Animation

This article challenges the widely held view that cinema is a subcategory of the larger entity, animation. Tracing the etymology of the word ‘animation’ reveals how it acquired two separate meanings: one to endow with life or to come alive, and the other, to move or be moved. In trade and professional discourses about cinema, ‘animation’ did not refer to single-frame cinematography or to the class of films using that technique until the early 1910s. The genealogical argument that animation was the ancestor of cinema exploits the semantic serendipity of these two meanings, but the approach distracts from a larger understanding of animation as a film form, genre and social practice. A negative result of this line of reasoning is that the distinctive features of the optical toys of so-called pre-cinema are valued only inasmuch as they resembled later cinema and may not be studied in their own right.

This article explores the history of early animation and modern magic in light of discourses on the cinema’s capacities for bringing inanimate objects (including the still photograph) to life. The cinema’s early encounter with a metamorphic magic book known as a blow book, which is constructed like a flip book without sequential imagery, will be considered in order to specify the terms of one form of animation and its structures of illusion and belief. The principles of modern magic will also be addressed to explain the significance of a number of trick films that featured the blow book directly as a means of demonstrating the animating ‘powers’ of the cinema. This analysis will challenge the use of animation as an umbrella concept within cinema and media studies, and provide a basis for beginning to think through the return of new media studies to 19th-century magic as a model for understanding digital illusions.

This article works through a contrast between the magic lantern and movie projector, focusing on Meiji Japan (1868—1912) as a pivotal site in order to address the relation between cinema and animation, historically and ontologically. Using Simondon’s notion of technical objects to transform Foucault’s notion of dispositif into a theory of technical paradigms, the author finds that the difference between cinema and animation is not primarily one of materials but of qualities of movement. An exploration of the projection-image (utsushie) of the magic lantern suggests that cinema and animation share a technical paradigm, linked to electromagnetism, one that is shadowed by Cartesian technism. Modifying Deleuze’s emphasis on any-instant-whatever and on time as the virtual of the cinematic movement-image, this study finds that cinema and animation share a dark precursor, any-matter-whatever. Because animation stays close to any-matter-whatever, it offers a direct experience of life-in-matter, and anticipates the any-medium-whatever of the digital.

This article seeks to position the early pioneering 3D stop motion animation of Briton Arthur Melbourne-Cooper and Russian Alexander Shiryaev within wider discourses of turn-of-the-20thcentury modernity. The discussion suggests that the significance of such work has been lost amidst the dominant discourses about the development of both the modern city and early cinema and, crucially, the ways in which the 2D ‘cartoon’ has been recognized as possessing the agency of modernist practice, while the 3D form has gone relatively uninterrogated and absorbed within other aspects of cinematic or cultural practice. The author argues that Melbourne-Cooper and Shiryaev self-consciously use 3D animation as a mediation between live-action photo-realist observation and the graphic freedoms of the early drawn forms, focusing on a ‘symbolic body’, which revises notions of the ‘attraction’ in early cinema, re-defines the city-space and documents the meaning in the motion of modernity.

By abandoning a linear understanding of film history, the author revisits animated film history by placing its emergence within the lineage of trick films. Analysis of discourses on the first animated cartoons — such as the critical and publicity discourses found in trade papers — reveals that these films were seen like any other trick films, not as a distinct type. How, then, can we explain the popularity of the first animated cartoons in the mid-1910s when trick films had almost disappeared? How can we account for the popularity of a variety of ‘trick films’ —animated drawings — precisely when these same trick films had almost ceased to exist? This article addresses these issues by looking at the process by which a major shift occurred in the way we look at the earliest animated drawings. More precisely, the author tries to outline the context of the transition from the perception that animated drawings were trick films to their eventual consecration as a genre within the institution.

This study of the oeuvres of Emile Cohl, Marius O’Galop and Robert Lortac, united by reason of their biohistorical and aesthetic kinship, helps to reconstruct the specificities of the first school of animated film in France. In their films, these animators, formerly caricaturists, combined models whose function was either entertainment or educational, and specific either to the illustration industry or to the children’s books and toys market, with spectacular paradigms borrowed from the stage and other performance arts. By showing how these multiple cultural series combine and interact, this analysis of their oeuvres thus opens up an arena in which the historiography of the Seventh Art in its infancy can be viewed and appreciated as a whole.