Performances of Animative Embodiment: Unbound Bodies Upon an Everyday Stage
I tried to imagine how Peter Pan, Wendy, and Captain Hook had “left” the flickering glow of our old tube television when, just after turning four, I sat up in a rambunctious theatre with my mom and older brother transfixed on my first live performance production to memory, a Peter Pan musical. I was confounded and enthralled as brightly costumed, dramatically choreographed, synchronized song-and-dance seemed to replace the animated film’s fantastical flourishes of fairy magic. Peter would bound and leap while singing, then scurry up to the rafters rather than “flying” overstage. Curtain call followed with an invitation for kids to meet outside so we could “learn one of the dances from the show!” Though eager to try, the torrent of noise from a crowd of vocally excited children under a hot midday sun, and a dance instructor shouting over the ruckus, quickly engulfed me in a sensory overload — so we left. Still, captivated from the production, I felt disappointed we couldn’t somehow experience more. My (undiagnosed at the time) difficulties processing loud, socially complex situations persisted over the following years. I struggled to form friendships or succeed academically. As my youth also largely revolved around performances of faith-based doctrine, like reciting scripture and prayer while abstaining from any “mortal sins,” animated media became my primary texts for learning to engage the world beyond given limitations. By comparison, animation’s abstract simplicities seemed unlimited and easy to emulate. Characters’ expressive voices and gestures were fun to mimic, and storylines readily comprehensible while imaginatively enriching. I would memorize sequences of dialogue from conflict-rich shows like Beast Wars and Rugrats, preparing for real-world interactions with comparably complex group dynamics, while also learning to mask my usual stutter behind snippets of rigorously rehearsed inflection.
Following my tenth and final year enrolled in a religiously fundamentalist K-12, steeped in ideologically strict, sometimes extreme interpretations of scripture nearly everywhere, one of my rare few friends invited me to my first anime convention (Anime Expo 2005), asking me to cosplay — dress and perform as characters to be recognized by other fans. I constructed makeshift costumes from cutup t-shirts, cardboard, hot glue, and staples, preparing basic looks of different characters to be staged for public photoshoots. Upon arriving I was again overtaken in my senses, again crowded under a hot sun with bustling bodies and voices pulsating from all directions as we posed for photos on concrete platforms outside a Southern California convention center. Yet, unlike the Peter Pan dance lesson I had missed more than a decade prior, I was now deeply immersed. I felt an unfamiliar but undeniably joyous shock of relief to my nervous system, as cosplaying and non-cosplaying fans alike seemed to exude purely positive energy in response to each other’s presence. Cosplayers’ individual, creative choices, from the looks of their costumes to the enthusiastic expressions of their performances, were openly, palpably celebrated in ways I found starkly different from usual circumstances.
These experiences ignited currents of curiosity still animating me to question how bodies can break barriers, social or material. Throughout this work I examine how human bodies can move against some of the restrictive tensions of everyday life — the conditions pushing people to behave within presently acceptable bounds of self-expression — by embodying the openly expressive form of animation through physically staged performance. Animation has long been “brought to life” through costumed reenactments, along the main streets of theme parks, upon main stages of Broadway, and through other forms of theatrical adaptation like ice-skating spectacles and promotional flashmobs. Studies of cosplay culture indicate strong preferences to construct and perform characters from animated media (Wishnoebroto et al 333; Puspitasari et al 117), as opposed to photorealistic media like live-action film and television, highlighting strong appeal among some fan communities to embody a more dynamically adaptable form. Contemporary technologies bring the interplay between animation and human activity further into commonly shared spaces. Augmented reality (AR) games like Monster Hunter Now (2023), for instance, make giant animated beasts appear on city streets and alleyways through users’ smart screens, engaging players as living, embodied participants within such games’ geographically familiar environments. Animation provides a kind of vibrantly malleable (i.e., expressively open-ended) “text” from which to extract and emulate, like a resource of expressive possibilities available, or at least adaptable, to the living body. Animation also happens to be an increasingly familiar medium to the general public (Puretz et al 9), making for everyday audiences who largely comprehend and appreciate the form. Performance, then, provides different methods for embodying the text of animation upon the stages of everyday life. I introduce the term animative embodiment to identify the phenomenon of people performing as, or alongside, animated figures from animated worlds (anime, cartoons, etc.), within the physical world, in turn experimenting with different ways bodies might express themselves more expansively than given circumstances could otherwise allow. Whether validating one’s sense of freedom outside of strictly-scripted commitments to common cultural values or affirming one’s ability to reject simple but typical presumptions about how one should socially interact, performances of animative embodiment can challenge how we inhabit our bodies, and how bodies inhabit public life.
I first discuss formative ideas helpful for understanding animative embodiment in relation to animation and performance more broadly, before examining the phenomenon’s foundational frameworks through posthumanist philosophy, literary theory, and animation and performance studies scholarship analyzing the materiality of the medium. I proceed to reevaluate my own expressively experimental (i.e., performance-based) observations of public presence through videogame play, cosplay, and theatrical adaptation, illustrating how performances of animative embodiment may manifest across different forms and spaces. Lastly, I argue for a more expansive study of animative embodiment through multiple modes of inquiry, reflecting how animation and performance transform over time, across environments, and within the unique circumstances of human life.
I. FORMATIVE IDEAS AND FOUNDATIONAL FRAMEWORKS
Classically, “Animative” simply means, “Having the power of giving life or spirit” (Century Dictionary), or, “That has the ability to animate; enlivening, life-giving” (Oxford English Dictionary). Against some of the pressures of everyday living, performances of animative embodiment express bodies’ capacities to find and figure out how to enact the enlivening elements of real-life, understood in the context of embodiment, as in meaningfully experienced through the corporeal form of the body. As a multimodal phenomenon (staged many ways), animative embodiment centers live bodies’ interactions with animated media that are made to appear in a physical form, channeling participants’ potential to be more outwardly expressive than rigidly familiar patterns of socially acceptable behavior would typically tolerate. Civil infrastructures formalize signs and authorities we are compelled to abide, or risk legal recourse (e.g., traffic signals, public safety officials, etc.). Cultural norms and values, reinforced through shared behaviors and rituals that have often been repeated since before collective memory can recall, influence socially-ascribed perceptions of race, culture, gender, age, and ability. Institutionally-enforced codes of conduct shape many other conditions of lived experience, from seemingly mundane school dress codes to the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretations of Constitutional Amendments and human rights.
