Editorial

Articles in this issue of animation: an interdisciplinary journal share an interest in particular aspects of technique and notions of power, control and responsibility across a range of topics, films and creative practice. Another theme that runs through some of them is a certain inconclusiveness of findings; this rests in part on a use of methods that aims to extract a particular set of data and information, but that cannot be used to make unequivocal statements or claims. This is in a classic tradition of sciences, where it is as important to conclude what does not work as to prove what does, and such findings can function as springboards for further research.

We start with keyframing, a central stylistic and artistic method that emphasizes unique and defining qualities of an animated character’s position, gesture and form. While it was and is often employed as a labour-saving device, in that other (lower-paid) artists would use these to create the artwork for cels between keyframes, with contemporary digital ‘inbetweening’ there are a number of new aesthetic considerations worth investigating. In ‘The Aesthetics of Keyframe Animation: Labor, Early Development, and Peter Foldes’, Peng-yi Tai is interested in a number of these, including how computer graphics create an aesthetics of ‘weightless kinetics’. Using Shrek as an example, Tai starts by explaining how algorithms result in a deformation, and then provides a concise overview and critique of the evolution of digital keyframing and its conceptual origins in cinematic, artist-drawn animation. The issue of the division of labour and production rationalization is thematized throughout a discussion of the move from cel to computer animation, and the move from inbetweening to interpolation. At this point, Peter Foldes is introduced as an animator working with computer graphics, and Tai suggests his interest in metamorphosis re-introduced artistic qualities to the aesthetic constraints of early computer graphics. This is demonstrated by a close analysis of selected sequences in La Faim (1974). Tai shows how Foldes exploited algorithmic weightless deformation to an artistic advantage and, further, how Disney’s use of ‘rubber hose’ animation gave figures an elegant effortlessness that is informed by Sergei Eisenstein’s concept of the plasmatic. Citing a number of key figures (Burtnyk, Lassetter and Manovich), Tai also interlinks early animation with early computer graphics.

The next article is also interested in labour, and the aesthetics and control afforded by computer animation, but it uses a different approach: Mihaela Mihailova’s ‘The Mastery Machine: Digital Animation and Fantasies of Control’ enfolds a discussion of animated urban architecture into the science fiction genre as a type of metaphor for how computer technologies and software may make animators obsolete. The notion of the animator’s full control over his or her artworks and end product is found in many animation studies texts, from psychoanalytic interpretations of omnipotence to the pragmatics of working with materials to create a world we can experience only on screen. Mihailova develops this notion and introduces a cautionary tale – continued throughout – aimed at workers who create animation using computers, locating fantasies of control and power in both the films and the production processes used to create them. Mihailova calls these ‘self-reflexive digital constructs’ and she capably moves between discussions of software and textual analysis, between longing for (digital) mastery over human form and what she calls ‘architectures of control’. The article also thematizes anxieties of human/environment and human/machine relationships in a range of other films, and how the viewer alleviates this fear with wonder at and (pleasurable) fetishization of digital feats, that Mihailova also attributes to control, located this time in big studios and proprietary software. Mihailova’s cautions shift to a pragmatic optimism in a conclusion that puts the individual before technology.

Anime narratives frequently contain issues about the environment and concerns for the earth and its civilization. Often set in strange worlds, these problems are usually solved by a young character who simultaneously goes through a ‘coming of age’ process, usually supported by a fantasy or supernatural character that may have origins in Japanese literature, religion or myth. These themes and figures are explored in ‘Spirited Away: Conceptualizing a Film-Based Case Study through Comparative Narratives of Japanese Ecological and Environmental Discourses’. Working with a set of interview responses, Japanese symbolism, hygienic traditions and Shinto, Lim Tai Wei establishes a number of themes on over-consumption and the nature/human interdependence. The narrative analysis that follows has a main focus on the film’s bath-house scenes, and Lim establishes links between the film’s central characters and Japanese folk and mythical spirits and deities that specifically relate to nature. Using Chua Beng Huat’s writings on Asian consumption, Lim then compares the film to Japan’s industrialization process and modernity. While the textual analysis can confirm the film’s representation of environmentalism, Lim concludes that the interview-based findings of reception in local contexts are inconclusive and do not allow a specific environmentalist statement to Miazaki’s intent. But they enable Wei to frame some larger questions about whether Japanese concerns for the environment are culturally specific or analogous to global concerns.

