Animation

Amsterdam University Press
Chapter Title: The Worries of the World(s) Cartoons and Cinema

Chapter Author(s): Karen Redrobe
Book Title: World Building

Book Editor(s): Marta Boni
Published by: Amsterdam University Press. (2017)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1zkjz0m.17
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Section 4
Media as World-Building Devices
14. The Worries of the World(s)
Cartoons and Cinema
Karen Redrobe (formerly Beckman)
Boni, Marta (ed.), World Building. Transmedia, Fans, Industries. Amster-

dam University Press, 2017
doi: 10.5117/9789089647566/ch14
Abstract
In recent years, Cinema and Media Studies scholars have hotly debated
animation’s connection to “the world”; its capacity to fabricate “worlds”;
as well as the relationship between singular and plural conceptions of this
concept. The problems of worlding in animation are further complicated
by parallel debates about what we mean by the term “animation” to begin
with. Suzanne Buchan, Paul Wells, and Maureen Furniss, among others,
have made clear that this broad term encompasses a wide variety of media
practices. Though these may share movement as a common denominator,
they differ profoundly from each other. At the same time as these scholars
call for greater attention to specific media practices (e.g. for distinctions
between 2D and 3D animation, or hand-drawn and computer anima-
tion), other scholars, including Lev Manovich and Alan Cholodenko,
have argued instead that animation should be further generalized to
encompass all cinema as an umbrella term. In the course of this essay, I
will attempt not only to map the contours of cinema and media theory’s
animated debates about worlding, but also why the stakes of these debates
become particularly prevalent at specific historical moments.
Keywords: Child’s world, Alternative Reality, Political Imagination,

Plasmaticness, Play
The Problem of “Animation”
In the last few years, Cinema and Media Studies scholars have hotly debated
animation’s connection to and investment in the physical world and lived
reality (related but not synonymous terms). At stake, in part, is the political,
254 World Building
aesthetic, and affective significance of this form’s fabricated and sometimes

imaginary worlds, as well as the relationship between singular and plural
conceptions of the very idea of “world.”
Yet, within a longer history of the study of moving images, many scholars
have tended to ignore animation as an inconsequential, even childish,
area of practice. Writing in 1982 of early film animation, Donald Crafton
suggests, “Film distributors (and alas, until recently, film collectors) tended
to regard these cartoons as material better suited for the dustbin than for
any other repository. More recently, film scholars have tended to ignore
early animation or to condemn it to the domain of film-buffism” (Crafton
1982, 4-5).
What exactly do we even mean by “animation”? A better understand-
ing of this notion could also highlight the complexity of the relationship
of animation and worlds. As Suzanne Buchan points out, “animation is
an imprecise, fuzzy catchall that heaps an enormous and historically far-
reaching, artistically diverse body of work into one pot” (Buchan 2014, 113).
The term is rarely clear, and yet Steve Reinke argues that “some of the most
interesting writers on animation provide, at best, partial or inconsistent
definitions of animation” (Reinke 2005, 9). Some theorists, including Alan
Cholodenko and Lev Manovich, have productively asserted “animation” as
an umbrella term that embraces all forms of cinema. More recently, Tom
Gunning has attempted to bring some nuance to this all-encompassing
gesture by suggesting that we “bisect our term animation into two related
but separable meanings” (Gunning 2014, 40). He posits “animation”1 as refer-
ring to “the technical production of motion from the rapid succession of
discontinuous frames, shared by all cinematic moving images.” By contrast,
“animation”2 refers to “moving images that have been made to move, rather
than movement automatically captured through continuous-motion picture
photography” (ibid., 40). In this second form of animation, there is, Gunning
argues, greater room for experiences of play, fascination, and wonder that are
rooted in “a fundamental manipulation of time” (ibid., 41). It is also in this
second form that we get a stronger sense of a world that has been animated,
rather than of a world whose movement has been recorded and reproduced.
Further complicating the logistical challenge of grappling with anima-
tion’s world-making capacities, animator George Griffin reminds us that in
addition to incorporating and hybridizing many different media practices,
animators also exhibit their work in a variety of venues. The “worlds” in which
we find animation include the cinema, television, online, the art gallery,
public space, and “urban forbidden zones” (Griffin 2013, 289). Increasingly,
to live in the contemporary world means engaging that world—whether
The Worries of the World(s) 255
we like it or not—with and through animation. It is, as Buchan argues,

pervasive: “As screens become part of everyday life—phones, laptops, pads,
and future technologies to come—animation will increasingly influence
our understanding of how we see and experience the world visually”
(Buchan 2013, 1).
Even within a more defined realm such as “cinematic animation”—and
Donald Crafton singles out Emile Cohl and Winsor McCay as figures who
took animation beyond mere special effects and “whimsical divertisse-
ment” into a definitively cinematic world—there is still a wide variety of
alternative, and often hybrid modes (Crafton 1982, 9, 60-61). “Animation”
cannot belong to a single history because the term simply invokes too
broad an array of media, technologies, venues, and uses. Yet, while it may
be impossible to tell a definitive story about how world making happens in
animation because animation creates, invokes, and adapts worlds in a wide
variety of ways, there are moments in the history of animation when the
stakes became particularly high concerning animation’s ability to make,
change, or record the world.
War of the Worlds: Political Utopianism, Play, and the Plasmatic