Animative embodiments, however, can work covertly within social and cultural allowances for free expression. For example, by reenacting portions of a scaled-down production of Beauty and the Beast originally performed from a large, traffic-heavy crosswalk, I later explore how following basic safety protocols — like staying within painted lines — can still disrupt others’ sense of normalcy about how bodies should typically occupy public junctures. Performance scholar Dwight Conquergood explains how performance “takes as both its subject matter and method [of inquiry] the experiencing body situated in time, place, and history” (187). While this study’s subject is, accordingly, firmly situated in the performance studies convention of studying performance-based phenomena through performance, I am invested in capturing how the form of animation influences such performances. Animative embodiment experiments with animated form through interactive play between performers and the physically felt environments performers occupy. As a phenomenological (experience-centered) study conducted through analyses of animation, performance, and media studies scholarship, subjects span a range of ideas and processes centrally concerned with animation, performance, and prior uses of animative in similar but distinct contexts.
II. ANIMATION, PERFORMANCE, AND ANIMATIVES ELSEWHERE
Animation is a visually versatile category of craftmaking commonly associated with the production of media like cartoons, anime, CGI, and stop-motion. Animation is also a conceptual form manifesting in many different ways. Media historian Deborah Levitt explains that “to animate means to endow with life; it refers to a process of making vital” (3). More mechanically, animator Brian Wells describes animation as “a technical process that results in the sequential manipulation of static images that attempt to portray or caricature the movement and change that we see in everyday life” (27-28). Animation scholar Dan Torre defines animation broadly as “the process of making something move or change through the application of external movement” (5), stretching understanding of the medium into the realms of animatronics, motion-capture, anywhere “external movement” evokes perceptions of life. Animative embodiment recasts — through touch, movement, and the material constricts of the living body — what Sergei Eisenstein describes as the “plasmaticness” of animation, “a rejection of once-and-forever allotted form, freedom from ossification, the ability to dynamically assume any form” (21). By adopting what filmmaker and scholar María Lorenzo Hernández calls “the autonomy of animation to generate its own codes of representation” (36), performances of animative embodiment experiment with a similar ability to recast the image of life through the expressive freedoms available to performers themselves. Through performance, animation itself is being experimented with while simultaneously being used to experimentally explore physical human life.
Lorenzo Hernández further observes, “In many senses, animation is actually a language closer to the stylized representation of theatre,” as each asks audiences to suspend their sense of disbelief in a reality already known (40). For animation scholar and artist Birgita Hosea, although an animated character “does not have agency or even exist in the ‘real world’, we recognise that it is giving a ‘performance’ by reading the body language of the character through its movements and postures and ascribing causality to them” (18). Often associated with theatrically produced, culturally meaningful expressions of human experience, performance can be rather broadly defined “as all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants” (Goffman 8). Performance strategically engages audiences’ expectations (values, sensitivities, etc.) through creatively staged forms of public expression and thus encompasses the stages of everyday life upon which we interpret, resist, and repeat social and cultural norms (Goffman 23). Critical ethnographer and performance scholar D. Soyini Madison contends how, “as a performing species, performance becomes necessary for our survival . . . due to the belief that we come to simultaneously recognize, substantiate, and (re)create ourselves as well as Others through performance” (“Critical Ethnography” 166). Animation processes, like performance, often entail reimagining ourselves as living expressions of our own imagination.
Torre further describes the animative-state — of the animation process — as “essentially an intermediate phase,” between construction and presentation, “where all of the animation elements have been prepared and readied, and manifested as a strip of film, a flipbook or a string of computer code” (5). When producing cartoons, animated characters may be prepared separately from background designs and special effects, before being composed into coherent storylines. For videogaming, pre-rendered character and object animations are compiled into in-game environments, then controlled and further animated through gameplay. The animative-state represents all possible ways the separately prepared elements of animation may be assembled, reimagined, and expressed. Much as the different elements of animated media “are conceived as distinct entities” (Torre 6), performances of animative embodiment may reassemble and reimagine anything perceived as animated and attainable, which necessarily includes the expressive potentials of the performers themselves.
Reflecting on her experience performing as Mickey Mouse for guests at Walt Disney World, performance and film scholar Tracy Stephenson shares how, even when directed to rigorously contain oneself within the literal mask of a corporate brand, individual insight and intention can still inform one’s performance:
As a woman performing Mickey, I concentrated on my body, especially my movement. Although my movements are already big, I focused on making them more definite and powerful. Using stereotypes of masculinity to inform my performance, I never sat with my legs crossed or together and when I shook a man’s hand, I would squeeze with incredible intensity. I also flirted with women. (61)
Although audiences “measure the performer in the role against some idea of what the role demands” (HopKins 230), Stephenson describes how her own distinctly embodied performance (e.g., signing autographs left-handed) “could intrude upon the myth of a singular Mickey” (62). While Mickey Mouse is a strictly kept intellectual property, believably interacting with park guests as an animated icon requires more than wearing a proportionally and stylistically accurate costume. Animative embodiments are assembled from the expressive capabilities of the performer, and from the animated text(s) they embody, both of which are reimagined for the purposes of each performance. For instance, younger guests at Disney Parks are welcomed to dress as their favorite characters, while guests of any age may practice “Disneybounding,” dressing to allude to beloved characters through “everyday outfits” creatively compiled to emulate animated figures’ forms and features (Williams 205).
