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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