Paul Wells - Battlefields for the Undead
Posted on July 7th, 2009Stepping 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.
