausen et al or
the rigid, staccato continuities offered within George Pals 1930s/40s Puppetoon films. While
Floriane Place-Verghnes notes that such elasticity provides a counterbalance to the sadism
(certainly inherent in Averys work) and acts as a way of diffusing trauma it also suggests in its
rebelliousness a questioning of the boundaries of reality itself: The very fact that his cartoons are
not bound by reality is indeed a mark of their not belonging to the realm of prosaic things (2006,
p.174). A freeform plasticity has certainly informed physical models in the work of Douglass
1
Despite seen by Nick Park as one of his most personal films the short has become the design lynchpin of much the post 1990s Aardman
output (1996, p.79). Park himself has noted that the wide-mouthed, eyes close together character aesthetic has become dominant amongst a
cadre of different animators and has created a sense of an entire studio being typecast by the success of one authors work. Regular Aardman
animation character designer, Michael Salter, adds to this in interview with Lane when he states that, My style had so many similarities to Nick
Parks but so many jobs came in that wanted the Nick Park look that I started doing it even more and now I cant do anything else now: its sort
of ingrained. (2003, p.103). Indeed the very concept of cuteness in terms of character design has been discussed at length across a range of
literature and in animation contexts it has been discussed predominantly against Disney and Anime settings. Gary Genoskos survey across a range
of animation media asserts that the deployment of ethological definitions of rounded features and body shapes within animation forms function
through the presentation of infant-like movements, awkwardness and general demeanour to accent identification, reinforce stability and ultimately
serve a commercial intent (2005).
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Smith (through his incarnation as Ivan Stang for the 1978, Reproduction Cycles Among
Unicellular Life Forms), Will Vinton, (in the hell sequence in the 1985 Adventures of Mark
Twain, for example) and, (notably once more), Sproxton and Lords rather self-explanatory,
Morph (1977-1995), which arguably shares that conceit. These, (among many other examples to
numerous to name here), provide a counter statement that are concerned with pushing the
boundaries of the stop-motion body and rejecting any limiting realistic index.
Within Harding Hills shorts expressive action and movement are not a part of the established
grammar stasis and economy are. Any such articulacy is relegated to facial movement and
occasional accompanying hand/paw gestures to illustrate points made by the central speaker with
any faster, more dynamic advancement banished to background gags and characters. Thus any
distortion possibilities are contained. The conformity of physicality is dictated by the demands of
the narrative itself. Although commenting on the un-dead qualities of Wile E. Coyote and the
construction of the Anime body, Christian McCreas comment about the dreaded anvil of
physicality bears transposition here (2008, p.19). As in this context the body remains fixed,
discrete, breakable, vulnerable and sealed to understood correlative physical movements albeit
those as much framed within human as any animal traits. Thus the body here resides well within
Paul Wells observations on Parks initial short as inhabiting a cartoon and animation
anthropomorphic hinterland (1998, p.59). Incongruity is thus located within a massive and
inherent irony of an expressive form deployed to offer non-expressivity, a lack of transmutation.
3. Challenging Notions of Representation within animation:
Representations of the physically impaired bear the weight of a grim past. Lennard J. Davis
posits that physicality has been historically defined against the problematic term of the norm a
culturally defined measurement that he observes emerged through modernist French and British
medical and statistical discourses. Though never a universal given as such, this troublesome
concept of the average in time and became embroiled into debates around eugenics, with
physical disability as a result being labelled as an undesirable trait within a healthy society
(1997, p.17). Those with disability often found themselves combined with criminality, heightened
sexual activity and mental illness as societal others with the end result being that the concept of
the disabled body became formulated as a definition excluded from culture, society (1997,
pp.11-21). This is cemented by Paul Longmores assertions that disability in cinematic and
televisual contexts has been co-opted too often into depictions of monstrousness, villainy,
criminality and revenge (2001, pp.1-17). Because of this history of negative stereotyping it is
understandable why disability and humour have remained traditionally uneasy bedfellows.
Extending this away from live action forms, certainly representations of disability within
animation has been limited at best. In formulating approaches to disability the few examples
available to us can be located within three distinct groups to date.
The first model of representation follows an earnest, educational stance. This is animation that
can be seen, as Paul Wells summates, as a democratising tool in offering up subjective views of
a particular condition (1998, pp.123-126). In less mainstream examples, like Stephen Palmers
Blindscape (1994) and Tim Webbs 1987, A is for Autism, issues of perception and subjective
personal experience are discussed and the freedom of animation as a form can be utilised to
illuminate an experience blocked off to mainstream audiences. Animation, in its formal flexibility,
scores over film here through its ability to address areas of perception and to transcend
boundaries. As Wells confirms, animation can access states of existence that supersedes any
simple recording or transcribing process.
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The second example is a more recent development fed through broader comedic trends that
