Reconstruction 8.2 (2008)
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Suspended Animation: Meditations on the Time and Space of the Moving Image / Davin Heckman
<1> An appropriate introduction to a cultural studies journal's special issue on cartoons should begin with two things: 1) A rough overview of the material and cultural processes of animation at its creation, and 2) and a rough overview of the cultural and material frames in which cartoons are consumed.
<2> Traditional animation is typically accomplished by assembling a series of still analog images. The illusion of motion is accomplished as the images are presented in rapid succession. Through a phenomenon called the Persistence of Vision, the eye retains each image until it is replaced by the next, giving the illusion of fluid motion. Technically, this process of "animation" is indistinguishable from the process of "cinema," so the difference between the two must be further defined. One crucial distinction is in the character of space and time represented in the production process. The animated image is typically assembled from a series of discrete moments in a world that does not exist except as representations. Cinematography, on the other hand, happens in real time and space (even if that space and time is compressed in the form of the scale model, the back drop, or the set). Early machines such as the zoetrope and phenakistoscope are early examples of animation in that they illustrate motion as an assembled series of discrete moments. Cel animation, what most people think of when they think of cartoons, is accomplished by drawing or tracing images onto transparent sheets. The sheets are photographed in sequence, usually on a static background, creating an event that never existed in real time or space except as a representation. Other methods of animation use everything from clay figures to direct inscriptions on film. To be fair, George Méliès' A Trip to the Moon, considered an early example of "cinema," incorporated stop motion animation techniques to tell its story.
<3> Contemporary animation, on the other hand, is typically digital. Still relying on Persistence of Vision to fool the eye into seeing motion represented as fluid, the difference in digital production occurs on two levels. First, figures can be modeled and moved through software rather than the meticulous construction of discrete images, allowing the action to take place virtually (in other words, software can do some of the work in assembling the series of images). Second, the increased digitization of animation and the increased digitization of film have moved the two media closer to a common language.
<4> Culturally and materially, the origins of cinema and animation coincide with the modern industrial capitalist era. Obviously, the heavily mechanical nature or early animation takes place in an era that was marked by great advances in mechanization. The technology of production was mechanical. The technology of presentation was centralized in movie houses and governed by the studios and distributors that could afford to show them. And the largest audience for this new entertainment consisted of America's massive working class. Sean Chadwell's contribution to this issue highlights just how intimately technology and animation were linked in this era.
<5> Digital animation emerges in the "new economy," characterized by the neoliberal emphasis on consumption, the decentralization of information, and the very real revolution in computer technology. Thus the technology of production is digital. The presentation is decentralized (through video and DVD, the web, computer gaming, and a proliferation of other platforms). The audience, regardless of income, values information for its ability to signify value within lifestyle systems. Laurie Cubbison's piece demonstrates the role that digital technology, globalization, and consumer tastes have played in the world of contemporary animation.
<6> With this larger framework in mind, we can approach the array of articles presented in this issue as though there is some order and reason underlying their selection. Unfortunately, "animation studies" historically has been subservient to "film studies," and has thus taken much longer to develop as a field. As a result, much of the work in animation studies, as a glance at the Animation Journal <http://www.animationjournal.com/> will reveal, is devoted to the Olympian task of constructing a historical record of animators, studios, techniques, and artifacts. As anyone working in cultural studies knows, popular entertainment (especially those associated with youth) has a long history of being ignored or despised by "serious" scholars (Literature/pulp novels, Art/comic books, Theatre/movies, etc.), the Cinema/animation relationship is just another dichotomy.
<7> Some credit for the increased scholarly attention to animation might belong to the rapid growth of animation and video games as an area of vocational and fine arts education. Additionally, some may belong to the work of popular culture scholarship and its breaking down of high/low binaries. But rather than break down the binary once and for all, I would for the next few paragraphs like to keep the dichotomy intact - only to invert it. And I would like to introduce a different idea: Only in the era of digital production has it become truly possible to invert the relationship between animation and film, and, consequently, for a well-formed theory of animation to emerge. To be certain, the strong steady field of animation scholars has grasped the importance of their object of study, but in an era when the default position for the art of the moving image is quickly becoming a digital one, the importance of animation can be grasped and asserted easily by non-animation scholars like myself.
