Animating

Film Theory
Karen Beckman, editor

Duke Universit y Press

Durham and London 2014
Animating Film Theory: An Introduction
K a re n B e c k ma n

Animating Film Theory begins from the premise that cinema and media
studies in the early twenty-­first century needs a better understanding of
the relationship between two of the field’s most unwieldy and unstable
organizing concepts: “animation” and “film theory.”1 As the increas-
ingly digital nature of cinema now forces animation to the forefront
of our conversations, it becomes ever clearer that for film theorists, it
has really never made sense to ignore animation. Tom Gunning has re-
cently described the marginalization of animation as “one of the great
scandals of film theory.”2 Marginalization, of course, is not the same
as total neglect; and in order to respond productively to this apparent
scandal, we need to consider both where and when this marginalization
has happened in the history of film theory, and where and when it hasn’t
­happened.
Flipping through the available film theory anthologies, one could
easily assume that film theorists have utterly neglected the topic of ani-
mation.3 Yet as both Suzanne Buchan and Oliver Gaycken point out in
their contributions to this volume, animation has been a sustained if
dispersed area of interest for a surprisingly substantial and prominent
list of authors. Part of the fragmentary nature of film theorists’ engage-
ment with the term may stem from the fact that animation signifies in
so many different ways. At different moments, it becomes synonymous
with a whole range of much more specific terms and concepts, includ-
ing movement, life itself, a quality of liveliness (that doesn’t necessarily
involve movement), spirit, nonwhiteness, frame-­by-­frame filmmaking pro-
cesses, variable frame filmmaking processes, and digital cinema, as well as
a range of mobilized media that appear within animated films, includ-
ing sculpture, drawing, collage, painting, and puppetry. These divergent
terms do not always sit easily with each other, and though the tensions
among them are important and interesting, they have not been ex-
plored as fully as they might, in part because our critical paradigms may
have foreclosed such lines of inquiry. Film theory and history both fre-
quently rely on a series of binary terms, including continuous versus non-
continuous, narrative versus experimental, indexical versus handmade, and
animated versus live action. Though these oppositions can be useful, they
can lead to inaccurate presumptions in that they do not always accu-
rately reflect the differences contained within any one of these terms,
such as experimental or narrative. This volume aims to unearth and think
through some of these inaccuracies, blind spots, and structural inhibi-
tors to clear some space, pose some questions, and set some priorities
for the future as well as the retroactive work of animating film theory.
It would be close to impossible to organize film theorists’ meandering
thoughts on this sprawling term into any kind of coherent category that
would work as well, for example, as realism, montage, spectatorship, ideol-
ogy, or sound seems to do on a film theory syllabus. Yet, as the examples
demonstrate, by seeking out those places where film theorists have
grappled with animation, we often stumble upon ideas that complicate
those concepts we think we can more easily corral into the straitjacket
of the textbook (this may help us to understand animation’s margin-
alization). No doubt, it would also be difficult to extract and antholo-
gize, for example, writing on animation from the body of work known
as classical film theory because of the way animation seems to wind in and
out of the theorization of other aspects of the experience and materi-
ality of cinema. Animation’s persistent yet elusive presence within film
theory’s key writings makes it both easy to overlook and essential to en-
gage.4 By briefly surveying some of animation’s cameo appearances in
the history of film theory, I hope to encourage readers to frame today’s
theoretical work on the digital’s relation to animation (a synonymous
relationship is too easily presumed) within a longer history of think-
ing about what cinema is and how it works. I also hope to reclaim and
reanimate some of the interesting but underdeveloped questions and
ideas to which earlier and overlooked musings on animation and its re-
lation to broader categories such as “film” or “cinema” gave rise. These
questions cannot be limited to the realm of animation studies as if they
were irrelevant to the broader study of moving images; as Edgar Morin,
one of the important bridge figures between earlier and later film theo-
ries, suggests: “It is obviously the cartoon that completes, expands, ex-
alts the animism implied in the cinema. . . . The cartoon only exaggerates
the normal ­phenomenon.”5

2  • Karen Beckman
Movement

Paul Wells suggests that abstract animated films always prioritize “ab-
stract forms in motion,” but a close look at experimental film theory
complicates this claim.6 For sure, Norman McLaren’s statement that
“animation is not the art of drawings-­that-­move, but rather the art
of movements-­that-­are-­drawn” seems to confirm that movement is
always the priority of frame-­by-­frame processes, but even for McLaren,
things are never that simple. In 1948 McLaren distinguishes between
techniques that lend themselves “more readily to creating visual change
rather than to action (side to side, and to and fro displacement of image
on the screen),” leading us to wonder what the relationship between
visual change and movement is.7 I don’t think that change and move-
ment are the same thing, but the tensions contained within the term
animation provide us with an opportunity to think about what these
two concepts share and how they differ, particularly within the context
of the visual image.8 Similarly, writing about the technical process of
making Blinkety Blank (1954), McLaren explains his need to alternate
between small clusters of discontinuous frames and continuous frames
that allowed for flow and motion. Here he makes clear that motion is
not a given in animation, and that discontinuous and continuous, as
well as single- and multiple-­frame, approaches often appear within the
same experimental film:
Sometimes . . . I would engrave two adjacent frames, or a frame-­cluster,
(that is, a group of 3, 4 or more frames); sometimes a frame-­cluster
would have related and continuous image within it and would thus
solidify some action and movement; at other times the frame-­cluster
would consist only of a swarm of disconnected, discontinuous images,
calculated to build up an overall visual “impression.” Here and there,
to provide much needed relief from the staccato action a single-­frame
images and frame-­clusters, I introduced longer sections of contiguous
frames with a flow of motion in the traditional manner.9

The Frame and the Shot

Taking a more extreme position in relation to the question of movement

in frame-­by-­frame processes, Peter Kubelka, in “The Theory of Metrical
Film,” asserts: “Cinema is not movement. This is the first thing. Cinema
is not movement. Cinema is a projection of stills—which means images

