ASAnimatedDialogues 2007 PDF

Animation Studies
Animated Dialogues
2007
Animation Studies
Editor
Nichola Dobson
Independent Scholar
Managing Editor
Timo Linsenmaier
Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe
Editorial Board
Charles da Costa Caroline Ruddell

Savannah College of Art and Design St. Mary’s College, University of Surrey
Ethan de Seife Paul Ward

Gettysburg College Bournemouth Arts Institute
Pierre Floquet Karin Wehn

ENSEIRB, Université de Bordeaux Universität Leipzig
Maureen Furniss Paul Wells

California Institute of the Arts 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-NonCommercial-

NoDerivs 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 editor’s address.
Cover illustration: Spriggan. © 1988 Studio 4°C/TBS/Bandai Visual.
ISSN 1930-1928
Animation Studies – Vol.4, 2009
Contents
iv Letter from the Editor 75 Facial Expressions for Empathic

by Nichola Dobson Communication of Emotion in
Animated Characters
1 An Animated Dialogue: Moving by Andrew Buchanan
Into the Local
by Amanda Third & Dirk de Bruyn 84 Behind the Flash Exterior: Scratching
the Surface of Online Animated Nar-
8 Battlefields for the Undead: Stepping ratives
Out of the Graveyard by Peter Moyes
by Paul Wells
91 The Svankmajer Touch
10 In the Sand a Line is Drawn: A Re- by Cathryn Vasseleu
flection on Animation Studies
by Adrian Martin 102 How Michaela Pavlatova both in-
corporates and rebels against the
14 (The) Death (of) the Animator, or: the Czech animation tradition
Felicity of Felix by Miriam Harris
by Alan Cholodenko
110 Reaching Out to Touch: Animation
20 Performing a Traumatic Effect: The and Aboriginal Children in Taiwan
Films of Robert Breer by Zhi-Ming Su
by Dirk de Bruyn
115 Recording Australian Animation
29 Superflat Eschatology: Renewal and History: Critical Significance of
Religion in anime Historical Research
by Michael Broderick by Dan & Lienors Torre
46 The Uncanny and the Robot in the 125 Submission Guidelines &
Astro Boy Episode “Franken” Creative Commons
by Katharine Buljan
55 Final Fantasy or The Incredibles:

Ultra-realistic animation, aesthetic
engagement and the uncanny valley
by Matthew Butler & Lucie Joschko
64 Flowerpot Men: The Haptic Image in

Brian Cosgrove and Richard Hall’s
Animations
by Cordelia Brown
iii
Letter from the Editor
Welcome to this long awaited special edition

of Animation Studies. I won’t say too much
here as my involvement was primarily in an ad-
visory capacity. This special edition of the
journal was guest edited by Dirk De Bruyn,
Amanda Third and Dimitris Vardoulakis. They
have worked hard with all of the authors and
have brought together some of the best papers
from the Animated Dialogues Conference held
in Melbourne 2007. Their introduction more
thoroughly describes the papers and the pur-
pose of the conference than I could, but I am
pleased to be able to present this work here.
The range and scope of the papers demon-
strates the excellent work coming out of the
Australasian animation studies community,
even if geography (and flight costs) forbids us
from meeting each other too often! I hope you
will enjoy their hard work and that all members
continue with their contributions.
Nichola Dobson
iv
Animation Studies – Animated Dialogues, 2007
Amanda Third & Dirk de Bruyn

An Animated Dialogue: Moving Into the Local
The Animated Dialogues 2007 conference was first conceptualised as an event that would
bring together scholars working in the field of animation studies in the Australasian region. This
first Animated Dialogues conference focused on the areas of texts, industries and audiences as a
way of bringing people together who frequently work in quite disparate geographical and
intellectual contexts. The conference’s aims were twofold: firstly, to consolidate the sense of an
intellectual community working in animation studies in the region and, secondly, to provide a
space to begin the work of documenting the rich and diverse histories, practices and critiques of
animation in Australasia. Implicit in the conference’s agenda was the desire to foreground issues
pertaining to the future development of the discipline of animation studies locally. That is, the
conference was envisaged as an opportunity to take stock of the work that is under way, as well as
to identify existing gaps and potential areas of interrogation, with an eye to expanding the
discipline in ways that build upon the backbone of rigorous research currently being undertaken.
The conference was a truly collaborative event, receiving funding from relevant schools and
departments at Monash University (Victoria), Murdoch University (Western Australia), RMIT
(Victoria), and Deakin University (Victoria). Two days of the conference were hosted at Monash
University’s Berwick campus - an outer suburban Melbourne campus with a strong animation
education profile – with the third day held at the Victorian College of the Arts in the inner city.
The conference was attended by delegates from Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and Japan that
hailed from a variety of academic, pedagogic, production and exhibition backgrounds, including
full and part-time university researchers, a cohort of postgraduate and Honours students
(notably, Andi Sparks’ Queensland contingent who made the trip en masse), artists such as Lisa
Roberts and Michael Roseth, and professional animators such as Antoinette Starkiewicz. Their
work addressed a wide array of topics, ranging from the deeply theoretical to the production-
inspired. We hope to have reflected some of the diversity of this work in the articles presented
within this collection.
The conference was planned to coincide with Melbourne’s premier animation event, the
Melbourne International Animation Festival held from the 19-24 June, 2007. The brainchild of
Director, Malcolm Turner, MIAF was established in 2001 and, since then, has grown in size and
scope into an international event that commands both recognition and respect as one of the
world’s largest and most vibrant animation festivals (see www.miaf.com.au). When the
conference committee first approached Turner to propose an academic conference to be run in
tandem with the festival, he and his team were highly supportive and offered to promote the
conference alongside the festival in order to encourage animation practitioners and fans to attend
and engage. It is our hope that an academic conference drawing on both local and international
expertise will be a feature of future festival programs in the region.
Part of the strategy of holding the conference in proximity to the animation festival was to
compel a focus on the dynamic intersections between theory and practice. Whilst many animation
scholars and practitioners in the Australasian region insist upon the importance of constructive
dialogue and exchange between on the one hand, theoretical arenas and on the other, artistic and
commercial practices, nonetheless the perception of a schism often prevails – much to the
detriment of the discipline as a whole. This is exemplified, for instance, by the claim that critics
need to have practical animation experience in order that their comments have currency and
1
move beyond ‘mere navel gazing’. Conversely, production-based animation research is only now
beginning to gain credibility within the academy in the face of, for example, all too often deeply
entrenched ideas about the illegitimacy of production-based research projects (frequently, we
might add, fuelled by the misguided perception that practitioners are reluctant to engage in the
historical and cultural analysis of their own work).
However, increasingly – to appropriate the mantra Paul Wells’ uses in the commentary that
opens this special issue – the call for ‘no theory without practice; no practice without theory; no
progress without history’ is taking centre stage in animation studies both in Australasia and
internationally. In practice, locally, there is a growing insistence within the tertiary education
sector that practitioners undertaking project-based research come to terms with contemporary
theoretical developments in ways that enhance the cultural and critical relevance of animation
texts without hindering the creative process (although admittedly, this balance is sometimes
difficult to achieve). In addition, organizations such as ASPERA (Australian Screen Producers
Education and Research Association) have lobbied, with some success, the previous and current
Australian governments to have production-based research outputs count in the government’s
tertiary research funding calculations. Likewise, as Alan Cholodenko argues in his introduction to
the recently released The Illusion of Life II, theoreticians are compelled to address the co-
implication of ‘global theorising’ and ‘piecemeal theorising’1 in ways that we would claim bring
questions about production practices and contexts into play more prominently within the
emerging body of ‘theoretical’ scholarship.
The issues to be canvassed in the development of the discipline in the region are multiple.
Whilst the discipline in Australasia needs to address the specificities of the ‘local’ (for example:
identifying the kinds of institutional contexts that will best nurture animation studies; generating
local animation archives that record the development of animation practices in the region;
understanding the particularities of regional industrial contexts on animation production), it is
also incumbent on us to keep ‘global’ issues firmly within our purview (for example: the impact
on animation texts of global processes of cross-cultural exchange; the implications of the
proliferation of handheld networked devices for the future of animation; the ramifications for
animation of the global shift in the conditions of media production whereby the new media
imperative that consumers become producers seems likely to become the dominant paradigm
into the future).
This special issue opens with contributions from Paul Wells and Adrian Martin. Our brief to
them was to outline their understanding of the key issues confronting the development of the
discipline of animation studies, and the resulting essays can be read as complementary
perspectives. Wells – whose intellectual work and dedication to the development of the discipline
of animation studies will not have escaped the animation studies scholar – gave a stimulating and
entertaining keynote address at the conference outlining the state-of-play in animation studies
globally. His astute and encouraging interventions into discussions during the conference were,
for many, a highlight. In his contribution to this issue, ‘Battlefields for the Undead: Stepping Out
of the Graveyard’, he reiterates some of the central points from his keynote address, reinforcing
our own sentiments about promoting and building upon the inclusive attitude pervasive in
animation communities around the world (an attitude implicit in the Society for Animations
Studies’ facilitation and support of both the conference and the publication of this special issue –
1
Alan Cholodenko, ‘Introduction’ to The Illusion of Life II (Sydney: Power Publications, 2006) 44.
2
thank you2). Martin is a longstanding and internationally regarded Australian film critic who
launched The Illusion of Life II at the conference.3 In his essay, ‘In the Sand a Line is Drawn: A
Reflection on Animation Studies’, he argues against the ‘narrowing of interests’ that so often
accompanies ‘newly-baptised’ disciplines.
The first of the articles presented here that were generated by the conference, Alan
Cholodenko’s ‘(The) Death (of) the Animator’, builds upon his important work of theorising
animation and facilitating theoretical animation scholarship within the broader animation
community through the publication of The Illusion of Life I and II. The theoretical concerns he
outlines here ‘commingle’, to use Cholodenko’s own term, with those issues identified by Wells.
Engaging with Gunning’s work on early cinema, Cholodenko argues for animation’s historical
place as ‘the first attraction of cinema’. He describes animation as the ‘uncanny spectre of cinema’
that endures despite ‘every effort by the “ghostbusting” analyst/theorists of cinema to master,
exorcise, conjure away and eradicate this spectre.’ Like Martin, albeit from a different
perspective, Cholodenko advocates the opening up of animation studies and, in doing so,
encourages an outward looking animation studies that is truly inter-disciplinary in its impulses. It
may, for example, be fruitful to place his arguments about animation’s historical niche next to the
emergent observation about the centrality of the painterly in image production within new media
debates.
Dirk De Bruyn offers a phenomenological reading of the traumatic effects engendered by
Robert Breer’s experimental animations. He enlists the direct impact of Gunning’s cinema of
attractions to support his claims. This essay contributes to the critique of the ‘relation of
animation (in all its techniques and forms) to avant-garde cinema’ that Martin highlights as an
area worth prioritising into the future. Indeed, such graphic and ‘direct’ work as Breer’s merits a
place within the animation studies ‘canon’ given its ‘avant-garde’, reflexive concern with the
medium itself. This emphasis places it in contrast to those experimental animations that are still
primarily concerned with entertainment and storytelling and often interwoven with a fascination
with the personalities of the artists themselves.
The next two articles provide thematic readings of animation texts. In ‘Saving the World from
Banality: Post-9/11 Animated Superheroes’, Amanda Third analyses Pixar’s re-rendering of the
traditional superhero figure in the 2004 feature length animation, The Incredibles. She argues that
the film’s focus on the banality of the everyday can be read as a coming-to-terms with the
problematisation of the everyday induced by the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington
in September, 2001. Mick Broderick tracks anime’s pronounced preoccupation with the
apocalyptic in ‘Making Things New: Regeneration and Transcendence in Anime‘. Focusing on
Spriggan (1998) and Appleseed (2004), Broderick argues against reading these texts in terms of
Western secular understandings of the apocalypse that focus on the moment of destruction. He
proposes instead that ‘anime glimpses beyond the cataclysms of radical renovation’ in ways that
are both culturally specific – aligning with the Japanese spiritual understanding of heroic
mythology – and cross-cultural, accounting for anime’s increasingly globalised market.
In ‘The Uncanny and the Robot in the Astro Boy Episode “Franken”’, Katharine Buljan brings
us to the concept of the uncanny which for both Cholodenko and Gunning is the order of all
animation (and, indeed, film). Unpacking the uncanny via an analysis of its Freudian origins,
2
On this note, our special thanks go to Maureen Furniss, Nichola Dobson and Timo Linsenmaier for their collaboration and support.
3
The Illusion of Life II documents Australia’s second international conference on animation held in 1995. This collection is reviewed at the end of
this special issue. For the published version of Martin’s launch address, see Adrian Martin, ‘Unleashing the Inanimate’, RealTime 80 (August -
September, 2007) at http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue80/8640.
3
Buljan argues that although Franken is depicted as producing an uncanny effect for the human
characters of the story, the film ultimately fails to construct Franken as uncanny for its audiences.
A critical point Buljan makes is that, had the animation been made in more realistic 3D, then the
uncanny effect imparted on the viewer would have been increased. This contention is worth
placing alongside Matthew Butler and Lucie Joschko’s research on the uncanny in ‘Final Fantasy
or The Incredibles: Ultra-Realistic Animation, Aesthetic Engagement and the Uncanny Valley’.
Applying Mori’s theory of the uncanny valley to the two films, they ask: ‘How does a film such as
Final Fantasy, clearly a technical triumph, suffer in comparison to the bright, burlesque qualities
of The Incredibles? Shouldn’t the realistic aesthetic of Final Fantasy allow us to at least engage
with characters to a greater extent?’ They find that computer generated animation does not
necessarily produce the desired character identifications in the audience.
The theme of the primacy of the animated experience within the contemporary world that
Cholodenko alludes to is taken up from a different perspective in Cordelia Brown’s ‘Flowerpot
Men: The Nature and Perception of the Haptic Image in the Stop-motion Animated Productions
of Brian Cosgrove and Richard Hall’. Brown investigates the haptic perceptions of the young,
perhaps ‘unformed’, audiences of the Flowerpot Men. She finds that the animation in these
children’s programs invites a haptic viewing that parallels the tactile elements of children’s
experience of play.
Andrew Buchanan and Peter Moyes hone in on the more technical aspects of animation practice. In
‘Facial Expressions for Empathic Communication of Emotion in Animated Characters’, Buchanan
proposes that the insights of behavioural sciences research on spontaneous and deliberate facial
expressions have much to offer animators, who have historically communicated emotion through more
symbolic methods. Buchanan argues for a more conscious and planned integration of this knowledge
within animation production. Peter Moyes’ ‘Behind the Flash Exterior: Scratching the Surface of Online
Animated Narratives’ adds weight to Butler and Joschko’s argument about the uncanny. Moyes asserts
that the simple graphics and limited movement of Flash animation can often communicate a greater
complexity than more realist forms of animation.
Both Cathryn Vasseleu and Miriam Harris investigate aspects of Czech animation, making
important contributions to the animation studies scholarship on national cinemas. In ‘The
Švankmajer Touch’, Vasseleu uniquely adds to the growing body of work on Jan Švankmajer’s
work. She investigates Švankmajer’s experimentations with tactility in his static artworks and
poems from 1974-1983 through a period of enforced hiatus from film production. Miriam Harris
focuses with impressive academic clarity on a lesser known Czech animator, Michaela Pavlatova,
in order to situate her work in relation to the tradition of Czech animation in ‘Checking out a
Czech Animator: How Michaela Pavlatova both incorporates and rebels against the Czech
animation tradition’.
Finally, Zhi-Ming Su contributes a report on workshopping animation in educational contexts
in Taiwan entitled, ‘Reaching Out to Touch: Animation and Aboriginal Children in Taiwan’. This
report discusses the achievements of animation workshops run according to the Association
International du Film d’ Animation (ASIFA) model in fostering educational advancement for
young people of Taiwanese indigenous communities in the central mountains and the east coast.
In addition to those areas of inquiry highlighted for potential development by our
commentators for this issue, in the spirit of expanding the discipline in a holistic manner,
conference discussions drew attention to the need for increased activity in the following areas: the
creation and study of local and/or regional animation archives; the analysis of the impact of
4
regional, industrial contexts; the critique of the impact of globalisation on Australasian animated
national cinemas; audience studies; and research on the impacts of technological developments
not only pertaining to animation production but also to its distribution and consumption.
To create a formal space for the interrogation of animation practices in the Australasia region,
the last day of the conference – held at the Victorian College of the Arts – was dedicated to a
showcase of Australian animation and its critiques. If the experience of the conference can be
understood as a gauge of the status of the discipline in Australia, what this day highlighted was
that the dedicated analysis of Australian animation is in its embryonic stages. This is not to say
that the quality of work being produced is inadequate but, rather, that the process of
documenting Australian animation traditions is only now gathering momentum. In particular, this
day highlighted a range of issues pertaining to the archive of Australian animation. Unfortunately,
as is often the case with valuable cultural artefacts, much archival material still languishes in the
garages and attics of prominent Australian animators or their families and, as such, is not readily
available for exhibition or to students and critics of animation for analysis. Indeed, when Grant
Stone decided he wanted to screen Alexander Stitt’s groundbreaking 1981 Australian animation,
Grendel Grendel Grendel – an experiment in 3D animation that required a dual projection system
– it took him almost three months of dedicated searching (and a good deal of brazen ‘cold
calling’) to locate a video copy. Following consultations with leading Australian film archives, it
would appear that the original reels have been lost to the rubbish heap.
Substantial work has begun in the collection and analysis of Australian animation. Notably,
Marian Quigley, a prime mover behind this inaugural Animated Dialogues conference, has
undertaken critical work documenting and critiquing the work of a variety of Australian women
animators. This work is collected in Quigley’s wonderful book, Women do Animate: Interviews
with Ten Australian Women Animators (2006).4 Similarly, Dan Torre and Lienors Torre are
currently undertaking a project the documenting the history of Australian animation. As part of
this process, they are interviewing key Australian practitioners and producing a series of
monographs, making this material available to scholars in a consolidated format for the first time.
As part of the conference program, they curated an exhibition of the works of Alex Stitt and Arie
Scheffer. This special issue concludes with a summary article on these exhibition/research
outcomes that operates both as a trace of their contribution to the conference and, hopefully,
gives this work more of an international audience. Notwithstanding this kind of collation and
inquiry, there is still much to be done to document the diverse histories and practices of
animation in the Australasian region. Further, the archive project confronting animation scholars
in the region not only entails the production of archives but also the development of appropriate
critical tools for the analysis of such collections.
Though present in some of the contributions to this special issue, industrial themes were
surprisingly not prioritised by conference delegates on this occasion. Nonetheless, industrial
contexts constitute an area demanding increased scholarly attention. Industrial perspectives on
animation have historically been limited to the influence of multinational animation corporations
such as Disney. Research could well be extended to encompass a broader range of industrial
settings, including comprehensive studies of Studio Ghibli5, Pixar and Aardman. The kind of
analysis of Czech national animation cinemas provided in this issue by Vasseleu and Harris could
4
Marian Quigley, Women do Animate: Interviews with Ten Australian Women Animators (Melbourne: Insight Publications, 2006). Quigley’s
connections with women working in the industry led to the conference organisers inviting Australian animation artist, Antoinette Starkiewicz to
present her work and lead an industry discussion at the conference.
5
To our knowledge, analyses of Studio Ghibli’s industrial regimes are yet to appear in English.
5
well be extended to other national cinemas such as that of Korea. The emergence of such national
cinemas and in relation to processes of globalisation also warrants further analysis. There is
certainly a need to document and analyse the studio settings and national industries shaping
Australian animation’s conditions of production.
Research with an industrial focus of particular relevance to Australasian animation production
(and perhaps beyond) might include an analysis of financing strategies for production (especially
for independent animators); the value of the promotion of work through festivals; DVD
distribution; and the impact of animation works placed within compilation programs. In
Australia, (independent) animators have traditionally experienced difficulties gaining funding
because they fall through the cracks of schemes set up for either artists or filmmakers. This is
perhaps one of the downsides of the enduring industrial regard of animation as inferior to film.
Further, whilst there are exceptions, such as Look Both Ways, animators’ careers don’t usually
follow the same trajectory as those of filmmakers whereby a filmmaker ‘cuts his/her teeth’ on a
couple of short films before moving to feature length productions. A longitudinal study of the
careers of animators would enable the industry to better plan for development.
Technological developments are occurring at an unprecedented rate, impacting on artistic
practices, mechanisms of distribution, and the dynamics of consumption. We await
comprehensive analyses of the impact of the seismic shift in short film reception and production
triggered by the pervasive use of new technologies and the rise of Web 2.0 platforms such as
youtube.com. The global proliferation of personality and technology driven animation festivals
(as a sub-set of short film) and their marketing through DVD compilations can be argued to be
part of a shift towards an industrial model akin to the one embraced by the music industry in the
1960s. The impact of a generation of techno and image manipulation savvy punters provides a
fertile and receptive audience for such a new animation aesthetics and consumption. Such
audiences are being cultivated by MIAF, for example. There is also a need to analyse and
compare the multiplying delivery systems that technology continues to produce. It may be of
benefit to analyse current changes in relation to those taking place a century ago with the
emergence of new technologies such as photography, electricity and cinema. As was the case one
hundred years ago, institutional and industrial models are changing to deliver a new set of
parameters within which animation and animators must operate. Although festivals may focus on
such issues in industry panels and show and tell sessions, there is a need to engage more critically
with these areas of production and reception in the academic arena.
Both the conference organisers and the Advisory Board of this special issue understand
animation studies as a hybrid scholarly discipline that operates at the nexus of a range of
institutional, disciplinary and production-oriented boundaries. It is a discipline that unfolds, for
example, at the intersections between theory and practice, art and technology, and the local and
the global. Although, as Wells points out, animation has its own history, animation’s critiques are
also inspired by the theoretical apparatuses of cinema studies, cultural studies, political economy
of the media, creative industries, and so on. However, it’s not just that animation studies is
informed by these traditions. Increasingly animation studies, positioned as it is at the intersections
between disciplines, has a role to play in, as Cholodenko states, informing theoretical and critical
developments in a range of other disciplines. It is demonstrably interdisciplinary in its reach. ^
6
Journal Special Issue Advisory Board

Amanda Third, Murdoch University
Dirk de Bruyn, Deakin University
Dimitris Vardoulakis, Monash University
Miriam Harris, Unitec
Marian Quigley, Independent Scholar
Paul Wells, University of Loughborough
Nichola Dobson, Independent Scholar/ Editor of Animation Studies
Animated Dialogues 2007 Conference Organising Committee

Amanda Third, Murdoch University
Dirk de Bruyn, Deakin University
Marian Quigley, Monash University
Lienors Torre, Victorian College of the Arts/Deakin University
Dan Torre, RMIT
© Amanda Third & Dirk de Bruyn

