Alive and Lifelike: Theatricality and Animation (through Duck Amuck)

Cultural theorists across disciplines have increasingly employed metaphors of performance and explorations of theatricality to engage with digital evolutions in labor, spectating, and consumer culture. As graphic animations often form the access point for our digital world, critical explorations of theatricality have erupted around the animated screen. Performance and theatricality, often at odds with each other, offer two different approaches to animation theory, with performance dominating the field. Focusing on self-reflective performance and artificiality, recent explorations of the theatricality of cinema offer promising sites of inquiry, but there are many more applications and definitions of theatricality useful to animation. With the help of Daffy in the 1953 film, Duck Amuck, this article argues for pursuing animation historiography and theory through the lens of theatricality, demonstrating along the way how animation reveals (and revels in) the theatricality of cinema.