Image
In the wake of World War II, in which participants on all sides made use
of animation for propaganda purposes, some film critics reflecting on
the politics of the image viewed the relationship between animation and
live-action cinema as something akin to a war of the worlds. In the early
1990s, for example, French film critic Serge Daney (1944-1992) reflects on
his personal film history and recalls:
Captivated by cinema, I didn’t need—as well—to be seduced. No need

either for baby talk. As a child I had never seen any Disney movies […]
Worse: for me, animated movies would always be something other than
cinema. Even worse: animated movies would always be a bit the enemy.
No “beautiful image,” especially drawn, would match the emotion—fear
and trembling—in front of recorded things. (Daney [1992] 2004)1
In Stanley Cavell’s influential meditation on the nature of cinema’s relation

to the physical world, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film,
the American philosopher again privileges the recorded over the drawn
image.2 First published in 1971, this book defines cinema as “a succession
256 World Building
of automatic world projections” (Cavell 1979, 167). For Cavell, cinematic

projections differ from the world itself primarily for temporal reasons.
Through viewing the projections of a past world, he suggests, film specta-
tors can heighten their awareness of the existence of a world that exists
always and necessarily beyond the self. After asking, “What does the silver
screen screen?” he responds, “It screens me from the world it holds—that
is, makes me invisible. And it screens that world from me—that is, screens
its existence from me. That the projected world does not exist (now) is its
only difference from reality” (ibid., 24).
Three years after this book’s publication, Alexander Sesonske published
a response to The World Viewed that asked where Walt Disney’s projected
animated worlds might fit into Cavell’s theory of cinema. The short answer
is that, for Cavell, they don’t really, but, in a lengthy postscript added to the
1979 (expanded) reprint of the book, Cavell attempts to explain why this is
the case. He declares that the region of animated cartoons “has nothing to
do with projections of the real world” (ibid., 167).3 While he acknowledges
that there is “no general problem of achieving conviction in such a world”
(ibid.,169), he notes that, because there seem to be “no real laws at all” in
the world of animation and because cartoon characters seem to “avoid, or
deny, the metaphysical facts of human beings” (ibid., 171), cartoons cannot
convince viewers that they have arisen, as Cavell suggests real “movies” do,
“from below the world” (ibid., 170, 39). 4 While movies are, in an ontological
sense, of the world, animated cartoons are merely in it.
Therefore, although Cavell allows that cartoons “are successions of
animated world projections”, he rejects outright Sesonske’s suggestion that
Hollywood films and cartoons are “not that different” (ibid., 173). At most,
Cavell allows that cartoons constitute “a child’s world” that “remains an
ineluctable substratum of our own, and subject to deliberate or unlooked
for eruption” (ibid., 169). Although, as the book’s title suggests, Cavell is
interested in the relationship of movies to a world that he understands as
singular in nature, this brief moment, an animated moment, shows Cavell
acknowledging a human subject that moves in and through different worlds,
or perhaps that distinct worlds move in and through the human subject.
For film theorists, animation seems to render these movements between
worlds more visible and more available to consciousness.
In the period between the first and second world wars, film and media
theorists in Europe explored the idea that cartoons might catalyze or affect
change in the so-called “real world”, in part because of their ability to high-
light the traffic between the shared space of the audience and individual
spectators’ inner worlds.5 World War I had tempered much of the previous
century’s belief in technological utopias. Yet, for some media theorists in