Edited by Nichola Dobson
7
Paul Wells
Battlefields for the Undead
Stepping Out of the Graveyard
I will be forever grateful to be asked to deliver the keynote address at the ‘Animated
Dialogues’ Conference in Melbourne in June 2007. My survey of the field of Animation Studies in
the current period – ‘Battlefields for the Undead: Re-assessing Animation Studies and other
Romantic Interludes’ – inevitably enabled me to get a few things off my chest, and posit some
ideas and thoughts pertinent to the Conference outlook and agenda. I was able to acknowledge,
for example, that to be back in Australia discussing animation was also to be celebrating one of
the first conferences dedicated to ‘Animation Studies’ that took place in Sydney in 1987, and
which led to Alan Cholodenko’s collection of essays, ‘The Illusion of Life’, some of which, to use
a ‘Cholodenko-ism’, ‘for me’, offered great insight, and others went straight over my head. His
current collection – ‘The Illusion of Life II’, with its polemical and challenging address of
animation literature, taking the field to task for the ways it has absented much post-modern and
post-structuralist thought from its evolving canon, concentrated too much on the concept of ‘the
auteur’, and privileged a view of animation as a ‘language’ rather than a philosophic trope, at the
very least signals how far the field has come; moreover, with its use of the work of critical
theorists and thinkers from other disciplines, significantly progresses further debates about
defining animation, and resists the notion, often posited by Suzanne Buchan, editor of the ‘new’
and extremely valuable ‘Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal’, that we are at a ‘starting point’
in animation study.
In the grand scheme of things, of course, this view might well be true, and some might argue
that I am merely challenging it, because my own small contributions to the field may be hurtling
to the remainder stores, never to be embraced again unless aesthetically improved by the addition
of a ‘sale’ sticker. Not so, actually. For me, this ‘starting point’ theory ignores a plethora of
writing about animation that precedes the notion of ‘animation study’; the profound contribution
of animation historians – often dismissed as mere ‘describers’ of the form, and not its
interrogators; those writers who have sought to theorise the form in some way; and of course, the
written and recorded work of animators themselves. There are some other issues, at stake, too,
not least of which is the idea that somehow ‘Animation Studies’ has created its own ghetto, and
that it does not reach out significantly to other disciplines, perhaps, most notably Film and Media
Studies. Cholodenko’s work, to cite but one example, is evidence that this is not so. Although,
arguably, it was perhaps necessary for writers of the calibre of Bendazzi, Crafton, Klein, Langer,
Pilling, Furniss, and more recently, Robinson, Leslie, and Gehman and Reinke, to determine
animation as a separate and progressive form, because ‘film’ would inevitably ‘lose its object’, and
the reclamation and definition of animation as a form in its own right was a necessary pre-
requisite for other disciplines ‘to come to the party’.
Academic cultures are rife with bizarre schisms and points of dogma and debate, of course,
which ultimately mean ‘not a jot’ in the ‘real world’. It is this ‘real world’, that also significantly
problematises animation, though, as the age old discussion about the apparent gap between
theory and practice supposedly grows wider – theorists clinging to French philosophers, ‘new’
media gurus, and art cultures, while practitioners study software manuals, work to impossible
deadlines, and tour the burgeoning list of animation festivals worldwide. Yes, I know these are
clichés, but like all clichés there are some grains of truth to discern, and assumptions to dispute.
8
My own mantra has been doing the rounds for some time now – ‘no theory without practice; no
practice without theory; no progress without history’ – and I genuinely believe this, but as is often
the case in many fields, the definitions of a form are often intrinsically bound up with the
personalities who pronounce them. My own background is informed by production in the
broadcast and theatre industries, and an attempt, at least, to write passionately and hopefully
intelligently about animation, so, ‘for me’, there is only the elision of theory and practice, and the
desire to ‘historicise’ in an increasingly de-historicised, if not de-politicised world. This is one of
the reasons why I have always suggested animation is a modernist form, with a proven distinctive
language, imbued with an ideologically and metaphysically charged agenda, and remained
interested in historiography and technological determinism. In my view, it is no surprise,
therefore, that the documentary enterprise turns increasingly to animation; comedy – so honed
and precise in animation – remains its ‘radical’ model of expression; and that ‘artists’ wish to use
it as a form; though, it must be said, while often denying this, for fear of in some ways being
soiled by the association with ‘the cartoon’.
Hmm, this remains a tricky one. Animation is an art, a stance, a record of psychological and
emotional memory, a technique, a concept, I could go on, but it seems to me unproductive to
potentially re-invoke the high culture / popular culture divide, in order to privilege a view of
‘artist animation’ or ‘the manipulated moving image’ or ‘extended cinema’, over the ‘frame-by-
frame’, ‘the cartoonal’, animation in visual effects (surely, the highest degree of ‘the manipulated
moving image’) or conventional storytelling in ‘new traditionalist’ CGI, or 3D stop motion
animation. This partly seeks to create a hierarchy in which, once more, particular kinds of critical
theory can meet animation as high art, in a self-fulfilling sense of its own importance. I, for one,
would find this difficult to accept. The animation community has traditionally been an inclusive
one. If it is to grow it needs to maintain this sense of embracing all perspectives and resist the
hierarchies that so undermine not merely academic fields of study, but working lives. Strange that
we should be at ‘a starting point’, when so many funereal metaphors – David Clark’s animation as
‘undead’ cinema and (the much missed) Dick Arnall’s ‘Death to Animation’ polemic, to name but
two – are played out to define animation. Animation should and does imbue things with life; for
theorists, practitioners, historians, artists, and anyone, however, ‘categorised’, who feels its energy
and insight, the intrinsic humanity revealed at the heart of its illusionism, is actually its shared
language, and should continue to prompt engaging work – both in practice and criticism – for the
foreseeable future. ^
© Paul Wells
9
Adrian Martin
In the Sand a Line is Drawn
A Reflection on Animation Studies
There are at least three problems that arise when any topic of interest (heterogeneous and
globally dispersed as it must necessarily be at the outset) transforms itself, in an (equally
necessary) institutional/territorial gesture, into a defined field of study - and I have seen all these
problems materialise at least once before in my lifetime, during the rise of Cultural Studies. How
might these problems affect the burgeoning area of Animation Studies?
1. As Paul Wells rightly remarks in his contribution to this issue of Animation Studies,
‘Battlefields for the Undead: Stepping Out of the Graveyard’, all previous attempts to
describe, map, appreciate, criticise or theorise the area are briskly banished into an
obscure pre-history, or handily erased altogether. This is the tabula rasa mode of a field’s
active self-definition: nothing that came before really matters; nobody ever before
attempted anything like we are doing; we are beginning from scratch. As John Cale once
sang: Antarctica Starts Here.
2. An academic field - and this is not a whinge against the academy per se – tends quickly
to erect a certain kind of canon: not so much the greatest works (although that implicit
judgement or valorisation tends to come quietly attached) as those that most readily
generate high-level commentary gathered around about half a dozen rubrics (aesthetics,
technology, industry, modernity, cultural zeitgeist, etc). This canon in animation studies at
present would uncontroversially include: anime, Svankmajer, the Quay brothers, Pixar,
Dreamworks … with some flashbacks to pioneers including Chuck Jones, Winsor McCay,
etc.
3. Once professional space has been (hard) won for a particular type, form or mode of
cinema (whether documentary, experimental, national or animated), the open-ended will
to network that type/form/mode with all other types/forms/modes tends to take a strictly
back seat in the conference, publication and pedagogical agenda of the field. Thus the
connections between narrative and non-narrative, between crystalline short-film and epic
feature-length forms, between animated and live-action, and much else, fall away from
investigation.
Note that I omit from my list a commonplace lament whenever a self-proclaimed new field
gets going: the creation of a specialist, sometimes difficult and laborious theoretical and/or
technical language – a jargon. Actually, I welcome the new jargon of animation studies, such as it
comes to us through, for instance, the two Illusion of Life anthologies edited by Alan Cholodenko;
this is indeed the healthiest sign of life in the area and, to my mind, the approach that holds the
most fertile promise for the work of the future. But a new language, in and of itself, does not
necessarily solve or even address the three institutional/historical problems outlined above.
Let me flashback to the 1950s: not a personal testimony (for my birth date scrapes in at the
decade’s very end), but a fragment of imaginative cultural restoration – as all truly historical work
(on cinema or anything else) must be. In fact, I will need to take liberty, in this sketch, to roam by
association ahead a little to the ‘60s and ‘70s; genealogies are never clean and neat.
Long before our contemporary moment (but still, today, in it) the French film magazine Positif
featured critics of a Surrealist persuasion such as Robert Benayoun (and later Petr Král)
eulogising popular American and experimental Eastern European animation alike; in the ‘70s, a
10
dazzling little dossier of this writing will appear, translated into English, in the American
publication Surrealism and its Popular Accomplices (which I encountered – fatal thrill – at the age
of 20). Chris Marker in Letter from Siberia (1957), like (a little later) Orson Welles in The Trial
(1963), inserts an animated sequence into an otherwise live-action work – that’s three and a half
decades before Tarantino did it in Kill Bill (2003 & 2004). Another member of the loose Left
Bank group of filmmakers in France, Alain Resnais, alludes frequently to cartoons and comics in
his work, including the splendid short essay about the Bibliothèque nationale, Toute la mémoire
du monde (1956). That film – like Walerian Borowczyk’s haunting, uncanny animations (pre-
Svankmajer, pre-Quays) – pops up everywhere in the very catholic/eclectic programs of voracious
cine-clubs or film societies in the ‘50s – even in country towns and church halls (it is a lost
network, and a fairly lost history as well, today). In the UK, from the early ‘50s, critic, theorist
and art school teacher Raymond Durgnat never ceases drawing the lateral connections between
all the forms of ‘graphism’ in cinema, whether drawn, staged, photographed, or somehow evoked
or alluded to …
Does this (I could list much more) add up to the same kind of energetic combustion we see
today in the newly-baptized animation studies field? Probably not; it was all too piecemeal and
dispersed, and gained no significant institutional traction (even if it did result in some of the
earliest and finest survey books in the field, such as Benayoun’s 1961 Le Dessin animé après Walt
Disney). But the point is not to pre-emptively assert that ‘it’s all been done before’ (because it
hasn’t); rather, we need the imaginative and creative reach, as well as the intellectual and critical
generosity, to mine these scattered but powerful moments of prior animation-appreciation, which
occurred all over the world (I have mentioned only a few Anglo-European instances). Precisely
with Walter Benjamin’s powerful goal (as articulated in his famous essay ‘On the Concept of
History’) in mind: to give back, to each of the significant but rapidly disappearing instants of the
cultural past, its unrealised future. Or, as we might put it today in relation to animation study, the
‘field’ or ‘discipline’ they never enjoyed in their time.
Where is animation study going? The military-style talk of a unified intellectual-pedagogic
field boldly going forth in one determined direction is usually grotesque (and we could tote up
plenty of examples of this nervous territorial excess from the histories of both Cinema Studies and
Cultural Studies). No topic or orientation should be off-limits. The problem – as the tendencies
listed at the outset attempt to suggest – is in the narrowing of interests, the casual exclusions of
bodies of work, the oppressive ‘critical mass’ of certain topics and references (aka ‘academic
fashion’).
For example, I would like to see far more attention paid to the relation of animation (in all its
techniques and forms) to avant-garde cinema – an extremely rich history, as well a rich span of
present-day activities. Within the Australian context, I have nothing against the acclaim and
attention paid to the meticulous character-based narratives of Harvie Krumpet (Adam Elliot,
2003), The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello (Anthony Lucas, 2005) or Happy
Feet (George Miller, Warren Coleman & Judy Morris, 2006). But I am personally more excited by
the possibilities of studying the ongoing avant-garde experiments in animation by Marcus
Bergner (The Surface, 2007), Van Sowerwine (Clara, 2004), Neil Taylor (Roll Film, 1994), Pia
Borg (Footnote, 2003), Philip Brophy (the installation Vox, 2007), or Sally Golding & Joel Stern
collaborating as Abject Leader for their expanded cinema performances – again, to name only a
few.
11
Is a theory of animation the veritable centrepiece of a theory of film itself? Certainly, the ideas
of Brophy, Cholodenko and others concerning the ‘animatic apparatus’, or Thomas Elsaesser’s
notion that contemporary cinema in the digital age tends ever more (as Durgnat intuited) towards
the surface manipulation of the graphic image on a computer screen, or most recently the stress
on the constitutive artifice of the cinematic medium in Daniel Frampton’s boldly argued
Filmosophy, take us inevitably toward a primal cinematic unit: the frame or (as the French like to
call it) the photogram. Film theory, in its conventional and classic forms (deriving from Bazin,
Kracauer, Arnheim, etc) tends to begin at basic levels several removes from the individual
celluloid frame, such as the photographic index, the theatrical scene, the performing body, and so
on. But let us not forget that some of the most visionary narrative filmmakers, from Orson Welles
to Tsui Hark, and not forgetting George Miller (channelling and updating Eisenstein’s montage
theories in his Mad Max films), have been compelled to work at the intricate level of single frames
for their most explosive effects. Nor should we forget that one of the founding texts of semiotic
film theory in the early 1970s, Thierry Kuntzel’s ‘Le Défilement’, is very precisely a study of the
erotically uncanny frame-to-frame transformations in a classic animated film, Peter Foldes’
Appetite of a Bird (1964).
A theory of the frame as the most basic unit of cinema is able to reach – in the Benjaminian
spirit of recovering the unrealised past – in many directions. Isidore Isou’s extraordinarily
prescient 1952 Lettrist manifesto, ‘Aesthetics of Cinema’, was already calling for a post-
photographic understanding of the film medium, based (in the manner of the entire Lettrist
system or approach) on the isolating and breaking-down (or ‘chiselling’) of frame-units. Since, in
works like Isou’s experimental classic Treatise on Slime and Eternity (1951), this involved drawing
and scratching on the celluloid strip (before Brakhage – who was deeply impressed and
influenced by Isou – and others made this a familiar aesthetic gesture), we are already knee-deep
in both the theory and practice of the photogram. Most recently, in a powerful revisitation and
reconsideration of the legacy of film semiotics, Kuntzel’s close compatriot Raymond Bellour (in
his 2008 Gauss Seminars in Criticism delivered at Princeton) refines his close analysis from the
level of the shot to the unit of the frame – taking, as his supreme example of the second-by-
second ‘mapping of emotion’ in cinema, the animated credits sequence of flapping avian wings
(against a bed of no less artificial synthesised noises) in Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963). And, in the
prodigious contemporary Austrian avant-garde, Peter Tscherkassky’s masterpieces Outer Space
(1999) and Dream Work (2001), produced by a meticulous ‘light pencil’ process trained on
frames from Sidney J. Furie’s horror film The Entity (1983), reveals the secret but powerful link
between narrative cinema’s regimes of ‘body horror’ and the medium’s potential for total
sensorial dissolution.
And thus the associative network spreads: from narration to abstraction, from features to
shorts, from the frame-unit to the whole filmic form, across the most distant genres and joining
the least likely auteurs … There is nowhere in this sand to draw a clear or solid
institutional/territorial line – unless it’s the sand painting which (in an allegory of cinema and its
perpetual movement-images) gets unfussily blown apart and away in the final frames of
Bertolucci’s Little Buddha (1993). Animation studies has to – appropriately enough – situate itself
in the flux of that movement, the perpetual transformation of ideas and sensations. It will be – as
it has always been – a merry dance. ^
12
References
Raymond Bellour (unpublished), ‘The 2008 Gauss Seminars in Criticism’, Princeton University,
April 2008.
Robert Benayoun, Le Dessin animé après Walt Disney (Paris: Pauvert, 1961).
Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, in Selected Writings Volume 4 – 1938-1940
(Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 389-400.
Philip Brophy, 100 Anime (London: British Film Institute, 2005).
Alan Cholodenko (ed.), The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation (Sydney: Power Publications,
1991).
Alan Cholodenko (ed.), The Illusion of Life II: More Essays on Animation (Sydney: Power
Publications, 2007).
Raymond Durgnat, Films and Feelings (London: Faber and Faber, 1967).
Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Film Studies in Search of the Object’, Film Criticism, Vol 17 No 2/3 (1993),
pp. 40-47.
Daniel Frampton, Filmosophy (London: Wallflower Press, 2006).
Jean-Isidore Isou, ‘Esthétique du cinéma’, Ion, no. 1 (Avril 1952), pp. 7-153.
Thierry Kuntzel, ‘Le Défilement: A View in Close-Up’, Camera Obscura, no. 2 (Autumn 1977),
pp. 51-65.
Franklin Rosemont (ed.), Surrealism and its Popular Accomplices (San Francisco: City
Lights,1980).
© Adrian Martin
13
Alan Cholodenko
(The) Death (of) the Animator, or: the Felicity of Felix
PartI: The Kingdom of Shadows1
The night of the 4th of July 1896 was a special night for cinema. It was the night that Maxim
Gorky attended the screening of the Lumière brothers projections at the Nizhny-Novgorod fair
in Russia and wrote the first significant review of cinema, a review that for me as for Tom
Gunning offers us the first substantial account of the experience of cinema, a rich, indeed
paradigmatic, guide to cinema and its abiding senses, sensations. For me, and it appears
Gunning, Gorky’s extraordinary ‘first sight’ of cinema defines the very experience of cinema
spectatorship (and also too cinema analysis, film theory).
When I say Gunning and I, I reference his canonical article ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment:
Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator’ (Gunning 1989) and my article ‘The Crypt, the
Haunted House, of Cinema’ (Cholodenko 2004). My article extends, qualifies and recasts
Gunning’s formulation in ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment’ of his notion of the cinema of
attractions, also by rereading Gorky’s review. It is crucial to understand at the outset that
Gunning’s re-modelling of early cinema as his cinema of attractions has become the orthodoxy in
Film Studies.
Although I have precious little space to take up not only Gunning’s but my article here, let me
make it clear that I am nevertheless in this new paper adding to and enlarging upon the work I
did in my article on his. So while I do rehearse points I made there, I am also animating what I
take to be pivotal new ideas from a return engagement with his and my text. It is an engagement
allowing me to propose (in section I) that Gunning confirms my still apparently radical notion for
animation studies, articulated in so many publications, that not only is animation a form of film,
all film, including cinema by definition, is a form of animation. Moreover, it allows me to argue
not only the singular importance of animation to cinema and to film but (in section II) the
singular importance of death to animation, hence to cinema and to film.
I
What is key for my thesis here is that in his article Gunning describes the ‘ur’ attraction, shock,
and experience of the earliest cinema – the experience in and by which it demonstrated its
powers to the spectator – as the sudden transformation, the ‘magical metamorphosis,’ from the
‘all too familiar’ still photographic image into the all too strange mobile cinematographic image of
living moving shadows of people and things. Gunning emphasises the fact that at the start of each
show the still image was held frozen long enough to disappoint spectators, making them believe
they were being conned and just at an all too familiar display of photographs; and only once that
feeling had set in was the projector suddenly cranked into action, turning that image into
something all too strange. Quoting Gorky’s famous words describing the unfreezing of the
photographic image (words never not evoking Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Dr Frankenstein’s
animating of his creature) – ‘Suddenly a strange flicker passes through the screen and the picture
1
The title of this paper is to be read ‘Death the Animator, the Death of the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix.’ A second part of this paper,
subtitled ‘A Difficulty in the Path of Animation Studies,’ was presented at the 2007 Society for Animation Studies conference in Portland, Oregon,
29 June – 1 July. It is published in the SAS journal Animation Studies, vol. 2, 2007, on-line at: http://journal.animationstudies.org/
14
stirs to life’ – Gunning sums up this process, what he calls ‘this cataclysmic event,’ as ‘this still
projection takes on motion, becomes endowed with animation, and it is this unbelievable moving
image that so astounds’ (Gunning 1989, pp. 34, 35).
There it is: that word – animation, ‘becomes endowed with animation.’
Though Gunning does not conduct any explicit examination of this term ‘animation’ and its
implications for an understanding of the process, he unwittingly makes my case for me. To put
that case simply, animation is the first attraction of the cinema. And as I shall propose, more: its
last attraction. And more yet: its enduring attraction.
What so attracts is the animating by a mechanical apparatus – its metamorphosing of the still,
the inanimate, into the mobile, the animate. And what that animating effectuates – in this case the
metamorphosis from photographic image to cinematographic image. And what is animated
thereby – ‘this unbelievable moving image that so astounds.’ And what is animated within that
image – living moving shadows of people and things. And what is animated within the spectator.
And what is animated within (and thence without) that space/place/room. All of which
commingle inextricably – the work of animation as the animatic.
Let me pause to say: I theorize the animatic as not only the very logics, processes, performance
and performativity of animation but the very ‘essence’ of animation – the animation and
animating of animation. The animatic – the very singularity of animation – is anterior and
superior to animation. It subsumes animation, is its very condition of at once possibility and
impossibility. It is at once the inanimation in and of animation and animation in and of
inanimation. The animatic is that nonessence enabling and at the same time disenabling
animation as ‘essence,’ including Eisenstein’s plasmaticness as ‘essence’ (which is why I put
essence in quotation marks). The animatic makes every animation always already a reanimation.
The animatic is not simply different but radically, irreducibly Other.
At this point we need to consider the consequences of Gunning’s and my animating attractions
in light of his now canonical notion of the cinema of attractions, the cinema for him defining the
earliest, what used to be called the ‘primitive,’ phase of cinema, generally from 1895 to 1905 or
so, cinema’s ‘childhood,’ as it were. The cinema of attractions is an exhibitionist cinema of direct
address, indeed confrontation, of the viewer, providing the viewer with attractions in the form of
shocks, thrills, chills, delights, frights, joys, terrors, curiosities, like trains coming directly at the
viewer, threatening death…
Here a key claim: insofar as Gunning makes animation the first attraction of cinema, he makes
his cinema of attractions animation of attractions. While attraction, as term of drawing, from the
Latin trahere, means to draw to and is the opposite of repulsion, this kind of attraction animates
at once attraction and repulsion, delight and fright, joy and terror. Or rather, and better, as term,
figure and performance of the graphematic (Cholodenko 2000) and animatic after Jacques
Derrida, this kind of attraction graphematically animates and animatically graphs/grafts both
attraction and repulsion, neither attraction nor repulsion, at the same time. It animates the at
once attraction of the repulsion and repulsion of the attraction, the delight in the fright and fright
in the delight, the at once joy in the terror and terror in the joy. Such animatic affects inextricably
commingle, exchange, reverse on each other, irretrievably blurring the distinction between them.
And, crucially, insofar as these moments of shock, of thrills and chills, of ‘suddenlys,’ defining
the cinema of attractions persist for Gunning beneath his cinema of narrative integration,
providing an ‘underground current flowing beneath narrative logic and diegetic realism’
(Gunning 1989, p. 38) and that periodically erupts in that cinema, that animation of attractions
15
and these attractions of animation persist for us.2 Even as, of course, the re-emergence for
Gunning of the cinema of attractions in the ‘Spielberg-Lucas-Coppola cinema of effects’
(Gunning 1986, p. 70) in the 1970s and 1980s marks that reanimation of the animation of
attractions as hyperanimation of hyperattractions, that is, the increasingly pervasive impact of the
reanimation of film animation as digital film animation, as the hyperanimatographic, which would
be, by the by, of the order of the hyperanimatic and hypergraphematic.
So, to sum up: in elaborating the nature of his cinema of attractions, Gunning unwittingly
makes animation the first attraction of cinema, the last attraction of cinema and the enduring
attraction of cinema, thereby likewise unwittingly makes his cinema of attractions animation of
attractions.
II
But for me there is yet far more to this animation of attractions and these attractions of
animation. It has to do with the nature and character of this animating, this reanimating,
including of the spectator, what might be called the attraction ‘as such,’ the ‘ur’ attraction. And it
is to Gorky’s review we turn to reach at this, with its famous opening lines:
Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows.
If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour.
Everything there – the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air – is dipped in
monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves
of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre.
Here I shall try to explain myself, lest I be suspected of madness or indulgence in symbolism. I
was at Aumont’s and saw Lumière’s cinématograph – moving photography. (Gorky quoted in
Harding & Popple 1996, p. 5)
‘Not life but its shadow,’ ‘not motion but its soundless spectre.’
As I argue in ‘The Crypt, the Haunted House, of Cinema,’ Gorky’s paradigmatic experience of
cinema makes the spectre ‘ur’ figure of cinema and the uncanny ‘ur’ experience of cinema. Indeed, I
propose there that what Gorky describes as his experience of cinema would be the effect of the
spectre, the spectre of cinema and its whole set of affects/shocks/attractions composing the ‘ur’
experience of cinema as form of animation for me – making that ‘ur’ experience what I call the
Cryptic Complex of the uncanny, the return of death as spectre, endless mourning and melancholia
and cryptic incorporation (Cholodenko 2004, p. 107).
Cryptic incorporation lies beyond projection and introjection, is the simulation of introjection,
and creates a crypt for a spectre inside the self, safe both from life and from death. It is a place
that can never experience closure, from which this living dead speaks as ‘the unconscious of the
other,’ turning the incorporated, encrypted self into a haunted house, ‘the haunt of a host of
ghosts,’ writes Derrida (1986, p. xxiii). One might say that the affect of cinema is the special
effect of the spectre. The spectre would be for me the ‘ur’ figure of cinema, could it be ‘ur’ figure,
which by definition it cannot, could cinema have an ‘ur’ figure, which by definition, as form of
animation as the animatic, it cannot. The spectre operates not only at every second at every level
in every aspect of every film but also at the level of the cinematic, or rather animatic, apparatus of
2
Insofar as the cinema of attractions subtends the cinema of narrative integration, provides its foundation, as it were, it is a foundation always
already uprooted, a foundation without foundation, likewise making that which is built upon it, the cinema of narrative integration, always already
uprooted, making any such ‘integration’ by definition impossible. See my ‘The Crypt, the Haunted House, of Cinema,’ p. 104.
16
film, hence at the level of film ‘as such.’ It operates therefore to confound cinema, film, subject
and world, knotting them inextricably, making it impossible thereafter to definitively distinguish
them.
Furthermore, I propose in my article that, in characterising the complex logics and operations
of the experience of cinema with such loaded terms as ‘canny’ and ‘uncanny,’ Gunning himself,
though he never addresses the uncanny, again unwittingly supports my reading. In fact, I propose
there that for me all that Gunning says of the advent of the cinema is already in Freud’s logics of
the uncanny, that the attraction, film (including therefore cinema) and all the more animation are
of the order of the uncanny.3 For Freud, as many of you readers know, the uncanny has to do
with the return of what gave us a fright when we were children to give us a fright again as adults.
It suggests that the adult is never only adult but always at the same time child, too, even as it
posits two sides to itself – the psychological and the anthropological – two necessarily
commingled, cryptically incorporated sides. Which means that what returns from one’s own
childhood is allied with what returns from the childhood of the human – our primitive animistic
fears of the return of the dead. And in both the nature of animation is at stake. For the uncanny
has to do with life and death, with the reanimation of that fright at seeing the dead return to life
as living dead: both alive and dead, neither alive nor dead, at the same time. And the fear that
they would not only haunt and continue to haunt us but harm us, even take us away with them,
turn us into one of them, even are taking us away with them, are turning us into one of them –
becoming one of the living dead, one of the undead, ourselves (which is co-incorporating the
Cryptic Complex effects!). For Freud, all uncanny returns/reanimations are stand-ins for his
Death Drive. It is death that returns, death that reanimates, as lifedeath.
Such would be the primal experience of cinema, a shocking, traumatic experience of
animation, of reanimation – of the animation, reanimation, of death – that even the sophisticated
Gorky rehearses for us in his account of the unaccountable, account of Freud’s most striking
example of the uncanny – haunting – the ‘relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the
dead, and to spirits and ghosts,’ as Derrida puts it (1994, p. 195, note 38), making cinema – the
crypt, the haunted house, of cinema – privileged example of Freud’s ‘unheimlich’ (haunted)
house. House of the living dead, a house, never a home.
To say that the ‘ur’ attraction of cinema, of film, is the uncanny, indeed is the Cryptic Complex,
is to say that the ‘ur’ attraction of cinema, of film, is animation, for not only is animation of the
order of the uncanny, of the Cryptic Complex, the uncanny, the Cryptic Complex, are of the order
of animation, of animation as the animatic.
So, recasting, indeed reanimating, Gunning, when Gunning says that the shock, the attraction
– that is, the simultaneous attraction and repulsion, fascination and dread – at seeing what was
still ‘come to life’ founds the cinema, persists in it and reemerges from it, he is unwittingly saying
that animation ‘founds’ cinema, persists in it and reemerges from it. And more: he is unwittingly
saying that the uncanny, the Cryptic Complex, the animatic, ‘founds’ cinema, persists in it and
reemerges from it. That lifedeath, at once the life of death and the death of life, ‘founds’ cinema,
persists in it and reemerges from it. Lifedeath is not simply the inanimate become animate, and
vice versa. Rather, and according with Derrida’s logics of it as both/and, neither/nor, at the same
time, it is the inanimate become animate and the animate become inanimate at the same time, that
is, both animate and inanimate, neither animate nor inanimate, at the same time – an ‘animate
3
A proposal I made earlier, in note 19 of my article ‘“OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR”: The Virtual Reality of
Jurassic Park and Jean Baudrillard,’ pp. 82-83.
17
inanimate.’ Lifedeath is animation as the animatic: both alive and dead, neither alive nor dead, at
the same time. Such is the ‘foundation,’ the foundation without foundation, of cinema. And of
animation.
Such is for us the first, last and enduring attraction of cinema as form of animation as form of
the animatic: the uncanny reanimation of the dead as living dead. And at the same time, the
uncanny reanimation of the living, including the spectator, as living dead. A reanimation
supported by the very conditions of viewing in this in-between space, this (non)place, Christian
Metz’s place of ‘licit illicitness’ (Metz 1975, p. 65), this crypt, the haunted house, of the movie
theatre itself, where all become again what they were never not.
So for us, put (ostensibly) simply, animation as the animatic is the uncanny spectre of cinema,
what animates and at the same time deanimates cinema. That is, cinema thought solely as of the
order of presence, essence, identity, self-identity, production, reproduction, pure productivity,
‘the reality principle,’ ontology, the Good – what I have called elsewhere cinema thought only in
terms of the subject and his desires and as only a mode of production and appearance. What that
spectre calls for is as well the thinking of all cinema (and all aspects of all cinema, including the
author, genre, the Imaginary, ideology, spectatorship, etc., all aspects of all films) through the
superior life of the object, the world and its games, to which for me animation bears privileged
relation. In other words, the spectre calls for the thinking of all cinema through animation.
Through animation as the animatic and its apparatus, which subtends the cinematic apparatus,
and through its modes of Seduction, play, dissemination and disappearance. Through the
animatic as lifedeath, as Cryptic Complex, as the hauntological – what would be the life of the
illusion of life, thought by me after Derrida, as well as after Jean Baudrillard (his notions of
Seduction, Illusion – the genie’s illusion of the world – Evil, irreconcilability, etc.), after Freud,
Gilles Deleuze and others, too. What would be a view from the necrospective, what I have called
a ‘vanishing point of view,’ a spectrography, a cryptography, a thanatography (Cholodenko 2004, p.
111) – an address of the thanatic ‘economies’ of film.
Of course, the spectre, as privileged figure of cinema, likewise privileges the legion of forms
with which it – as living dead, as the ‘undead’ – populates the cinema. Even as it makes the ghost
film privileged, as it does the horror, gore, science fiction, crime, detective and thriller genres.
Even as it turns spectatorship into spectreship, into haunting and being haunted, cryptically
incorporating and being cryptically incorporated. Even as it turns Plato’s Cave and all theorised in
its light, including in the modelling of cinema by Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry et al., indeed all
modellings of cinema in terms of an ontology of the image, into the special case, the conditional,
reduced form, of the hauntological, of the crypt, the haunted house, of cinema. Even as it puts
paid to any and every effort by the ‘ghostbusting’ analysts/theorists of cinema to master, exorcise,
conjure away and eradicate this spectre, including putting paid to Metz’s, indeed anyone’s, dream
of a Theory of Everything (TOE) cinematic.4
So, to ‘conclude’: ironically, paradoxically, animation as the animatic privileges death over life,
and makes every encounter with cinema as form of animation as form of the animatic an
encounter with death. Thanks to the animatic, the excluded, the ‘blind spot’ – animation – and
the excluded of all excluded, the ‘blind spot’ of the ‘blind spot’ – death – are always already
reanimated and reanimating, are always already back. ^
4
In terms of Stephen Hawking’s aspiration for a TOE of the universe, see my ‘The Nutty Universe of Animation.’
18
References
Cholodenko, A 1997, ‘”OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR”: the
virtual reality of Jurassic Park and Jean Baudrillard,’ in N Zurbrugg (ed), Jean Baudrillard,
Art and Artefact, Sage Publications, London, republished 2005 in International Journal of
Baudrillard Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, January, Bishops’ University, Canada
(ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies).
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 2006, ‘The nutty universe of animation, the “discipline” of all “disciplines”, and
that’s not all, folks!,’ in International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, January,
Bishops’ University, Canada (ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies).
Derrida, J 1986, ‘Fors,’ in N Abraham & M Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy,
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, p. xxiii.
Derrida, J 1994, Specters of Marx, Routledge, New York.
Gunning, T 1986, ‘The cinema of attraction: early film, its spectator and the avant-garde,’ Wide
Angle, vol. 8, no. 3/4, p. 70.
Gunning, T 1989, ‘An aesthetic of astonishment: early film and the (in)credulous spectator,’ Art
and Text 34, Spring, pp. 34, 35, 38.
Harding, C & S Popple, In the Kingdom of Shadows, Cygnus Arts, London.
Metz, C 1975, ‘The Imaginary Signifier,’ Screen, vol. 16, no. 2, Summer, p. 65.
© Alan Cholodenko
19
Dirk de Bruyn
Performing a Traumatic Effect
The Films of Robert Breer
“We must go back to the working actual body – not the body as a chunk of space or a
bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement.”
MERLEAU-PONTY (1964B: 162)
“I used to take lessons in a biplane and do stunts and things.”
ROBERT BREER (IN GRIFFITHS, 1985)
Introduction
American animator Robert Breer’s playfully short, quickly moving animations ‘research’
(MacDonald, 1992: 17) the perceptual experiences of cinematic reception that are generally
ignored and buried by the industrial model of film production. They are rich in technical
innovation and resist the narrative expectations of an audience weaned on entertainment films.
Breer has been credited in introducing the first visual bomb to cinema in his loop film Image by
Images I (Paris 1954).
Two abstract animated films by Robert Breer are examined: 69 (1968 5 minutes) and Fuji
(1974 10 minutes): 69 as a metaphor for a system that collapses and Fuji as an articulation of that
embodied seeing required for train travel. In their single frame or multiple frame bursts and
clusters, these graphic animations contain a mixture of abstract and concrete images that explore
the illusion of motion through a reconstituted collage of fragments, sudden appearances and
subliminal effects. They can be read as formal reflexive examinations of the tension between the
single frame and the perception of motion.
A phenomenological approach is useful in focusing in on the perceptual and performative
aspects of this work, emphasising phenomenology’s focus on the pre-reflective moment at the
heart of ‘being-in-the-world.’ As ‘a movie is not a thought; it is perceived’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a:
58) these films are read here as about as a direct body centred ‘making sense.’
The ‘unspeakable’ or ‘unknowable’ of trauma may also be of some value in articulating the
elusive text of Breer’s moving image art. The relationship between trauma and cinema has
generated a level of analytic and critical attention, most clearly indicated by the special debate
and dossier sections of the journal ‘Screen’ in 2001 and 2003 where Susannah Radstone (2001)
identified a focus on ‘trauma, dissociation and unrepresentability’ evident in the work of Cathy
Caruth, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (see Felman, 1992 and Caruth, 1992) It is argued here
that the direct impact of 69 and Fuji re-perform a traumatic effect on the viewer. The flashback is
identified as such an effect and the unsettling experience of early train travel is also investigated
to illuminate the disorienting reception that Breer’s films can illicit on the unprepared viewer.
The use of Brewin’s neurological research into memory processing evident in trauma is also
used here. This is a line of research built on a psychological reading of trauma articulated in the
writings of Janet and Van der Kolk.
Pierre Janet, working with the victims of shell shock in the late 1800’s identified that such
shock or trauma can be precipitated by severe emotional responses and that such responses effect
how memories are stored in a fragmentary manner. ‘Intense emotions, Janet thought, cause
memories of particular events to be dissociated from consciousness, and to be stored, instead as
20
visceral sensations (anxiety and panic), or as visual images (nightmares and flashbacks)’ (Van der
Kolk, 1996a: 214). Baer’s concept of re-windability is also introduced as a method for presenting
both trauma and Breer’s films.
Let us now focus on the two films in question.
69
In 69 the title image oscillates through positive and negative figure/ground flicker, creating
afterimages that seem to float in front of the screen. The film proper begins with a line drawn
hexahedron rod on white background rotating into frame on the left and moving away from the
viewer. Other shapes go through similar arcs of movement. A conventional 3-D perspective is
respected in these shapes and movements and there is the precision of an architectural drawing to
the imagery at this early stage of the film. The motion effect is like the movements of the rods on
a locomotive wheel, yet highly stylised and abstracted. This rotation sequence is repeated
throughout the film in various permutations. In the next cluster the line shapes become blocks of
colour, then a mixture of line and colour, then with a darker blue background.
Now and then there are bursts of single frame abstractions flickering and flashing. This
palimpsest of forms flickers across the original in a repeating, yet disintegrating sequence. The
sounds are very mechanical, a phone like repeating click, a tick-tick sound and the sound of
switching between stations on a radio reflect these indeterminacies and breakdowns. 69 ends with
its opening sequence. The film can be read as a loop, now ready to begin again.
What one sees in such a Breer film is not what is actually physically on the film-strip but the
fleeting product of the film’s performance on the retina. The velocity of Breer’s ‘sensory
manipulations’ generally defies any kind of assessment, or thinking through while watching them.
These films are designed as a cavalcade of visual impressions. Thinking can only come after the
event. This is a critical point that eternally re-surfaces when describing Breer’s films.
Breer says of 69 that: ‘69 undoes itself. It starts out like a system, then the system breaks down
and goes to hell. During the editing I came up with the idea that it should break down, so I
shuffled the cards. I thought it served me right to undo my own pretence at formal purity’
(MacDonald, 1992: 43). Breer here articulates a critical act of irreversibility: ‘In shuffling the
cards I could never get them back in their proper order again. They weren’t numbered’
(Griffiths, 1985). Like the breadcrumbs that Hansel and Gretel drop to leave a trace back out of
the forest that then gets erased by being eaten by the birds: there is no way back. Yet we can
watch the animation again. In this continual moving away from the originating material in both
sequence and form arises this notion of a further displaced trace of a trace (of a trace), which can
be considered an approximation of Elsaesser’s event without a trace.
In the trauma debate that took place in ‘Screen’ flagged earlier Elsaesser speculates on whether
a general traumatizing of the image has occurred inside the post-modern. He asks whether the
rule of in-authenticity, the pervasiveness of the fake and within documentary the role of re-
enactment situate a ‘traumatic’ status for the ‘moving image in our culture as the symptom
without a cause, as the event without a trace’ (Elsaesser, 2001 : 197). Is this what is also
happening in 69? Is there a traumatising of the image happening in these erasures upon erasures,
this moving away from source through a relentless application of technique? Is this not that
unspeakable un-locatable space that so much contemporary trauma research is seeking to
discern?
21
Fuji
Fuji is constructed from more recognisable imagery. There are a number of wide-angle shots, a
panorama of the Japanese countryside being moved through by the train window, with a special
contemplative emphasis, through rotoscoping, on Mount Fuji. These sections focusing on Mount
Fuji are broken up, paused, by moments of black that could simulate the going through a tunnel
in a train. After such pauses we receive another animated sequence out of the train window, often
re-using frames from previous sequences at different speeds.
Geometric abstractions reminiscent of 69 are overlayed and inserted over these ‘real’
rotoscoped traces of movement through the landscape. Posts and shrubs that flash past close to
the window offer a connection to such iconic graphic shapes, in both shape and abruptness of
appearance and disappearance. These sequences suggest a re-enactment of the perceptual play
framed by train travel itself. Within a ‘real’ moving railway carriage the eye at times focuses on
the surface of the window and its flecks of dirt and inconsistencies, at times it quickly samples
into the distant slower moving, yet less detailed horizon line or then one stares out of focus at
those shadows and blurs that flash past in an instant. Sampling in and out of these layers of
movement and abstraction require the same visual skills used to negotiate a Breer animation
successfully. Fuji addresses this correspondence explicitly.
Is it merely a co-incidence that both audience resistance to experimental film (within which
Breer’s animations can be placed) and the perceptual difficulties experienced in viewing the
landscape at the advent of train travel are inscribed with parallel histories? Audiences weaned on
entertainment often found experimental films dull, boring, unreadable and too stressful to watch.
They were not entertainment. It can be argued that the politics of such work is implicit rather
than explicit. ‘Viewing experimental films is always a bit like experimenting with yourself, being
confronted with your own expectations, attention span and viewing habits. We try and watch
without inhibitions but rarely succeed’ (Edwin Carels in Abrahams, 2004 :14).
Lebrat makes this point specifically about Breer’s films:
The speed and compression of images; the refusal of beautiful images and drawings; in short
the frustration imposed by the film’s short running time, and its denied communication which
ensues, upsets people’s habits and demands a new kind of spectator. (Burford, 1999: 75)
In his examination of the industrialization of space and time that the technology of early train
travel facilitated, social commentator Wolfgang Schivelbusch notes that:
Dullness and boredom resulted from attempts to carry the perceptual apparatus of traditional
travel, with its intense appreciation of landscape, over to the railway. The inability to acquire a
mode of perception adequate to technological travel crossed all political, ideological and aesthetic
lines. (Schivelbusch, 1986: 58)
The disorienting impact of train travel on the early passenger can offer insights into the
perceptual tools required to unpack a Breer film. Schivelbusch identified three perceptual
adaptations, or organising principles that train travel delivered (1986: 160): Panoramic vision, the
compartmentalisation of time and space and a shift to a more sampled reading strategy while
travelling. These shifts made the old way of seeing seem alien.
The traveller who concentrated on his reading behaved in just as old-fashioned a manner as a
traveller who, accustomed to the pace of the stagecoach, attempted to fix his stare on objects
flitting past the compartment window. In both cases, the result was exhaustion of the senses of
22
the mind. To adapt to the conditions of rail travel, a process of decentralisation, or dispersal of
attention, took place in reading as well as the traveller’s perception of the landscape outside.
(Schivelbusch, 1986 :68-69)
This dispersal of attention, de-centredness can prove useful in negotiating Breer’s rapid-fire
films whose images disappear as soon as they are presented. Visually capturing each fragment and
fracture generates too much visual fatigue for the viewer. Letting them wash over you avoids its
stress. The frustration builds trying to grab things visually as they disappear. There is no time
given to think, to appreciate these objects, so it is better to let go, go with the flow, to survive.
Schivelbusch similarly describes the unique abruptness of train travel as delivering a sense of
stress and bodily fatigue through a ‘series of small and rapid concussions’ (1986: 117) to the body.
It could be said that Breer also delivers a series of small and rapid concussions to the eye. If such
cumulative stresses of travel can lead to metal fatigue, what effect may it have on the body?
The visual ‘acrobatics’ required to negotiate a film like Fuji can be conceived of as a indexical
reconstitution of the performative elements of panoramic vision, which, Schivelbusch contends,
with its de-centredness and its focus back on the body, is necessary for train travel. Such ‘staring’
and body awareness can itself be read as emblematic of a dissociative space associated with
trauma.
Phenomenology
Having outlined a level of correspondence between train travel and the reception of
experimental film it may be of some use to now backtrack, and expand on the rationale for using
phenomenology to frame Breer’s films. Train travel and Fuji (presented here as a kind of artifact
or document of train travel), impart their disorienting effect, their trauma, in that pre-reflective
moment before narrative thinking occurs. Trauma may very well be about being frozen, or stuck
in such a moment. Phenomenology can provide a method for articulating such a space.
A philosophy for which the world is always ‘already there’ before reflection begins – as an
inalienable presence; and all its efforts are concentrated upon re-achieving a direct and primitive
contact with the world, and endowing that contact with a philosophical status. (Merleau-Ponty,
1962: x)
And further:
My field of perception is constantly filled with a play of colours, noises and fleeting tactile
sensations which I cannot relate precisely to the context of my clearly perceived world, yet which
I immediately place in the world, without ever confusing them with my daydreams. Equally
constantly I weave dreams around things. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: x)
The ‘constant play’ of ‘fleeting sensations’ that makes up the real can also be read as the focus
of Breer’s work. In fact it reads like a description of his animations. ‘Invoking dream states’ is not
of interest to Breer. It is a concern with perception that stands before the dream and the
daydream that pre-occupies both Breer and Merleau-Ponty. As Merleau-Ponty attempts in his
writing about the ‘real,’ Breer attempts in a performance of the ‘direct.’ Neither focuses on the
realm of dreams and day-dreams that are ‘wrapped around’ thinking. It is about something more
essential as Breer articulates:
23
‘I have a mind-set that if something crops up and seems absurd that must be good thing in a
way. I am not interested in surrealistic juxtapositions. Invoking dream-states or anything of the
kind, its not that. But I make choices on a total basis, there might be several reasons for choosing
this thing or that thing, one might be the shape of it. See it’s a general point but a good one;
animation is a system that leads to metamorphosis.’ (Griffiths, 1985)
In this emphasis of not-dream (or more emphatically: ‘anti-dream’) evident in both Breer’s and
Merleau-Ponty’s thinking, phenomenology offers a reading of experimental film and trauma
within that pre-reflective space not open to psychoanalysis.
It is interesting that Breer began his research into the moving image in Paris at a time when
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology was also taking hold there, suggesting perhaps parallel
investigations into shared existential issues, one inscribed into the moving image, the other into a
philosophical text.
VAM and SAM Memory Systems

“The body is an organ of memory as well as perception.”
J.S. BOLEN, QUOTED IN (WHITFIELD, 1995: 243)
Just as Merleau-Ponty called on Gestalt Psychology to articulate and support his
phenomenological theorising about a sense of being-in-the-world, and particularly his discussion
of a metamorphosis of the senses, we are employing a similar tactic in foregrounding neurological
research on memory to focus in on this immersive pre-reflective space of direct experience in
which Breer’s work operates and reflects upon itself. Clinical research into memory processes in
post-traumatic stress Brewin et al (1996) has proposed a dialogue between two memory systems –
Verbally accessible memory (VAM) and Situational accessible memory (SAM) – to help explain
traumatic responses like the flashback.
‘Verbally accessible memory’ (VAM), also referred to as declarative memory (Squire, 1991,
Van der Kolk, 1996b: 285), involves the ‘encoding and storage of conscious experience’ (Brewin,
2001: 161). Verbally based, it enables narrative with retrieval upon request. Because it is linear
and consequential in assembly its process speed is limited, akin to the impact of low bandwidth in
computer technology. VAM enables a strong sense of time. The hippocampus is involved in this
formation of conscious memories, of building up a unified ‘cognitive map’ (Van der Kolk, 1996b:
295) that allows flexible access to these memories. It can be related to objective or reflective
thinking.
With ‘Situationally accessible memory’ (SAM) or implicit memory, there is no retrieval upon
request and no sense of time. It is the situation that triggers the experience. This accounts for the
unexpected flashback triggered by external cues or thoughts in traumatised individuals. SAM is
‘unable to encode spatial and temporal context’ (Brewin, 2001: 161). It focuses narrowly on risk
and is detail rich. According to Hellawell and Brewin, SAM consists of ‘the exclusive automated
mode of retrieval, the high level of perceptual detail, and the distortion of subjective time, such as
the event is experienced in the present’(2004: 3). Such processing is more aligned with Merleau-
Ponty’s notion of the pre-reflective and with subjective experience. SAM is processed in an older
part of the brain; the Amygdala. The amygdala’s functions are not flexible, are concerned with
attaching affect to incoming cues and the ‘establishment of associations between sensory stimuli’
(Van der Kolk, 1996a: 230).
24
How do samming and vamming interact when these two systems are operating normally in
parallel to each other? When you have a conversation or travel from A to B, you may recall or
explain what you have done (vamming) but there are certain gestures, impressions that somehow
do not fit in. These may come back to you uneasily (samming). You may talk to someone about
them until, somehow, they become integrated into the story of the day.
To insert into narrative, in normal functioning, visual replay (flashback) is rehearsed. This
facilitates the move from the SAM to VAM memory system. Metcalfe and Jacobs (1998) have
identified that high levels of arousal (trauma) breaks down hippocampus functioning and inhibits
vamming so that no narrative exists for the flashback to be inserted into. Like a broken record it
has nowhere to go and is destined to try again later. Rich in detail with no temporal context, such
‘affect fragments’ periodically redial into a network that was never built.
This is a model that describes how a non-narrative film like 69 is experienced. Breer’s films’
rich perceptual performances are immediate and direct. There is no story for these experiences to
be inserted into. Where a narrative does surface, is after the event, and the value of a film like Fuji
is that it can be unpacked phenomenologically to reveal in its construction a self-reflexive
awareness of its own functioning. That is a story that manifests a level of correspondence with the
avant-garde project: ‘The avant-garde continues to explore the physical properties of film and the
nature of perceptual transactions which take place between viewer and film’ (John Hanhardt,
1976: 44).
This relationship between vamming and samming also re-calls the relationship between verbal
and visual thinking. Brewin’s model is a much more systemic and dynamic model than the left
brain/right brain oppositions that Small (1994: 6) employs in his argument in Direct theory that
the visual reflexivity that occurs in experimental film is a form of theorising with a right brain
emphasis. It is also more developed than the old brain new brain dichotomy used by Len Lye to
talk about his ‘doodling’ film work as old brain work (Horrocks, 1979: 33). Maya Deren’s
thinking on vertical and horizontal editing also resembles Brewin’s dichotomy. Correspondences
between Brewin’s memory systems and Mcluhan’s insights into oral and visual biased cultures or
Innis’s concepts of space and time oriented empires (which inspired McLuhan’s ideas) are also
worth exploring further. As has been indicated Brewin’s model can be used to ‘flesh out’
Merleau-Ponty’s pre-reflective/reflective, subjective/objective and implicit/explicit dialectics. The
body centred samming and the cortex centred vamming also has suggestions of the perennial
mind-body split. Trauma itself has in fact has been conceptualised as an extreme mind/body
disassociation.
The Flashback
The effect is certain but unlocatable, it does not find its sign, its name; it is sharp and yet lands
in a vague zone of myself; it is acute yet muffled, it cries out in silence. Odd contradiction; a
floating flash. (Roland Barthes, 1981:52-53)
The flashback is a term in usage in both cinema and trauma studies. In both instances
‘flashbacks’ represent an ambivalence and operate in the here and now. Flashbacks not only
implore one to remember the past but to insert, to knock, to shatter these forgotten difficult
events into the present. Can such flashbacks be thought of as a visual blow: flash back? If so, how
much of the forgotten, knocking at the door of re-presentation is re-cognised? Does not the blow
itself re-traumatize, delivering back the trauma rather than the memory? There is an unresolved
25
tension between a re-constitution and the flash, the optical stun. What comes back in the flash? It
is a paradox that also begs the question: how easy is it to think, to negotiate when you have just
been ‘hit’?
Phenomenologically speaking: Is the flashback a replay of a pre-reflective moment or
experience that the senses replay anew? Is it a perceptual cluster of effects that is unexpectedly
inserted into, and upsets a train of reflective thought, that impacts the body but emerges into
reflective thought? The trace of the trauma remains in the body and the flashback is its
incoherent call. In its stun it is difficult to unpack analytically, remaining in its performance
‘unspeakable.’
In her discussion for the ‘Screen’ debate on trauma in film ‘The trauma of history: Flashbacks
upon flashbacks’ Turim (2001) describes the flashback as signalling the return of a trauma, the
break of a settled narrative for both those within the film and the spectator watching it: ‘these
flashbacks were often abrupt, fragmentary, and repetitive, marked by a modernism of technique.’
Such a description could double as an account of Fuji or 69 and compliments the introductory
report on these films. In their abruptness, Breer’s compact films can be experienced as such the
incomplete self-contained visual flashbacks that Turim describes and supports Brewin’s
VAM/SAM interactive model.
Turim also acknowledges that ‘similar abrupt flashbacks marked 1920’s avant-garde films’
(2001: 207). This suggests an important connection back to Breer’s line of direct research into the
moving image. The European Avant-garde of the 20’s, contains within it, in Viking Eggeling,
Fernand Leger, Walter Rutmann, Hans Richter and Man Ray, Breer’s originating influences and a
line of experimentation with image and temporal structure that can itself be traced back to a ‘pre-
cinema’ and early cinema aesthetic that Breer also invokes in his sculptural work, modified from
optical toys like the flip-book, the mutascope, the thaumatrope and the zoetrope.
Breer’s work can be related back to the exhibitionist and often joy-ride films from early cinema
which were about showing and enacting ‘direct stimulation’ rather than telling or recounting.
This is what Gunning has referred to as a ‘Cinema of Attractions.’ ‘Attraction’ is Eisenstein’s term
taken from the fairground. ‘An attraction aggressively subjected the spectator to ‘sensual or
psychological impact” (Gunning, 1990: 59). These were the visceral qualities that also attracted
the Futurists to Cinema. ‘It is not separate from life but rather rediscovers the primal relationship
of things’ (Marinetti [1916] quoted in Cantrill, 1971: 16).
Dadaist shock tactics have also been compared by Benjamin (1976: 238) to the visceral impact
of film. For Kirby such effects as used by a 1920’s avant-garde can still act with the ‘force of
trauma.’ She identifies a male specific hysteria within such early cinema forms and identifies how
shock has not only been co-opted by the avant-garde but resides within film more generally:
If shock was by this time a programmed unit of mass consumption, and a principle of modern
perception, it could clearly turn back in on itself and frighten – or thrill – with the force of
trauma. (The flicker film is a perennial tribute to this power.) (Kirby, 1988: 121)
Breer has made explicit this debt to a 1920’s avant-garde:
‘The tricks you used to do that are Cubist tricks: figure/ground reversals, intersections, over-
lappings. Of course, (Hans) Richter did all this in 1921, in Rhythm 21. I guess it’s pretty obvious
that I’d seen that film by the time I made Form Phases IV. I got to know Richter later in New
York, but I remember that film having a big impact. I lifted stuff right out of it.’ (MacDonald,
1992: 18)
26
Reprise/rewind
We have described and reflected upon Fuji and 69 and Breer’s filmmaking practice generally,
with respect to Breer’s own reflections on his methodology, in relation to symptoms of trauma
(Van der Kolk), brain physiology, the perceptual nature of flashbacks in narrative cinema (Turim)
and the perceptual qualities of train travel (Schivelbush). It has become apparent in watching 69
and Fuji that we are uncannily confronted by what Merleau-Ponty calls the ‘real.’
The real is a closely woven fabric. It does not await our judgement before incorporating the
most surprising phenomena, or before rejecting the most plausible figments of our imagination.
(Merleau-Ponty, 1962: x)
This is not always an encounter we do willingly or with pleasure. We may look away or shut
ourselves down and go perceptually and reflectively elsewhere. We may even move our bodies
out of the room. But even here Breer has us, incorporates this into his retinal performances. Like
with trauma, there is no escape. Into this we are captured. What awaits the viewer of a Breer film
is an encounter with one’s own perception and a sublime suggestion on how it needs to function
and not function in our technologised being-in-the-world.
The perceptual shift or re-alignment of the cluster or Gestalt of the senses required to confront
radical experiences can be overwhelming. It can be experienced traumatically. It can shut the
body down. It is therefore, as Baer suggests (2002: 170-1), in its rewind-ability that 69 and Fuji
present a historically specific traumatic structure that remains open for inspection.
Because film presents images not as a succession of still photographs but as indistinguishable
from movement, it can continually restage this ‘disintegrating unity’ without either instituting
coherence or succumbing to total fragmentation. (Baer, 2002: 170)
Rewind-ability acts here as a request to inspect history and is enabled because film continues
to exist in its originating form after each performance. This availability can present us with a
methodology of re-presenting (continually and upon request) the unknowable of trauma.
As at the advent of photography at the beginning of industrialisation, the photograph was seen
as offering a superior form of memory in its ability to record the most intimate of details that the
naked eye missed, so too here now Breer offers up the moving image for this new digital post-
industrial period as a prosthetic memory. It is offered up with an artistic methodology illuminated
by phenomenological reflection, to trace the most invisible of missed relationships and to record
the unspeakable and transgressive interconnectedness between and across bodies and objects. ^
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Kirby, L. (1988) ‘Male hysteria and Early Cinema’. Camera Obscura, 112-131.
MacDonald, S. (1992) A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, Berkeley,
University of California Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) The Phenomenology of Perception, London, New York, Routledge and
Kegan Paul.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964a) Sense and Non-sense, Evanston, Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964b) The Primacy of Perception, Evanston, Northwestern University Press.
Metcalfe, J., Jacobs, W. (1998) ‘Emotional memory; the effects of stress on ‘cool’ and ‘hot’
memory systems’. In Medin, D. L. (Ed.) The psychology of learning and motivation. New
York, Academic Press.
Radstone, S. (2001) ‘Trauma and screen studies: Opening the debate’. Screen, 42, 188-192.
Schivelbusch, W. (1986) The Railway Journey : the industrialization of time and space in the 19th
century, New York, Berg.
Small, E. S. (1994) Direct Theory: Experimental Film/Video as Major Genre, Carbondale,
Southern Illinois University Press.
Squire, L., Zola-Morgan, S. (1991) ‘The Medial Temporal Lobe Memory System’. Science, 253,
1380-1386.
Turim, M. (2001) ‘The trauma of history: Flashbacks upon flashbacks’. Screen, 42, 205-210.
Van der Kolk, B. A. (1996a) ‘The Body Keeps The Score’. In Van der Kolk, B., McFarlane, A.
and Weisaeth, L (Ed.) Traumatic Stress: the Effect of Overwhelming Experience on Mind,
Body and Society. New York, London, Guilford Press.
Van der Kolk, B. A. (1996b) ‘Trauma and Memory’. In Van der Kolk, B., McFarlane, A. and
Weisaeth, L. (Ed.) Traumatic stress : the effects of overwhelming experience on mind, body,
and society. New York, London, Guilford Press.
Whitfield, C. L. (1995) Memory and Abuse: Remembering and Healing the Effects of Trauma,
Deerfield Beach, Florida, Health Communications Inc.
© Dirk de Bruyn
28
Michael Broderick
Superflat Eschatology
Renewal and Religion in anime
“For at least some of the Superflat people [...] there is a kind of traumatic solipsism, even
an apocalyptic one, that underlies the contemporary art world as they see it.”
THOMAS LOOSER, 2006
“Perhaps one of the most striking features of anime is its fascination with the theme of
apocalypse.”
SUSAN NAPIER, 2005
“For Murakami, images of nuclear destruction that abound in anime (or in a lineage of
anime), together with the monsters born of atomic radiation (Godzilla), express the
experience of a generation of Japanese men of being little boys in relation to American
power.”
THOMAS LAMARRE, 2006
As anime scholar Susan Napier and critics Looser and Lamarre suggest, apocalypse is a major
thematic predisposition of this genre, both as a mode of national cinema and as contemporary art
practice. Many commentators (e.g. Helen McCarthy, Antonia Levi) on anime have foregrounded
the ‘apocalyptic’ nature of Japanese animation, often uncritically, deploying the term to connote
annihilation, chaos and mass destruction, or a nihilistic aesthetic expression. But which
apocalypse is being invoked here? The linear, monotheistic apocalypse of Islam, Judaism,
Zoroastra or Christianity (with it’s premillennial and postmillennial schools)? Do they encompass
the cyclical eschatologies of Buddhism or Shinto or Confucianism? Or are they cultural hybrids
combining multiple narratives of finitude?
To date, Susan Napier’s work (2005, 2007) is the most sophisticated examination of the trans-
cultural manifestation of the Judeo-Christian theological and narrative tradition in anime, yet even
her framing remains limited by discounting a number of trajectories apocalypse dictates.1
However, there are other possibilities. Jerome Shapiro (2004), for one, argues convincingly that
the millennial imagination, as a subset of apocalyptic thought, is closer to the Japanese spiritual
understanding of heroic mythology. Elsewhere Thomas Looser (2007) reflects upon 1990s
Japanese media and art and interprets the obsession with apocalyptic images from the Superflat
school and Gainax anime as a preoccupation with the postmodern crises of capital and its limits.
To develop this thesis the following essay reads key anime sequences not covered in Napier’s
lengthy critique through various strains of apocalyptic discourse, namely Spriggan (Dir: Kawasaki
Hirotsugu, 1998) and Appleseed (Dir: Aramaki Shinji, 2004), while referencing others in the
genre (e.g. Steamboy, Dir: Otomo Katsuhiro, 2004 and Metropolis, Dir: Rintaro with Otomo
Katsuhiro, 2004). It considers the utopian teleology of the chaotic, transitional period each
narrative heralds (the ‘middest’ as Frank Kermode describes it) that creates a pathway to a new
order, or returns balance to a corrupt and moribund world, often through trans-humanist,
1
See Susan Napier, Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle. Throughout this essay I concentrate chiefly on chapter 13: ‘Waiting for the End
of the World: Apocalyptic Identity’ (249-274). An example of Napier’s confusing discussion of apocalypse can be found in the following passage
from her essay ‘The World of Anime Fandom in America’. In Frenchy Lunning (2007) (ed.) Mechademia: Emerging Worlds of Anime and Manga,
Vol. 1. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 47-63, where she states ‘Many of Studio Ghibli’s films have at least a metaphorical
apocalyptic subtext, but the possibility is always one of at least the possibility of hope and redemption on the part of ordinary human beings’ (p.
58). Yet this dualism this is precisely what is entailed in apocalypse thought and action-hope and redemption alongside chaos and destruction,
where violence enables the passage of transition to a new, harmonious state of being.
29
technological hybridity or psychic/supernatural human evolution.2 While catastrophic imagery of

wholesale destruction and vengeful violence is certainly present in these works this article will
consider the often ignored, complementary apocalyptic themes of regeneration and renewal that
are drawn from both Japanese and Western mythic or religious traditions.
Anime, eschatology and secular apocalypse

“‘Transcendence’ is the state by which Japanese spirituality is posited on a mortal plane
devoid of Judeo-Christian morality [...] the ‘being’ of a person (which can be one’s soul,
mind, blood-line, weapon, limb or organ) is always caught in modes of transition. Acts of
transformation, reconstitution, replication and attaining consciousness are all indications
of transcendences.”
PHILIP BROPHY, 100 ANIME
One of the most consistent and perceptive analysts of anime, Philip Brophy, has produced
pioneering work on aesthetics and form, in particular recuperating the work of Tezuka (Tetsuan
Atomu/Astro Boy) for Western audiences, and demonstrates a critically nuanced and sensually
(aural and visual) sophisticated appreciation of anime as art, commercial product and as
transnational culture. Over the past 15 years Brophy has demonstrated how the influence of the
atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can be traced throughout anime’s post-war
development and aesthetic sensibilities – from the ocular flash contained in kawaii cartoon eyes
to the radiating beams and explosive detonations of energy weapons in mecha (Brophy &
Ewington). Yet Brophy also underplays the importance of regeneration and renewal in what he
repeatedly describes as the ‘apocalyptic’, ‘post-apocalyptic’ and ‘hyper-apocalyptic’ in Japanese
animation.3 Similarly other writers, like Brophy, foreground the post-nuclear Japanese experience
as radically informing the thematic, aesthetic and formal concerns of anime, including its
apocalyptic dimension.4 However, these authors rely predominantly on secular Western
understandings of apocalypse to connote and conflate what is essentially an eschatological
perspective (i.e. the study of finality). Collectively, the critical concern of these analysts is in the
destructive, explosive and mutational form and theme of the medium and its national-historical
contexts (and, importantly its seduction and/or phenomenological appeal).
Susan Napier (2005), on the other hand, while embracing the cultural impact of the atom
bombings, also recognizes the origins and re-visioning of indigenous Japanese variations on
apocalypse, and at least foregrounds the possibility of transcendence or rebirth. Her complex
reading of the most popular genres of anime finds them dominated by apocalyptic visions
(p.251). Napier also acknowledges “one of the basic paradoxes is that apocalyptic destruction is
both feared and welcomed” (2005, p.253) but doesn’t expand on this millennial desire for
retribution and annihilation, one that is in fact embraced by Brophy’s eloquent and lyrical
discourse but can be traced back to Susan Sontag’s seminal essay ‘The Imagination of Disaster’,
Frank Kermode’s Sense of an Ending, Norman Cohn’s Pursuit of the Millennium as well as Guy
Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.
2
‘Balance’ and ‘harmony’ are vital to the understanding of Japanese art and culture and perform a deep structural platform for aesthetic
expression.
3
Brophy’s excellent and poetic BFI handbook, 100 Anime, for example, is full of abridged summaries of major works frequently described as
apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic or hyper-apocalyptic (Ai City, Akira, Barefoot Gen, Doomed Megalopolis, Giant Robo, Roujin-Z, Demon City
Shinjuku, Fist of the North Star, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Space Adventure Cobra, Steamboy, Urotsukidoji, Violence Jack).
4
I am in no way attempting to discount the veracity of these authors’ scholarship, or homogenize their critical work as ‘secular’. While this may
seem a pedantic (or semantic) issue, the continued figuring of anime in terms of Judaeo-Christian theological tradition is deeply problematic and
imprints a Western reading and epistemology on Japanese (no matter how globalized) cultural production.
30
Yet by principally accentuating the secular apocalyptic nature of anime narratives, most critics
and theorists articulate a nihilism or ambivalence concerning the catastrophic destruction
rendered in these works which negates the traditional dual nature of apocalyptic telos – to restore
harmony for a millennium or transcend human time and space into a divine realm. Equally
significant is the discounting of Japanese religious influences and traditions that inscribe both the
aesthetic composure and sensibility of anime’s form and content. Limiting the exploration of
anime to the application of Western apocalypse in this way forecloses analysis of the remaining
organizing principles of this chiliastic theology, such as the role and figuration of messiah and
antichrist, the battle of Armageddon, saving of an elect, day of judgment and the afterlife. These
tropes are evident in anime’s hybrid iconography and appropriation of this Western master
narrative of legitimation, recirculated within the globalized medium of international animation.
Indeed, much anime explores, if not challenges the perceived postmodern malaise (Kumar, 1995)
by envisioning ‘hope’ in the form of surviving apocalyptic change, from planetary renovation to
species evolution/hybridisation, to individual psychic and emotional transcendence.
Hybrid Apocalypse, Masse or Mappo?