<8> I am not the first person to posit this inverted relationship. In his article on Jurassic Park, Alan Cholodenko notes that animation may very well be what cinema has aspired to all along: "By means of computer animation techniques operating not at the old 'mechanical' level of the exotechnical but at the level of the esotechnical, Jurassic Park ecstacizes the process which it declares to be at work in 'cinema' 'itself', pushing the special effect to its limit, its fulfillment and annihilation." While Paul Ward, in "Animation Studies, Disciplinarity and Discursivity," posits a definition of animation studies that situates it as a cultural studies artifact par excellence: "My suggestion is that we need to develop a discursive view of apparently 'multi-sited' fields of knowledge, like Animation Studies: rather than making what are ultimately false calls for recognition of yet another free-standing discipline, the dialogic and dialectical relationship between fields of knowledge must be seen as the central focus" (par. 1). In other words, animation is formed at the points of contact between several disciplines - it is mass media, fine art, literature, and/or cinema. Indeed, in this context, the argument put forward by Ward in "Animated Realities" on realism affirms the representational power of animated images.
<9> If we take the claims of theorists like Ward and Cholodenko seriously, we are poised to reconsider just what we mean when we speak of animation. If, we accept, as I've described above that animation is a process of assembling still images from outside of the constraints of space and time in series to create motion, then we have a meaningful lens for understanding the pleasures of traditional animation. Common cartoon gags that run through works of animation icons like Tex Avery, Friz Freling, Ub Iwerks, Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett (running off of a cliff and pausing to contemplate the situation, the use of Rube Goldberg machines, the superelastic cartoon body, the direct address of the viewer, the appearance of the animator's hand, etc.) suggest both meticulous attention to comic timing and a desire to perpetually accomplish the impossible. Not surprisingly, early animators and their works were inspired by jazz, a genre which Ralph Ellison credits with the potential to "destroys one's sense of time completely" (13). A couple examples of the jazz influence in early animation include the Betty Boop cartoon Minnie the Moocher (1932) featuring Cab Calloway and the Tin Pan Alley Cats (1943) featuring a caricature of Fats Waller. In spite of the controversial representations and appropriations of blackness in early animation (particularly in the infamous "Censored Eleven"), these animated shorts are valuable here in that they illustrate an important common impulse: The desire to play with the boundaries between order and chaos, to carve out time for personal expression in the spaces of daily life.
<10> In the era of analog production, this tension between order and revolution finds free reign in the animated realm. And though the manipulation of clock time does exist in traditional cinema (particularly in the process of editing), the time of production for the animator is a time of perpetual "editing" undergirded by pressures (to complete the work and get it to market). But nevertheless, the animator performs seamlessly a series of impossible jump cuts, assembling the pictorial world outside of time. Hence the interest in representing this process playfully, in pushing it, and testing its boundaries. And, given the industrial employment of audiences, this playfulness surely found pleasure in the possibility of subverting the hard rules of space and time through subjective practices (this playfulness also appears films like Chaplin's Modern Times or Keaton's Cops).
<11> In the digital era this changes. As CGI and other digital production techniques have become more common, we have seen applications of the technology which showcase their novelty (see for instance, the "Bullet Time" slow motion of The Matrix, the re-release of the Star Wars Trilogy, or technocentric spectacle of Tron). But the emergence of a CGI-film "aesthetic" in films (like 300 and Beowulf), the common use of CGI for TV series (like Babylon 5, Stargate SG-1, and the new Battlestar Gallactica), and CGI commercials (like Pepsi's "I'm Spartacus" commercial) have established animation as yet another aspect of filmmaking. But, as Forrest Gump's revisions of documentary footage, the Star Wars Trilogy's re-release, and Pepsi's "I'm Spartacus" commercial demonstrate, digital techniques open up all film to animation. As digital editing becomes the default position, the decision to go "natural" becomes an editorial decision (much in the same way that Jackie Chan's performance of his own stunts, reinforced by the presentation of injury footage at the end of his films, is notable because it is the exception). In effect, the digital era brings all imagery under the auspices of the editorial question. This fact should make us question the dichotomy that places the process of out-of-time process of animation beneath the real-time process of traditional filmmaking. Perhaps it is time to admit that all film exists in relation to animation. Certainly this view of film emphasizes the role of discursive framing and deemphasizes the role of the auteur, the script, and the star in interpretation, as all aspects of the represented world must be viewed as constructed. To return to the music analogy offered above, the improviser has been replaced with the producer.
<12> This radical reframing of the animation/film relationship that takes place in the move from analog to digital methods has ramifications for the relationship between order and revolution described above. As animation has become a normal aspect of film, there is a certain expectation among viewers that films can and will play fast and loose with the rules of space and time (consider, for instance, the intersection of globalization, animation, and editing described in Laurie Cubbison's "Not Just for Children's Television".)