Animating Film Theory • 3

which do not move—in a very quick rhythm. And you can give the illu-
sion of movement, of course, but this is a special case.”10 Kubelka resists
the idea that cinema has to be equated with an illusion of movement
while simultaneously rejecting the assumption that the shot is neces-
sarily the dominant location of cinema’s articulation. Thus, he invites
us to think more precisely about the language we use to describe editing
and rhythm, particularly in relation to the grammar of animated and
experimental films. Kubelka demonstrates that it can at times be much
more important to attend to the individual frame and the relationship
between single frames than to the unit of the shot; yet as he shifts our
attention toward one definition of animation—a frame-­by-­frame process
of filmmaking—movement is never presumed as a desired outcome. The
point, rather, is to revise accepted understandings of experimental film
grammar, rhythm, and editing through a recasting of the frame as a pri-
mary unit of production:
It can be a collision, or it could be a very weak succession. There are many
many possibilities. It’s just that [Sergei] Eisenstein wanted to have a col-
lision—that’s what he liked. But what I wanted to say is: Where is, then,
the articulation of cinema? Eisenstein, for example, said it’s the colli-
sion of two shots. But it’s very strange that nobody ever said that it’s not
between shots but between frames.11 It’s between frames where cinema
speaks. And then, when you have a roll of very weak collisions between
frames—this is what I would call a shot, when one frame is very similar
to the next frame, and the next frame, and the next frame, and the next
frame, and the next frame—the result that you get when you have just
a natural scene and you film it. . . . This would be a shot. But, in reality,
you can work with every frame.12

Animism and Objectification

In The Art of the Moving Picture (1915), one of the earliest extended pieces
of writing about film, Vachel Lindsay introduces an observation about
film’s animistic power that persists in the writings of many of his con-
temporaries. In chapter 11, devoted to the topic of architecture in mo-
tion, Lindsay writes: “I have said that it is a quality, not a defect, of
the photoplays that while the actors tend to become types and hiero-
glyphics and dolls, on the other hand, dolls and hieroglyphs and mecha-
nisms tend to become human. By an extension of this principle, non-­
human tones, textures, lines, and spaces take on a vitality almost like

4  • Karen Beckman
that of flesh and blood.”13 With impressive economy of style, these two
sentences highlight cinema’s capacity to anthropomorphize inanimate
objects, including humanoid dolls as well as signs and machines; turn
actors (presumably human) into lifeless dolls or signs; and, in what is
perhaps the most conceptually challenging of these claims, imbue ab-
stract tones, lines, and spaces with a sense of life in addition to cor-
poreality.14 While Lindsay does not explicitly mention the term anima-
tion, he identifies early in the medium’s history a few preoccupations
that are pertinent to this volume’s interest in how the discourse of film
theory has engaged animation, and how that engagement could enrich
contemporary film theory. These preoccupations, which often take on a
mystical dimension, repeatedly return to cinema’s capacity to reframe
the relationship between humans and objects; to evoke, through anima-
tion, whether of letter, object, line, or space, attachments and emotional
responses to nonhuman things; to make us think carefully about what
movement is and where it is located—in the object, on the screen, or in
the mind-­body of the spectator; and to alter our perception of time and
space through framing, camera movement, and montage, all of which
have the capacity to endow supposedly still objects (animation some-
times makes us question whether true stillness in the world actually
exists) with a sense of liveliness and mobility, or at least potential mo-
bility, even when the object in question is not being animated in the tra-
ditional sense of this term.15
Prefiguring André Bazin’s sense of nature’s on-­screen agency, Jean
Epstein declared in 1926 that cinema’s greatest power lies precisely in
this quality of “animism”: “On screen, nature is never inanimate. Ob-
jects take on airs. Trees gesticulate. Mountains, just like Etna, convey
meaning. Every prop becomes a character.”16 Cinema, for him, is an “ani-
mistic” language that “attributes a semblance of life to the objects it de-
fines,” and this magical, animating force, along with its impact on the
conceptualization of realism, the role of the actor, and the difference be-
tween humans and objects or abstract lines and shapes on screen, are all
primary preoccupations for early film theorists.17
The German-­Hungarian theorist Béla Balázs is no exception. While
Epstein emphasizes the liveliness of objects, Balázs, like Lindsay, seems
at least as interested, and at times more interested, in how film turns
people into objects, and in the role of the cartoon in illuminating the dif-
ference between the film image and other types of images, particularly
where the image’s relationship to reality is concerned.18 Balázs’s most
significant discussion of animation occurs in a chapter titled “The Abso-

Animating Film Theory • 5

lute Film” in The Spirit of Film (1930), where he opens numerous sugges-
tive lines of inquiry. First, he writes of American slapstick comedy as if
the bodies on screen actually were cartoon bodies, and he argues that
slapstick discovers its tempo thanks to what Gaycken in this volume
describes as time-­lapse photography’s decomposition of time. Balázs
writes, “For it was the tempo of time-­lapse that determined the tempo
of the typical mad chases of the slapstick comedy. And similarly, their
non-­psychological, purely mechanical confusion and chaos expressed
the exuberance of a technology that can do with its creatures as it likes
because they possess no gravity of their own or any autonomous logic.”
(We might note here that for Stanley Cavell, writing in 1979, it is cartoon
characters’ “abrogation of gravity” that places them outside of the world
of “movies.”)19 For Balázs, slapstick comedians and not cartoon charac-
ters have no gravity, and it is in the context of slapstick, not cartoons,
that he discusses the absence of danger and death in cinema:
Events in slapstick seem unthreatening because they are, after all, no
more than mere images. . . . This complete absence of danger is what
makes these old-­style comic scenes the absolute products of the image.
For every (written) fairy tale, however comic, always contains the possi-
bility of someone losing his life or something being destroyed. But the
worst that can happen to images is that they can be erased or faded out
or painted over—they can never be killed off.20

Here again we find a direct contrast with Cavell, for whom the impossi-
bility of death is one of the hallmarks of cartoon characters in particu-
lar: “Their bodies are indestructible, one might almost say immortal.”21
Midway through this chapter, Balázs, in order to explain the “abso-
lute image” and the “absolute film,” compares a legend about a Chinese
painting to the world of cartoons created by Pat Sullivan. This extended
passage provides an important precedent to the “cartoon physics” that
Scott Bukatman discusses later in this volume. Balázs begins by illus-
trating the centrality of animation to film theory’s meditations on the
nature of film realism in comparison with realism in other art forms:
“There is an old Chinese legend that tells of an old Chinese painter who
has painted a landscape. A beautiful valley, with mountains in the dis-
tance. The old painter likes the valley so much that he walks into the
painting and disappears into the mountains, never to be seen again.”
Balázs then proceeds to contrast the Chinese painter with Felix the Cat
and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, arguing that with them, “the matter is
not so simple.”22