Statistical film analysis has been widely used in live-action film, particularly methods developed by Barry Salt, and while it has resulted in many useful findings for live-action film, it is a method rarely employed for animation film. The definition of a shot is complicated in animation because one could argue that every single frame is a shot, since the camera doesn’t shoot continuously (but that is another discussion: see my book The Quay Brothers, 2011: 154–157). As the title implies, in ‘The Shot Length Styles of Miyazaki, Oshii, and Hosoda: A Quantitative Analysis’, Itsutoshi Kohara and Ryosuke Niimi use statistical analysis, yet they embed this into discussions of storyboarding, a key stylistic element in animation. After establishing some basic premises of film style that include quantitative methods, they explain their choice of method, directors and films, allowing that statistical analysis cannot alone determine style, but provides a useful set of information towards this goal. Supported by a series of tabular findings, of log shot length distribution, skewness and kurtosis, they use the latter two to develop their hypothesis of how storyboarding is often used as a form of planned editing, with directors most likely establishing their own individual shot length style early on before their works were made in larger industry contexts. They conclude that this alone cannot establish style, but their findings may be useful for further investigations into how shot length affects other formal parameters.

The Interstices section of this journal is reserved for writing that has a strong relation to practice and that explores animation’s relations to other creative disciplines outside the moving image. In ‘Morel_Moreau_Morella: The Metamorphoses of Adolfo Bioy Casares’ Invention in a (Re)Animating Universe’, María Lorenzo Hernández connects metaphorical and allegorical concepts in Bioy Casares’ novella with what she calls ‘three animating forms: the phantasmagoria, the automaton, and the machine-environment’. She begins by proposing a set of particularly animated figures/machines in the novella, followed by a discussion of phantasmagoria, then links these through a discussion of the anima and the observer/reader/viewer’s perception of movement and of ‘life’. A review of various incarnations of human-like automata follows, with examples from Méliès to mocap, which are then explored though Mashahiro Mori’s ‘uncanny valley’ that she again links back to Bioy Casares’ novella. The final section on the man–machine environment includes descriptions of a number of these in animation and in literature, and the article ends with some conclusions on how our interest in these various ‘doubles’ of humans may be linked to dreams – and fears – of immortality and reincarnation.

As a very popular genre of animation, writing on anime is plentiful in English-language publications for a number of reasons, one of which is pragmatic – it is the lingua franca of academia. While our readership is international, and many readers are versed in the other languages that research is published in around the world, and although (English) translations are increasing, many valuable works remain inaccessible, which means we are not able to learn more about different cultural and theoretical approaches to animation. The term ‘anime’ as it is used in Japan means more than the feature-length films the West has come to associate with it; it includes all genres and forms of animation made in Japan. This is the subject of Imiji ŭi cheguk: Ilbon yŏlto wi ŭi aenimeisyŏn (Empire of Images: Animation on the Japanese Islands), written in Korean by Joon Yang Kim (an Associate Editor of this journal). Han Sang Kim’s review gives us a flavour of why the book was selected for a Best Scholarly Book award by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, South Korea. He describes in detail the multilayered value of Kim’s book that covers Japanese animation from its pre-cinematic period to contemporary anime. The review critically evaluates the book’s scope, from its investigations of socio-economic backgrounds and political and historical factors of Japanese animation inside and outside the industry, to Kim’s reflections on historiography. Han Sang Kim also suggests this pioneering book may have implications for animation studies elsewhere, for instance a re-evaluation of animation aesthetics in light of certain cultural hegemonies and transformations that Kim topicalizes. As with other reviews of non-English books in this journal, we hope forward-looking publishers and translators may be reading them too.