revolves less around any attempt to truly depict the direct experience of those who are physically
challenged and is more about the policing of boundaries of taste. This ambivalent paradigm
challenges the (problematic) concept of political correctness and seeks to detonate taboo within
comedy narratives.
Commercial animation has rarely engaged with disability directly apart from the occasional
throwaway set-up for a gag, such as in Bugs Bunnys mock infirmities in Bob Clampetts The Old
Grey Hare (1946). However several recent examples have materialized. In the controversial BBC/
CHX/Moi Jaime La Television production, Popetown (2005), disabled children are featured as
comedy props to complement the central narrative. In the first episode of the single series, The
Double, an under-explored sub-plot is detailed of a group of children in wheelchairs who have
won a trip to meet the Pope. These figures appear to be comprised of the same pliable material as
their wheelchairs which all conform to a tried and tested squash and stretch articulation. The
joke being here that the children are far from restricted in movement, (as expected), and in fact
they exhibit a deliberately cartoon-y sense of speed and physicality which exists merely to render
a range of background sight gags. Through such actions this reinforces a heroic, beatific and
admittedly exclusionary depiction that contains them away from the story itself.
More challenging attempts at representation can be found within Canadian
animator/cartoonist, John Callahans Media World production Quads! (2001) and in Matt Parker
and Trey Stones Comedy Central programme, South Park, (1997- to date). Through over twentysix half-hour episodes and two syndicated series Callaghan offers up a whole range of disabled
characters as a de facto family of minorities, that presents depictions of blindness and amputees,
as headed up by quadriplegic Reilly OReilly. Each character appears as abusive, conflicted,
flawed defiantly hard-drinking and confrontational in some fashion. Parker and Stones
provocative characters Timmy and Jimmy Vulmer too provide an equally potent example of
the shifts in contemporary comedy and animation which has resulted in both becoming accepted
mainstream figures. Wheel-chair-bound palsied, aphasia sufferer, Timmy, (who arrived in the
episode, Tooth Fairy Tats 2000, April 2000) and crutch-wielding stand-up comedian, Jimmy
Vulmer, (who first appeared in Cripple Fight, June 2001) are along with the constructs in Quads
typical of this type. In that they are rendered as intelligent, wholly integrated models that
admittedly nod towards normalisation but often they are placed into their narratives solely to
subvert expectations as much as confirm them.
To present a positivist reading of this the animation forms distance from direct representation
and adherence to caricature could arguably be seen to be flattening out depiction into the kind of
equal opportunity burlesquing coined by Terry Lindvall and Ben Fraser when discussing the
troublesome depictions of race within Classical animation (1998, pp.121-136). In that the
comprehensively unflattering character designs in each example suggests a comic animated
universe where no-one is privileged and that the physically impaired fare no better or worse than
the more able-bodied. Indeed the highly self-conscious limited, flat, minimalist aesthetics
displayed in both the Flash animated Quads and Parker and Stones text in particular positively
encourage this practice. The removal from a naturalistic design sense cushions the viewer and
creates a buffer between representation and offence.
These constructs are emblematic of larger shifts within the mainstream initiated by
writer/comedians in live action comedy within cinema and television settings across America and
Britain. The likes of The Farrelly Brothers, Larry David, Chris Morris, Ricky Gervais and Stephen
Merchant have all fore-grounded disabled characters and have used them as foils to discuss areas
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of social discomfort and of issues of reduction through alliance to a set of seemingly progressive
but in fact often restrictive, loaded narratives of supposed equality. These types of representations
are, in truth, more focussed on the able-bodied people around them and their attitudes. Social
acceptability is the real agenda here, in tandem with an examination of what is deemed acceptable
within the (perceived) post-PC landscape of appropriate interpretation and language. Certainly
this is exemplified in series two of BBC TVs The Office (2003) which features a recurring
wheelchair-bound character, Brenda, (as played by real life disabled actress Julie Fernandez). She
is posited to not only reveal central character, David Brents (Gervais), own inadequacies in social
interaction and self-awareness but also she highlights his innately reactionary nature through his
misconceptions and misreading of the acceptable terminology and its subsequent applications
surrounding the physically impaired.
These concur with Ann Pointon and Chris Davies point on representation that while these
characters are, while well-intentioned, in fact still retain the function of a cathartic device where
we are permitted a glance into our innermost fears surrounding disability (1997, p.8). In this case
this could potentially mean social limitation, or at worst, exclusion. More generously this address
here does use humour to re-conceptualise a laudable social space for the marginal. It also
supplies, (an at times dubious) release valve aimed at alleviating tensions around addressing the
unknown quantity of minorities as well as nodding to a welcome process of normalisation.
In the Aardman text we have here a third typology that offers a fresh depiction and that builds
on incongruity. Murray Davis sees that jokes made at the expense of minorities have been
continually popular due to this undermining of multi-incongruous systems and the play with
social propriety that sits at the heart of egalitarian ideologies (1993, p.12). Through this there is
