Abstract
The study of animation often employs methods and concepts from other disciplines – in this way, it is similar to film studies as it began to develop out of literature, art history and cultural studies departments. Anthropology has long figured in investigations of documentary film, and in her article ‘Reading Animation through the Eyes of Anthropology: A Case Study of sub-Saharan African Animation’, Paula Callus, who researches anthropology in media, demonstrates how this discipline can be useful when applied to culturally specific animation film made outside dominant Western production models. Her contribution, a case study on sub-Saharan animation, also demonstrates why it is important to challenge Western cultural hegemonies and paradigms apparent in existing texts. Callus’s proposals are aimed at animation scholars who are increasingly engaging with the rise in national animation production in a range of countries and cultures, and she also encourages visual anthropologists to consider animation as one of the media forms to investigate. Callus’s blog (http://paulacallus.blogspot.co.uk/) is a valuable resource for readers interested in sub-Saharan animation.
Leon Gurevitch’s article takes us back to Western productions and his critical focus is on the continuing phenomenon of film marketing strategies, advertising and product placement. Drawing on a theoretical framework of Renaissance perspective, consumerism and computer design techniques, ‘Buzz Lightyear to the Sales Floor: To the Checkout and Beyond! Computer Generated Animation as Product Design Engineered Culture’, Gurevitch develops an argument for what he terms ‘automated visual nominalism’, that draws on Lev Manovich and other film theorists. Underpinned by analysis of a number of computer generated animated features and their offspin physical marketing products – Pixar and toys – he makes a convincing critical case for an ‘aesthetics of continuity’ and for how an historical, material-based manufacturing praxis (based on the hand) contributes to their contemporary digital equivalents (algorithms and pixels) in production and commodity consumption.
The following article continues a theme of animation and its relationship to marketing and consumption, but with a precise focus on phonotoys – the machines and technology that brought sound into consumers’ homes in the 20s and 30s – and their position in a geneaology of sound in early cartoons. Jacob Smith’s ‘Phonograph Toys and Early Sound Cartoons: Towards a History of Visualized Phonography’ convincingly elides two notionally distinct practices and areas of consumption: phonograph recording and animated moving images. Smith not only notes the aspirations of the former to achieve a similiarity of synchronized movement as the latter, but also demonstrates how both of these entertainment commodities made rampant use of figures and themes that can be read as racist, colonialist, jingoist and Orientalist. Concluding with a discussion of how animators sought inspiration for their films’ narratives and characters from sound recording, Smith’s article makes a solid contribution to the under-researched parameter of sound in animation.
The next two articles move the reader from Western animation production and consumption to the geographic East. While it also includes observations on the technical processes of animation, Kenny Chow’s ‘Toward Holistic Animacy: Digital Animated Phenomena Echoing East Asian Thoughts’ focuses on East Asian philosophy and a typology of ‘liveliness’ thought through a framework of cognitive psychology and perception. Chow also considers this typology for an analysis of the processes involved in creating animation and draws distinctions between traditional animation techniques (Disney) and digital methods and environments (swarms, crowd animation). He then reflects on the implication this has on viewers, using a linguistic term ‘animacy’ that he then elegantly transfers to holistic notions of life in Dao and Shinto thought, and applies his concepts to several East Asian animation works. Chow’s ‘holistic animacy’ gives pause for thought in a number of ways. He opens up debates on East Asian animation by regarding these through a cultural glass specific to the culture they are made in; with his concepts of spirituality and through his analysis of animation, he attempts a reconciliation between organic and mechanistic divisions in human experience.
The next article takes on the challenge of finding what the authors describe as ‘the missing link’ in Japan’s animation production history between the shorts of the 1930s and the country’s first post-war feature. While the West’s production of propaganda and public information films is well documented, in particular the USA (Disney and the Hollywood animation studios) and Great Britain (Halas and Batchelor), little is known of equivalent productions in wartime Japan. Working with industry documentation and reports, in ‘The Shadow Staff: Japanese Animators in The Tōhō Aviation Education Materials Production Office 1939–1945’, Jonathan Clements and Barry Ip undertake a historiographic correction – or augmentation – of Japanese animation production. Working solely with a number of key Japanese documents and reports on the 22 animated instructional films they mention are no longer extant, the authors reveal some interesting parallels between Western and Japanese productions – government contracts, the influence of Disney’s style – but also differences in the way animation films were received at the time (what the authors call little seen, ‘invisible’ productions lacking humour, in contrast to the West’s entertaining animation shown in cinemas). They also describe distinctions between Disney’s now famous ‘Nine Old Men’ and the anonymous Japanese ‘Shadow Staff’ who created the films. Mining the strata of documentation about these works, the authors argue effectively for inclusion of these artists in existing canons of Japanese animation. They also provide a useful appendix listing details from these lost works.
The first review in this issue also takes on a publication about Japanese animation. In an evaluation of Gigi Hu Tze-Yue’s Frames of Anime: Culture and Image-Building combined with a wider engagement with the subject of anime, Chris Carter undertakes a chapter by chapter evaluation of the book. He highlights main strengths of the book: its rigour, its effective connection of Japanese film with the country’s traditional non-cinematic art forms, and the author’s argument that anime, in narrative and style, pre-existed anime in a cultural proto-form before cinema productions began. Carter then engages in a discussion with Tze-Yue about Tezuka Osamu’s influence on anime and develops his own thoughts on Tezuka’s development and contexts. His summary conclusion is that Tze-Yue’s book is a culturally informative, deeply researched non-‘fan’ book on anime, a welcome contribution to the field. Kathy Merlock Jackson’s review of JP Telotte’s The Mouse Machine: Disney and Technology commends the author’s technology-centred approach to the Disney empire’s works as one that brings new information to this, one could say, sub-discipline of conventional animation studies. She summarizes Telotte’s chronological approach and a selection of an enormous range of films and projects chosen for discussion, a mix of the early colour shorts to theme parks, television series and digital collaborations with Pixar. One shortcoming that Merlock notes is the complete lack of images, a familiar issue with numerous non-hagiographic scholarly works (and one this journal once unsuccessfully attempted for an author in the past) that are not able to gain permissions from the company.