Editorial

The year 2017 brings with it a continuing destabilizing period of post-fact information and arbitrary despotism. In a literal and figurative ‘animated’ response, the web was flooded with GIF animations of Donald Trump morphing into an imaginative range of forms – the GIPHY website currently returns over 9000 for the keywords ‘animated’ and ‘Trump’ (Giphy.com). While it entails a stretch of the imagination to link the seriousness of contemporary political instability and the outrageous insecurity of affected individuals and populations to the practice and theory of animation, the latter is the subject of this issue. We can find an analogous unsettlement in Norman Klein’s ontological notion of the ani-morph, introduced in his incisive chapter ‘Animation and Animorphs: A Brief Disappearing Act’ published in Meta Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick Change (2000) that Vivian Sobchack (2008: 261) describes as a ‘paradoxical concept’. Klein (2000: 22) defines the ani-morph as

a midpoint in [an animated walk] cycle, between the extremes – a lapse or hesitation … the shift is suddenly not very stable. For a few frames, the object – the body, in this case – does not look like what it was, or what it will be. (Emphases in original)

This is the case with many of the Trump GIFs; so far into this year, it does not seem to be so with the ‘real’ Donald Trump. In the first article of this issue, ‘Developing Expressive Ani-Morphs’, Amanda Quist undertakes a careful and thorough examination of the morph, and the ani-morph, in a range of animation films. After establishing a theoretical framework for her argument, she then develops a set of formal categories within a taxonomy as a framework for the ensuing detailed analyses of transformations in animated sequences, highlighting their specific visual expression. Quist’s corpus includes early films as well as music videos, which she selects for the aural underpinning of music that enhances the emotional experience of visual morphs. Her conclusion offers some speculation on digital and future development of these visual techniques, in her words ‘using the history of the ani-morph to predict how the digital morph will develop stylistically’ (p. 9). While it is wishful thinking, perhaps we could find an analogous prediction for the future development of global politics in the context of its sometimes successful history.

Recent years have also seen a rise of political nationalism in European countries and elsewhere, in part due to a growing phenomenon of global migrations of victims of war and economic inequality. An element of this nationalism seeks to secure and ‘protect’ historical and cultural identities in the so-called ‘target’ countries of suffering refugees seeking respite from the terrors of armed conflicts. Another version of identity politics at play in a series of animated feature films released in China and Hong Kong is explored in Hang Wu’s ‘The Translocalized McDull Series: National Identity and the Politics of Powerlessness’. In her article that includes changes in co-production, target audience, film politics and distribution over the period of the series, Wu argues that, while the earlier films displayed and promoted local Hong Kong cultures and identity, a shift in narrative content, characters and story location towards mainland China can be observed. Working with a recent concept of translocalization – as distinct from transnationalism or global/glocalization – Wu concentrates on how the films in the series demonstrate shifts in narratives in the Hong Kong/mainland China relationships of economic and political power, as well as a change in the target audience from Hong Kong adults to mainland China children. An example of this is the gradual transformation of the originally cute and powerless child character McDull into an active engaged adult figure in line with the Chinese Communist Party’s ‘ideology of Chinese children who could rejuvenate the Chinese nation and make it greater in the future; this is an ideology closely connected with nationalism’ (p. 41). She contrasts these with an increased depiction of Hong Kong as a weakened subordinate locality in close vicinity to its overbearing ‘neighbour’, concluding with observations on the Chinese film market and national identities, and the ongoing cultural appropriation of the McDull figure in both localities.

The next article ‘Resistance to a Posthuman and Retrograde Oughtopia: Exploring the Narrative of South Korea’s Sci-Fi Animation, Wonder Kiddy’ also concerns East Asia; instead of a focus on reality-based political contexts, in his examination of an animated science fiction TV series, South Korean author Ahn Songbeum speculates on future possibilities of national and social identities of humans and machines within a technological posthuman context. After an extended contextualization and review of concepts relevant for his discussion, including technophobia, cyborgs and non-humans, Ahn explains his use of Yŏng-sik Cho’s reciprocity-based ‘oughtopia’ community model. In the following analysis of the animation series, he continues to work with these concepts, first in political, labour-oriented and cultural evaluations of South Korean society in the late 1980s, then in an unravelling of how the animated series depicts and reflects this society’s technological fears in a selection of specific scenes and thematics, including ecology, human-centrism and environmentalism. Ahn concludes on a cautionary note and his reading of the series may suggest humans themselves are the root of their own fears and social systems.

