Abstract
Already in his title, ‘(In)Animate Semiotics: Virtuality and Deleuzian Illusion(s) of Life’, Spencer Roberts hints at a number of tensions he explores around issues of representation, the notion of becoming, and process philosophy in relation to animation. With a focus on Dan Torre’s recent book Animation – Process, Cognition and Actuality (2017), Roberts mainly concentrates on works from two proponents of proto- and early cinema – Emile Cohl and J Stuart Blackton – and some more recent animation films. He weaves a critical discussion of intersections and diversions, conservatism and radicalism, between a range of thinkers, from Deleuze and Brian Massumi to Nicholas Rescher’s process philosophy and others, to examine notions of representation and faces in the films. Roberts’ conclusion returns to his title and he explains why he can remove some of the parentheses.
Rebecca Rowe’s ‘Shaping Girls: Analyzing Animated Female Body Shapes’ engages with a specific type of representation, a typology of four young girls’ body forms as found in a wide-scoping analysis of film made in American studios of the past 30 years. Her forms are simple, geometric or curvaceous, and her argument is that, in recent years, a shift towards a dominance of specific forms is, however, perceived as more nuanced by young female viewers. She takes into account the increase in animated female characters and reads these through a set of methods and approaches from social, formal-aesthetic, animation, and child and adolescent media studies. Her article summarizes her findings as well as some of the advances and gaps of research to date, and offers a set of questions for further investigation.
The current isolationism and nationalism of the USA is affecting global understanding of it as an authoritative yet fair and democratic power for good. Moving from the representation of girls to men, the next article focuses specifically on the change in ideologies of fathers in post-Depression, pre- and wartime 1940s America as presented through the Disney lens. In ‘Absent Patriarchs and Persuasive Enforcers of the Future Nation: A Contextualized Reading of American Wartime Fathers in Walt Disney’s Pinocchio, Dumbo and Bambi’, Aino AT Isojärvi first takes us through some of the studio and industry conditions and regulations of the period. She then discusses patriarchy, masculinity and father figures in society and culture of the times, along with a reflection on shifts in promoted domestic policy, familial ideologies and structures. Then the focus is on Disney’s fathers, one ‘human’, another a surrogate (anthropomorphized) mouse and the third a hypernaturalized stag, and the discussion engages both symptomatic interpretation and cultural analysis. The conclusion is that the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the USA’s entry into WW2 significantly affected not only the country’s male population, but also its animated equivalent – in this case, Bambi’s father. This majestically animated animal represented a type of paternal nationalism that has unfortunately resurged as symptomatic of the real world politics of the USA and elsewhere.
The final article – David Golding’s ‘Rocko’s Magical Capitalism: Commodity Fetishism in the Magical Realism of Rocko’s Modern Life’ addresses commodity fetishism as displayed in a popular TV series in a discursive context of capitalist and indigenous animism in animation. Golding provides a symptomatic reading of a satirical and dark set of themes in a programme shown on a network aimed at a demographic of young people and children (Nickelodeon). Golding further invokes the genre of Magic Realism and the writings of Situationist Guy Debord to develop his argument around the labour and agency of the series’ animated, sometime anthropomorphized, objects that would be inanimate in the ‘real’ world. By examining specific characters, relationships and settings in selected episodes, Golding provides well-chosen examples to support his evaluations.
Reviews
This issue’s book reviews include one on stop-motion, a technique that is underrepresented in animation studies: Rachel Moseley’s Hand-Made Television: Stop-Frame Animation for Children in Britain, 1961–1974, is reviewed by Gill Bliss, who casts a thoughtful and critical eye on the structure, selection, and theoretical and conceptual underpinning of the book. In his review of Angela Tinwell’s The Uncanny Valley in Games and Animation, Kristopher Purzycki observes how the author’s extensive research as well as thematic and conceptual approaches expand our knowledge and understanding of Masahiro Mori’s incisive and enduring term. He also offers some areas of future research that would respond to those of Tinwell.
Farisa Khalid starts her review by contextualizing Tracey Louise Mollet’s Cartoons in Hard Times: The Animated Shorts of Disney and Warner Brothers in Depression and War, 1932–1945 in relation to previous publications, and then selects elements from the chapters to present the author’s structure and discussion. It seems apparent that this is not a Disney hagiography but rather a cultural critical examination of a key period in both animation and social and political upheavals. Drawing the Iron Curtain: Jews and the Golden Age of Soviet Animation, from Maya Balakirsky Katz, is reviewed by Victoria Grace Walden, who give us a chapter-by-chapter summary of the author’s fresh and extensive analysis of both animated images and representations of Jewish people as well as those working in the industry. This is embedded in a wider discourse of censorship culture, politics and ethnicity, and Walden effectively highlights the tensions and developments presented over the course of the book and the period of years it covers.
For the Editorial Team