Contents

Introduction
by Amanda Third and Dirk de Bruyn

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Battlefields for the Undead : Stepping Out of the Graveyard
by Pauls Wells

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In the Sand a Line is Drawn: A Reflection on Animation Studies
by Adrian Martin

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(The) Death (of) the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix
Part I: Kingdom of Shadows
by Alan Cholodenko

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Performing a Traumatic Effect: The films of Robert Breer
by Dirk de Bruyn

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Superflat Eschatology: Renewal and Religion in anime
by Michael Broderick

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The Uncanny and the Robot in the Astro Boy Episode “Franken”
by Katharine Buljan

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Final Fantasy or The Incredibles: Ultra-realistic animation, aesthetic engagement and the uncanny valley
by Matthew Butler and Lucie Joschko

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Flowerpot Men: The Haptic Image in Brian Cosgrove and Richard Hall’s Animations
by Cordelia Brown

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Facial Expressions for Empathic Communication of Emotion in Animated Characters
by Andrew Buchanan

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Behind the Flash Exterior: Scratching the surface of online animated narratives
by Peter Moyes

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The Svankmajer Touch
by Cathryn Vasseleu

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Checking out a Czech Animator: How Michaela Pavlatova both incorporates and rebels against the Czech animation tradition
by Miriam Harris

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Reaching Out to Touch: Animation and Aboriginal Children in Taiwan
by Zhi-Ming Su

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Recording Australian Animation History
by Dan and Lienors Torre

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Complete Volume

The complete volume is available for download as PDF here.

The Animated Dialogues 2007 conference was first conceptualised as an event that would bring together scholars working in the field of animation studies in the Australasian region. This first Animated Dialogues conference focused on the areas of texts, industries and audiences as a way of bringing people together who frequently work in quite disparate geographical and intellectual contexts. The conference’s aims were twofold: firstly, to consolidate the sense of an intellectual community working in animation studies in the region and, secondly, to provide a space to begin the work of documenting the rich and diverse histories, practices and critiques of animation in Australasia. Implicit in the conference’s agenda was the desire to foreground issues pertaining to the future development of the discipline of animation studies locally. That is, the conference was envisaged as an opportunity to take stock of the work that is underway, as well as to identify existing gaps and potential areas of interrogation, with an eye to expanding the discipline in ways that build upon the backbone of rigorous research currently being undertaken.

The conference was a truly collaborative event, receiving funding from relevant schools and departments at Monash University (Victoria), Murdoch University (Western Australia), RMIT (Victoria), and Deakin University (Victoria). Two days of the conference were hosted at Monash University’s Berwick campus - an outer suburban Melbourne campus with a strong animation education profile - with the third day held at the Victorian College of the Arts in the inner city. The conference was attended by delegates from Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and Japan that hailed from a variety of academic, pedagogic, production and exhibition backgrounds, including full and part-time university researchers, a cohort of postgraduate and Honours students (notably, Andi Sparks’ Queensland contingent who made the trip en masse), artists such as Lisa Roberts and Michael Roseth, and professional animators such as Antoinette Starkiewicz. Their work addressed a wide array of topics, ranging from the deeply theoretical to the production-inspired. We hope to have reflected some of the diversity of this work in the articles presented within this collection.

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Stepping Out of the Graveyard

I will be forever grateful to be asked to deliver the keynote address at the ‘Animated Dialogues’ Conference in Melbourne in June 2007. My survey of the field of Animation Studies in the current period - ‘Battlefields for the Undead : Re-assessing Animation Studies and other Romantic Interludes’ - inevitably enabled me to get a few things off my chest, and posit some ideas and thoughts pertinent to the Conference outlook and agenda. I was able to acknowledge, for example, that to be back in Australia discussing animation was also to be celebrating one of the first conferences dedicated to ‘Animation Studies’ that took place in Sydney in 1987, and which led to Alan Cholodenko’s collection of essays, ‘The Illusion of Life’, some of which, to use a ‘Cholodenko-ism’, ‘for me’, offered great insight, and others went straight over my head. His current collection - ‘The Illusion of Life II’, with its polemical and challenging address of animation literature, taking the field to task for the ways it has absented much post-modern and post-structuralist thought from its evolving canon, concentrated too much on the concept of ‘the auteur’, and privileged a view of animation as a ‘language’ rather than a philosophic trope, at the very least signals how far the field has come; moreover, with its use of the work of critical theorists and thinkers from other disciplines, significantly progresses further debates about defining animation, and resists the notion, often posited by Suzanne Buchan, editor of the ‘new’ and extremely valuable ‘Animation: A Cross-Disciplinary Journal’, that we are at a ‘starting point’ in animation study.

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A Reflection on Animation Studies

There are at least three problems that arise when any topic of interest (heterogeneous and globally dispersed as it must necessarily be at the outset) transforms itself, in an (equally necessary) institutional/territorial gesture, into a defined field of study - and I have seen all these problems materialise at least once before in my lifetime, during the rise of Cultural Studies. How might these problems affect the burgeoning area of Animation Studies?

