Contents

Half-breed Dog, Half-breed Film: Balto as Animelodrama
by Amy Ratelle

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The Newly Developed Form of Ganime and its Relation to Selective Animation for Adults in Japan
by Sheuo Hui Gan

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“Steadier, happier, and quicker at the work”? Women in Canadian Animation
by Lynne Perras

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TV 2.0: Animation Readership/Authorship on the Internet
by Birgitta Hosea

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Visions of a Future Past: Ulysses 31, a Televised Re-interpretation of Homer’s Classic Myth
by María Lorenzo Hernández

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The Spectre in the Screen
by Alan Cholodenko

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Why animation historiography?
by Timo Linsenmaier

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The Ontology of Performance in Stop Animation
by Laura Ivins-Hulley

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Taking an Appropriate Line
by Van Norris

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Linda Willams (1998) defines melodrama as “a peculiarly democratic and American form that seeks dramatic revelation of moral and emotional truths through a dialectic of pathos and action” (p. 42). This emphasis on moral and emotional truth, as opposed to cinematic realism or adherence to historical fact positions the figure of the “suffering innocent” (p. 43) as a dividing line between the oppositions of (cinematic) “good” and “evil.” Balto (1995) takes several liberties with history. The nature of these liberties is of great interest, especially as the film is promoted as a “true” story (on its movie poster), and more particularly if we are to understand the film is operating specifically as melodrama. This paper examines Balto in terms of its melodramatic structure, and how the liberties taken with actual history serve to enhance the visceral impact of the film.

Melodrama is most often (pejoratively) deemed a genre of excess. Nearly all the writings on melodrama focus on its excessive qualities as properties of the “woman’s film” (Williams, 1998; Gledhill 2000), and are framed in terms of issues of violations of good taste, in that they are overly, often uncomfortably, sentimental. Children’s cinema is also often framed in terms of violations of good taste – too loud, too bright, too nonsensical. The similarity in negative views of these “marginalized” genres has yet to be noted in writings on melodrama or children’s cinema. It seems only logical, then, to examine Balto in terms of its excessive pathos, sentimentality and action-packed third act, especially in that the film undermines historical fact in order to drive home a larger point on suffering and the rewards of virtue, and because it implicitly maintains a tie to history, inherent in the live-action opening and closing “brackets”. Though most, if not all, children’s animation is melodramatic, Balto in particular is deserving of special attention by virtue of the tensions of pathos/action in the animated narrative, and the implicit “real-life” history in the live-action, which requires an anchor to an actual lived experience, as provided by the live-action bookends. While other animated films may have this explicit division between live-action and animation, in the case of Balto, the shift in medium is more than simply indicative of a flashback. As the human grandmother is revealed as Rosie, the little girl in the animated “core text,” this lends greater historical credence to the emotional journey of Balto in the animated portion of the film.

This troubled relationship to history is heightened by the division of the film into two parts – a brief live-action opening sequence, the animated “core text,” and a return to the live-action space at the end. Christine Gledhill (2000) further observes that “melodrama’s heightened contrasts and polar oppositions aim to make the world morally legible” (2000, p. 234) – pure/impure, rural/urban, wild/domestic, and nostalgia/history. The division of the narrative into two separate parts highlights the grey areas between historical fact and emotional truth. The interdependence of these two modes of representation as separate, yet inseparable parts of the same narrative is crucial to understanding the film as melodrama.

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Ganime is a new corporate project to develop the features of selective animation to provide a more flexible category of anime. Ganime was created jointly by Toei Animation and the publisher Gentosha. The overall project is to promote auteurism in animation by encouraging creators to have the freedom to exercise their imagination instead of conforming to the predetermined norms of the anime industry. The Ganime project also intends to liberate the artists’ creativity through collaboration among painters, novelists, musicians and film directors.

“Ga” is written with a character meaning “painting,” in their usage it is not restricted to any particular method but could be oil painting, ink painting, wood block printing, photography or even clay models; “nime” is written with katakana as a shortened form of “anime.” As the project name indicates, Ganime stresses the value of the drawing by the artists, treating them as establishing the core to which words and music are integrated to create a new form of expression.

At time of writing, fourteen Ganime titles have been released since the project was launched at the end of May 2006. Each work exhibits a different drawing technique, visual style and represents various genres. The Ganime Project also aims to incorporate works that employ different materials besides drawn animation. Most works have adapted noted examples of classic and contemporary literature and music to enrich the narrative element.² Ganime tends to be character-based, slower in pace and rendered with less motion than usually found in anime. Ganime has been introduced to the public as “the art of slow animation.”³ The works are being released directly on DVDs without prior showing on television or in theatres. Ganime works vary in length; the shortest being seventeen minutes, and the longest forty minutes, while most are between twenty to thirty minutes.

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In the film industry, historically it seems to be a truism that women have not occupied major positions. Although they have participated in the profession, there has been a relatively small number of female producers, directors, and head writers for many years. A similarly small number of women have held positions of influence in the animation industry.

A variety of reasons might be suggested for the scarcity of women animators: these might include systemic discrimination, institutional bias, and the fact that traditional animation and its focus on violence and physicality appealed to very few women. The relative dearth of females in the industry notwithstanding, the status of women in animation in Canada is anything but discouraging. From a cultural and historic perspective, this discussion will focus upon Canadian female animators and their experiences and suggest that at least some of the pessimism regarding women’s contributions to animation may have been overstated. Through examination of the challenges faced by female animators as well as strategies discovered that sustain their work, it becomes apparent that there is clearly a reason to celebrate the efforts and progress of women in Canadian animation, past and present.