Many commentators on Japanese society stress the fundamentally secular nature of daily life
and culture.5 Reischauer and Jansen recognise the importance of religion “in the Japan of old”
but suggest the type of secularism extant within the West “dates back at least three centuries in
Japan” (2005, p. 203). Religious thought in post-war Japan remains essentially hybrid, combining
Confucianism, Buddhism and Shintoism. Just as Kumar and Kermode determine that Judeo-
Christian apocalyptic tropes and traditions are evident in the secular West, there remain lingering,
centuries-old traditions of Shinto (animistic worship of the nature and environment, whether
animate or inanimate objects), Buddhism (transmigration of the soul, salvation and fulfilment in
paradise) and Confucianism (ethical values informing moralities of governance, education, and
loyalty to family and employer). Christianity, impacts Japanese society to a far lesser degree (under
two per cent of the population), however, it retains a large influence on the educated elite.6
Increasingly Japanese are attracted to popular movements assuming “new religions” status, of
which several hundred have achieved official recognition and now claim membership in the tens
of millions (Reischauer and Jansen, 1995). Most are themselves hybrid with elements drawn from
older Shinto, Buddhism and Chinese folk rites. Ironically, the thousands of shrines across the
islands, domestic altars, and public festivals, performative marriages with Christian or Shinto
ceremonies and elaborate Buddhist funerals, all contribute incongruously to the daily secular life
of the 70-80 percent of Japanese who “do not consider themselves believers in any religion”
(Reischauer and Jansen, p.215).
Susan Napier does explore and acknowledge, to varying degrees, the Japanese religious
undercurrents of apocalyptic approximation. Indeed, of the three principal modes of anime that
she delineates, both the Elegiac and Carnival have clear relevance to the third mode, the
Apocalyptic. Yet, by 2005 Napier finds an “absence of major apocalyptic series or film” anime,
curiously discounting Metropolis (2001) as “retro apocalypse” and nihilistic (Napier, p. xv).7 It is
odd in this context that Napier addresses neither Appleseed nor the ‘steam-punk’ Steamboy (Dir:
5
See Kitagawa, Religion in Japanese History; Reischauer & Jansen, The Japanese Today; and Aoki & Dardess, As the Japanese See It.
6
“Christians are strongly represented among the best-educated, leading elements in society and have therefore exerted a quite disproportionate
influence. Another factor is that Christianity, as an important element of Western civilization, has attracted general attention. Most educated
Japanese probably have a clearer concept of the history and basic beliefs of Christianity than they do of Buddhism” (Reischauer and Jansen, The
Japanese Today, p. 213).
7
Indeed, Metropolis is no more “retro” that Miyazaki’s earlier Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986).
31
Otomo Katsuhiro, 2004), two significantly ‘apocalyptic’ anime of recent years. Indeed the
retrospective yearning, nostalgia and sadness over the transient nature of things evident in these
productions is best reflected in the mono no aware sentiment articulated by Shapiro and other
observers. While Napier does consider “the medieval notion of mono no aware” as historically
informing the contemporary sense of Japanese apocalypse, particularly the Elegiac mode as a
“bitter awareness of a lost past” (p. 255), it is surprising that its articulation is not applied to
Metropolis and Steamboy. Both are clearly apocalyptic elegies (as well as contemporary allegories)
of a melancholic future-past, far removed from the “odor free” cultural context she identifies in
Miyazaki’s nostalgic early works.8
Just as several critics (Zamora, O’Leary, Norris) of postmodern Western eschatology observe,
Napier finds colloquial slippage from the original meanings of apocalypse and its contemporary
“common understanding” which she describes as “something on the order of global destruction”
(pp.251-52). Fully aware of its original Greek meaning as ‘revelation’ or ‘uncovering’, Napier
emphasizes that this context of disclosure remains present “even though it is lost to conscious
usage [...] so many of our images, ideas, and stories about the end of the world continue to
contain elements of revelation” (p. 252). More significantly, as a process intrinsic to apocalyptic
discourse, she asserts:
In many works of anime, much of the narrative tension is not from “waiting for the end of the
world” but from the revelation of how and why the world should end. Given the distance
between Japanese religion and Christianity, it is fascinating that present-day Japanese notions of
the end of the world echo much in Revelation (Napier, p.252).
Amongst these traces she includes exaggerated visions of death and desire, messianic figures
offering revenge fantasies and a hostility towards history and temporality.
Napier suggests that the process of animation itself contributes to “developing a distinctively
Japanese notion of apocalypse”, which partly draws from the Buddhist doctrine of mappo with its
concept of “a fallen world saved by a religious figure” and based on the ‘latter days of the Law’,
the final 1000-year phase of decadence and decline following the Buddha’s death (Napier, p.252).
Yet Japanese historian of religion, Kitagawa, recognizes that this apocalyptic heritage and lineage
is a more extensive and complex one, where the:
yearning of the Japanese people to restore the idealized state of the golden days, coupled with the notion of the
identity of religion and politics (saisei-itchi), has often developed a messianic fervor, especially during political
crises. The ethnocentric, messianic restoration implicit in the indigenous religious tradition of Japan received
further stimulus from the apocalyptic notion of Buddhism known as mappo (the coming of the age of
degeneration of the Buddha’s Law) as well as from the “immanental theocratic” motif of Confucianism, as
exemplified by the messianic motif of Nichiren’s teaching in the thirteenth century, respectively. Many observers
sense the similar ethnocentric, messianic motif in [...] many other postwar new religions that present the “old
dreams” of Japan as the “new visions” of the coming social and political order. (Kitagawa, 1990, p. 339)
In this way, the Superflat movement, or ‘superplaner’ animation style, evokes an arguably
reactionary move to simplify the complexities of postmodern life via the compression of dense
cultural forms into a new hybrid flatness that is pure surface.9 Following Okamoto Taro’s decree
8
On the “culturally odourless” nature of Japanese kawaii, see Napier’s reflection on Iwabuchi Koichi. Susan Napier 2006, ‘The World of Anime
Fandom in America’, in F Lunning (ed) Mechademia: Emerging Worlds of Anime and Manga, vol. 1, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis,
pp. 47-63.
9
For Lamarre, the superflat and superplanar anime style, “implies that something is not simply flat but very, very flat-complexly flat. To make
something look superflat, you have to begin with layers that introduce the possibility of depth and then crush it [...] Depth comes right to the
surface even as it serves to direct attention to the character. Foreground and background become equally striking. This is the basic idea of
superflat: no element within the image is more important than any other element. The result is a visual field without any hierarchy among elements
[...] When everything comes equally to the surface”. Thomas Lamarre 2006, ‘The Multiplanar Image’, in F Lunning (ed) Mechademia: Emerging
32
that ‘art is explosion’, for the superflat apocalypticists, its rendering becomes entirely flat
(exemplified in Mirukami’s Time Boken cartoon-like mushroom cloud series), yet it remains
paradoxically and complexly multiplanar. As Lamarre (2007) offers: “Surprisingly, however, are
the recurring images of explosions, space battles, planetary destruction [...] In other words,
superflat anime is not in opposition to action, or to genres of space war and futuristic military
action” (p. 133)
While Napier recognizes the importance of apocalyptic cults in Japan, that she finds evident
since the 19th century, other commentators have shown how millenarian movements and
ideologies can be traced to the 10th century, if not before, with various charismatic shamans and
messianic cult leaders appearing to the present day.10 In Japanese history, as much as its
representation in manga and anime, such sects and cults emerged regularly and, as with the West,
frequently espoused radical ideology announcing the end of days. Most famously in recent Japan,
Aum Shinrikyio, the messianic cult led by Ashara Shoko responsible for the 1995 sarin gas attack
on the Tokyo subway, was preparing for the end of the world and its members were avid
consumers of “apocalyptic manga and anime” (Napier, p.8). Indeed, six years earlier, with the
international film release of Akira, following its successful manga serialization, a doomsday cult is
depicted at the margins of the narrative.11
Writing in Atomic Bomb Cinema: the Apocalyptic Imagination on Film, Jerome Shaprio finds
the Buddhist mappo tradition in Japanese cinema and anime complemented by another arcane
institution, masse. Conceptually, the latter is closer to an apocalyptic narrative than the former:
“masse describes the complete end of the world, and the beginning of an entirely new one”
(Shapiro, 2002, p.257). This is an important distinction in terms of both Spriggan and Appleseed
and qualifies the Japanese apocalyptic further as there is not so much a continuity or salvation of
an elect in this schema, as in Western tradition, but the closure of one narrative and the
beginning of another. In Spriggan, a human machine hybrid (i.e. cyborg) attempts to annihilate all
life on the planet and start afresh with newly designed creatures, whereas in Appleseed, artificially
augmented human clones (bioroids) are created to harmonize warring homo sapiens but are
themselves positioned to be the inheritors of Earth once humanity is ‘euthanazed’.
There should be no surprise in these apocalyptically ‘bricolage’ plots. Shapiro (2002), for
example, strongly emphasizes the impact of Post-Meiji modernization and influence of Western
mythologies and narratives in contemporary Japanese cinema and anime which he perceives as
another form of social ambivalence, ambiguity and cultural hybridity: “Almost paradoxically, the
Japanese are infatuated with the new, disdain anything outdated, and are not sentimental about
revising, amending, or discarding ‘tradition’” (p. 257).
What Japanese films exhorting the apocalypse achieve distinctively is “a passion, both serious
and playful, for living in accord with the natural world-in all its beauty and terror” (Shapiro, pp.
255-56). The notion of playfulness is a serious one for Shapiro and one largely missing from
Napier’s textual readings, and can be found equally in mono no aware, a point Shapiro takes
eminent Japanese film scholar Donald Ritchie to task over (and by implication Napier) as
fundamentally misreading this Buddhist tradition (Shapiro, pp. 264-67). Equally, the influence of
traditional, pre-cinematic modes of art such as Haiku (championed by Gerald Vizenor) requires
Worlds of Anime and Manga, vol. 1, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp. 135-136.
1 0
See Kitagawa Religion in Japanese History, Hall Apocalypse Observed and Stone (Ed.) Expecting Armageddon.
1 1
For a more detailed analysis of Akira’s millennial cult and an expansion on this essay, see Mick Broderick 2008. ‘Animating Apocalypse:
Millennial Expression in Japanese Film’, in John Wallis & Kenneth Newport (eds), Apocalyptic Texts in Popular Culture, Equinox Publishing,
London (forthcoming).
33
the skilled reading/mastery of interpretation. As in the hermeneutics required for biblical

exegesis in such rich apocalyptic texts as Revelation, appreciating Haiku requires a ‘transcendent
oneness’ in the act of contemplation that seeks to harmonize and find balance in any reading. Yet
harmony and balance also informs Western theological interpretation and practice. As Frank
Kermode argues, following Helmut Gerber’s assertion that “genuine decadence is a renaissance”,
apocalyptic transition requires the balance of both decadence and renovation or renaissance, and
is often indistinguishable and/or at least contemporaneous (Kermode 1995, p. 258).
In anime such as Metropolis and Steamboy, the apocalyptic narratives are infused with hubris
and entropy, where the former affect impels the construction of Babel-like edifices that serve
rapacious ambition and demagoguery though these are ultimately destroyed by rebellion and in
retribution. If there is a latent sadness and sensitivity towards things evident in their passing
(aware), it is in the exploitation, expendability and the perceived loss of innocence associated
with modernity’s nascent technological ascendancy, one largely wasted by military-industrial
misadventure and protofascist ideology. Innovative energy sources are monopolized, whether
Steamboy’s late 19th Century super-pressurized water or the early 20th century fissile elements of
Metropolis deployed for global domination.12 Ultimately apocalyptic, tranformative and
transmutational power corrupts and almost always is emblematically represented in anime via the
hybrid, cyborgian form of human-machine ‘becoming’.
Fig. 1 – Metropolis. © 2001 Tezuka/Bandai Visual/Dentsu.

All rights reserved.
Shapiro (2002) further delineates the Buddhist canon: “masse signifies an age of moral
decadence, and in ancient times it also meant a retributive event that guides humanity”, but
unlike Judeo-Christian apocalypse, it assumes an eschatological stature, not Revelation’s
consummation of history into a single, linear teleology. “Rather than connoting rebirth or the
battle of good and evil, masse simply denotes punishment for crimes rather than sin. Masse does
not include a cosmic reorganization [...] rather the world ends, and then something else takes its
place” (Shapiro, p.341, n.19). In this way, masse complements the concept of mono no aware, in
that it embodies a sense of sorrow for the loss and transience of all things. According to Shapiro,
it also “expresses a profound sympathy which is more difficult to define” (p.264).
Both Metropolis and Steamboy as exemplars of Thomas Looser’s (2007) attribution of the
“positive, productive function” of the Superflat movement in its embrace of the apocalyptic. Just
as Steamboy is inspired by Victorian England’s Crystal Palace World Exhibition and the science
fiction writings of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, the opening epithet in Metropolis, reads simply:
1 2
In Metropolis, the city’s central and dominating Ziggurat disguises an enormous weapon system that fires ‘Omotanium’ energy at the sun
causing massive fluctuations in the solar fusion reaction which leads to the irradiation of the earth’s surface. Conversely, Steam Boy deploys
superheated steam to catastrophically superfreeze central London.
34
“every epoch dreams its successor – Jules Michelet”. While this can reference the nostalgic, post-
war manga imagination of Metropolis creator Tezuka (based on the Fritz Lang film, then unseen
by the artist), it is equally relevant for the contemporary, post-millennial anime generation,
revisioned by animator-artists Rintaro and Otomo. For Looser it is no coincidence that this
apocalyptic anime/Superflat cultural production occurs at the end of the Showa era with the
death of emperor Hirohito, and the start of the Heisie era: “The very name Heisei contains the
idea of productive ending. Literally the culmination or completion of peace, the word was meant
to indicate an ostensibly successful completion of Japan’s postwar policies. Even if the period is
constructed negatively, it may be read as one that nonetheless still points hopefully to something
else” (Looser, p. 94)
Even here we find the ubiquitous amalgam of Judeo-Christian apocalyptic with manga and
mecha. When the über-industrialist of Metropolis, Duke Red, secretly builds a robot girl (Tima) in
the form of his dead daughter she unwittingly becomes an instrument of catastrophic change as a
superhuman cyborg that complements the enormous Ziggurat/weapon-system when she is
installed upon its throne. Tima instantly merges symbiotically with the machine’s operating
system via tentacular cables and wires (reminiscent of Tetsuo in Akira). One character witnessing
the transformation fatalistically quotes Biblical scripture: “and so God’s wrath descended upon
the Tower of Babel” while the cavernous control room morphs momentarily into a massive
crucifix, with Tima at it centre which alludes to the giant antediluvian being, Lilith, in Neon
Genesis Evangelion based on Judaic folklore. The religious symbolism is complete when she
ascends the Ziggurat throne and rises on a sphere, recalling the iconography of the Virgin Mary
atop a globe.
Fig. 2 – Metropolis. © 2001 Tezuka/Bandai Visual/Dentsu.

In retribution for humanity’s ill-treatment of the robot underclass, Tima unilaterally decides
humanity’s fate:
Destruction of the human race will begin through irradiation and the use of multiple weapons
systems. This will be complete in 17 hours, and 27 minutes.
Through the usual intercession of a selfless anime hero, Tima is prevented from unleashing
global calamity but effectively destroys the Ziggurat, the despotic designs of Duke Red along with
the centre of the Metropolis. An apocalyptic reprieve ensues, like the prophesied Biblical
interregnum between millennial adversaries, providing the potential for harmony and balance to
be restored, however evanescent.
Hence apocalyptic anime and the Superflat aesthetic is well suited to interrogating this
transcendent feeling, momentarily closing the rupture between what is and what will be, linking
the here with ‘what lies beyond’. In order to further demonstrate these influences in greater detail
35
I have selected two major Japanese animated productions, Spriggan and Appleseed, both from
serialized manga origins that engage thematically with apocalyptic concerns but which have yet to
receive significant critical attention. Unlike the soteriological impulse of Western apocalypse, the
advocates and potential instigators of Armageddon in Spriggan and Appleseed neither seek the
salvation nor the perpetuation of humankind. These anime entertain narratives of mappo and
masse as myths of decadence and decline, which are ultimately rejected in each film with the
messianic intervention of deliver-heroes. For all of its failures, moral exhaustion and its capacity
for self-destruction, humanity is saved or granted a reprieve in these productions by rejecting
false gods and prophets, or by embracing advanced transhumanist ideals that complement and
compensate for human flaws.
Spriggan
This OAV (original anime video) was also released theatrically in a number of international
territories and is a curious amalgam of many hybrid thematic and iconographic references to
biblical apocalypse. As in many anime, such as Akira, Spriggan is set in a future realm not too
indistinguishable from today. It is a world under ecological threat where humankind seems pre-
ordained for extinction, punished in a quasi-biblical, technological deluge that conflates Buddhist
masse tradition with Old Testament prophecy to encompass renewal or evolutionary progress.
After the death of a classmate as an unwilling suicide bomber under post-hypnotic command
who has the words “Noah will be your death” scrawled across his chest, Yu Ominae, the
impulsive and eponymous ‘Spriggan’ confronts his supervisor, Mr Yamamoto of ARKAM, a
covert global intelligence organization. As a high school senior, Yu is the youngest spy working
for ARKAM and is later revealed to be a genetically enhanced product of military
experimentation and indoctrination. Peering out of his office window at the myriad skyscrapers
before him, the camera pans upward while Yamamoto quotes from Old Testament scripture, his
pale cigarette smoke slowly ascending and dispersing in a neat visual metaphor of transcendence
and transformation:
Fig. 3 – Spriggan. © 2001 Tezuka/Bandai Visual/Dentsu.

“And the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great and His heart was filled with grief.
And the Lord said ‘I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the Earth. And
behold, I myself am bringing floodwaters on the Earth to destroy from under heaven all flesh in
which is the breath of life and all that is on the Earth shall die”.
This ponderous sequence works typologically to recall and anticipate the catastrophic deluge,
both as historical myth and an antediluvian prophecy of future calamity. It is the Spriggan’s
cryptic introduction to a battle that will take place atop Mt Ararat in Turkey, where one of two
36
competing secret armies has located the Ark in a battle for access. As Norman Cohn has
comprehensively demonstrated, the near universal mythologies of flood act as a precursor to
Biblical apocalypse (Cohn, 1999). Punitive Deluge is a mini-narrative of end-time that
demonstrates rebirth and suggests something cyclical, yet is contained within Judeo-Christian
theology as a linear and teleological movement. Arguably both Shinto and Buddhist purification
rituals employing water contribute this rich tradition of deluge mythology, especially given the
archipelago’s ongoing assault by tsunami and typhoons (Kitagawa, 1990).
In his appropriately titled book, Strange Weather, Andrew Ross (2001) suggests the mythic
resonances of deluge (and other ‘violent’ acts of Nature) is due to their ubiquitous effect. Indeed,
as Ross maintains, such anthropomorphising of nature and spectacular weather continues from
the pre-modern into the post-modern world, as we find in Spriggan and other anime. The biblical
Flood attains the dimension of micro-apocalypse, or a rehearsal for the complete point of
eschaton, with the apocalypse, in the immanent future. Hence, even seemingly linear and singular
myths of decline and rebirth hold cyclical and repeated motifs, that exegete Northrop Frye calls
‘type’ and ‘antitype’ (Frye, 1983, p.25).
Such mythologies are germane to Spriggan. In a clandestine Pentagon operation, the US
Machine Corps sends a telekinetic child cyborg, Colonel MacDougall, and two appropriately
named assassins, Fat Man and Little Boy, on a ‘black op’ to gain control of the Ark, having
obtained a triangular entry key from another alien artifact excavated from elsewhere. Inside the
ARKUM laboratory atop Mt Ararat the diminutive Col. MacDougall forcibly wrests control from
an elderly scholar-scientist, Dr Meisel. After briefly downloading/absorbing Meisel’s linguistic
computer data, MacDougall translates the alien glyphs for those present, explaining that the Ark
is a giant machine controlling the Earth’s weather by manipulating ozone and carbon dioxide in
the upper atmosphere and adjusting the global intake of ultraviolet radiation:
“I am the Lord of the sky. He who awakens me shall have dominion over that which enfolds
the earth, the mighty shield that protects all. When evil runs rampant on the Earth I will change
the blessings of heaven to the curses of hell and the children of God shall be once more destroyed
and created anew”.
Inside the Ark, Dr Meisel, Margaret and the child cyborg MacDougall locate the giant
machine’s alien operating system, known as ‘Noah’. The sequence is a stunning one. As the
scientists decipher the central control panel, a cavernous hemisphere of rotating Mandela and
arcane hieroglyphs radiate across a massive internal canopy, resembling an astronomical and
astrological map of the cosmos. All present are in awe of the sublime spectacle unfolding before
them. MacDougall enthuses:
Fig. 4 – Spriggan. © 1988 Studio 4°C/TBS/Bandai Visual.

37
“It’s incredible! With the Cold War over, the greatest single threat to the Earth is destruction
of the environment. Acid rain, ozone depletion, global warming – with Noah in our hands we
could eliminate all of these problems in a heartbeat.” This sequence is intercut with Spriggan
Ominae in the twilight periphery surrounding the Ark’s core, trying to locate the three
protagonists while traveling through a liminal dimension that bends and distorts time and space.
In this weird, quantum realm he encounters enormous dinosaurs, frozen in stasis, alongside
scores of other creatures both reptilian and mythological and fantastic.
Fig. 5 - Spriggan. © 1988 Studio 4°C/TBS/Bandai Visual.

MacDougall continues: “I don’t doubt that Noah could have helped create the ice age that
destroyed the dinosaurs, but I always felt that it might have had another function beside simply
changing the atmosphere [...] I don’t think those creatures were just collected by Noah, I think
they were created here. I think they are experimental prototypes for the next generation of
animals to walk the earth.” As Ominae searches deeper into the alien zone the creatures appear
more incredible and bizarre and MacDougall’s scientific exposition attains a millenarian rant.
“Noah doesn’t just control the weather, it’s a creator of life! [...] it might even be possible that the
entire human race began here in the Ark of Noah. Forget about saving the old world doctor,
together you and I can create a new one [...] The entire human race is a mistake of history doctor.
We have the chance to correct God’s only creative failure [...] He’s giving us the chance to correct
all that is wrong in the world”

Unappeased by Meisel’s categorical refusal to cooperate, MacDougall activates the Ark in
retribution: “I’ve just triggered the global warming function doctor. In minutes hurricanes and
typhoons will begin forming in unprecedented numbers. The polar ice caps will melt and the
levels of the ocean will begin to rise. At last, the second flood has begun! It’s the end of the world
as you knew it…” The three watch the global climatic rupture from within the heart of the Ark as
38
a montage of satellite views of spiraling storms, ice sheets tearing asunder, flooded cities and giant
tsunamis forming, MacDougall adds: “Why wait forty days and nights when you have tidal
waves”.
But in a selfless act of messianic heroism Spriggan Ominae manages to intervene and rescue
Meisel and Margaret, temporarily overcoming MacDougall who initiates the Ark’s self-destruct
sequence destabilizing the “alien time/space stasis” that maintains the massive structure. The
machine implodes in a massive climatological inversion resembling hurricane, tornado and
collapsar into which all matter (including the maniacal McDougall) is sucked, disappearing at the
event horizon.

The sublime atmospheric contortions and turbulence subsides. Despite widespread
destruction the process of ecological apocalypse is averted. MacDougall-anti-christ, false prophet
and deceiver – is vanquished and annihilated. The film concludes with two Spriggans (Ominae
and his French counterpart) united after escaping the Ark. The pair has prevented the wannabe
cyborg deity from obliterating homo sapiens and replacing them with his new creations.
Appleseed
If Spriggan succeeds in retelling and reinterpreting biblical mythology of decadence, decline
and deluge by conflating a postmodern secular narrative with apocalyptic and millennial tropes
and characters, the more recent Appleseed instantly foregrounds its literally apocalyptic agenda
with an introductory title and passage from Revelations 12:4.
And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth; and the
dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon
as it was born.13
At first this passage appears unrelated to the mecha fury of urban battle we are about to
witness, rendered by live motion-capture within 3D CG, as well as the segue within minutes from
the maelstrom of Armageddon to the utopian city of Olympus.14 Yet the New Testament
quotation foregrounds the centrality of the female protagonist in an apocalyptic battle between
forces of entropic human genocide and those who would protect the ‘future perfect’ by making
things anew. Significantly, Appleseed’s characters and locations also draw from classical Greek
1 3
In the accompanying DVD audio commentary, director Aramaki Shinji explains that although the film begins with this biblical quote, “it was
not absolutely necessary here but it had atmosphere, and it was phrase that put everything into place, and I had strong feelings about it.”
1 4
As Arakami outlines in the director’s commentary, the visceral and kinetic violence of the opening sequence is deliberately chaotic and
confusing, to disorient the viewer: “You don’t really get a good sense of what’s going on”.
39
myth and literature in nomenclature and its overall dialectical narrative interrogation of historical,
progressive decline and decadence which, while tangential to Judeo-Christian apocalypse, is far
closer to concepts of mappo and masse.
The opening sequence establishes the catastrophic, post-holocaust terrain inhabited by guerilla
fighters and their mechanized military opponents. A lengthy firefight ensues inside the shell of a
decaying multi-story building where resistance fighter Deunan Knute is captured by the elite
ESWAT (Extra Special Weapons and Tactics) team airdropped in to the ruined city. Knute
awakens to find herself in the new ‘utopia’ of Olympus, a majestic 22 nd century metropolis
populated by genetically engineered human-hybrid clones called ‘bioroids’ that now govern the
remnant functioning world. One of the next generation of bioroids, Hitomi, introduces the
bewildered Knute into the socio-political history of the city: “In Olympus, mankind has finally
achieved a state of utopia, in a fair and balanced society”.15
Fig. 8 – Appleseed. © 2004 Geneon/Toho. All rights

reserved.
Maintaining this utopian existence, however, requires a form of biological Mutual Assured
Destruction (MAD) as deterrent. Atop of Daidalos, a massive ringed metal and glass structure
that houses the enormous Intelligence Network ‘brain’ that oversees Olympus, nick-named Gaia,
is ‘D-Tank’ containing a genocidal virus that if ever released, would eliminate all bioroids
Resigned to this ever-present threat, Hitomi laments: “I know it’s man’s need for self-
preservation [and] it’s vital to maintain a balance between us; that’s why Gaia also monitors the
emotional effect of bioroids on humans”. She explains that Gaia is a self-expanding network that
monitors all aspects of daily life in the city: “Particularly the bioroid interaction with humans”

reserved.
1 5
As Jerome Shapiro reminds us, “In Japanese philosophy and culture, especially its aesthetics, balance is a fundamental principle. Balance,
however, is something fluid, dynamic and transient”, Shapiro 2002, p. 265.
40
since “humans are ruled by unstable emotions. Their inherent anger often leads to war but in
bioroids emotional reactions are suppressed. We harbour no anger or jealously towards other
people and that’s how we’ve been able to keep the peace.”
Arriving inside the giant complex Hitomi introduces Knute to the Olympus Elders, seven
nonagerians who hover about the transparent domelike container of Gaia’s fluctuating neural
plasma, like a giant version of the Dr Onishi’s scientific display monitoring the god-child in
Akira.
Hitomi relates that the will of Olympus is decided through a form of Socratic dialectics
involving “debate between Gaia and the seven elders”.16. One by one, the elders explain Gaia’s
function and the genocidal Olympus fail-safe mechanism. Gaia is a “collection of the wisdom and
acumen of the scientists who designed it”, a machine, perfect in its stability that will never waver,
with no capacity for human sentiment. “By adding our seven minds to its collective
understanding of humanity we give Gaia’s thinking a measure of flexibility”.

reserved.
However, all is not well in paradise. At first Appleseed’s utopian community appears like post-
millennial elect but smoldering interspecies conflict suggests this is only a brief apocalyptic
interregnum of relative peace prior to an imminent and decisive battle. After a terrorist attack by
rebel factions of human soldiers decimates the bioroid’s preservation technologies inside the
heavily fortified Daidalos, the Olympus parliament convenes in emergency session. One elder
informs the assembled council that the genocidal attack on bioroid life-extension “imperils the
future of humanity as well”. Announcing to the chamber that Gaia has willed that all
reproductive functions will be permanently restored to the bioroids, the humans present (mostly
regular army) are incensed. Speaking simultaneously to the parliament and live to all Olympians,
the Elder trumpets with emphatic confidence: “Bioroid reproductive capabilities will be restored
and they will evolve into a new race of man and create a shining paradise for us all”. But this
millennial prophecy only masks a more insidious plot hatched by the elders.
An unwitting pawn in an apocalyptic game, Deunan Knute retrieves vital data and revives it
for the expedient and complicit Elders. Bioroids, they explain, as a new form of life could help us
save humanity: “Man was doomed, but coexistence gave us all a glimmer of hope. Even so, the
human race could not suppress its violent nature. Mankind despises those that are different.
Once again man has succumbed to hatred and anger [...] and he no longer has the ability to
1 6
These old men are deeply ambiguous if not duplicitous characters, and revealed to be complicit in several homicidal schemes, ranging from
individual murder (Knute’s mother, Dr Gilliam), through to ‘speciescide’. The seven may also allude to the myth of the assault on Thebes - it’s
seven gates and the seven soldiers who led an army against the city. The allusion is further strengthened in the anime when the seven spider-like
defence robots are activated by the Elders to destroy D-Tank and usher in the end of homo sapiens.
41
maintain this planet”. Echoing the terminal prognosis of Colonel MacDougall in Spriggan, the
Elders attempt to justify to Deunan their devious manipulations via apocalyptic logic and
rhetoric: “Gaia has made an accurate prediction, that the human race is doomed to annihilate
itself and destroy the world in three generations. Deunan, our time has passed. The human race
must step aside [...] if the world is to survive we have no choice but to relinquish the future to the
bioroids”.
The decrepit men next reveal the truth about D-Tank, contradicting Hitomi’s earlier ‘fail-safe’
narrative of bioroid genocide, like an updated genetic Doomsday Device recalling Dr Strangelove
(Dir: Stanley Kubrick, 1963):
When the tank is destroyed the virus will make the entire human race permanently infertile.
We swore that no human life would be taken. And so it won’t - instead we will slowly close the
book on human history. The last chapter will be the euthanasia of mankind [...] even utopia
could not quell man’s need for violence. Once again he became embroiled in a global war and
reduced the world to ashes. And now Olympus too has been marred by the sins of humanity [...]
The bioroids will create a new species, and mankind will be eradicated from the planet.
Deunan protests that the Elders deceived her and manipulated Gaia’s data, forcing it to make
a spurious decision. Unrepentant one elder asserts with dogmatic certainty: “It is humanity’s
destiny [...] we accept the fate of our race and intend to perish along with the rest”, but just as
another is about to press the red doomsday button releasing the infertility virus, the bioroid
Prime Minister, Athena, enters with her personal guard and aborts the global genocide. She
reminds the Elders of the bioroids’ primary function: “To ensure the survival of the human race”,
ironically confirming the previous public prophecy by her seemingly defiant intervention: “We
are no longer the bioroids you created but members of a new race”.
Appleseed concludes with this triumphant declaration. Partly by design and possibly by
chance, the superior bioroids are shown to have already attained ‘enlightenment’, advancing to a
higher realm of (co)existence with homo sapiens. In this brave new world, under the watchful eye
of the artificial intelligence network Gaia, human women and female bioroids unequivocally
usurp the exhausted ideology of patriarchy moments before it set about unilaterally extinguishing
all human life.
An Ending
According to apocalyptic scholar Malcolm Bull (1995):
Popular-secular apocalyptic feeds on the same images of nuclear holocaust, ecological catastrophe, sexual
decadence and social collapse that inspire contemporary religious millenarianism. But unlike the religious variety,
secular apocalyptic – which is found in many areas of popular culture, but most notably in science fiction, rock
music and film – is not usually intended to influence public opinion in favour of social or political objectives such
as nuclear disarmament or environmental regulation, but in many cases the language of apocalyptic is deployed
simply to shock, alarm or enrage (pp. 4-5).
Japanese animation has frequently been accused of exploitation and gratuitous excess. Yet
what any number of anime are successful in achieving is rendering and evoking the
‘inconceivable’. Instead of halting at Armageddon’s denouement, apocalyptic anime glimpses
beyond the cataclysms of radical renovation. The demolished metropolis, felled buildings, spent
ordinance, devastated urban populaces and planetary topographies riddled with explosive
craters, smoking fissures, molten frameworks, and blasted terrains from heaving overpressure; the
cacophonies of battle, mass evacuation, blinding light, searing rays, nuclear detonations, psychic
energy pulses and the corresponding silences of affect – these are the chaotic processes that
42
announce and produce the violent but necessary transition from one state of existence to the
next, often as evolutionary development, or as a counterforce to nihilistic agendas, or to usurp
and prevent entropy, hubris or the destructive interventions from internal or external parties.
Regardless of the recent, modern preponderance of secular apocalypticism that critics such as
Malcolm Bull target, anime texts that adopt apocalyptic, messianic or millenarian tropes
frequently do so as an organising principle of their hybrid narratives as well as aesthetic
processes. The glib or cynical postmodern self-reflexivity Bull finds amongst cultural circulation
is largely eschewed in anime. There is no apocalyptic MacGuffin here, momentarily trotted out to
expediently explain or justify or motivate plot and character.17 The films discussed above are
nuanced and sophisticated interpretations that engage in ‘revelation’ while adopting the poetic,
linguistic and iconographic excesses of biblical ecriture applied to the specifics of the superplanar
animated film medium, Japanese tradition and a globalized market. 
References
Aoki, MY & Dardess, MB (eds) 1981, As the Japanese See It: Past and Present, University of
Hawaii Press, Honolulu.
Broderick, Mick 2002, ‘Anime’s Apocalypse: Neon Genesis Evangelion as Millennarian Mecha’,
Intersections, no. 7, viewed 10 September, 2007,
http://wwwsshe.murdoch.edu.au/intersections/issue7/broderick_review.html
Brophy, Philip & Ewington, Julie (eds) 1994, KABOOM! Explosive Animation from America and
Japan, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.
Brophy, Philip 2005, 100 Anime, British Film Institute, London.
Brophy, Philip 2007, ‘Sonic-Atomic-Nuemonic: Apocalyptic Echoes in Anime’, in A Cholodenko
(ed.), The Illusion of Life 2: More Essays on Animation, Power Publications, Sydney,
pp.191-208.
Bull, Malcolm 1995, ‘On Making Ends Meet’, in Malcolm Bull (ed.), Apocalypse Theory and the
Ends of the World, Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 1-17.
Campbell, Joseph 1991, The Masks of God, Vols 1-4. Penguin, London.
Cholodenko, Alan (ed.) 1991, The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation, Power Publications,
Sydney.
Cholodenko, Alan (ed.) 2007, The Illusion of Life 2: More Essays on Animation, Power
Publications, Sydney.
Cohn, Norman 1957, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical
Anarchists of the Middle Ages, Oxford University Press, New York.
Cohn, Norman 1999, Noah’s Flood: The Genesis Story in Western Thought, Yale University Press,
New Haven.
Crawford, Ben 1996, ‘Emperor Tomato Ketchup: Cartoon Properties from Japan’, in M Broderick
(ed.), Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Ja panese Film,
Kegan Paul International, London, pp. 75-90.
Debord, Guy 1995, Society of the Spectacle, Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Zone Books,
London.
1 7
MacGuffin is a term Alfred Hitchcock coined to describe essential but superfluous plot exposition that gave context for the plot direction and
seemed important but merely serves as a catalyst for action/themes of much more interest to the filmmaker and audience (e.g. jealousy,
surveillance, murder, sexual dysfunction). Shapiro, finds that nuclear plots are often little more than MacGuffins in the majority of what he has
called ‘atomic bomb cinema’, yet he recognizes that some bomb films deploy apocalyptic narrative to, as Kermode would have it, make sense of
the end. See Shapiro 2002, pp.60-62.
43
Eliade, Mircea 1971, The Myth of the Eternal Return: or, Cosmos and History, Bollingen,
Princeton NJ.
Freiberg, Freda 1996, ‘Akira and the Postnuclear Sublime’, in M Broderick (ed.), Hibakusha
Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film, Kegan Paul
International, London, pp. 91-102.
Frye, Northrop. 1983. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, London: Ark Paperbacks.
Goodall, Jane 2007, ‘Hybridity and the End of Innocence’, in A Cholodenko (ed.), The Illusion of
Life 2: More Essays on Animation, Power Publications, Sydney, pp. 152-170.
Hall, John R 2000, Apocalypse Observed: Religious Movements and Violence in North America,
Europe and Japan, Routledge, London.
Kermode, Frank 1967, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, Oxford
University Press, Oxford.
Kermode, Frank 1995, ‘Waiting for the End’, in M Bull (ed.), Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of
the World, Blackwell: Oxford, pp. 250-263.
Kitagawa, Joseph M. 1990, Religion in Japanese History, Columbia University Press, New York.
Kumar, Krishan 1995 ‘Apocalypse, Millennium and Utopia Today’, in M Bull (ed.), Apocalypse
Theory and the Ends of the World, Blackwell: Oxford, pp. 200-226.
Levi, Antonia 1998, Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation, Open Court,
Chicago.
Lamarre, Thomas 2006, ‘The Multiplanar Image’, in F Lunning (ed.), Mechademia: Emerging
Worlds of Anime and Manga, vol. 1, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp. 120-
143.
Looser, Thomas 2006, ‘Superflat and the Layers of Image and History in 1990s Japan’, in F
Lunning (ed.), Mechademia: Emerging Worlds of Anime and Manga, vol. 1, University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp. 92-109.
McCarthy, Helen 1993, Anime! A Beginners Guide To Japanese Animation, Titan, London.
McCarthy, Helen 1996, The Anime Movie Guide - Japanese Animation since 1983, Titan, London.
Moore, Pauline 2007 ‘When Velvet Gloves Meet Iron Fists: Cuteness in Japanese Animation”, in
A Cholodenko (ed.), The Illusion of Life 2: More Essays on Animation, Power Publications,
Sydney, pp. 119-150.
Napier, Susan 2005, Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle, Experiencing Contemporary
Japanese Animation, Palgrave Macmillan, New York.
Napier, Susan 2007, ‘The World of Anime Fandom in America’, in F Lunning (ed) Mechademia:
Emerging Worlds of Anime and Manga, vol. 1, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis,
pp. 47-63
Norris, Christopher 1995, ‘Versions of Apocalypse: Kant, Derrida, Foucault’, in Malcolm Bull
(ed.), Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World, Blackwell, Oxford.
O’Leary, Stephen 1999, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric, Oxford
University Press, New York.
Reischauer, Edwin O & Jansen, Marius B 1995, The Japanese Today: Change and Continuity, 3rd
Edition, Belknap Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Ross Andrew 1991, Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits, Verso,
London.
Shapiro, Jerome F 1994, ‘Does Japan have a Millenary Imagination?’, Kyoto Daigaku
Sôgôningengakubu Kiyô, July, pp. 133-45.
Shapiro, Jerome F 2002, Atomic Bomb Cinema: The Apocalyptic Imagination on Film, Routledge,
New York.
44
Sontag, Susan 1965/1996, ‘The Imagination of Disaster’, Reprinted in M Broderick, (ed.),

Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film, Kegan
Paul International, London, pp. 38-53.
Stone, Jon R 2000, Expecting Armageddon: Essential Readings in Failed Prophecy, Routledge,
London.
Thompson, Damian 1996, The End of Time, Minerva, London.
Zamora, Lois 1989, Writing the Apocalypse: Historical Vision in Contemporary U.S. and Latin
American Fiction, Cambridge University Press, New York.
© Michael Broderick
45
Katharine Buljan
The Uncanny and the Robot in the Astro Boy Episode “Franken”
Introduction
In the story of ‘Franken’, by Osamu Tezuka, humans flee in horror at the sight of a robot
named Franken,1 unaware that he is actually on a search for his lost friend, as well as for
mechanical pieces to repair himself. Directed by Kazuya Konaka, ‘Franken’ is an episode of the
Japanese animation series Astro Boy, from 2003. The story begins with a shot of an interior, in
which three thieves from an underground robot theft ring disassemble the parts of stolen robots
with the aim of selling them. The sombre colours of the interior without windows and an
unidentified, mysterious and eerie voice heard in the background imbue the introductory shot
with a frightening and unnerving atmosphere. This consequently acts as an initial tension-builder
for the developing story. In deep night, discarded parts of the stolen robots are then disposed of.
Out of the pile of these discarded, dismantled robots’ parts arises a machine-like one-eyed
creature, with extremities that resemble mechanical feelers. Soon after, the episode starts to
switch between shots, following the one-eyed creature on the way to Metro-musements, an
amusement park near Metro City, with other shots following Astro Boy’s class day in this
amusement park. The ‘Franken’ story is an intriguing confluence of Western mythological and
literary references, while simultaneously incorporating the animistic component from the
Japanese Shinto religion. With its sophisticated use of these references, coupled with a masterful
use of 2D animation, ‘Franken’ delivers an interesting story about humans and robots.
By looking at the horror, present in the interaction of Franken with humans, the paper
explores whether Franken elicits an uncanny effect. Here, for the framework, Sigmund Freud’s
and Masahiro Mori’s views on the uncanny are used. The discussion comes to the conclusion that
while Franken exercises an uncanny effect on the human characters in the story, he fails to
stimulate any sense of uncanniness in the viewer of the animation. This is due to a number of
reasons, found in the way in which the animation is directed.
Uncanny, Horror and the Robot

‘Franken’ is directed in a way that emphasises the horror in the story by depicting Franken as
an embodiment of a number of Western literary and mythological references. The first of these
appears in the name of the robot himself, Franken, which is also the title of the episode. This is a
reference to Mary Shelley’s fictional character of Frankenstein2 – a monster created from human
parts. The initial shot of ‘Franken,’ which shows the thieves working on dismantling stolen
robots, bears a strong resemblance to the Frankenstein story. The successive shots show Franken
emerging from a pile of discards as a mysterious machine with one red eye. This reveals another
Western reference, more precisely a reference to the Cyclops, frightening one-eyed giants from
Greek mythology.3 As Franken approaches the amusement park and enlarges in size, due to his
consumption of the metal objects he finds on the way, he resembles King Kong, a terrifying giant
1
The name of the robot is Franken, however, in the story he is occasionally referred to as Al. This paper will refer to him as Franken, not Al.
2
Mary Shelley anonymously published her novel Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus for the first time in 1818. The second edition followed
in 1823 and the third, which was revised by Shelley, came out in 1831 (Joseph 1969, p. xix).
3
Franken’s eye is situated in the middle of his forehead. The eye of the Cyclops also appears in the same place (Scott Littleton c2002, p. 228). In
addition, the Cyclops have been often represented in the movies.
46
gorilla from the Western fictional work.4 All of these references work on making him a horrific
monster. Concerning horror, the importance which the uncanny has in its context should be
stressed here. Writing about zombies – a kind of monster – Kyle Bishop notes that
zombies also have close ties to other, more literary monsters. They belong to a diverse class of creatures that cross
the metaphysical line between life and death, where a strong sense of the uncanny inspires unease and fear.
(Bishop 2006, p. 200).
Bishop’s lines highlight fear’s dependence on the uncanny and their close connection with the
blurred boundary between the animate and inanimate. The uncanny effect is produced when an
entity, believed to be inanimate, suddenly appears as animate – zombies are an example. This
kind of uncanniness consequently enables the production of horror as a textual effect or textual
construct. The horror that is produced by monsters’ uncanniness is not only due to their
appearance, which might be frightening and threatening, but, as is later seen in Freud’s theory,
because there is something familiar about them.
Going back to the monster robot Franken, as the story develops he is represented as terrifying
the humans he encounters. The first of these is a couple in the car whom he confronts in a tunnel
and whose car he then devours. After he walks out of the tunnel he enters the amusement park,
where he causes a great deal of panic and horror in the people there, consuming three roller-
coasters and the Super Safari Ride. Even the friend he is looking for, a boy named Jack Fuller,
because he does not recognise him, flees in horror in front of him. This brings to mind Freud’
view that fright and the uncanny are easily elicited by that which is novel (Freud 1955b, p. 221).
Yet, he also adds, ‘some new things are frightening but not by any means all.’ (Freud 1955b, p.
221). The uncanny, according to Freud (1955b, p. 219), is without doubt related to what arouses
dread and horror.5 Since Freud’ views6 on the uncanny are relevant for questioning the uncanny
in relation to Franken, it is valuable firstly to shed light on his views here.
Freud explains that, ‘The German word “unheimlich” is obviously the opposite of “heimlich”
[“homely”], “heimisch” [“native”] – the opposite of what is familiar’ (Freud 1955b, p. 220). In
his discussion Freud briefly examines different interpretations of the term uncanny in various
languages such as English, Latin and Greek, but then looks more thoroughly at examples from
the German language and literature. In analysing the use of the German terms ‘heimlich’ and
‘unheimlich’ Freud comes up with an interesting conclusion: ‘among its different shades of
meaning the word “heimlich“ exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, “unheimlich.”
What is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich.’ (Freud 1955b, p. 224). This point at which
‘heimlich’ equals ‘unheimlich’ is a crucial point in Freud’s theory of the uncanny, for he would
later conclude that ‘uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar
and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process
of repression’ (Freud 1955b, p. 241).
Yet, before he would come up with bringing the uncanny and familiar together, Freud
observes that there is a temptation to conclude that being not known and not familiar produces
an effect of the uncanny. However, the novel or unfamiliar alone, according to Freud (1955b, p.
221), is not sufficient to elicit the uncanny. Something needs to be added to the novel, unfamiliar
4
Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack produced and directed the first King Kong film which premiered in the United States in 1933. The
original story was created by Cooper and Edgar Wallace (Gottesman and Geduld 1976, p. 15).
5
In addition, Freud, in his paper, presents no explicit discussion about what Angela Connolly calls the subtle and important semantic differences
between terror and horror (Connolly 2003, p. 408). As Connolly elegantly puts it: ‘while terror refers to the mental state associated with fear, horror
refers more to its physical effects and has semantic overtones of disgust and repugnance’ (Connolly 2003, p. 408).
6
According to Nicholas Royle (2003, p. 6), the most indispensable text published on the theme of the uncanny is Freud’s paper ‘Das
Unheimliche,’ published in 1919 and translated in English under the title ‘The Uncanny’ - the text used in this paper.
47
and the unknown, he asserts, in order to make it uncanny (Freud 1955b, p. 221). Freud further
observes that the uncanny ‘is undoubtedly related to what is frightening – to what arouses dread
and horror’ (Freud 1955b, p. 219). He further looks at Ernst Jentsch’s observations of the
uncanny. Jentsch (1995, p. 13) proposes a view that closely connects the uncanny with a feeling of
uncertainty. Amongst other things that have the potential to trigger the uncanny, he singles out
the doubt regarding whether an entity is animate or inanimate (1995, p. 14). This uncertainty
stands on the opposite pole to intellectual certainty, which, as Jentsch observes, ‘provides
psychical shelter in the struggle for existence’ (1995, p. 15). Intellectual mastery over the
environment, according to Jentsch (1995, p. 15), represents a strong human desire. Freud,
however, finds Jentsch’s proposal of the intellectual uncertainty incomplete in explaining the
uncanny, and, thus, continues his analysis.
While Freud, as previously mentioned, closely connects the uncanny with the frightening, he
highlights that there are different classes of frightening. The uncanny, according to him, belongs
to that class of the frightening which relates not to what is alien and unfamiliar, but, on the
contrary, to ‘what is known of old and long familiar.’ (Freud 1955b, p. 220). This leads Freud
(1955b, p. 240) to an interesting point, which is the animistic conception of the universe. 7 More
precisely, he observes that one of the reasons8 for the occurrence of the uncanny experience is
‘when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed’ (Freud
1955b, p. 249). As he develops his arguments Freud points out a preference for the usage of the
term ‘surmounted’ rather then ‘repressed’ in the context of this kind of uncanny (Freud 1955b, p.
249).
Freud (1955b, p. 250) highlights that the uncanny is conditioned by a conflict of judgement.
Unless there is a conflict of judgement, the uncanny experience will not occur.
The feeling of the uncanny, in Freud’s view, is frequently experienced at its highest in relation
to the ancestral beliefs in ‘the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts’ (Freud 1985, p. 364).
In Freud’s terms, Franken then can symbolically represent the embodiment of surmounted
ancestral beliefs, such as, for instance, belief in a supernatural beings9 or belief that the dead can
return to life.10 The presence of Franken, however, despite his references to Western literary and
mythological monsters, fails to reconfirm those surmounted beliefs in the viewer, and,
consequently, fails to elicit the uncanny sensation. Monsters, as Steven Schneider puts it, ‘are able
to produce in many viewers that conflict of judgement necessary for a feeling of uncanniness’
(Schneider 1999). Franken’s failure to produce this lies in a number of reasons that originate in
the way in which the animation is directed. The first of these reasons relates to highlighting that
the story is placed in an imaginary world. Some elements from a real world are present but are
given a minor importance. Freud observes that there is an important difference concerning the
uncanny in the context of the fairy-tale and real life.11 Fairy-tales represent the imaginary reality,
and in them certain things are not uncanny which otherwise would be so if they happened in real
7
Animism is the belief that numerous things in nature have souls. In relation to the animistic stage and the scientific view, it is interesting that
Freud, in ‘Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thought’ notes: ‘At the animistic stage men ascribe omnipotence to themselves. [...] The
scientific view of the universe no longer affords any room for human omnipotence’ (Freud 1955a, p. 88).
8
Freud also connects the uncanny with the return of the repressed which refers to coming to the consciousness of the unconscious infantile
complexes. To look at additional interpretations by Freud is, however, outside the scope of this paper.
9
As previously mentioned, Franken bears a resemblance to Cyclops and these can be viewed in terms of a class of supernatural beings.
1 0
Franken’s name appear to derive from Shelley’s monster Frankenstein and Frankenstein can be classified in this group, as he was made out of
parts from corpses.
1 1
Freud also notes that: ‘The imaginative writer has this licence among many others, that he can select his world of representation so that it either
coincides with the realities we are familiar with or departs from them in what particulars he pleases. We accept his ruling in every case’ (Freud
1955b, p. 249).
48
life (Freud 1955b, p. 250). Since in the ‘Franken’ story there is a strong accent on fantasy, the
viewer, consequently, is not compelled to take it as if it is happening in the real world. This
prevents eliciting the sense of the uncanny as the story does not subject itself to reality testing
and, as a consequence, the conflict of judgement – Freud’s condition for uncanniness – does not
occur. In Freud’s view (1955b, p. 250), the viewer of the story adapts his/her judgement to the
imaginary reality of the story’s author.12 Franken is not seen by the viewer in the same way in
which he would have been seen if the story had been directed in a way that emphasised that it
was situated in the real world. While according to Freud, as stated earlier, there is no uncanny in
fictional works such as fairy-tales because they do not call for reality testing, on the other hand,
Freud does not completely rule out the possibility for the uncanny in the context of fiction. He
notes that fiction could indeed be a fertile ground for the production of the uncanny (Freud
1955b, p. 249).13 Looking at the ‘Franken’ story in this light, it could be said that if the story had
been directed in a way that accentuated the elements that belonged to the real world, then this
would have increased the possibility for the viewer to experience the uncanny. 14 This brings into
perspective an important point, which is the relationship between reality and fantasy.
The world of reality has its laws, possibilities and limits – it is the world of the finite. On the
other side, fantasy, as Richard Mathews writes, ‘enables us to enter worlds of infinite possibility’
(Mathews 2002, p. 1). Reality is governed by the laws of logic, while, on the other side, fantasy, as
Mathews points out, ‘does not require logic – technological, chemical, or alien – to explain the
startling actions or twists of character and plot’ (Mathews 2002, p. 3). Although reality and
fantasy could be seen as dialectical opposites, interestingly, Rosemary Jackson sees a symbiotic
element there.
Fantasy re-combines and inverts the real, but it does not escape it: it exists in a parasitical or symbiotic relation to
the real. The fantastic cannot exist independently of that ‘real’ world which it seems to find so frustratingly finite.
(Jackson 1981, p. 20).
Thus, for Jackson, reality and fantasy are neither mutually exclusive nor incompatible.
Stories that are set in the real world impose the necessity of complying with its laws in order to
convey the sense of reality to the viewer. Contrary to this, stories that are situated in the context of
a fantasy world do not have this necessity. 15 That is, the lack of restrictions of various kinds is one
of the main features of fantasy.
While the worlds of fantasy and reality have their differences, fantasy, as Jackson pointed out,
feeds off the world of reality. Stories set in either of these worlds, though, do have one thing in
common – they are both interested in inviting an emphatic response from the viewer. 16 If the
1 2
Freud’s discussion of Oscar Wilde’s Canterville Ghost greatly illustrates this point. He says that even the ‘real’ ghost in Wilde’s work loses the
potential to elicit even only gruesome feelings at the point in which the author of the story, by being ironical, begins to amuse himself (Freud 1985,
p. 376).
1 3
Freud comes up with what he calls a ‘paradoxical result’ - not only that numerous events could be uncanny in real life while appearing non-
uncanny in their fictional context; but also that fiction has many more ways to create the uncanny (Freud 1955b, p. 249).
1 4
This finds further ground in Freud’s following thought: ‘We adapt our judgement to the imaginary reality imposed on us by the writer, and
regard souls, spirits and ghosts as though their existence had the same validity as our own has in material reality. In this case too we avoid all trace
of the uncanny. The situation is altered as soon as the writer pretends to move in the world of common reality. In this case he accepts as well all
the conditions operating to produce uncanny feelings in real life; and everything that would have an uncanny effect in reality has it in his story.’
(Freud 1955b, p. 250).
1 5
This important point of distinction between reality and fantasy is nicely articulated by Jackson: ‘Literary fantasies have appeared to be ‘free’
from many of the conventions and restrains of more realistic texts: they have refused to observe unities of time, space and character, doing away
with chronology, three-dimensionality and with rigid distinctions between animate and inanimate objects, self and other, life and death’ (Jackson
1981, pp. 1-2).
1 6
Tzvetan Todorov, for instance, talks about how in the context of the fantasy work the integration of the reader with the characters’ world is, to
use his term, ‘implied’ (Todorov 1975, p. 31).
49
fictional works succeed in suspending acceptance in a viewer, that what is happening is not
fictional but real, then, in the case of horror movies, for instance, the viewer is likely to have an
experience of the uncanny. Thus, it cannot be easily concluded that an experience of the uncanny
is exclusively related to stories set in the real world, while works of fantasy and fiction in general
are eliminated from this context.17 If a viewer’s acceptance that s/he is watching a fantasy story is
suspended, and instead s/he is led to believe that the story is set in reality, this opens a space for
an experience of the uncanny within the fantasy. In the ‘Franken’ story the viewer is not
stimulated to suspend her/his acceptance and thus this is one of the reasons which prevents the
viewer from experiencing the uncanny.
While the facial expressions of the humans in this story are used to depict them as
experiencing uncanny moments when they encounter Franken, the viewer is not empathising
with them – and thus not experiencing the uncanny. This is because the animation is directed in
such a way that the viewer is not following the story from the perspective of these humans. What
furthermore adds to the viewer’s not experiencing the uncanniness, in relation to the ‘Franken’
animation, is the choice of presenting it in a 2D style. Franken’s character does not convince the
viewer that, in Freud’s terms, beliefs that are considered surmounted are possible. In other
words, he is not stimulating in the viewer either a conflict of judgement or doubt about the reality
of these beliefs.18 The choice of a realistic 3D style would have had a different impact on the
viewer, and thus, a different effect concerning the idea of the uncanny, as 3D would significantly
influence the realism in this animation.
Since the effect of the uncanny is closely related to realism, it is important to interrogate here
the conditions of realism within animation in general. Alice Crawford notes the close relation
between computer animation and realism when she says that, ‘Developments in computing
technology have, among other effects, put an unprecedented capacity for realism within the reach
of many animators’ (Crawford 2003, p. 115). Lev Manovich holds a similar view when he says
that, ‘”Realism” is the concept that inevitably accompanies the development and assimilation of
three-dimensional computer graphics’ (Manovich 1997, pp. 5-6). Realism, as Manovich nicely
articulates, is achieved when the distinction between the computer image and a photograph of an
object cannot be made (Manovich 1997, p. 6). Thus, viewed from the perspective proposed by
Crawford and Manovich, realism within animation refers to animation’s visual style mimicking the
physical world via the technical aid of 3D software. While the narrative in the ‘Franken’ story
does exhibit certain elements from the physical or real world, on the other side, the visual style of
the story created in 2D greatly lacks the realism to which Crawford and Manovich refer. This
consequently contributes to preventing the viewer from having an experience of the uncanny as
related to Franken.
Since this paper highlights that the experience of the uncanny in relation to the ‘Franken’ story
also depends on the realism of its visual style, it is important here to explore reality and the
conditions of realism within sub-genres such as science fiction, adventure and drama, within
which this story is situated.
1 7
As Freud says about the writer: ‘he deceives us by promising to give us the sober truth, and then after all overstepping it. We react to his
inventions as we would have reacted to real experiences; by the time we have seen through his trick it is already too late and the author has
achieved his object’ (Freud 1955b, pp. 250-251).
1 8
Freud explains this conflict of judgement and the return of these old beliefs in the following way: ‘it is as though we were making a judgement
something like this: “So, after all, it is true that one can kill a person by the mere wish!” or, “So the dead do live on and appear on the scene of
their former activities!” and so on’ (Freud 1955b, p. 248).
50
Views differ concerning the question of whether science fiction occupies a space within reality
or fantasy. For Christine Cornea, it is in between these two that the genre of science fiction is
situated (Cornea 2007, p. 4), whereas according to Karl Kroeber, ‘The genres of science fiction
and fantasy overlap and interpenetrate.’ (Kroeber c1988, p. 9). Thus, for Kroeber, science fiction
and the world of fantasy are closely connected. John Rieder’s view comes close to Kroeber’s when
he says that the narratives in science fiction disconnect themselves from the experienced reality
(Rieder 2007, p. v). Although Rieder rightly points out that the events in science fiction stories do
not occur in reality, they frequently have their ground in it, in the sense that they represent what
might be futuristic achievements of humanity.19 The choice of 2D or 3D software, again, plays an
important part in the context of the realism of science fiction stories. That is, their realism greatly
depends on the degree of the lifelikeness of their visual style, apart from a more realistic narrative.
Concerning reality in the context of adventure – another sub-genre within which the ‘Franken’
story is placed – Brian Taves says that, ‘In adventure, ideals are achievable within the real world;
in fantasy, humankind must ultimately call upon more powerful forces’ (Taves c1993, p. 10).
Adventure in the ‘Franken’ story is not a real-world adventure, but it belongs to the realm of a
fantastic adventure, as Franken is not a creature from a real world. There is a lack of realism in
this adventure; realism would have been most likely achieved if the story had been not only
created using 3D software but also had changes made to its narrative. That is, the story would not
have been about a human encounter with Franken, but instead represented a kind of real-life
adventure, for instance, an example drawn from humanity’s history. Furthermore, drama, as
Keith Sanger rightly states, ‘denotes conflict, contradiction, confrontation, defiance’ (Sanger
2000, p. 6). These are some of the most general characteristics of drama also found in the
‘Franken’ story. Dramatic moments are recognisable throughout the story, such as, for instance
when Franken falls into a hole in the ground. Yet many of these dramatic moments do not belong
to the realm of the real, as the story involves the Franken creature. A number of points would
have contributed to the realism of drama in this story. These include making its narrative reflect a
humans’ drama that is likely to happen in the real world – thus rendering its situation more
realistic. Also, not only choosing to express its visual style by means of 3D software, which has
already been highlighted in this paper, but also rendering the characters’ appearance more
realistically, instead of choosing a cartoon style.
Going back to the story, Franken – a vicious monster, as described in the episode by Inspector
Tawashi – is attacked by the special military forces. During the attack his monster features are
destroyed, and at this point he appears as a humanlike robot. Questioning whether, as such,
Franken has the ability to evoke an uncanny response on the part of the viewer brings the theory
of Uncanny Valley by Mori into the discussion.
Mori, a Japanese roboticist, wrote an article titled ‘Uncanny Valley’ in 1970, in which he
explored human reactions to humanlike robots. Here he suggested that the human reaction to
robots is in proportion to the degree of their human likeness in terms of their appearance and
movements. Mori mentioned the example of a humanlike robot which had twenty-nine artificial
facial muscles, and that the speed of these moving muscles was important in conveying a feeling
of familiarity.20 If the speed of the muscles changed, he noted that the robot’s laughing looked
unnatural. He concluded this observation by saying that, ‘This illustrates how slight variations in
movement can cause a robot [...] to tumble down into the uncanny valley’ (Mori 1970). While
1 9
Humanity’s history contains countless examples which demonstrate how fantasy became reality. For instance, for the ancient world, humans’
landing on the Moon would have been only fantasy.
2 0
It was at the World Expo held in Osaka, Japan in 1970 where Mori saw this robot, which had twenty-nine artificial facial muscles.
51
humanlike robots have the potential to elicit, in a human, a kind of response directed toward
other humans, Mori observed that as soon as subtle differences come into the awareness of the
humans, their sense of familiarity is substituted by the feeling of strangeness.21 At this point the
robot falls into the Uncanny Valley. Thus, such a robot, which begins to rather resemble an
animate corpse, falls into the same place where Mori also placed zombies and corpses – at the
bottom of the Uncanny Valley. The Uncanny Valley, as Dave Bryant puts it, ‘is where dwell
monsters, in the classic sense of the word’ (Bryant 2006). Mori, surprisingly, made no explicit
mention of Freud.22 In order to prevent a robot falling into the Uncanny Valley, Mori suggested
that robot designers should not aim for a total human likeness.
Observing Franken from the perspective of the Uncanny Valley, at the point in the story in
which he has a humanlike appearance, this paper suggests that he does not fall into the Valley.
This is due to the fact that although Franken is a highly humanlike robot, dressed as a human,
with behaviour, movements and even a heart like humans, the artificial side of him presents itself
to the viewer through his visibly metal skin and ears. Thus, it is his noticeable artificial side that
prevents him from falling into the Uncanny Valley. In other words, the degree of artificiality that
his character shows precludes Franken from resembling an animated corpse. If he had been
created in a realistic 3D style and with a higher degree of humanlike appearance, this would open
the possibility for him to fall into the Uncanny Valley, and thus to evoke the sense of the uncanny
in the viewer.
Conclusion
This paper has addressed the question of whether Franken, a robot in the ‘Franken’ episode of
Astro Boy, evokes a feeling of the uncanny. It has reached the conclusion that, based on the
depictions of humans’ reactions to Franken in the story, he appears uncanny to them. However,
he fails to produce an uncanny effect on the viewer of the animation. In other words, from the
perspective of the viewer, there is, in Freud’s terms, a representation of the uncanny, 23 but not an
experience of it. This is due to a number of reasons, identified in the way in which the animation
is directed. These include the accent on situating the story in an imaginary world, rather than
highlighting its elements from the real world. As a consequence, the viewer is not confronted with
the need to undertake a reality check. Furthermore, if the viewer was stimulated to put
herself/himself in the place of the humans encountering Franken, this scenario would greatly
impact on the viewer’s perception of the uncanniness of Franken. In the part of the animation
where his body appearance reflects references to monsters from the Western cultural heritage, he
does not trigger a sense of the uncanny. One of the reasons for this is due to the choice of the 2D
style of animation. If Franken had been made in a realistic, 3D style, with the characters looking
more real, the chances of him evoking an uncanny effect on the viewer would greatly increase.
Although Franken appears as a highly humanlike robot, his metal skin, noticeable despite the
human clothes he wears, reveals his artificial side. This consequently prevents him from falling
into Mori’s Uncanny Valley. 
2 1
While in his article, Mori placed healthy human beings on the highest point of the curve in the Uncanny Valley diagram, he made a statement
in 2005 which reflects the change in his thinking about this particular point. According to Mori’s new observation, not a human being but
something else should indeed occupy the highest point of the curve. This in his view is ‘the face of a Buddhist statute as the artistic expression of
the human ideal.’ (Mori 2005).For more details on Mori’s the Uncanny Valley see MacDorman (2005).
2 2
Mori questions the reason for the feeling of strangeness, and whether it is necessary. Without going further into the research, he supposes that
it may be related to self-preservation.
2 3
Seen in the facial expressions and reactions of the people who encounter Franken in the story.
52
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© Katharine Buljan
54
Matthew Butler & Lucie Joschko

Final Fantasy or The Incredibles
Ultra-realistic animation, aesthetic engagement and the uncanny valley
Introduction
This paper examines the aesthetic qualities of two animated feature films, Final Fantasy: The
Spirits Within and The Incredibles, as a precursor to considering what issues are associated with
the shift toward ‘ultra-realistic’ animation. The concept of realistic depiction of animated
characters will be analysed within the context of Western culture with a particular focus on the
notion of aesthetic engagement.
How does a film such as Final Fantasy, clearly a technical triumph, suffer in comparison to the
bright, burlesque qualities of The Incredibles? Shouldn’t the realistic aesthetic of Final Fantasy
allow us to engage with characters to a greater extent?
The commercial and critical success of both animated features will be evaluated in relation to
Masahiro Mori’s theory of the Uncanny Valley. Although proposed over three decades ago,
Mori’s theory of emotional responses towards robots and other non-human entities offers distinct
application to contemporary animation studies, supporting the argument that today’s computer
technology may indeed be no match for a well-crafted story and characters.
A Historical Overview of 3D and ‘Ultra-Realistic’ animation

Computer graphics entered the world of animation in the early 1980s, giving rise to the
Computer Generated Images (CGI) revolution that followed. Disney employed their first
computer graphics in The Great Mouse Detective (Walt Disney Pictures) in 1986 and Industrial
Light and Magic (ILM) effectively designed a water creature in The Abyss (Lightstorm
Entertainment, 1989). The Abyss was considered a visual breakthrough as the shimmering water
tentacle emulated human qualities (Debra Kaufman, 1998). CGI and the introduction of digital
actors continued to astonish audiences in Batman (Warner Bros. Pictures, 1989), Terminator 2
(Canal+, 1991) and Jurassic Park (Universal Pictures, 1993). By the 1990s, CGI matured its way
into animation and ‘revolutionized the process of creating animated films’ (Jerry Beck 2004, p.
306). The success of Pixar’s Toy Story (Walt Disney Pictures, 1995), the first 3D animated feature
released in 1995, marked a critical time in the history of animation production. CGI finally proved
that it could be used for character animation (Rebecca Farley, 1998). The rapid changes in
technology in the past decade contributed to the increasing image quality, setting new
benchmarks for production houses such as Pixar, DreamWorks and Blue Sky studio.
While the employment of 3D technology in animation can be perceived by some as a
movement away from traditional methods of animation, the basic elements of existing 2D
animation, such as timing, anticipation, follow-through and weight were still greatly utilized in 3D
animated films. However, with the new capabilities of 3D rendering and 3D environment,
animators began to aspire towards creating a realistic human motion and photorealistic aesthetics.
Animation journalist Debra Kaufman (1998) argued that animators in the late 1990s focused
heavily on ‘creating completely realistic digital creatures, including human beings.’ Notably, ultra-
realistic 3D animation aimed at creating an illusion of reality can be quite convincing and
animated characters nearly indistinguishable from real live actors. However, Bill Hilf (1997)
points out that the arrival of CGI should be perceived as an aesthetic distinction rather than an
evolution in the industry as the metamorphosis from traditional 2D animation to realistic 3D
55
form is merely ‘an extension of an art form.’ Similarly, John Lasseter (1998) insists that the
computer, similarly to pencil or clay, is merely another medium and that the most vital element
remains to be creativity and imagination.
For a number of years, one focus of 3D animators has been to reach the point where it is
virtually impossible to distinguish between an animated character and live actor. In 1970
Japanese roboticist Mori proposed an idea he dubbed the ‘Uncanny Valley’ (Mori, 1970). In this
theory Mori perceived a phenomenon whereby the more lifelike a robot becomes, the more
likeable they are, but only up to a point. Once they become too lifelike a sense of unease forms,
frightening or repulsing us. In applying Mori’s theory to the advancements of 3D animation
technologies and creation of ultra-realistic 3D characters, the question arises whether ultra-
realistic imagery increases our engagement with characters or whether we have indeed reached
the depths of the uncanny valley.
To further examine the impact of these technologies that allow the creation of ultra-realistic
animation and to evaluate the interconnections between ultra-realistic imagery and aesthetic
engagement, two animated features will be analysed: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (Chris Lee
Productions, 2001) and The Incredibles (Walt Disney Pictures, 2004). The theory of Uncanny
Valley will then be applied to these two films to discuss whether audiences in fact become
alienated by animated ultra-realistic imagery.
Case Study Introductions: Final Fantasy and The Incredibles

Final Fantasy and The Incredibles were selected as a case study for two specific reasons. Firstly,
Final Fantasy very clearly represents a benchmark in 3D animation, widely acknowledged as the
first feature length animated film to aim for characters as realistic as possible. As a result it is
often cited in critical analysis of animated film as well as discussion of animation technologies.
The Incredibles on the other hand has been chosen as it offers a distinct counterpoint to the
intentions of Final Fantasy. Although also displaying a mastery of animation technology, the
aesthetic for its cast is very different to that of Final Fantasy.
Concern may arise from the fact that The Incredibles was produced three years after the release
of Final Fantasy. This however strengthens the further discussion. In this case it can be
highlighted that The Incredibles made a conscious artistic decision in its specific aesthetic, even
though the technology to create a more ‘realistic’ set of characters has already existed.
Whilst wishing to acknowledge cultural differences affecting audience reactions and
commercial success, the scope of this paper does not allow for the study of aesthetic engagement
in diverse cultures, therefore limiting the evaluation of both feature animations to the context of
Western culture.
Final Fantasy
The plot of Final Fantasy is clearly inspired by the storylines of Japanese manga and anime. Set
in the year 2065, the film tells the story of young scientist Dr. Aki Ross and her quest to save the
planet from an invading race of aliens. In reality, the storyline however is secondary to the
technical achievements on display. The most identifying characteristic of the film is in the
animation style itself. Indeed, Final Fantasy is acknowledged in many instances as ‘far and away
the most ambitious (and expensive) attempt to render realistic digital humans to date’ (Weschler,
2002).
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Although set in the future and in alien worlds, the filmmakers have achieved a frightening
realism to the human characters. Dr. Ross in particular is presented with the flowing hair and skin
blemishes of a real actress. This achievement came at a significant cost, with a spectacular array of
technology being required to bring the characters to life. The power of this technology can be
best summarised in a statistic provided by Dave Seager, Lighting Supervisor on the film. Seager
suggests that the animation data all added up to ‘934,162 days of render time on one processor’
(Stokes and Ragan-Kelley, 2001). This figure illustrates that although extreme in its power and
complexity, the technology now exists to create ultra-realistic animated characters, offering a
previously unfeasible animation design aesthetic.
The Incredibles
The Incredibles focuses on a modern day superhero family. Bob Parr and his wife Helen are
former superheroes trying to live a normal life, raising their three children. Bob however cannot
let go of his past life of heroism, struggling with a job of exceeding tedium and immorality. When
a mysterious organisation contacts him to play the role of hero again, the lure is too much,
beginning a series of adventures for him, Helen and all three children.
The overall aesthetic style of the characters of The Incredibles is distinctly different to that of
Final Fantasy. Whereas Final Fantasy opted for ultra-realism, The Incredibles focused on
caricature. To highlight both the individual personalities and personal conflicts of each character,
their physical characteristics were exaggerated, with Bob Parr being the most obvious example. It
may be argued that The Incredibles live in a world of superheroes, inherently leading to a more
caricatured environment, however it should be noted that the world of Final Fantasy is one of
aliens and spirit, not the ‘real’ world.
The technology employed by The Incredibles consisted predominantly of Pixar developed
specialist software, however commercial applications such as Shake, After Effects and Maya were
employed. It must be noted however that although particular technological focus was placed on
developing authentic muscles, skin and hair, as well as lighting effects, The Incredibles
intentionally did not present these elements in an ultra-realistic aesthetic.
Commercial Success
Reaction to the two films can be judged in two distinct ways: Commercial and Critical.
Although the advent of DVD sales has changed the dynamics, basic commercial success still relies
on the very simple metrics of cost and box-office receipts in order to determine how well a film
has performed. Figure 1 below provides a brief summary of the commercial performance of the
two films.
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Film Cost (est.) US Box Office Int’l Box Total Box Net Profits
Office (est.) Office (est.) (est.)
Final $137,000,000 $32,131,830 $53,000,000 $85,131,830 -$51,868,170

Fantasy
The $92,000,000 $261,437,578 $274,900,000 $ 536,337,578 $ 444,337,57

Incredibles
Fig. 1 - Cost and Box Office Receipts for Final Fantasy and The Incredibles (Figures provided by IMDB.com)
According to figures from IMDB, the total box office receipts for Final Fantasy totalled at US
$85,131,830. When deducted from the estimated cost of production, Final Fantasy lost over $51
mil US, effectively bankrupting Square Pictures. In comparison, The Incredibles box office
receipts were more than six times higher, with profits totalling over $444 mil US. These figures
do not take into account a number of factors such as economic conditions and competition with
other animated features in the marketplace. However, the difference in Net Profits is so
significant that these factors do not undermine discussion.
Critical Reaction
The box office figures for Final Fantasy strongly indicate a lack of positive reaction from
audiences, a fact further supported by the overwhelmingly poor response from film critics. The
Online Film Critics Society (OFCS), a professional international association comprised of film
critics, historians, scholars and journalists, collates and presents reviews as well as providing an
overall rating. According to OFCS, Final Fantasy rated at only 44%. This figure represents the
approximate percentage of positive reviews of the film.
While the reviews certainly criticized the poor quality of screenplay, simplistic plot and poor
characterisation, a large number of critics also responded negatively to the film’s aesthetics. Given
that Square Pictures set out to achieve a breakthrough in applying 3D technology to animation
their goal quickly became one of their most significant downfalls. This sentiment was echoed by
many critics, most eloquently expressed by Jason Vice: ‘Ironically, the film’s greatest strength is
also one of its biggest weaknesses. As realistic-looking as the characters are, the flat,
expressionless features make them seem emotionally aloof and rather unsympathetic’ (Vice,
2001). Other reviews go on to feature such terms as ‘puppet’ (Canemaker, 2004), ‘coldness’ and
‘mechanical’ (Travers, 2001), as well as ‘creepily artificial’ (Zacharek, 2001).
In a similar contrast as presented by the box office figures, The Incredibles proved to be a great
success with critics, with the OFCS rating the film at an astounding 93%. Reviews typically
focused on the strength of the screenplay, however also touched on the distinct animation style.
The film was complimented for its choice of ‘smooth, dynamic aesthetic’ (Chen, 2004), ‘warmth
of its flatness’ (Zacharek, 2004) and realism of character’s emotions rather than their bodies
(Byrnes, 2004). In comparison to Final Fantasy, The Incredibles appear to be driven by ‘distinct
shapes and solid colors’ (Chen, 2004).
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The critical reviews underscored Pixar’s evident strategy in animating human characters,
where they are not necessarily aiming for realism of their physical features. John Lasseter, Pixar’s
chief creative officer, argues that ‘strong characters and a compelling story, rather than
technological advances, are what make an animation project great’ (Lasseter 1998, p. 39).
Therefore, it may be argued that the value of entertainment resides in the effective
communication of ideas and in the personality of characters more so than in the technical mastery
of reaching ultra-realistic characters.
This notion can be investigated and supported from another perspective. Using the critical
reaction as a starting point it can be seen that there is a clear suggestion of an aesthetic
engagement taking place with the audience. Although the screenplay is a vital factor, it is evident
that the aesthetics of both The Incredibles and especially Final Fantasy played a major role in how
audiences respond to the films, thus this aspect of the production of animated films requires
further analysis.
Ultra-Realistic Animation and Aesthetic Engagement

