Editorial

This issue’s optic is trained on Asia, with articles on relationships between aesthetics, style, politics and culture. One of the aims of animation: an interdisciplinary journal is to encourage epistemological debates on what defines animation – among other approaches – as a term, a style of making, or a technique that shares the material base and digital properties of the moving image. This extends into cultures, and while a notably Western perspective on aesthetics and style predominated in discussions of animation, including works made around the world in specific national visual traditions, this is changing, in part due to articles published in the journal.

In his ‘The Rotoscopic Uncanny: Aku no Hana and the Aesthetic of Japanese Postmodernity’, Zachary Samuel Gottesman begins with a review of pertinent theoretical, ontological and aesthetic standpoints on the ongoing aesthetic and technological shift that CGI is affecting in moving image culture. He then turns to a long-established technique – rotoscope – beginning with a material history examining the aesthetics of this technique in terms of the uncanny and the hauntological, in order to establish a set of approaches he terms a ‘rotoscopic uncanny’. Essential for Gottesman is the material base of the rotoscope, upon which he builds a discussion on labour politics and capitalism. Working with the series Aku no Hana (Hiroshi Nagahama, 2013, based on Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, 1857) and after summarizing the plot, Gottesman engages with Baudelaire and a range of 20th-century thinkers – from Benjamin to Bataille – to weave capitalist ideology, the flâneur and the postmodernist condition into a discourse with the film’s characters and events. After briefly noting the symptoms of otaku culture, an excursion is made into the historically long-reaching rotoscope technique, from the USA (the Fleischer Bros. and Disney) to China and Japan; Gottesman then establishes a shared aesthetic of animated naturalism. Returning to the West, and moving towards more contemporary productions, he introduces an interesting notion of ‘the revenge of the rotoscope’ as an antidote to mainstream ‘cuteness’. Here, he returns to the immersive ideology, erotics and aesthetics of otaku culture, linking the ugly with the uncanny and with the ‘necropolitics’ and commerce of (post)colonial Japan through further analysis of Aku no Hana.

With a focus on socio-cultural formation and stylistics of a particular type of animation from lesser-known areas of China, in ‘Dong for Movements, hua for Drawings: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Investigating Chinese donghua’, Minhyoung Kim undertakes a transmedial, lingual and national analysis of language, the beginnings of cinema and animation. Working with changing meanings of a set of terms across Asia, their expression in visual styles and political contexts of tradition and modernity, Kim concludes by proposing a notion of translocality to open up thinking and research beyond national foci, for the East as well as the West.

While Kim’s article covered a wide historical range, the issue’s next article concentrates on the development of contemporary independent animation in China as an element of the modernization of visual culture. Weihua Wu’s ‘The Ambivalent Image Factory: The Genealogy and Visual History of Chinese Independent Animation’ considers and opens up binary discourses and categories by explaining how different meanings of the term minjian – a central concept in his discussion – were evident in political, cultural, educational, technological and commercial areas. He works with a cultural genealogy and the development of subcultures, mapping them to, and contrasting them with, animation production and developments in the West. He also points out the important role of awards and festivals. Wu then discusses a set of specific animation films focusing on their style, content and visual aesthetics, and how digital tools and technologies enabled independent animators to both work with, and move away from, Chinese artistic traditions.

Interest in the relationship between the artist and the figures and characters he or she creates is a longstanding topic of interest in animation studies. In ‘The Animator as Inventor: Labor and the New Animated Machine Comedy of the 2010s’, Peng-Yi Tai turns her attention to the character of inventors and their machines in recent feature animation films. Calling on Donald Crafton’s excellent writings on self-figuration and performance (1982) and Tom Gunning’s (1994, 2003) writings on operational aesthetics and early (animated) cinema, Tai develops a discussion around Fordism, the figures of the engineers at the centre of this, and their representation in a number of early animated films. The focus then turns to digital productions and the software tools available to animators, in which she sees a continuation of the inventor character, proposing an observed change away from mechanical workings to ‘human’ teamwork in these films; in essence, a shift to post-Fordism, freelance working and labour precarity.