Editorial

This issue brings you a set of interdisciplinary articles in unanticipated dialogues with each other, often through a long view, of histories of art, natural science and (pre-) cinema. For this reader, there is also an undercurrent throughout of pioneering media (an)archaeologist Zielinski’s (2006) Deep Time of the Media, that should be required reading for all interested in animation – and cinema as a whole – before and after the invention of photochemical processes. Zielinski’s challenges are to ‘an anemic and evolutionary model [that] has come to dominate many studies in so-called media’ (p. vii) and to a dominant orthodox historiography (pp. vii–viii). He is clear that the field of media archaeology ‘faces numerous issues to evolve histories of technologies, apparatuses, effects, images, iconographies, and so forth, within a larger scheme of reintegration in order to expand a largely ignored aspect of conventional history’ (p. ix). As an academic journal, we also encourage authorship that engages with expanding our field, including in the ways Zielinski proposes.

Some of the articles in this issue develop ontological, media-archaeological or philosophical approaches to our understanding of animation and move beyond the concept of the illusion of life often used to define the form. Others are seeking distinctions and new ways to approach specific sets of works or techniques, apparatuses and technologies. Most engage with the phenomena described by Colin Williamson of magic ‘hidden in plain sight’ that is the main title of his (2015) monograph, that ‘focuses on the “long” shared history of magic and the cinema’ (p. 18). The journal’s scope, since 2006, is to address all animation made using all known (and yet to be developed) techniques, from 16th-century optical devices to contemporary digital media. Considering the direction and expansion that Animation Studies has been taking in recent years, it is time to responsively expand our scope into a longer-reaching techno-scientific and historical past and, with paradigm-shifting, disruptive new technologies into the speculative future.

In the late 18th century, as one of a number of movements following on from the European Enlightenment and challenging its rational restraint, the German Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) was known for its focus on subjectivity and emotions. A key figure in this music and literary movement was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; yet this polymath’s contribution far exceeded the arts, with wide-ranging – what we would now call interdisciplinary – investigations into everything from colour theory to the natural sciences. One of the latter is the focus of Zeke Saber’s ‘Animating Goethe’ in which he takes one of the main terms used to describe a defining feature of animation – metamorphosis – to unfold and complicate this through Goethe’s aesthetic, philosophical and scientific considerations of the botanical phenomenon of morphology. Saber’s aim is ambitious: to propose a theoretical framework that is tailored to the practices, processes and experiences of animation film. After a brief sweep of definitions, Saber arrives quickly to his topic, first unpacking some of Goethe’s key statements and findings in Goethean morphology and the Urpflanze as an epistemological tool for the arts and humanities. Then animation itself is under scrutiny, and Saber unfurls tendrils of Goethe into animation studies, technological and stylistic practices and audience reception, with a focus on Sergei Eisenstein, and Alla Gadassik and Caroline Leaf’s works, and a meaningful excursion to a discussion of André Bazin and the filmic index. Saber’s proposition of a proleptic film theory and promotion of Goethe to the ‘hallowed group of “early animators”’ is thought-provoking in that he extends the time frame into a past well before the discovery of photochemical cinema.

A section of Saber’s article briefly considers genealogies, and this method is given consideration, albeit for a very different set of animation practices, in Paola Voci’s ‘Para-animation, in Practice and Theory: The Animateur, the Embodied Gesture and Enchantment’. Her interest is in what she terms ‘animateurs’ working outside the mainstream and, to a degree, outside animation as it is notionally understood, through mainly multimedia, often analogue, practices of para-animation. Voci begins by explaining that her interests and research were initiated by the experience of a performance; this led her to a specific set of ‘Chinese-accented’ contemporary artists of handmade cinema that work with the everyday and the real, and to then seek, and not find, a space for these in recent animation studies she briefly summarizes. Voci then offers some criteria and definitions for para-animation, before paying attention to what she describes as a key modality: the embodied gesture. Acknowledging the hand of the animator as an oft-used and self-reflexive trope, Voci works with a set of films to open it up to notions of diegesis, enchantment and tactility. She also reflects on other para(cinematic) elements not in the works themselves, such as sound recordings or photos on artists’ websites, that she considers integral both to the artists’ practices and to her theory of para-animation. Voci then engages with Williamson’s ‘hidden in plain sight’, locating her animateurs in this non-medium-specific genealogy that, like Goethe’s morphology, spans centuries. Voci also shares with Saber the interest of opening up boundaries between disciplines and differentiating between forms and media, and she also proposes a theory for ‘vernacular animation’. Her conclusion invokes the enchantment of Jane Bennett and Barbara Maria Stafford et al.’s devices of wonder to settle on and celebrate the common thread of the materials and phenomena of the everyday.