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The Kingdom of Shadows¹

The night of the 4^th of July 1896 was a special night for cinema. It was the night that Maxim Gorky attended the screening of the Lumière brothers projections at the Nizhny-Novgorod fair in Russia and wrote the first significant review of cinema, a review that for me as for Tom Gunning offers us the first substantial account of the experience of cinema, a rich, indeed paradigmatic, guide to cinema and its abiding senses, sensations. For me, and it appears Gunning, Gorky’s extraordinary ‘first sight’ of cinema defines the very experience of cinema spectatorship (and also too cinema analysis, film theory).

When I say Gunning and I, I reference his canonical article ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator’ (Gunning 1989) and my article ‘The Crypt, the Haunted House, of Cinema’ (Cholodenko 2004). My article extends, qualifies and recasts Gunning’s formulation in ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment’ of his notion of the cinema of attractions, also by rereading Gorky’s review. It is crucial to understand at the outset that Gunning’s re-modelling of early cinema as his cinema of attractions has become the orthodoxy in Film Studies.

Although I have precious little space to take up not only Gunning’s but my article here, let me make it clear that I am nevertheless in this new paper adding to and enlarging upon the work I did in my article on his. So while I do rehearse points I made there, I am also animating what I take to be pivotal new ideas from a return engagement with his and my text. It is an engagement allowing me to propose (in section I) that Gunning confirms my still apparently radical notion for animation studies, articulated in so many publications, that not only is animation a form of film, all film, including cinema by definition, is a form of animation. Moreover, it allows me to argue not only the singular importance of animation to cinema and to film but (in section II) the singular importance of death to animation, hence to cinema and to film.

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The Films of Robert Breer

“We must go back to the working actual body - not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement.” Merleau-Ponty (1964b: 162)

“I used to take lessons in a biplane and do stunts and things.” Robert Breer (in Griffiths, 1985)

Introduction

American animator Robert Breer’s playfully short, quickly moving animations ‘research’ (MacDonald, 1992: 17) the perceptual experiences of cinematic reception that are generally ignored and buried by the industrial model of film production. They are rich in technical innovation and resist the narrative expectations of an audience weaned on entertainment films. Breer has been credited in introducing the first visual bomb to cinema in his loop film Image by Images I (Paris 1954).

Two abstract animated films by Robert Breer are examined: 69 (1968 5 minutes) and Fuji (1974 10 minutes): 69 as a metaphor for a system that collapses and Fuji as an articulation of that embodied seeing required for train travel. In their single frame or multiple frame bursts and clusters, these graphic animations contain a mixture of abstract and concrete images that explore the illusion of motion through a reconstituted collage of fragments, sudden appearances and subliminal effects. They can be read as formal reflexive examinations of the tension between the single frame and the perception of motion.

A phenomenological approach is useful in focusing in on the perceptual and performative aspects of this work, emphasising phenomenology’s focus on the pre-reflective moment at the heart of ‘being-in-the-world.’ As ‘a movie is not a thought; it is perceived’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a: 58) these films are read here as about as a direct body centred ‘making sense.’

The ‘unspeakable’ or ‘unknowable’ of trauma may also be of some value in articulating the elusive text of Breer’s moving image art. The relationship between trauma and cinema has generated a level of analytic and critical attention, most clearly indicated by the special debate and dossier sections of the journal ‘Screen’ in 2001 and 2003 where Susannah Radstone (2001) identified a focus on ‘trauma, dissociation and unrepresentability’ evident in the work of Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (see Felman, 1992 and Caruth, 1992) It is argued here that the direct impact of 69 and Fuji re-perform a traumatic effect on the viewer. The flashback is identified as such an effect and the unsettling experience of early train travel is also investigated to illuminate the disorienting reception that Breer’s films can illicit on the unprepared viewer.

The use of Brewin’s neurological research into memory processing evident in trauma is also used here. This is a line of research built on a psychological reading of trauma articulated in the writings of Janet and Van der Kolk.

Pierre Janet, working with the victims of shell shock in the late 1800’s identified that such shock or trauma can be precipitated by severe emotional responses and that such responses effect how memories are stored in a fragmentary manner. ‘Intense emotions, Janet thought, cause memories of particular events to be dissociated from consciousness, and to be stored, instead as visceral sensations (anxiety and panic), or as visual images (nightmares and flashbacks)’ (Van der Kolk, 1996a: 214). Baer’s concept of re-windability is also introduced as a method for presenting both trauma and Breer’s films.