The cases discussed in the previous section highlight an interesting conflict. As suggested,
there are several issues that certainly play a strong role in the contrasting critical and commercial
success of the Final Fantasy and The Incredibles. We propose that these can be grouped under
the umbrella of ‘aesthetic engagement’.
This idea of engagement in motion pictures and art is not new. Film theory suggests that
narrative structures and themes are designed to tap into the emotions of the audience and
provide a stronger emotional bond with the characters. However engagement is not generated
simply from the emotional resonance of a screenplay. The cases discussed, particularly in the
context of the reaction to the films, alluded to an aesthetic engagement that is taking place,
possibly more strongly in animated features than in their non-animated counterparts. The notion
of engaging with the visual elements of a film is not unique to animation. Indeed the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences present such visual awards in cinematography, visual effects
and art direction to name but a few. Similarly the debate over choice of aspect ratio such as
widescreen versus Panavision as well as the current ‘film versus digital’ indicates that aesthetic
qualities of cinema are of the utmost importance. However it seems that a genuine aesthetic
engagement is taking place in animated features and is being heightened by the trend toward
ultra-realistic animation.
Aesthetic engagement in animation can be seen to focus fundamentally on the appearance of
the characters. Although the overall appearance of animated films (including backgrounds)
contributes to the viewer’s level of immersion and depth of their cinematic experience, it can be
argued that true engagement is primarily derived from the portrayal of characters. Researchers
confirm that the animated version of reality needs to remain sufficiently abstract to allow
audiences to employ their imagination and create unique bonds with characters. Winton (1998)
insists that with animation, audiences do not ‘have to pretend that what they see is real. … All
audiences have to do with animation is relate to the characters and their emotions’ (Winton, 1998
cited in Farley 1998, p. 67). With Hollywood producers opting for 3D computer animations over
‘traditional’ animation styles and with the ability to create ultra-realistic characters, examination
of the function of aesthetic engagement in animation is becoming more critical.
The application of Mori’s theory of Uncanny Valley to principles of aesthetic design in 3D
animation may provide a better insight into why a cartoonish family of superheroes might be
more engaging than an animated figure that looks just like you or I. In 1970, Masahiro Mori, a
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Japanese Robotics scientist, published a brief hypothesis regarding the emotional response to
robot design as well as other non-human entities. This hypothesis was named ‘The Uncanny
Valley’ and although containing obvious links back to the work of both Ernst Jentsch and
Sigmund Freud in the early 1900’s, was a landmark observation on our emotional responses in
general.
Mori provided a figure charting our emotional response against our levels of familiarity, for
both moving and still entities.
Fig. 2 – The Uncanny Valley. Based on Mori, 1970.
Figure 2 above shows that as the human likeness of an entity grows, so too does our level of
familiarity. This familiarity can also be interpreted as our ‘engagement’ toward the entity.
However, as can be observed in the dramatic dip, or the ‘uncanny valley’, the likeness reaches a
point where it becomes quite disturbing. This can be understood as the point where the likeness
is so close to human, yet with enough variation, that it is the differences that suddenly become
prominent.
It is obvious that the Uncanny Valley principle has connotations reaching outside the domain
of robot design. Canemaker (2004) suggests that ‘as a visit to Madame Tussaud’s proves, masses
of highly specific visual information don’t necessarily result in a higher degree of believability – in
fact, the results can be downright creepy.’ Although not specifically referencing Mori’s Uncanny
Valley, the links are undeniable.
It is only in the past few years that the association of the Uncanny Valley with filmmaking has
been made. Indeed, the reaction to Final Fantasy in Western culture has been a major part in
drawing this connection, particularly to the animation context. It is apparent nonetheless that as
the technology is developed for animation to reach a level tantalisingly close to reality, the
concept of the Uncanny Valley becomes increasingly relevant.
Regardless of specific reference to Mori, research suggests that animation filmmakers are
beginning to consider whether their characters indeed reside in the depths of the ‘valley’. In
discussing technical advances in the development of facial animation, Lawrence Weschler (2002)
highlights that PDI/DreamWorks’ Lucia Modesto noted her team had to pull back a little on
60
Princess Fiona (of Shrek): ‘She was beginning to look too real, and the effect was getting
distinctly unpleasant.’ In the same article, Weschler even elicits a similar concern from those
responsible for Final Fantasy. He notes that
while a completely convincing replication of a human being had never been his [Andy Jones, Final Fantasy
animation director] team’s goal, he, too, had noticed how ‘it can get eerie. As you push further and further, it
begins to get grotesque. You start to feel like you’re puppeteering a corpse.’ (Weschler, 2002)
Brad Bird, director of The Incredibles also indirectly raises the Uncanny Valley concept. In a
piece in Computer Arts Bird states: ‘The character design was difficult. … CGI looks plastic
without detail, but beyond a certain point with the stylised deformed people, it starts to look
creepy’ (Computer Arts, 2004).
The notion of aesthetic engagement again arrives at the fore. Filmmakers’ concerns about the
appearance of their lead characters revolve largely around possible levels of audience
engagement. Critics turn to descriptions such as ‘distinctly unpleasant’, ‘eerie’ and ‘grotesque’
rather than simply acknowledging that audiences may find the characters unrealistic. Contrasting
these problems is the example set by The Incredibles. ‘They are cartoonish, yet completely
acceptable as living, breathing, flawed humans with a range of feelings and problems’
(Canemaker, 2004). Whilst the aesthetic design of The Incredibles does not exhibit ultra-realism,
engagement with these characters is indeed partially generated by identifying with their physical
attributes. Parents relate to Bob Parr, the father of the family of superheroes, mostly due to his
appearance as a caricatured overweight and down-trodden middle-aged man in an unfulfilling
job. Teenagers can identify with Bob’s daughter Violet because she is a cartoon representation of
the typical ‘outsider’ in high school, complete with ‘alternative’ look and nervous disposition. If
these characters were designed to look as close to realistic as the technology would allow, then
rather than empathise, audiences may be concerned that Bob’s large belly wobbled too much, or
that Violet’s doe-eyes were scarily large.
As a result, Mori’s theory of the Uncanny Valley can be directly applied to the realm of 3D
animation in considering the notion of aesthetic engagement in animated features. Indeed, Mori’s
original figure for charting our response to human likeness can be adapted to focus on
engagement rather than familiarity.
Fig. 3 – Aesthetic Engagement and the Uncanny Valley
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Clearly, the charting of engagement is expected to follow the same patterns as Mori’s levels of
familiarity. Indeed, critical response to Final Fantasy indicates that viewers are more concerned
with what is wrong with the animated characters than to warm to their humanness. Similarly,
critics heralded The Incredibles‘ style as a large part of how they related to the characters. As
critic Stephanie Zacharek says:
I can’t help gravitating toward the warmth of its flatness. But Bird and his team pay close
attention to details – fabric, hair, the texture and tone of skin – and take great care to make sure
nothing is too creepily hyper-realistic. (2004).
It is also argued that ultra-realistic (or photorealistic) animation offers no visual space for
viewers to engage their imagination in order to form a unique experience. Phaedra Riley (2005)
suggests that ‘by selectively focusing on the details of movement and gesture over true-to-life
reproduction, animators create a stronger emotional bond with their audiences by allowing
people the visual space to enrich the animation with their own experiences.’ The essential
elements of animatronics such as anthropomorphism and emotional projection are vital for an
animated film to successfully interact with their audiences and to evoke empathy. Arguably, it is
here that ultra-realistic animation also fails in establishing strong emotional connection.
Figure 3 is not intended to detail a definitive explicit relationship between engagement and
human likeness, but rather to apply Mori’s ideas into the animation context, particularly that of
3D animation. Now that the technology exists to achieve animated characters that are ultra-
realistic in their physical characteristics, this paper aims to elevate awareness of the role that
character aesthetics play in engaging audiences of animated cinema.
Conclusions
Is this to mean we must shun technical advancement in the realm of 3D animation? Certainly
not: The Incredibles has already proven otherwise as an example of technical mastery with
consideration for an aesthetic engagement.
It is clear that in an age of computer-driven technical advancement in animation, physical
realism of animated characters can be achieved. Animated films have embraced this heightened
realism, arguably culminating in the release of Final Fantasy. However, the realm of ‘uncanny’
realism employed in this animated feature also demonstrates how the notion of aesthetic
engagement may be reversed. While limiting this study to the context of Western culture, the
application of Uncanny Valley theory to animated films strongly contributes to the discussion that
aesthetic engagement indeed represents one of the major elements that enables animation to
remain such a charming and timeless art form.
It becomes evident that aesthetic designs of ultra-realistic 3D animations provide audiences
with limited opportunities to employ their imagination and to generate strong emotional
interaction with characters. The speculations how digital photo-realistic actors would
revolutionize film-making continue to fade while animators are returning to the essential elements
of animatronics such as anthropomorphism and emotional projection. If one of the main
purposes of animation is to make our audiences laugh, cry, and feel for the characters, then the
goal should be the peaks and not the troughs of the uncanny valley. 
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References
Beck, J. (2004). Animation art : from pencil to pixel, the history of cartoon, animâe and CGI. New
York, Harper Design International.
Byrnes, P. (2004). ‘The Incredibles.’ Sydney Morning Herald, Retrieved June 10, 2007,
http://www.smh.com.au/news/Reviews/The-Incredibles/2004/12/23/1103391888128.html
Canemaker, J. (2004). ‘A Part-Human, Part-Cartoon Species’. The New York Times, Retrieved
June 10, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/movies/03cane.html
Chen, J. (2004). ‘The Incredibles’. Window to the Movies Retrieved June 10, 2007,
http://www.windowtothemovies.com./LV-incredibles.html
Computer Arts (2004). ‘Inside the Incredibles’. Retrieved June 10, 2007,
http://www.computerarts.co.uk/in_depth/features/inside_the_incredibles
Farley, R. E. (1998). ‘Play and Transformation: The Animated Aesthetic.’ Department of English.
Brisbane, University of Queensland. Masters of Arts, English, p. 151.
Hilf, B. (1997). ‘Don’t Believe Your Eyes: It is Real or is it Animation?’. Animation World
Magazine, Issue 2.5, Retrieved June 10, 2007,
http://www.awn.com/mag/issue2.5/2.5pages/2.5hilfbelieve.htm
Kaufman, D. (1998). Animation Journalist. Animation 101. E. Pintoff. Studio City, CA, Michael
Wiese Productions.
Lasseter, J. (1998). Computer Animator and Director. Animation 101. E. Pintoff. Studio City, CA,
Michael Wiese Productions.
Mori, M. (1970). ‘The Uncanny Valley.’ (K. F. MacDorman & T. Minato, Trans.), Energy 7(4), p.
33-35.
Riley, P. (2005). ‘Animate Pillow Project’. Tisch School of the Arts. New York, New York
University.
Stokes, J. and Ragan-Kelly, J. (2001). ‘Final Fantasy: The Technology Within.’ Retrieved June 10,
2007, http://arstechnica.com/wankerdesk/01q3/ff-interview/ff-interview-1.html
Travers, P. (2001). ‘Final Fantasy’, Rolling Stone, Retrieved June, 10, 2007,
http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/movie/5949317/review/5949318/final_fantasy
Vice, J. (2001). ‘Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within’, Movie Review Retrieved June 10, 2007,
http://deseretnews.com/movies/view/1,1257,205000080,00.html
Weschler, L. (2002). ‘Why Is This Man Smiling?’, Wired, Issue 10.06, Retrieved June 10, 2007,
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.06/face.html
Zacharek, S. (2001). ‘Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within’. Salon Arts and Entertainment, Retrieved
June 10, 2007,
http://archive.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2001/07/13/final_fantasy/index.html
Zacharek, S. (2004). ‘The Incredibles’. Salon Arts and Entertainment, Retrieved June 10, 2007,
http://dir.salon.com/story/ent/movies/review/2004/11/05/incredibles/index.html
© Matthew Butler & Lucie Joschko

63
Cordelia Brown
Flowerpot Men
The Haptic Image in Brian Cosgrove and Richard Hall’s Animations
I. The Haptic Image

Haptic is a term used to describe the experience of touch. In most fields it refers to a
generalised tactile sensibility. For example in Child Psychology, haptic is defined as ‘the
perceptual experience that results from active exploration of objects by touch’ (Vasta et al. 1999,
p.201). In recent art history and media theory, haptic is a term that has come to articulate the
perception of touch through any experiential means. So one may have a haptic experience
through vision, sound, taste etc., without any exclusive use of the touch sense itself.
Haptic visuality (Marks 2002, p. xiii) or viewing, detaches this sense of touch in order to focus
exclusively on that which is experienced via vision. In other words one can experience the
sensation of touch through vision alone. This application of the term has its basis in art history
(Gandelman 1991, p.5) but has more recently also been adapted to apply to the moving image
and cinema theory. For example, an image of skin being cut, or an intimate portrayal of the
texture of a stone wall facilitate an haptic viewing. The eye is able to relate in the brain the
process of a tactile sensation without the viewer’s physical touch sense (i.e. the skin) playing any
part in the process.
Haptic viewing moments such as these occur frequently within cinema, as well as in other
visual arts. French philosopher Gilles Deleuze was one of the earliest to address such a moment
within film in his interpretation of a scene from Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket in which hands are
depicted brushing against each other and passing around an object:
The hand doubles its prehensile function (of object) by a connective function (of space); but from that moment, it
is the whole eye which doubles its optical function by a specifically ‘grabbing’ [haptique] one, if we follow Reigl’s
formula for indicating a touching which is specific to the gaze. (Deleuze 2005, p.12)
Deleuze refers to the early twentieth century art historian Alöis Reigl in his use of the term
‘haptique’. In order to situate the haptic qualities of an image, Alöis Riegl makes a comparison
between haptic and optical viewing.
Riegl stated that one type of artistic procedure, which corresponds to a certain way of looking, is based on the
scanning of objects according to their outlines. This trajectory of the regard Riegl called the optical. The opposite
type of vision, which focuses on surfaces and emphasises the value of the superficies of objects, Riegl called the
haptical (from the Greek haptein, ‘to seize, grasp,’ or haptikos, ‘capable of touching’). (Gandelman 1991, p.5)
The optical viewing mode is perhaps a more widely recognised way of seeing for contemporary
cinema audiences. That is, they watch a film and observe the actions of objects or figures on
screen, in order to follow some sort of narrative. It is important to note, however, that this need
not inhibit a haptic viewing in any way. As Laura Marks stresses, ‘In the sliding relationship
between haptic and optical, distant vision gives way to touch, and touch reconceives the object to
be seen from a distance’ (Marks 2002, p.xvi). So when the viewer sees an image, it is in terms of
the complex, continually shifting association between the haptic and the optical.
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II. Haptics and Stop-motion Animation

I have carried out analytical research that compared a range of feature films from Jan
Švankmajer and Ray Harryhausen.1 Its aim was to detect similarly visual instances, within such
different examples of animation, in order to reveal haptic visual qualities that were potentially
inherent to the form. Subsequently, I have proceeded to establish a number of devices for
discerning the haptic moments within stop-motion animation. It is the aim of this study to apply
these devices and prove their relevance to the topic and the animated image.
For the purposes of this research, stop-motion animation includes any sort of animated
filmmaking that constructs a moving image via the sequential movement and image capture of a
physically present object. The focus of this research is on puppet or model replacement
animation, which could be considered a significant sub-set of stop-motion animation.2
The interpretation of such haptic visual moments in stop-motion animation can be categorised
in terms of what I have defined as five key cinematic devices:
Framing and Intimacy of camera to object

The proximity of the camera to the surface of an object has much to do with how we perceive
its texture. Two cinematic concepts come into play here: framing and depth of field. Framing
establishes what will fill the screen, be it an extreme close up on fur or a wide-angle establishing
shot of a city-scape. Depth of field determines where the objects are situated in relation to the
camera and therefore establishes a concept of distance. With a large depth of field the texture of
the grass in the foreground can be as clearly depicted as the shape of the hills in the background
of the same shot. In relation to haptics, if the camera lens draws so close to an object that its
figure/shape is obscured and only its surface can be observed, this facilitates an entirely haptic
viewing. When/if the camera pulls back to allow the figure/shape of the object to be observed
this then allows for an optical viewing.
Depiction of light and shadow

The distinction between light and dark plays an integral role in the eye’s ability to observe a
texture. The relative difference detected by the eye between areas of light and areas of no light
allows the eye to ‘feel’ or recognise and translate the touch sensation associated with an image of
a texture (eg. fur or gravel).
Film stock/quality
The moment that the eye is drawn to difference is key in terms of defining the haptic vision.
This element applies to the visibility or discrepancy in how the quality of film or film stock used
depicts an image. For example the difference is obvious when one compares the image quality of
the two versions of Bill and Ben, one from 1953 (Cosgrove Hall Productions/BBC 1953) and
Cosgrove Hall’s treatment in 2001 (Cosgrove Hall Productions/BBC 2001). If one sets aside
assumptions associated with technology of each of the productions respective cinematic age, and
one focuses instead on the texture or screen surface that each presents, then a haptic viewing can
be achieved. The moment the eye is drawn to a discrepancy in the quality of the image, in relation
1
This research was presented as an unpublished essay entitled Touching on the Form: How stop-motion animation represent the animator’s reality.
2
The process involves hand animating a physically crafted character often within a set or scene, to be photographed frame-by-frame.
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to what it is used to seeing, this experience of texture constitutes a visually haptic moment.
Marks’ analysis of the haptic visual qualities of video art takes a serious look at this concept and
the steps that artists have taken to recognise the existence of screen texture.3
Fragmentation versus fluidity of movement

The process of animating demands that an object’s movement becomes fragmented, that is,
any cycle of movement is created or planned and then captured in a series of still frames.
Therefore, unlike live-action cinema, the object really never moves of its own accord. This poses a
query as to what spaces the object occupies between frames – in the images that the viewer will
never be able to see. In other words, a haptic image can exist as a still image. The effect that the
process of animation has on such an image – that is, a successive simulation of movement via the
position and capture of still frames – raises the issue of haptic movement. In a scene from Jan
Švankmajer’s Alice the puppet version of Alice floats down a stream of water. Whilst her
movement is fragmented, this is in relative difference to the movement of the stream that she
floats down. Therefore, one element’s believability of movement must be sacrificed. In this case it
is the role of movement of the water versus Alice’s character that becomes disrupted. The puppet
appears to have authentic movement and the water does not, whereas in the actual filming
process this is the other way around. The nature of the water’s original movement is very different
to that of the film frames that are being played in a successive order. In other words the two
elements originally moved at different velocities but via the animating process they are
manipulated to take on a more equal speed. This leads to the eye being drawn to the unusual or
strange movement of the water. This facilitates a similar haptic observation of the relatively
foreign surface of an object that has its figure obscured. Hence, what the eye is drawn to in terms
of difference or contrast exists as an instance of haptic movement.
Sound
Sound can play a huge part in supplementing a visually haptic image, just as it is able to create
its own haptic aural experience. However, as the present article focuses on the haptic image,
minimal reference will be made to the role of sound, even as a supplement to the haptic image.
III. Cosgrove Hall’s Haptic Images

Stop-motion or model animation has such a naturally inherent physicality and tactility that in it
haptic images can exist on a more equal footing with optical images. Model animation for
children concentrates on a sense of tactility, yet also manages to allow for the prevalence of figure
and character, thereby offering the right environment in which to locate this balance. It is a
simultaneous intention that such an investigation will further strengthen my claims towards the
inherent haptic visual qualities of stop-motion animation in general.
In order to carry out this analysis, I will analyse the stop-motion or model animated
programmes produced by Cosgrove Hall in relation to the aforementioned devices. This company
has a thirty year history of producing a variety of animated productions for children. I will
concentrate on Chorlton and the Wheelies (1976), Noddy (Cosgrove Hall Productions/BBC 1992),
3
Many of these works manipulate the celluloid or video image directly in order to accentuate the screen as a surface, rather than as a transparent
pane for looking through. Although Marks does not refer to him specifically, Len Lye’s direct animation technique is a good example of this. This
technique involves scratching and painting directly on to blank film celluloid, therefore bringing what is presented on screen as close as possible to
the surface of the screen.
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Bill and Ben, Flower Pot Men (Cosgrove Hall Productions/BBC 2001) and Little Robots (Cosgrove
Hall Productions/BBC 2003). These films effectively represent the company’s stop-motion/model
animation pursuits in terms of time span, commercial success and variation in style.4
Framing and Intimacy of camera to object

In terms of the textures that the camera reveals to the audience, there is a sharp contrast
between textures that are recontextualised and those that have been reclaimed. Recontextualised
textures are those that are easily recognisable as textiles or materials that might exist
predominantly within the viewer’s world. Textures such as fur, hair, woollen textiles and wood
grain are examples of these. They become apparent to the eye because they stand out in terms of
scale, relative to associations of scale prompted by the character models (which are all less than
fifty centimetres tall). So the extent to which the size of the wood grain and the fineness of the
hair and fur fibres contrast, in scale, to the other elements within the diegesis (i.e. a character’s
hand or eye) indicate that the material has been taken from another context. In terms of the
haptic image, this distracts the eye from the figure or objects and draws it to focus on a more
direct tactile moment and one that relates back to the viewer’s subjective tactile knowledge.
In contrast to recontextualised textures, the predominant aesthetic theme of the animations is
smooth, flat and rounded surfaces and bright, solid colours. This may have something to do with
the technical requirements in terms of maintaining consistency and continuity in such a highly
changeable and precarious filmmaking process. This aesthetic does not necessarily pervade all
areas of design but certainly dominates. Also, some productions appear to make use of this
aesthetic more so than others do. The sets, props and characters in Chorlton and the Wheelies and
Noddy, for example, prescribe to this aesthetic, whereas for Bill and Ben and Little Robots effort
seems to have been put into including and constructing other textural aesthetics. In Bill and Ben
there are a lot of organic textures that may situate the diegesis in a space that becomes easily
associated with the viewer’s own environment (e.g. their backyard). Little Robots reworks the
recontextualised aesthetic via an interesting artistic technique in which the smooth surfaces of the
puppets and set appear somewhat greasy or grimy. Whilst managing to retain a consistency of
texture, the look is disrupted in such a way so that rather than a colour appearing bright and
uniform there is a notable amount of tonal variation.
Design intentions also influence the depiction of colour and shape in terms of creating a look
that will appeal to young audiences. Cosgrove Hall’s creative director Bridget Appleby suggests
that
The round bellies, biggish hands and bright embraceable costumes of Astronaut Al and Messenger Mo [from
Engie Bengie another Cosgrove Hall production] allow the characters’ childlike personalities to easily shine
through.’ For her, the colorful, clean lines of preschool programming are both fine art and great fun. ‘I think
there’s a danger with model animation; to build in too much detail,’ Appleby says. ‘That’s not necessary for me. I
think simple lines are best. Simplicity allows the depth and richness of a character to come out in the animation.
(Street 2002, p. 20)
There is an evident desire in terms of the production process, to create characters and sets
with clean simple shapes and bold colours that are easily perceived and understood by very young
audiences.
4
According to executive producer Chris Bowden the main production techniques used to produce the films are model replacement and poseable
puppets. Models are constructed from a steel armature skeleton with a foam latex or silicon skin (and occasionally fibreglass for heads) in order to
sculpt the character’s body. Costumes and props are ‘generally regular fabrics that can be store bought but died and printed to our specifications.’
67
Such an aesthetic is achieved via the sculpture of materials such as latex, clay, rubber,
fibreglass and spray paint. In terms of the art form one could even go so far as to say that the
smooth clay/latex material has become a look so well recognised in relation to stop-motion that it
has been claimed as something intrinsic and distinct to the art form. This is where the concept of
reclaimed texture becomes apparent. The look has become so innate to this form of moving
image that it becomes difficult to locate the textures as belonging to anywhere but the diegesis
itself. The striking look of such a texture – that is, one that is unique to its diegesis (and in the
case of these films an often very surreal diegesis at that) – immediately registers with the eye’s
haptic awareness.
The textures within these productions present themselves as extremely visually haptic in terms
of their relative recognisability and the eye’s tendency to attempt to place them within an original
context. This concept of texture placement is also something that is particularly relevant to
Cosgrove Hall’s programmes, wherein entire fantasy or foreign environments are created in terms
of mise en scéne. Further, it seems that recontextualised textures are obscured wherever possible.
For example in scenes that include leaves or bush within Bill and Ben and Noddy, the plants are
positioned either too far away or too close to the camera. This makes the details of the object
often appear out of focus but also provides the depiction of the set with a certain depth-of-field.5
The difficulties involved in simulating organic or ‘natural’ objects may play a part in such a tactic.
In other words, the ability of the eye to discern the texture of the object as being uncharacteristic
means that it is preferable to obscure the camera’s depiction of these elements. Through dark
lighting and extreme close-up within a large depth of field, the elements can exist within the
scene as environmentally relevant objects in terms of colour and rough outline. They then avoid
comparison to other, less authentic scene elements, such as the characters themselves. Note here
that, relative to such elements, the characters are placed in areas of light and remain the focus of
the scene.
Depiction of light and shadow

The application of light and shadow in relation to haptic viewing can be perceived similarly to
that of the reclaimed textures. The most noticeable aspect of the lighting in these productions is
that it is everywhere and in abundance, except where it is not supposed to be. Where an area of
shadow is needed, it is applied in extreme contrast to the predominantly well-lit remainder of the
scene. For example, in Bill and Ben only the shed and the Slowcoach’s home receive such a
relatively shadowed lighting design and, where this is applied, it in very high contrast. In Noddy
and the Broken Bicycle the night scene appears to be lit almost like a stage, with blue light and
chiaroscuro patterns projected on the ground. In terms of texture, high contrast lighting such as
this uses side-lighting in order to draw out surfaces relative to each other, therefore potentially
increasing the haptic qualities of the image. Such an approach aligns with the tendency of these
programmes to present the mise en scéne as a discrete set, reminiscent of theatrical stages or
puppet shows.
Light is also utilised to obscure recontextualised materials, again in order to promote the
status of reclaimed textures. In this way, the brightly lit6 versus the shadow obscured textures
create a surreal and fantasy based diegeses. The lighting presents everything in the diegesis as too
5
Such an effect is also supplemented through lighting, especially with the use of high contrast, light and dark areas as will be discussed.
6
It is important to discern here between an over-saturated lighting setup and maximised saturation. To describe a scene as ‘brightly lit’ refers in
this example to a technical lighting temperature that maximises the saturation of colour in the shot. In other words the exposure will sit towards
the middle of the range of exposure times and temperatures. This gives the effect of full colour saturation so that the scene appears ‘bright’ but not
over lit. This in turn will maximise the visibility of both light and dark and therefore any notable textures.
68
real or ultra real, which in turn draws attention to its status as a make-believe world. This helps to
assert the diegesis-specific position of materials like latex and painted balsa/plastic, and of the
presence of recontextualised materials that are left very visible (hair, fur etc.).
Film stock/quality
As with the lighting techniques, the film quality and post-production elements maintain a
crystal clear image, especially in the most recent Little Robots. It is unclear as to the technical
specifications of film stock used in these films, however the establishment of Cosgrove Hall’s new
C.G. (Computer Graphics) unit suggests the intention for an image of film quality to be produced.
The relative visual clarity and quality of a screen image is of course an inevitable artefact of
technological developments, but its presence certainly helps reinforce the surreal, ultra bright
environments created by lighting and use of colours. The granular and relatively washed out
colours of Chorlton and the Wheelies (and even the relatively recent episodes of Noddy) is a
notable artefact that marks a contrast to the more recent productions. This is despite the fact that
its production, compared with productions from a similar era and with similar budgets, would
seem to have had relatively equal attention to image quality as its predecessors. The haptic image
qualities of the film stock itself seem to be an element that becomes haptically more relevant
when discrepancies occur. Any elements such as a granular picture, noticeable qualitative
differences relative to contemporary cinematographic film or damage can provide moments in
which the screen develops a surface for itself.
Fragmentation versus fluidity of movement

The movement of the models in all of the productions is strikingly noticeable to the haptically
viewing eye. Characters move with a combination of sliding, jerky movements and completely still
poses. The use of wheel-based technological implements is also a recurring theme in terms of how
the characters move about on set. While these instances are again specific design strategies that
are symptomatic of the technical constraints of simulating movement in stop-motion animation,
they are utilised to enhance characterisation (eg. Bill and Ben’s sliding, Noddy’s tricycle,
Chorlton’s wheeling). The jerkiness of the characters’ movement may arise from the ratio of the
length of limbs to the number of joints in a model. This gives the impression of broken up or
arthritic movement that has a visually haptic sensation to it. For example, in a scene in which
Noddy helps Big Ears (an elderly character that had injured himself in a bicycle accident) to walk,
despite Big Ears being doubled over, his walking movement does not appear dissimilar from
Noddy’s. This sort of character design, accompanied with their movement, is one that enhances
their toy-like status.
This would cohere with the aforementioned claim that haptic qualities of the moving stop-
motion image are perceived with the awareness of discrepancies in the natural movement of an
object. So, when one notices a walk cycle that appears different to what may be witnessed outside
of the animation’s diegesis, the eye attempts to discern what is causing such a discrepancy. Also,
because the viewer is aware of the nature of the character, their physical movement becomes
naturalised and does not distract from the haptic qualities of the movement. In other words in
Chorlton and the Wheelies, their strange frenetic, sliding movement does not distract the viewer
from the character itself, but adds to the entire diegesis. The majority of the characters move in
this way and this haptic motion therefore becomes more identifiable with the show as a whole
69
and its production style, rather than as some character-based quality. The haptic movement is a
sensation the viewer experiences when watching the programme and as such need not interfere
with narrative or character based concepts.
IV. The Child Audience and Play Simulation

Cosgrove Hall’s animated productions have proven extremely popular throughout their thirty-
year history. The success of their model-animations is no exception. Professionally they have won
a number of reputable film and television awards and their productions sell to over eighty
countries around the world (Pelling 2001, p.16). According to Iain Pelling, ‘programs like Fetch
the Vet and Bill & Ben sell faster than they can be produced in more territories than ever before’
(2001, p.16).
The consumer demographic responsible for giving these model animations such a warm
reception consists of a child audience aged up to about five years old. This is both the market at
which they are targeted and the actual group that have subsequently become their audience. Chris
Bowden (2006) asserts that the programmes included in this research have all been targeted at the
three to five year old age group. Also, although industry ratings information remains unavailable,
the awards gathered by the shows and the nostalgic ‘fan sites’ that exist are evidence enough of
their popularity.7 I suggest that the haptic visual qualities of the form play a major role in such
audience appeal. By extension, it can be argued that the way this age group perceives haptic
images is unique.
In Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Laura Marks makes a number of
references to haptics in her discussion of infants’ perception highlighting the psychoanalytic
aspect:
If we were to describe it [the haptic] in psychoanalytic terms, we might argue that haptics draw on an erotic
relationship between mother and infant. In this relationship, the subject (the infant) comes into being through the
dynamic play between the appearance of the wholeness of the other (the mother) and the awareness of being
distinct. (2002, p.17)
Marks also addresses children’s haptic perception within a more psychological frame of
reference: ‘Infants can feel but they cannot identify what they feel, because the ability to
symbolise must be acquired.’ (2002, p.11). In Marks’ understanding then, infantile perception is
based around minimal, symbolic vision and the reliance on touch – the infant’s tactile relationship
with its mother – for the basics of survival.
Research into infantile perception from a more empirical psychological perspective would
seem to correspond with such a position. According to Tom Bower’s The Perceptual World of the
Child, ‘lack of knowledge means that a baby cannot use his perceptual system in the same way
that adults can’ (1977, p.8). He then links this idea to infant physiology.
[T]he lens of the eye, which can change its shape in adults to permit precise focusing of objects at different
distances, does not change in infants. This means that the image projected onto the infants retina is somewhat
blurrier than that typically projected onto the adult’s; at worst, the infant might not see some things that are
perfectly visible to the adult. (1977, p.16)
For Bower then, not only does the image that the infant sees lack the associated knowledge of
an adult’s perception, but it seems that the image itself is also of a lesser clarity.
7
Both Bill and Ben and Little Robots have won industry awards and web sites such as ‘Cosgrove Hall Ate My Brain’ prove that even older shows
such as Chorlton and the Wheelies not only enjoyed a popular reception but have established a cult status as classic animation.
70
There appears to be, however, a lack of conclusive evidence in finding such a difference in the
visual aesthetics of perception at the age of the viewing audience that Cosgrove Hall’s model
animations attract (i.e. up to the age of five years). The difference that does remain in such an
audience compared to their adult counterparts is the role of prior knowledge and the concept of
reality that is subsequently perceived. Such an anthropological investigation was carried out in
relation to a programme called The Sooty Show, which was also a British produced, puppet-based
(although not stop-motion) production made for children in the late 1980’s. In ‘The Bear
(Ir)Realities’, the authors discuss the relationship of play, reality and perception of the audience
of this show. They look into how the young audience can perceive a programme and to what
extent this image is understood as something that is really happening.
The study has much to offer in relation to the haptic perception of young audiences of stop-
motion animation. The authors suggest that The Sooty Show’s audience is in an extended play
phase of pretence (Smith et. al., 2001, p.112), one of the developmental stages established by
child psychologist, Jean Piaget: ‘This is said to be accompanied by more solitary play and a
greater reliance on predefined characters and themes, as derived from media-related and
marketed toys’ (Smith et. al., 2001, p.112) Essentially, the study aligns the child-audiences’
perception of the programme with a form of play activity. In addition to this ‘because Sooty is
constituted as both a TV persona and a merchandised toy, there is a necessity to interrelate play,
media, and children’s material culture more broadly’ (Smith et. al., 2001, p.112). So the manner
in which the programme aligns itself with play is further enhanced by the marketability of its
characters as toys, rather than solely as on-screen puppets. Both of these points would suggest
that these television programmes simulate the process of play via the onscreen animation of toy-
related figures and worlds.8
Such a simulation suggests that the audience contributes a certain level of belief in the reality
of what appears on screen. As is suggested in ‘The Bear (Ir)Realities’:
[T]he show becomes perhaps for those child viewers even more exciting than their own play because of their
capacity to look into a world from without, where the world looked into, although containing many possible
typical imaginative themes, presents itself as bizarre but nonetheless real.’(Smith et. al., 2001, p.120).
The suggestion here is that the child-aged audience is at a developmental stage in which they
are able to perceive onscreen action as believable. As mentioned above, the lack of prior adult
specific knowledge and their associations with real world play experiences means that the child
witnesses a play simulation. It is one that is perhaps even more vivid (or at least more explicitly
‘occurring’) than the world of play, imagined in the interaction that they have with their
physically present toys. Whilst this study finds such use of the term ‘real’ and ‘reality’
problematic, particularly within the field of media studies, such an assertion certainly seems to
concur with the idea of the apparent simulation of the play process that is/can be perceived.
If one considers the possibility that the audiences of these shows are at a stage of development
that allows them to engage in a detached, playful simulation, then the role of haptics in this
process can assert itself as an essential characteristic of the animation. The tactile parallels drawn
between the moving image and the play in the physically present world are able to transfer across
the screen surface. In other words the qualities addressed above (camera intimacy, lighting,
movement etc.) all contribute to the potential haptic perception of the audience. The tactile
images affect the young viewer’s perception so that they are able to enjoy the experience of a
8
The common transition that these program concepts make into the toy market itself is also significant of and further cements the association of
the play process. Both Bill and Ben and Noddy have had their characters marketed as products within the toy industry and Little Robots has an
interactive web site (associated with the BBC) where children can extend the play process past the programme itself.
71
fantasy play situation being played out in front of them. This occurs much in the same way as if
they were involved in the creative imagining of such a scene with their own toys. The marketing
opportunities that have been exploited in terms of merchandise created in relation to the shows
are further proof of the existence of this connection.
V. Accessing a Haptic Audience

One aspect of what has motivated a research project of this nature stems from the observed
presence of an anxiety concerning the popular status of stop-motion animation. Despite the fact
that in 2005-06 two commercially successful stop-motion animated feature films were released,9
the legitimacy of the form as a commercially viable genre of moving image is frequently
challenged. The suitability of such an art form for mass production, for example, has perhaps
been hindered by what can be perceived as technical impairments. The production efficiency of
stop-motion animation has made relatively small technological advancements in terms of the
actual animating process. Chris Bowden (2006) advises of the process that: ‘We have improved
the technology of cameras and digital recording devices but the technique of moving a puppet a
frame at a time and taking a picture remains unchanged from the turn of the century.’ This
seemingly inherent characteristic of the art form is what fuels public opinion that it cannot be
commercially viable10.10 It is this characteristic that also grounds the form within a specifically
haptic sensibility – the physical process of touching the object in order to animate it has never
changed.
A further point, which should be made here, relates to the development and addition of C.G.
to the model animation process. It is understood that Cosgrove Hall has recently established a
C.G. unit and the addition of computer manipulations to images within film’s such as Corpse
Bride are signs that the two techniques are increasingly merging. This research takes the stance
that in order to retain an authentically haptic image, the filmmaker must involve himself or
herself with the production in a physically tactile way. Bowden (2006) has suggested that
kids do seem to respond well to stop-motion puppets. Even though compared to C.G. animation it’s relatively
limiting there is a very definite sense of something real moving around on screen. Also because animator’s are
making the shots frame-by-frame, there is an inherent element of organic imperfection to the movements which is
far more real than perfectly programmed moves of some CG shows.
This is not to say that C.G. techniques will not and have not made allowances for a haptic
approach. Devices such as 3D sculpture tools and translators have made steps towards retaining
the three dimensional physicality of what will become 3D computerised images. Therefore, the
evidently changing nature of the haptic image in light of such technological developments is an
area that has become increasingly relevant to emerging discourse on the topic.
The model animations of Cosgrove Hall have proven popular with young audiences because of
their ability to create an on screen play environment. The construction and manipulation of
diegeses made entirely from reclaimed and recontextualised textures and the placement of toy-
like characters in such a space invites what is termed as a haptic viewing. Such a viewing functions
due to the ability for the programme’s young audience to believe in the physical existence of such
9
Aardman animation’s Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Wererabbit, directed by Nick Park and Corpse Bride, directed by Tim Burton, were
both feature length stop-motion animated productions that received widespread cinematic release and had significant box office success, reaching
top 10 ratings in U.S. box-office figures in 2005 (see: News for Corpse Bride).
1 0
The following is an example of such popular criticism form a DVD review web site: ‘stop-motion animation is a dying art form, considering its
look can be neatly recreated in CG without the time and expense of creating and filming puppets. Virtually the only studios keeping it alive are
Laika Entertainment-originally founded by Will Vinton, renamed after he was ousted by owner Phil Knight; they were the animation house
responsible for Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride and they’re now the home of Henry Selick-and Aardman Animation.’ (Jackson, DVD Verdict Review).
72
an on screen situation. In other words the productions present a simulation of a play situation
that the child viewer may relate to their own process of play with toys. The presence of visually
haptic elements in these productions facilitates the translation and relation of an extremely haptic
screen environment. Its reception is based on the highly tactile process of a child playing and
creating imaginary environments with their own toys. 
References
Alice. Dir. Jan Svankmajer. DVD. Czechoslovakia/Switzerland/U.K./West Germany Channel
Four Films, 1988.
Bower, T 1977, The Perceptual World of the Child, Open Books, London.
Bowden, C 2006, [Discussion on Cosgrove Hall Films] (Personal Communication, 27 September
2006)
Chorlton & the wheelies. 1976. [Online]. You Tube Inc. Available at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_NUXnl49RI [accessed November 2, 2006]Corpse
Bride 2005, DVD, Warner Bros, U.K./U.S.A., Directed by Tim Burton and Mike Johnson.
Cosgrove Hall Ate My Brain n.d., Retrieved November 5, 2006, from
http://www.nyanko.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/chamb/chorlton.html/
Cosgrove Hall Productions/BBC., 1953. Bill and Ben flower pot men. [VHS]. London:
BBC/Westerham Arts Film. (distributed by VIDZ FROM OZ (MVW)).
Cosgrove Hall Productions/BBC., 1992. Noddy and the naughty tail. [VHS]. London: BBC.
(distributed by VIDZ OF OZ (MVW)).
Cosgrove Hall Productions/BBC,. 2001. Bill & Ben: flobbadobba fun!. [VHS]. London: BBC.
(distributed by Roadshow Entertainment Australia)
Cosgrove Hall Productions/BBC., 2003. Little Robots: Big Adventures. [DVD]. London: BBC.
(distributed by 20th Century Fox, 2006)
Deleuze, G 2005, Cinema 2: The Time Image, Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Athlone,
London.
Jackson, M n.d., DVD Verdict Review, Retrieved November 8, 2006,
fromhttp://www.dvdverdict.com/reviews/wgcursewererabbit.php/
Gandelman, C 1991, Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and
Indianapolis.
Marks, L 2002, Touch: Sensuous theory and Multisensory Media, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis & London.
News for Corpse Bride n.d., Retrieved November 6, 2006, from
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0121164/news/
Pelling, I 2001, ‘Cosgrove Hall Films Celebrating 25 Years: Leading UK animation studio grows
from 2D to model to CGI’, Animation Magazine, vol 15, no 6.
Smith, C, Forrest, C, Goldman, L & Emmison, M 2001, ‘The Bear (Ir)Realities: Media Technology
and the Pretend-Real Distinction on a Television Puppet Show’, in HB Schwartzman,
Bergin & Garvey (eds), Children and Anthropology: Perspectives for the 21st Century,
Connecticut and London.
Street, R 2002, ‘Simply Engie: CHF’s heartwarming preschool design’, Animation Magazine, vol.
16, no.6, June 2002.
Vasta, R, Haith, MM & Miller, SA 1999, Child Psychology: The Modern Science, John Wiley &
Sons, Inc, New York.
73
Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were Rabbit, Dir. Nick Park and Steve Box, U.K.,
Dreamworks animation/Aardman features, 2005.
© Cordelia Brown
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Andrew Buchanan
Facial Expressions for Empathic Communication of Emotion in Animated Characters
Introduction
The challenge of communicating emotional content to an audience via animated characters has
existed since the art form first appeared. As animation techniques and technology have advanced,
animators and character designers find themselves with a multitude of resources and tools for the
creation of facial expressions so as to effectively communicate the emotions of their animated
characters within each scene. However, by using evolved forms of symbolic facial expression,
which are widely accepted, these technologies and techniques often overlook the unconscious
communication conveyed via actual human facial expressions. The fundamentals of this instant
and unconscious emotional communication have been well studied and documented, yet the
systems developed by the scientific community for reading and interpreting facial communication
have only occasionally and recently been applied by animators.
As they relate to emotional experiences, facial expressions can be divided into two main types:
spontaneous facial expressions; and deliberate facial expressions (Ekman & Rosenberg 1997).
Animated characters traditionally use a third type of facial expression: symbolic or artistic facial
expressions. Executions of animated facial expressions may have a natural tendency to fall into
the third category, but certain types of emotional communication may be aided by attempts to
include hallmarks of the spontaneous expression type, or a hybrid of these two.
Studies have suggested that the reading of facial expressions is an unconscious process and
that our reactions to these facial expressions can be unconsciously generated (Murphy & Zajonc,
1993). This finding is supported by previous publications by Paul Ekman (2003) and Carl Jung
(1974). This suggests that a deeper understanding of how to execute facial expressions which can
be unconsciously read as true expressions of emotion may be a useful tool for effective
communication of emotion when creating animated characters.
These symbolic expressions are effective at generating two of the three main responses to facial
expressions – environmental expectation and behavioural expectation – which are described in
the paper ‘Facial Expressions as modes of Action Readiness’ (Frijda & Tcherkassof 1997).
The third main type of response is the generation of an empathic response. The paper
Components and Recognition of Facial Expression and Communication of Emotion by Actors
(Gosselin, Kirouac, et al, 1997) has found that empathic emotional responses are generated more
effectively through spontaneous facial expressions, than through symbolic or deliberate facial
expressions.
Formal systems for the decoding of facial expressions established by other disciplines may
offer animators new opportunities to draw upon methods outside their own practice to create
facial expressions that communicate emotions effectively to the audience without any
requirement that they look realistic. For example, the use of Ekman and Friessen’s Facial Action
Coding System (FACS) in the creation of the character Gollum in Lord of the Rings – The Two
Towers (2002), (Kerlow, 2004) resulted in a character performance which was widely regarded by
critics as emotionally believable and well integrated with the action and other characters in the
film.
75
Scope
It is necessary to note that the conveyance of emotion in any animated work is never restricted
to facial expressions alone. The history of cinema lends to animation all of its methods for
storytelling, including casting, dialogue, lighting, cinematography, body language, music,
emoticons, physical changes, and special abilities or super powers. The consideration of different
types of animated facial expressions for emotional communication in isolation from the other
cinematic elements and animation techniques explained above would be erroneous – indeed, the
specific objectives of a particular production may make complex facial animation superfluous.
The diversity of animation as an artistic, narrative and communication medium will require a
range of approaches and methodologies – indeed by its very nature, animation thrives through its
diversity of style and approach. It is not the contention of this paper to provide a universal
approach to creating animated facial expressions. Specifically, the types of animation which may
find some benefit from the findings of this paper are those which seek to induce a cathartic
emotional response from their audience for the purpose of advancing a dramatic narrative. In
making this distinction, it is recognised that, even within this category, there may be a multitude
of reasons why approaches suggested within would be inappropriate for a given production.
The context in which a facial expression is displayed is particularly important in animation
where every image, movement and action is crafted deliberately to contribute to the objectives of
the sequence. Humans often display deliberate expressions which do not relate to our true
feelings or we may use facial expressions to intentionally mask our emotions (Crag, Hyde, et. al.,
1997). Society may dictate which expressions are appropriate at which times, and hence some of
our emotions may not be represented physically (Fernandez-Dols & Ruiz Belda, 1997). This can
be equally true for animated characters, and animators may also have their own set of rules for
when and how to display certain facial expressions. Additionally, there may be stylistic or
practical considerations of the art form such as double-takes, anticipation, overshoot and settle,
and reducing expression changes during broad moves (Williams, 2001) which may influence the
implementation of any findings within.
The Study of Facial Expression

