Literature survey: eastern philosophy/experimental animation
Animation: An interdisciplinary Journal: selected abstracts
Roland Domenig
Review: Kenji Iwamoto: Gentō no seiki. Eiga zenya no shikaku bunkashi (Centuries of Magic Lanterns in Japan: A History of Visual Culture on the Eve of Cinema). Tokyo: Shinwasha, 2002. pp. ISBN 4 916087 25 9, ¥ 3,600
Animation July 2011 6: 193-196, doi:10.1177/1746847711406376
Voice and Vision in Oshii Mamoru’s Ghost in the Shell: Beyond Cartesian Optics
Hyewon Shin
City University of New York, USA, hshin@gc.cuny.edu; hshin73@hotmail.com
Abstract
This article investigates Oshii Mamoru’s experiments with voice and vision in his film Ghost in the Shell (1995). The audio-visual inversion articulated by the disembodied voice in the film dissolves the conventional image-voice conformity. The inorganic gaze adopted by Oshii breaks out of the human observer’s body to spread into space, unlike the anthropocentric gaze standard in cinema. While this depersonalized sight expresses the subject’s dissemination, it also echoes the film’s motif of mankind’s ontological opening up towards the environment. Oshii’s audio-visual experiment can be considered a critique of Cartesian optics: whereas the bodiless voice undermines the Cartesian domination of vision over other senses, the inorganic gaze produces a non-perspectival space and non-human vision supplementing Renaissance perspectival systems. Consequently, Oshii’s tendency to separate the voice from vision renders his animated bodies as heterogeneous, discrete agents distributed through multiple spatiotemporal dimensions beyond classical constructions of subject—object boundaries.The result of his challenge to Cartesian optics produces in the audience an intense affectivity reminiscent of Eisenstein’s ‘ecstasy’ of animation.
doi: 10.1177/1746847710391506
Animation March 2011 vol. 6 no. 1 7-23
Rethinking Plasticity: The Politics and Production of the Animated Image
Yuriko Furuhata
McGill University, Canada, yuriko.furuhata@mcgill.ca
Abstract
Writings on animation have often noted the plastic quality of the image: objects stretch, squash and change forms. Such discussions of the plastic quality of animation tend to equate plasticity with the appearance of the image. This article proposes a rethinking of plasticity in animation, suggesting that it is not simply an attribute of the finished image, but an aspect of the material conditions of its production. Introducing the work of Imamura Taihei and Hanada Kiyoteru, two leftist Japanese intellectuals who wrote on Disney animation during the 1940s and 1950s, and contrasting their work with the writings of their European counterparts, this article will suggest that these Japanese thinkers focus our attention on the importance of Fordism in the production of Disney animation. The work of Imamura and Hanada enables us to critically approach plasticity in animation in terms of the material conditions of the image production within Fordism, thus enabling us to consider plasticity at the level of the medium as well as that of labor.
doi: 10.1177/1746847710391226
Animation March 2011 vol. 6 no. 1 25-38
Subanimation: Verina Gfader in Conversation with Takehito Deguchi and Koji Yamamura
Verina Gfader
Flat 4, 81 Greencroft Gardens, London NW6 3LJ, UK, sissu@basicray.org
Abstract
This article is a conversation with Takehito Deguchi and Koji Yamamura, two distinct voices in animation practice and theory. Situated in Tokyo, Japan, the discussion follows a concept of expansion through decentralization, both in terms of the subject of animation and the place from where one speaks. Decentralization is considered in relation to how our understanding of the contemporary artwork, including animation, is formed, de- and re-formed through transforming and widening socio-political grounds. Addressing the complexity and hybridity for grasping the evolving layers in the field of anime, the dialogues with Deguchi and Yamamura gather questions and responses particularly about the status of experimental work, social change, the institutional and non-histories, seen as manifestations of incomplete historical understanding. Links are drawn between experimentation and time rupture, drawings and their shifting status in society, institutions and traditional statements, and social sentiments and animation’s intrinsic qualities. The text concludes with a summary of the conversations, including valuable statements that have been made, which open out the research subject for further debates.