6  • Karen Beckman
 [Pat Sullivan’s] pictures do not create a natural reality into which the
artist might enter like the old Chinese painter. This world is popu-
lated only by beings sketched with a pencil. Yet their outlines are not
so much representations of the shapes of independent beings; the lines
themselves are those beings’ only substance. Unlike what happened to
the old Chinaman, there is no transformation here of appearance into
reality. . . . Art is not transformed into nature. Instead, there is abso-
lutely no distinction between appearance and reality. . . . There are no
miracles in this world. There are only lines that function in accordance
with the shape they assume.23

The Line and the Letter

The cartoon line, as the thing itself, has for Balázs as much utopian
possibility as it does in Eisenstein’s more frequently cited writing on
“plasmaticness,” a concept taken up in this volume by Esther Leslie and
Gertrud Koch in particular. Balázs suggests, “Lines are lines and where
lines can be drawn, everything is possible.”24 But Balázs also cautions
readers against abstract films in which these lines of possibility become
nothing but “ornaments in motion” without any further purpose or
meaning.25 If film theory has paid little attention to the interest that
Balázs expresses in cinema’s “first innovation” of bringing “movement
into drawn lines,” Andrew R. Johnston explores the possibilities of that
mobile line in this volume in his chapter.26 While Balázs rejected what
he considered to be the purely ornamental animations of the abstract
film, there are nevertheless effects derived from the abstract film that
promise to make possible “directly materialized meaning.”27 He sees this
potential particularly in the realm of animated letters and intertitles,
which are both explored further in this volume by Yuriko Furuhata and
Tess Takahashi, as well as by Mihaela Mihailova and John MacKay, who
expand the existing English-­language work on Dziga Vertov’s use of
and writing about animation within the 1920s Soviet context.28 Balázs
thinks about animated letters’ symbolic force and he compares the effect
of movement and directionality with the effect of changes in volume
levels in the context of sound: “Letters that hurl themselves at us, as-
saulting our eyes just as a scream assaults our ears?” He also explores the
affective quality of moving text and variable typefaces: “Living letters
are the graphic traces of an emotional movement. They are not abstract.
They are the direct reflections of an inner state.”29

Animating Film Theory • 7

Evolution and Utopia

Mihailova and MacKay argue that Aleksander Rodchenko’s spinning

intertitles have a revolutionary component; but this concern with
transformation is not only found within the Soviet context. Indeed, for
Epstein, cinema’s animated force is inextricably linked to change. For
him, when the moving image is animated “as much as its nature compels
it to be,” it shows “that everything is diversity and evolution.” Evolution-
ary and frame-­by-­frame, cellular paradigms ultimately lead Epstein to
the same conclusions about cinema: “Whether we think about the cine-
matographic space according to its discontinuity, from cell to cell, or
according to its continuous evolution, the visual data—which is, here,
the sole information—indicates that most forms do not remain equal
to themselves, neither in their transposition from one frame of discon-
tinuity to another, nor during their passage from one moment of conti-
nuity to another.”30
This association of the animated image with constant evolution pro-
vides the foundation for many utopian theorizations of animation, and
they are explored here in different ways by Bukatman, Koch, Esther
Leslie, and Mihailova and MacKay. For sure, cinema’s animistic force
disrupts conventions of time and space, but as Epstein points out in
a passage on variable-­speed cinematography, where the scientific ex-
periment plays a central role (as it does for several of the authors col-
lected here, including Alexander R. Galloway, Gaycken, Gunning, and
Koch), cinema’s disruption of the natural is to be found in all new ways
of thinking: “One may object that it is an artificial result. But is there an
experiment or even an advanced observation that does not employ a de-
vice and that does not more or less disrupt natural phenomenon while
at the same time communicating new appearances? And yet, we do not
consider those to be false.”31

Kinesthetic Thinking and Feeling

Germaine Dulac, in “Aesthetics, Obstacles, Integral Cinégraphie” (1926),

offers an extended meditation on how cinema’s engagement with move-
ment changes between the 1890s and the 1920s. This essay provides
rich terrain for engaging the phenomenon of movement in cinema as a
physiological experience, as well as a catalyst for both analytic thought
and emotion. She states that if cinema is only “an animated reflection”
of “the expressive forms of literature, or of music, sculpture, painting,

8  • Karen Beckman
architecture, and the dance,” then “it is not an art.” Dulac distinguishes
between cinema as “a mechanical invention created to capture life’s true
continuous movement” and as “the creator of synthetic movements.”
Furthermore, Dulac here maps an interesting, complex, and perhaps
surprising set of affinities among different types of movement, narra-
tive fiction, and documentary. Soon after the arrival of the Lumières’
train, she suggests, “sympathetic study of mechanical movement was
scorned” (it is worth noting here that it is the loss of the study, not
the recording, of mechanical movement that she bemoans).32 Dulac con-
tinues, “In the hope of attracting an audience, the spiritual movement
of human feelings through the mediation of characters was added.” Dis-
tancing itself from the “actual experience” of movement, cinema be-
comes subordinate to “bad literature,” as “one set about arranging ani-
mated photographs around a performance.” In the course of the essay,
Dulac explores what she considers to be the proper and improper role of
movement or animation by introducing several different forms of move-
ment: the novel’s movement of ideas and situation; theatrical movement
that allows for the “development of moods and events”; the movement
of human feelings; and the “concept of movement in its plain and me-
chanical visual continuity as an end in itself.” She critiques the focus on
characters as the “principal objects of concern when, perhaps, the evo-
lution and transformation of a form, or of a volume, or of a line would
have provided more delight. . . . The meaning of the word ‘movement’
was entirely lost sight of, and in the cinema it (movement) was made
subservient to succinctly recounted stories whose series of images, too
obviously animated, were used to illustrate the subject.”33 Dulac’s obser-
vation that the “composed” films in which movement is subordinate to
narrative offer none of the “psychical and visual sensation” of prenar-
rative cinema provides an interesting early precedent and useful start-
ing point for contemporary theorists exploring cinema’s corporeal and
affective dimensions. This kind of theoretical resonance is particularly
rich in Dulac’s inquiry into the spectator’s emotional response to non-
human and even nonorganic moving forms, as when she wonders: “Can
lines unwinding in profusion according to a rhythm dependent on a sen-
sation or an abstract idea affect one’s emotions by themselves, without
sets, solely through the activity of their development?”34
She extends this passage in a way that opens up interesting ques-
tions about the relationship between variable-­speed cinematography
and cinematic “truth,” and also about the relationship between motion
and what she calls “a purely visual emotion”:

Animating Film Theory • 9

 In the film about the birth of sea urchins, a schematic form, generated
by greater or lesser speeds of time-­lapse cinematography, describes a
graphic curve of varying degrees that elicits a feeling at odds with the
thought that it illustrates. The rhythm and the magnitude of movement
in the screen-­space become the only affective factors. In its embryonic
state, a purely visual emotion, physical and not cerebral, is the equal of
the emotion stimulated by an isolated sound.35

Classical film theory is often distinguished from later theories con-

cerned with questions of identity, subjectivity, affect, and ideology. But
here, through a mode of cinematic movement decoupled from both the
human and narrative, we find an opportunity for unexplored conti-
nuities between early and postclassical film theories and among Dulac’s
emotion-­ inducing line, Lindsay’s flesh-­ and-­blood lines and spaces,
Eisenstein’s plasmaticness, Walter Benjamin’s theorization of play and
innervation, contemporary interest in “thing theory” and object rela-
tions, and Judith Halberstam’s queer celebration of Pixar films as places
that enable the development of an “animated self” that disrupts the idea
of “a timeless and natural humanity.” These are sites for people “who be-
lieve that ‘things’ (toys, nonhuman animals, rocks, sponges) are as lively
as humans and who can glimpse other worlds underlying and overwrit-
ing this one.”36
Our ability to recognize these types of affinities owes much to the late
Miriam Hansen, whose pioneering work, like that of Esther Leslie, has
done so much to help us understand the way in which for Benjamin and
Theodor W. Adorno, “Disney films became emblematic of the juncture of
art, politics, and technology debated at the time.”37 These imbrications
are important because they enrich the context in which we might read
the chapters collected here, such as Koch’s discussion of animation in
relation to kinesthetic and emotional thinking, Takahashi’s exploration
of the intersection of video-­animation techniques and identity politics
in experimental documentaries of the 1980s and 1990s, and Johnston’s
exploration of the energy of Len Lye’s “wiggling” lines. But by drawing
out such continuities, these chapters also offer a counterdiscourse to the
influential model for thinking about animation’s relation to the world
that is proposed by Cavell in his 1979 addendum to The World Viewed.
Cavell describes a shared world that contrasts with the childish world of
cartoons. The inhabitants of the former are, apparently, quite certain of
“when or to what extent our laws and limits do and do not apply”; this is
a real world populated by people who are universally recognized as pos-

10  • Karen Beckman
sessing a soul and being vulnerable to death, a world in which all bodies
are “fed” and not “stoked.”38 For Halberstam, certain kinds of animation,
like Pixar, encourage not so much escapism from the so-­called real world
as critiques of the fictions of equality and permanence that undergird
the unchanging reality that Cavell describes. On this question, Hansen
is particularly helpful, for she highlights Mickey Mouse’s affinities with
a contemporary world that resists the clear division of human and non-
human on which Cavell relies:
Benjamin’s Mickey Mouse points toward the general imbrication of
physiological impulses with cybernetic structures that, no longer con-
fined to the domain of cyberfiction, has become standard practice in
science and medicine, architecture and design, and a host of other
areas. This cyborgian quality brings Mickey Mouse into the purview of
Benjamin’s reflections on the body: the problematic of the psychophysio-
logical boundaries supposed not only to contain the subject “within” but
also to distinguish the human species from the rest of creation.39

Worlds and Spaces

In her own exploration of “Micky-­Maus,” Hansen sees no need either

to assert a hierarchy between live action and animated cinema or to de-
termine whether animation belongs “inside of” or “under” cinema. But
many other participants in this conversation about the relationship be-
tween film theory’s proper object (cinema) and its freaky cousin (anima-
tion) have often been drawn to this type of spatial mapping. These geo-
graphic narratives tend either to insist on a total separation of realms, as
we see in Cavell’s distinction of “worlds,” or to map out areas of overlap
between cinema and animation in the context of paradigms where one
term is always dominant. In 2001 Lev Manovich, in The Language of New
Media, made this oft-­cited claim: “Born from animation, cinema pushed
animation to its periphery, only in the end to become one particular case
of animation.”40 Although Alan Cholodenko, as he points out in his con-
tribution to this volume, made a similar claim about all cinema being
a subset of animation more than a decade before Manovich, it is only
within the context of the rise of digital cinema, and the intense critical
focus on cinema’s changing role as what Koch describes as a “membrane”
that enables us to experience the world, that the radicality and inherent
interest of this claim has been properly taken up. However provocative
these spatial metaphors that draw on the language of geography and

Animating Film Theory • 11

Venn diagrams can be, they also run the risk of becoming defensive, of
“fixing” different types of cinema, of generating and enforcing laws in
order to maintain a particular idea of cinema instead of allowing the ex-
periment of cinema’s mediation of life to provoke our philosophical re-
flections through its evolution.
Dudley Andrew struggles valiantly to resist this temptation in his re-
cently articulated sense of “what cinema is.” Yet even as he emphasizes
cinema’s adaptation, he still pursues a more stable sense of cinema, one
that has gathered over time, noting that “identity accumulates.”41 He
positions what he calls Bazin’s “aesthetic of discovery” “at the antipodes
of a cinema of manipulation, including most animation and pure digital
creation,” and later celebrates Jia Zhangke for his ability to “deploy ani-
mation, but always in the service of cinema, not trying to exceed it.”42
At odds with the general spirit of his own book, Andrew’s mapping and
ranking end up linking “discovery” to a rather narrow sense of cinema,
and this volume pushes back against that narrowing, primarily because
it occludes important sites of discovery that help us better understand
our own moment.
We find another potent form of mapping in David Bordwell and
Kristin Thompson’s Film Art: An Introduction, which in many cinema and
media studies programs provides students with their foundational para-
digms and terminology for further study. The authors locate documen-
tary, experimental, and animated films in a shared space that functions
as an alternative to the fictional, apparently mainstream, and live-­action
fare that constitutes the primary focus of the book’s other chapters.43
There are multiple problems with this approach. First, it leaves unques-
tioned and unhistoricized certain assumptions, such as the one that
cinema usually refers to “live-­action film” unless otherwise specified,
an assumption that also undergirds large sections of Manovich’s argu-
ment about the disappearance and return of “manual construction” over
the course of twentieth-­century film history.44 For as Hervé Joubert-­
Laurencin (a scholar who has elsewhere underscored the importance of
animation for Bazin) demonstrates in his chapter on André Martin, the
division of cinema into live action and animation, and the assumption
that cinema means all films except animation films, occurs at a very par-
ticular moment, one almost coincident with the fall, and not the rise,
of the Hollywood studio system. Joubert-­Laurencin explores the con-
sequences of this in the pages ahead.45 Writing in France in the mid-­
1950s, Martin asked of those cinephiles who were resistant to animation
a question that should be reiterated for today’s cinephiles (who are often

