Para-animation in Practice and Theory: The Animateur,the Embodied Gesture and Enchantment

Prologue

Several years ago, intrigued by the promise of a live-performed animated retelling of Ulysses/Odysseus’ travels, I went to see The Paper Cinema’s Odyssey, a show produced by a UK-based company touring New Zealand. The event took place on a stage – or rather what looked like a workstation – where a projector and a large screen, although placed in the centre, appeared to be accessories to the overall set-up, eclipsed by stacks of paper drawings and cut-outs, instruments and other sound-making tools (see Figure 1a). As the show began, Odysseus’ story materialized both on and off screen as the animators–puppeteers sketched or manipulated pre-drawn objects on stage, simulating cinematographic effects via a combination of hand gestures and multimedia materialities (see Figure 1b).

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Figure 1.

The Paper Cinema’s Odyssey: the ‘accidental’ meeting of different materials and performative (f)acts: (a) left, projector, screen, paper drawings and cut-outs, instruments and other sound-making tools; (b) right, manipulation of objects and simulation of cinematographic effects. Photo credit: Jose Farinha (1a), Tim Easton (1b). © The Paper Cinema. Reproduced with permission.

On their website, the makers of Paper Cinema describe their own creative work by listing, rather than selecting, possibilities. In a brief, informal declaration of intents – a quasi-manifesto – they (The Paper Cinema, 2012) refer to a combination of different materials and performative (f)acts:

The Paper Cinema is an illustrated song, a shadow, a smoke, a mirror, a puppet show, a cinema show, side show, magic show, a show and tale, a show off. It exists in the meeting of live music and moving drawings.

Their web ‘quasi-manifesto’ ends with an unanswered question: ‘What happens at the accidental meeting of inkblots, photocopies, cardboard, angle-poise lamps, the occasional table, video technology, a laptop and a banana box?’ By suggestively and evocatively referring to an improbable combination of ordinary objects, the makers of Paper Cinema invite us to see and think about what may happen when multimedia – cinematic and pre-cinematic, digital and analogue – materialities cross paths, interact, combine, merge and morph. Rather than defining their creative work as either cinematic or theatrical, story-based or spectacle-driven, visual or musical, they place instead an emphasis on the all-encompassing experience of wonder that emerges from re-enchanting the ordinary.

Over the years, the vivid memory of my viewing experience and the Paper Cinema’s own conceptualization of their creative practice have continued to resonate with me and played a major role in my interest in what I have described and conceptualized as ‘animateur’ practices, fluidly intersecting with the visual avant-garde, while also reclaiming artisanal creativity as an expression of the (extra)ordinary space of the everyday.

In this article, I focus specifically on how animateur practices contribute to expand our understanding of the moving image, which is actualized as a key location for an alternative, both embodied and enchanted, experience of the modern world. Adopting and adapting Thomas McLaughlin’s (1996) call for a ‘street-smart’ vernacular theory of the everyday that develops in the de-centralized non-academic space of popular culture, I argue that these practices critically expand our understanding of the moving image, which arguably has been dominated by scholarship focusing primarily on either the mainstream or the avant-garde. I propose that both in the craft of the moving images and in the animateurs’ reflective articulations of their work emerges a vernacular theory of ‘para-animation’, i.e. a liminal, nearby, or off idea of animation that critically expands both theories of the moving image and media archaeology. Para-animation’s uncontainable and overflowing multimedia-animated images challenge film’s representational and photographic genealogy and re-centre the (extra)ordinariness of human imaginative and crafting agency in shaping our relationship with reality. This emphasis on the (extra)ordinary is at the core of para-animation’s light ontology of enchantment.

Here I am guided by Jane Bennett’s (2001: 4) conceptualization of enchantment as asserting an affective attachment to the world, so that we can ‘be enchanted . . . struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and the everyday’. Embracing Stephen White’s advocacy for a ‘weak ontology’, i.e. a non-absolutist and yet affirming understanding of the modern world, Bennett defines enchantment as one of such ‘weak’ ontologies. She sees wonder as a key driver for enchantment in our everyday life, i.e. an experience of the modern world that emphasizes surprising encounters and hybrid crossings. By making the moving image a key location for enchantment, para-animation also reveals multidirectional – across times and places – connections between the animateurs and other enchanters (inventors, prestidigitators, performers, storytellers), similarly crossing and morphing boundaries between technology and magic, representation and imagination, science and art, knowledge and pleasure.

Animateurs: Crafters of wonders

Animateurs are hard to trace, let alone categorize. Simultaneously, but not exclusively, digital animators, visual artists, storytellers, puppeteers and performers, animateurs are characterized by liminality or, perhaps more accurately, intersectionality, vis-à-vis the mainstream and the avant-garde. Both on screens and beyond (as, for instance, in live audiovisual performances), their approach to the animated moving image points to hybrid genealogies that include analogue handmade cinema and performing arts, such as the magic lantern show, puppetry and shadow play. Initially I ‘found’ and conceptualized the animateurs primarily in the vicinity of cinema, examining contemporary amateur and semi-professional digital animations made by, and circulated for, online moviemakers and viewers, in non-institutional and unofficial channels (Voci, 2015). Later, I began to unpack animateurs’ connection with pre-digital and pre-cinematic embodied practices, such as shadow play, and explore their contribution to a parallax story of a moving image, outside the institution of cinema (Voci, 2017: 194). I view animateurs as an expression of light culture (Voci, 2010), often becoming noticeable, endorsable and theorizable only when they acquire some weight, either by means of economic profitability or cultural capital. ¹ Being an animateur is often a temporary, occasional or partial identity. For example (in a chicken-and-egg process as it is unclear what caused what), Lei Lei – a quintessential animateur – has been appraised in various international animation festivals and attracted considerable media coverage and academic scrutiny; he is now recognized as an ‘independent artist’ or a ‘global practitioner of independent animation’ (Zhou, 2020: 129–174). Similarly, while Chai Mi’s The Sparrow and The Raven or Wang Haiyang’s Freud, Fish and Butterfly can be considered animateur works, Chai’s and Wang’s paintings, performances and installation works have given them the much ‘weightier’ reputation of global artists. In order to examine the spectrum of animateurs’ creative practices, we need to look beyond and/or before endorsements coming from mass-media or art circles, and be concrete and speculative, i.e. explore the specificity of their texts and contexts, while engaging with broader theoretical conjectures.