doi: 10.1177/1746847710391227
Animation March 2011 vol. 6 no. 1 55-71
From Pictorial Collage to Intermedia Assemblage: Variations V (1965) and the Cagean origins of VanDerBeek’s Expanded Cinema
Andrew V. Uroskie
Department of Art, 2224 Staller Center for the Arts, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794-5400, USA, andrew.uroskie@stonybrook.edu
Abstract
Post 1964, after a half-dozen years pursuing an increasingly successful career as an independent producer of animated films, Stan VanDerBeek began to devote himself to a more performative and interdisciplinary practice he termed ‘expanded cinema’. This article contends that the most significant moment and motivation in this transition was the artist’s close collaboration with John Cage and Merce Cunningham in the production of Variations V, and that an examination of VanDerBeek’s Movie-Mural in the context of that production helps us to understand the important role played by his former Black Mountain College teachers in the genesis of this vision. The author proposes that an interdisciplinary rhetoric of ‘assemblage’ in this period can help bridge the aesthetic and conceptual gap between the artist’s early practice of collage animation and his later turn to expanded cinema and intermedia performance.
doi: 10.1177/1746847710368329
Animation July 2010 vol. 5 no. 2 223-241
In Memory of Meishu Film: Catachresis and Metaphor in Theorizing Chinese Animation
Weihua Wu
School of Television and Journalism, Communication University of China, 1#, Dingfuzhuang East Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100024, People's Republic of China, weihua.wu@gmail.com
Abstract
This article looks at historical catachresis and cultural metaphor in producing and theorizing Chinese meishu (fine arts) film in relation to the socialist, artistic discourses of the ethnic/national style. By investigating some of these issues raised by the Chinese School, the author explores the conceptualization and constitution of meishu film as a powerful metaphor for producing nationalist identity. This identity brings visual arts and the socialist nation-state discourses into a shared space to recreate Chinese aesthetics in animation filmmaking. The author argues that the Chinese meishu film, identified as a unique, nationalized cinematic form in Chinese visual history, conceptualizes and mediates the national/ethnic style, as well as constituting a discourse-based aesthetic school that has helped it survive within socialist culture and politics.
doi: 10.1177/1746847708099741
Animation March 2009 vol. 4 no. 1 31-54
The Spiritual—Functional Loop: Animation Redefined in the Digital Age
Kenny Chow Ka-nin
Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Y715 School of Design, Hung Hom Kowloon, Hong Kong, sdknchow@polyu.edu.hk
Abstract
Can animation bring life to the computer? Can the computer take animation to a new horizon extending from cinema and visual art? This article starts with a scrutiny of the conventional definition of animation and its connection to the continuum of liveliness, followed by an examination of the two furthest points on that scale: lively movement, which is spiritual; and inorganic movement, which is functional. The author shows that, in the digital age, movement of various degrees of liveliness can be significant and meaningful through a wide array of motor—sensory functions. This brings about a new notion of materiality, which constructs an innovative meaning of animation. The author then argues that, when combined with the unique functions of the computer, animation can find a shortcut between the two extremes of liveliness: spirituality and functionality. Therefore, the field of animation could benefit from an expansion of its digital attributes. Finally, the author discusses a corpus of artefacts created in different historical periods and different media that exemplify the spiritual—functional loop.
doi: 10.1177/1746847708099742
Animation March 2009 vol. 4 no. 1 77-89
Technologies of Perception: Miyazaki in Theory and Practice
Susan J. Bigelow
Chofugaoka 4-31-9, Chofu-shi, Tokyo, 182-0021, Japan, bigelow77@triton.ocn.ne.jp
Abstract
The current Western fascination with Japanese animation can be understood in relation to the experience of the digital in cultural production that opens new avenues of understanding about the self-as-subject. Visualization to engage with the image in interactive, virtual environments involves relinquishing control to recognize the individual as emerging through the unique pattern of their relationships, both human and non-human. This reality is articulated in Eastern philosophical notions of interrelatedness and pre-reflective thinking, what Marshall McLuhan called `comprehensive awareness'. The Japanese animator Miyazaki Hayao draws on a Zen-Shinto religious imaginary to empower the individual to relinquish the self. As an alternative politics to the moral confusion of the post-modern age, his practice demonstrates that Walter Benjamin's gamble with cinema is in play.
