Animation

It is well known that, despite his close engagement with cinema, Gilles Deleuze was less concerned with animated film, being somewhat dismissive of its capabilities. In recent years, however, a number of attempts have been made – most notably by William Schaffer, Thomas Lamarre and Dan Torre – to construct Deleuzian positions in animation theory. This article outlines some of these approaches, whilst engaging critically with Torre’s writings. In particular, it foregrounds Torre’s neglect of the post-structural, political dimension of Deleuzian thought through an examination of the concepts of faciality, the close-up, and relation as they occur in Deleuzian and Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy. This is in part facilitated through a comparison of Stuart Blackton’s Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) – a work directly addressed by Torre, and Emile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) – a work which he largely passes by. It is claimed here that, despite a number of apparent similarities, the animations of Cohl and Blackton express a radically divergent series of ontological commitments. Cohl offers the audience an experience of chaotic, mutable, relational complexity that revels in its incoherence, whilst Blackton presents a series of more straightforward set pieces, dwelling for the most part upon object-centric representational form. The tension between representation and becoming that occurs between these works is employed to facilitate a critical engagement with Torre’s process-cognitivism. It is suggested that Torre’s work, though exceptional in its pedagogic value, is likewise expressive of this tension, and that in its effort firstly to combine a series of process-philosophical and cognitivist ideas, and secondly to unpack the radical ideas of Deleuze through the more conservative philosophy of Nicholas Rescher, it runs the risk of falling back into a quasi-Kantian philosophy of generality and representation.

The debate over whether television and film affect girls’ body image has been contentious. Researchers argue that film and television negatively affect, only partially affect, or do not affect girls’ body image. These studies have one common limitation: they approach animated female bodies as if they are the same because they are, mostly, thin. In this project, the author seeks to extend and complicate this existing scholarship by analyzing bodies in 67 films produced by several American animation studios from 1989 through 2016. In this study, she classifies 239 female characters as one of four body types: Hourglass, Pear, Rectangle, or Inverted Triangle. Her argument is two-fold: (1) over the last 30 years, there has been a shift from a singular dominant shape (Hourglass) to the dominance of several body shapes (especially Pear and Rectangle); and (2) young girls may be affected by characters their own age who have been largely ignored in studies thus far. The author argues that young girls see diverse images of bodies rather than the singular image that scholars study. Girls’ body image may be affected by animation, but animated images are so diverse that this effect may be difficult to determine. A more nuanced understanding of the body shapes animation utilizes may allow researchers to study the more complex messages that girls do or do not internalize.

This article discusses the portrayal of fatherhood and paternity in Walt Disney’s benchmark features Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942) through a contextualized historical and cultural analysis. The author aims to provide a coherent study of how the father figure is constructed in each of these films and why the tone of this presentation varies considerably within the short time span between the theatrical releases. The article proceeds to demonstrate how, with their prominent father characters, these features exhibit metaphorically the transitional and challenged sentiments regarding fatherhood and masculinity in early 1940s America. The immense societal crises, the Great Depression and the Second World War, destabilized prevalent gender roles and, as a response, sparked ideologically charged discourses that were pretentiously spread in contemporary mainstream film, and which sought to restore the former patriarchal order. This article intends to discover to what extent the Disney studio participated in these popular discourses or used them for its own interests. Finally, the article investigates how these films contribute to the construction and understanding of ‘reality’ of this past and the role of fathers within it.

This article presents a textual analysis of the Nickelodeon animated series Rocko’s Modern Life. Drawing from the theories of Guy Debord and Imamura Taihei, the series is posited as a revelatory lens into the spiritual crisis of late capitalism. The author then argues that the series employs magical realism to depict an animist capitalism in which the fetishization of commodities literally brings them to life. The show’s characters experience the alienation of labour as the draining of their spirit, haunting their workplaces as dead labour reanimated through the necromancy of commodity fetishism. As consumers, the characters attempt to recapture the enervated agency of their alienated selves by populating their lives with commodities. Ultimately, they are unable to find meaningful agency and spiritual fulfilment amidst the distributed agency of animated commodities. Despite its often problematic engagement with both indigeneity and animism, this close analysis of Rocko’s Modern Life supports Imamura’s theory that Western animation appropriates elements of indigenous animism to bring dead labour back to life in the form of fetishized commodities. It also suggests further research into the interconnection and contestation between capitalist animism and indigenous animism within animation.