Performance scholar Diana Taylor presents animative acts as “embodied, communicative acts that refuse the performative utterance that tries to interpellate and frame them,” encompassing “defiant, boisterous, contradictory, hostile, and vexed behaviors” (Taylor 48 “Enacting refusal”). In turn, performance studies scholarship presents performative acts as expressions that derive from, repeat and reinforce, and sometimes disrupt socially-learned patterns of behavior (Austin 6; Butler 2). While a “referee’s declaration of the winner in a sport” is performative — a formal, socially sanctioned action with mutually understood outcomes — “animative points to the ruckus that breaks out in the stadium” (Taylor, “Remapping genre” 1419). Responding to conditions of inequity, animative acts may present as unsanctioned protest or some other rejection of normalcy, authority, or institution. Inequitable conditions can show up as pressures to conform with local gender norms, workplace practices enforcing uniformity in appearance and groupthink, messages within places of worship amplifying antagonistic beliefs against some of their own community, and as dehumanizing policies and practices embedded into institutional systems of governance.
Animatives emerge “as and through enacted refusal” (Taylor 47 “Enacting refusal”). When people wore bright, bold, rather goofy and cartoon-like inflatable animal costumes to help confront brutalizing anti-immigration tactics used by U.S. Federal agents in 2025, they expressively blunted political rhetoric that had been broadly framing activists at rallies as violent protestors (Galli Robertson). While having limited impact and appeal among activists, wearing inflatable frog and unicorn suits to express opposition to anti-immigrant paramilitary government forces functionally repels the equivocation of public dissent with terroristic violence. “For better or for worse, animatives lack the legitimating structures, authority, and hierarchies that empower performatives” (Taylor 52 “Enacting refusal”). Winnie the Pooh moving among activists’ other brightly-inflated creature costumes (Roth and Wentz-Graff) shows how animative embodiments may be expressed as distinctly animative acts, able to confront uneven power structures through animation’s unique appeals to freedom of form.
Performances of and with animated media upon the physical stages of everyday life further reject the generally sedimented perception of animation as a primarily two-dimensional, screen-bound, intangible thing. Performances of animative embodiment, rather, are characterized by their capacity to inhabit the performative spaces of everyday life while strategically exploring the expressive potentials of human experience. The stage adaptation of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away may be enthusiastically celebrated for its cultural impact globally (Wyer), while also challenging popular media’s privileging of photographic realism (Tucher 1-2) by contrasting the tactile textures of costumes and set pieces with the otherworldly proportions of puppeteered spirit creatures. Universal Studios’ dark ride, The Secret Life of Pets: Off the Leash, moves riders through set, prop, and animatronic replicas of scenes and characters from The Secret Life of Pets animated films. Passengers move past smart cameras making them appear on large screens, staged like reflective surfaces, as 3D-animated animals within the ride’s corporeally re-animated environment. Live movements reflect back as cartoonishly exaggerated facial features and gestures, prompting riders to playfully perform as/with their animal-animated reflections (Gregory).
Although one can experience significant pressures to perform within the home, classroom, job site, etc., a learned expectation to satisfy others’ sense of normalcy can essentially dissolve once one is tasked, and equipped, with portraying the living caricature of a cartoon. However staged, animative embodiments are crafted from animated, or available-to-be-animated, elements within and surrounding one’s reality, composed from pleasingly familiar texts (animation), and channeled through available modes of public expression (performance), which in tandem help guide processes of expressive experimentation and discovery.
III. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS
Familiar encounters with physical life can reflect animation’s expressive malleability in many forms. Consider the preeminently crisp vibrance of sun- and moonlight, the aurora borealis, fireflies and bioluminescent fish, Earth-gushing molten lava, all ways “our” world is already occupied with dynamically illuminating forms of nature, matter, and energy. Ancient cultures sometimes embodied cosmic forces through ritual, dance, and regalia representing how “the human body and celestial bodies . . . correspond to each other,” as “correlations exist between bodily and celestial rhythms” (Rappenglück 314; emphasis added). Raw substances from the Earth could be “transformed into cultural artefacts . . . charged with spiritual and ideological force,” like illustriously textured “rattles” that could create sparkling bursts of light by shaking together minerals containing special properties that discharge electricity when clashed (Saunders 120). Long before animated media, people could actively encounter and experiment with, through concrete lived experience, a perception-bending mystique akin to animation as we largely know it now.
Animation’s malleability is further reflected across many modes of inquiry used to understand it. Theoretical physicist and posthumanist scholar Karen Barad provides the framing of agential realism — a heightened, realistic awareness of agency, as in power to influence. Barad emphasizes the realistic agency of matter, as in physical reality’s inextricable influences over the circumstances enveloping human experience (climate, terrain, ecosystem, geomagnetism, etc.). “To restrict power’s productivity to the limited domain of the ‘social,’ . . . or to figure matter as merely an end product rather than an active factor in further materializations, is to cheat matter out of the fullness of its capacity” (Barad 810). Agential realism essentially deprioritizes the power of “social discourse” to influence material life, offering a more complex “discourse of matter” that richly accounts for the palpable stuff preceding and thus entangled with human existence (816). Simply put, we can only talk about and affect material things because (of the extent to which) they are here to begin with, whether or not we (attempt to) reconstruct them into something “new” to discuss. While cuts of fabric, foam, and wig hair meticulously constructed into a Sailor Moon cosplay may require the intent and insight of someone who comprehends the character, these materials first need to be sourced from the same physical world within which animated media like Sailor Moon are created and consumed. Through animative embodiment, animation is re-introduced, not only to the public realm from which it has been referenced, but to the physical realm from which animation’s processes and vibrancies originate.