the late 1920s and early 1930s, cartoon animation’s multiple renderings
of the world (or worlds), its penchant for metamorphosis, and the playful
attitude it tended to induce in spectators of “animation”2 still appeared
to have the potential to foster viewers’ openness to alternative ways of
structuring the world. Animation, some argued, and cartoon animation in
particular, has the potential to cultivate the political imagination of mass
audiences through its acts of comic invention; its endless stretching and
squashing of time, space and bodies; and its creation of characters that
function as collective dream spaces. Such utopian and, at times, revolution-
ary claims regarding animation’s ability to remake the world did not arise
randomly. They occurred in specific historical circumstances, often in
desperate conditions of extreme poverty and violence where bodies, the
physical landscapes they inhabit, and the laws that governed both, were
being threatened, destroyed, and technologically rebuilt.
Animators can suck viewers into alternative realities that often fore-
ground, then mess with, perceived boundaries between form and formless-
ness, life and death, human and non-human, possible and impossible, the
world(s) we know and the ones we don’t. In our own time, we might think,
for example, of Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away,
which both depict children’s ability to access magical spirit worlds that are
largely unavailable to the films’ adult characters; or Peter Lord and Nick
Park’s Chicken Run, in which a group of chickens refuse the fate assigned to
them by humans and become politically active, which, queer theorist Jack
Halberstam suggests, offers no less than “a Gramscian structure of coun-
terhegemony engineered by organic (chicken) intellectuals” (Halberstam
2011, 32). While the political possibilities Halberstam finds in Chicken Run
largely concern narrative structure, character, and plot resolution rather
than anything specific about animation aesthetics, many of the earlier
utopian discussions about animation’s world-changing capacities focus on
particular audiovisual aesthetic experiments that often predate and even
resist the use of animation for feature-length narrative films.
Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs represents a punctuation
point in this early debate about cartoon animation’s radical potential. While
earlier forms of animation had been notable primarily for their celebra-
tion of freedom from fixed form, after Snow White, Esther Leslie suggests,
feature-length animated films:
reinstitute the laws of perspective and gravity, and lead a fight against
flatness, while producing traditional dramaturgical characters. They
258 World Building
no longer appear to explode the world with the surrealistic and analytic
dynamite of the optical unconscious.… They distance themselves from
the art of the avant-garde, which takes fragmentation and disintegration
into its law of form, making clear how constructed not only it is but also
the social world—ripe for transformation. (Leslie 2002, 121-1)6
Prior to this move toward realism and away from experimental forms,
however, radical media theorists frequently thought through early cartoons,
which they saw as having affinities with the experimental and abstract
work of modernist artists.7 Early 20th-century theorists focused less on
changes at the narrative level than on the visual prevalence of mutating
forms, as well as on the relationship of those visual forms to soundtracks.
They considered the perceptual impact of animated “eye-music” that altered
audiences’ relation to the world by scrambling the traditional organization
of sensory perception and blurring the distinction between sound and
image.8 These kinds of experiments made animation prone to being aligned
with revolutionary politics and social visions of total transformation.
At times, there was a tension between animators working with modernist
abstraction and those working within more narratively oriented paradigms.
Walter Ruttmann, a pioneer of abstract animation, for example, asked of
Lotte Reinigers’s cut-out fairytale, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, “What
has this to do with 1923?” (Leslie 2002, 27). Yet the genres to which narratively
oriented animators have been frequently drawn, such as the fairytale and
the folktale, tend to underscore the kind of formal audiovisual surprises we
find in non-narrative works, as when the fate or physical form of characters
alters in unexpected and seemingly impossible ways. A similar resonance
exists between the pioneers of animation and film slapstick. Crafton, for
example, discusses both Walt Disney’s admiration of Buster Keaton and
Keaton’s admiration of Winsor McCay, noting that for many early filmmakers,
Keaton included, McCay’s animated film Gertie had done nothing less than
“revealed the possibility of the medium” (Crafton 1982, 297 and 134).9
In the early 20th century, as the architectural theorist Anthony Vidler
has pointed out, a growing awareness of inner or psychological space
impacted how people saw, experienced, and depicted the physical world.
Animation plays a complex role in the way modern people moved between
the world ‘outside’ themselves and a world that was newly and increasingly
designated as “within”. Animators like McCay both reflect and contribute
to this changing sense of the interaction between the world and the self,
at times depicting territories that seemed to have been physically shaped
by the projection of interior landscapes.10 As the new phenomenon of “shell
shock” had demonstrated, these interior landscapes had also been shaped
by the technologically enhanced destruction of World War I. Animation
both responded to and was part of the modern war machine. Propaganda
filmmakers, for example, had pioneered the strange temporality of the
animated map in World War I, creating speculative views of the world
designed to sway public opinion about the war by visualizing both projected
victories and enemy invasions. Animation had thus become a vehicle for
mass audiences and intellectuals alike to grapple with and learn to inhabit
a changed world.
Walter Benjamin’s Foreign Bodies: Animated Dreams and

Nightmares
In an unpublished fragment written in 1931, the German-Jewish philosopher