As the names of the animateurs I mentioned above have suggested, my research has focused on Chinese or, more accurately, ‘Chinese-accented’, contemporary animateurs. ² Localized in the PRC and abroad, they do not self-identify as being confined in national belonging, rather they describe themselves as ‘graduates or students of’ institutions in the UK, the USA and China, ‘living and working’ or ‘currently based’ in Hangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing, Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, London and Taiwan. Instead of any implied notion of ‘Chineseness’, and in common with other animateurs from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, they share an intrinsic lightness that makes them and their works resist framing (and naming) in categories or genres and instead embrace hybrid expressive modalities. They are closer to the makers of Paper Cinema than animators working at the Shanghai Animation Film Studio, Hong Kong Animation Studio or Wang Film Production.

More specifically, these animateurs seek an alliance between the human body and the technological (analogue and digital) in order to perceive, re-imagine and reconnect with the world by creating a state of wonder in the everyday. Neither mass-media nor avant-garde, these wondrous animateur practices are an expression of vernacular creativity, which, unlike classical cinema’s vernacular modernism, does not involve a mass production of the senses (Hansen, 2009) but rather brief, occasional, small-scale, light affective attachments.

I begin by situating my research on animateurs in the field of animation studies and in critical dialogue with the recently developed focus on handmade cinema (Zinman, 2020), process cinema (MacKenzie and Marchessault, 2019) and ‘craft’ in animation production (Ruddell and Ward, 2019). I propose that animateurs situate their practices at the intersection of the handmade, in-process and crafted/crafty moving image, embracing, rather than resolving, the tension between the technological and the human, the artistic and the artisanal, the rational and the magic. Both in their practice and in their vernacular theory, an alternative idea of animation develops – which I term ‘para-animation’ – based on non-medium-specific expressive modalities. Referring to a selection of animateur works, I focus on the embodied gesture of ‘the hand on-screen’ as one of these key modalities through which para-animation re-centres the body and allows for a simultaneously technologized and de-technologized re-enchanted experience of reality.

Animation 2.0: Where do animateurs fit in?

Animation’s long overdue re-inclusion in the broader scholarship on cinema has generated a wealth of original perspectives in media archaeology, and film histories and theories. Like the earlier exclusion, this re-inclusion is neither incidental nor accidental; both need to be understood in their contexts. The former exclusion is rooted in critical frameworks developed to understand film as a modern medium (Adorno and Levin, 1981; Benjamin, 2006[1936]) or, more accurately, as an expression of ‘vernacular modernism’ (Hansen, 2009, 2012), which took narrative film as its main referent. In these frameworks, animation’s marginalization mostly derived from a lingering emphasis on film’s photographic realism, which has shaped our understanding of the aesthetic, cultural, social and political value of cinema as the ‘eye of the century’ (Casetti, 2008). The latter re-inclusion is rooted in critical frameworks developed to understand film vis-à-vis the digital medium (Cubitt, 2004, Manovich, 2001; Rodowick, 2007; Youngblood, 2020) and can be described as ‘animation 2.0’. Building on earlier scholarship (Furniss, 1998; Klein, 2000; Russett and Starr, 1988), a renaissance of animation studies (Buchan, 2013, 2014; Cubitt, 2013; Richards, 2020; Williamson, 2013) has intersected with a growing interest in re-thinking media historiographies and theories from transnational and transcultural perspectives, in light of globally pervasive digital cultural shifts.

Animation 2.0 is a much-improved version of the discourse about animation. More de-westernized and theoretically nuanced, animation scholarship has expanded, ‘before Mickey’ (Crafton, 2015) and before Miyazaki, to include animation studios, animation directors and experimental animators/kinetic artists from different geographical and historical contexts. Animation 2.0 can be also seen as an exercise in translation or transculturation as it picks up lost threads of non-English-language scholarship previously secluded and excluded, mostly because of linguistic inaccessibility. Even when centred on animation traditions of different countries, this new discourse does not advocate the revival of national frameworks but promotes comparative analyses and transnational dialogues. For example, Asian animation scholars have been suspicious and critical of the biases of cultural determinism (embedded in concepts such as Chineseness and Japaneseness) and have focused on unpacking the tension between Chinese animation’s national and international stories and histories (Du, 2019) or exploring the magic lantern as a precursor of film and anime in Japan (Lamarre, 2009), promoting a dialogue between ‘material and perceptual specificity’ and ‘macrohistorical technical paradigms’ (Lamarre, 2011: xxiii).