The physical and social conditions of everyday human life, however, remain largely entangled. Literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin describes medieval carnival celebrations as pageants “without footlights and without a division into performers and spectators,” a collapse of strictly outlined conditions for socially acceptable expression (Dostoevsky’s Poetics 122). Carnival is a days-long festival inviting people to freely interact and perform together across social divides and enforced hierarchies, celebrating boisterous behavior and mockery of institutions (the Crown, the Church, etc.) (Bakhtin, Dostoevsky’s Poetics 123). Carnival elicits comparisons with contemporary gatherings that similarly celebrate freedom of expression and human connection, from anime and other fandom-catered conventions, to electronic dance music (EDM) festivals. The “carnival spirit offers the chance to have a new outlook on the world, to realize the relative nature of all that exists, and to enter a completely new order of things” (Bakhtin, Rabelais 34). Medieval carnivals could help alleviate a sense of strife derived from continuously living without fair access to basic resources, under the governance of authoritarian monarchy. Everyday people, during carnival, could openly criticize the symbol, and wearer, of the Crown. The rise of mass literacy later promoted qualities of carnival pageantry through carnivalesque (carnival-like) interpretations of human experience, expressed through popular texts consumed as part of everyday life over the past several centuries (Bakhtin, Rabelais 218). As “specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted” throughout social and material life (Barad 816), animated media uphold carnivalesque pageantry through freedom of form, eccentric characters and plots, a blending of disparate voices (storyboard and voiceover artists, etc.), and a characteristic readiness to ridicule norms and institutions under cover of the form’s regularly perceived innocence.
Performances of animative embodiment further confront conditions that limit the eclectic freedoms of the human spirit. Like the carnival pageant itself, animative embodiments may be able to manifest out in the open, generally abiding by the rules and allowances of the institutions in which they occur, yet while reimagining the everyday roles participants are categorically compelled to play within those same systems. Performances of animative embodiment can provoke new perceptions of bodies’ presence in public life, while the physical processes and properties preceding animation can also help to effectively evaluate, from a reimagined outside looking in, the tangible costs of performing with or against institutional norms and pervasive inequities.
Performance and comics scholar Sasha Sanders utilizes stop-motion animation as a medium of interrogation, providing for close analysis of institutional norms that uphold the pervasive conditions of anti-Blackness. Sanders compels “scholars to think critically about the possibilities of resistance for individuals working with and against anti-Black surveillance in the academy” of higher education (15). Repositioning handpainted peg dolls, frame-by-frame, Sanders reenacts a troubling experience being profiled and accused of trespassing at an academic conference, sharing “a glimpse into how power is exercised and negotiated on a micro level” (37). Sanders shows how methodical reenactment of real-life experience through stop-motion can bring into clearer focus the conditions surrounding and restricting one’s movements through life. Sanders explains that “the form of stop-motion animation prompts me to think of oppression itself as a process or a system that can be broken into multiple sequential frames or movements” (35). Sanders’ expansive work exemplifies how the sense of agency one may attain through animation’s expressively pliable processes may help us more effectively recognize institutions’ most entrenched inequities, while envisioning with sharper, more precise clarity the potential paths ahead.
Connected as “forms of play [that] exist in the space where ‘me’ and ‘not me’ merge” (Silvio 426), animation and performance can each help us reimagine the boundaries and complexities of human life. Performance and film scholar Patricia A. Suchy’s examination of theatrical sideshadowing, which “allows audiences to account for image, especially the complexity of the image of the performer’s body orchestrating various versions of itself” (8), helps further illuminate animative embodiment’s multidimensional qualities. Cosplayers embody distinct features of the specific characters they perform, while simultaneously presenting expressive characteristics and design choices unique to their own personalities. Theme park mascot performers take stock of their existing repertoire of expressive movements, then evaluate accordingly how they might satisfactorily perform the mannerisms of their assigned character(s). Advanced players of the arcade game, Dance Dance Revolution, within which animated dancers’ movements correspond to players’ physical dance steps, can achieve perfect scores by moving in-sync with the dance directions and rhythms of a given song, while still incorporating into their perfect-score performances different gestures, facial expressions, and additional dance moves entirely unique to each player and moment of play. Levitt observes how “there’s always been a kind of slipperiness that haunts the usage of” animation, “from art to life and back again” (3). Through performances of animative embodiment, animation as a mode of artistic expression, and animation as an expression of life itself, appear essentially as one and the same.
IV. ON-SITE INSIGHTS: EXPLORING MODES OF ANIMATIVE EMBODIMENT
Performances of animative embodiment can introduce one to new experiences traversing unfamiliar terrains, or new discoveries within well-known spaces. Animative embodiments can attract large communal gatherings and spontaneous interactions of eccentric behavior, and they can challenge expectations for how bodies should occupy and navigate (express themselves within) public spaces typically known, or feared, for inviting scrutiny. As part of a previous project, I conducted public, participatory observations performing as and alongside animated media (Langner Modes 12). I reevaluate below my deliberate playthrough of AR mobile game, Pokémon Go; my on-site, partial reenactment of a live iteration of Beauty and the Beast (1991) produced in a busy Los Angeles crosswalk; and my reflective return to large-scale anime convention, Anime Expo.
Animative embodiments do not require a “traditional” stage specially made to accommodate theatrical performance. As I recount, my ability to embody the purpose of a Pokémon Trainer allowed me to turn a stretch of downtown Baton Rouge, Louisiana into the stage on which I played; city crosswalks can make compelling venues for staging or reenacting musical theatre; and facilities hosting anime conventions rarely contain cosplayers from pouring into nearby streets, businesses, etc. For each mode of performance, I illustrate a capacity to move through the scrutinizing spaces of public life with a heightened sense of “animative agency” — a greater awareness for how one might freely express themselves beyond learned limitations.