In 1967 a study into the universality of facial gestures was undertaken by Paul Ekman and
Wallace Friessen. The study involved tribes in Papua New Guinea who, because they were largely
isolated from other groups, would tend to display only those expressions which were deemed to
be automatic and common to all humans. The study focussed on how emotion is displayed on a
person’s face, and the mechanisms humans have developed for interpreting these displays.
Ekman and Friessen explain in their book titled Unmasking the Face (2003) that facial
expressions are one of the key indicators of human emotion and primary sources of identifying
emotion in others: ‘We do know that the face is a primary, clear and precise signal system for the
expression of the specific emotions’ (Ekman and Friessen 2003).
In his book, Silent Messages: Implicit Communication of Emotions and Attitudes (1981), Albert
Mehrabian states that 55% of an emotion based message is communicated through what he terms
‘facial linking,’ which includes appearance, facial expression and body language. Only 7% of the
message is communicated through the words chosen (verbal linking) and 38% is communicated
by the way the voice is used (vocal linking).
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The Facial Action Coding System (FACS) co-authored by Ekman and Friesenin 1978, is a
system whereby the various actions of a face are broken down into their component movements,
based on the specific facial musculature which stimulates that movement. These individual
movements are known as Action Units (AUs).
By analysing the various AUs observed during analysis, a FACS practitioner can determine the
emotions in evidence in that example. For example, the true ‘enjoyment’ smile indicating the
happiness emotion can be identified by the presence of 2 major Action Units; AU 12, and AU 6.
These codes represent the contraction of the zygomatic major muscle (which raises the corners of
the lips and the cheeks), and contraction of the orbicularis oculi, pars lateralis (which squints the
eyes and makes crows-feet wrinkles) (Ekman & Rosenberg, 1997).
Often, the smile we use and notice in others is not a spontaneous representation of the
happiness emotion, but what can be called a ‘requested’ or ‘deliberate’ expression. The deliberate
smile shows a contraction of the zygomatic major, but does not often include the contraction of
the orbicularis oculi (Ekman & Friessen, 1978). This particular action unit is very difficult for
humans to perform on demand. This deliberate smile is the one we use during situations where it
appropriate to put someone at ease, to be pleasant or welcoming to others, during our polite
interactions with strangers, or when smiling for a photograph but is not generated spontaneously
by our emotion.
Charles Darwin, in his study The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals noted as early
as 1872 that humans can automatically distinguish genuine expressions from deliberate ones.
Referring to photographs in which people smile, he noted:
Almost everyone recognized that the one represented a true, and the other a false smile; but I
have found it very difficult to decide in what the whole amount of difference consists. It has often
struck me as a curious fact that so many shades of expression are instantly recognized without any
conscious process of analysis on our part. (Darwin, 1998 [1872])
Our responses to the smiler are guided by our unconscious assessment of whether the smile is
genuine, and by the insights this gives us into the motivations of the smiler.
The spontaneous and deliberate facial expressions in humans are neurologically as well as
physically different as explained by Mark Frank (et al) in his paper ‘Behavioural Markers and
Recognisability of the Smile of Enjoyment’:
not only do emotional and nonemotional facial activity originate from different parts of the
brain (subcortical and cortical motor strip, respectively) and arrive at the face through different
motor systems (extrapyramidal and pyramidal, respectively) but also the appearances of these
actions differ. (Frank, Ekman et al. 1997)
The importance of this for any animator seeking to utilise this system for purposes of encoding
an emotion through a facial expression (rather than decoding, as was the original intent of the
FACS), is to recognise that the hallmarks of a spontaneous expression differ from those of a
deliberate expression.
Although we may like to believe we are in control of our perceptions of our environments, our
interactions and the way in which we know and react to our world, in reality we are aided by
complex brain functions which automatically sort and assess information gained through our
senses, and provide us with appropriate deductions and automatic responses. These can include
changes in physiology (as in the fight/flight response, caused by an automatic sense of danger), as
well as supplying data for the conscious brain to process. In his book Emotions Revealed (2003),
Paul Ekman uses the term ‘autoappraisers’ to describe the mechanisms at work in the human
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brain which constantly scan our surroundings and detect when something important to our
welfare is occurring (Ekman, 2003). He notes that through the use of these autoappraisers ‘we
can make very complex evaluations very quickly, in milliseconds, without being aware of the
evaluative process’ (Ekman, 2003). This process of automatic appraisal is what generates
‘spontaneous’ facial expressions – those linked closely to the experience of the emotion they
represent. By contrast, deliberate facial expressions, or those which are culturally or personally
moderated are generated by ‘reflective appraisal’ (Ekman 2003), requiring some conscious input
from a person to generate the expression.
The ability to read different expressions displayed by others, and our understanding of how
those expressions relate to the emotions they portray is also an unconscious process (Murphy &
Zajonc, 1993). As humans, we have a hard wired ability to decode the emotions of other people,
developed over the course of our evolution. The psychologist Carl Jung, in his 1968 book titled
Man and His Symbols, notes that ‘universally understood gestures and many attitudes follow a
pattern that was established long before man developed a reflective consciousness’ (Jung, 1968).
Those animated characters displaying expressions which we unconsciously recognise as
spontaneous and emotion driven expressions may have a greater emotional resonance with an
audience than those who display expressions which are unconsciously read by the audience as
deliberate expressions.
Animators working on sequences, films or other projects which seek to elicit emotional
responses and effective emotional communication with their audience may consider the
implications of the use of expressions which appear spontaneous as opposed to those which may
appear deliberate.
Facial expressions can generate three main responses in the viewer: environmental expectation
– such as an expression of fear on another person’s face warning us of immediate danger;
behavioural expectation – such as another’s angry expression warning us to expect conflict from
that person; and, empathic response – such as a feeling of sadness when witnessing another’s grief
(Frijda & Tcherkassof, 1997). Traditional forms of animated facial expressions will likely be
effective in conveying both environmental and behavioural expectation to an audience, however
these evolved techniques may be less effective than spontaneous human expressions at generating
an empathic response as described by Frijda and Tcherkassof.
It is necessary therefore, to review some of the historically evolved techniques, and highlight
innovations which offer methodologies and workflows to support the creation of animated facial
expressions.
The Evolution of Animated Facial Expressions

In the early days of The Walt Disney Company, one of the pioneer organisations of the
popularised animated medium, animators recognised that facial expressions could communicate
the inner thoughts of a character to the audience. Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston comment in
their book The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation that ‘Through a change of expression, the
thought process was shown’ (Thomas & Johnston, 1981).
Early animated films were a purely visual medium accompanied by a live music performance
and therefore had a high degree of physical humour and visual action. The facial expressions of
this early period were understandably simple, as they sought clarity in the communication of a
narrative for which there was neither an accompanying sound effects track nor dialogue. The
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simplified facial expressions these characters bore were initially based on ‘photostats’ of actors
deliberately making each expression, and were also influenced by a concurrent history of cinema,
in which the trend of the day was toward what might now be considered ‘over-acting.’
Commenting on the short film Playful Pluto (1934) involving Pluto the dog wrestling with a
piece of fly-paper, the animators at The Walt Disney Company noted that
Expressions played a very important part in the entertainment value of the scenes, and while
everyone admitted that this was only a broad cartoon symbol for a dog and lacked any attempt at
realism, it was still felt that the door had been opened. (Thomas & Johnston, 1981)
The sequence in Playful Pluto clearly shows Pluto experiencing and expressing human-like
emotions through a series of exaggerated and simplified expressions that represent those
emotions.
This evolving set of expressions and (quite separate and often very different from the human
‘spontaneous’ and ‘requested’ expressions) can be called the ‘artistic’ or ‘symbolic’ representation
of a character’s emotion. Jose Miguel Fernandez-Dols notes in his paper ‘Spontaneous Facial
behaviour During Intense Emotional Episodes: Artistic Truth and Optical Truth’ that
if a painter, actor or layperson sets out to convey happiness or anger [...] then a smiling or
frowning face is the right image to choose. In the absence of words, context or further
explanation, a smiling face conveys ‘a happy person,’ just as a cartoon mouse is successful in
conveying ‘mouse.’ (Fernandez-Dols, Ruiz Belda, 1997)
This view suggests that the expression symbols for emotion, while rarely an accurate portrayal
of the emotion as displayed by humans, have become accepted substitutes for communicating the
idea of these emotions. In particular, animation from Japan has a history of using generic and
exaggerated facial symbols to convey the emotion of a character.
The symbolic expression informs us of the emotional state of the character through our
referential knowledge, generated by previous viewings of animated productions. This may
however be less effective than the use of spontaneous expression types in generating an empathic
response, allowing the audience to cathartically experience the immediate emotional conditions
of the characters.
In 1937, The Walt Disney Company released the first full length animated feature film, Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs. This release, with its extended length, complex narrative and
dramatic themes required animated characters to deliver some form of emotional fulfilment
through the viewing of the film. The expectation that certain types of dramatic animated films
can and should deliver this type of experience has continued, and today the emotional content of
these particular animated productions is often critically considered with much the same weight as
it is in live action films.
Actors in live-action productions are required to portray the emotions of their characters
through convincing facial expressions as well as other body language and dialogue. Animators are
tasked with a similar job, but while actors have some advantage due to an innate ability to
generate facial expressions through the previous experience of the emotions with which they are
associated, animators are required to manually construct expressions for their characters.
The traditional methods for achieving this include the use of personal mirrors, so that
animators can examine their own faces while posing expressions, and careful analysis and
research of human and animal facial expression and movement. These techniques are coupled
with a historical emphasis on animators understanding of anatomy and years of drafting and
drawing practise.
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Animators working on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs discovered that it would be much
easier to use images or footage of facial expressions as reference material for their animation,
rather than attempting to completely invent a character’s facial expressions. They used Photostats
(an image printed from a single frame of moving 35mm film) of actors’ faces portraying different
expressions. Initially, these images were traced directly, in an attempt to create an animated
version of the human expression. This process is known as rotoscoping, a technique which is still
in use in some forms today. The animators found however, that the rotoscoped animation often
looked strange, mechanical and inhuman. Without realising it, they were perhaps experiencing
the Uncanny Valley – a phenomenon of aversion to not-quite-human entities first asserted by the
Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970. The animators found that their animations were
improved when these expressions were exaggerated, and the actions produced using the cartoon
movements they were familiar with (Thomas & Johnston, 1981).
One of the chief problems inherent in this process is that it relies heavily on the actor to be
able to produce realistic expressions of emotion on demand. One method actors have for creating
spontaneous, emotion driven performances is to use the technique called Method Acting. Put
very simply, this process involves an actor attempting to re-live events in their past which had
previously generated the emotions required. The actor can then use the generated emotion to
naturally and unconsciously produce spontaneous facial expressions and other physiological
changes, such as crying, changes in the voice and unconscious changes in the actor’s body
language (Gosselin, Kirouac, et al., 1997). This process is also known as the Stanislavski System,
after Konstantin Stanislavski, who developed the technique in the early 1900s.
In an interview contained in Behind the Scenes – Making Nemo (Disney Pixar, 2003), Mark
Walsh, the animator of the fish character Dory for the film Finding Nemo (2003) describes
utilising a form of method acting. When attempting to animate a particularly emotional scene,
Walsh explains that he was aided by attempting to re-live similar experiences in his own life, and
then filming himself performing the lines of the character while experiencing that emotional state,
thus generating reference footage for the sequence. This technique is a combination of the
traditional use of mirrors by animators, combined with method acting. Film critic Mark Caro of
the Chicago Tribune notes; ‘You connect to these sea creatures as you rarely do with humans in
big-screen adventures’ (2007).
A study, published in 1997 titled Components and Recognition of Facial Expression in the
Communication of Emotion by Actors (Gosselin, Kirouac et al. 1997) has shown that actors
employing the Stanislavski System of method acting are able to generate more emotionally
believable facial expressions than straight acting. Conversely, facial expressions which appear to
be spontaneously, rather than deliberately generated would imply genuine emotions. Studies
show that spontaneous facial expressions arising from genuinely felt emotion can be more
effective at eliciting an empathic response in an audience, particularly for some emotions
(Gosselin, Kirouac et al. 1997).
The facial design of an animated character may in some ways determine the characters ability
to create facial expressions which appear emotionally spontaneous. For example, the character
Winnie the Pooh (created by The Walt Disney Company) which has neither upper nor lower
eyelids is unable to produce some of the FACS Action Units, making some of the expressions
described therein impossible. This character may be restricted to a symbolic set of facial
expressions, and thus the animator may be limited in their approaches to communicating emotion
to the audience. In contrast, Seth McFarlane’s character designs for the television show Family
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Guy have both upper and lower eyelids, a design which increases the potential for the animator to
create expressions which appear to be spontaneously emotion driven, despite the characters
otherwise simplified facial design.
Technological advances and changes to animation production techniques have influenced the
way in which many animated facial expressions are created. Particularly in what is commonly
referred to as 3D (3 dimensional) animation or CG (computer generated) animation, practitioners
are offered a vast set of tools for creating and animating faces. One of the most prevalent of these
new techniques is called combination sculpting, and involves the animator setting up a number of
facial poses which are then implemented to varying degrees over time. This is one area of
animation where the use of tools such as FACS has been utilised with some success, aiding the
character artist or animator in some cases to create poses based on specific muscle movements
and combinations rather than traditional reference images or mirrors.
Another technique gaining popularity in animation production is Motion Capture (or
Performance Capture). In this process, an actor is rigged with reference points – usually stick-on
dots – which are then tracked by a digital system to record their movement. This movement is
then translated to corresponding points on an animated character automatically. This process
reduces the time taken to animate a sequence, and provides instant feedback to the director for
review and re-taking.
A point for consideration here may be that while some of these methods can assist in the
creation of characters which have a more life-like appearance, or in making the animation process
easier, the animator (or actor) must still have a solid understanding of which facial shapes to
make, when to make them and how to integrate them with the rest of the character’s
performance.
Isaac Kerlow in his paper titled ‘Creative Human Character Animation: The Incredibles vs. The
Polar Express’ (2004) notes the success of the integration of the FACS into the production
pipeline of the character Gollum in the film The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The
animation team used reference footage of the actor, Andy Serkis, for the motion and facial
expressions of Gollum. By having the reference actor act with the other characters in each scene,
the actor was given valuable context for his performance. The animators of Gollum did not use
any performance capturing devices for the face of the character, but chose instead to animate the
character directly over the reference footage – a process they referred to as roto-animation – and
deviate from this footage when it was felt appropriate. The animators used the process of
combination sculpting in order to efficiently pose the expressions of the character, with the
various facial poses designed by Bay Raitt (the lead character designer on the project)
corresponding to Ekman and Friessen’s Action Units, from the Facial Action Coding System.
Another approach to integrating the FACS into technology based pipelines is described by
Parag Havaldar in his paper entitled ‘Performance Driven Facial Animation,’ where he describes
in detail the process of digitally ‘re-targeting’ facial expressions captured with a motion capture
system to match pre-set Action Units which had been set up specifically for the cartoon-like facial
shapes of the character. By pre-designing the facial poses based on the FACS, the production
team on Monster House (2006) was able to capitalise on the speed of motion capture animation in
the production, while maintaining facial expressions which corresponded with the appropriate
Action Units.
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Some previous animated features which have used motion capture technology – notably The
Polar Express (2004) – have been associated with the notion of the ‘Uncanny Valley,’ first
explained by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970 (Kerlow, 2004). The phrase describes
the phenomenon of decreased emotional response to characters (Mori was initially referring to
robots) as they tend towards a close resemblance of humans. Initially, our response is positive –
we react well to objects or characters which resemble humans. As this resemblance increases,
however, there is a marked drop in our response to these characters, before climbing again as the
character becomes completely human (MacDorman, 2005).
The implications for the animator may be that complete human accuracy in facial expression
may not achieve the desired empathic response; rather, this may be a source of revulsion in the
viewer. Characters which are deliberately non-human or non realistic in their appearance may
however avoid the uncanny valley, as with the characters in The Incredibles (Disney Pixar, 2004),
while still benefiting from facial expressions which are unconsciously read as spontaneous and
emotion driven by the audience.
Discussion
The use of symbolic or artistic expressions may continue to be more practical for many
animation productions. Symbolic expressions have the advantage of being unambiguous in their
meaning, and are free from cultural influence beyond the established culture of animation. It is
also possible that these productions can benefit in terms of their emotional communication by
utilising the established context of the animation art form and relying on the referential
knowledge of the audiences previous viewing experiences within this framework.
Though all animated facial expressions could be called deliberate due to the process of
animation, animated characters may benefit from the inclusion of both deliberate expressions as
described in this article. The audience will read these automatically and understand the
motivations for these expressions as long as the context for them is maintained and suitable.
Deliberate expressions can give insight into the motivations of a character and deliver a greater
understanding of inter-character relationships and scene contexts.
The inclusion of facial expressions in animated characters which look spontaneous may help to
establish an unconscious communication of emotion with the audience based not on our
referential knowledge of animation, but on our unconscious understanding of non-verbal
communication with other humans. This is likely to be most effective where a cathartic
experience of emotion in the audience can be managed with the other requirements of the
production, or where this forms one of the key narrative techniques for the project.
Whichever facial action design is chosen for an animated production, and regardless of the
production method employed, this choice should be a conscious one, and not established
through artistic instinct. The methods chosen by the production team will influence the design of
the characters which must produce the expressions.
The example of the character Gollum as an animated character able to communicate emotion
through facial expression suggests that an amalgamation of various techniques and processes may
yield effective results. In this case, the Facial Action Coding System is used as a reference and as a
safety net for creating appropriate expressions. Like the use of 3d animation tools and advanced
technology in animation, the application of findings from the Behavioural Sciences must be an
integrative process, adding to, rather than superseding, the established body of animation
knowledge and practice. 
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References
Caro, M. (2007) Movie Review: ‘Finding Nemo’ http://chicago.metromix.com/movies/
review/movie-review-finding-nemo/158128/content
Craig, K. D., S. A. Hyde, et al. (1997). ‘Genuine, Suppressed, and Faked Facial Behaviour during
Exacerbation of Chronic Low Back Pain’. What the Face Reveals. P. Ekman and E.
Rosenberg. New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press: 243-267.
Darwin, C. (1998). The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals New York, Oxford
University Press.
Ekman, P. (2003). Emotions Revealed: Understanding Faces and Feelings London Weidenfeld &
Nicholson.
Ekman, P. and E. Rosenberg, Eds. (1997). What the Face Reveals; Basic and Applied Studies of
Spontaneous Expression Using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). Series in Affective
Science. New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Ekman, P. and W. V. Friessen (1978). Facial Action Coding System (FACS): A Technique for the
measurement of facial action Palo Alto, CA, Consulting Psychologists Press.
Fernandez-Dols, J. M. and M.-A. Ruiz-Belda (1997). ‘Spontaneous facial behaviour during
intense emotional episodes: Artistic truth and optical truth’. Studies in Emotion and Social
Interaction, Second Series. J. A. Russell and J. M. Fernandez-Dols. (eds) Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press & Editions de la Maison des Sciences le l’Homme: 78-102.
Frank, M. G., P. Ekman, et al. (1997). ‘Behavioural Markers and the Recognizability of the Smile
of Enjoyment’. What the Face Reveals. P. Ekman and E. Rosenberg. (eds) New York,
Oxford, Oxford University Press: 243-267.
Frijda, N. H. and A. Tcherkassof (1997). ‘Facial Expressions as modes of Action Readiness’.
Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction, Second Series. J. A. Russell and J. M. Fernandez-
Dols. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press & Editions de la Maison des Sciences le
l’Homme: 78-102.
Gosselin, P., G. Kirouac, et al. (1997). ‘Components and Recognition of Facial Expression in the
Communication of Emotion by Actors’. What the Face Reveals. P. Ekman and E.
Rosenberg. (eds)New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press: 243-267.
Havaldar, P (2006). ‘Performance Driven Facial Animation’. SIGGRAPH 2006.
http://www.siggraph.org/s2006/main.php?f=conference&p=courses&s=30
Jung, C. G., M. L. V. Franz, et al. (1974). Man and his Symbols New York, Dell Publishing Co.
Kerlow, I. (2004) ‘Creative Human Character Animation: The Incredibles vs. The Polar Express’
vfxworld.com
MacDorman, K. (2005) ‘Androids as an Experimental Apparatus: Why is there an Uncanny
Valley, and can we Exploit it?’ Cognitive Science Society, Osaka.
http://www.androidscience.com/proceedings2005/MacDormanCogSci2005AS.pdf
Mehrabian, A. (1981) Silent Messages: Implicit communication of Emotions and Attitudes.
Belmont, California. Wadsworth
Murphy, S. T., & Zajonc, R. B. (1993), ‘Affect, cognition, and awareness: Affective priming with
optimal and suboptimal stimulus exposures’. Journal of personality and social psychology, 64,
723-39.
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New York, Disney Editions.
© Andrew Buchanan
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Peter Moyes
Behind the Flash Exterior
Scratching the Surface of Online Animated Narratives
Introduction
The flat simplified graphics and limited animation of Flash online creations recall 1950 and
1960s cartoons for TV and stand in stark contrast to the photo-realistic forms and naturalistic
movement of high-end 3D computer realisations. Celebrated for its ease of use, its affordability,
and its enhanced dissemination, Flash has become the ‘people’s choice’ in animation software.
Yet its widespread use and apparent simplicity (its association with pop culture ‘toons’) veil
sophisticated modes of reception. Just as the animations of the Zagreb School and the United
Productions of America (UPA) studio, with their pared down graphics, stylised forms and limited
movement, are now feted as unique animated expressions, Flash animations can also be
appreciated for exploiting medium-specific narrative effects via reflexive strategies and
interactivity.
This paper argues that despite outward appearances (simple graphics and limited animated
movement), Flash can engage an audience in more complex relations with the text through active
participation (via interactive functions and reflexive representations) than more passive modes of
reception (often associated with high-end realist animations). Similar to comic art, Flash
animations are able to activate imagination in the audience by offering representational cues
rather than providing an immersive experience; in distancing an audience from the illusion – via
stylised imagery, flattened space, non-naturalistic movement and overt transitions – space is
provided for critical reflection.
Flash has enlivened the medium of 2D animation and empowered a new generation of
animators. It appeals to contemporary audiences (re)discovering the stylisations of 1950s-60s
graphics and to counter-cultures weary of big-budget realism and enjoying the freedom of a new
kind of ‘writing’ – Lawrence Lessig’s ‘to rip, mix and burn’ (2004).
This paper scratches the surface of the Flash phenomenon by considering the machinations of
online Flash animation in its relations with audience. I argue that despite Flash’s outward
simplicity – what Ross Olson details in ‘The Flash Aesthetic’ (2001) as scaling, 2D style, heavy
strokes and motion without cycles – complex relations with audience are possible.
This paper acknowledges the many aesthetic possibilities that are generated by developments
in Flash software, including efforts towards a ‘fuller’ animation. However, it focuses on, and
celebrates, the visual features more commonly associated with the software, and identified above
as the ‘Flash aesthetic’ – that is, Flash as ‘limited animation.’
Limited vs Full Animation

We are all aware of the drive towards realism that has informed and motivated the technology
of animation. Disney figured prominently in efforts towards a realist aesthetic that some argue
brought animation closer to the public but further from its unique potential:
In later years, Disney’s ‘realism’ became more and more dominant … many sequences became
minute, decorative copies of reality, breaking the basic unwritten rule of animation never to
challenge live-action cinema in its own territory. (Bendazzi, Giannalberto 1994, 65)
The most recent manifestations of this are, of course, high-end photorealist 3D CGI productions.
We also know that from the very beginning of film, a stream of anti-illusionist animated cinema
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can be identified that – in exploring imagery, movement and sound beyond the reach of the live-
action camera – has been celebrated by many for its expression as, or at least proximity to, ‘pure
animation.’ In a history of figurative animation perhaps this stream’s best-known examples are
the limited animations of the UPA studio and the Zagreb school.
However, despite this critical acclaim, limited animation’s reputation has waxed and waned. In
the 1960s, in its association with cheap animated productions for TV, limited animation was
dismissed as the animated equivalent of fast-food, paling in comparison with the visual feasts of
the big-budget feature:
TV is such a monster. It swallows up all this animation so fast that nobody seems to care whether it’s good or
bad. These kids’ shows are badly done technically; it seems as though nobody really looks at them but the kids.
(Friz Freleng in Solomon, Charles 1989, 229)
More recently, in its easy fit with the mechanics of the web, its accessibility and affordability,
Flash has reinvigorated limited animation so that its graphic charms are feted once more. Yet,
beyond this aesthetic appeal, Flash animations can be seen to differentiate themselves from realist
works in offering the potential for significant relations with audience via interactivity and
reflexivity. Whilst realist works offer illusion and spectacle that generates passive escapism, Flash
animations offer both active engagement and a critical distance that opens a space for audience
participation.
Flash and Interactivity

Interactive Flash animations offer an audience the chance to engage directly with the text;
designs may be customised, narratives navigated, actions activated, and dialogue posted. As a
departure from the passive modes of traditional viewing, this is a significant aspect of Flash
animations. However, this interactivity is common to and perhaps even exploited further in 3D
CGI realist modes that boast enhanced narrative participation. The interactivity in these mimetic
realities facilitates an immersive experience so that participants feel as if they are within the story
as first person players or in the form of avatars. Yet, enveloped as they are in these fictive worlds,
this paper questions whether a critical distance for the ‘reader’ is at risk, such that sensorial
experience overshadows considered reflection.
Interactive Flash animations, on the other hand, offer the possibilities of direct engagement
with the text, while clearly maintaining the distinction between text and reader. Moreover, they
preserve a creative space in which the audience ‘completes’ the narrative, by improvising,
personalising and responding to the graphic narrative cues.
Reflexivity and the Comic(s) Comparison

Christopher Stapleton and Charles Hughes (2003) relate that ‘Hemingway once compared a
good story to an iceberg. He believed that a book represents only the tip of the iceberg and that
three-quarters of the story is “beyond the page”‘ (12) – that is, in the reader’s mind. The
representational cues embodied in simple graphics, flattened space and limited movement in
many Flash animations serve a similar function, leaving space ‘below the surface’ for the
activation of imagination and creative response as audiences join the dots, complete the illusion,
and make the narratives their own.
Chris Lanier (2000) compares Flash animation with the (printed) comic, celebrating the
creativity engendered because of, not despite, the limitations of the form.
The most profound ‘liberation’ effected by the limitations of Web animation is the removal of the
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burden of spectacle. … Comics (and Flash animations) are a profoundly collaborative medium.
[They] draw you into an imagined world through the efficacy of ‘closure.’
In Understanding Comics (1993), Scott McCloud describes the ‘gutter’ (or interval between
panels) as the space in which the reader enacts closure. In seeking narrative continuity, the
audience closes this gap, thereby entering into the story telling process and creating personalised
meaning.
McCloud offers an example by way of a 2-panel comic sequence, the first of which depicts a
panicked individual, with assailant in the background, axe held aloft. The second panel offers a
wide shot of a darkened city skyline with the letters ‘EEYAA!!’ splattered across the sky. ‘I may
have drawn an axe being raised … but I’m not the one who let it drop, or decided how hard the
blow, or who screamed, or why. That, dear reader, was your special crime, each of you
committing it in your own style’ (1993, 66).
McCloud is discussing the gap between panels, which, for the comic, facilitates narrative time.
Yet Flash animations, although endowed with the dimension of time in motion, can be seen to
engage an audience in similar ways. When Flash animations do not attempt to mimic reality via
realistic imagery, natural movement, or seamless continuity, the comic’s imaginative gap is
activated. McCloud’s gutter is evident, albeit in a conceptual sense, between both (stylised) image
and (limited) animated movement and their references in the natural world, and in transitions
from scene to scene. In a reflexive sense, attention is drawn to the constituents and mechanics of
the text; audiences are asked to invest life in overtly inanimate forms, and to collaborate with the
text (and author) in creating narrative coherence.
In such animations, the evocative potential of the written word (think Hemingway’s icebergs)
is retained via imagery and sequences that (like comics) hover somewhere between the iconic (a
relationship of resemblance between the image and what it refers to) and the symbolic (a
conceptual relationship between the image and its referent) (Saraceni, Mario, 2003, 13-33);
indeed, the incorporation of written text in many Flash animations emphasizes this symbolic
facility. Interactive Flash animation makes no claims to stand in for reality but, as Matthew T.
Jones explains, once again in relation to the comic:
through the use of reflexive strategies, authors and readers (of comic art) are able to contextualize the narrative
act and experience an approximation of intimacy or closeness by making clear the link between the (comic) text
and the outside world in which it was born, and of which it is a part. (2000, 20, my emphasis)
This approximate relationship between symbol and referent (between stylised 2D image and
idea) allows space for individual interpretation and inflections, albeit within the bounds of visual
and narrative conventions. Visual metaphor, abstract notions, suggestion, implication, inference,
ambiguity are given space to expand; the gap is left open for imaginative response, and less
conjures more.
Besides this creative space between image and idea, the other kind of gap which can be
appreciated in many interactive Flash animations is from scene to scene. As the reader activates
buttons to prompt changes of scene and progression through the story, her agency is required to
suture the scenes on both a physical and imaginative level. Unlike virtual environments in which
the illusion of a continuous unfolding of space (and time) is relatively seamless (usually via
simulated hand-held camera), Flash interactives are generally progressed via a more overt
application of classic cinematic transitions (wipes, cuts, dissolves, or rudimentary zooms). These
reflexive devices ask that we create such closure in our ‘mind’s eye’ – and ‘beyond the page.’
86
Mention also needs to be made of this overt employment of narrative transitions in drawing
attention to the constructed and subjective processes of storytelling through animation (or any
other medium for that matter). When audiences are made consciously aware of the grammar of
film, literacy is enhanced, so that participants are not only placed in a position of complicity (as
discussed above) but they are also empowered in the tools of creating their own filmic narratives.
Simon Norton’s Testimony: A Story Machine, ‘an interactive comic strip’, is a fine example of
an online animation that exploits the interactive and graphic possibilities of Flash. By clicking on
a central character (innocuously chomping on a sandwich), further frames are generated across
the screen inviting a reading from left to right, as per a comic (or storyboard). This sequence
indicates an event – a figure falling from a building behind the central character.
Upon further movement of the cursor however, each frame is seen to be active, and it is from
here that Norton’s world opens up for us. By clicking on any of the frames, different sequences
(stories) can be generated across the screen, and by continued clicking on the one panel, a
narrative ‘thread’ can be followed sequentially into the screen, resulting in endless narrative
combinations across both planes. There appears to be no one set (logical) narrative sequence that
underlies these improvisations. Rather Norton provides prompts for endless invention; time and
space is teased out in an overtly reflexive manner. Participants invest in their ‘narratives’ in three
ways: across the story (closing the comic gutter), into the space (seeking cinematic continuity) and
by attributing life to the simple graphic symbols of the ‘Flash aesthetic’; their engagement is
active, conscious and creative. Physical and conceptual space is left open for play.
Although Norton’s animation is more or less an experiment in interactive narrative, with no
ambitions for a classic narrative arc in evidence, its graphic style, limited animation and
interactive aspects make explicit the potential of the Flash aesthetic when applied to more
conventional interactive narratives.
The Case for Children

There is much literature about the possibilities of interaction (and immersion) in a learning
context for children. Authors such as Krystina Madej urge creators to exploit the potential of new
media for meaningful content rather than shy away with preconceptions regarding its present use:
Rather than seeing the immersive and compelling qualities of computers and video games as
negatives, it is encumbant on us to study these qualities and use the information to create equally
immersive and compelling digital narratives that will help children understand and cope with the
world. (2003, 15)
Certainly the rewards of active involvement in meaningful texts for children are clear (and well
documented): greater sustained attention, greater investment in the narrative, greater learning
and retention, and yes greater immersion in story – yet this paper argues for immersion in the
more traditional sense as fostered by 2D presentations: the knowing suspension of disbelief in
imaginative worlds of our own making.
87
Immersion in virtual worlds – particularly photo-realistic virtuality – encourages a heightened

experience but is it not an experience which potentially squeezes out the child’s attempts at
effecting (imaginative) closure? In its prescriptive representations, is not the child’s act of
enlivening visual symbols encumbered? Is not contemplative space (a fast-fading phenomenon)
edged out in the act of so much hands-on against the clock haste?
Research thus far has revealed not a lot in the way of engaging online 2D interactive stories for
kids. Madej claims that a lot of work is failing to exploit the possibilities of new technologies;
older formats (static image and text) are clung to, with very little in the way of genuine interaction
beyond page turning. The few exceptions in evidence point to great opportunities in the way of
engaging children in imaginative and educational narratives.
Two websites which begin to exploit such possibilities are Starfall, specialising in teaching
comprehension and phonics via online books and activities, and Nickjr, which complements and
extends Nickelodeon’s television presentations. In stories like Peg the Hen (which features the
short letter sound of ‘e’), Starfall’s audiences drive narratives based on simple causality and
incorporating bold naïve imagery. Children are given space and time to learn at their own rate, as
they curse over the letters of the text, each generating their respective phonetics. They can revisit
and repeat text, go forward or back in the story; they can personalise experience and effect
change by customising characters with choice of colour, by dressing characters, and with
rudimentary intervention in the character’s actions.
Nickjr’s Rumble, Grumble, Gurgle, Roar, an online story by Jonny Belt and narrated by
Whoopi Goldberg, is set in the North Pole and aimed at an older audience. Children can once
again dictate the pace of the story; they might linger a while and chip off some more melting
icicles (an environmental message?) or click on the central penguin character to generate more
hungry sounds from its belly. As in the previous example, imagery is simple and flat, animation is
rudimentary, and written text is incorporated. In both cases, children are able to drive the
narrative, play, seek closure, and importantly flesh out the reality/fantasy of the story actively and
in their imagination.
A third case study incorporates both 2D and 3D platforms in its interactive narrative. F.
Garzotto and M. Forfori describe their FaTe (Fairy tales and Technology) and FaTe2 projects as
designed to exploit ‘storytelling, edutainment, and collaborative interaction (as) powerful
paradigms to promote learning in young kids’ (2006, 113). They suggest that FaTe2 offers a
‘combination of these paradigms by providing a web based, multi-user, two and three dimensions
virtual space where children (aged 7-11) can meet, chat, explore, play, and perform storytelling
activities in collaboration’ (2006, 113).
Similar to other self-directed narratives for children, the structural elements of traditional
narrative (initiating event, subjective response, objective response, consequence, reaction) are
maintained for their learning potential and perceived resonance with the human condition;
variance (participant input) is made possible within each narrative component. What is of interest
to this paper is that the 2D presentation is employed for the presentation of story, whilst 3D
space allows for tangential exploration and collaborative input within a narrative component. It
would seem that, for the FaTe2 project, the Flash platform is deemed appropriate to the abstract
schema of story, providing conceptual space for its contemplation (of narrative ‘components’;
their causal implications, and personal relevance) whilst the 3D platform provides physical
‘doing’ space for encountering simulated objects, for engaging with others, for posting story
ideas, and for collaborating.
88
Conclusion
This paper has argued that despite the apparent simplicity of Olsen’s ‘Flash Aesthetic’, it is
exactly the limited nature of much animation created in Flash which enables complex relations
with an audience. In comparison to more traditional modes of passive reception, the Flash
Aesthetic’s stylised forms, strong outlines, bold flat colours and limited movement, invite
participants to effect narrative closure in a creative relationship with the text. In interactive online
narratives created in Flash, agency for the reader is twofold: via this reflexive nature of aesthetics
and form, and through manual participation in the text (interactive buttons).
Although developments in Flash have pushed the software towards wider applications that
include more realist imagery and fuller animation, it is the more emphatically 2D flash animations
that are being celebrated here. Flash animations that employ pared-down imagery, that use
limited means of movement and rudimentary transitions, exploit the creative potential of
McCloud’s comic gutter and thereby invite an audience into a collaborative production of
meaning; meaning that is personalised and individual. Alternatively, narratives that immerse the
participant in realist imagery, full animation and seamless continuity (be they 2D or 3D driven)
risk closing this (imaginative) gap so that individual inflections are fettered; experiential spectacle
leaves little space for imaginative play and speculation.
A full debate on the relative merits of immersive animation is beyond the scope of this
discussion; this paper does not deny the huge potential of the virtual world, rather, it suggests
that amidst the pursuit of more fully realised interactive animated spaces, we should not overlook
the imaginative possibilities of more simply rendered reflexive realities. In the case of children,
let’s allow them to flex their imaginations, let’s encourage their appreciation of abstract ideas
(and stylised imagery) and their ability to apply the conceptual to their individual realities; let’s
leave room for their enacting closure.
By experiencing a good story well told, we create our own immersive environments, with
details unrivalled by electronic media. We are able to see the anxiety in faces, we can hear the
excitement in voices, we can smell the food in kitchens, we can feel the hairs on the back of our
neck react to scary situations. Technological additions should complement the immersion already
present in the human system. 
References
Bendazzi G. (1994) Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation, London: John Libbey &
Co.
Brooks, K. (n.d.) ‘There is Nothing Virtual about Immersion: Narrative Immersion for VR and
Other Interfaces’, alumni.media.mit.edu/~brooks/ storybiz/immersiveNotVirtual.pdf
(accessed May 2007).
Garzotto, F. and Forfori, M. (2006) ‘FaTe2: Storytelling Edutainment Experiences in 2D and 3D
Collaborative Spaces’, portal.acm.org/citation (accessed May 2007).
Jones, M. T. (2006) ‘Running Head: Reflexive Comics: Reflexivity in Comic Art’
http://mattsmediaresearch.com/pdfs/ReflexivityInComicArt.pdf (accessed May 2007).
Lanier, C (2000) ‘The Aesthetics of Internet Animation’, Animation World Magazine, Issue 5.05,
August 2000.
Lessig, L. (2004), Free Culture: How Big Media uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down
Culture and Control Creativity, Penguin, New York.
McCloud, S. (1993) ‘Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art’, Harper Collins, New York.
89
Madej, K. ‘Towards Digital Narrrative for Children: From Education to Entertainment: A

Historical Perspective’, ACM Computers in Entertainment, vol 1, No 1, Oct 2003.
Olson, R (2001) ‘The Flash Aesthetic’, http://alistapart.com/ (accessed May 2007).
Saraceni, M. (2003) The Language of Comics, Routledge, London.
Solomon, C. (1989), Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation, Alfred A. Kknopf, New
York.
Stapleton, C. and Hughes, C. (2003) ‘Interactive imagination: Tapping the emotions through
interactive story for compelling simulations’, in Computer Graphics and Applications, Sept.-
Oct, vol 23,issue 5, 11-15
Visual references
Still from Testimony: A Story Machine, animation, Simon Norton – sourced from
http://www.myballoonhead.com/home.html (accessed June 2007)
Websites
http://www.myballoonhead.com/ (accessed June 2007); ‘Nickjr’, http://www.nickjr.com/
(accessed June 2007); ‘Starfall’, http://www.starfall.com/ (accessed June 2007): Scratching
the Surface of Online Animated Narratives
© Peter Moyes
90
Cathryn Vasseleu
The Svankmajer Touch
I am a hand with six fingers with webs in between. Instead of fingernails I have petite,
sharp, sweet-toothed little tongues with which I lick the world.
JAN ŠVANKMAJER, SELF-PORTRAIT, 1999 (2002, 6)
Jan Švankmajer’s animated films are renowned for their tactile dimensions. Heads devour one
another in devastating conversations, objects collide painfully with mismatched intentions, lovers’
bodies melt into one in a tender embrace (Dimensions of Dialogue, 1982). A master at extending
filmic experience to include tactile as well as audiovisual sensations, Švankmajer also offers us a
unique vision of the communicative powers of touch. We can draw this insight out if, instead of
observing Švankmajer as a filmmaker whose movies work at a tactile level, we regard him as a
Czech Surrealist for whom touch is indispensable. Although Švankmajer is best known for his
films, the vitality of touch in his creative practice is most apparent in a range of static artworks
and poems made during a period (1974-1983) in which he experimented intensively with tactile
experience.
Commentators have made reference to this interlude when noting how touch is integral to
Švankmajer’s films. However, film/animation scholars have not studied the tactile experiments as
artworks in their own right, nor has their intrinsic value to the artist been analysed in detail.
Naturally enough, film/animation scholars are more interested in observing the application of his
tactile experiments in his films. If, however, we focus on Švankmajer’s turn from film to tactile art
(instead of the other way round) we discover a more remarkable objective. In his tactile
experiments Švankmajer animates with touch, in the same way as he animates with a camera (or a
pen, or a puppet). His aim is to liberate tactile perception as a means of poetic expression.
Švankmajer’s experiments with tactilism

In the 1970’s, a few years after the Soviet Union put an end to the progressive communist
government of Czechoslovakia, Švankmajer stopped making films and turned instead to
experimenting with tactile art. There is a simple explanation for what motivated this shift in
Švankmajer’s creative focus. He had been banned from working as a cinema director. First, his
politically satirical short film Leonardo’s Diary (1972) was denounced in the Czech Communist
newspaper. Then, after attacks on his next film, The Castle of Otranto (1973-1979), by the
internal censor at Krátký Film, he resigned after the film-shoot. He was unable to direct his own
films again until 19791.
Švankmajer had previously worked in live and puppet theatre (the Theatre of Masks and the
Lanterna Magika Puppet Theatre), and as a artist and writer. Now, in collaboration with artist
Eva Švankmajerová, he worked with graphics, ceramics, everyday objects and poetry. The pair
made collages, art implements, ‘natural history’ cabinets, ‘tactile’ scenarios and portraits. Most of
the pieces were made between 1974-1983 (mainly 1977-1978), and Švankmajer continued making
tactile art after he returned to making films again. The name they gave to all these artworks was
‘tactile experiments.’
1
See Michael Brooke’s interview with Švankmajer (Brooke 2007). The Castle of Otranto was eventually cleared for distribution in 1979. Most
filmographies indicate that the film was made between 1973-1979, which would suggest that Švankmajer did in fact make a film during the period.
I was alerted to the need to explain this otherwise puzzling discrepancy by an anonymous reviewer’s comment about the confusion over the film’s
production date, for which I thank them
91
Švankmajer published a book, Hmat a Imaginace [Touch and Imagination], documenting his
and several other artists’ tactile experiments.2 In 1970 the Švankmajers had joined the subversive
Prague-based Czech Surrealists group. The tactile experiments began in 1974 as a collaborative
game, called ‘Restauráteur’ [Restorer], which Švankmajer devised for members of this group. The
game began with a newspaper photograph of an art restorer at work, chosen by Švankmajer.
Švankmajer presented the participants in the game with a tactile interpretation he had made of
this photograph, which the participants had not seen. Participants were asked to manually
explore the artwork, which was hidden under a cloth, and list the items they identified, along
with their first impressions of them. Each participant was asked to create a visualized impression
of Švankmajer’s artwork. Participants then described their tactile impressions as associations,
analogies and an imagined whole. Finally, the participants were asked to figure out which one of
a group of photos they were shown was Švankmajer’s model for the tactile interpretation. Most of
the participants found it difficult to choose only one picture; they saw analogies with their own
interpretations in many of them.
The primary purpose of the game was to study the extent to which touch is capable of
stimulating associative thinking and becoming an imaginative stimulus, as opposed to touch
having a merely identifying or utilitarian function. Švankmajer was also curious to compare tactile
perception and visual perception of an artwork. His conclusion was that touch, in the sphere of
art, is a sense unruled by convention. As such, it is difficult to imagine its confinement to any
purely aesthetic, or formally determined purpose. Equally though, Švankmajer was convinced by
his ‘Restorer’ experiment that tactile objects could express feelings objectively just as well as
words, colours or shapes could describe them (Švankmajer, 1994: 36). If Surrealism is directed at
the restoration of universal powers of irrational thought, emotion and perception, then
Švankmajer sought to demonstrate that tactile experience, as poetry, restores access to them.
Fig. 1 & 2 - Tactile lids, 1978 (Švankmajer 1994;

reproduced by courtesy of J. Švankmajer)
Švankmajer then embarked on an exploration of sources of tactile creativity. These included

erotica, childhood tactile memories, tactile dreams, and other stimuli of tactile experience. He
devised various techniques for stimulating imaginative tactile experience, observing that although
hands are the most communicative organs of touch, they are not the most sensitive or excitable:
2
Hmat a Imaginace (1994) includes artworks and poems that Jan Švankmajer and Eva Švankmajerová created between 1974-1983, as well as
works from after that time. It was preceded in by a samizdat (five copy) edition with a ‘tactile’ cover in 1983. There is no published English
translation of the book, apart from English and French translations of some fragments that are included in the Czech edition, and some that are
published in Afterimage, 13 (Autumn), 1987: 4-67. I have been fortunate to have access to an English translation by Stanley Dalby, which, at the
time of submission of this article we are in the process of editing, with revisions by Jan Švankmajer, for publication.
92
‘It is the “passive” parts of our bodies, and their connections to the entire surface, cavities,
internal organs and mucous membranes, which act as a link to our most intensive sensory
experience’ (Švankmajer 1974: 43).
Fig. 3 & 4 - Arcimboldo Elements Game, 1990