Moving from identity and national politics to an aesthetic-based investigation of anime’s ‘identity’ as a recognizable style, Stevie Suan’s ‘Anime’s Performativity: Diversity through Conventionality in a Global Media-Form’ also works with notions of global and local, but in this context in terms of anime as a brand, a genre and a media-form. Beginning with a discussion of Thomas Lamarre’s award-winning The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (2009) and of how anime is generally understood as a unified style and body of works, Suan then maintains and argues for a range of distinct qualities in this genre of animation filmmaking. Introducing the term ‘anime-esque’ as describing a set of shared formal conventions, he reflects on the various brands of anime and compares how they operate with the system and process of genre. He then asks how uniformity and diversity are maintained over time before addressing anime’s ‘identity’ and conceptualizing this in notions of performativity, joining this with the ‘anime-esque’, to then offer a set of proposals based on style, design, character and movement and their development over time in a selection of films. Referring to Donald Crafton’s innovative publication on performance in Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief and World-Making in Animation (2012), Suan works through certain conventions of character design and movement, then introducing an interest concept of anime as ‘a creative process of assembling and performing citations’ (p. 71) and detailing the communalities of what these could be (character design, behaviours, facial and body expression). He then applies this to a specific character design in the Macross series, pointing out how the iterative citations result in variation, difference and dynamic change. Returning to Lamarre, Suan expands on serialization in anime to include ‘performances that enable the doing of anime’ (p. 76), adapting Lamarre’s (2009: 122) analysis of the ‘exploded view’ to include cycles of iteration and convergence as a final example of his argument for how both uniformity and diversity of style are possible to achieve in anime.

The final article also concentrates on design, this time in a corpus of non-narrative instructional animations from content creators who make their films available online. In ‘The Similarities and Nuances of Explicit Design Characteristics of Well-Received Online Instructional Animations’, Terry Lucas and Ruslan Abd Rahim are interested in design characteristics and their effectiveness in visual representation, and they apply content analysis with the aim of providing designers and educators with useful information on their own work on such films. The focus here is very much on the learners who are increasingly engaging with these instructional films, and the discussion is underpinned by statistical data and interpretive analysis. A literature review provides a theoretical structure that includes details of educational, cognitive and comprehension-related writings, followed by a section on users’ experience of different visualization technologies and an introduction to the evidence-based methodology employed. The authors then discuss a set of systems and criteria, state their objective (to successfully argue for the importance of the design aspect in instructional animation), justify their selection of 10 films and describe their data extraction method to then present the data and interpret it. They go on to develop their argument supported by tabled findings, describing how the films selected qualify as ‘well received’, noting here too limitations of methods employed. After summarizing potential further applications of their research, the authors conclude with an encouragement for future creators of instructional animation film to consider their findings towards improving the quality of audience appreciation of instructional animation film designs.

Finally, we include a conference review from Sebastian Bartosch of an event held in Hanover in November 2016: ’“On the Aesthetics of the Made in Animation and Comics”: Interdisciplinary Symposium of German Language Animation and Comics Research’. Bartosch explains the interdisciplinary emphasis of the symposium’s organizers and provides useful details on presented papers and panel constitutions. Returning to this editorial’s opening comments and to conclude with a personal observation, the US presidential election results on 9 November confirmed Donald Trump had won a majority of votes. As one of the attendees at the Hanover conference, when participants convened on this sober ‘morning after’ of one of the most unexpected and shocking changes in political direction in recent decades, the silence I initially understood as disinterest or lack of engagement with global politics soon became evident as speechlessness and despair; no doubt we were a few dozen of millions around the world struggling to find words. A datamoshed GIF uploaded on Know Your Meme.com visualized what some of us, and an artist, could not find the words for: http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/086/958/1fe.gif