IV.A. GIRL (Gaming in Real Life)
From arcades to home consoles, to motion- and touch-responsive hardware, to virtual- and immersive-reality, videogame play has always facilitated players’ sensuous, kinetic relationship with animated form. Just as “how we experience connection, intimacy, presence, and . . . touch” has been transformed through real-time advancements in technology (Bennet 3), videogaming compels people to feel and move. Considered with concurrent advancements in motion-sensing technology (Chen), it “seems reasonable to expect that these increasingly physical forms of gameplay also lend themselves to a more performative situation” between those actively playing and those not, as “jumping, ducking, and punching certainly seems more engaging and enjoyable to watch than one who is pressing buttons on a controller” (Downs et al. 3437). AR-based games that animate imagery over players’ immediate surroundings bring videogaming into real-world environments by encouraging physical forms of interaction with animated subjects.
Pokémon Go’s in-game map outlines players’ surrounding geographies on their smartphone screens. Using the device’s camera, AR-animated creatures appear, to be battled and/or captured, on paths, outside buildings, in parks, anywhere programmed “safe” to play. When engaging with the animative embodiment of Pokémon Go in early 2019 — given my own decades-long familiarity with the Pokémon franchise, and my awareness that I was exploring spaces open to the public — I felt relatively free to pursue, or expect to encounter, initially unfamiliar experiences. I let the game compel me to investigate the spaces of downtown Baton Rouge, a place I was somewhat familiar with, but for which I had not yet formed strong opinions that could overinfluence my interpretations of the experience. I arrived around sunset and began seeking Pokémon to battle or capture. Moving along the shops, bars, and park spaces, I encountered a giant head statue with a distinctly unusual (but aesthetically pleasing) design, elegant modern architecture unexpectedly blended amongst a contrasting dearth of charmingly antiquated wood accents outlining windows and doors, and large open spaces with grand views of the bordering Mississippi River. Although I had been here before, these were easily observable sights/sites I had not yet taken the pleasure to fully experience — as whenever I venture into unfamiliar environments I typically concentrate all focus on my most immediate surroundings, trying to avoid “the multidimensional difficulties that visual sensory experiences could cause for many autistic people” (Parmar et al 9). Although I performed this active observation mid-week in hopes of avoiding as many other people as possible, others noticed me in ways I could not ignore. This included a verbal confrontation from a driver who thought I was attempting to break into a business after hours, as I appeared to linger in the dark nearby (I was more likely looking for a Bulbasaur). In fairness, the allure of capturing new Pokémon in new locations has resulted in people causing significant damage to personal property, and even the loss of life from traffic accidents caused by players pursuing in-game achievements (Faccio and McConnell). Others appeared to watch closely as I traversed from one location to another, patronizing none of the businesses that were actually open.
While engaging players’ tactile and social interactions with their real-world environments, the game reflects familiar narrative elements found across the Pokémon universe — adventure and exploration, creature collection and training, and friendly competition. Researcher Leejiah Dorward explains how Pokémon Go also “exposes users first hand to basic natural history concepts such as species habitat preferences and variations in abundance,” which can expand players’ practical knowledge about their surrounding physical environments (162). The animative embodiment of a game like Pokémon Go is felt in the breath and acquired bodily experience of the terrain-traversing player and in perceived changes to the terrain being traversed. The physical environment around an AR game precedes both the game and the player, yet, the environment has typically already been broken down and rearranged into physical infrastructures serving human interests (e.g., parks and shops). The game, the player, and the environment are all implicated in “specific material (re)configurings of the world through which local determinations of boundaries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted” (Barad 828). By interjecting into the regular rhythms of everyday life with the physical appearance of animated subjects, with which people are playfully motivated to interact, gaming in the “real world” invites players to reimagine the normalized circumstances compelling bodies’ movements through space.
Film scholar Sandra Annett further explains how creators raised “with digital media as part of everyday life are now highlighting animation’s potential to evoke a posthuman form of embodied experience that incorporates the virtual while remaining grounded in an inextricable entanglement with the living world” (193). Conventionally, videogames bring players’ perspectives into virtual environments by allowing control over characters and objects that are digitally animated on two-dimensional surfaces, while AR technology helps advance videogaming’s history of facilitating physically active play. The advancement of wearable AR technology — in particular, bifocal lenses translating smartphone-like functions into interactive experiences within users’ immediate fields of vision (Nazar and Subash) — indicates how games like Pokémon Go may be more passively augmented into users’ everyday interactions with physical life. When games like Pokémon Go and Monster Hunter Now re-build their storyworlds on top of real-world maps, they encourage players to explore the geography around them in search of new in-game interactions, requiring some degree of engagement with the physical features of the outer world in which these interactions are programmed to take place. Videogames already “enable us to build thought-provoking simulations of any system, and they give us represented powers unimaginable to us in the real world” (Lamerichs 104). A more technologically versatile evolution of gaming allows players to imagine different systems overlaid or interwoven with those already facilitating their everyday lives. When human life is channeled through technologically-mediated experiences, “Hands learn new gestures, bodies learn new speeds and new forms of comportment, eyes establish new sensitivities to colour, and these perform new ways of moving, seeing and feeling” (Rose 142). A body openly going through unfamiliar motions also invites others to observe and account for different ways bodies might occupy the shared spaces of public life. As videogaming becomes at once more mobile and immersive, animated figures from animated worlds increasingly peer out from the peripheries of the human mind, familiarizing audiences’ and performers’ living senses with the presence of animated beings appearing more frequently among us.
IV.B. Theatrical Adaptation of Animation
In 2018 I traversed the stage — I mean, the crosswalk — at the intersection of Beverly Boulevard and Genesee Avenue between CBS’ Los Angeles Studios and a gas station. I crossed the street several times while trying to dance and sing like the ensemble performers from The Late Late Show’s 2017 camp rendition of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. On my first trek across, I performed a single grand jeté, a high balletic jump that extends one leg forward and the other back, usually with hands and arms also extending. I crossed back and forth repeatedly, selectively reenacting any portions of the performance I could recall. Without the production value (and likely legality) of a large legacy studio’s staging (viewable online to-date), I emulated expressive dance phrases performed by the ensemble while singing selections from “Tale as Old as Time” as loudly as I could muster. My purpose was to observe and document the reactions I received as a singular body trying to invoke the expressive boldness of a theatrically-adapted animated film.