Walter Benjamin finds in Mickey Mouse a figure who renders visible how
the war had changed the place of the body in the world. Although humor
and play are both important aspects of Benjamin’s understanding of how
animation shapes the worlds we inhabit, the tone of this fragment is undeni-
ably grim.11 In a world in which technological advances had first blown
away limbs and then replaced them with mechanical prosthetics, Benjamin
writes, “Property relations in Mickey Mouse cartoons: here we see for the
first time that it is possible to have one’s own arm, even one’s own body,
stolen.” “In these films”, he continues, “mankind makes preparations to
survive civilization.” He ends the fragment by asserting, “So the explanation
for the huge popularity of these films is not mechanization, their form; nor
is it a misunderstanding. It is simply the fact that the public recognizes its
own life in them” (Benjamin 1931, 545). But how exactly does the public
either prepare to survive the civilized world or recognize itself through a
cartoon mouse?
Miriam Hansen, the most perceptive commentator on Benjamin’s media
writings, is helpful here, pointing out that “if this somewhat counterintuitive
conclusion is to make sense, it has to be understood not as a matter of
representational verisimilitude but rather as referring to the films’ lending
expression to salient aspects of modern experience through hyperbolic hu-
mor, kinetic rhythms, and plasmatic fantasy” (Hansen 2012, 170).12 Benjamin
resists the temptation to retreat into a pre-modern fantasy of a redemptive
and technologically uncontaminated natural world, instead finding in
Mickey Mouse a dialectical figure in which to discover both the destructive
element of modern life and the mode of surviving it. Hansen explains that,
260 World Building
for Benjamin, “the Mickey Mouse films engage technology not as an external
force, in a literal or formal rendering of ‘mechanization,’ but as a hidden
figure: they hyperbolize the historical imbrication of nature and technology
through humor and parody” (ibid., 174). She continues, “While mechanically
produced, the miracles of the animated cartoon seem improvised out of
the bodies and objects on the screen, in a freewheeling exchange between
animate and inanimate worlds” (ibid., 174).
While some film and media theorists fetishize the differences between
animation and live-action films, Hansen suggests that “Benjamin bypasses
the hierarchy of live-action over animated film fostered by Hollywood” (ibid,
p. 175). For him, she argues, the bodies of Mickey Mouse and the screen actor
are both examples of moving images that complicate our understanding
of the relationship between human beings and things within the modern
world. Reading across a variety of texts by Benjamin, Hansen draws com-
parisons between the functions of the screen actor, the cartoon character,
and the strange characters in Franz Kafka’s writing for whom the body
itself becomes the “most forgotten alien territory” (ibid., 177). She suggests
that, for Benjamin, these examples both allegorically render the alienating
conditions of life under modernity visible, and present a utopian possibility
for surviving the paradoxical condition of the self as itself a foreign world.
Benjamin most explicitly theorizes how the utopian aspect of Mickey
Mouse might work in the first version of his essay, “The Work of Art in the
Age of Its Reproducibility”, composed in 1935 in Paris and then revised for
publication in 1936. His position here is clearly speculative, a maneuver
on the part of a writer who would see fewer and fewer options in the face
of fascist violence. This narrowing would eventually result in his leaving
the world through suicide in 1938. Play, long important to Benjamin, and
closely related to both animation and slapstick in its world-making and
world-bending possibilities, takes on a heavy charge in the artwork essay.
In 1928, Benjamin had already suggested a number of important functions
of play in relation to the possibility for a human subject to be in the world.
Repetitious play with things, Benjamin suggests, enables the subject to
“gain possession of ourselves”, to “transcend ourselves in love and enter into
the life and the often alien rhythm of another human being”, and finally,
to transform “a shattering experience into habit” through its repetition
(Benjamin 1928, SW 2.1, 117-121; 120).
Turning his attention to film, Benjamin saw the film camera as a tech-
nology that both renders visible “hidden details in familiar objects” and
“manages to assure us of a vast and unsuspected field of play [Spielraum]”.
Through it, he claims, “we first discover the optical unconscious” (Benjamin
1935, 30). Crucially, Benjamin posits that via this optical unconscious that
the onscreen image makes available, “the individual perceptions of the
psychotic or the dreamer can be appropriated by the collective percep-
tion of the audience”; and Mickey Mouse emerges alongside the onscreen
actor as a figure of “collective dream” (ibid.,31). Just as play provided early
training for entering into the alien world of another through love, so, he
claimed, cartoon audiences might somehow meet in the shared dream of
Mickey Mouse’s drawn body in ways that could redeem the world. Benjamin
even went so far as to suggest that cartoon violence might therapeutically
prevent real violence when he argued that the “forced development of
sadistic fantasies or masochistic delusions can prevent their natural and
dangerous maturation in the masses” (ibid., 31). But as Hansen points out,
by this point in history, Benjamin “was well aware of how close the Disney
subject could come to the spirit of fascism” (Hansen 2012, 181).13 He also
understood how unpredictable the effects of laughter could be, yet he chose
anyway to argue for, or perhaps simply to hope for, the world-saving power
of comedy and cartoons alike: “Collective laughter is one such preemptive
and healing outbreak of mass psychosis” (Benjamin 1935, 31).
Benjamin understood that animation, like the repetitions of play and habit,
contained the possibility of both happiness and horror, and that it potentially
reinforced in subjects an acceptance of violence as inevitable (see: Benjamin
1936, SW 3: 99-133; 130, n. 30). There has been a critical tendency to turn Ben-
jamin into a naïve, cartoon-loving caricature of himself in contrast to the less
optimistic position articulated by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer in
Dialectic of Enlightenment ([1944] 2011), that “Donald Duck in the cartoons and
the unfortunate victim in real life receive their beatings so that the spectators
can accustom themselves to theirs.” But, as Hansen suggests, it is more accurate
to maintain their “conflicting perspectives in a stereoscopic view”, not least
because all three thinkers saw the function of cartoons in the world changing
as cartoons themselves evolved (Hansen 2012, 163).
Adorno and Horkheimer, for example, acknowledge that cartoons “were
once exponents of fantasy against rationalism”, allowing “justice to be done
to the animals and things electrified by their technology, by granting the
mutilated beings a second life” ([1944] 2011, 1023), while Benjamin recognizes
by 1936 “how easily fascism takes over ‘revolutionary’ innovations in this
field too”—so much so that he chooses to revise his essay, removing much
of the utopian material about Mickey Mouse in the process (Benjamin
1936, SW 3: 99-133; 130, n. 30). In hindsight, Benjamin’s early invocation of
Mickey Mouse as a collective dream might seem unrealistic and escapist,
yet his diary entries from 1938 make clear not only that his dream-world
262 World Building
brought little escape, but also that, in his dreams as much as in his waking
life, he explored the conditions of being and suffering in a world made
present through the interconnectedness of sound, drawn images, writing,
the land, and the biological body. Here it is worth noting that, as Kirsten
Ostherr has demonstrated, since at least the late 1920s, this biological body
was not distinct from but constructed by and understood through a hybrid
medical moving-image practice that combined hand-drawn animations
of cross-sections, live-action film footage of living bodies, stop-motion
animation of cadavers undergoing dissection, and textual labels (Ostherr
2013, 58-61). On 6 March 1938, following a dream in which he had remarked
aloud that he “probably wouldn’t live much longer”, Benjamin records,
I’ve been suffering greatly from the noise in my room. Last night, my
dream recorded this. I found myself standing in front of a map and,
simultaneously, standing in the landscape which it depicted. The land-
scape was terrifyingly dreary and bare; I couldn’t have said whether its
desolation was that of a rocky wasteland or that of an empty gray ground
populated only by capital letters. These letters writhed and curved on
their terrain as if following mountain ranges; the words they formed were
approximately equidistant from one another. I knew or learned that I
was in the labyrinth of my auditory canal. But the map was, at the same
time, a map of hell (Benjamin 1938, SW 3: 335-6).
There is a critical tendency to discuss animation’s relation to the world in

