Report about the “Animated ‘Worlds’ Conference”, Farnham, England, July 2003
Theories on Real Phantasies

The Animated ‘Worlds’ Conference, organised by the Animation Research Centre (ARC) in the more than comfortable and picturesque Farnham Castle (UK) in July 2003, was already half a success before the first key-note speech actually was pronounced. Director of the ARC, Suzanne Buchan, managed to persuade three prominent names in the field of film theory to participate in a two-day investigation of the state of animation studies. The fact that Laura Mulvey, Kristin Thompson and Vivian Sobchack are now willing to focus their attention and apply their ideas on certain aspects of animation is a strong signal that the field of animation studies is gaining maturity, and that its ‘ghetto’ is opening up to a wider range of discourse.

The more the conference proceeded, the clearer it became that keynote speaker Vivian Sobchack‘s panel introduction (‘Final Fantasies or the (Dis-)illusion of Life‘) indeed contained some of the most vital issues at play in many of the proposals that followed. Although commercially not the most successful film, and even by fans of the game received with very mixed feelings, the feature film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) does provide an ideal ground for debate. The simple fact that nearly one third of the budget was spent on rendering the hair of the female lead character to be as naturalistic as possible immediately raises questions about why hyperrealism is so dominant, which kind of mimesis is being pursued in this fantasy setting and what the semiotics are of this kind of animation that, at the same time, wants to be hyper-realistic and hyper-cinematographic.

This ‘splitting of ontological hairs,’ as Sobchack put it, also resonated in the solid papers of Livia Monnet (‘Invasion of the Movie Snatchers: Mimesis and Melancholia in Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within‘) and Thomas Lamarre‘s ‘From Cinematic Movement to Animeic Worlds.‘ On a less metaphysical note, the issue of the reality effect also returned in the paper of Carol-Anne Poole and Alex Jukes (‘Uniqueness, Detail and Perception in Computer Generated Film‘). Paul Ward discussed realism in his ‘Animation Aesthetics and the ‘Interactive’ Documentary‘. The construction of flexible, transformative dimensions of recognisable space was addressed by both Aylish Wood (‘Metamorphosis and Dynamic Space’) and Pedro Serrazina (‘The Use of Space as a Narrative Tool‘). Panel chair Kristin Thompson concentrated on the blurry distinctions between computer generated animation and digital effects regarding the feature film The Lord of the Rings (‘The Computer Meets Tolkiens ‘Feigned History’: Special Effects in The Lord of the Rings‘). Panel chair Laura Mulvey, on the other hand, compared live stillness and movement, life and death via more experimental approaches of the animate and inanimate in celluloid cinema, such as the work of Martin Arnold (‘Stillness and Movement, Life and Death. The Animate and the Inanimate in Celluloid Cinema.‘).

As the bibliographic references of all these papers were distinctly different, it appeared hard to draw any coherent analysis from these ‘piecemeal’ studies. Lev Manovich‘s The Language of New Media does seem steadily to replace the standard references to Eisenstein’s book on Disney, but as far as a common language is concerned, it was striking to notice how many of the participants used the Freudian term of the uncanny on an almost compulsive basis. Not only did Mark Langer applied his continued study of Fleischer’s Rotoscope to notions of the double and the uncanny, Heather Crow also made extensive use of Freudian paradigms in her analysis of two recent films by the Quay Brothers (‘Hysteric Gesture and Puppet Doubles‘). Although sometimes there are indeed literal and historical arguments to link the subjects of a Quay film to the theories of hysteria, or, as in the case of panel chair Richard Weihe‘s approach, to the legacy of Hoffman (‘The Strings of the Marionette‘) it would be a mistake not to test their oeuvre to more contemporary theories as well.

‘Fetish’ is another term more often used in a Freudian than a Marxist sense when discussing particular traits of an animated film. This conference distinguished itself from the usual colloquia on animation in that the focus was much less on the American tradition of cartoon-series. Suzanne Williams-Rautiola (‘Animated Fathers: Representations of Masculinity in ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘King of the Hill’) was the only one who invited us to make comparisons that remained with the same production-context with her presentation on The Simpsons and King of the Hill, with regard of the respective father figures. Also the traditional authorist approach was largely kept outside. Even when reconsidering Len Lye (‘Literary Len: Trade Tattoo and Len Lye’s Link with the Literary Avant-garde’), Miriam Harris talked as much about the literary avant-garde of his time, than about the filmmaker himself. Paul Wells went a step further in his ‘Ambiguity, Stream of Consciousness and the Objective Correlative: Defining Narrative Spaces in Brit-lit Animation’, suggesting a return to the heritage of British literature to look for what he terms ‘literal applications of imagination.’ Rachel Kearney‘s use of Schelling and Coleridge to compare ‘digital animation and the romantic imagination’ is even more ambitious and thought-provoking (‘The Joyous Reception: Digital Animation and the Romantic Imagination‘).