12  • Karen Beckman
nostalgic for Martin’s era): “How can one love the Cinema so much, to
what end can it serve to see all films, if one is incapable of seeing and
following all Cinemas?”46
Like Joubert-­Laurencin, Mihailova and MacKay illuminate a further
terminological conundrum that threatens to trouble the boundary be-
tween live-­action and animation film by focusing our attention on the
writing of another important film theorist who has been ignored or
underrecognized within the English-­language context, Aleksandr Bush-
kin.47 Bushkin, they point out,
in particular, took issue with the odd application of the term multiplica-
tion to animated film (still today normally called mul’tiplikatsiia in Rus-
sian), noting that it was live-­action film that involved the shooting of
“multiple” frames with each turn of the camera’s handle, in contrast to
the frame-­by-­frame fixing of every constituent part of a movement typi-
cal of animation. In that sense, Bushkin argues, animation would more
precisely be termed “frame shooting” (kadro-­s’ëmka), where the basic
units of the film are taken to be frame-­sized modules, rather than shots
of unpredictable duration.

As we ponder the mathematics of specific animation practices, like the

variable-frame, live-­action process of Norman McLaren in Neighbours
(1952), it becomes clear that, at least from a mathematical point of view,
cinema has always been a bit more similar to an algebraic expression
with changing values than a knowable formula. This is why, when it
comes to thinking about film, we will never be posttheory. Film theo-
rization involves testing out those shifting values at the borders of a
cinema that evolves across time and space, and as this volume demon-
strates, animation, like theory, seems to provide a way of grappling with
these changes before they are properly understood.
A second problem with Bordwell and Thompson’s system of catego-
rization is that it constructs an intellectual paradigm in which students
and teachers are encouraged to ignore the differences and interactions
among experimental, documentary, and animated films, to think of
them only, or at least primarily, in comparison with the live-­action fic-
tion film. The organizational structure discourages readers from con-
sidering the experimental documentary, animated documentary, or
animated experiments, and one of the goals of this volume is to invite
more attention to these overlooked or marginalized spaces.48 Thomas
LaMarre’s chapter, for example, shines a spotlight on an important
film theorist, Imamura Taihei, who may not be well known to English-­

Animating Film Theory • 13

language readers. In doing so LaMarre foregrounds how, via the concept
of “the apparatus,” Imamura simultaneously thought about animation
and documentary, always emphasizing the (often overlooked) photo-
graphic dimension of cartoons.
Koch explores how animation, like the experiment and like theory
itself, becomes a way to think at the limit of understanding in an at-
tempt to get past that limit, a useful corrective to the notion that con-
temporary film theorists should stop trafficking in spaces of confusion.49
Drawing on the examples of Eisenstein’s writing on plasmaticness as
well as Siegfried Kracauer’s reflections on movement as “the alpha and
omega of the medium,” Koch explores the role of “motor-­sensory knowl-
edge” and “moods” as filters by which we understand the world and de-
velop a sense of both life and being alive. Yet even as she explores what
we can know of life and liveness through “the experiment of film,” Koch
distinguishes this from scientific experiments, with their demand for
“identical reproducibility,” by noting that the aesthetic experiment is
temporally open and interminable.
While Koch distinguishes the scientific from the aesthetic experi-
ment in a manner that is analogous to Bukatman’s distinction between
“cartoon physics” and the “physics of the real world,” other contribu-
tions make clear just how important a role animation has played in
scientific experimentation and visualization, and they explore where
modeling fits in relation to film theory’s discussions of time and space,
revelation and creation. Drawing primarily on the writing of Epstein,
Gaycken examines what scientific uses of cinema have in common with
“the traditional understanding of what constitutes animation.” “Here,”
he continues, “the scientist uses cinema in a process that is explicitly
opposed to recording or reproducing an already evident phenomenon.
These creations are acts of creation, thaumaturgic.” While Gaycken illu-
minates the overlooked ways in which three-­dimensional modeling has
a long history within the cinematic context, Galloway’s contribution
generates some productive tension within the volume by placing the
three-­dimensional model outside of, or even against, a cinematic nar-
rative. He states provocatively: “The goal then, to give away the ending
before barely having gotten under way, will be to reconstruct a geneal-
ogy not for the moving image but for the information model, not for
serial animation but for parallel animation, not for the linear but for the
multiplexed; in short, not for the cinema but for the computer.” Gallo-
way’s counternarrative focuses on François Willème’s experiments with
twenty-­four cameras mounted in a rotunda, with shutters opened simul-