I felt sharply watched by those around me, at rush hour, cars and pedestrians on all sides. Taking breaks at a nearby bus stop to process and document observations, I reflected on a surrounding sea of stares and states of seemingly sincere wonder. This expressively experimental approach to observational analysis evoked my years performing in live theatre and dance. On the crosswalk, as one propless, costumeless individual, I recognized the same qualities of flourishing fantasticality found in traditions of poor theatre. Poor theatre prioritizes the expressive intensities of raw emotion, authentic human connection, and unconventional approaches to crafting character and scene without the sensations of high-budget spectacle (Grotowski et al 62). Smaller-scale productions exemplifying the low-budget potentials of comedy and camp can attract audience curiosity, not unlike a plain-clothes dancer leaping and twirling across a busy city intersection at sunset. The Pokémusical (2013) is a stage parody celebrated for comedically capturing the character and charm of the original Pokémon anime by utilizing boldly exaggerated humor along with simple items in lieu of extravagant puppets and props, including printouts of Pokémon puppeteered on rulers. Conversely, well-funded, large-scale productions can sensationally command audiences’ attention using complexly-calculated scenic, lighting, costume, and sound designs, as in stage adaptations of The Lion King, SpongeBob SquarePants, and many others. Theatrical spectacle may certainly be one effective means of producing animative embodiments as boldly expressive and sharply defined as their original animated counterparts, yet every scale and mode of production has potential to channel, reimagine, and restage the vibrancies of human life.
Whether through high-cost spectacle or an intentional lack thereof, theatre is uniquely well-equipped for corporealizing the animated form. Theatre has a long history of animating physical scenery, for instance, in order to produce “a new life-like realism” on stage (Arnold 252). My experience in the crosswalk further affirmed how one can carry bold forms of self-expression onto stages well outside any conventional traditional theatrical space. Without question, staged performance can be quite fun, but the “wonderful thing is that such a pleasurable activity [as performance] is also so finely instructive to us as human beings” (Bacon 152). My crosswalk reenactment did elicit an anxious energy some might associate with other “fun” activities like skydiving, in that I also felt the live tension of unknown risk. This process reflected what Madison describes as “desire for a generative and embodied reciprocity, sometimes with pleasure and sometimes with pain . . . a mutual creation of something different and something more from the meeting of bodies in their contexts” (“Dialogic performative” 320). The displacement of a leaping, skipping, slowly dipping body moving through the middle of a busy rush hour intersection provoked my pedestrian audience, apparent in the stark looks of bewilderment received through surrounding car windows, from people going in and out of the gas station, and from others also using the crosswalk. Transplanting the expressive boundlessness of animation onto a public stage otherwise outlined for typical use by pedestrians and drivers allowed me to capture a more concrete sense of the original performers’ and audiences’ experiences. Tapping into the theatrical potential of animated media more broadly, performances of animative embodiment can upend performers’ and audiences’ beliefs about how bodies (should) navigate the spaces of public life.
As animation further “challenges our expectations of what is ‘normal’ or ‘real,’” the physical adaptation of animated media presents upon a public stage “material that may seem more appropriately housed in dreams or the unconscious” (Napier 73). Animation is unrestrained by everyday aesthetics. When actively embodying animation through performance, one can retain an expectation for experiencing the unexpected. Adapting animation from screen to stage involves finding ways to recraft the expressive qualities of the medium to align with, or benefit from, the capabilities of live human performers, with or without relying on conventions of technical stagecraft. Animation can aesthetically and kinetically (through pleasing visuals and motion) interpret the material and social worlds humans inhabit. Performances of animative embodiment physically re-interpret animation’s representations of material life, inciting changes to ways people engage with a given space, with others, and with their own sense of presence.
Theatre’s capacity to re-stage the human imagination can translate into nearly any kind of space or culture. Theatre is a craft one can learn and transfer into any genre and apply to many other skills, much like cosplay. Animative embodiment through theatre — already understood, like animation, as a medium of heightened expression beckoning audiences to believe in the unbelievable — adapts the corporealized image of the animated form to the stage, wherever one might be found, whatever its parameters.
IV.C. Animated Cosplay
Attending the 2005 Anime Expo sharply elevated my awareness of animation’s potential to help bodies imaginatively re-stage encounters with everyday life. For fans like myself and others, “Significant communication issues . . . can be hidden more effectively” in the online spaces where fandom culture largely lives (Peeples et al 252). At the same time, in-person convention-style gatherings reveal a “readymade commonality with other geeks,” which “diminishes fear of being judged for their love of their subculture” (Peeples et al 252). In 2022, I wrote and presented a short performance for the Southern States Communication Conference titled, “Cartoon Corporeality and GenderQueer Morality,” critically reflecting on the kind of individually validating, communally enriching experience cosplay can foster. The following amended version — written with a poetic syntax to help reflect the cadence of my vocal delivery, and minimally edited to help clarify intended meaning — helps illustrate how performing authentically in my own body, as an otherwise-two-dimensionally animated figure, helped propel me toward this very study:
Anime, videogames, fantasy and science-fiction, comics, and cartoons of all kinds, in these we [can] find intimacy in: imagining… being… a body… animated… unbound. Cosplay crafts, collaborates, and creates community. Costumed bodies capture, as cartoons, ourselves, [that is,] our more vibrant selves performing publicly characters we love from stories within worlds we find fantastical, fracturing; [and how] frighteningly, forcefully unsettling to be me — [but] an anime-me, real, live, fairy — strut the streets and breathe, just f***ing be, perceived but unseen in a sea of real-life cartoons stretching from and beyond the Anaheim Convention Center for my first of many Anime Expos and cartoon cons to follow. At 15, [I was] quietly Queer but, here and there, a ruckus of frustration, [with] mind and body in constant circulation between two big lies: I was born a masculine heterosexual; and, I secretly could, but simply stubbornly chose never to learn most anything as one typically seems to learn most everything. Creatively through therapy, eventually, I would, finally, functionally learn at least to read ‘round the ripe age of 16, school and home and church still encapsulated an insulated, unquestioning distance from most everything so-called “secular.” But on weekends, cartoons by my side — I mean, on my mind — my body loud — I mean, wide awake — I felt I found a freedom teachers and preachers conveyed in hellish ways was nowhere in our submission to suffering, learned as love, as grace and glory for all-knowingly creating the Queer and caricature, [but] then to shrug, “Sure, we’ve all sinned.” Publicly performing [the character] Salt from anime, A Little Snow Fairy Sugar, one mid-aughts, rather hot, early summer at [the] request of one of few true friends I’d ever make behind [the] bars and gates of [an] academy doctrine-designed for no body like mine, felt ever anything but safe or certain, was, in turn, then, animating — I mean, life-changing. As one cartoon come to life or another, I found I could allow myself to find, if only at moments in space, in time, fuller form and freedom of mind, made an unrequited body, all mine — real, live, fairy.