In this renewed and expanded animation 2.0, the light creative space of animateurs remains largely unexplored. ³ Yet meaningful connections with animateurs emerge at the intersection with animation 2.0 in scholarship on handmade cinema with its focus on the artist’s hand (Zinman, 2020), process cinema with its focus on the experiential and artisanal turn (MacKenzie and Marchessault, 2019) and the ‘crafty animator’ with its focus on craft and its relationship with art, digital technology and authenticity (Ruddell and Ward, 2019).

Even before the digital earthquake shook film theories and spurred the ongoing re-evaluation of cinematic realism, scholars engaged with the idea that the moving image could exist with limited or no indexicality to the real. In particular, handmade cinema has emerged as part of the discussion on the non-indexical ontology of film, most notably in experimental cinema and video art. The focus on hands – their gesture, manipulation and handling – establishes a clear connection with the animated moving image, even though there seems to be an uncomfortable relationship with animation itself, both as a practice and as a discipline. Exploring the materiality and ontology of cinema beyond the conventional photographic film, Gregory Zinman’s conceptualization of handmade cinema focuses on ‘analogue technologies for the production of cameraless moving images’ in order to understand the role played by ‘the artist’s hand’ in past, present and future cinema ontologies. He convincingly demonstrates that the ‘handmade’ praxis – i.e. the making/manipulation of the moving image process leading to the creation of the audiovisual text – takes place both on- and off-screen, implicating non-photographic viewing and, in some instances, tactile experiences when such manipulation is incorporated or indirectly referenced. Impressively wide-ranging, the selection of artists that informs Zinman’s (2020: 4) analysis reflects a focus on ‘contemporaneous art movements, art historical scholarship, and a synthesis of materialist cultural criticism and media theory’ that is mostly disengaged from what is commonly understood as animation. He does not include traditional cel animation because, he explains, ‘that system involves an established frame-by-frame photographic process; is often figurative and/or narrative in form and content; and is often collaborative’ (p. 6). Nor does he include stop animation, for while it ‘has a rich history deserving of its own in-depth study, [it] falls in the service of narrative storytelling and traditional figuration’ (p. 7). Furthermore, he points out that his conception of handmade cinema subsumes and improves the notion of ‘direct animation’ and that ‘the makers of handmade films at the centre of this study did not think of themselves as producing “animation” in the colloquial sense of the word’ (p. 12).

A different, less theoretical and more broadly multidisciplinary, approach to handmade cinema develops from a focus on ‘the experiential and artisanal’ as being historically relevant and central in the digital age. Process Cinema is a rich collection of essays that focuses on past and present, individual and collective ‘handprocessed films’, including early cinema (mostly women) hand-colourists and contemporary artists engaged in developing a sustainable and non-environmentally invasive cinema (MacKenzie and Marchessault, 2019). Like Zinman’s handmade cinema, handprocessed films move away from the index (Gunning, 2007), sharing ‘process-driven methodology and phenomenology that are not tied to the simple replication of the real’ (MacKenzie and Marchessault, 2019: 4). Manipulating the materiality of film is only one component of a long artistic and artisanal creative tradition that emphasizes the process rather than the product. Process cinema ‘incorporates a multiplicity of media such as performance, music, painting, text and sculpture’ and embraces an ‘unscripted, improvisational, participatory’ idea of cinema (pp. 3–4). In this collection, only two essays engage with animation practices and, in both, the focus is on avant-garde visual artists. ⁴ Like Zinman’s makers of handmade films, most of the darkroom, abstract, pure, avant-garde filmmakers, painters, artists (artist-run) film labs and collectives, schools and manifestos examined in this anthology do not see themselves or are not seen as producing animation.

While there is no programmatic exclusionary intent in Zinman’s monograph or Scott MacKenzie and Janine Marchessault’s edited collection, it is as if animation, despite being emancipated and no longer ‘cinema’s bastard relative’ (Manovich, 2001: 298), still carries uncomfortable connotations and restrictive belongings for practitioners and scholars alike. There may still be lingering biases attached to animation as a popular, low-brow discourse, i.e. what Zinman (2020: 12) refers to as ‘“animation” in the colloquial sense of the word’, that separate the experimental and/or avant-garde art of animation from both more mainstream narrative forms or industrial productions and other hybrid forms of vernacular animation.

Caroline Ruddell and Paul Ward’s (2019) edited collection investigates some of these lingering biases by unpacking how the notion of craft, central to animation aesthetics and production, has impacted on animation’s cultural, social and political value. In their introduction, Ruddell and Ward note how the misleading divide between artistic and artisanal, based on the assumption that ‘art is made to elicit a purely aesthetic response’ (p. 8) has led to a de-evaluation of craft. They also point out how the equally untenable opposition between technology and the handmade has led to the misplacement or romanticization of craft as a marker of ‘authenticity’ and/or defender of ‘tradition’ (p. 9), thus revealing a mistrust for or, in fact, a fear of the ascendancy of digital technologies.

The volume chapters explore different connections and tensions between the handmade and animation industries, screen franchises, independent and experimental animation, while also tangentially engaging with animateur practices. For example, in her analysis of the relationship between the handcrafted and the ‘authenticity effect’ in autobiographic stop-motion animation, Carla MacKinnon (2019: 123) analyses two animations that were ‘produced in educational environments by non-professional animators’, thus arguably located in the liminal space of animateurs. In their examination of Lotte Reiniger, Katharina Boeckenhoff and Caroline Ruddell (2019) examine how her gendered craft was used to marginalize her as a producer of ornamental and pretty silhouettes, and, ultimately, an ornament herself, in contrast to the (male) avantgarde filmmakers with whom she collaborated but was not seen as being an equal contributor. Indeed, ‘Reiniger’s handmade silhouettes inhabit the (extra)ordinary, artisanal space of the animateur’ (Voci, 2017: 202) and her scissor-craft foregrounds the embodied gesture of contemporary digital animateurs.