(Švankmajer 1994; reproduced by courtesy of J.
Švankmajer)
Fig. 5 (below) - Utilitarian bondage (tactile chair), 1977
(Švankmajer 1994; reproduced by courtesy of J.
Švankmajer)
Švankmajer also experimented with ‘tactile’ hand gestures, realised in the form of sculptures
and poems. During the creation of any such artwork, he stipulates that there should be a
discharge of accumulated emotional tensions, through gestures that express the creator’s
psychical state. Unlike gestural painting however, these works were created without the
mediation of instruments such as brushes or scrapers (Švankmajer 1994: 191). In the process of
making gestural sculptures, Švankmajer literally thrusts and squeezes his pent-up emotions into
the clay.
These objects are created by hand gestures
that are made without seeking analogical
structures that correspond to our feelings
(Švankmajer and Švankmajerová 1998 :74). In
other words, they are fossilized impressions
made by injections of emotion that can pass
directly into our own psyches and affect or
animate us too, rather than passive, repre-
sentational artworks. As in the case of rub-
bings of objects made with pencil and paper
(frottage), which Švankmajer has also ex-
perimented with (Švankmajer 2004: 84), the
artist’s hand becomes the ‘medium’ of an
intertwined external and inner reality coming
into being.
Švankmajer makes some qualifying re-
marks about the visual reproduction of tactile
artworks, which apply to the images that are
reproduced here. Tactile perception involves
a gradual exploration of the tactile art object,
which entails seeking out elusive identifiable
connections. In a visual representation, a
viewer can immediately appraise the tactile
93
artwork as a whole, including making formal judgements about its aesthetic qualities (Švankmajer
1994: 26). In making this observation Švankmajer asserts that time, movement and interaction
play an essential role in the tactile perception of objects. We experience this directly in works
such as The Reverse Side of Touch (1978), and Game of Cunnilingus (1990).
Instructions for touching: First have a careful look at the drawing. Select a place from which to
begin and start touching. Gently place fingers on the starting point, close your eyes and set off on
a journey from memory. The whole way keep repeating in your mind: ‘ I will never see this again.’
(Švankmajer 1994: 168; trans. Gaby Dowdell.) The aim is to push the ball with the tongue into
the furry hollow as fast as possible.
Švankmajer made many observations about
touch and visual perception in his tactile
experiments. These, in turn, enabled him to
convey tactile impressions using cinematic
means. Having studied touch in isolation,
without the influence of visual perception, he
also observed the ways touch merges with
sight in everyday perception. He was struck
by the extent to which the feeling of an object
can be ‘visualized,’ and the intensity with
which this occurs in some forms of psychosis.
Having become attuned to the evident cross-
over of sensory experience at play in touch-
vision, Švankmajer supposed that the
connection between the two senses made it
possible to transmit tactile impressions
though sight (Švankmajer, in Brooke 2007).
Although Švankmajer gives prominence to
touch in his earlier films, the tactile
experiments are widely recognised as having
Fig. 6 - Animated Gesture, 1990 (Švankmajer 1994;
reproduced by courtesy of J. Švankmajer) an important influence on his later films
(Hames 1995: 1; Jackson 1997: 3; Wells 1997:
181; Brooke 2007). Nevertheless, the reason why the artist would make tactilism the focus of his
creative practice during the seven year break in his filmmaking career is not immediately apparent
from such observation. (Nor does it explain why Švankmajer continued to make tactile artworks
after being permitted to resume filmmaking). Švankmajer acknowledges this himself when asked
how film and the tactile fit together. He says, ‘At first glance it may seem paradoxical. After all,
film is an overwhelmingly audiovisual form’ (Švankmajer 1994: 234). Even so, Švankmajer was
determined to make use of his discoveries about touch when he returned to making animated
films, and there can be no doubt he succeeded in making the transition. Eruptions of tactile force
became an integral part of Švankmajer’s idea of filmic experience.
Underlying any observable continuity between Švankmajer’s tactile and film works is his
adherence to Surrealist principles. This is the clearest motivating factor in his turn to tactilism.
Švankmajer explores tactile sensation as an implement for realising the imagination. As Vratislav
Effenberger, a leading theorist within the Czech Surrealist group, observes: ‘Like his objects and
collages which through film strive for a temporal and spatial continuity, at least two dimensional,
his imagination demands the expansion of the field of sensory perception to live more and more
94
on the dynamics of reality, to reach its universal

integrity’ (Effenberger in Švankmajer 2004: 67-
68). Thus we can observe in the tactile artworks
that Švankmajer credits physical objects, words
and images with the energy and ability to
communicate with equally forceful, psychical
impact as live actors or animated characters.
He was able to build on his tactile experiments
in his filmic practice because he understood
them both as co-extensions of his fascination
with psycho-sensory dynamics. This occurs, for
example, in The Fall of The House of Usher
(1980). In the film, Švankmajer evokes Usher’s Fig. 7 - The Reverse Side of Touch (tactile drawing), 1978
spiritual descent into a state of insanity, which (Švankmajer 1994; reproduced by courtesy of J.
is communicated in an animated sequence of Švankmajer)
tormented gestures forced into clay (Švankmajer 1994:195). Conveyed in the tactile ‘torture’ of
yielding matter is the reality of Usher’s inner world.
Despite Švankmajer determination to make films that are visually and aurally ‘tactile,’ he
doesn’t think of himself as an ‘animated film-maker,’ or even as a ‘film director.’ Film is just one
medium among many that he uses in his art. When pressed to name his calling, Švankmajer says
he considers himself to be a poet: ‘If I should say it in a slightly exaggerated way, I would say I
consider myself to be a poet. There is only one poetry, and whichever tools or methods you use,
poetics is all one’ (Švankmajer 2006). His reference to poetics alludes to his location within
Surrealism as a broad artistic movement.3 Aiming to transform their powers of vision, the first
surrealists referred to themselves as poets, or seers who are said to work with eyes turned
inwards. As graphically depicted in the legendary eye-ball slitting scene of Bunuel’s and Dali’s Le
Chien Andalou (1928), vision must cut through the visible to become a conduit to the inner
realities of madness, dreams and the unconscious4. Likewise, Švankmajer’s first feature film, Alice
(1988), based on Lewis Carroll’s book, Alice in Wonderland, opens with the instruction: ‘Now you
must close your eyes, otherwise you will see nothing!’ The deliberate excision of the visible in this
way frees sight from its outward alignment with rationality. By means of this ‘opening,’ we enter
the dreamworld of Alice, in accord with André Breton’s understanding of waking and dreaming
as ‘communicating vessels’ (Breton 1990). We also enter, following Švankmajer, into the domain
of touch as extravisual experience (Dryje, in Švankmajer 2004: 9).
3
For more on Švankmajer’s connection with both surrealism and Czech surrealism see Peter Hames’ interview with him (1995: 101-14). An
extended interview is also included in the forthcoming The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer: Dark Alchemy (Hames 2008), which I have not yet sighted.
For an account of the Czech and Slovak surrealists’ approach to their more recent cultural circumstances see Solarik (2005) and Michael Brooke’s
interview with Švankmajer (2007). For an English language survey of Czech and Slovak surrealist art see the ‘Anthology of Czech Surrealism’
published serially in Analogon, 37-43 (2003-2005).
A brief background note on the interconnections between Czech surrealism and another movement, Czech poetism, is also in order here. In the
1920s, Devêtsil, a loosely aligned, prominent group of artists, writers and architects within the Czech avant-garde, took poetism as its creed.
Poetism was an attitude, or a style of living, that celebrated the ludic spontaneity of modern life in a way that put paid to previous, artistically
drawn boundaries between art and life. Karel Teige, a prominent theorist and art critic of the interwar Czech avant-garde, is an important figure in
this regard. Teige penned ‘The Poetist Manifesto’ in 1924 (and a second one in 1928). Poetism and surrealism existed in dialogue with each other
for a while. In 1934 one of poetism’s main practitioners, the poet Vitêzslav Nezval founded the Czech surrealist movement, which Teige also
joined. For more writing in English language about the practitioners of Czech poetism and its relationship to other European interwar avant-garde
movements see Bydžovská (2003), Zusi (2004), Thomas (2005) and Bronislava Volek’s review article of Vladimir Müller’s Der Poetismus,
München: Otto Sagner, 1978 (1980).
4
Surrealist photography is crowded with images in which sightless women embody this principle (Lassalle 1987).
95
For Surrealists, poetry resides in the

plasticity of literal meaning. Švankmajer’s
poetics also lie in the interruptions, fissures,
discontinuities and figures of exteriority that
characterise the plasticity of alchemic
transformation. Alchemy seeks for means of
transmutation (the key to changing base
metals into pure gold). In the Czech Sur-
realist’s view: ‘alchemy is about trying to
connect things that you cannot connect, that
are “un-connectable.” Poetry is a parallel for
alchemy, and alchemy is a parallel for poetry’
(Švankmajer, interviewed by Jackson 1997: 8).
Thus we can understand that Švankmajer is
saying he is the alchemist-poet of objects, sen-
sory modes and realities that are capable of
metamorphosis on every level.
If Surrealism invests cinema with the
power to perform the transition from one
reality-state to another – unanchoring sounds
and images from their referents (Levi 2006:
Fig. 8 - Game of Cunnilingus, 1990 (Švankmajer 1994; 110), tactile connection is invested with the
reproduced by courtesy of J. Švankmajer) power to resuscitate memories of illicit
conjunctions. ‘Tactilism,’ an art practice made
famous by the Futurist F.T. Marinetti, was embraced with a competing sensory poetics by
Surrealism. Believing that touch was the most basic and important of all the senses, Marinetti
proclaimed the need to investigate, tabulate and reshape tactile experience according to
harmonious combinations of ‘tactile values.’ Marinetti prophesised that ‘hands would become
organs as knowing as brains, penetrating into the true essence of matter’ (Marinetti 1924,
reprinted in Classen 2005: 332).
Like other Surrealists before him, Švankmajer is critical of Marinetti’s belief in the omni-
potence of scientific progress and aesthetic formulations of touch.5 In his turn to a poetic
tactilism Švankmajer wields tactile sensibility as an unlikely political weapon that slips under the
radar of a State that is more concerned with policing audiovisual mass media. When Švankmajer
returned to filmmaking, he added the evocation of tactile sensations to the emotive arsenal
already available to him in the audiovisual medium. The self-styled ‘militant Surrealist’ of Prague
believes, as Marinetti did, in a fuller grasp of reality that can be achieved through an attentiveness
to touch. However, Švankmajer’s interest in tactilism has a poetic twist that does not adhere to
Marinetti’s inadvertent reassertion of a tactilist metaphysics.6
5
Švankmajer makes numerous comments about Marinetti’s ‘Tactilism’ essay in Hmat a Imaginace, some to the effect that Marinetti is not as
radical in his thinking about touch as the anti-aesthetic stance of the Surrealist poets. This stance is uppermost in Švankmajer’s own assertion of
‘the importance of touch … for the restoration of sensibility that has been so poorly represented in our civilisation’ (Švankmajer 1994: 234).
6
For a sustained argument that touch founds an entire philosophical tradition of haptocentric metaphysics see Derrida (2006). I should emphasize
that I, rather than Švankmajer, read Marinetti’s tactilism as belonging within this tradition. See note 5 above for Švankmajer’s reading.
96
Švankmajer’s tactile art dwells on the textures, temperatures, densities, surfaces and
malleability of objects. This is not intended to simply communicate the physical qualities of
things, or to create a tactile image of a physical object. It aims to free tactility from its utilitarian,
organic functions. Tactile art is a creative tool with no aesthetic objective for Švankmajer. As a
Surrealist, his primary intention is to let the abilities of the imagination loose to flourish freely.
The alchemist-poet aims to create analogies that, taking the route of magical and infantile
regression, achieve satisfaction in accord with a primal pleasure principle. This is a method of
working that Švankmajer devised in his period of tactile experimentation.
Švankmajer’s films are unclassifiable, indiscriminate mixtures of genres: live-action footage,
puppets, drawn animation, montages, claymation and object animations. The ‘undead,’ a
thematic preoccupation of the horror genre, which Paul Wells points out is literally present in the
‘life’ of any animated object (Wells 2002: 4), is transfigured into the ‘inner life’ of fear, anxiety,
and repressed sexual, sadistic, and perverted impulses in Švankmajer’s films. As much as we
might recognise references to our own psyches, Švankmajer is not encouraging us to enter into
anthropomorphic identification with his strange spectacles of vitality. As Maureen Furniss
observes, it is the inner life of inanimate objects, beyond the complexities of human psychology,
that is the real focus of Švankmajer’s animation (2005: 157). Inanimate objects have such a
profound effect on Švankmajer, he even concludes that he must be a necrophile because he
communicates with dead rather than living things!7
The objects of Švankmajer’s tactile experiments are similarly charged with the interdiction of
taboo, awakening repressed memories of the same labyrinthine, mutable reality. Mere connection
transforms tactile sensations that we barely perceive in our everyday lives into fragments of
transgressive poetry: ‘there is a “tactile memory” that stretches back to the most remote corners
of our childhood, from which it bursts out in the form of analogies evoked by the slightest tactile
stimulus or by stirred tactile fantasy. Tactile art thus becomes communicative’ (Švankmajer 1994:
234).
Švankmajer activates the sensory modality of touch to investigate the psychical powers
inherent in ordinary objects. These investigations serve a particular purpose for Švankmajer. The
tactile experiments were a crusade against ‘civilised society’ (Solarik 2005: 5). The Surrealist poet
thinks of his tactile experiments as forceful, defensive measures against the repressive institutions
of civility, and its monstrous political inventions such fascism, totalitarianism and, more recently,
consumerism. Some suggest that Švankmajer’s employment of tactilism as a Surrealist strategy
may be circumscribed in its effectiveness. Michael Nottingham describes it as one of various
‘palliative’ attempts made by the Czech and Slovak Surrealist group to address the same sober
truths that his films do (Nottingham 2004-5: 131).8 However it is more accurate to say that
Švankmajer was determined to pursue his obsession with tactilism, even in the audiovisual
medium of film, convinced that his best weapon to liberate the imagination is the emotive charge
of inner states communicated by tactile analogy.
7
Geoff Andrew quotes Švankmajer, in ‘Malice in Wonderland’ (Time Out 19-26 October, 1988: 17), as saying: ‘Since I communicate with dead
things rather than living people, according to the psychologist Erich Fromm, I am a necrophile’ (Wells 2002: 4).
8
Nottingham does not make this comment critically, but rather to include Švankmajer’s tactilism in his assessment of the Czech Surrealists
generally. Nottingham notes that their emphasis on co-operative group activity and aesthetic interdependence also offers a constructive model for
the concept of the collective, in the face of an individuality that is at the mercy of hostile objects and unseen forces.
97
Animating with touch

The tactile experiments fulfil Švankmajer’s aim to make the creation of tangible connections a
dynamic process of discovery. His ‘restoration’ of the ability to animate objects in this way is one
of Švankmajer’s most remarkable achievements. Indeed, animating with touch is essential to
Švankmajer’s poetic vision in a way that film animation isn’t – or, as he proposes, once wasn’t.
While acknowledging that film animators cannot do without technological tricks and techniques,
Švankmajer also invokes a prior, animistic ability to breathe life into inanimate matter merely by
willpower or magic (Švankmajer 2004: 111). Švankmajer’s objectives are realised more by
alchemic transmutation than the creation of animated illusions: ‘Animators tend to construct a
closed world for themselves, like pigeon fanciers or rabbit breeders. … I never call myself an
animated filmmaker because I am interested not in animation techniques or creating a complete
illusion, but in bringing life to everyday objects’ (Interview in Jackson 1997: 111). We see this in
Švankmajer’s films, where he favours puppets, old toys, mechanised dolls and items in states of
decay (Jackson 1997: 111). Likewise, the static, tactile artworks demonstrate that, in the
metamorphosis of their functions, physical objects have the power to touch and move us in
unexpected ways. Magically altered, they are not inanimate; rather, like words and images, they
have an eloquence that can manipulate human sensibilities.
Švankmajer doesn’t use animation techniques to create illusory motion. He awakens the senses
to animate objects. Film animation is just another alchemical aid to the performance of a magic
ritual in which Švankmajer summons forth the immanent vitality that resides in inert material. He
reveals the mystery of how this happens in the poem ‘The Magic Ritual of Tactile Inauguration’:
‘touch, freed from its practical contexts and constantly realised as an experience, at certain
moments passes through the barrier of its merely identifying existence and without noticing,
begins to speak with the voice of a poet’ (Švankmajer 1994: 235). This capacity for
metamorphosis extends to moving images. Here objects undergo the same metaphoric
transformation that occurs in the tactile art experiments, where they abandon their handy
functions in life to become tactile metaphors for denied memories, emotions, sexual fantasies and
alternate ideologies.
Švankmajer’s work explores the idea that both direct and indirect tactile experience is
mediated by the ‘tactile’ imagination. This is the magical ingredient in Švankmajer’s alchemy. He
cites Merleau-Ponty’s studies of Goldstein’s neurological cases, which discredited the idea that
touch only occurs as a result of direct physical contact, as proof of the existence of ‘tactile
memory’ (Švankmajer1994: 234). The tactile imagination is capable of retaining and transforming
tactile memories into analogies that are charged with psychical intensity. For Švankmajer,
seemingly inert objects have the mutability to arouse this tactile sensibility, which can be recalled
from earliest childhood, and resurfaces in states of extreme emotional agitation.
The meeting of heterogeneous elements in Surrealist assemblages was said to produce an
irrational spark of ‘convulsive beauty.’ The chance meetings of heterogenous elements in
Švankmajer’s assemblages produce a subliminal quiver of surprising reality. Švankmajer
concretises the Surrealist insistence that phantasms are indistinguishable from normal perception.
Irrational as the ‘dialogues’ between his objects may appear, Švankmajer fabricates them in such a
way that audiences can believe that these meetings are really able to happen.9 The uncanny
relationships these unpremeditated exchanges create suspend and alter normal perception.
9
The ‘chance meetings’ are not mere illusions or fantasies. They are governed by a logic that Švankmajer thinks will ensure that the audience has
the feeling of a certain ‘everyday reality’ (Interview in Hames 1995: 110).
98
Echoing André Breton, Švankmajer says: ‘My ambition is to render the audience’s utilitarian
habits unstable’ (Interview in Hames 1995: 110). Rather than serving the utilitarian ethos of
Communist agitational propaganda, Švankmajer alludes to unspeakable fears and primal urges
that conflict with the ideals of ‘civilised’ cultures. He also values the view of the world formed in
childhood as one of the basic sources of creativity. That is why, above all else, the ‘Švankmajer
touch’ is vehemently opposed to the ‘Disney touch,’ a form of illusory realism said to give life to
objects and drawings. Švankmajer’s tactile analogies have the capacity to be frighteningly,
ludicrously, disturbing, but the benign realism of Disney animation is infinitely more alarming.
It’s trademark magic has the capacity to dampen children’s ability to imagine.10
Švankmajer understands the power of touch in terms of poetic metamorphosis. We see this
most clearly in his experiments with tactile perception. Here touch becomes a creative sensory
modality in which the analogous play of objects can, like words, sounds and images, kindle
thoughts, perceptions and emotions. The tactile imagination is the unseen binding/moving force
of Švankmajer’s bifold Surrealist universe. He is fascinated by the memories that physical objects
contain by virtue of their enduring material existence, and their ability to affect us. These
memories awaken the senses to motility within inert matter they would otherwise miss in a
singular universe, ordered only by either movement or stasis.
Švankmajer’s tactile artworks are as playful and erotic as they are perverse and poignant. As
such, their ultimate value lies in their contradiction of any ‘function’ assigned to touch within
socio-cultural, scientific, or political systems or frameworks. Švankmajer is not motivated by a
desire to create artworks in which touch serves an aesthetic purpose, or that extend the usefulness
of haptic perception. Instead, the webbed, tongued, hex-digited hand of the alchemist-poet
restores communication between the material world and occult psychical realities by investing
touch with uncanny, transformative powers. 
References
Breton, A. (1990) Communicating Vessels [1932]. Translated by M. A. Caws and G. T. Harris.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Brooke, M. (2007) ‘Free Radical, Michael Brooke interviewing with Jan Svankmajer’. Vertigo, 3
(5) Spring. http://www.vertigomagazine.co.uk/showarticle.php?sel=bac&siz=1&id=759,
accessed 10.12.2007
Bydžovská, L. (2003) ‘Against the Current: The story of the Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia’.
Papers of Surrealism, 1 (Winter). http://www.Surrealismcentre.ac.uk/publications/
papers/journal3/acrobat-files/lenka.pdf; accessed 10.23.2006
Cherry, B. (2002) ‘Dark wonders and the Gothic sensibility: Jan Svankmajer’s Neco z Alenky
(Alice, 1987)’. Kinoeye, 2 (1). http://www.kinoeye.org/index_02_01.php, accessed
10.20.2006
Classen, C. (ed.) (2005) The Book of Touch. Oxford: Berg.
de Bruyn, D. (2001) ‘Re-animating the Lost Objects d’Childhood and the Everyday: Jan
Švankmajer’. Senses of Cinema, 14. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/
cteq/01/14/Švankmajer.html, accessed 10.23.2005
1 0
Asked by Peter Hames why he described Walt Disney as a leading destroyer of European culture, Švankmajer contends: ‘Disney is among the
greatest makers of ‘art for children.’ I have always held that no special art for children simply exists, and what passes for it embodies either the
birch (discipline) or lucre (profit). “Art for children” is dangerous in that it shares either in the taming of the child’s soul or the bringing up of
consumers of mass culture’ (Švankmajer 2002: 5).
99
Derrida, J. (2006) On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy. Translated by C. Irizarry. Stanford: Stanford

University Press.
Hames, P. (ed.) (1995) Dark Alchemy: The Films of Jan Švankmajer. Westport, Connecticut:
Greenwood Press.
Hames, P. (2002) ‘Bringing up baby: Jan Švankmajer interviewed about Otesánek (Little Otik,
2000)’. Kinoeye, 2 (1).
http://www.kinoeye.org/index_02_01.php, accessed 10.20.2006
Hames, P. (ed.) (2008) The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer: Dark Alchemy . London: Wallflower
Press.
Jackson, W. (1997) ‘The Surrealist Conspirator: An Interview With Jan Švankmajer’. Animation
World Magazine, 2 (3): 1-8. http://www.awn.com/mag/issue2.3/issue2.3pages/
2.3jacksonŠvankmajer.html, accessed 23.10.2005
Lasssalle, H. (1987) ‘The Sightless Woman in Surrealist Photography’. Afterimage, 15 (5), 4-5.
Levi, P. (2006) ‘Doctor Hypnison and the Case of Written Cinema’. October, 116 (Spring), 101-
118.
Nottingham, M. (2004-5) ‘Downing the Folk-Festive: Menacing Meals in the Films of Jan
Švankmajer’. EnterText, 4 (1), 126-150.
Solarik, B. (2005) ‘The Walking Abyss: Perspectives on Contemporary Czech and Slovak
Surrealism’. Papers of Surrealism, 3 (Spring). http://www.Surrealismcentre.ac.uk/
publications/papers/journal3/acrobat_files/Solarik.pdf, accessed 10.23.2006
Švankmajer, J. (1994) Hmat a Imaginace, Taktilní experimentace 1974-1983. Prague: Kozoroh.
Švankmajer, J. (2002) ‘An alchemist’s nightmares: Extracts from Jan Švankmajer’s diary’.
Kinoeye, 2 (1). http://www.kinoeye.org/index_02_01.php, accessed 10.20.2006
Švankmajer, J. (2004) Transmutace smyslů/Transmutation of the Senses, 2nd ed. S. Hoškova, K.
Otcovská and O. Fridlová, eds. English translation by V. žáková and B. Day. Prague:
Pražská /Metrostav.
Švankmajer, J. (2006) ‘”After revolution, the shit!” Jan Švankmajer talks to The Context’. http:
www.thecontext.com/docsi/3804.html accessed November 14, 2006
Švankmajerová, E., and Švankmajer, J. (1998) Anima, Animus, Animace. Prague: Slovart
Publishers, Ltd and Arbor Vitae - Foundation for Literature and Visual Arts.
Thomas, A. (2003) ‘Between Paris and Moscow: Sexuality and Politics in Interwar Czech Poetry
and Film’. Papers of Surrealism, 3 (Spring). http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/
publications/papers/journal3/acrobat_files/Thomas.pdf; accessed 10.23.2006
Volek, B. (1980) ‘Czech Poetism: A Review Article’. Slavic and East European Journal, 24 (2),
155-158.
Wells, P. (1997) ‘Body consciousness in the films of Jan Švankmajer’. In: Pilling, J., ed., A Reader
in Animation Studies. London: John Libbey, 177-194.
Wells, P. (2002) ‘Animated anxiety: Jan Švankmajer, Surrealism and the “agit-scare.”‘ Kinoeye, 2
(1). http://www.kinoeye.org/index_02_01.php, accessed 10.20.2006
Zusi, P. A. (2004) ‘The Style of the Present: Karel Teige on Constructivism and Poetism’.
Representations, 88 ( Fall), 102-124.
Filmography
Alice/Nêco z Alenky (1987) 84m col 35mm. Directed by J. Švankmajer. Switzerland/W
Germany/UK: Condor Film (Zürich)/Hessicher Rundfunk (Germany)/Film Four International
(UK).
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The Castle of Otranto/Otrantský zámek (1973-79) 17m col 35mm. Directed by J. Švankmajer.
Prague: Krátký Film/Jiří Trnka Studio.
Dimensions of Dialogue/Možnosti dialogu (1982) Directed by J. Švankmajer. Prague: Krátký
Film/Jiří Trnka Studio.
Leonardo’s Diary/Leonardův deník (1972) Directed by J. Švankmajer. Prague: Krátký
Film/Jiří Trnka Studio.
The Fall of the House of Usher/Zánik domu Usherů (1980) 15m bw 35mm. Directed by J.
Švankmajer. Prague: Krátký Film/Jiří Trnka Studio.
© Cathryn Vasseleu
101
Miriam Harris
How Michaela Pavlatova both incorporates and rebels
against the Czech animation tradition
Introduction
The Internet’s potential for global shrinkage, electronic travel, and animated transmission is a
technological development that would have left citizens of previous centuries stupefied by such
wondrous demonstrations of magic. Typing in the address for the Czech animator Michaela
Pavlatova’s website transports one as if by sorcery to Prague, and a realm of moving words and
images with a distinctly unique and deliciously demented perspective. Her site embodies an
attitude that seems rather different from the outlook of artists and animators in the English-
speaking West, and while difficult to pinpoint exactly, consists of a mixture of irony, black
humor, a delighting in the absurd and the erotic, yet also a very moving focus upon the intricate
nuances of domestic life and relationships.
Such an irreverent and soulful blend certainly contains a strong universal appeal, and
Pavlatova has received numerous awards and accolades at international film festivals. In 1992, she
was nominated for an Oscar for her animation Words, Words, Words (1991), and in 2006 she
received the equivalent of a Czech Oscar for her most recent animation, Carnival of Animals
(2006). Her particular vision can be seen as both drawing on, and departing from, features that
have come to be associated with the Czech animation tradition. This tradition in the context of
animation history has acquired such an aura of significance and weight that the term seems to be
inscribed in capital letters. Yet Pavlatova is a vital contemporary player on the international
animation scene, and a sure sign that the Czech animation tradition is fluid, rather than a practice
immortalized in stone. She acknowledges her artistic inheritance, but also plays with
expectations, allowing for the injection of new aesthetic and conceptual considerations. Over the
course of this paper, I will explore some examples that reflect this duality, and consider how
Pavlatova incorporates a uniquely female perspective that differs from that of many of her male
artistic elders and peers.
Denotation and Connotation

Relationships between men and women are fertile subjects that frequently appear in
Pavlatova’s animations, and she intertwines dexterously nuanced character animation, utilizing a
variety of visual styles, with symbols and words that are laden with associations. Consequently, in
endeavoring to translate these coded layers, the semiotic theories of Roland Barthes, and his
discussion of denotational and connotational images in the essay ‘Rhetoric of the Image,’ can
offer a valuable decoding device. In my quest to shed light upon the uniquely female perspective
that differentiates Pavlatova’s vision from that of many male animators, I have found that certain
feminist theories, such as Laura Mulvey’s essay ‘Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema,’ which
explores the notion of the spectator’s gaze and the viewing of women in film, help locate the
subjective position within Pavlatova’s animations. However, Pavlatova has proven to be a subject
who defies ready theorization, and this is probably one of the reasons why I like her work so
much. At the very moment when a viewer thinks that the themes or structure of an animation
have become clearly apparent, Pavlatova pursues an unexpected branch in the road. For instance,
in a series of Flash animations that can be viewed on her website about a neurotic heroine called
‘Laila,’ we witness Laila agonizing over whether an unnamed partner is cheating on her; she
102
consoles herself with the thought that ‘He told me they are just friends.’ The tone is one of
intimacy and we empathize with the vulnerable heroine. As a female viewer, I experience a sense
of solidarity with this young woman who has been so viciously betrayed by the callous world of
men. One is therefore thoroughly unprepared for the camera pan to the left that exposes the
identity of her unfaithful partner: a cat who is energetically having intercourse with another feline
companion.
I believe that there is currently only a small cluster of female animators from English-speaking
countries who have introduced the kind of anarchic, black twists to their narratives that one often
encounters in the work of Pavlatova. Part of the reason for this phenomenon could be that the
Western acculturation of women requires an observation of polite rules of etiquette in order to be
‘ladylike’ and therefore attractive to men. The edgy, gutsy humor of Matt Groening, Bill
Plympton, Phil Mulloy and Mike Judge is able to accommodate nudity, farting, burping, sexual
innuendo (and in the case of the independent animators Plympton and Mulloy, explicit sexual
depictions), violence, and leaking orifices, with nary the lifting of an eyebrow, but I believe that
the audience response might involve a greater sense of discomfort if one of these creators was a
female. Pavlatova herself has commented that she could have pushed the sexual content of
Carnival of Animals further, and created less controversy, if she was a male animator. In a 2006
interview she observed that: ‘I think that if a man had made this movie it would be more daring
and more direct’ (Halkova 2006). Pavlatova has therefore employed strategies that involve a
certain veiling of her content, such as symbolism, allegory, and irony, in order to temper the
directness of her message, but such techniques also increase the outlandish humour and delicious
nuttiness within the animation.
Surprising twists in a narrative’s trajectory constitute part of the pleasure derived from
Pavlatova’s animated films; her technique of partial veiling, so that a viewer interacts not only
with the surface of the narrative but also experiences the reverberation of rich layers of meaning,
adds further to the viewer’s enjoyment. In his classic essay ‘Rhetoric of the Image,’ Barthes
analyses an advertisement for Italian pasta, and observes that words in conjunction with images
help anchor their signification, whereas images on their own can trigger a stream of signifieds. In
his analysis of the advertisement, he writes that ‘the distinction between the literal message and
the symbolic message is operational; we never encounter (at least in advertising) a literal image in
a pure state’ (1977, p. 42). Consequently, there is the presented, or ‘denoted’ scene, a photograph
of a string shopping bag with fresh produce, but also a variety of connotative signs whose reading
depends on ‘the different kinds of knowledge – practical, national, cultural, aesthetic – invested
in the image’ (Barthes 1977, p. 46), so that a viewer’s awareness of the tomato and pepper as vital
ingredients within Italian cooking, will have their notion of the image’s ‘Italianicity’ augmented.
Barthes adds that ‘the denotation of the drawing is less pure than that of the photograph, for
there is no drawing without style’ (1977, p. 43).
Barthes’ observations are extremely helpful in understanding why Pavlatova’s imagery is so
resonant, creating a rich stream of associations for the viewer. In Carnival of Animals (2006), for
instance, an early sequence deals with the onset of puberty: a group of nervous young girls are
noticing changes in their bodies such as budding breasts, armpit hair that requires shaving, as
well as a newfound interest in the unkempt boys who slouch past them. The characters in this
sequence are drawn with a style that recalls the ‘Art Brut’ and deliberately ‘childlike’ work of
artists such as Jean Dubuffet and the cartoonist William Steig, and thereby accentuates the sense
of childhood’s raw and awkward progression into adulthood. A viewer who has knowledge about
experimental animation and the principles underlying animated movement will find that the next
103
sequence carries a host of connotations, because Pavlatova plunges into a whirlwind of diamond-
like vagina motifs and sausage-shaped penis symbols that speed to and fro across the screen,
chasing each other, like an abstract animation by Len Lye. It is a side-splittingly outrageous
animation joke, and she has even applied the classic animation principle of ‘squash and stretch’ to
the bouncing penises. For the rest of the film, Pavlatova plays with the audience by introducing
unexpected scenarios, a range of drawing styles, images that are the literal embodiment of
linguistic phrases, and sexual innuendo in the most unlikely locations, such as an ejaculating
fountain. The viewer is taken on a journey that defies traditional notions of political correctness,
yet the romp is saved from sleaziness due to the myriad associations evoked. The overall message,
to my mind, is the enjoyment of a variety of sexual scenarios as well as the animator’s sheer
playfulness. Pavlatova says that it is ‘about getting joy from life’ and ‘it is something sparkling, but
which doesn’t stay very long, like a small bottle of champagne.’
A Feminine Language
Contemporary female animators from the English-speaking world with the courage to skate
close to the edge of ‘good taste’ include the British animator Joanna Quinn, the American
animator Suzan Pitt, and Martha Colburn, an American who draws and paints over stretches of
old films, including porn, to create new animated narratives that trigger both unease and
laughter. Colburn’s recent animation Destiny Manifesto (2006), which rhythmically juxtaposed old
painted images of Cowboys and Indians with scenes from the war in Iraq to a haunting,
vaudeville-like piano soundtrack, is a masterpiece, and a biting condemnation of US policy. A
gentler tone however emerges in Pavlatova’s work, through her ability to evoke an extraordinary
range of emotions in her drawn characters, from rage to embarrassment to acute vulnerability.
Pavlatova and Colburn belong to a generation of female animators who face battles in relation to
sexuality and gender that are less overt than the issues that dominated feminist discourse of the
1970s and ‘80s, which included the need for a specifically female language, and the dismantling of
the hegemonic stranglehold wrought by patriarchy.
The twenty-first century has witnessed works by the above female animators that continue to
push boundaries in terms of what is an acceptable feminine creative version. Joanna Quinn’s
recent animation Dreams and Desires: Family Ties (2006) depicted a drunken mess of a wedding,
with her beautiful pencil drawings acquiring the vertiginous shifts and rolls of a hand-held video
camera, and her subject matter paralleling the rollicking randomness of such a camera, with
glimpses of inebriated casual sex, female belching, a toppled crucifix and religious minister, and a
damaged zip revealing extensive naked flesh. Quinn’s subject matter is more the province of a
bawdy, Rabelaisian thwarting of sacred codes, than the assertion of a female erotic gaze, which
was a major concern in her 1987 animation Girls Night Out. In that film, Quinn enjoyably
subverted the traditional male gaze of cinema outlined by Laura Mulvey in her essay Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, so that a hunky male stripper is voyeuristically relished from the
perspective of a group of women, and then later toppled off his cocky perch when one of the
women removes his G-string. However, Quinn’s and Pavlatova’s post-millenium animations,
while having feminist sympathies, contain too many surprises, ambiguities and revelations that
border on the politically incorrect, to easily discuss their work in the context of feminist theory.
Pavlatova’s twists tease us by allowing the completely unexpected to burst upon the familiar, so
that insinuations of bestiality, for example, suddenly appear within a moment of domestic angst,
and in Taily Tales (2001) there is even a bored cat called Norbert who relieves the tedium of his
week by spending a day exuberantly fellating his tail.
104
It could be said that our Western

notions of political correctness have
somewhat bypassed the former Soviet
bloc, but it is now eighteen years since the
‘Velvet Revolution’ restored democratic
rule in Czechoslovakia, and all but two of
Pavlatova’s films have been created with-
out Soviet censors breathing down her
neck. She has also lived for several years in
San Francisco, been a visiting professor at
Harvard University, and a worldly know-
ledge of international art practices informs
her work. I would posit that the rich
Fig. 1 - Michaela Pavlatova: Taily Tales, 2001 legacy of Czech animation is nevertheless
an important influence in the particular
sensibility that infuses her work and differentiates it from her Western peers, and I want to apply
some scrutiny now to the characteristics of this tradition, and Pavlatova’s layering of her
animations with a variety of semiotic codes.
The Czech Animation Tradition

If one examines the work of Jiri Trnka and Jan Svankmajer, two of the great Czech animation
auteurs, features from their oeuvre arise that may be compared and contrasted with those of
Pavlatova. Both Trnka and Svankmajer have worked principally with three dimensional puppets
or objects, whereas Pavlatova has animated different styles of drawing, or interfused drawing with
live action, such as in her film about her grandmother, O Babice (2000), and she has also directed
the live-action feature film, Faithless Games (2003). Svankmajer firmly identifies as a Surrealist
artist, while Pavlatova has declared in the autobiographical documentary This Could Be Me
(1996) that ‘I like the world of ordinary things. Reality can be more interesting than fiction.
Reality and relationships with my parents, with my brother, with my friends, with my grandma,
and relations between the man and the woman.’ In an animated drawing of her face, she
proclaims in a saucy, breathy voice: ‘I like to watch people,’ and continues ‘I like to observe their
faces, to create the stories hidden behind the words.’ This confession that she enjoys voyeuristic
pleasure reveals an artistic stance that can be related to Svankmajer’s interests, but Pavlatova’s
delight in ‘hidden stories’ and the use of images possessing a wide sphere of connotation,
operates within the realm of human interactions and domesticity.
Svankmajer, like Pavlatova, possesses the ability to push the subject matter of his films to the
very edge. Absurdity therefore resounds in each of his films, and in animations such as Food
(1992), where diners eat their clothes and body parts, there is the type of insane black humour
and totally unpredictable narrative trajectory that one relishes in Pavlatova. Sexual symbolism
and fetishism crop up in both Svankmajer’s Conspirators of Pleasure (1996) and Pavlatova’s
Carnival of Animals. As Marina Warner wrote in a recent article in The Guardian, although there
are no explicit sexual references in Conspirators of Pleasure, a conspirator ‘treats himself to an
orgy of stimuli secretly in his garage, where he massages himself with his fabricated utensils’ such
as ‘brushes, bristles, nails, feathers, velvet, fur and rubber fingertips,’ resulting in ‘one of the most
suggestive and filthiest experiences you will ever have the good fortune to see – or rather to feel’
(Warner 2007). While Carnival of Animals features some outlandish scenarios from a
105
conventional perspective – long-beaked birds tweaking the nipples of women while old men
masturbate, a phallus-shaped fountain that ejaculates liquid at the climax of a sequence (see fig.
2) – Pavlatova however, does not regularly couch her animations in the type of extreme situations
that often crop up in Svankmajer, nor do her narratives typically resemble dreamlike fragments.
Fig. 2 - Michaela Pavlatova: Carnival of Animals, 2006
There is always a contrapunctal lightness that balances the darker themes within her
animations, and a focus on human interaction. In this area she can be compared to Trnka, with
his attention to character and nuance, and tender emotions co-exist with darker sentiments in her
sequences. Compared to both Trnka and Svankmajer, Pavlatova’s interests are much more
domestic and personal, and she is fascinated with the emotional motivations behind daily dramas
and small, seemingly banal details.
In tracing the influences upon Pavlatova and Czech animation, it is worth considering the
legacy of decades of Soviet rule and censorship. Although she only made two animations under
Communism, it is interesting to explore to what extent Pavlatova has absorbed the legacy of Czech
animation under the Soviets, and in what ways she departs from this tradition. Chris Robinson
writes that Estonian animation ‘can be characterized by its strange combination of the rational
and absurd’ (2006, vii). Paul Wells, in Understanding Animation, also regards the presence of the
absurd as a defining feature of Eastern European animation, and he links it with the works of
Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco. Wells writes that the absurdists brought ‘a philosophic
dimension to the visual pun,’ and that their outlook sprang from the belief that human beings
were depersonalized by modern society and subjected to mind-numbing systems of oppression
that crippled human potential. Only the spirit of black humor could allow people to live amidst
such bleak conditions, because it recognized ‘the absurdity of ever-repeating patterns of behavior,
and, inappropriate notions of order and routine as they are determined by hierarchical power
structures in society’ (Wells 1998, p. 134).
Black humor certainly is a strong feature within Pavlatova’s animations, and whereas Eastern
European animators under Communist rule used it to vent against insane governmental systems,
in Pavlatova’s work, black humor expresses the insanity of various relationships, whether they are
familial or romantic. She collapses the decorum that surrounds social niceties, revealing the dark
urges within us all, and the truth to Freud’s insight that tendentious humor reveals repressed
drives that are considered taboo. In Uncles and Aunts (1992), for example, animated sepia
photographs with written captions depict family get-togethers, and Vladimir, who has been
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poking his tongue out at the plump Auntie Marushka, finds that she eventually pins his tongue to
the floor with her heavy boot. Grandpa meanwhile turns up in a wheelchair and is greeted with a
birthday cake blazing with candles. Both he and the chair are accidentally incinerated; the family
stands around and pragmatically roasts sausages over the flames.
The German film The Lives of Others (2006) explores the lives of a group of artists in the
former East Germany, and the debilitating constraints imposed by the system and the Stasi secret
police. Czech artists under Soviet rule also faced a severe curtailing of expression, forcing the
writer Milan Kundera and filmmaker Milos Forman into exile, and the work of writers such as
Ivan Klima to be banned for years. Wells notes that such strictures propelled Central and East
European animators towards allegory and metaphor as vehicles for expression, because protest
could be hidden beneath symbolic layers and thereby dodge the censors. Puppets, distanced from
the human form and therefore supposedly innocuous, served as mouthpieces for dissent, as
exemplified in the classic stop-motion The Hand by Jiri Trnka. Jan Svankmajer’s fascination with
the contents of the repressed embraced absurd juxtapositions of childhood motifs, sexuality,
death, and grotesque horror, that also spoke of the traumatization of the individual due to
external forces, and thus can be read as the effects of both political and personal oppression.
There are no longer any Soviet censors scrutinizing the moral fabric of Czech animation, and
these days there is comparative artistic and political freedom. Nevertheless, Pavlatova’s
animations still bear the imprint of the legacy of the past, although it is the sphere of personal
relationships rather than the Communist State that now possesses the power to inflict various
agonies, and in her films, characters rebel against the injustices of lost love, disappointment and
betrayal by using the full repertoire of the Czech animation legacy: black humor, absurdity, and
the use of allegory and images with highly symbolic, connotational capacities. In her 1995
animation Repete, men and women are stuck in a perpetual rut of behavioural problems that
cause a great deal of frustration and misery; a young woman rejects her partner and he
immediately pulls a noose over his head, an elderly woman brings her husband a plate of food at
his desk and he barely notices her.
Pavlatova literalizes the relentless repetition of patterns by repeating the various vignettes of
dysfunctional interaction to a rhythmic percussive beat, so that sound carries a symbolic
resonance. The potential bleakness of such scenes is relieved by some very funny, black moments:
in Pavlatova’s world, animals also experience relationship difficulties, and two worms
passionately kiss and then one slaps the other. The climax of the film depicts all the protagonists
in the animation crossing over into each other’s vignettes, and because they have all been
represented with a variety of visual signatures, a vivid stylistic mélange occurs, and the characters
are symbolically depicted as being from different worlds, but still connected. They finally realize
the destructiveness of their behaviour and try to alter their patterns. But there is no redemptive
happy ending in Repete; rather, some of the couples are able to make positive changes, while for
others the new patterns become just as problematic as the old ones.
The Presence of Words