an inference that this particular comedic space follows similar aspects of the second model, in the
demarcation of a processing space for audiences to adjust in approaching potentially difficult
subject matter. As the animation mediums plasticity facilitates the negotiation of issues of
discomfort and offence for the minority represented and it allows the smuggling in of serious
issues under the shell of a form perennially typecast as being in service to the simplistic.
Similarly in line with the formal space that animation tenders, the deployment of
anthropomorphism further aids the deactivation of anxiety. It is clear that in the models on offer
in both runs all maintain behavioural and articulation in line more with humans than animals,
they are active, personable and self-aware. Each sketch relies on placing the characters in real
world situations that imply a connection to society and refutes tired notions of disability as
linked to isolation. From Flash the sausage dogs inference over a mastery of the right
equipment when referring to the bicycle wheels he has in place of back legs, Roxys
proclamation of a highly sexualised self, (in itself an animation first arguably in terms of tone
and maturity) to Tim the tortoises matter-of-fact description of his regular journey to the sweet
shop for his children the characters are, as demonstrated by the careful placement of setting,
located and functioning within a recognisable everyday environment. The narratives present them
as self-aware, independent individuals who can express themselves intelligently and can make
valid points about their frustration with issues of mobility and their perceived invisibility within
society.
This third model also borrows from the two previous ones in that it presents subjective
experience while still disputing expectation. In contrast to most narratives the subjects have been
brought into the creative process via the charitys own research on the subject of access and they
are placed at the very heart of the narratives. While authorship is still contained within the
expected channels the shorts refutes positioning of this representation beyond that from acting
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merely as cipher, as a satellite feeders of lines to able-bodied performer and neither is there
present here a patronising dialogue of deification. From which approach troublesome dialogues
of Noble-isation can thus emerge.2
Thus we have in operation a more subtle gradation in depiction and one which, despite the
minimalist setting, uses this framework to provide a more complex, multi-faceted construct. This
is one that combines both subjectivity, (through the expression of individual experience),
objectivity, (in the manner by which these messages are presented) and a sense of connection that
comic animated forms fosters through the processes of identification facilitated by
anthropomorphism. Roger Scruton offers a summative point for us here when he suggests that
through the collusion of caricature and exaggeration, key determinants in animation, the
contrasting of differing surface perceptions in effect can and should be used to present a deeper
message: it is an incongruity that illustrates a deeper congruity between an object and itself
(1987, p.160). The presentations of disability through comedy and using the medium of stopmotion work in the Creature Discomforts series leads us away from staid representations and
through incongruous discourses allows an access to richer truths surely the project of any
animation?
^
Van Norris has been Senior Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the School of Creative Art
Film and Media, University of Portsmouth, England since 2003. He is currently completing a
PhD thesis, Drawing on the British Tradition: The Mapping of Cultural Attitudes and Identity
and the intersection with Comedy Modes employed within British Television Animation. This
paper was presented at Animation Unlimited, the 20th annual SAS conference, held at the Art
Institute at Bournemouth, 18-20 July, 2007.
References
Billig, M. (2005), Laughter and Ridicule Towards a Social Critique of Humour, Sage, London
Clark, M. (1987), Humor and Incongruity, The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, State
University of New York Publishing, New York
Davis, L. J. (1997), Constructing Normalcy - The Bell Curve, the Novel and Invention of the
Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century, The Disability Studies Reader, Routledge, New
York and London
Davis, M. (1993), Whats So Funny? - The Comic Conception of Culture and Society, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago
Deneroff, H. (July 29th, 2008), Animation Unlimited 2008 - harvey@deneroff.com - Comments
and Thoughts on Animation and Film. Retrieved August 14th, 2008: http://deneroff.com/
blog/
Dickens, P. (26th June, 2008), E-Mail Correspondence
Fraser, B. & Linvall, T. (1998), Darker Shades of Animation: African-American images in the
Warner Bros. Cartoon, Reading The Rabbit - Explorations in Warner Bros. Animation,
Rutgers University Press, New Jersey and London
2
As Laurie E. Harnick notes, this is a worthy but troublesome and unsatisfying process, which is highlighted within two recent animated releases
featuring Victor Hugos tortured Quasimodo figure, (The Hunchback of Notre Dame from 1995 for Goodtime productions and from 1996 by
Disney). Harnick sees that in both adaptations the darkness of the original text is discarded with the titular figure is ascribed a more heroic set of
sympathetic, less ambiguous and saintly connotations (2001, p.92). Though not physically impaired, as such the issues of reduction and
stereotyping assigned to his deformity and the resultant societal rejection makes Quasimodo a relevant model here. And this is reinforced through
the agenda present in the 1995 film which stresses the mistreatment of the disabled at the hands of the state. This process arguably includes, (as
Harvey Deneroff very kindly points out in his on-line column - July 2008), the likes of Long John Silver in Treasure Planet (2002).
75