So, where do animateurs fit in? I propose that they share many of the qualities that are characteristic of handmade, process cinema and the crafty animator. What distinguishes rather than separates them are both their light – vernacular, neither mainstream nor avant-garde – locations and their emphasis on an embodied and enchanted moving image that originates from their multimedia, artisanal practices, i.e. what Bennett (2001: 1–17) describes as the ‘wonder of minor experiences’.

In her contribution to The Crafty Animator, Birgitta Hosea (2019: 19) cautions us that the revival of artisanal craft could also be interpreted as a form of populist nostalgia, part of a broader anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist opposition to the mass-industrialization and hyper-technologization of visual arts. Indeed, the emphasis on the ‘handmade’, especially when associated with experimental animation, comes with its own set of biases. As Hosea points out:

This privileging of the handmade as somehow more artistic within experimental animation is predicated upon outmoded concepts. Relying upon a romantic conceptualisation of the lone artist working by hand, this is a relic of an earlier era when a view of the art object as unique, material expression of an individual consciousness was prevalent. (p. 40)

However, animateurs are not reviving romantic notions of the artisanal as an authentic expression of ‘individual consciousness’. Their craft is indeed artisanal; it is an embodied – neither romantically individualistic nor technologically defined – wondrous gesture.

Their project is also not political; rather than ‘crafting dissent’ (p. 40), animateurs like the Paper Cinema’s collaborative team or the solo-practitioner Lei Lei are interested in creating light provocations, playful estrangements and unexpected disturbances that allow us to see the world differently and re-imagine the ordinariness of the everyday.

At this scholarly juncture, taking a closer look at animateurs can help us address animation’s persisting idiosyncrasy and stimulate us to develop a more inclusive idea of the moving image. Animateurs – with their multiple identities as crafters, puppeteers, performers, storytellers – focus on handcrafted moving images, emphasizing the process rather than the finished product, often directing us to what happens off-screen instead of absorbing us in what happens on-screen. Their slow-time work is made of both pre-cinematic and digital materialities; it is non-medium-specific and it often relies on performativity and an aesthetics of shadow(ing) and morphing of lines and shapes, evocative of shadow plays and magic lantern shows. Furthermore, animateurs also share multidirectional connections with other experiential and artisanal practices that challenge the boundaries of analogue and digital screen technologies. I propose that their vernacular, multimedia, embodied engagement with the moving image can be best understood and conceptualized as ‘para-animation’.

Para-animation, in practice and theory

I am here borrowing and adapting Jonathan Walley’s theorization of ‘paracinema’. Walley (2003) was interested in examining a moving image (at the time, mostly pre-digital) that distances itself from medium specificity and focuses on an ‘idea of cinema’ that is developed via non-filmic phenomena, such as time and light. By deploying the prefix ‘para’, Walley emphasizes its off nature vis-à-vis the centrality of film and its liminal position, nearby, away from and contrary to a moving image defined by a specific technological medium and materiality. Working in the interstitial locations of light cultures rather than those of the avant-garde, I similarly propose that para-animation is nearby animation, disassociating the idea from a focus on any specific technological medium and instead focusing on multimedia materialities and non-medium-specific phenomena. While Walley’s paracinema emphasizes a dematerialized idea of cinema, in para-animation, materiality is not discarded; rather it is expanded to embrace multiple materials and media (e.g. puppets, paper silhouettes, 2D cel animation, stop-motion, 3D computer animation) and performative acts (e.g. shadow play storytelling, screenings, live performances). It is this multiplicity that makes para-animation off, peripheral to mainstream animation and nearby handmade camera-less moving image, the experiential practices of process cinema and the crafty, ‘tricky’, animators.

Para-animation is an idea of animation that is expandable, open to new inclusions, which similarly allow us to think of the moving image as a site of multiple encounters, between multimedia materialities, performative acts and embodied gestures. For example, para-animation intersects with critical interventions such as Jordan Schonig’s (2021) conceptualization of ‘motion forms’, which also adopts a non-medium specific approach to the moving image and analyses how movement in cinema is actualized via hybrid crossings between the analogue and the digital. As it bridges the artificial split between the world and its representation, para-animation also evokes François Laruelle’s (2011: 6) ‘non-photography’, i.e. a ‘certain specific relation to the real’ that precedes and subsides the medium-specific invention of photography, a symbolic ‘vision force’ that reconnects with, rather than reproduces, the world. ⁵ In para-animation, the moving image is freed from both the index and the virtual, as reality is not just there to be (re)presented or remade, but instead, crucially, to be reconnected with. By refocusing on the relation with the world, the affective force of this vernacular experience of enchantment forgoes the division between the artist who creates for aesthetic pleasure or political action, and the artisan who ‘makes’ for entertainment and (Bennett, 2001:10) challenges the elitist ‘claim that the capacity for wonder is restricted to the rich, learned, and leisured’. ⁶

To understand para-animation, we need to examine it as both a praxis and as a vernacular, ‘practice-smart’ theory (McLaughlin, 1996), which develops in the making of moving images as well as in critical reflections, shared on their websites, expressed in interviews, or conveyed in commentaries, photo albums and documentaries. In order to do so, I will focus on one defining key modality of para-animation: the embodied gesture.