Illusion and magic, this time of a digital nature, is at the heart of our next article, Nick Jones’s ‘Far from Houdini: The “Magic” of the VFX Breakdown’. Jones is interested in the ‘back office’ of digital animation creation, the VFX breakdowns that function as a type of technical trailer, teaser or behind the scenes making-of for large projects; he is particularly interested in the labour that goes into these videos that is hidden, but not in plain sight (which is his point). Jones explains the contexts, purposes and uses of these breakdowns, how they ‘pull back the magician’s curtain’ of process, and he raises a key concern in terms of where they are disseminated: in his words ‘ the mode of delivery adopted by the breakdowns vanishes away the people, places and labour time required to undertake VFX work.’ One of his aims is to reframe the VFX breakdown as worthy of critical and artistic evaluation. Jones works with an effective vocabulary and a set of sub-headings that keep a relation to some of the main effects of magic (now you see it). After building a basis for his discussion with other scholars who have engaged with this form of artistic work, Jones then examines a set of examples from mainly recent digital feature films that combine live-action with VFX, both formally and in terms of aesthetic and artistic value. His discussion could be seen in a lineage with Thompson’s (1980) ‘Implications of the Cel Animation Technique’ on the sidelining of animation in classic Hollywood due to its disruptive nature (pp. 118–119); the disruption Jones reveals also has to do with an ideology of (digital, virtual) realism too.

That temporality is an element of process is implicit in Goethe’s morphology and in the concept of Bildung that Saber discusses in concert with Eisenstein’s dialectical montage. Seeking a new ontology for optical image systems through what she calls ‘time light’, the temporal is addressed by Deirdre Feeney through animation, media archaeology and film, by analysing her own creative practice. In ‘Achronologies, Materiality and Mechanics of Time in Optical Moving Image Systems’, Feeney is interested in devices, the viewer and a magic – a ‘perpetual spell’ cast on the viewer – and how animation can evade the Kronos (duration) of the real world. She regularly cites Zielinski (2006), whose Deep Time of the Media is faintly and lightly peppered with this Greek concept in a compelling tension with the more pungent Kairos, one meaning of which is ‘the unique moment when one quality changes into another’ (pp. 30, 58). Feeney’s conceptual approach to time is in both the article’s structure and in the artworks and viewer experience, or time made visible. She sets out the wider theoretical contexts, her approach and methodology – one that wants to move beyond the viewer and image, and towards the devices that create the practice. Her expanded animation Hollow Lens is then discussed as a durational work and a material investigation that explores historical technologies such as 19th-century magic lanterns and hydraulics. This interest continues in the second work, Ghost, this time referencing Charles-Émile Reynaud’s devices for projection and other philosophical ‘toys’ of that period. The technical descriptions and artistic aims of these two projects are concise and illuminating, and provide the reader with a real-world technical anchor for the aesthetic and experiential discussion that reaches back in time into a range of systems of ideas around optics and scientific devices. Williamson’s ‘hidden in plain sight’ is implicit here too, this time referring to the ubiquity of time-light that is unnoticed until the viewer becomes aware of the device creating it, specifically, the lens. Feeney then turns attention to how some moving image practices expose and reveal the devices that are the source of the images, or rather the more usual hiding of them. After reminding us of the physical engagement that was an element of 19th-century pre- and early cinematic technologies (for example, the lanternist and the praxinoscope), Feeney turns to the next two centuries and, framed by a range of more recent authors, she explains how this embodied experience is activated in her own and other contemporary works that also make use of digital technologies, and that these ‘decloaked’ devices offer the viewer a new kind of animated temporal experience.

Our next article engages with histories too, specifically of one multidisciplinary genre and style of art that has what Christopher Holliday calls ‘historical mobility’ with a ‘transhistorical logic’: the Baroque. The article too has affinities with Voci, Jones and Feeney in that specific Neo-Baroque qualities also include concealment and illusionism; at the same time, he pays more attention to qualities of spectacle and excess afforded through digital technologies. In ‘Walt’s Art History: Late Style, Digital Aesthetics and the “Disney Baroque”’, Holliday locates the influences of the Baroque beyond art into a far wider range, from global to local and economic to technological, and he works with this frame in a critical and corrective examination and evaluation of stylistic phases in the Walt Disney Studio, with a later focus on a corpus of contemporary feature-length productions. He discusses the intimate dialogues between Disney artists and fine art practices and principles – on a spectrum from traditional mimesis to abstract – and convincingly frees the studio from three clear-cut formulaic stylistic periods generally referred to by authors and the Studio in an art-historical narrative of early, middle and late, to a less temporally periodic and more dissident and evolutionary process of artistic development. There is a commonality with other articles in this issue in Holliday’s interest in re-evaluating histories and knowledge, specifically acknowledging the Eurocentric canonicity and limitations of European art histories, the need for decolonization and wider global expansion partly assuaged by demonstrable extensions into non-Western countries and cultures. The understanding of the (Neo-) Baroque as a geographically and historically mobile term sets a conceptual framework to examine a set of ‘late’ mainly computer-animated features that Holliday explores through what he terms as the ‘Disney Baroque’. In this, he introduces a new set of art-related vocabulary for us to work with to approach the corporation’s remediation of its own stylistic histories.