<13> But deeper than these patterned expectations are the material and cultural processes that underpin these expectations. As Hai Ren documents in "Subculture as a Neo-Liberal Conduct of Life in Leisure and Consumption" <http://www.rhizomes.net/issue10/ren.htm>, the movement of subcultural studies can be summed up in three main tendencies: the Chicago School's study of youth, deviance, and delinquency from the 1920s to the '60s, the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies' focus on the resistant practices of the disenfranchised from the 1960s to the '80s, and postmodern turn towards heterogeneity, lifestyle, and leisure from the 1990s to the present. Ren maps this sweep onto the emergence of late capitalism:
I take a genealogical approach to investigate how subculture studies has contributed to the development of a style of thinking that addresses the neo-liberal agency of an individual under certain historical conditions of capitalism. Not only does a subculture express meanings of style (through clothing, decoration, color, and music), but it also communicates a personalized way of conducting one's life, one that especially emphasizes being active (being eccentric, decoding and recoding), calculative (managing risks and costs), subjective (accepting discourses, media representations, and capital accumulation), and intelligent (believing and deciding what counts as reasonable). The latter dimension of a subculture underscores an ideal mode of conduct under two important aspects of the neo-liberal historical condition. (par. 3)
In other words, animation's openness to construction, editing, and manipulation coincides with the values of neoliberal society. Ren continues, "The rapid development of media (especially of multiplicity-based media) provides an important material and cultural means for the development of neo-liberal modes of conduct in everyday life" (par. 44). Unlike analog animation, which presented an alternative to the clock-based temporality of the industrial workplace, digital animation reinforces the logic of the postmodern world.
<14> Nowhere is this new logic more evident than in the aura surrounding Pixar studios. As Rebecca Farley notes:
The first is the description of Pixar as an animation "house", relating it back to the domestic, the realm of the private, the realm of play (as opposed to the public realm of work). This is underlined by the association with children (who are free to play) and pets (more domesticity - and of course, what you do with your pet, usually, is to play with it). Working at Pixar (especially compared to work in university admin, or a convenience store) can hardly amount to work at all. It's too much fun. (par. 7)
From the simulated gag reels that have become standard at the end of Pixar features to the atmosphere of the studio itself, Pixar seeks to wrap itself in a narrative of play - a narrative which pervades all aspects of neoliberal existence - from gentrified urban spaces to Silicon Valley offices, from shopping malls to theme parks, from sexuality to eating.
<15> This shift positions animation at the center of contemporary culture and should provoke cultural studies scholars of all stripes to evaluate the importance of the cartoon image. Essays like Ngwarsungu Chiwengo's "Memory, Ideology, and Exile," Joanne Knowles' "The Simpsons and the Nuclear Family," and Matthew Diebler's "'Thank Goodness He-Man Showed Up,'" though they approach radically different works, affirm the importance of the animated image in cultural life. This issue is an attempt to initiate such a discussion.
Works Cited
"Censored Eleven." Wikipedia. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censored_Eleven>
Cholodenko, Alan. '"OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR": The Virtual Reality of Jurassic Park and Jean Baudrillard', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 2.1 (January 2005): <http://www.ubishops.ca/BaudrillardStudies/vol2_1/cholodenko.htm>.
Cops. Dir. Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton. Perf. Buster Keaton, Virginia Kline. First National Pictures, 1922.
Ellison, Ralph. The Invisible Man. New York: Vintage International, 1995.
Farley, Rebecca. "How Do You Play?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.5 (1998). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/how.php>.
Matrix, The. Dirs. Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski. Perf. Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne. Warner Brothers, 1999.
Minnie the Moocher. Dir. Max Fleischer. Talkartoons. Fleischer Studios. 1932.
Modern Times. Dir. Charlie Chaplin. Perf. Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard. United Artists, 1936.
Ren, Hai. "Subculture as a Neo-Liberal Conduct of Life in Leisure and Consumption" Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 10 (Spring 2005): <http://www.rhizomes.net/issue10/ren.htm>.
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (re-release). Dir. George Lucas. Perf. Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher. 20th Century Fox, 1997.
Tin Pan Alley Cats. Dir. Bob Clampett. Leon Schlesinger Studios 1943
Tron. Dir. Steven Lisberger. Perf. Jeff Bridges. Buena Vista Pictures, 1982.
Ward, Paul. "Animation Studies, Disciplinarity and Discursivity." Reconstruction, 3.2 (Spring 2003): <http://reconstruction.eserver.org/032/ward.htm>.
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