14  • Karen Beckman
taneously with the ultimate goal of producing an object that Willème,
in 1860, would patent as photosculpture, an object relying on “discrete
photographic impressions” that are “segmented” not across time, as in
the chronophotographic processes that have received quite substan-
tial attention (particularly in the context of animation’s relation to the
comic strip and serial photography) but rather “in a spindle of space.”
This, Galloway argues, posits an “alternative history of photography
in which point of view has no meaning.” We are dealing here not with
camera movement or the illusory re-­creation of it in animated films,
but rather with the construction of a virtual point of view that, at least
for Galloway, constitutes “an anticinematic way of seeing,” a mapping of
space that preempts computer modeling and sidesteps cinema. Without
doubt, this is a contentious claim, but it is one that draws our attention
to the question of whether film theory’s language for describing cam-
era movement, editing, and cinematic space and time is adequate for
the task of describing recent image-­making practices that often (and
perhaps unhelpfully) come under the spacious umbrella of “animation.”
Furthermore, Galloway asks us to consider what other media histories,
in addition to film history, need to be included, or excluded, when ani-
mation is the object to be theorized.
Furuhata, Gunning, and Marc Steinberg all raise this same question
about how animation needs to be thought in relation to media beyond
film, even though these authors approach the question in quite distinct
ways. Furuhata explores how for experimental Japanese xerox artists in
the 1960s, graphic design’s material ephemerality was at once countered
by animation through the process of rephotography, a form of archiv-
ing, and translated into a temporal format—the image became newly
ephemeral, not because it was in danger of crumbling or fading away,
but because it was set into motion. Steinberg, drawing on the writing
of two of Japan’s main animation critics, Ōtsuka Eiji and Azuma Hiroki,
suggests that in order for film theorists to understand how realism
functions in anime, it has to be placed within a broader “media ecology”
that includes both manga and the culture of otaku (hard-­core fans) of
the intertwined media landscape that includes “books, comics, maga-
zines, and animation programs.” Steinberg pushes film theorists to ex-
pand “the canons of film and animation theory to include writers from
as yet underexplored critical milieus” because “it is in these milieus that
we may find the potential to overturn some of the most naturalized as-
sumptions in the canons of film and animation theory—such as the con-
tinued presumption that realism has to relate to the unmediated ‘real.’ ”

Animating Film Theory • 15

Ducks: Theory, Politics, History

By separating our thinking about animation from our thinking about

other crucial terms like realism, and also genre, framing, point of view,
editing, rhythm, continuity, and the photographic image, we lose the pos-
sibility of thinking about these perhaps overly familiar terms in a new
light. While Bordwell and Thompson discuss at length Chuck M. Jones’s
1953 masterpiece, Duck Amuck, within the context of their chapter on
documentary, experimental, and animated films, the analysis they offer
persistently delimits the film’s inventiveness to the realm of animation.
Remarking on the film’s reflexivity, they state: “It gradually becomes ap-
parent to us that the film is exploring various conventions and tech-
niques of animation.”50 By contrast, Richard Thompson’s superlative
1975 essay on Duck Amuck recognizes the extent to which the cartoon is
simultaneously “extremely conscious of itself” as “an act of cinema,” an
introductory film studies textbook (but more fun), and a theoretical re-
flection on what film is and how it works.51 He writes, “It is at once a laff
riot and an essay by demonstration on the nature and conditions of the
animated film and the mechanics of film in general. (Even a quick check
of film grammar is tossed in, via the ‘Gimme a closeup’ gag.)”52 Resisting
the urge to defend the borders between animated and live-­action film,
allowing them to be considered alongside each other while still mark-
ing the differences, Thompson notes a whole variety of features—about
camera movement, revelation, the frame line, off-­screen space, space
and time, intertextual reference, genre, and the relationship between
film actor and character—that make this essay an unusually rich start-
ing point for thinking about animation within, and as, film theory. In-
deed Thompson’s work becomes the foundation on which Dana B. Polan
builds another exemplary film theory essay that engages animation in a
discussion whose pertinence extends far beyond the realm of cartoons.
In “Brecht and the Politics of Self-­Reflexive Cinema” (1974), Polan’s
analysis of Duck Amuck plays a central role in his exploration of the dis-
tinction between political and purely formal uses of self-­reflexivity. Cru-
cially, Polan judges Duck Amuck to be an example of “nonpolitical art”
not because it is an animated film but rather because it remains within
the realm of fictive characters: “If duck amuck is a metaphor for the
confusions of life (as Thompson suggests), it is a disengaged metaphor
at best, for it fails to examine confusion through a politicized perspec-
tive. Indeed, the source of Daffy Duck’s angst reveals itself to be none

16  • Karen Beckman
of the agents of social domination in the real world, but merely Bugs
Bunny—another fictive character, whose power is tautological in ori-
gin. The film opens up a formal space and not a political one in viewer
consciousness.”53
Vachel Lindsay, writing of ducks on screen, associated the film ver-
sion of this particular animal with “the finality of Arcadian peace” and
insisted that “nothing very terrible can happen with a duck in the fore-
ground.”54 He obviously hadn’t met Donald. For Adorno and Max Hork-
heimer, this duck actively participated in the violent oppression of the
proletariat by the forces of capitalism: “Donald Duck in the cartoons and
the unfortunate victim in real life receive their beatings so that the spec-
tators can accustom themselves to theirs.”55 Ariel Dorfman and Armand
Mattelart agree, as they make clear in their Marxist publication Para leer
al Pato Donald (1971), which was translated into English and republished
as How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic in
1975 after it had been banned and burned in the wake of the Chilean coup
d’état of 1973. The book’s potent critique of the use of cartoon characters
for the purpose of colonization—a blurb from John Berger on the cover
describes the work as a “handbook of decolonization” and compares it
to the writings of Franz Fanon—highlights the importance of expand-
ing the purview of Third Cinema and ideological film theory’s concerns
to the realm of animation.56 A number of scholars have already done
important work on how animation has been used for propaganda pur-
poses, usually within a frame where the emphasis is more historical than
theoretical. Eric Smoodin’s Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons from
the Sound Era (1993) offers an exemplary model of this type of work, and
several chapters in this volume—particularly those of Christopher P.
Lehman and Bishnupriya Ghosh—continue to explore the ideological
operations of animation within a historical framework. These two chap-
ters also intersect with and are enlivened by more general theoretical
speculation about animation and film. Ghosh, for example, builds on the
pioneering work on scientific animation and microcinematography by
people such as Scott Curtis, Christopher Kelty, Hannah Landecker, and
Kirsten Ostherr by putting these scholars of the scientific image in con-
versation with theorists of global capital as she explores the interaction
between the individual unit of the cell and the extracellular environ-
ment in her close analysis of the U.S. military’s “malaria films” from 1942
to 1945. Like Ghosh, Lehman finds those moments when live action and
drawn animation combine on screen to be rich sites of ideological work.