Para-animation’s embodied gesture: A closer – or wider? – look at the ‘hand on-screen’

In Lei Lei’s allegorical tale Big Hands Oh Big Hands (2013), a little child plays the role of the enchanter, revealing the creative, imaginative, magical power we literally have in our hands. In the animation, people – all identifiable as adults – have disproportionately large hands, which are only used as tools for work, productivity and everyday tasks. After the child, who has small hands but boundless imagination, urges them to ‘open up your hands and have a safe landing’, the people discover that they can use their hands to enrich their life with playfulness (dancing, clapping) and do extraordinary things (flying), re-enchanting their reality (see Figure 2). From this tale of magical hands that can make almost anything happen emerges a critical conceptualization – a ‘practice-smart’ theory – of the embodied gesture of animation, which, following Vilém Flusser (2014: 3), I understand as a ‘movement of the body or of tool attached to the body, for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation’ and for which ‘meaning must be discovered’ (emphasis added).

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Figure 2.

The embodied gesture of animation: the enchanter’s magical hands. Still from Big Hands Oh Big Hands, Let It Be Bigger and Bigger, dir. Lei Lei, 2013. © Lei Lei. Reproduced with permission.

Indeed, in animation, the embodied gesture has been closely associated with the movement of the hand. ‘The “hand of the artist”, whether explicitly and literally shown or merely implied, is often fundamental to the form’ (Ruddell and Ward, 2019: 2) and ‘different types of animation foreground or self-consciously showcase notions of the (hand) crafted’ (p. 4). Norman Klein (2000: 22) notes that:

The audience may catch a glimpse of the hand at work – not the hand itself, but the tactile fact of a drawing on paper . . . that glimpse into praxis is a self-reflective device. It highlights the craft of the animator, not unlike ‘gesture’ in modern painting.

While viewers are aware of the handmade materiality of animation, the hand itself is supposed to remain unseen. When it does appear, this embodied gesture is strong evidence of praxis as ‘self-reflective’ or as theory in making.

The insertion of the hand drawing, assembling, painting, shaping or even morphing with the moving image is a visual trope (a text) as old as animation itself and it is a powerful location (a metatext) for critical reflections on the relationship between the world, technology and the human. This visual trope begins with the first screen appearances of the drawing hand (and body) of Stuart Blackton in The Enchanted Drawing (Blackton, 1900) or the erasing hand in his Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (Blackton, 1906) or the drawing and manipulating hand in Émile Cohl’s (1908) Fantasmagorie. A famous variation of this trope is Chuck Jones’s (1953) Duck Amuck, which wittily reveals ‘the hand of the artist’ as belonging to another animated character, Bugs Bunny, a mise en abyme of animation’s embodied gesture. Much less famously (at least outside Chinese studies), in Wan Guchan’s (1958) Pigsy Eats Watermelon, the hands displayed at the beginning of the animation are neither drawing nor erasing images but cutting paper silhouettes. In Osvaldo Cavandoli’s La Linea (aka Mr Linea or Lineman, 1971–1986), the symbiosis between the animateur’s ‘hand’ and the animated character becomes a visual metaphor for a fluidly metamorphosing creative subject. In all these iterations, the ‘hand on-screen’ is identifiable as the animateur’s persona.

In the contemporary, Chinese-accented, animateur context of my research, the hand of the artist has also been visible, ‘explicitly and literally shown or merely implied’. In interviews, self-presentations or impromptu manifestos, animateurs often refer to the importance of the ‘hand’ in relation to handmade techniques and tactility as a means of emphasizing their individual agency and the slow time involved in their artisanal craft. One example of these ‘impromptu manifestos’ is Lei Lei’s (2012) TED Talk, in which he discusses how he works on his own, drawing on paper, making use of (rather than relying on) computer technology. Similarly, in her commentary on Animate, Liu Jiamin (2019) explains that she combines handmade stop-motion with cut-out animation ‘to reveal the working process of an animator’. Online biographical notes and media commentaries also point to the importance of tactility and embodied gesture in animateurs’ work. For example, on her website, Cho Pei-Hsin (nd) stresses how she ‘combines traditional and digital mediums to depict a variety of inward feelings that attempt to transcribe subtle emotions into tangible and visually tactile images’. In the short bio following her interview to China’s Stopmotion Animation (2013), Chai Mi is described as ‘insisting on using hand-made and hand-drawn technique to create art’.

Among Chinese-accented animateurs, the self-reflective ‘hand on-screen’ is pervasive, albeit differently materialized and interpreted, and expressing distinctive formal choices. Hands are either isolated or fluidly morphed to their bodies, which may be implied or fully displayed, or partially visible, at times disguised, fragmented or morphed into other objects, anthropomorphic subjects or abstract shapes. While hands also appear as painted, drawn and animated, displaying the same texture as all the other objects in the audiovisual text, I will mostly focus on the insertions of the ‘real’ hand, ⁷ in a necessarily limited but sufficiently diverse range of diegetic and non-diegetic gestures.