terms of mimesis and realism, yet this frame persistently returns us to the
same question of how effectively animation recreates a world that pre-dates
it, and this time line may be limited in what it can reveal about how lived
worlds are made. Benjamin’s diary entry here offers a view of the world
coming into human consciousness through the intertwining of dreams,
perception, matter and thought. As graphic images and words become
entangled with the physical earth on which we stand and the body with
which we do the standing, the world makes itself felt.
Sergei Eisenstein and the Quest for Freedom
Hansen sees similarities between Benjamin’s somewhat excessive response

to Mickey Mouse and “[Sergei] Eisenstein’s obsession with Disney’s fire
imagery in The Moth and the Flame” (Hansen 2012, 180). For both writers,
animation becomes a conceptual vehicle for rejecting a notion of the world
as fixed and fully made. The formal traits of Disney’s animation provide a
scaffolding that enables the imagination and articulation of the possibility
of radical change. Writing a few years later than Benjamin, in 1940-1941,
Eisenstein’s writing on Disney also emerges in fragmentary form at this
moment when his status as a filmmaker under Stalin was most uncertain.
In 1940, the year Eisenstein began writing about Disney, he was working
primarily on a production of Wagner’s Die Walküre at the Bolshoi Opera and
it is clear that his writing on animation is inflected by this operatic context.14
Echoing Benjamin’s earlier utopian writing about cartoons, Eisenstein dis-
covers in the fluid form of Disney’s drawn animated characters an ecstasy
and lack of stability, shared by fire and music, that he describes as “a sensing
and experiencing of the primal ‘omnipotence’—the element of ‘coming into
being’—the ‘plasmaticness’ of existence, from which everything can arise”
(Eisenstein 1988, 46). For Eisenstein, drawing on Heraclitus, Hegel, and Lenin,
animation’s resonance with fire and ecstasy puts it in a category of phenom-
ena that capture primal experiences of “coming into being”--including the
coming into being of the world itself—experiences that at once exceed the
capacity of the image and yearn to be captured. “Thus”, Eisenstein argues,
“there will be phenomena with poly-formic capabilities.” In a fragment that
turns to Engels, Eisenstein sees to underscore that this dynamism is not
separate from a physical world understood as a finite thing but is instead an
integral but fluid component of “the unity of the whole system of the world”
(ibid., 47). Eisenstein grapples with the seemingly irresistible “attractiveness”
of this “plasmaticness”, a quality through which a “being of a definite form”
is “capable of assuming any form” (ibid., 21). In part because his writing on
animation appears in the form of fragments rather than a completed text,
Eisenstein is perhaps too easily associated (both positively and negatively)
by contemporary critics with an oversimplified view of animation’s ability
to realize freedom in the world through formal play alone.
Yet, in response to the question of who would be attracted to the flame’s
endless mutability of form, Eisenstein answers, “He, of course, who more
than anyone else, lacks its fascinating traits: and foremost—freedom of
movement, freedom of transformation, freedom of the elements” (ibid.,
30). He goes on to note that “a passion for fire”, an element completely
intertwined with drawn animation in this essay, “is characteristic for
regressive conditions and is so well-known in psychiatry, that there even
exists a special euphonious term for it—‘pyromania’” (ibid., 31). In recent
years, scholars have returned with renewed interest in Eisenstein’s theory
of the plasmatic as they attempt to understand the overlooked importance
of fluid forms to film history in the age of the “digital morph”.15 But these
264 World Building
returns frequently highlight the utopian dimensions of Eisenstein’s writing