Animating Film Theory • 17

He demonstrates the unusual frequency with which African Americans
appear on screen through this type of combination. His analysis of this
phenomenon expands in significant ways the existing work of Rey Chow
and Sianne Ngai on how the animated body gets subjected to power and
manipulated by external forces precisely because of the quality of plas-
maticness that Eisenstein, Benjamin, and others frame as a source of
utopian possibility. As Ngai states, “Although in the last instance Chow’s
pessimistic reading of the animated-­technologized body as a Taylorized
body seems more persuasive than Eisenstein’s optimistic one, the two
perspectives point to a crucial ambivalence embedded in the concept
of animation—ambivalence that takes on special weight in the case
of racialized subjects, for whom objectification, exaggerated corpore-
ality or physical pliancy, and the body-­made-­spectacle remain doubly
freighted issues.”57 Ghosh and Lehman both illustrate the importance of
film history and theory as inseparably intertwined enterprises; but their
chapters can also be read as two possible responses to Leslie’s questions
about whether animation has a history and how it registers the time of
its making.

Cinema without Photography?

Leslie’s question is in part motivated by a recognition of the way live-­

action film “reflects its age into itself” through the photographic cap-
turing of “every detail, the fashions, the hairstyles, the makeup (even if
the film purports to be a historical one), the attitudes,” and so on. Ani-
mation reflects its age differently, although as Lehman’s discussions of
the use of rotoscoping make clear, not always that differently. Further-
more, as Gunning points out, there is a “secret symmetry” between ani-
mation and photography that we need to recuperate in order better to
understand how animation works. Although he recognizes that “val-
orizing animation as the ‘anti-­index’ played an essential role in shift-
ing theoretical focus from a narrow obsession with photography,” he
goes on to ask, “does opposing animation to photography really provide
our best understanding of its nature?” Gunning makes the crucial point
that “most film animation depends on photography”—and this includes
cameraless animation, which relies on photographic processes in order
to be transferred to the filmstrip. The fate of some of Harry Smith’s un-
photographed material makes clear what happens when this stage of
animation is bypassed. In 1965 Smith says of the film that Jonas Mekas
called The Magic Feature (#12):

18  • Karen Beckman
 There was also an enormous amount of material made for that picture.
None of the really good material that was constructed for that film was
ever photographed. . . . On that Oz film, that expensive one, of course,
I had quite a few people working; so that all kinds of special cut-­outs
were made that were never photographed. I mean really wonderful ones
were made! One cut-­out might take someone two months to make.
They were very elaborate stencils and so forth. All of my later films were
never quite complete. Most of the material was never shot, because the
film dragged on too long.58

No wonder, then, that Smith would ultimately decide: “I don’t think I’ll
make any more animated films. They’re too laborious and bad for the
health.”59
Although the photographic process is essential for the very survival of
certain kinds of ephemeral visual material, as both Smith and Furuhata
make clear, Gunning explains that animation’s symmetrical relationship
with photography goes beyond the recording function. Whether or not
the filmmaker pays attention to the limits of the frame on the strip when
producing the images, these images are, Gunning points out, inevitably
“translated into the discontinuous rhythm of the machine” in the mo-
ment of projection. Developing two distinct but complementary defini-
tions of animation, Gunning uses the difference between these mean-
ings to explore the shared terrain of animation and still photography,
which for him lies in their mutual fascination with the instant. In a key
sentence, he explains: “Animation reveals the dynamic nature of the in-
stant through motion, while photography reveals its potential through
stillness—but considered together these technological processes also
reveal that stillness and movement depend on and transform into each
other in the production of the instant.”
This volume’s call for the animation of film theory is not a question of
special pleading on behalf of marginalized practices or special-­interest
groups, although much writing on animation has this activist dimen-
sion to it (and understandably so). Rather, in this volume, the primary
goal is to explore the kinds of theoretical questions that have remained
underexplored because we have allowed ourselves to be constrained by
too narrow a sense of what cinema is. By not exploring our critical terms
within the richest possible context, our analytic language has become
impoverished and stuck. The consequences of this narrowing have be-
come increasingly visible within discussions of the digital turn, and this
is the fertile terrain out of which these chapters spring to life.

Animating Film Theory • 19

Notes

1. Suzanne Buchan points out in the opening to Animated “Worlds” that animation
is a term whose precise meaning often eludes us, possibly referring to a style, a
technique, a technology, or a way of experiencing the world (vii).
2. Gunning, “Moving Away from the Index,” 38.
3. I am obviously excluding anthologies that are dedicated to theorizing anima-
tion, such as Alan Cholodenko’s The Illusion of Life and The Illusion of Life 2.
4. Here I will not focus on the volumes dedicated exclusively to the topic of ani-
mation, many of which have emerged out of the context of animation studies,
and which tend to adopt an approach that is more oriented toward history and
practice than theory. There are now, however, a growing number of authors
whose work crosses over between the worlds of cinema studies and animation
studies. Several of them, including the contributors to this volume, as well as
Maureen Furniss, Chris Gehman, Judith Halberstam, Peter Hames, the late
Miriam Hansen, Norman M. Klein, Laura U. Marks, Gerald and Danny Peary,
Steve Reinke, Bella Honess Roe, Robert Russett, Eric Smoodin, Vivian Sob-
chack, Cecile Starr, Paul Ward, and Paul Wells, very actively engage the inter-
section of film theory and animation theory, practice, and history, and this vol-
ume builds on their pioneering work.
5. Morin, The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man, 68. Karl Schoonover offers a useful
summary of Morin’s place in the landscape of film theory in Schoonover, “The
Cinema, or The Imaginary Man and The Stars by Edgar Morin.”
6. Wells, Understanding Animation, 44.
7. Russett and Starr, Experimental Animation, 123; emphasis added.
8. Colin Williamson’s dissertation, “Watching Closely with Turn-­of-­the-­Century
Eyes,” engages this difference in an interesting way by thinking about anima-
tion and trickery in the histories of time lapse, the substitution splice, and cgi.
9. Russett and Starr, Experimental Animation, 127.
10. Kubelka, “The Theory of Metrical Film,” 140. Kubelka’s contribution to P. Adams
Sitney’s The Avant-­Garde Film is not a single essay but a compilation extracted
from recorded and transcribed lectures given at New York University in 1974–
75, combined with statements he made in preparation for a 1966 interview with
Jonas Mekas. The passages cited here are both taken from the 1966 statements.
11. Several years earlier, at the 1961 Vancouver Film Festival, Norman McLaren
uttered what is probably the most frequently cited statements about anima-
tion, which Kubelka both forgets and, through echoing, recalls: “What is the
essence of animation? It is what happens between each frame of film—this is
what is all-­important.” Quoted in “The Craft of Norman McLaren: Notes on
a Lecture Given at the 1961 Vancouver Film Festival,” Film Quarterly 16, no. 2
(Winter 1962–63): 17.
12. Kubelka, “The Theory of Metrical Film,” 141.
13. Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture, 133.
14. Linsday’s statement resonates in interesting ways with McLaren’s later experi-