Diegetic gestures can be directed outwardly, towards the re- enchantment of the everyday, via manipulation and handling of the material world, such as Huang Liang-Hsin’s (2016) stop-motion animation Finger Paradise, where ‘real’ hands and their fingers are embedded in a playful dancing and drinking party made from everyday objects (see Figures 3a and b). Or they can be directed inwardly, pointing to the visualization and materialization of intimate emotions as in Huang’s (2019) A Girl Who’s Afraid of Touching People, in which the painted hands of an invisible but audibly breathing female subject (a girl who’s afraid of touching people) caress and scratch the surface of the everyday, touching and being touched by the world she inhabits (see Figures 3c and d).

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Figure 3.

Re-enchanting the everyday via manipulation and handling of the material world and visualization of tactile emotions: (a and b) above, hands dancing with everyday objects; (c and d) below, caressing and scratching the everyday surface. Stills from Finger Paradise, dir. Huang Liang-Hsin, 2016 (a and b) and A Girl Who’s Afraid of Touching People, dir. Huang Liang-Hsin, 2019 (c and d). © Huang Liang-Hsin. Reproduced with permission.

In other instances, hands make gestures to para-animation as a light ontology of enchantment. For example, in Liu Jiamin’s (2014) Animate, ‘real’ hands are attached to (and detached from) the body of the animateur, who also appears as a photographic version of herself, effectively blurring the divide between the diegetic and the non-diegetic. Emerging from a crescent moon – a gesture to the long-standing trope of the moon as the location for the fantastic – the animateur’s arm reaches out to the space of her own animation (see Figure 4a). With a similar process of mise en abyme as in Duck Amuck, the animateur is framed both on- and off-screen, sitting within and outside the universe she is shown in the process of drawing with her digital brush (see Figure 4c) and inserting and moving objects into it (see Figure 4d). Taking a step further in blurring the divide between the self and the world, images of the animateur as creative subject are interspersed with images of the animateur’s hands and body as created objects, which are then embedded and morphed with other objects in the world. In an increasingly accelerating pace, ‘real’ body parts appear and make other drawn objects appear, in fast multiplying embodied gestures: waving, moving, kicking, pulling, pointing, touching, turning, handling, reaching out (see Figure 4b). By allowing both herself and the world around her to disaggregate and reaggregate, the animateur therefore seeks to reconnect with the world, rather than just represent it or interpret it.

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Figure 4.

The animateur as creative subject and the animateur’s hands and body as created objects: the mise en abyme of the animating and animated realities: (a) clockwise from top left: the animateur’s hand emerging from the crescent moon; (b) the animateur’s body disaggregated and turned into playful animated objects; (c) the animateur subject painting with the digital brush; and (d) manipulating objects in her own animation. Stills from Animate, dir. Liu Jiamin, 2014. © Liu Jiamin. Reproduced with permission.

Non-diegetic occurrences of hands can be very brief, and at times almost subliminally inserted. The Clock in My Room Stops (dir. Cai Caibei, 2017) is a record of a woman’s insomnia; the ‘real’ hand can be spotted in a fleeting, almost concealed moment at the end, sliding under a grey, blurred surface (see Figure 5a), which, the voice-over informs us, may be the pillow of the swirling, floating, empty bed (see Figure 5b), which – like all the previous images (lemons, cats, abstract shapes) in this chronicle of insomnia – inhabits the space between the tangible and the imaginary. The hand’s gesture is a quick appearing/disappearing (f)act which could almost be missed; it is tangential, nearby, off, the main content of the animation. This light but purposeful insertion of the ‘real’ hand re-inserts the non-diegetic ‘reality’ (where the viewer is also implicitly located, so the ‘real’ hand also acts as a proxy for the viewer) into the imaginary, illusionary, crafted reality of the painted animation. Meaning further expands when we understand this fleeting ‘real’ hand also as a gesture towards Cai Caibei’s (2018) own praxis and her declared emphasis on the ‘tactile dimension’, which she explores in Half Asleep. In this animation, drawn hands and other fluidly and partially sketched parts of two half-bodies are the diegetic foci of the animation, which shows the sensual morphing of organic and inorganic forms and shapes, also located in the space between the tangible and the imaginary, fished out of an oneiric reality and pulled into the frame (see Figures 5c and d).

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Figure 5.

Gesturing to the space between the tangible and the imaginary: (a and b) above, the appearing/disappearing act of the ‘real’ hand; (c and d) below, hands morphing with limbs and other objects in the ‘tactile dimension’ of reality. Stills from The Clock in My Room Stops, dir. Cai Caibei, 2017 (5a and b) and Half Asleep, dir. Cai Caibei, 2018 (5c and d). © Cai Caibei. Reproduced with permission.

Beyond what we can see on screen, embodied gestures also appear in the animateurs’ recordings/commentaries, photo albums and documentary videos, which are often placed on their websites or Vimeo channels, alongside the animations. It is in this shared apparatus that para-animation manifests itself as both a practice and a vernacular theory. For example, in a series of still images, Wang Qieer (2017) has captured the planning, equipment, tools and developing stages of her claymation Dystopia Rooms, including close-ups of hands daubed with clay followed by (clean) hands holding the finished clay figure. Also engaging with the embodied gesture of animation, The Making of Sister is a short documentary on the process of making Sister (2018, dir. Song Siqi). ⁸ The documentary is uploaded on the website, paired with the animation, allowing us to get a peek into the animateur’s tricks and dexterity. In the video, the crafty animator re-inserts herself in the process of construction, revealing her creative and manipulating agency. As in Wang Qieer’s images, the emphasis is often on the bodiless, ‘magical’ hands, rather than on ‘how it is done’ or capturing the animateur at work. In the documentary, hands are shown manipulating the puppets and their home (see Figure 6a) or using a tiny brush (pretending) to paint the watercolour art within the animation, performing a ‘trick’, an evocative gesture, rather than the ‘real’ act of painting (see Figure 6b). By making visible the process, but leaving most explanatory details out, the video does not produce (Bennett, 2001: 7) ‘a narrative of disenchantment’. Rather, it prompts us to take notice that Sister is hand-made, so that we can be surprised, enchanted by the film’s craft.

