ANIMATED FILMS AS MATTERTEXT AND

ELOQUENT BODIES: LEES TARBOY AND

BOYDENS AN OBJECT AT REST
Dr. Basak AGIN DONMEZ
Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey
agin@metu.edu.tr

INTRODUCTION
Vibrant, agentic, lively matter
Mattertext
Material ecocriticism thus signifies a vast spectrum of creativity
which extends into all networks of vital materialities
(Oppermann, Material Ecocriticism 59).

EXAMPLES
James Lees Tarboy (2009): Illustrates the Baradian reading of
Schrdingers cat experiment.
Seth Boydens An Object at Rest (2015): Displays discernible
similarities with Jeffrey J. Cohens analysis of lithic bodies as
narrative sites.
These animations exemplify how the agentic potentials of the
nonhuman become visible through ecologically oriented animated
films.

James Lees Tarboy (2009)

Tarboy is an attempt to destabilize the human in its biological,
social, and political aspects (Joy and Neufeld 171). It involves a
quite engaging story about posthuman encounters between
humans and responsive technological bodies.
The film intentionally replaces humans with robots to question the
centralised position attributed to humans. Without even
mentioning the human, the film envisions a fictional world of Robo
sapiens, replacing Homo sapiens.

Plot
A young robotic body, the grandson, asks his robot grandfather to
tell him a bedtime story. The story that the robot grandfather tells
turns out to be the story of the films protagonist, Tarboy.
The story begins with the words, [o]nce, there were three rich
Fat Cats, who ruled the world (Lee, Tarboy n.p.). The Fat
Cats, symbolising multinational corporations that dominate our
world, used robot slaves in their mines to make high profits, and
Tarboy was once among those robot slaves.

Robot Grandson

The Fat Cats

Nonhuman Strikes Back

Not needing anymore the robot slaves due to discovering better
methods of production, the Fat Cats destroyed their slaves and
dumped them into the tar pit (Tarboy), causing these slaves to
die a painful death.
Not to the knowledge of the Fat Cats, the robots collective
consciousness (in the form of memory chips) survived and
combined itself with the tar, as a result of which was born a boy
made of tar, who named himself Tarboy, the only desire of whom
was to strike back at the Fat Cats (Lee, Tarboy n.p.).

Resurrection?
Although Tarboy was skilled in combat, the Fat Cats were cunning,
and were able to lay a trap. When Tarboy arrived, they turned on a
number of giant heat lamps. Being made of tar, Tarboy
immediately began to melt [and] in a matter of seconds, he was a
mere puddle. (Lee, Tarboy n.p.)
At the end of the story, the grandfather surprises both his
grandson and the audience, showing a jar, which contains the
remnants of Tarboy, waiting to be resurrected one day.

Re-situating Self-Contained Entities

Tarboy, being born out of a collective consciousness, stands for the
multi-faceted concept of the posthuman. It thus disengages
certain sets of relations, concepts, or practices between the
dominant and the dominated figures from the fixed contexts and
stable realms that draw their boundaries (Sharon 177).
After severing the robot slaves from their singular, permanent, and
unchanging categories, Tarboy, as a posthuman collective figure,
then, resituate[s], recontextualize[s] and br[ings] these
previously separate entities into new relations within a new
system or assemblage (Sharon 177).

Tarboy vs. Schrdingers Cat

Tarboy exists within the blurred lines between being and not
being. It is, because the grandfather robot possesses the remains
of Tarboy in a jar, which signals the likelihood of Tarboys survival
and its promising potentialities. It is not, because it is kept in a
jar, which means there might never come a moment when it reemerges to avenge the subservient robots that have been sent into
the tar pit.
Both Tarboy and Schrdingers cat bear a 50% probability of being
or not being. Moreover, their existence depends entirely on other
possibilities at hand, which means their materiality cannot be
separated from a seemingly exterior environment.