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Animation Readership/Authorship on the Internet

Introduction

Traditional platforms for animation, such as broadcast television or cinema, are rapidly becoming obsolete as a new type of spectator demands more choice, the ability to interact with animated content and access to global distribution for their own user-generated work. Audiences are no longer satisfied with receiving a top down distribution of content from traditional cinema or broadcasters. Internet technologies are emerging to address this demand for active spectatorship and enable communities of interest to evolve their own alternative distribution methods.

Viewing animation online has become increasingly accessible with the mass adoption of broadband and the emergence of new file formats. TV 2.0 is an amalgamation of Internet technologies that combine video on demand with the social networking capabilities of Web 2.0. In the age of TV 2.0, the role of the viewer has increased in complexity with new possibilities for active interaction and intervention with the content displayed. This new audience seeks a form of spectatorship that can extend beyond the passive recipience of programming distributed by elite broadcasters. TV 2.0 on the Internet has changed both methods of distribution and traditional patterns for the viewing of animation. However, any potential for democratic participation in the visual culture of moving images that this could entail may be a brief historic moment before the assimilation and control of active readership by mainstream corporate culture.

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Ulysses 31, a Televised Re-interpretation of Homer’s Classic Myth

This paper gives an overview of the animated series Ulysses 31 (1981), a French-Japanese co-production based on the epic poem The Odyssey, which introduced children and young audiences to Greek myths, relocating the original narratives into futuristic contexts such as the 31^st century.

Twenty-five years later Ulysses 31 remains a cult series, however it is also largely unknown since the images it invokes are buried in the memories of childhood. Although the series substitutes the wooden ships with spacecrafts crossing the universe of Olympus, Ulysses 31 manages to capture some of the original relationships within Homer’s thesis, in spite of their eccentric portrait. The heavy use of pastiche takes us back to the 1980s and the emergence of the ‘new’ fantasy-driven science fiction cinema; thus it is important to examine and discuss the series’ employment of futurist aesthetics and technology in its exposé of classic mythology.

Ulysses 31 is a good example of a successful series from that period. Employing traditional animation throughout -such as painting on cells, cut-outs and the use of the multiplane camera- the art of the series offers a distinctive style that would be virtually impossible to reproduce through more recent technology. This paper will examine this aesthetic and compare it to similar shows from that period in order to locate its place in ‘the future past’.

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Theories of spectatorship and cinema are nothing new. In fact, they abound. On the other hand, theories of spectatorship and animation are still rare. Rarer still are theories that implicate animation and cinema, including in the area of spectatorship.

For us, beyond as well as between theories of cinema spectatorship that attribute a pure passivity to the spectator and those that grant him a pure mastery, and beyond as well as between those that present themselves as purely text based and those that present themselves as purely context based, lies something, something missing from consideration that calls for acknowledgement, something integral to cinema spectatorship as it is to cinema ‘as such’, as it is to film spectatorship and to film ‘as such’-animation, film and media studies’ “blind spot”.

In accord with my larger project to bring to the fore the crucial nature of animation for the thinking of not only all forms but all aspects of cinema, of film, of film ‘as such’, this paper seeks to elaborate a theory of spectatorship ‘proper to’ animation, to film ‘as such’ as a form of animation.

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Or: Why the commissar shouldn’t vanish

“Truth is strange, stranger than fiction.”
William Makepeace Thackeray, The tremendous adventures of Major Gahagan
(Thackeray 1921, 1)

In spring 2008, a vociferous discussion erupted on the Society for Animation Studies’ mailing list on the subject of an extensive definition of animation. More technically-oriented explanations clashed with highly theoretical ones, scarcely finding a common ground between the variety of arguments brought forward. Strangely absent from the discussions, however, was the question of animation historiography, of an analysis of the processes by which our historical knowledge of animation is obtained and transmitted, helping in the definition of the object of inquiry.

And indeed, while there have been rather many histories of animation, so far only a few animation scholars have thoroughly undertaken to explore how historical developments relating to their study of animation are registered and chronicled. There are certainly well-worn, often formative paths of narration that so far characterise how history has been viewed and written in Animation Studies. Several examples come to mind: Giannalberto Bendazzi’s gargantuan, yet curiously Vasarian canonical work Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation (Bendazzi 1994); Michael Barrier’s landmark, but deliberately re-narrating Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age (Barrier 1999); John Halas’ influential, but very production-orientated framework Masters of Animation (Halas 1987); or Sergey Asenin’s Walt Disney: Secrets of a Drawn World (Asenin 1995), which, while in many ways insightful, is peculiarly unsuspecting of the difficulties of “oral history”.

These works, while all of them milestones in Animation Studies, to a certain extent miss the possibility of reflecting on the ways in which intrinsic as well as extrinsic factors influence the way historical conceptions are developed. However, this is certainly attempted in works like, for example, David MacFadyen’s book Yellow Crocodiles and Blue Oranges (MacFadyen 2005) that draws on a large variety of sources and their analysis; it can also be encountered in Robin Allan’s Walt Disney and Europe (Allan 1999) that undertakes a laborious verification of sources to establish its main arguments.

This paper will endeavour to examine some aspects of this heterogeneous initial situation, posing the question of “how history has been and how it is written” (Breisach 2004, 4). A discussion that has been conducted in the discipline of history itself since in the 19^th century, Leopold von Ranke asked the question of “wie es eigentlich gewesen” (a question well-nigh untranslatable, as it not only asks for “what has actually happened”, but also for the metaphysical implications of what has happened) - especially as, thinking of Hans Belting’s “The End of the History of Art?” (Belting 1987), similar discussions have been launched profitably in other disciplines.

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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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