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Figure 6.

Gesturing to enchantment: showing (off) the animateur’s tricks and dexterity: (a) left, the bodiless, ‘magical’ hand sets the stage for the animation; (b) right, ‘paints’ the objects within it. Stills from The Making of Sister, dir. Song Siqi, 2018. © Song Siqi. Reproduced with permission.

Similarly seeking to capture the embodied nature and enchanting effect of animation, Cho Pei-Hsin’s (2019) graduation documentary Shoegaze Into, rather than a full record of the exhibition, is an impressionistic expansion on the key relationship between the animateur’s agency as a crafter of wonders and the spectator’s enchantment, which originates from a direct (live) interaction with the animation. In the video, the ‘real’ hand touching – and being touched by – the animated images’ shadows is left ambivalent. It can be both that of the animateur herself or one of the wondering spectators captivated by the extra-ordinary animated images of self-slicing bread loaves and moving cat silhouettes (see Figure 7). As in the other examples, the hand points to the embodied gesture of animation but, in this case, it also meaningfully blurs agency. It is no longer clear who is eliciting enchantment and who is enchanted by it.

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Figure 7.

Whose embodied gesture? The ambivalent ‘real’ hand of the animateur and/or the spectator. Stills from Shoegaze Into (Exhibition Documentary) RCA Grad Show, dir. Cho Pei-Hsin, 2019. Available at: https://vimeo.com/348052983. © Cho Pei-Hsin. Reproduced with permission.

Photos and the videos focusing on the making or the exhibition of animations are not mere addenda, but integral contributions to para-animation’s praxis. Together with the animateurs’ written commentaries and interviews, they function as articulations of a vernacular theory of para-animation. Addressing the ‘paradox that underpins much animation . . . namely, that it simultaneously reveals and conceals its own construction’ (Ruddell and Ward, 2019: 2), the animateurs share their trick (craft) together with the animation. In a delayed temporal modality compared to the Paper Cinema’s live-staged performance, by watching these photos and videos within the same screening (web)space of the animation, viewers are witnessing and partaking in the embodied gesture of animation.

Importantly, just as in their occurrences within the animations, the hands are isolated and separated from the body of the animateurs so that the focus remains indeed on the gesture of animation. The emphasis on the dextrous, quasi-magical hands also presents the (prestidigit)animateurs as modern magicians, who, instead of informing us that ‘there’s a trick but you can’t see it’, are in fact alerting us to ‘there’s a trick and you can see it’, or rather, almost see it. It is in this ‘almost’ that lies the potentiality of enchantment. We are not given a full step-by-step explanation of the process of craft; instead, selected snapshots, visual impressions invite us to see besides, beyond or in-between the frames of the animation. In the same way, on the dim-lit stage of the Paper Cinema or in shadow theatre, we can only partially make out the many objects and performers involved in the making of the show. This elliptical revelation thus evokes – rather than fully exposes – the human agent and gives us a glance of the technological apparatus. As the process is revealed to be human-crafted but is not entirely disclosed, the sense of wonder persists, even when we are reminded of the ‘trick’.

Magic, trick films and the (prestidigit)animateur

Showing or evoking the animateur’s presence and process creates a pervasive ‘now-you-see-it and now-you-don’t’ effect. The ‘hand on-screen’ becomes a gesture of apparition and materialization, evocative of the persistence of magical domains in modern life, which, in turn, points to the need for seeing/imaging beyond reality, to be surprised by wondrous experiences. That is why not only do (prestidigit)animateurs find themselves nearby artisans and artists who focus on the handmade, but also to magicians or, more precisely, prestidigitators and their agile, nimble fingers.

Scholars have examined the historical and ontological connections between early cinema, wonder and magic (Barnouw, 1981; Gunning, 1989; Solomon, 2010; Souriau, 1952). Colin Williamson (2011, 2015) has examined the shared history between magic and cinema, uncovering ‘what unifies’ them in order to answer the question ‘how and to what extent do the tricks of digital technologies resonate with the manual and mechanical magic of early cinema?’ Williamson argues that the figure of the magician has remained central to cinema, even with the technological changes brought about by digital media. Cinema is a ‘device of wonder’, which, Williamson (2011: 8–14) explains, can be described as a ‘mechanical magician’ who, like the stage magician, attracts audiences with its tricks and invites us to ‘suspend disbelief’.