20  • Karen Beckman
 ments with pixilation, which Maureen Furniss defines as “animation that is
created by moving a live human or animal figure incrementally.” Furniss, The
Animation Bible, 265. When shooting Neighbours, McLaren explains that he had
to use animators as the actors because “they knew exactly how to move them-
selves, for instead of making a series of drawings they made a series of pos-
tures.” Quoted in Furniss, The Animation Bible, 270.
15. Furniss writes the following about “stillness” in relation to realism within the
context of animation: “In real life, living beings are never completely still be-
cause bodily functions such as breathing and heartbeats cause at least minute
amounts of movement at all times. Seeing an animated figure that is com-
pletely still—that is, to see a single image that is photographed for more than,
say, half a second—might strike the viewer as being unrealistic. Most anima-
tion contains constant motion, even if only at the level of blinking eyes and
moving lips, or a camera movement across a still background. . . . Absolute still-
ness can work against one of the central attractions of animation, the illusion
that inanimate objects have been ‘endowed with life’; it could be said that, when
an image within an animated production becomes still, its lifelessness is readily
apparent.” Furniss, Art in Motion (2007), 79.
And Paul Wells, for example, opens his useful book Understanding Anima-
tion with the following working definition of animation in practice, even as he is
aware of the definition’s insufficiencies: “A film made by hand, frame-­by-­frame,
providing an illusion of movement which has not been directly recorded in the
photographic sense.” Wells, Understanding Animation, 10.
16. Epstein, “The Cinema Seen from Etna,” 289.
17. Epstein, “The Cinema Seen from Etna,” 295.
18. Alan Cholodenko’s work here and elsewhere explores the dialectical tension be-
tween film’s uncanny capacity to turn both the object and the live being into
“the living dead.” See, for example, Cholondenko, “The Crypt, the Haunted
House, of Cinema.” Will Schmenner’s dissertation in progress (University of
Pennsylvania) also addresses this issue in interesting ways, and I am grateful to
him for being a wonderful interlocutor.
19. Balázs, The Spirit of Film, 172; and Cavell, The World Viewed, 170.
20. Balázs, The Spirit of Film, 172.
21. Cavell, The World Viewed, 170.
22. Balázs, The Spirit of Film, 173.
23. Balázs, The Spirit of Film, 173–74.
24. Balázs, The Spirit of Film, 174.
25. Balázs, The Spirit of Film, 175.
26. Balázs, The Spirit of Film, 174.
27. Balázs, The Spirit of Film, 175.
28. “Drawings in motion. Blueprints in motion. Plans for the future. The theory
of relativity on the screen. WE greet the ordered fantasy of movement,” Dziga
Vertov declares in his 1922 text, “WE: Variant of a Manifesto.” Vertov, Kino-­
Eye, 9. For earlier discussions of Soviet animation in English, see, for example:

Animating Film Theory • 21

 Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands, esp. “Eisenstein Shakes Mickey’s Hand in Holly-
wood,” 219–50; Mjolsness, “Dziga Vertov’s Soviet Toys”; and Tsivian, “Turning
Objects, Toppled Pictures.”
29. Balázs, The Spirit of Film, 175.
30. Epstein, “The Cinema Seen from Etna,” 397, 398.
31. Epstein, “The Cinema Seen from Etna,” 401.
32. Dulac, “Aesthetics, Obstacles, Integral Cinégraphie,” 389–90. In 1928 Dulac re-
inforces the importance of the study of movement over the illusion of move-
ment when she writes of cinema’s “decomposition” of movement, which allows
for analytic vision. See Dulac, “From ‘Visual and Anti-­visual Films,’” 32.
33. Dulac, “Aesthetics, Obstacles, Integral Cinégraphie,” 390–91.
34. Dulac, “Aesthetics, Obstacles, Integral Cinégraphie,” 396.
35. Dulac, “Aesthetics, Obstacles, Integral Cinégraphie,” 396.
36. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 46, 27–28.
37. Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 163.
38. Cavell, The World Viewed, 170, 172.
39. Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 176.
40. Manovich, The Language of New Media, 302.
41. Andrew, What Cinema Is!, 140.
42. Andrew, What Cinema Is!, 42, 59.
43. Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art, 110.
44. Manovich, The Language of New Media, 307–8.
45. See Joubert-­Laurencin, La lettre volante.
46. Martin, “Films d’animation au festival de Cannes,” 39.
47. Bushkin was responsible for the production design of Vertov’s animated short
stories that appeared under the title Humoresques (1924). See Tsivian, “Vertov’s
Silent Films,” 407.
48. Bordwell and Thompson do dedicate one subsection of chapter 5 in Film Art to
“An Example of Experimental Animation: Fuji,” but my argument here is that
the overall organization of the book actively discourages thinking about these
three categories—experimental, animation, and documentary—as anything
other than various alternatives to the mainstream. Bordwell and Thompson,
Film Art, 149–51.
49. See Turvey, “Theory, Philosophy, and Film Studies,” esp. 119.
50. Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art, 148.
51. Thompson, “Duck Amuck,” 41; my emphasis.
52. Thompson, “Duck Amuck,” 41.
53. Polan, “Brecht and the Politics of Self-­Reflexive Cinema.”
54. Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture, 174.
55. Adorno and Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry,” 1023.
56. Dorfman and Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck.
57. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 101.
58. Sitney, “Harry Smith Interview,” 94–95.
59. Sitney, “Harry Smith Interview,” 102.

22  • Karen Beckman