on mobile forms without noting his insistence that the attraction of such
forms emerges only in times and places where constraints on freedom
have all but extinguished life itself.16 Though he mentions modern America
and eighteenth century Japan as examples of repressive contexts, his own
attraction to these forms implies that the Soviet Union under Stalin is not
exempt from his critique:
In a country and social order with such a mercilessly standardized and

mechanically measured existence, which is difficult to call life, the sight
of such “omnipotence” (that is, the ability to “become whatever you wish”),
cannot but hold a sharp degree of attractiveness. This is as true for the
United States as it is for the petrified canons of world-outlook, art and
philosophy of eighteenth-century Japan. (ibid., 21)
Eisenstein pursues with interest the aesthetic possibilities of these protean

forms, including their ability to bring about new correspondences between
sound and image (ibid., 64-66), and to access a “pre-logical” part of the psyche
that is capable of overriding logical objections to “belief” in these omnipotent
creatures and the worlds to which they belong. He writes, for example,
We know that they are… drawings and not living beings. We know that
they are… projections of drawings on a screen. We know that they are…
“miracles” and tricks of technology, that such beings don’t really exist.
But at the same time: We sense them as alive. We sense them as moving,
as active. We sense them as existing and even thinking! (ibid., 55)
There is a wonder and ecstasy that Disney’s animations inspire in Eisenstein,

even as he recognizes that, during the war, they “become utilitarian—in-
structionally technical” (ibid., 65). Yet, for him, the spectator’s attraction
to the plasmatic remains rooted in “the world around the author—an
inhuman world”, a world of social constraint (ibid., 10).17
Imperfect Tense: Animation in the Age of the Anthropocene
Writing in 1948, in the wake of World War II, French film critic André Bazin
celebrates those writers and filmmakers whose personal style within a work
did not alter the “chemical composition” of “the facts” of the physical, material
world that he conceptualizes (as Cavell would later do) in terms of “the law of
gravity”. Within this postwar context, animation’s capacity to build worlds

might come to seem like interference with the “fact” of the world, or even
deception, but, as I have argued elsewhere, it is important not only to read
such Bazinian moments in the historically specific context of World War II
propaganda, but also to recall Bazin’s wonder at and interest in the worlds
that Walt Disney conjured up (Beckman 2014, 177-197). The “image fact” is
central to Bazin’s sense of an ethical postwar cinema. The human constitutes
one, but only one of these “facts” in the world, and for Bazin, the human view
of things is held in check by the presence of a whole other material reality
within a film: “Man himself is just one fact among others, to whom no pride
of place should be given a priori” (Bazin 2005, 31). Yet, almost 70 years later,
some scientists suggest a change in the relationship between the human
“fact” and the geological materiality of the world. While the International
Commission on Stratigraphy and the International Union of Geological
Sciences still subscribes to the idea that we are currently in the Holocene, a
geological epoch of warmth that began 11,700 years ago after the last ice age,
in 2000, there is increasing interest in the suggestion of atmospheric chemist
Paul Cruzen and others that we are now in the age of the Anthropocene, in
which humans function as a geological force (Stromberg 2013).18
Does animation still play a role, as it did in the 1930s, in collective efforts to
imagine how we might contain our self-generated forces of destruction? The
realm of animated data provides one interesting example of the reemergence
of a salvational mode of image-making. Within the environmental context,
we might look at the HeadsUP! Project, founded by digital media artist Peggy
Weil, which invites designers to visualize critical global issues for display on
a 19,000 square foot digital signboard in New York’s Times Square. In 2012,
for example, designer Richard Vijgen developed an animated map that drew
data from the GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) mission
to visualize the alarming rate of changing ground water levels worldwide.19
While these animations can seem like direct appeals from the belly of the
earth to human vision, these images emerge out of, and therefore also assert,
what Lisa Parks has called “vertical power”, reflecting the uneven distribution
of privacy, as well as of access to data about everything from fluctuating
natural resources to migrating bodies.20
While Cavell and Bazin treasured the cinematic image for its projection
of a world-that-has-been at a specific time and place, animated data images
often condense and systematize continuous pasts into legible patterns that
can become the basis for future predictions about the world. Animation
has the capacity to evoke something akin to the imperfect tense by visual-
izing experiences that shape our sense of the world because they repeat
266 World Building
continuously. In its ability to convey the routine time and actions that
often undergird structural forms of violence that, in their repetitions, fail
to meet the criteria of the newsworthy event, animation has the potential
to disrupt what Arielle Azoulay describes as the “general pattern of being
on the verge of catastrophe,” a pattern to which we tend to be indifferent
as long as death itself itself is held at bay (Azoulay 2008, 69). Although
for Cavell, it is ultimately the cartoon character’s invulnerability to death
that renders animation not of this world, there is a resonance between the
worst of our world and the absence of death that desperately requires more
animated thought and action.
Notes
1. For a discussion of the importance of animation to European filmmakers in

