Animation

This article defines and explores the history of ‘useful animation’. Animation has found frequent application as a powerful practical and conceptual tool in professional fields requiring a versatile instrument for a variety of representational needs, from science and medicine to education and advertising. Today, forms of useful animation populate our television news, social media and urban environments in ways that are no less consequential for their having become second nature. But how did we get here? This tradition is distinct from entertainment or art and its investigation requires a revision of existing animation history, prompting new research questions and methodologies. This article presents such a framework for further work in this field. In doing so, it has three main aims. First, the authors establish the intellectual context and consider the historiographic implications of prior research in this area. Second, they ask three key theoretical research questions that can guide the investigation of the history of useful animation: How did useful animation build upon existing graphic traditions? What were the professional and institutional contexts for useful animation and how did these develop? and What impact did animation have on professional fields and their understanding of the world? Finally, the authors present three case studies from the first decades of film history that illustrate how these questions can be answered, and they suggest methods and research resources available to scholars of useful animation. These address Jean Comandon’s public health films in post-WWI France, animated maps made by the Austro-German Institut für Kulturforschung in the inter-war period and the animated film Unemployment and Money made in Britain illustrating Michael Polanyi’s economic theories in the 1930s. This article provides a basis for future research into this topic.

This case study investigates the overlapping categories of animated documentary, useful animation, and fiction inspired by real events. It analyzes a training video for adults who work with child soldiers that was created by IoM Media and the Dallaire Institute for Children, Peace, and Security. This video incorporates elements of animated narrative fiction, children’s television animation, reenactment, and photographic and auditory indexicality. Ultimately, no one form has a greater claim to the truth than the others; rather, truth is constructed through the interrelation of disparate elements, and the video’s pedagogical and activist ends are served by abstraction and anti-realism as much as by indexicality. The video also prompts wider questions about temporality and degrees of abstraction in different modes of documentary. The arguments this article presents about the case study are more broadly applicable to non-fiction animated film and to both live-action and animated documentary.

Animated documentary has at its core the tension of the filmmaker attempting to represent and speak about the historical world while working in a medium that is wholly constructed and lacking in evidentiary indexicality. Reflexivity – the revelation of animation’s constructedness – is considered by many scholars to be a key element in resolving this tension and granting animation documentary legitimacy. In this article, the author reflects on the reflexive strategies he used in making the animated documentary, Polonia (2023). He posits that the film is the result of the dynamic between the processes of reconstruction – the piecing together of the historical narrative through the collection of testimony and gathering of evidence – and construction – the building of the filmic world. These processes are manifest in the film as distinct aesthetics and a spatial taxonomy – ‘archival’ and ‘cinematic’ spaces that embody the tension between actuality and creative interpretation.

The screening of colour cel animation Why Is the Crow Black at the 1956 Venice Film Festival was seen as a pivotal moment in Chinese animation history. It is recorded that Why Is the Crow Black was misidentified as a Soviet animation by international judges, which made this film an epic failure. Frustrated Chinese animators, led by Te Wei, reflected on the imitation of the Soviet styles and commenced the exploration of a Chinese style. This ultimately led to the foundation of the Chinese School of Animation, marked by the release of Te Wei’s film The Conceited General in 1956. However, many of the widely believed ‘facts’ in this narrative are false. There is no evidence of an actual award, nor of the mis-identification of Why Is the Crow Black. A series of false assumptions have converged to form an entirely mistaken narrative of causality that the Crow’s reception transformed the production of the General. This narrative has become ingrained in Chinese animation historiography, and the doubters remain marginal. This article argues that the ‘Crow Incident’ was a 1980s fabrication, arising from transcultural misunderstandings, translation errors, and perhaps even deliberately misleading assertions. The alleged Crow Incident has been used to explain and justify the urgency and necessity of exploring the Chinese minzu style in the 1950s, yet it devalues the subjectivity, initiative and self-awareness of Chinese animators.

Onomatopoeia are words signifying sounds by phonetically imitating or suggesting them. Research into the use of onomatopoeia in literature, language and comics has been rich and varied while the study of the use of onomatopoeia in film, television and their functions has so far been limited. This article focuses on two aspects: (a) the relationship between onomatopoeia and sound effects in US animation and Japanese anime; and (b) audiovisual humour caused by the use of onomatopoeia and sound effects in US animation and Japanese anime. The author introduces classifications and usage patterns of onomatopoeia in English and Japanese, and analyses the different types of onomatopoeia and sound effects in recent popular US animation films and TV, and in Japanese anime and their contributions to creating humour by applying humour theory (incongruity theory in particular). This study combines film analysis, soundtrack analysis, linguistic analysis and theories of humour, and will be of interest to students and scholars of film, sound, linguistics, psychology and other subjects interested in the study of onomatopoeia and audiovisual humour.