Editorial

Thinking about the cinematic experience of animation is a core constituent of this journal’s remit. This extends from the cinematic frame-based experience into technological advancments and new ways of seeing being developed, which are also expanding our experiences of time-based moving image culture. A shared strength of the first three articles of this issue lies in an emphasis on the viewer experience and engagement. The first two are specifically concerned with the creators of the work and the viewer experience, the first with the practices of frame-based animation and the second with virtual reality.

Departing from the notion of the frame as ‘the nexus of all film theories’, in ‘The Phenomenology of Animation’, Jack Parry is interested in pursuing perceptual and philosophical aspects of the experiences of watching animation. As a practising artist who recently completed a PhD, central to his aim to articulate a phenomenology of animation is a consideration of the actual processes of creating the profilmic frames of animation – the practices of animating itself – and the artist’s performative creation of an animated world. Discussing various temporal stages and forms of the film frame throughout, Parry develops a theoretical context and framework mainly around Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology and Neo-Platonists, in particular Henri Bergson; from the latter Parry distils six constructs, or dimensions, of consciousness, temporality and spatiality, as well as a Bergsonian paradox of vitality and lived experience. Owing to the interest in the inward experience of practice as crafting transcendence rather than post-filmic projection, there is less reference to Maurice Merleau-Ponty or Vivian Sobchack’s magisterial and ground-breaking The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (1992). Parry provides a helpful overview of how he is working with the very broad and complex philosophy of phenomenology as applied to viewer experience in moving image studies. Each of the six constructs are framed, elaborated and exemplified in terms of the experience and activities of specific freedoms that animated practice affords. He concludes with the proposal that it is the eternity of the frame that is at the core of his proposed phenomenology of animation.

The next article has a specific focus on a very different kind of frame than the passive screen-based one of cinema: the 360-degree environment of Virtual Reality (VR). In their ‘Exploring the Viewer’s Role in Narrative-Based Animated Virtual Reality Experiences: Strategies for Role Activation and Immersive Storytelling’, Ye Eun Kim and M Javad Khajavi also explore six themes that have some overlaps with those of Parry in terms of creative agency, presence and activity, but are more focused on viewer immersion, interaction and decision-making in interactive storytelling. The authors’ methods are informed by theoretical contexts, a data-based qualitative and thematic analysis and a set of criteria to examine animated VR works, exemplified by a set of data samples. Some key points they discuss are the release from narrative linearity and varieties of new kinds of point of view afforded by VR. Each of the six themes is then explored, with reference to creative elements and processes of VR works, and these are then developed into a set of strategies with the aim of providing insights for practitioners working in VR into how audiences participate and engage with their works. Kim and Khajavi also offer viewers an understanding of their own creative activities and choices available in the VR experience. In their concluding section, they indicate further areas of research into ways of uniting theory and creative practices in the emerging field of VR research and the worlds we can experience in this technology.

Our next two articles share a political interest – one ecological, the other national – and the first also shares Parry’s interest in vitality and engagement as an element of the viewing experience. A concern for the more-than-human as depicted in animation is at the core of Sylvie Bissonnette’s ‘Cross-species Perception and Ecological Disposition in Animation’, with the non-human perspective illustrated throughout by an exemplary single film: Ferenc Rófusz’s Oscar-winning A Légy (The Fly) (1980). Before engaging deeply with the subject of cross-species perception between animals and humans, Bissonnette begins by exploring the differing animal worldviews as presented in documentaries and ecological animation films (‘enviro-toons’), with a critique of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrist perspective. An interdisciplinary range of philosophers and theorists provides a contextual framework. She then discusses various aspects of Rófusz’s film that create the fly’s worldview, working with a ‘structure of engagement’ to explain the viewer’s engagement with the film’s non-anthropomorphic character. She also invokes Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concepts of becoming-animal and assemblages in order to develop a discussion around the very important point that animation is always a created world, a fiction, if you like. In this, her article has affinities with Parry’s, also in sections with a phenomenological thread. Bissonnette then scrutinizes the film in detail, describing camera techniques, perspective and lenses (all created in the drawn animation that enables the cinematic experience in the first place) of scenes in the film that offer the viewer a sense of embodiment in the fly’s own physicality and consciousness, and its point of view flying outside that stimulates empathy and sympathy for the fly’s entrapment in the room, as well as allegiance with it in the frenzy of its death. It is here that the political aspect of her article develops.

As humans, our experience of the film’s real-life insect is universal; listening with closed eyes to the masterful sound track’s nuanced, precise and dramatic arrangement of loudness and pitch of the fly’s buzz (the main sound in the house besides a clock, footsteps and various ‘thwacks’) will recall our own experiences of an irritating fly in the home. After reading Bissonnette’s article, we may think differently about the real and living more-than-human, and open a window instead of reaching for a fly swatter.

With a very specific national political approach and sharing an interest with our first two articles in the creativity of animation practitioners, in ‘Raising Children for the Communist Party: The Shanghai Animation Film Studio’s Infantilized Style (1950s–1980s)’, Mengxue Wei critically investigates socio-cultural contexts of four decades of Shanghai Animation Film Studio’s (SAFS) productions aimed at children. After introducing the SAFS through a literature review of three types of research on the studio, Wei arrives at a central question that the article seeks to answer: which children does SAFS serve? This is done through examining the influences of the Communist Party of China’s political contexts and policies, the studio’s creative history of the period and what Wei posits is an ‘infantilized style‘ of meishu genre films that emerges in her analysis of testimonies and comments from studio staff. The target audience was not differentiated into genders, ages, demographics or other criteria and factors, leading to stereotypes and an underestimation of children’s capacities of cognition and understanding of more complex storylines and visual styles. Wei unpicks and interweaves a number of ideological, social, cultural and artistic threads to develop a strong case for the concerted and directed lack of attention paid to the complex diversity of the actual children who viewed films intended for formation of perfect, passive, receptive, non-questioning audiences (the future Communist adults of the CPC). Thematic and symbolic evaluation of indicative film examples substantiate Wei’s argument that, rather than serving children, the SAFS, guided by CPC policy, overprotected them. Wei concludes that, even after the 1980s economic reforms and change of many policies, the current CPC still holds influence and continues the ideologically-tinged legacy of serving children as in the past.

Our final article also evaluates an area of creative industries yet, instead of a critical history, the authors take a view to the future through a pedagogical lens: the animation and visual effects (VFX) as they are taught in Scotland and the connection to industry. In ‘The “Skills Gap” in the Animation/VFX industry in Scotland’, Jonathan Mortimer, Kendall Richards and Nick Pilcher raise a number of important questions about the current state of education and potential specializations, as well as what could be improved in the industry itself to connect better to graduates so they have the required skills, also what role government could play in this. After an initial review of the animation and VFX sector in Scotland, the authors build a pedagogic discussion supported by a set of references on how subjects of creative study are generally established, and apply this to Scotland’s academic landscape as well as to animation as a programme of practice-based study. A set of interview-based data (university lecturers and industry professionals with a diverse range of specialisms) is deliberated through themes that aim to identify the ‘skills gap’ of the title and its causes within both the academic setting and in the VFX industry. The authors offer numerous correctives, solutions and ways forward for practitioners, teachers and studios; importantly, they also address funding in education and paint a picture of decline if nothing is done soon. The article will be useful to students and graduates, industry-appropriate curriculum development and exchange, as well as VFX industries who can benefit from knowledge of how VFX programmes are conceptualized in Scotland, the UK and beyond.