Probability of Re-emergence
As Barad notes, the cats fate is entangled with the radioactive
source and not merely epistemically, but ontically; that is, the
cat and the atom do not have separately determinate states of
existence (Living 169-70).
Tarboys emergence as a collective posthuman body is strongly
related to the probability of the re-emergence of the very
conditions that paved the way for its existence; and the same
applies to the existence of the conditions.

Conclusion for Tarboys case

Being a posthuman Robo sapiens, Tarboy is independent of any
one origin or destination or component (Weinstone 28-29), and its
state of life is indeterminate. Tarboys case might be deemed
nonlocal, a designation indicating modes of being in the world, of
worlding, that circulate among the living, the nonliving, the
human, the nonhuman and that serve as multiply-signed capacities
for some or all of these (Weinstone 29).
Tarboy not only fluctuates between animal, human, and
technology, but also inherently involves an indefinite potentiality
of emerging and re-emerging. Its body circulates within and
through these up-and-coming states.

Seth Boydens An Object at Rest (2015)

It follows an agential realistic account of matter, text, and
ethics, as formulated by Karen Barad, envisaging how even the
smallest unit of existence, perhaps imperceptible by human
sensitivities, can play a crucial role in the intertwined network of
the biosphere.
Through a reflection of becoming, the film highlights a
posthumanist ethics since a disrupted body of an organism may reemerge in the form of another, while human experience remains
only to be yet another factor determining the nonlinear causality.

Plot
An Object at Rest, ironically entitled after Isaac Newtons first law
of motion, also known as the law of inertia, opens with a view
from the ocean depth and shifts to terrestrial life, where the story
of an anthropomorphised stone becomes the locus. The plot
follows the life of a stone as it travels over the course of
millennia, facing natures greatest obstacle: human civilization
(Todays Best n.p.).

An attempt to return to an inert state

Jeffrey J. Cohens Stone vs. Boydens Object

An Object at Rest displays how the ontology of the stone is
shattered through different phases of the human impact, and yet,
it also exposes how the stone returns to its primal state of being
at rest. Thus, echoing the taxonomies that shape Cohens
introductory geonarratives, which follow Like a Rock, Like a
Mountain, and Like a Rolling Stone, the protagonist of Prossers
film, the lithic mattertext, unfolds a history of naturecultures that
involves both human and nonhuman stories within. In this, the
object at rest reveals that it is actually the object in motion,
triggering and catalysing narrative agencies of the nonhuman.

Journey of a Stone
On the literal level, the epic tale of a rock [. . .] told over
millions of years, as Rob Munday puts in his review, An Object at
Rest takes it viewers on a journey through time as we witness our
stone protagonist battle against the forces of nature and
mankind (n.p.).
The film also raises the same question that Cohen asks: If stone
could speak, what would it say about us?

Cohen on Stone
Stone would call you transient, sporadic. [. . .] Stone was here from
near the beginning, when the restless gases of the earth decided
they did not want to spend their days in swirled disarray, in
couplings without lasting comminglings. They thickened into
liquids, congealed to fashion solid forms. Nothing of that primal
clot survives, but sediments and magmatic flows from earths young
days linger. [. . .] When you stand on such bedrock, you touch
matter that solidified perhaps 4.3 billion years ago.

 every one of your migrant continents conveys rocks of at least

3,500,000,000 years. A fortunate animal endures perhaps for 70. Do
the math: it is inhuman. These ubiquitous boulders, not even the
eldest of the earth, possess the lifespan of million upon millions of
fortunate animals. They will persist into a future so distant that no
human will witness their return to liquids and powders. (Stories of
Stone 57)

Humans, battling to tame nature

Boyden on An Object
Rob Mundays email-interview with the director reveals how
Boydens personal history as a human body with memory and
experience is integrated into the story of the stone and into that
of the flesh of the world. From a material-ecocritical perspective,
Boydens body can also be read as a site of a living text, as it is
also encoded with matter and meaning.