Animation has an equally strong connection with magic and wonder. Animation regularly performs magic tricks, breaking laws of physics, stretching and morphing shapes, displaying impossible accelerations and sudden dis/re-appearances. One can argue, however, that certain developments in CGI and 3D animation have diminished or disrupted animation’s magical appeal. Angela Ndalianis (2000: 264) notes that Terminator2:3D ‘lures us into accepting illusion as reality’ as ‘it creates levels of reality that perceptually collapse the frame that separates us from illusion’. She compares 3D illusions of reality to the magic shows of the 19th century and the tricks of Trip to the Moon. However, neither prestidigitators nor trick films plan to ‘lure us into accepting illusion as reality’. Rather, they invite us to be enchanted and marvel about the skills/ability of the magician (or the filmmaker) behind the trick. Conversely, special effects, which produce mere recognition of technological sophistication, impress us but do not enchant us. Wonder and surprise come not from seeing things that do not occur in our everyday reality, but from knowing that this transformed reality is made possible by human dexterity, creativity and ingenuity. We are not enchanted because ‘we perceptually accept as real illusions we know cannot be true’ (Ndalianis, 2000). We are enchanted because we know that these ‘illusions’ are truthful, albeit playful and creative, experiences of reality. While 3D or virtual reality animation may ‘lure us into accepting illusion as reality’, animateurs’ works are better understood as ‘postdigital’ tricks that openly and playfully manipulate reality so that we can experience affective attachments to it. ⁹

This is why the ‘hand on-screen’ is worth a closer and wider look; it is a trope that allows us to discover meaning (Flusser, 2014: 3) in the embodied gesture of animation and understand how it contributes to expand our understanding of the moving image. By showing (off) their hand’s dexterous and creative skills, and rejecting the supremacy of technology, animateurs contribute to ‘reinvesting the body as the very origin of the image in all its forms’ (Hansen, 2001: 83), and they re-imagine (re-draw, re-enact) the gesture performed by many other enchanters of the everyday. As one of para-animation’s key modalities, the embodied gesture of the ‘hand on-screen’ evokes multiple, non-medium specific connections across different times and places. It connects with pre-cinema and early cinema’s magicians and the continuing tradition of today’s prestidigitators and hand-shadow performers; with handmade cinema’s analogue and digital artists and animators, from Norman McLaren’s hand-painted films and graphical sounds to the Korean-based Handmade Filmlab Spacecell; with past and present handmade storytelling, from shadow play to the Paper Cinema; and with exhibitionist ruptures in conventional, commercial animation, from Duck Amuck to the opening of Butterfly Lovers (dir. Tsai Ming-Chin, 2004). In all these instances, the embodied gesture of animation directly involves the viewer, who is made both aware and part of a simultaneously mediatic (technologized) and humanized (de-technologized) process, i.e. a creative manipulation in which the world’s everyday (f)acts are re-imagined and re-enchanted.

Epilogue: para-animation’s light ontology of enchantment

I return to my key proposition – i.e. para-animation expands our understanding of the moving image by making it a key location for an enchanted experience of the modern world – with some concluding thoughts on para-animation’s light ontology of enchantment. In para-animation’s creation of wonder, technology has a role to play, but it is not determinant. It is ‘revealing’ in Heideggerian terms. ¹⁰ As Barbara Maria Stafford et al. (2001: 1) argue in Devices of Wonder, there are complex, multidirectional connections between ‘revealing technologies and magical domains’, which show that ‘art and science do not so much rival each other as intermingle and branch’. Like Stafford’s devices of wonder, technology in para-animation is only part of a complex mixture of materialities, media and performative acts, which, when combined, allow us to relate to the world and uncover aspects that are ordinarily concealed. From this mixture emerges a playful relationship with technology, which is characterized by manipulation, hybridization and de-technologization of the material world. Rather than being a tool to transform the world, technology in para-animation re-centres the human experience as the meaning-maker (Mark BN Hansen, 2001) and opens up our ‘being-in-the-world’ and its ‘truth’ to include what the world can ‘reveal’, how we can re-imagine it and re-connect with it.

Moving beyond the ontology of ‘belief’, Simon During (2002: 62) has argued that modern enchantments can and should be theorized as a form of ‘secularized magic’ by focusing on the ways ‘modern culture (which turns around fiction and spectacle) nourishes secular magic as a substitute for loss of supernatural presence’. During re-evaluates the work of Shaftesbury, a ‘neglected cultural theorist who opens the way to an appreciation of the lightness and fun (to use a favourite term of the later 18th century) of a profane popular culture’ (p. 56), emphasizing the interactivity and implicit complicity between magicians and spectators. During reminds us that ‘entertainment-magic audiences seek experiences which are not merely surrogates for supernaturalism. They engage with performances through secular and heterogeneous skills and pleasures, most of which do not come anywhere near fulfilling the needs and aspirations satisfied by religion’ (p. 77). As Joshua Landy and Michael Saler (2009: 14) argue, ‘The world is, in every traditional sense, disenchanted’ and ‘must be enchanted anew’. Such an imperative echoes Bennett’s (2001) views that enchantment allows for a more genuine and ethical connection with the world (human and non-human). She warns us that ‘without modes of enchantment, we might not have the energy and inspiration to enact ecological projects, or to contest ugly and unjust modes of commercialization, or to respond generously to humans and nonhumans that challenge our settled identities’ (p. 178).

By re-animating the world with ordinary objects, skilful hands, technological devices and cunning tricks, para-animation meaningfully contributes to re-enchant the world, without renouncing the ‘secular rationality’ of our age, neither turning to the mysticism of religion nor bowing to the deterministic supremacy of technological thinking, instead embracing the ‘lightness and fun . . . of a profane popular culture’. Animateurs’ wonders are very much secular, profane, light creations; their magic resides not in the supernatural or the technological virtual but in the human capacity to interact with, re-imagine and re-connect with the material world. Like the showmen of the past who revealed ‘the marvels of the unexpected artistic possibilities of the animated projections’ (Mannoni, 2000: 467), today’s animateurs are seeking the ‘marvels of the unexpected’ by showing us the extra-ordinary possibilities of the material fabric of the everyday and allowing us to be enchanted.