the postwar period, particularly the French filmmakers Alain Resnais and
Chris Marker, see: Karen Beckman, “Animating the Cinéfils”. Sada Niang
highlights the “shortsightedness” of the marginalization of Moustapha Alas-
sane from postcolonial African film history. Niang draws attention to Alas-
sane’s use of animation for political satire in films such as Bon Voyage Sim
(1966), noting the exemplary nature of these films in relation to the FEPACI
Charter. See: Nationalist African Cinema, 91-104, especially 94-95.
2. Cavell builds on the work of the German art historian Erwin Panofsky (1892-
1968) and French film critic André Bazin (1918-1958) among others.
3. While “cinematic animation” is often considered to be something like the
opposite of photo-based, live-action cinema, Tom Gunning follows D. N.
Rodowick in pointing out that “animating drawings in classical animation
involves photographing them onto a filmstrip”, going on to add that “Even
animation that employs drawing and painting directly on the filmstrip,
often called cameraless animation […] commonly involves the making of a
projection print through photographic processes. Thus, at the minimum,
most animation requires photography as a means of mechanical reproduc-
tion.” See: Gunning, p. 37-38.
4. Although there are great difference between the attitudes of Donald
Crafton and Stanley Cavell to animation’s relation to the world and world
making, the two meet, I think, around this idea of what Cavell calls “convic-
tion” and Crafton calls “belief”.
5. For a discussion of how early Disney shaped early theories of film realism
and possible worlds in Japan, see: Lamarre.
6. Leslie also points out that Snow White initiates a moment of transformation
in the world of animation production, causing Disney to “massify produc-
tion”, open a “24-hour factory of distraction production”, and adapt “Fordist
methods”.
7. Donald Crafton provides one of the best histories of early animation in

Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898-1928, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982.
8. Early pioneers of “visual music” or “eye music” include Bruno Corra,
Arnaldo Ginna, Bernhard Diebold, Walter Ruttman, Hans Richter, Oskar
Fischinger, and Viking Eggeling. Important later figures include Len Lye,
Norman McLaren, and the Whitney Brothers. See: Raphäel Bassan, “Cinema
and Abstraction: From Bruno Corra to Hugo Verlinde, Senses of Cinema (De-
cember 2011): http://sensesofcinema.com/2011/feature-articles/cinema-and-
abstraction-from-bruno-corra-to-hugo-verlinde/; Esther Leslie, Hollywood
Flatlands, 47; Robert Russett and Cecile Starr, Experimental Animation:
Origins of a New Art, revised edition (New York: Da Capo, 1976): 32-71, 163-
177; and the Center for Visual Music: http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org.
9. Scott Bukatman also notes the unruly affinities among comic strips, car-
toons, and slapstick comedy. See: Bukatman, 3, 26, 40, and chapter 4.
10. For a discussion of Anthony Vidler’s study of “warped space” and its
relevance to changing modes of spatial representation in animation, see:
Telotte, chapter 2, especially 48-50. For a discussion of McCay’s subjective
and objective drawn worlds, see: Bukatman, chapter 1.
11. Although Mickey Mouse made his first proper screen appearances in
Steamboat Willie (1928) and Plane Crazy (1929), Crafton points out that this
animated star, who began life as Mortimer Mouse, is only one of a series
of “similar-looking rodents [who] had romped through the 1920s animated
films drawn by Terry, Messmer, Nolan, and Disney himself”. Crafton, 295.
12. Elsewhere Hansen describes the audience’s self-recognition in Mickey as
being rooted in the cartoon’s ‘graphic evocation of recognizable elements of
modern experience’, 201.
13. Esther Leslie discusses the relationship between Walt Disney and Leni
Riefenstahl in Leslie 2002, 123-157.
14. Jay Leyda notes that Eisenstein often turned to “theoretical work that did
not depend on administrative approval” at those moments when attempts
to advance film projects were frustrated by the Soviet film industry. See:
Leyda, 1983, 360.
15. The new significance of morphing to visual culture is highlighted in Sob-
chack, ed. 2000.
16. Rosalind Krauss represents one exception to this trend. She notes that,
“Disney’s ‘plasmaticness’ may […] not be a twentieth-century version of the
phenomenon of fire or the primitive idea of animism but, instead, an ana-
logue of the principle of universal equivalence that reigns at the heart of
capital.” While Krauss shares and develops Eisenstein’s sense of the negative
dimensions of the plasmatic, she may also underestimate Eisenstein’s own
awareness of this in his writing. See: Krauss 2005, 108.
17. On the dialectical nature of the plasmatic, see also: Bukatman 2012, 21.
18. Stromberg 2013 points out that those scientists who subscribe to this idea
debate this epoch’s starting point.
268 World Building
19. This video can be seen here: https://vimeo.com/42607107. Sarah C. Rich