Stone inserted into a satellite mirror

Stone as a Narrative Agent

Thinking about the boulders that were ground into tiny pieces and
scattered on the street, I wondered where those rocks had been
before, and where they would go after the road was gone. This
sort of began the perception of rock time where everything that
happened over centuries of our human history would probably just
be seconds from the perspective of a rock. [. . .] Most of the
choices for scenes were determined by experiences from historical
locations that I remember visiting from when I was young. All that
was left was to weave the rock character into these moments to
give it a narrative context. (Boyden qtd. in Munday n.p.)

A Reading of the Stone

Starting its emergent narrative life as a huge hill, the stone in
An Object at Rest is like a never-dying tragic hero that undergoes
several changes of millennia through which it witnesses the shift
from and to various geological epochs. Affected by the
environmental changes from the Cretaceous period to the Ice Age,
it is eroded into smaller pieces, and different plants start growing
on it. With the human impact that causes deforestation, the stone
is then used for several human cultural practices. Every time the
stone manages to save itself from human hands, and wishes to go
back to its inert state, it is disturbed by yet another human
endeavour to tame it and employ it for their own purposes.

The stone desires:

Needless to say, the stones desire to go back to its inert state
should not be taken as a wish to embrace a mechanised view of
nature. Instead, it should be considered as a comic attempt to
critique human interference with nature, which often has alarming
consequences for the rest of the living and nonliving world. In
addition to this, by giving the stone an ability to move, the
director calls into the question what we often take for granted as
a natural categorisation: that we, humans, are active and
mobile, while the stone and the rest of what we consider to be
inanimate are passive and immobile.

Anthropomorphism as a Heuristic Strategy

Boyden, thus, subtly criticises our boundary-producing mindset,
which prioritises action over stasis. Moreover, although we often
tend to believe that the figure of the stone is fixed and rigid, the
stone itself has proven to be more active than we originally
supposed.
By anthropomorphising the stone, therefore, the film challenges
the idea that nature is passive because such an idea lies at the
heart of so-called human mastery over nature. As such, this
animation re-vitalises what was once thought to be inanimate, and
thus, signposts inorganic matter as much more variable and
creative than we ever imagined (De Landa, A Thousand 16).

Conclusion
Reality is a time and context-bound meshwork of alliances that
unites human and nonhuman agents. A diamond becomes a precious
gem because its rarity, lucidity and durability can sustain a strong
confederation with human and inhuman forces, tools, economic and
aesthetic systems coalitions that pumice cannot maintain. An
alliance between the shipbuilder and granite will fail because the
stone cannot support the laborers marine desires, but that between
the granite and the architect will flourish since granite will comply
with her desire to shape it into a durable, aesthetically pleasing
support for kitchen appliances. (Cohen, Stories of Stone 61)

THANK YOU

Works Cited
An Object at Rest. Dir. Seth Boyden. 2015. Film.
Tarboy. Dir. James Lee. 2009. Film.
Barad, Karen. Living in a Posthumanist Material World: Lessons
from Schrdingers Cat. Bits of Life: Feminism at the
Intersections of Media, Bioscience, and Technology. Eds. Anne
Smelik and Nina Lykke. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2008. Print.
165-176.
Cohen, Jeffrey J. Stories of Stone. Postmedieval: A Journal of
Medieval Cultural Studies 1.12 (2010): 56-63. Print.

Works Cited
De Landa, Manuel. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New
York: Zone, 1997. Print.
Joy, Eileen, and Christine M. Neufeld. A Confession of Faith:
Notes toward a New Humanism. Journal of Narrative Theory 37.2
(2007): 161-190. Print.
Lee, James. Tarboy. Web. 05 Mar. 2014.
Munday, Rob. An Object at Rest. Review. Web. 15 Jun. 2015.
Oppermann, Serpil. Material Ecocriticism and the Creativity of
Storied Matter. Frame 26.2 (2013): 5569. Print.

Works Cited
Sharon, Tamar. Human Nature in an Age of Biotechnology: The
Case for Mediated Posthumanism. Dordrecht: Springer, 2014.
Print.
Todays Best Animation: An Object at Rest. Review. Web. 15
Jun. 2015.
Weinstone, Ann. Avatar Bodies: A Tantra for Posthumanism.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004. Print.