Abstract
Animation is nothing if not visual, and the screen presupposes this defining mode. Yet, interdependent of it being visual, animation is nothing if not movement. The moving image first emerged in devices like Plateau’s 1832 phenakistoscope and Horner’s 1834 zoetrope, both succeeded by Reynaud’s praxinoscope in 1872. The magic lantern slide shows of the later 1800s employed limited animation techniques. Such devices helped ignite late Victorian fascination with movement and technology. For over a century, animation has found its form as projected imagery, leaping out from various technical apparatuses to animate screens large and small in fleeting frames of captured movement. By thinking outside the projection screen altogether we can draw from concepts and practices outside the Western canon of technologies of the moving image: a 5000-year-old Iranian vase that depicts frame-like images of a jumping goat, Palaeolithic cave drawings showing ‘movement’ through overlaid instances of animal motion, the Japanese concept of mono no ke (‘alive-things’). Robots, butoh dance and other objects that animate through their physicality challenge us to reimagine animation. This strategy opens animation up to new conceptual relationships to the screen and to movement, respectively: identifying movement itself as definitive of our relationship to animation, screened or otherwise. The ‘illusion of life’ metaphor remains a popular definition of ‘animation’. What attracts us to the animated image is its animacy, perhaps reflecting a latent hylozoism in us still. From Greek, zōē ‘life’ + -tropos ‘turning’, the zoetrope is an interesting case in point. A plethora of animated physical zoetropes (for example at the Ghibli Museum in Tokyo) nurtures a fascination with movement and technology. Part of the thrill of these physical zoetropes is how mechanical objects afford the illusion of a moving image that, as the mechanism slows, reveals the relationship between us and the object that is described by movement.
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Notes
- 1.
Burnt City pot (proto-cinematic animation) The Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies, online http://www.cais-soas.com/News/2008/March2008/04-03.htm (accessed 2 October 2018).
- 2.
The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation (1981) is also the title of a popular animator’s text book, written by Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas, two of nine ‘master animators’ in Walt Disney’s studio. Cholodenko distances his use of the term ‘illusion’ in his own two volumes on animation from that of Walt Disney, describing the latter’s ‘illusion’ as ‘animation aspiring to a realism of depiction such as one associates with Hollywood live action cinema’ (Cholodenko, 2007: 51).
- 3.
Barsamian’s large zoetrope ‘Juggler’ (1997) can be viewed here: https://gregorybarsamian.com/Juggler Accessed 21 September 2019.
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Woodcock, R., Torre, L., Tosaki, E. (2019). Off-screen: Reimagining Animation. In: Batty, C., Berry, M., Dooley, K., Frankham, B., Kerrigan, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Screen Production. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21744-0_6
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