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Renewal and Religion in anime

“For at least some of the Superflat people [...] there is a kind of traumatic solipsism, even an apocalyptic one, that underlies the contemporary art world as they see it.” Thomas Looser, 2006

“Perhaps one of the most striking features of anime is its fascination with the theme of apocalypse.” Susan Napier, 2005

“For Murakami, images of nuclear destruction that abound in anime (or in a lineage of anime), together with the monsters born of atomic radiation (Godzilla), express the experience of a generation of Japanese men of being little boys in relation to American power.” Thomas Lamarre, 2006

As anime scholar Susan Napier and critics Looser and Lamarre suggest, apocalypse is a major thematic predisposition of this genre, both as a mode of national cinema and as contemporary art practice. Many commentators (e.g. Helen McCarthy, Antonia Levi) on anime have foregrounded the ‘apocalyptic’ nature of Japanese animation, often uncritically, deploying the term to connote annihilation, chaos and mass destruction, or a nihilistic aesthetic expression. But which apocalypse is being invoked here? The linear, monotheistic apocalypse of Islam, Judaism, Zoroastra or Christianity (with it’s premillennial and postmillennial schools)? Do they encompass the cyclical eschatologies of Buddhism or Shinto or Confucianism? Or are they cultural hybrids combining multiple narratives of finitude?

To date, Susan Napier’s work (2005, 2007) is the most sophisticated examination of the trans-cultural manifestation of the Judeo-Christian theological and narrative tradition in anime, yet even her framing remains limited by discounting a number of trajectories apocalypse dictates.¹ However, there are other possibilities. Jerome Shapiro (2004), for one, argues convincingly that the millennial imagination, as a subset of apocalyptic thought, is closer to the Japanese spiritual understanding of heroic mythology. Elsewhere Thomas Looser (2007) reflects upon 1990s Japanese media and art and interprets the obsession with apocalyptic images from the Superflat school and Gainax anime as a preoccupation with the postmodern crises of capital and its limits.

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Introduction

In the story of ‘Franken’, by Osamu Tezuka, humans flee in horror at the sight of a robot named Franken,¹ unaware that he is actually on a search for his lost friend, as well as for mechanical pieces to repair himself. Directed by Kazuya Konaka, ‘Franken’ is an episode of the Japanese animation series Astro Boy, from 2003. The story begins with a shot of an interior, in which three thieves from an underground robot theft ring disassemble the parts of stolen robots with the aim of selling them. The sombre colours of the interior without windows and an unidentified, mysterious and eerie voice heard in the background imbue the introductory shot with a frightening and unnerving atmosphere. This consequently acts as an initial tension-builder for the developing story. In deep night, discarded parts of the stolen robots are then disposed of. Out of the pile of these discarded, dismantled robots’ parts arises a machine-like one-eyed creature, with extremities that resemble mechanical feelers. Soon after, the episode starts to switch between shots, following the one-eyed creature on the way to Metro-musements, an amusement park near Metro City, with other shots following Astro Boy’s class day in this amusement park. The ‘Franken’ story is an intriguing confluence of Western mythological and literary references, while simultaneously incorporating the animistic component from the Japanese Shinto religion. With its sophisticated use of these references, coupled with a masterful use of 2D animation, ‘Franken’ delivers an interesting story about humans and robots.

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Ultra-realistic animation, aesthetic engagement and the uncanny valley

Introduction

This paper examines the aesthetic qualities of two animated feature films, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and The Incredibles, as a precursor to considering what issues are associated with the shift toward ‘ultra-realistic’ animation. The concept of realistic depiction of animated characters will be analysed within the context of Western culture with a particular focus on the notion of aesthetic engagement.

How does a film such as Final Fantasy, clearly a technical triumph, suffer in comparison to the bright, burlesque qualities of The Incredibles? Shouldn’t the realistic aesthetic of Final Fantasy allow us to engage with characters to a greater extent?

The commercial and critical success of both animated features will be evaluated in relation to Masahiro Mori’s theory of the Uncanny Valley. Although proposed over three decades ago, Mori’s theory of emotional responses towards robots and other non-human entities offers distinct application to contemporary animation studies, supporting the argument that today’s computer technology may indeed be no match for a well-crafted story and characters.

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The Haptic Image in Brian Cosgrove and Richard Hall’s Animations

I. The Haptic Image

Haptic is a term used to describe the experience of touch. In most fields it refers to a generalised tactile sensibility. For example in Child Psychology, haptic is defined as ‘the perceptual experience that results from active exploration of objects by touch’ (Vasta et al. 1999, p.201). In recent art history and media theory, haptic is a term that has come to articulate the perception of touch through any experiential means. So one may have a haptic experience through vision, sound, taste etc., without any exclusive use of the touch sense itself.

Haptic visuality (Marks 2002, p. xiii) or viewing, detaches this sense of touch in order to focus exclusively on that which is experienced via vision. In other words one can experience the sensation of touch through vision alone. This application of the term has its basis in art history (Gandelman 1991, p.5) but has more recently also been adapted to apply to the moving image and cinema theory. For example, an image of skin being cut, or an intimate portrayal of the texture of a stone wall facilitate an haptic viewing. The eye is able to relate in the brain the process of a tactile sensation without the viewer’s physical touch sense (i.e. the skin) playing any part in the process.

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