provides a detailed discussion of the project in “Groundwater, Gravity, and
Graphic Design,” http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/ground-
water-gravity-and-graphic-design-92023106/. For Chris Poulson’s animation
of the GRACE data for the National Drought Mitigation Center, see: https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=nddXeGhZmbk&feature=youtu.be. For a
detailed discussion of the technology used to measure the groundwater
changes, see: Riebeek 2012.
20. See: Parks 2013; see also: Parks, forthcoming; see also: Kaplan, Loyer, and
Claytan Daniels 2013, 418.
Works Cited
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Bassan, Raphäel. 2011. “Cinema and Abstraction: From Bruno Corra to Hugo
Verlinde,” Senses of Cinema 61 (December). http://sensesofcinema.com/2011/
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Bazin, André. 2005. “An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism (Cinematic Realism and
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Benjamin, Walter. 1931. “Mickey Mouse.” In: Selected Writings, 4 vols. edited by Mi-
chael W. Jennings et al., translated by Rodney Livingstone, Edmund Jephcott, H.
Eiland, et al., 545-6. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996-2003, vol. 2.2.
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Buchan, Suzanne. 2014. “Animation, in Theory.” In: Animating Film Theory, edited
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Buchan, Suzanne. 2013. “Introduction: Pervasive Animation.” In: Pervasive Anima-
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Bukatman, Scott. 2012. The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animat-
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Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The World Viewed. Enlarged edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
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About the author
Karen Redrobe (formerly Beckman) is the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor
of Cinema and Modern Media and Chair of the Department of the History
of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Vanishing
Women: Magic, Film and Feminism and Crash: Cinema and the Politics of
Speed and Stasis; co-editor of Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography
and On Writing With Photography; and editor of Animating Film Theory. She
is currently working on a new book project entitled, Undead: Animation and
the Contemporary Art of War.

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Amsterdam University Press

Chapter Title: The Worries of the World(s) Cartoons and Cinema

Book Title: World Building

This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-

Karen Redrobe (formerly Beckman)

Boni, Marta (ed.), World Building. Transmedia, Fans, Industries. Amster-

Keywords: Child’s world, Alternative Reality, Political Imagination,

The Problem of “Animation”

aesthetic, and affective significance of this form’s fabricated and sometimes

we like it or not—with and through animation. It is, as Buchan argues,

War of the Worlds: Political Utopianism, Play, and the Plasmatic

Captivated by cinema, I didn’t need—as well—to be seduced. No need

In Stanley Cavell’s influential meditation on the nature of cinema’s relation

of automatic world projections” (Cavell 1979, 167). For Cavell, cinematic

century’s belief in technological utopias. Yet, for some media theorists in

Walter Benjamin’s Foreign Bodies: Animated Dreams and

In an unpublished fragment written in 1931, the German-Jewish philosopher

There is a critical tendency to discuss animation’s relation to the world in

Sergei Eisenstein and the Quest for Freedom

Hansen sees similarities between Benjamin’s somewhat excessive response

returns frequently highlight the utopian dimensions of Eisenstein’s writing

In a country and social order with such a mercilessly standardized and

Eisenstein pursues with interest the aesthetic possibilities of these protean

There is a wonder and ecstasy that Disney’s animations inspire in Eisenstein,

Imperfect Tense: Animation in the Age of the Anthropocene

gravity”. Within this postwar context, animation’s capacity to build worlds

1. For a discussion of the importance of animation to European filmmakers in

7. Donald Crafton provides one of the best histories of early animation in

19. This video can be seen here: https://vimeo.com/42607107. Sarah C. Rich

About the author

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