Animation, Sport and Technology

Abstract

Technology has had a major impact upon every aspect of life, essentially underpinning the making of the modern world. It is no surprise then that technology has proved extraordinarily influential in both sport and animation, enabling both practices to grow and develop. In essence, all technology itself starts out as a facilitating agent — ‘neutral’ in relation to its ideological or cultural charge — but, thereafter, depending upon its application, raising complex issues about its impact and affect. Almost inevitably, technology prompts change, and with change there often comes significant questions, resistance and anxiety. Equally, once technologies have been deployed, used and accepted, there is usually an acknowledgement that they in some way improve and progress a practice or process, even if there remains a nostalgia for ‘the old ways’. It is pretty clear, for example, that Nick Park’s inventor-cum-do-it-yourself expert, Wallace, clearly approves of his Soccamatic, discussed in Chapter 4, priding himself on the fact that his machine provides ‘all the goals, none of the fuss’, but ‘the old mechanic’, who features in McLaren’s ‘Tooned’ series, partly hankers after the pioneering days of Bruce McLaren driving a ‘tin can on wheels’ in 1953, rather than admiring the advanced technologies of the contemporary era. There always seem to be benefits and drawbacks, then: gain always tempered by loss; new skills and practices measured against those they replace; new equipment invented to improve the old.