Kawamoto’s House of Flame and Švankmajer’s The Fall of the House of Usher

Judy clubs Punch with a mallet. Jack the Pumpkin King decides to take Santa’s place one Christmas. Gumby foils the Blockheads’ plans, yet again. In each of these cases, we as the audience focus our attention on the moving figures, finding pleasure in the characters and stories. Yet, though we focus our imaginative attention upon Jack dancing through Halloweentown, we are always aware of the animator and the fact that these engrossing figures are inanimate objects. So who is the performer? When we discuss performance in an animated film, are we talking about the animated figure? The animator? Do films without anthropomorphized characters contain performances? In live action films, it is quite easy to center a discussion of cinematic performance on the actor and never feel compelled to consider the role the audience plays in co-creating the performance. I do not mean to suggest that film spectatorship is not a wide and rich field, but that very often when assessing “performance,” we specifically refer to actors and dancers. However, since the animated figure does not move itself, the nature of performance becomes more complicated. In the animated film, we must take the audience into consideration to determine how performance is constituted.

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Exploring Representations of Disability within British Mainstream Animation

This article discusses how representations of disability operate within the mainstream animation narratives of the British Creature Discomfort series (2007-8). These images are constructed as a response to concerns about broader social perceptions of the physically disabled and once scrutinized it is apparent that they are managed through established notions of comic incongruity. This is a framework that not only aids a less reductive insight into the lives of those restricted in mobility but it provides a comic contrast to the serious messages being imparted about ignorance, stereotyping and access. Through the application of incongruity there emerges a modification of representation here and one that builds upon and subverts extant depictions of physical impairment within previous animated discourses. This reframing refines our understandings around representation within contemporary media and constructs here a hybrid of several extant discourses that services an overall more nuanced conception of day to day life for those who are physically disabled.

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