Pavlatova’s animations Words, Words, Words (1991) and Carnival of Animals (2006) both
exemplify the power of the visual pun that Wells associates with the Eastern European animation
tradition. They also display numerous instances where abstract concepts are concretized; a
feature of Svankmajer and especially Saul Steinberg, a Jewish Romanian artist, whose beautifully
absurd cartoons exploring life in America adorned the pages of The New Yorker magazine for
decades. Steinberg consistently played with the fact that words and images are both signs, which
107
according to the father of semiotics, C.S. Pierce, are presences standing in for absences. Words
are concepts and images, and Steinberg exposed their multidimensional nature in drawings, for
instance, where the word ‘Here’ is depicted as a sculptural object standing some distance from
‘There.’ The linguistic playfulness within Steinberg’s work is present both in Words, Words,
Words and Carnival of Animals. For example, in the latter film the ‘animalistic’ power of the
libidinal drive in Pavlatova’s animation is rather startlingly concretized by the fact that humans
and animals literally joyfully frolic and fornicate together to the music by Saint-Saens. In another
sequence an orgiastic circle of rabbits embodies the vernacular phrase ‘bonking like bunnies.’
Indeed, the interchangeability of words and images can be identified as a consistent feature in
East European animation during the years of Soviet rule. In Jan Lenica’s 1964 animation A, the
letter ‘A’ relentlessly brutalizes a man until he expels it from the room, only to have the letter ‘B’
appear. In Miroslav Kijowicz’s 1966 film Klatki or ‘Cages’, letters represent freedom of thought
rather than oppression: letters appear to form the names of philosophers such as Heidigger and
Sartre. In the Czech animator Bretislav Pojar’s 1981 film, E, the letter ‘E’ acquires such a civic
monumentality, that a man who instead sees the letter ‘B’ is pronounced a lunatic.
Such strategies helped foil the Soviet censors, but they also explore the very nature of
representation and communication, and cultural constructs. In Words, Words, Words, the
English saying ‘to go in one ear and come out the other’, which Pavlatova says has an equivalency
in Czech, is conveyed by a liquid substance that a woman releases by speaking into the ear of an
elderly man, and it reappears on the other side of his head, without his reacting.
The substance’s blue coloration creates a variety of watery connotations in English, such as ‘a
stream of words’ or ‘a torrent of abuse.’ Words, Words, Words is indeed chock-full with examples
of a visual ‘language’ that require the audience’s interaction and interpretation, and the film itself
is a poignant and hilarious study of the human need to interact. Pavlatova’s masterful linework,
her delight in a playful absurdity, and her predilection for conceptual complexity rather than trite
answers, may be compared with the approach of Steinberg, Steig, and the Estonian animator Priit
Parn, and when I suggested this, she said she felt honoured to be included in such company, and
that teachers had shown the work of these artists to her class at university.
Conclusion
Pavlatova might in fact consider my comparison of her animations with certain traits evident in
the Eastern European animation tradition under Communism to be a load of melodramatic
hogwash, an interpretation by an Antipodean outsider, and this is fine, as her films lend
themselves to multiple interpretations. Certainly, there is a warmth and sunniness, coupled with
her sense of irony and black humor, that is quite different from stereotypical Eastern European
angst. In addition, Pavlatova creates female characters that are not just passive playthings for
men, or confined to traditional household tasks as in several of Svankmajer’s films, but
individuals with needs who strive and suffer valiantly. In one of her early animations for instance,
Crossword (1989), a domestic farce unfolds with a woman asserting her sexual needs, only to
despair when her husband busies himself with a crossword puzzle. In Carnival of Animals, a
powerful and poignant sequence depicts a woman in a business jacket and skirt who is clearly
older than the nubile age celebrated by women’s magazines and Britney Spears’ fandoms. This
woman stands confidently in a spotlight while her stockings and clothes slowly glide up and down
her body, and are removed. It is a sensual and moving celebration of female sexuality.
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I find it heartening that in our contemporary culture of reality shows and various quick-fix
narratives devoid of subtlety, the richness of Eastern European animation with its allegorical and
symbolic levels, its philosophical reflection upon the human condition, and its sheer poetry and
lunacy, has not been lost but continues to unfold in the work of animators like Pavlatova. She has
turned her gaze to the nuances of relationships, sex, and the experience of being female, a
perspective that serves to refreshingly expand upon the vista explored by Trnka and Svankmajer.
Czech animation has found a worthy successor to ensure that its vibrant tradition continues. 
References
Barthes, R. (1977). Image Music Text. London: Fontana Press.
Freud, S. (1976). Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. London: Penguin Books.
Halkova, J. (2006). ‘Michaela Pavlatova: an Oscar-nominated Czech animator, Interview with
Michaela Pavlatova’, Czechs Today, [Online] 26 April. Available at: http://
www.radio.cz/en/article/78278
Mulvey, L. (1992). ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’ In Screen (ed) The Sexual Subject.
London & New York: Routledge, pp. 22-35.
Pavlatova, M., Flash animations. Available at: http://www.michaelapavlatova.com/laila/ &
http://www.volny.cz/aamica/tailytales/
Robinson, C. (2006). Estonian Animation: Between Genius and Utter Illiteracy. Eastleigh: John
Libbey Publishing.
Silverman, K. (1984). The Subject of Semiotics. Oxford University Press.
Warner, M. (2007). ‘Dream works.’ The Guardian, [internet] Saturday 16 June. Available at:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2103939,00.html
Wells, P. (1998). Understanding Animation. London: Routledge.
© Miriam Harris
109
Zhi-Ming Su
Reaching Out to Touch
Animation and Aboriginal Children in Taiwan
Introduction
Taiwan aboriginal means the residents who have been living in Taiwan before the immigration
from Mainland China in the seventeenth century. The Council of Indigenous People, Executive
Yuan in 2006 recognized thirteen aboriginal tribes in Taiwan. They are Tayal, Saysiat, Bunun,
Tsou, Rukai, Paiwan, Puyuma, Amis, Yami, Thao, Kavalan, Taroko and Sakizaya. Their
combined population is four hundred and seventy-four thousand people. This constitutes two
percent of the population of Taiwan, distributed throughout the central mountains and the east
coast (Taiwan Aboriginal Tribes 2007).
The living styles of these tribes are grounded by their environments. They make a living from
whatever resources are available. Those living on a mountain live off the mountain by hunting
and farming while those living near the water live off the water by farming and fishing.
All the aboriginal tribes in Taiwan pay attention to ancestral belief. They believe that their
ancestors’ spirits are living high in the mountains. Each tribe has unique memorial ceremonies.
Some of their cultures have fused due to intermarriage or familiarity by shared locations. They
dance and sing for their ancestors to favour them with good health and a substantial harvest the
following year. They perform very well in music, culture, and sports endeavours.
However, the educational system in Taiwan disadvantages indigenous children. They have
education at primary schools and high school generally, but fewer students continue their
learning in higher education. They receive less educational opportunities and resources than
children in the rest of the country, for they are living in the mountains and remote eastern
regions. According to the survey by the Ministry of Education, most of the primary and high
school teachers prefer to teach in the city schools, with some teachers working in the aboriginal
tribes for few years as a passport to another school for teaching. Although all the aboriginal
primary schools are small scale, the allocated educational resources are below the national
average. Often the management strategies and the teaching methods are not beneficial in
furthering traditional tribal values and culture with children. Thus the majority of aboriginal
children learn traditional values and culture from their tribe and family (Aboriginal Education
2007).
Children’s Animation Workshops in the World

The pioneer of children’s animation workshop in the world is Association International du
Film d’Animation (ASIFA). It was established in 1960 in Annecy, France and today the
association has more than thirty chapters, totaling over 3000 members around the world.
The roots of ASIFA Workshop Group go back to 1979. The animation workshop is held
annually over ten days leading to the Annecy Festival. There are over 30 ASIFA children
workshops in the world, where children are supported in making animated films. Every year a
worldwide animation project composed of several territorial children animation workshops is
staged. Instructors are animators from different countries, and some of the productions are
collaborations between several nations, with exchanges of children. New generations are thus
introduced to animation from the inside, whether they advance to become animators themselves,
or become an appreciative audience.
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ASIFA has amassed throughout the years over 400 titles in 35mm and 16mm, and is
transferring them to video for better access to its members. Exchange of both works and
directors is organized between various countries for the benefit of the art of animation.
Educational Animation for Taiwanese Children

The children’s animation workshop in
Taiwan is modelled on the ASIFA work-
shops and has been taught throughout
Taiwan since 2000 as a result of the afford-
able and portable animation technology. The
computer, sound and image software and
digital camera has popularized animation
production in Taiwan. While teachers can
instruct pupils in simple animation skills,
such as cut-outs and clay animation, to make
a film by personal equipment fifteen years
ago was quite difficult. The high expenses
for animation production tended to exclude
smaller companies. Technological developments now make it possible for anyone to make and
edit their animation using sophisticated home equipment.
The workshops have utilised Mini DV cameras, Digital cameras, tripods, a computer with
editing software, a projector and lunch box. Lunch box is very useful for children to test the
timing of their animation and to adjust the rhythm by themselves. We taught students how to
make animation but the post-production involved complicated editing software so instructors
completed all the sound and image editing.
The children’s animation workshops were started in 1999 by students studying at the
Animation Institute in the Tainan National University of Arts (TNNUA). Many excellent
Taiwanese young generation animators graduated from there. When Yu-Ling Liu was studying
animation at TNNUA, she organized and managed Taiwan’s first children’s animation workshop.
This was staged at the Shinzhu Image Museum. Subsequently other animation students from
TNNUA joined the teaching group.
The first animation workshop for Taiwan’s aboriginal children followed in 2003. It was
initiated by Shu-Man Chang. Chang visited aboriginal tribes through friends who were working at
Taitong Historical Museum. Chang had
travelled the east coast of Taiwan many times,
and was fascinated and impressed by the
unique aboriginal culture and thought there
was an opportunity to provide more edu-
cational activities for these children as well.
What eventuated was the animation work-
shop program for indigenous Taiwanese
children. The focus became the preservation
of traditional aboriginal culture through ani-
mation.
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Workshop grants were established by the local governments and the Ministry of Education.
The elementary schools apply for grants for the activities during summer and winter vacation
each year. It includes transportation and provisions, fare for instructors, and animation materials.
The local elementary schools or residents provide accommodation for instructors. The volunteer
instructors from TNNUA take the responsibility to design and implement the whole program
with the Animation Institute providing animation production facilities.
Teaching Methodology
Each workshop runs for either three or six
days and is held every winter and summer
during school holidays. There are three to five
children in a team with each team making a ten
to fifteen second animation. We get the child-
ren to focus on a specific topic such as ‘Magic,’
‘Sea world,’ or ‘Summer time’ to enable them
to tell a story. Children proved brilliant story-
tellers and highly imaginative. Otherwise, the
program is sequentially structured progressing
from animation principles to making objects
move for fun, to understanding select ani-
mation techniques, to story telling by brain-
storming, to character development, scene production, timing and finally film shooting.
A three-day workshop is very limited so we needed to time-manage well and complete the
tasks efficiently. During the workshop students make cut-outs, drawing, shape clay and produce
pixilation animation. These techniques provide a quick, easy and fun way to learn and to achieve
a remarkable work by cooperation.
An observation of these workshops is that among the skills employed, children can make
superior cut-outs. There are two general techniques that fall under the heading of cut-out
animation, the major difference being lighting. Like most animated images, cut-outs generally are
top lit, allowing the viewers to see their colours, textures, and so forth. However, a few artists
have specialised in silhouette animation, which is back lit, causing cut-outs figures to have a solid
black form. Both types of cut-out animation may involve hinged figures to facilitate movement, or
non-hinged figures. If no hinges are used, figures can be moved through a ‘‘substitution method,’
meaning that an entire figure is cut-outs and used for each of the necessary incremental
movements (Furniss 1998, p. 45).
Children were keen to colour their cut outs so we used top-lit lights to present the vibrant
colours forcefully. We mixed different techniques occasionally, such as cut-outs with clay or cut-
outs with the object to form a multi-media animation.
To sustain children’s attention on all operations, we try to make the workshop vivid and
vigorous. In-between different stages singing and other traditional practices and rituals,
amusement generally is organised. As the creation of animation combines art, music, drama,
performance, story telling, and entertainment it is therefore an excellent medium with which to
approach expressing and preserving traditional culture especially through pixillation. Pixilation
consists of applying the principles normally used in the photographing of animated and cartoon
movies to the shooting of actors, instead of placing drawings, cartoons of puppets in front of the
animation camera, we place real human beings, composing a single frame at a time (Russet &
112
Starr 1976, p. 125). Norman Mclaren’s Neighbours (1952) and Two Bagatelles (1952) exemplify
the pixilation technique. Transferring traditional cultural practices like dance and ritual into
animation frame by frame is an easy step for children to make.
Achievements in Children’s Animation Workshops

Over the five years that the animation workshops in the remote districts in Taiwan have been
staged the children evidenced a propensity for art. Not only have they learnt animation skills from
working in teams but also they acquired an expressive outlet for their traditional cultures
enabling a wider appreciation of their culture beyond their tribal context. This occurred without
requiring students to reference their traditional cultures. Many incorporated traditional
decorative patterns in their costumes, specific animals and plants from their daily lives, as well as
the characters of the tales or legends from their ancestors. Thus preservation of traditional
aboriginal culture was effected. Self-confidence was encouraged through (fun) team-work, like
chorus singing. We even used their singing as the sound track for the animation produced in
2004.
Conclusion
Art education is a significant issue in contemporary first school enlightenment in Taiwan.
Animation has enjoyed increased usage in educational instruction in recent years, favoured
because it enriches the content of art learning through combining image and sound. It has been
over one century since the first animated film made by Emile Reynaud screened in 1892
(Bendazzi 1994, p. xx). ASIFA has pioneered and encouraged indigenous children to make
animated films from their viewpoint in order to present their inner world. They are not just
audiences anymore. New technology makes it possible to assist all children to develop their
animation aptitude.
We can assist aboriginal children to tell their own stories through conducting animation
workshops. The workshops have become an exciting twice yearly event in Taiwan for both the
children and their teachers who learn from each other’s experiences.
Finally, this is an opportunity for children to show their films at Animation Festivals around
the world. One of the workshop instructors Chang is the membership of ASIFA. She submitted
aboriginal children’s animation to ASIFA. The film made by the children was selected for
screening in the ‘Children’s animation collection’ at the Hiroshima International Animation
Festival, Japan in 2006. Their outstanding works have received great admiration. Both the
children and instructors were pleased at the outcome. The workshop brings some educational
benefits to the children while highlighting to Taiwanese society ways to effectively educate
aboriginal children and something of their cultural history. 
References
Bendazzi, G. (1994), Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Furniss, M. (1998), Art in Animation: Animation Aesthetics. Sydney: John Libbey & Company.
Russet, R & Starr, C. (1976), Experimental Animation. New York: Litton Educational Publishing.
Aboriginal Education 2007. Retrieved July 2, 2007, from http://www.sinica.edu.tw/info/edu-
reform/farea8/j21/13.html
International Animated Film Association 2007. Retrieved June 28, 2007, from http://asifa.net/
113
Taiwan Aborigine Tribes 2007. Retrieved July 3, 2007, from http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/

%E8%87%BA%E7%81%A3%E5%8E%9F%E4%BD%8F
%E6%B0%91#.E6.96.87.E5.8C.96.E7.89.B9.E8.89.B2
The Tribes in Taiwan 2007. Retrieved July 3, 2007, from http://www.apc.gov.tw/english/
docDetail/detail_ethnic.jsp?cateID=A000427&linkRoot=101
Photographs courtesy of Anima Animation Group, Shu-Man Chang, Supervisor.

© Zhi-Ming Su
114
Dan & Lienors Torre

Recording Australian Animation History
Critical Significance of Historical Research
Animation has been practised in Australia from a relatively early stage in the worldwide history
of cinematic animation, as evidenced by quite mature examples of cutout animation by cartoonist
Harry Julius beginning in 1912. It may therefore seem odd that there is comparatively little
written of its history. In America and Europe established histories of animation have been
recorded. The growth of the medium in these other countries led to the comparatively early
establishment of institutions teaching its history and practice.
A history of animation is not a definitive or closed text. Rather it is the collection of
information as sources diminish with time, and its evaluation and sifting to construct a factual
narrative. But in Australia there is little firm basis upon which to assess the Australian
contribution to the medium, or the trends towards the future. The progress of the major
commercial companies has been spasmodic, a series of peaks and troughs in which the troughs
have fortunately been levelled to an extent by the work of smaller companies and individual
independent animators.
There is need for a recorded history - perhaps more than one is necessary to fully reveal the
multi-layered identity of animation in Australia. With animation’s becoming an accepted
discipline for study and source for critical writing, it becomes important to define each country’s
history of its foundations and growth, whatever the significance, to identify each national
animation in its subject and form, and to stimulate its capacity to survive as a vigorous medium
both nationally and internationally.
This certainly is not to deny the valuable contributions of others that have published
invaluable Australian historical material based upon their original recordings of animators’
visions (eg. Bradbury 2001; Quigley 2005; Monahan 1989; Bendazzi 1994). Yet a definitive
history of Australian animation is unlikely to be constructed immediately. It is more likely that a
future historian will sift through the data recorded by different researchers, thereby achieving a
more comprehensive balance.
It has been our wish to augment this data by recording through videoed interviews the
recollections of those people still living from the earlier periods, and those of the contemporary
animators. From these we would portray the work of the numerous smaller companies and
independent animators, critically analysing particular films of significance, aiming to augment the
existing account to a richer, fuller and more complex chronicle.
We have thus far recorded over fifty videotaped interviews. With these, together with
substantial archival research, we have commenced a series of monographs devoted to individual
practitioners. We envision emerging from this study a more comprehensive text assembling a
background to Australia’s animation progress, simultaneously offering a greater theoretical
consideration of original Australian animation.
The Australian Background

Australian cinema is said to have commenced in 1896 with visiting Frenchman, Sestier’s film,
Melbourne Cup - its French title Les Courses - immediately followed by a local production of
documentaries (Bertrand 1989). Of particular note was The Soldiers of the Cross, produced in
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1900 in Melbourne, which was an extravagant hybrid of film projection (3,000 feet of film) and
magic lantern slideshows (200 coloured slides). The slides were projected using a ‘tri-unial’ three-
lens lantern, enabling many ‘animated’ effects (ABC 2001).
However, Australia was first more widely introduced to animation when Sydneysider and
political cartoonist, Harry Julius, visited New York in 1911 to discover animated film making,
returning to Australia to spend a lifetime making animated shorts and commercials for the Ure
Smith and (his own) Julius Studios (Bradbury 2001). From these early experiments an animation
industry developed in Australia. Australian Animated Cartoons opened in 1936. The first major
animation company was the Eric Porter Studio, which began in Sydney about 1939, expanding
into some major productions until the mid 1970s (Torre 2004a). Air Programs International,
which commenced in 1962, expanded the boundaries of animated commercial films beyond the
slapstick cartoon with a series of sixty-minute adaptations of literary classics. This genre of
production was extended by the films of the Burbank Animation Studios (Torre 2007a; Torre
2007b), and further extended by Southern Star (Torre 2007c).
But the dichotomy continued between the animated films of the commercial studios and those
of the independent animators. The studios persistently reflected the animation cultures that
originated and developed in America, spurred by investments from the United States in the
Sydney studios of Hanna Barbera, then Disney. According to Bradbury, ‘The U.S. was the
primary inspiration for, but also the primary menace to, an indigenous film and animation
industry. The sheer size of the American enterprise threatened always to overwhelm the home-
grown product’ (Bradbury 2001, pp. 207-08).
Australia in the 1970s was not subject to the intense union influence and resulting high wage
structures and work limitations that were imposed on the animation industry in the U.S.A. Bill
Hanna saw the opportunity to cut production costs by opening a studio in Sydney, where he
found an existing and strong nucleus of well-trained animators. Hanna Barbera opened its
Sydney studio in 1972, thus consolidating a move by American companies to contract animation
to Australia. The first productions of his Sydney studio were Robin Hood and Funky Phantom.
He spent some years in Sydney during which he oversaw and stimulated the studio staff, installing
the pragmatic disciplines of animation, particularly that of producing quantity on time. As the
Hanna Barbera studio wound down, the Disney Sydney studio opened in the 1980s to produce its
animated, direct to video, feature films (Torre 2004b; Torre 2005a; Torre 2005b).
A very prominent exception to the general trend at this time was Yoram Gross, who migrated
from Poland and Israel in 1968, opened a studio in Sydney and, by 1977, had gathered a large
staff of such competence and professionalism that he could embark upon a full-length animated
feature. Dot and the Kangaroo is a quintessential Australian children’s story written by Ethel C.
Pedley in 1906. Gross animated the characters of Dot and the bushland animals that she talks
with, using for his backgrounds live action film shot in the forests and grasslands of the
Australian bush (Torre 2004c).
But it was the commencement of television in 1956 in Australia that spurred a tumult of
activity and a vigorous competition for the consequent advertising contracts. Many small
companies and independents found animation opportunities: two of such beneficiaries were Alex
Stitt and John Scheffer. Serials, feature films and art animations followed. The Australian
Government legislated a requirement that Australian commercial television broadcasters employ
Australians; this was followed in 1960 with the requirement that all advertisements screened on
Australian television originate in Australia; and this provision was strengthened in 1961 with the
imposition of an overall Australian content requirement in the programs broadcast by the
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television stations. The concrete result of this legislation was to stimulate the commercial stations
to create their own in-house studios in both Sydney and Melbourne. The Australian Government
went further, creating the Australian Film Commission with funds to promote the production of
feature films in Australia and further funds to encourage individuals wishing to make
independent films.
Currently a number of companies are producing both for entertainment and commercial use,
and many animators have worked independently to produce films of interest and originality;
Australian animated feature films have attracted international notice, and Australia recently
received an Academy Award with Adam Elliot’s short animation ‘Harvie Krumpet’; also two
nominations for Sejong Park’s Birthday Boy (2004) and Anthony Lucas’ The Mysterious
Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello (2005).
The Exhibitions
For the 2007 Animated Dialogues conference, we curated at the Victorian College of the Arts
two exhibitions stemming from our research in recording Australia’s history in animation. We
simultaneously launched the first two volumes in a series of published monographs highlighting
Australian animators.
Fig. 1 & 2 - Animated Dialogues exhibitions,

Victorian College of the Arts
The exhibition and accompanying publications featured the work of two very disparate
Melbourne animators. The immediate choice was the celebrated Alexander Stitt, who was the
first Artistic Director of Fanfare Films, an animation studio created by Melbourne’s first com-
mercial television station, Channel Nine, which commenced its operation with the introduction of
television coinciding with the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games. Stitt subsequently established his
own studios, producing a ceaseless flow of work, both for commercial sponsors and for enter-
tainment.
The second exhibition featured the work of John Scheffer, who explored the field of puppet
animation in Australia. Scheffer, born in Holland, had migrated to Australia in 1955 and had died
in 1984. His wife, Vivienne, living in Lorne, a popular seaside town west of Melbourne, was
interviewed. She and their four children had retained much of Scheffer’s original work.
The discussion below consists of paraphrased extracts from the illustrated catalogues of the
two exhibitions.
117
Alex Stitt (born 1937)
Fig. 3 (above) - Alex Stitt in his home

studio, 2007 (photo by L. Torre)
Fig. 4 (right) - Cover of Alex Stitt
monograph
We derive the following text from an interview with Alex Stitt, 17 April 2005, and an interview
with Frank Hellard, 3 September 2004.
Stitt, one of the prominent figures in the history of Australian animation, undertook a design
course at the Melbourne School, now the RMIT University. He recalls courses at that time
offered in illustration, advertising design, and industrial design; but none related to filmmaking.
Commencing with a homemade camera stand and a Bell and Howell camera which, ‘if you
pressed the release button just enough, would take one frame of film; but which otherwise took
continuous motion’, Stitt experimented with animation while still at RMIT.
By 1957 he had completed the RMIT course and begun working professionally. Designer,
Richard Beck, arranged that he occupy a freelance desk in Castle Jackson Advertising in the city,
becoming a third member of the studio together with a layout artist and a finishing artist. Being
the only one of the three with a design background, he was given design work for clients right
from the start. He made it known that he could make animated commercials - ‘which I’d never
actually done, but I had the feeling I would be able to!’ - and during the next two years produced
some half-dozen which went to air.
Later in 1957 he was engaged as a member of the animation team to be trained at Channel
Nine, which created Fanfare Films to produce its animated films and advertisements; he has been
involved continuously since. ‘We were in production right from the start. I suppose I was the Art
Director of the Unit. I actually had a reel - after all, I’d made five commercials!’
He and Bruce Weatherhead, who also worked on designs and stories, spent their days in the
animation studio, but freelanced at night. According to Frank Hellard they worked, ‘endlessly,
and they worked most of the night, coming to work late - although nobody would complain
because they were obviously the key members of the team. Stitt wasn’t only a good designer; he
had a gift for stories and design generally, and a fifth sense about what was possible in animation.
He’d always think of a new problem which was soluble. He didn’t know how to solve it, but it
was soluble! I think it’s an inventor’s pre-thinking of a solution to a job. He would write
118
something into a story that you would really have to think about for a long time before you found
a way of doing it.’ When Channel Nine halved the animation studio’s staff at the end of the first
year, Weatherhead left.
Stitt remained another four years supervising the design department. ‘Right through this whole
period I’d also been doing a lot of freelance work, with the thinly disguised blessing of the
company. It was a very symbiotic relationship. I was doing freelance print and advertising
material - not competitive in terms of animation - but if I were doing press ads for some agency,
there was a chance we’d pull in a film job for the company; so it all worked pretty well.’
In 1963, Weatherhead opened a studio of his own and asked Stitt if he would like to form a
partnership. Stitt resigned from Channel Nine, and spent the next ten years working with
Weatherhead. Then in 1973 Stitt commenced the Al et Al studio. He has generated a vast amount
of work including countless advertisements, title sequences and short films; and has produced
two animated features.
His work is striking for its careful attention
to design, for its use of colour and form; yet,
perhaps most intriguingly, in its use of line.
Although the works themselves have been
diverse, there is always an overall quality that
labels each a design by Stitt. In the traditional
animation process, colour, form and line are
distinctive elements that come together in the
assemblage of the completed work. Stitt
makes use of these distinctions, whether it is
the broken, staccato line of the characters in Fig. 5 - Cel set-up from Grendel, Grendel, Grendel. Photo
by L. Torre; from the collection of David Atkinson.
many of his screen advertisements (he jokes
that he cannot draw a straight line), or his visually stunning animated features, Abra Cadabra, and
then Grendel Grendel Grendel, that dispensed with the line altogether - a bold initiative,
particularly at a time when the photocopied line universally predominated the cell animation
production process.
But even when he did utilise the black line to delineate his characters, it was always hand inked
onto the cell, traced from the pencil drawing. Creative control was preserved - the mechanical
photocopier was not allowed to mediate the line. Additionally, the absence of line on the
characters influenced the manner by which they would need to be coloured, compelling
modification to their design. It had a further subtle impact on their motion.
Grendel Grendel Grendel, devoid of black outlines, achieved a certain status of dimensional
believability. Rather than have the image flattened by the line, it seamlessly blended into the
background, effectively using light, shadow and colour - the primary conventions of filmic
representations to define space and form. But his designs are anything but photographic
(although photographs and real objects were sometimes employed). His work has consistently
been concerned with reducing imagery and motion to their essence, always acutely aware which
facets were critical to maintain.
Abra Cadabra took a further bold step with its innovative 3D process invented by Mike
Browning for the production of this film, a process that involved complex multi-plane separations
and projections. It created a convincing 3D effect, without actually requiring the two-camera
119
system. The work utilises a moving text, often defined in a simple, hand-written style reflective of
the approach towards much of the imagery. This use of typography effectively serves as a
character design element, as well as communicator of information.
Stitt retained his team of core animators.
Often each would focus on a character and
carry it through the entire production. For
Abra Cadabra, rather than provide set char-
acter designs in the traditional sense, he
produced a single design sheet containing no
character turn-arounds or detailed measure-
ments. This gave the animators a generous
measure of creative freedom in developing
the character according to their own percep-
tions, while keeping to the spirit of its
distinctive design. It further allowed modifi-
Fig. 6 - Character design sheet (detail) for Abra Cadabra. cations to make the character more conducive
Courtesy of Alex Stitt. to its motion requirements. Similarly, when
the Victorian Government commissioned a series of television shorts aimed to persuade viewers
to promote their health through exercise, Stitt created the character, Norm, for the ‘Life Be In It’
Campaign. Required to extend his movements, Norm’s design was modified and evolved, the
animation thus influencing the design.
Stitt lost the still incomplete Abra Cadabra when the Channel Nine network was sold.
Disappointment resulting from the Abra Cadabra experiment was the catalyst for his finally
loosing interest in making animated features. ‘I’ve continued to make some commercials, films,
bits and pieces since then. But the whole world was changing at about that time. This is when the
computer was beginning to take over animation - a process that, at the time, I wasn’t even slightly
interested in. It’s extraordinary that there’s been such an expansion in animation, and specifically
in animated features, since then. But they’re all of the computer-generated style - not anything I
was interested in, can do, or be part of: which is how I drifted out of the animation business.’
Stitt continues: ‘Animation at the time that the industry was starting here in Australia was the
beginning of a new form of communication. Being given a new medium to play with and to invent
was part of the attraction. I’ve realised since that my interest was in the technology and the art,
not communication. These days, if you’re making a television commercial, then the emphasis is
on the commercial. In those days, because we didn’t have any competition and because nobody
knew much, our emphasis was really always on the art. You weren’t up against hard-nosed
commercial concepts from other people. The films sold; they managed to do their primary job
while we were having fun doing what we really wanted to do.’
Stitt still animates, but currently concentrates on print material. An educational publishing
company has commissioned over four hundred first reader storybooks for primary school
children. These ‘employ many of the skills that I’ve needed to make films because they’re very
simple little books, a couple of lines of text with drawn or photographic illustrations. It’s
necessary to tell a story straight through - really like doing a storyboard in a sixteen-page book
instead of panels on a single page of paper. It needs the same kind of story-telling that a film
does.’
120
John Scheffer (1915-1984)

We derive the following text from an interview with Vivienne
Scheffer, 19 May 2007:
Although relatively unknown today, Dutch-born John (Jan)
Scheffer was an Australian animator who produced stop-motion
television advertisements from the late 1950s to the 1970s. He also
produced a number of short films and experimental animated
works.
Scheffer’s tertiary education at the Amsterdam School of Art
was interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War. He
became a fighter pilot with the Dutch air force, was imprisoned by
the Nazis during the invasion of Holland, escaped the prison camp
and reached London where he enlisted with the Royal Air Force as
an instructor pilot. When the war finished, he developed his
interests in drawing, painting and photography and, particularly, in
stop motion animation. As an animator he was self-taught, working
Fig. 7 - Cover of John Scheffer
monograph. in the early nineteen-forties with an old cine camera.
He never returned to art school. He met his Australian-born
wife, Vivienne, in London, where they married and soon afterwards moved to Amsterdam. Here
Vivienne attended the Amsterdam School of Art, completing a four-year diploma course
specialising in design and fashion design. This enabled her to assist her husband in his later work,
designing and colouring backgrounds for puppet films, setting up and assisting with the filming
process.
In Amsterdam, Scheffer was engaged by Joop Geesink Studios to work in the laboratory. The
company, impressed with his tiny, three-fingered puppet hands fashioned uniquely from a plastic
coating on a wire-frame armature, was keen to utilise his skill and newly developed techniques in
making and operating the puppets. The company was the biggest producer in Europe at that
time.
‘Then, things becoming very unsettled in Europe, John suggested they go to Australia. We
travelled to Melbourne and set up a studio in the inner suburb of South Yarra, enabling us to
start making films according to the Australian standards - which meant abandoning European
standards with the traditional backgrounds of folklore and fairy tales. We approached clients,
gained some orders which started us off: and in 1955 became John Scheffer Productions in
Melbourne.’
Scheffer had begun experimenting with animation in London in the 1940s. Very little stop-
motion puppetry was being produced in Australia at this time, and his studio operated in relative
isolation. His studio was successful, contracting to make films for a number of manufacturing
companies, advertising tap fittings, biscuits, socks, shoes and slippers. Not only did it lead - and
in fact ‘corner’ - the market on stop-motion technique; it also capitalised on the newly introduced
medium of television, which was providing a huge impetus to the growth of animation in
Australia.
Animation and motion were fundamental to the success of his work. But, in common with
most stop-motion animators, the materials and materiality of the scenes were also of crucial
importance. He was innovative with his production technique, willing to experiment with diverse
materials. He created stop-motion water flowing from a hose using a series of cut-to-form sheets
121
of plastic, changing them frame-by-frame. The cellophane-type plastic provided the reflective
‘water’ sheen. He then lightly sanded each of these sheets, achieving a scratchy, opaque animated
texture that emulated the foamy quality of water spraying from a hose.
His productions were often referred to as ‘puppet films’ rather than stop-motion, in effect,
placing the emphasis on the object - the materiality - rather than the method of animation. Thus
he felt free to imbue the objects with motion not only through stop-motion techniques, but
occasionally using live-action puppetry. An example is a dragon hand puppet he created, through
which he blew cigarette smoke to simulate the ‘fire breathing’ effect.
The puppets were fabricated onto a wire armature. Starting with a suitable gauge of steel wire,
several strands were bent to the shape and length of a limb, the ends held in a vice while the
strands were twisted together, then soldered enough to hold the wire in place. This base was
covered with a finer, copper wire the give the final shape, using a drill to spin the wire around. It
was finally passed through the flame of the gas jet to be slightly tempered, which gave it
suppleness and strength.
The hands were separate, made in moulds
to different sizes according to the size of the
puppet. The skeleton of the hand with the
three fingers and one thumb would have the
wire already centred. The moulds were made
originally in plaster, later using aluminium;
they would go to the foundry where a pre-
pared mixture of PVC was poured into the
each of the two halves. The two halves, placed
together, were cooked in an oven. When
cooled they were taken out, the edges sand-
papered where the two moulds met to give a
perfect set of hands. These were connected Fig. 8 - Aluminum mould with foam-latex hand. The
with long threads of wire into the existing mould was made by Scheffer and cast in Melbourne. Photo
frame of the puppet. The whole frame was by L. Torre.
covered with plastic foam, bound with linen, and finally clothed. It was significant that the
puppet had only three fingers. This was to maintain the body proportions - a four-fingered hand
would be too wide. Having their own armatures, the hands were fully functional.
Extending this skill, he made artificial hands for several people who had lost a hand. He would
copy the remaining hand, reverse it, then make a false hand out of plastic. He made his own hand
as an example - an exact copy, even the veins and little marks!
The puppet walked by balance, folding from one foot to the other. Scheffer would calculate
the number of movements, allowing a twenty-fourth of a second per movement. The puppet
heads were first made from balsa wood; but he developed fibreglass when this first became
available. The mouth movements would be a built-in wire construction; or could be
interchangeable, using very hard paper hand-painted around the outside of the lips to make the
words. An alternative method to operate the lips was to cast them in zinc, interchangeable by
means of a pin inserted in the mouth.
In his later years Scheffer tended towards experimentation, often letting the materials dictate
the direction of the work. He worked directly on to film, creating hand-made scratch-on-film;
and he gained recognition and renown with his innovative film The Drought. Using rolls of paper,
122
he painted a series of dramatic backdrops in

acrylic and chalk featuring scenes of parched
land, desperate farmers and stock These were
pulled across rolls of a highly polished mirror foil
in real-time and at a right angle to the warped
reflective surface, producing reflected images that
shimmered, blending and distorting, creating the
strange, dreamlike, often surreal, images which he
filmed. The Drought is a very Australian film, in-
dicative of the cultural evolution in his work.
John Scheffer Productions tapered off and slowly
closed, ceasing business in the 1970s. Scheffer’s
health was a contributory cause; but also changes
were taking place in the industry, both factories
and publicity moving overseas. 
References
ABC (2001) ‘Limelight’. [Online] Available from: <http://www.abc.net.au/limelight/docs/
capture/4_1_2_1.htm>[January 12].
Bendazzi, G. (1994) Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation, Bloomington and
Indianapolis, Indiana University Press.
Bertrand, I. (Ed.) (1989) Cinema in Australia: A Documentary History, Sydney, NSW University
Press.
Bradbury, K. (2001) ‘Australian and New Zealand Animation’. IN LENT, J. A. (Ed.) Animation
in Asia and the Pacific. Bloomington, Indiana University Press.
Monahan, C. (1989) ‘Animated’. Canberra, Ronan Films.
Quigley, M. (2005) Women Do Animate: Interviews with Ten Australian Animators, Melbourne,
Insight Publications.
Torre, D. & Torre, L. (2004a) ‘Joy Porter Interview’. Australian Animation Video-Interview
Series. Melbourne, Australia.
Torre, D. & Torre, L. (2004b) ‘Margaret Parkes Interview’. Australian Animation Video-
Interview Series. Melbourne, Australia.
Torre, D. & Torre, L. (2004c) ‘Yoram Gross Interview’. Australian Animation Video-Interview
Torre, D. & Torre, L. (2004d) ‘Frank Hellard Interview’. Australian Animation Video-Interview
Torre, D. & Torre, L. (2005a) ‘Robbert Smit Interview’. Australian Animation Video-Interview
Torre, D. & Torre, L. (2005b) ‘Gairden Cooke Interview’. Australian Animation Video-Interview
Torre, D. & Torre, L. (2005c) ‘Alex Stitt Interview’. Australian Animation Video-Interview Series.
Melbourne, Australia.
Torre, D. & Torre, L. (2007a) ‘David Field Interview’. Australian Animation Video-Interview
123
Torre, D. & Torre, L. (2007b) ‘Rod Lee Interview’. Australian Animation Video-Interview Series.
Melbourne, Australia.
Torre, D. & Torre, L. (2007c) ‘Neil Balnaves Interview’. Australian Animation Video-Interview
Torre, D. & Torre, L. (2007d) ‘Vivienne Scheffer Interview’. Australian Animation Video-
Interview Series. Melbourne, Australia.
© Dan & Lienors Torre

124
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Animation Studies

Charles da Costa Caroline Ruddell

Ethan de Seife Paul Ward

Pierre Floquet Karin Wehn

Maureen Furniss Paul Wells

Animation Studies is published by the Society for Animation Studies,

All articles are published under the Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-

Cover illustration: Spriggan. © 1988 Studio 4°C/TBS/Bandai Visual.

iv Letter from the Editor 75 Facial Expressions for Empathic

55 Final Fantasy or The Incredibles:

64 Flowerpot Men: The Haptic Image in

Letter from the Editor

Welcome to this long awaited special edition

Amanda Third & Dirk de Bruyn

Journal Special Issue Advisory Board

Animated Dialogues 2007 Conference Organising Committee

© Amanda Third & Dirk de Bruyn

VAM and SAM Memory Systems

Burford, J. L. (1999) Robert Breer, Paris, Re:Voir Video.

technological hybridity or psychic/supernatural human evolution.2 While catastrophic imagery of

Anime, eschatology and secular apocalypse

Hybrid Apocalypse, Masse or Mappo?

the skilled reading/mastery of interpretation. As in the hermeneutics required for biblical

Fig. 1 – Metropolis. © 2001 Tezuka/Bandai Visual/Dentsu.

Fig. 2 – Metropolis. © 2001 Tezuka/Bandai Visual/Dentsu.

Fig. 3 – Spriggan. © 2001 Tezuka/Bandai Visual/Dentsu.

Fig. 4 – Spriggan. © 1988 Studio 4°C/TBS/Bandai Visual.

Fig. 5 - Spriggan. © 1988 Studio 4°C/TBS/Bandai Visual.

Fig. 6 - Spriggan. © 1988 Studio 4°C/TBS/Bandai Visual.

Fig. 7 - Spriggan. © 1988 Studio 4°C/TBS/Bandai Visual.

Fig. 8 – Appleseed. © 2004 Geneon/Toho. All rights

Fig. 9 – Appleseed. © 2004 Geneon/Toho. All rights

Fig. 10 – Appleseed. © 2004 Geneon/Toho. All rights

Sontag, Susan 1965/1996, ‘The Imagination of Disaster’, Reprinted in M Broderick, (ed.),

Uncanny, Horror and the Robot

Sanger, K 2000, The Language of Drama, Routledge, London; New York.

Matthew Butler & Lucie Joschko

A Historical Overview of 3D and ‘Ultra-Realistic’ animation

Case Study Introductions: Final Fantasy and The Incredibles

Final $137,000,000 $32,131,830 $53,000,000 $85,131,830 -$51,868,170

The $92,000,000 $261,437,578 $274,900,000 $ 536,337,578 $ 444,337,57

Ultra-Realistic Animation and Aesthetic Engagement

Fig. 2 – The Uncanny Valley. Based on Mori, 1970.

Fig. 3 – Aesthetic Engagement and the Uncanny Valley

© Matthew Butler & Lucie Joschko

I. The Haptic Image

II. Haptics and Stop-motion Animation

Framing and Intimacy of camera to object

Depiction of light and shadow

Fragmentation versus fluidity of movement

III. Cosgrove Hall’s Haptic Images

Framing and Intimacy of camera to object

Depiction of light and shadow

Fragmentation versus fluidity of movement

IV. The Child Audience and Play Simulation

V. Accessing a Haptic Audience

The Study of Facial Expression

The Evolution of Animated Facial Expressions

Limited vs Full Animation

Flash and Interactivity

Reflexivity and the Comic(s) Comparison

The Case for Children

Immersion in virtual worlds – particularly photo-realistic virtuality – encourages a heightened