Flux and flurry

Stillness and hypermovement in animated worlds

Esther Leslie

Animation, as any Wikipedia reader knows, is ‘the optical illusion of movement’, whether achieved through photographing drawings, moving clay models and recording the tweaks frame by frame, drawing directly on film or devising models digitally. But the definition is a weak one, or only a starting point. Not only animation but all film/video proceeds by generating an ‘optical illusion of movement’. A recording device samples fragments of the world, repeatedly biting a moment of time from its flow. Later the resulting still frames of a film or video strip are cranked or streamed into motion, generating a second-order re-creation of the motion of which they had once been part. Furthermore, to define animation as ‘the optical illusion of movement’ makes it impossible to think of animated stillness – perhaps rightly so. But, in one way or another, there is much stillness in animation: from the aforementioned individual cels or frames at animation’s root to the static backgrounds that accompany a scene’s main action; from production storyboards to those moments, occasioned by the narrative or gag, when everything has to stop. This must be qualified: it is true only inasmuch as stillness can ever be said to exist and is not itself something of an illusion. It is, after all, a question of scale whether the movement that inhabits all things is perceived and, in addition, the perceiving eye itself is always in movement. Moreover, what animation or any cinematic production presents is not simply an illusion of movement. It is movement itself: movement of the image data through the projecting mechanism, which produces movement on the screen. There is, indeed, an animation technique that explores vision’s contingency and the relativity of stillness and movement through the extreme extension of time. Bullet time or time slice or view morphing stills the scene or object within the flow of the film or moves it only at extreme slowness, while our view of it changes constantly, as the visions of multiple cameras are sequenced. Thereby a frozen moment of time is stretched out, presenting us not so much with an example of the optical illusion of movement of an object but rather with the perception of movement itself in motion.

A definition of animation, found in the relays between movement and stillness, is outlined here, perversely perhaps, by exploring some scenes or sites that are more or even much less conventionally conceivable as animation. At first glance these are motionless sites, but, on closer examination, they prove to be sites of movement, in various ways. The characterization of animation pursued is different to the commonsensical. It is best described as an insistence that animation’s special contribution to cinematic culture is not the illusion of movement but rather, chiastically, and at least potentially, the movement of illusion, a displacement that brings to light or focuses the given illusion even to the point of dispelling it. It does this through the condensation, within and between animated elements, of a number of movements, a series of passages between different states and forces, conditions and temporalities. A shorthand version of my definition is animation is ‘different nature’ or animation is ‘non-indifferent nature’. Animation is ‘different nature’ (Benjamin1) because it is different to ours, but not distinct from it. Animation reflects on nature, but shatters its laws in its physics-defying recombinations of space, time and matter. Animation proposes ‘small worlds’, each one bound by the newly and specifically devised laws of the animator. Animation is ‘non-indifferent nature’ (Eisenstein2), because it appeals to us, invites us into its particular small world. Its appeal is mediated via technology and is a shuttle between the image world of a new or second nature and us, addressed too as nature. We are invited in for the duration of the show. This image world or microcosm is, in turn, appropriated – or, better, inhabited – by its viewers. Animation’s small and dialectical image worlds propose certain stances on the part of viewers, encouraging them to be at least minimally alert to the ways of the image world unrolling before them, especially as it compares to the world in which they sit. They are aware too, at some level, of the differences within the image world – that is to say, the gaps between the cels or poses. These gaps, key to animation’s structure, enable the excessive or implausible movements that characterize animation and mark it as seemingly unlimited and infinitely potential. This animated nature might assume any form and usually does in its presentation of hybrids of human and animal, coagulations of machineries and bodies, scenarios in which natural law is overturned or maliciously asserted. Animation presents a dynamic image world in which – in much the same way as Sergei Eisenstein, Disney fan, describes the dialectical cinema he hoped to develop as his contribution to post-revolutionary culture – there is manifested a condensation of tensions that appeals, or may appeal, in a particular, cognitive way to its viewers. This is because, in propelling the viewer from image to thought, from percept to concept, it models the motion of thinking itself – such that viewers are invited to complete the film through an act of appropriation of its new nature.

To specify, animation is, characteristically, whatever its form, genre, technique, enlivened, which is not to say that it is lively only because it displays movement. Rather, more specifically, it is made lively by the inherent movement of the dynamic contradictions that inhabit it and that are projected in its small image worlds. Animation’s small image worlds are generated – structurally, formally, content-wise – through the work of oppositional and interconnected, or, better, dialectical, forces, these being stillness and movement, life and lifelessness, identity and non-identity, singularity and universality, fetishism and its criticism and a basic repetition or replication that paradoxically yields heterogeneity. These forces are at work variously: perhaps in the image or between images or in the storyline or the technology or at the moment of projection and being seen.

To explore this further the present enquiry takes in some frozen sites – ostensibly the least animated thing imaginable, for that which is frozen is precisely immobilized, though this no more so than the still image that is the cell of animation. After a spell among the frozen, some melting into air follows. First the focus is on a stilled figure, allowing us to arrest our attentive eye on an entity that quite literally crystallizes numerous dialectical tensions, such as might also be found lurking in the obviously mobile animated image.

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