While and after cosplaying as the orange- and yellow-clad, blue-winged character named Salt from a brightly-drawn anime featuring spice-themed magical fairies, I felt uniquely validated as a repressed Queer teenager seeking expressive freedom, and as a developmentally distinct learner discovering new ways to express myself with others. Coming from an environment entrenched in deeply vitriolic animosity toward Queer people, and toward socially and neurologically atypical experiences, discovering new ways to express myself, and potentially form community in the process, was powerfully self-affirming. As transformative “costumes and performances gain their meaning through juxtaposition” to performers’ everyday surroundings (Hale 19), the freeing agency that comes with cosplaying as an animated figure helped to unearth deep dissatisfaction with the harshly regulated institutions in which I had formed my self-concept and worldview. As researcher Moqiao Liu contends, “Cosplay helps cosplayers overcome mental pressure in reality through role play. By alleviating mental pressure, cosplay enhances the sense of happiness of cosplayers” (13). Animative embodiment through cosplay alleviates some of the tensions typically restricting freedom of individual expression using forces of common repression (social pressures, etc.).
Attending Anime Expo again in 2018, I re-immersed myself as an interrogator of an event I had enthusiastically participated in for many years. Finding meager pockets of space among tens of thousands, I felt the collective heat of attendees radiate through the large open halls of the Los Angeles Convention Center while analyzing and documenting observations. Excitedly, expressively, and seemingly without reservation people would burst into dance and song (typically anime theme songs), and jump into improvised action scenes with other cosplayers. I encountered the mushroom-headed Toad from Super Mario Bros. casually perform the dance trend, the “Floss” (Horning); a teddy bear rendition of world-destroying Marvel villain, Thanos; armored, samurai-style interpretations of franchise icons, Hello Kitty and Pikachu; and impromptu photoshoots staged with cosplayers performing humanoid interpretations of magical gem warriors from Steven Universe. As seemingly all “distance between people is suspended” (Bakhtin, Dostoevsky’s Poetics 123) and “life [is] drawn out of its usual rut” (126), one can observe at events like Anime Expo how communal cosplay animates the carnivalesque spirits of freedom and eccentricity.
Fans often translate their admiration for characters being performed into an appreciation for performers as individuals, and for the particular care with which they craft their overall performance, from apparel to character construction (Gn 585). Events like Anime Expo — where performances of animative embodiment through cosplay are central to the experience — regularly welcome and celebrate the creativity and free expression of others. Though “cosplayers often bear little resemblance to their favorite characters” (Peeples255), cosplaying through animated media, in particular, appeals to a more expansive sense of creative expression. The textured costumes and set pieces represented in live-action media can be replicated in the real world, essentially verbatim, whereas garments and props associated with animated characters are more open to interpretation. Cosplaying at anime conventions can help one acquire a sensuous knowledge of person and place, blending in with a cacophony of other anime-adorned performers traversing convention halls and surrounding localities. Research indicates opportunities for “self-expression and facilitating social interaction” are primary reasons many people cosplay (Reysen et al 51). The friend who first invited me to Anime Expo is now a professional, award-winning cosplayer known as Steff Von Schweetz. Reconnecting in 2025, Von Schweetz contributed the following perspective as someone who has been steeped in this kind of performance for decades:
While there’s no one way or wrong way to cosplay, there’s a pressure to be accurate to live action media. People go to great lengths to source the same fabrics and construct garments, props, and even wig work to make it feel authentic. Even makeup choices tend to skew with how they were done in the show or movie. When something has been physically created for [live] media, I know what I’m supposed to make; and that will limit my personal design choices and how my final product looks. . . . It’s not easy to source or make things that have a “correct” way of doing them. However, it’s not something I find fulfilling in my art. My art, my sewing, is my own; and I enjoy putting my own personal spins on everything I make. People can see fanart of my costumes and still place the reference as me because my work is unique. I don’t think I would have made it to twenty plus years if I was always copying someone else’s work. The joy comes from my own personal style coming through.
Cosplaying animated media, as Von Schweetz indicates, involves a process of blending the image of the animated figure with the expressive resources, inclinations, labors, and talents of the performer, a process which performance and literary scholar Wallace Bacon classically associates with the oral interpretation of literature. “What goes on in the matching process [between text and performer] is a gradual merging of two bodies into a third body which becomes the performance. At its best, the new presence is a joyful, transcendent body” (Bacon 356-357). For fans of animated media, much of the joy of cosplay comes from recognizing and reveling in the uniquely embodied interpretations of beloved characters freely brought to life.
