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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Critical Significance of Historical Research

Animation has been practised in Australia from a relatively early stage in the worldwide history of cinematic animation, as evidenced by quite mature examples of cutout animation by cartoonist Harry Julius beginning in 1912. It may therefore seem odd that there is comparatively little written of its history. In America and Europe established histories of animation have been recorded. The growth of the medium in these other countries led to the comparatively early establishment of institutions teaching its history and practice.

A history of animation is not a definitive or closed text. Rather it is the collection of information as sources diminish with time, and its evaluation and sifting to construct a factual narrative. But in Australia there is little firm basis upon which to assess the Australian contribution to the medium, or the trends towards the future. The progress of the major commercial companies has been spasmodic, a series of peaks and troughs in which the troughs have fortunately been levelled to an extent by the work of smaller companies and individual independent animators.

There is need for a recorded history - perhaps more than one is necessary to fully reveal the multi-layered identity of animation in Australia. With animation’s becoming an accepted discipline for study and source for critical writing, it becomes important to define each country’s history of its foundations and growth, whatever the significance, to identify each national animation in its subject and form, and to stimulate its capacity to survive as a vigorous medium both nationally and internationally.

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In 2008, the noted Cuban journalist and art critic, Pedro de la Hoz, contended that, “What’s most important is that with animation and other graphic media… we have an extraordinary weapon for the formation and transmission of revolutionary, patriotic and human values, and for cultivating the sensitivity, love and intelligence needed to help us conquer the future” (Stock 2009, p.126). In 1959, when the revolutionary government established an animation studio (Dibujos Animados) within the Cuban Institute of the Art and Industry of Cinema (Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industrias Cinematográficas, ICAIC), it also identified animation as ‘a tool of the Revolution’ charged with the task of serving the interests of the new state and its people (Agramonte 1996). Thus, for fifty years, artistic innovation in Cuban animation has sought to coexist with political and social struggle.

An Australian artist who was attracted by the opportunity to combine political commitment with creative expression and contribute to Cuba’s social and cultural reform process was the social realist, Harry Reade (1927-1998). In 1961, Reade went to Cuba where he was to have an influence on the development of the educational sector of that country’s animation production (Bendazzi 1994, p.386). This paper examines Reade’s progression towards involvement in the Cuban Revolution, and the way in which he used animation to serve an instructive social function. It also considers how his work in Cuba was informed by a network of political alliances and social philosophies that grew out of his experiences and creative development in Australia.

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