Genosko, G. (2005). Natures and Cultures of Cuteness, Invisible Culture - An Electronic Journal
for Visual Culture, 9. Retrieved November 11th, 2008: http://www.rochester.edu/
in_visible_culture/Issue_9/genosko.html
Harnick, L. E. (2001). Lost and Found in Translation: The Changing Face of Disability in the
Film Adaptations of Hugos Notre Dame de Paris: 1842, Screening Disability -Essays on
Cinema and Disability, University Press of America, Boston
Hogarth, W. (1955), The Analysis of Beauty (1753), Clarendon Press, Oxford
Lane, A. (2003), Creating Creature Comforts - the award winning animation brought to life from
the makers of Chicken Run and Wallace and Gromit, Boxtree Publishing, Oxford
Longmore, P. K. (2001), Screening Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People, Screening Disability
-Essays on Cinema and Disability, University Press of America, Boston
Macdonald, K. (1996), A Lot Can Happen in a Second - Nick Park Interview by Kevin
Macdonald, Projections 5 - Filmmakers on Filmmaking, Faber Publishing, London
McCrea, C. (July 2008), Explosive, Expulsive, Extraordinary: The Dimensional Excess of
Animated Bodies, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 3, (1), pp. 9-24
Medhurst, A. (2007), A National Joke - Popular Comedy and English Cultural Identities,
Routledge, Oxford
Place-Verghnes, F. (2006), Tex Avery: A Unique Legacy, John Libbey Publishing, Malaysia
Pointon, A. & Davies, C. (1997), Introduction, Framed: Interrogating Disability in the Media,
BFI Publishing, London
Pointon, A. (1997), Disability and Documentary, Framed: Interrogating Disability in the Media,
BFI Publishing, London
Sandler, K. S. (Fall 1997). Pogs, Dogs or Ferrets: Anthropomorphism and Animaniacs,
Animation Journal, vol. 6, (1), pp. 44-53.
Scruton, R. (1987). Laughter, The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, State University of New
York Publishing, New York
Wells, P. (1998), Understanding Animation, Routledge, London
N/A. (2008), Introducing Leonard Cheshire Disability, Retrieved July 2nd, 2008:
http://www.lcdisability.org/?lid=32
N/A. (May 1st, 2006). MTV to air trial episode of Popetown. Retrieved October 3rd, 2008: http://
www.cbc.ca/arts/story/2006/05/01/popetown-germany-protest.html
N/A. (2002). John Callahans Quads. Retrieved October 3rd, 2008: http://www.
mediaworld.com.au/animationworks/quads/
Van Norris
76

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Animation Studies is published by the Society for Animation Studies,

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Letter from the Editor

51 Why animation historiography?

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

I think you will agree that each paper here is

From this years Bournemouth conference

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Half-breed Dog, Half-breed Film

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

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Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Okada 2006 p.17.

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Steadier, happier, and quicker at the work?

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

of Communication and Culture, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Originally

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

For the last few years, bandwidth issues

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

New Internet technology has resulted in an active form of spectatorship. As patterns of

Addictive TV remixes Antonio Banderas... (2006) Mashup. Directed by Addictive TV.

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Visions of a Future Past

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Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

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Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Ulysses returns to Earth?

Ulysse 31 (Uch densetsu)

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

The Spectre in the Screen

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008

Animation Studies Vol.3, 2008