Book review: Animating the Unconscious: Desire,Sexuality,and Animation

There is an increasing amount of scholarship produced within animation studies focused on the potential for the medium to function as a vehicle for expressing subjectivity. Defying the assumed objective indexicality of photographic celluloid since its inception, animation has offered itself as a medium into which ideas of artistic intentionality and expressivity have been writ large. This association with subjectivity has become an increasing area of theoretical interest. The turn towards an analysis of the relationship between subjectivity and animation is replacing previous debates arising from questions over animation’s ontology or taxonomy (Cholodenko, 1991; Furniss, 1998; Wells, 1998). Scholars are transposing some of the theoretical considerations present within contemporary film and media theory at large into the field of animation studies and considering the phenomenological and affective potential of a wider range of numerous animated forms (Beckman, 2014; Buchan, 2013). These approaches to animation help to articulate the capacity for animation to move beyond representation in line with contemporary film theory’s consideration of cinema’s haptic materiality. This approach to animation theory has operated alongside an increasing visibility of a number of autobiographical animations (Persepolis, 2007; Waltz with Bashir, 2008; Tower, 2016) made by practitioners seeking to use the expressive capabilities of the non-photographed moving image to both represent and interrogate subjectivity. These works have found particular popularity amongst art-house and film festival audiences, suggesting a growing appetite for this form of animation within a worldwide audience of film enthusiasts.

As an edited collection, Animating the Unconscious makes a timely contribution to this expanding and prominent field of research, responding to the contemporary interest in animation as a medium uniquely capable of expressing the subject’s relationship to the world. The book’s contribution is both theoretical and curatorial. In addressing ideas of subjectivity specifically in relation to desire and sexuality, the collection offers a series of scholarly readings of animations that articulate a complex process by which animation taps into bodily concerns of gender and sensuality. In applying these analyses to a series of animation works less widely known than those aforementioned works popular with select audiences, the collection is also able to showcase this theoretical interest through a range of thought-provoking and rich works that deserve greater scrutiny than the attention received to date. Produced on the back of a successful DVD release (reviewed in animation: an interdisciplinary journal by Annabelle Honess Roe, 2009), the curatorial value of the collection is revealed through its analyses of a series of often overlooked animators working within independent and avant-garde practice, offering up insights into a complex relationship between creative process and interpretation which allows readers to reach a greater understanding of the process of laying bare subjectivity through animation.

The book is organized into three sections. The first two sections wisely seek to add specificity to often porous terms like sexuality and desire by offering up an examination of such issues across ideas of gender. This leads to a number of recurrent enquiries that emerge as a tacit dialogue across different chapters. Section One, ‘Women: From Outside in and Inside Out’, provides a range of writings from both practitioners and theorists seeking to explicate the interwoven relationship between desire, sexuality and animation within a range of works. Julie Roy studies the work of neo-Dadaist Michèle Cournoyer and draws fruitful links with both psychoanalytic and neuro-scientific approaches to feminine subjectivity as means of exploring how Cournoyer’s work speaks in such a potent feminine voice (pp. 23–25). Oliver Cotte provides a nuanced engagement with the work of Michaela Pavlátová using a close formal analysis to articulate the themes of existential absurdity and frustration found across her body of work (pp. 47–49). Simon Pummell analyses the ‘hand-made’ aesthetic present in the works of Ruth Lingford (p. 71), considering the way this is interwoven with imagery from newsreels (Pleasures from War, 1998) in order to offer a ‘humanistic political perception of human conflict’ (p. 75). The efforts made in this section complement broader attempts within animation studies (including recent initiatives by the Society of Animation Studies) to give greater prominence to the history of female animators working within a diverse range of national contexts. Animating the Unconscious offers a contribution to that effort by highlighting the important work of both female authors and authors addressing cultural and personal understandings of the feminine in their works.

Section Two, ‘Interrogating Masculinity’, analyses how examples of animation function to enact and disrupt notions of masculinity. Jayne Pilling’s chapter blends material selected from an interview with Pedro Serrazina with Michel Chion’s (1998) canonical theory of sound and the voice in the cinema. This approach allows for a useful integration of theory and practice, allowing Pilling to articulate the nuances available within the work whilst also showcasing the end result of Serrazina’s creative process. Karen Beckman grounds her discussion of desire with a psychoanalytic definition as an excess to subjectivity (p. 189). Applying this approach to The Stain (Marjut Rimminen and Christine Roche, 1991), Beckman examines how the animation is able to probe the gaps between and beyond masculine norms. Throughout the first two sections, analyses of directors’ works are interspersed with interviews with the artists themselves, an approach that offers a productive synergy between creative self-reflection and independent scholarly examination within the respective chapters.

The final section, ‘Modes of Reality’, broadens and sharpens this part of the collection’s overall analysis. Blending essays by animation theorists with director interviews, the section seeks to offer a more precise articulation of the creative processes that might inform and contribute to its central pairing of animation, desire and sexuality. The interviews provide an obvious source of intrigue, allowing individuals who have turned to animation as a means of articulating these modes of engagement with a means to express their intended aims, as well as opportunities to reflect on their process post-mortem. At the same time, scholarly examinations of their work offer up an insight into the overall effect and meanings available within their animation. There might be an issue over the potential scope of hagiography given the closeness a number of animators have to the collection, with several individuals acting as both subjects of study and contributors to the work. However, overall, the collection maintains a well-positioned balancing act between distanced, critical reflection and a more emotive, intellectual fascination.

It is this bringing together of interviews with artists and reflections from scholars where the collection is arguably at its strongest. This is testament to both the chapters’ authors and to Pilling’s work as editor, creating a collection in which individual sections can be easily placed in dialogue by the reader so that the book becomes more a series of diverse voices structured around a broad central theme. Animating the Unconscious is at its most insightful when it is able to use this dialogue between theory and practice to probe animation’s capacity to represent subjective experience. In the words of Pilling, the book ‘springs from a desire to explore animation’s unique ability to portray aspects of human experience and relationships that affect us all – desire and sexuality’ (p. 1). ‘Explore’ is perhaps the key verb here as it indicates both the excitement and innovation that the collection is able to generate in its chosen subject matter, whilst also alluding to some of the potential limitations of the project. There is perhaps a claim to be made that contributors across the board could be more robust in their methodology and analysis. There are often gestures towards multifaceted theoretical debates still raging within film and media theory surrounding the relationship between body/mind, gender/sex or film/spectator without much recourse to the full nuances that exist within scholarship as a whole on these topics. Within the often fascinating close readings presented in each chapter, in which ideas of desire and sexuality can be seen to inform directors’ creative decisions, questions of gender (other than tacit correlations between sensuality and cultural notions of the feminine, for example) are often presumed rather than interrogated. What these sections lack in potential theoretical veracity, however, is made up for in their ability to showcase a body of work that readers (at the very least, this reader) was unaware of, and to provide insightful commentaries on the production process and creative output that raise plenty of useful questions about the central relationship between desire, sexuality and animation that the collection seeks to scrutinize.