Similar to AR gaming, cosplay encourages performers to creatively explore accommodating public spaces by centering fans’ shared, but invariably distinct, appreciations for the characters and storyworlds being publicly represented and performed. Notably, “cosplayers are not only trying to enter into the [anime] storyworld (by way of identification) but also to bring forth, to embody the storyworld in the actual world” (Domsch 136). Unlike a conventional theatrical adaptation, cosplayers do not need to wait for a specific cue, moment, or scripted response from scene partners in order to call out their lines or animate their movements. Fans expect cosplay performances to align with what they know about characters’ appearances, mannerisms, and so on, yet cosplayers interpret animated texts with a great deal of creative freedom. When individual cosplayers are encountered together, they can complement one another, creating an impression that each individual performance is situated within a more fully animative physical world.
V. FORMATIVE FINDINGS AND FUTURE FRAMEWORKS
Through animation, impressions of physical reality may be abstracted and reassembled as exaggerated features, bright colors, and an unlimited capacity to change form. Performances of animative embodiment re-interpret animation’s impressions of physical life — by re-enacting animation within the same material reality that first forms the conditions for animation to be created. More broadly, humans appear to seek some sense of control over how we might be implicated in the vibrance and malleability of the much larger physical reality we are a part of. Many, it seems, find such a sense of agency through the expressive form of animation, embodied through performance in more ways than this initial project can address. Performances of animative embodiment should be further scrutinized for how they continue evolving, and for how they manifest across the richness of human life.
Animative embodiment will continue developing in tandem with emerging technologies. Elaborately choreographed flying drones animate battle scenes between almost-otherworldly videogame characters, like Mario and Bowser, in large outdoor scenescapes overlooking oceans and deserts. Drawn one illuminated drone at a time, these technologically-mediated performances can appear like giant, living, three-dimensional games of connect-the-dots domineeringly animated against an all-enveloping canvas of the dark night. As once-newer technologies become more functionally integrated into daily life, they become more efficient to produce and more widely accessible (Burg and Ausubel). We should then expect illuminated flying drones to shrink with time (Koenderink et al). Three-dimensional, animated figures floating in physical space will therefore become producible on smaller scales using more simply designed drones which, when produced with ever-greater industrial efficiency, will allow greater density and detail of the three-dimensional images they animate (i.e., less space between the dots of light forming figures’ shapes). We can thus anticipate one day interacting with 3D, holograph-like images reminiscent of technologies from science-fiction storyworlds like Star Wars.
The industrial scaling of 3D printing, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI) has already facilitated the development of mechanically animated, AI-integrated “smart toys” capable of interacting with users through emotive movements (Komis). Some have faces digitally illuminated onto small screens, or use mechanized limbs and wheels for more complex play (e.g., interactive replicas of animated robot, Wall-E, inclusive of the dystopian droid’s quirky mannerisms). We may also chronicle how commercial industries like toy design could be implicated in the co-development of technologies like motion-capture and computer-synchronized flying drones (Teh et al 24). In the context of this study, we should especially pay attention to the emergence of physically-animated avatars (Dafarra et al), external three-dimensional objects (or networks of objects) that can move in-sync with human players. From early rotoscope to modern motion-capture, the moving human body has long been an invaluable point of reference for innovations used to explore and thereby expand what can be animated and how animation can be made to happen.
While animative embodiment should be further explored technologically, it is a phenomenon of human self-expression and experimentation, mediating vibrant possibilities of the material world we are interconnected with using broadly familiar modes and scripts of public discourse (performance and animation) in ways that can disrupt the often punishing pressures of everyday life. Performances of animative embodiment have become increasingly observable across popular forms of entertainment. On multiple continents, people attend “Shrek Rave” events — greenly-lit, ogre-themed dance parties based on the Shrek movies. Major theme parks have corporealized widely known animated environments, like Universal Studios’ Super Nintendo World. Cartoon-themed performances have been featured on the RuPaul’s Drag Race franchise, with one 2025 and 2026 competitor, Lucky Starzzz, self-describing as an “animated fantasy brought to life . . . like a living cartoon stuck in reality” (“Squirrel Games”).
As a performance-based phenomenon manifesting in many different areas of popular culture and everyday life, animative embodiment should continue to be explored through performance, in part through the works of established artists who actively engage animation through embodied play. Performance scholar Natsu Onoda Power founded The Live Action Cartoonists performance troupe, who once staged live shows where performers would interact with, and create scenes interpreted from, Osama Tezuka’s Astro Boy in real-time. More conventionally, playwright Steve Yockey’s aptly titled play, Cartoon, employs tropes from animation to establish an original cartoon-themed storyworld on stage. As “performance . . . tends to hide the ontological difference between animated characters and the people who create, use, and interact with them” (Silvio 423), animation’s continual, corporeal emergence compels one to consider how and why people embody, experiment with, and discover through the form. To interrogate the phenomenon across a more eclectic array of human experience, artists and scholars may further isolate and reveal different qualities of animative embodiment through any number of cultural perspectives and/or available performance methods (poor theatre, spoken word, contemporary dance, installation art, etc.).
For now, I aim to uncover how performances of the animated form — embodied dynamically within the same physical environments people co-inhabit with each other’s tense differences — present compelling, continually changing possibilities for meaningful expression shared across many different factions of human life. As people project into animated form circumstances first encountered in the material world, we can utilize animated media to extract and understand anew the different kinds of experiences mediated through them. Performances of animative embodiment re-animate a form once primarily presented on many bright, flat surfaces, adding more sensorial dimension to the already-endlessly-malleable medium of animation. Through freedom of experience, expression, and discovery, however attainable, embodied performances of the animated form can help us access more tangible and eclectic forms of expressive force inherent within ourselves, and apparent within the physical world we occupy — with one another on this Earth, and with a preeminently animative universe.
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