Developing a ‘well made language’, as Suzanne Buchan put it in her invitation to the conference, is not a process that can come to fruition in a mere two days. In fact, one of the positive aspects of these combined papers is that not many of the speakers actually tried to ‘coin’ their own terms. The suggested interdisciplinary approach indeed demands more restraint. And more patient work. The application of recent theories in the field of cinema studies and other academic disciplines requires, paradoxically, a continuity in the piecemeal approach, before relevant patterns or significant hiatuses can come to the fore. Besides psychology, philosophy and literary theory, there just as much reason to draw from, say, musicology, dance theory to come to a more exhaustive notion of the effect of animated movement.

Animation involves many different discourses and an important one, as is most explicit in the thinking of Vivian Sobchack, is the cognitive response of the viewer. This could provide the most accessible common ground for a more encompassing analysis. The ‘Animated ‘Worlds” conference demonstrated that the enthusiasm and the theoretical potential is there to flesh out animation studies as one of the most exciting areas in contemporary media studies. At the same time, the challenge is enormous and grows more complex by the month. Changes in technology imply changes in spectatorship. The domain of interactive computer games, which was hardly referred to during the conference, might very well produce a more solid and more consistent theoretical support than the impossibly kaleidoscopic realm of independent and/or commercial animation. And while, for instance, animation studies still needs to address the new genre of machinima (independent animations made with commercial game engines), the pioneering examples may already be hard to find in their natural context, the world wide web. As both the paper by Karin When (‘An Unrecognised Treasure Chest: The Internet as an Animation Archive‘) and a screening of 35mm films from the ARC Archive Collections pointed out: so many specific works of the last decades and of the recent past are never even being addressed. The historiography of animation theory needs to be reconsidered time and again as well. Only after several more of these conferences might it become clear as to whether animation studies can finally consolidate – or if this will remain a fantasy forever.

Edwin Carels
Fore more information: http://www.surrart.ac.uk/arc/

Programme

Thursday July 10th


Vivian Sobchack: ‘Final Fantasies or The (Dis-) illusion of Life’

Session 1: Vivian Sobchack (chair)
Aylish Wood: ‘Metamorphosis and Dynamic Space’
Paul Wells: ‘Ambiguity, Stream of Consciousness and the
Objective Correlative: Defining Narrative Spaces in Brit-lit
Animation’
Livia Monnet: ‘Invasion of the Movie Snatchers: Mimesis and
Melancholia in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within‘

Session 2: Andrew Darley (chair)
Paul Ward: ‘Animated Interactions: Animation Aesthetics and
the ‘Interactive’ Documentary’
Karin Wehn: ‘An Unrecognised Treasure Chest: The Internet as
an Animation Archive’

Richard Weihe: ‘The Strings of the Marionette’

Session 3: Richard Weihe (chair)
Mark Langer: ‘The Rotoscope: The Double and the Uncanny’
Pedro Sarrazina: ‘The Use of Space as a Narrative Tool Within
Animation Short Film’
Heather Crow: ‘Hysteric Gesture and Puppet Doubles’

Friday July 11th


Laura Mulvey: ‘Stillness and Movement, Life and Death.
The Animate and the Inanimate in Celluloid Cinema.’

Session 4: Laura Mulvey (chair)
Thomas Lamarre: ‘From Cinematic Movement to ‘Animeic’
Worlds’
Suzanne Williams-Rautiola: ‘Animated Fathers:
Representations of Masculinity in ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘King
of the Hill’
Miriam Harris: ‘Literary Len: Trade Tattoo and Len Lye’s
Link with the Literary Avant-garde’

Kristin Thompson: ‘The Computer Meets Tolkiens ‘Feigned
History’: Special Effects in The Lord of the Rings‘

Session 5: Kristin Thompson (chair)
Rachel Kearney: ‘The Joyous Reception: Digital Animation
and the Romantic Imagination’
Carol-Ann Poole and Alex Jukes: ‘Uniqueness, Detail and
Perception in Computer Generated Films’

Plenary Session: Chairs Summary with Suzanne Buchan and
Delegate Discussion