doi: 10.1177/1746847708099740
Animation March 2009 vol. 4 no. 1 55-75
Christophe Thouny
Review: French Lunning (ed.) Mechademia, Volume 1: Emerging Worlds of Anime and Manga. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. 184 pp., 32 b/w and 13 col. illus. ISBN 0—8166—4945—6 $19.95
Animation July 2008 3: 212-217, doi:10.1177/17468477080030020703
Roland Domenig
Review: Kenji Iwamoto: Gentō no seiki. Eiga zenya no shikaku bunkashi (Centuries of Magic Lanterns in Japan: A History of Visual Culture on the Eve of Cinema). Tokyo: Shinwasha, 2002. pp. ISBN 4 916087 25 9, ¥ 3,600
Animation July 2011 6: 193-196, doi:10.1177/1746847711406376
Voice and Vision in Oshii Mamoru’s Ghost in the Shell: Beyond Cartesian Optics
Hyewon Shin
City University of New York, USA, hshin@gc.cuny.edu; hshin73@hotmail.com
Abstract
This article investigates Oshii Mamoru’s experiments with voice and vision in his film Ghost in the Shell (1995). The audio-visual inversion articulated by the disembodied voice in the film dissolves the conventional image-voice conformity. The inorganic gaze adopted by Oshii breaks out of the human observer’s body to spread into space, unlike the anthropocentric gaze standard in cinema. While this depersonalized sight expresses the subject’s dissemination, it also echoes the film’s motif of mankind’s ontological opening up towards the environment. Oshii’s audio-visual experiment can be considered a critique of Cartesian optics: whereas the bodiless voice undermines the Cartesian domination of vision over other senses, the inorganic gaze produces a non-perspectival space and non-human vision supplementing Renaissance perspectival systems. Consequently, Oshii’s tendency to separate the voice from vision renders his animated bodies as heterogeneous, discrete agents distributed through multiple spatiotemporal dimensions beyond classical constructions of subject—object boundaries.The result of his challenge to Cartesian optics produces in the audience an intense affectivity reminiscent of Eisenstein’s ‘ecstasy’ of animation.
doi: 10.1177/1746847710391506
Animation March 2011 vol. 6 no. 1 7-23
Rethinking Plasticity: The Politics and Production of the Animated Image
Yuriko Furuhata
McGill University, Canada, yuriko.furuhata@mcgill.ca
Abstract
Writings on animation have often noted the plastic quality of the image: objects stretch, squash and change forms. Such discussions of the plastic quality of animation tend to equate plasticity with the appearance of the image. This article proposes a rethinking of plasticity in animation, suggesting that it is not simply an attribute of the finished image, but an aspect of the material conditions of its production. Introducing the work of Imamura Taihei and Hanada Kiyoteru, two leftist Japanese intellectuals who wrote on Disney animation during the 1940s and 1950s, and contrasting their work with the writings of their European counterparts, this article will suggest that these Japanese thinkers focus our attention on the importance of Fordism in the production of Disney animation. The work of Imamura and Hanada enables us to critically approach plasticity in animation in terms of the material conditions of the image production within Fordism, thus enabling us to consider plasticity at the level of the medium as well as that of labor.
doi: 10.1177/1746847710391226
Animation March 2011 vol. 6 no. 1 25-38
Subanimation: Verina Gfader in Conversation with Takehito Deguchi and Koji Yamamura
Verina Gfader
Flat 4, 81 Greencroft Gardens, London NW6 3LJ, UK, sissu@basicray.org
Abstract
This article is a conversation with Takehito Deguchi and Koji Yamamura, two distinct voices in animation practice and theory. Situated in Tokyo, Japan, the discussion follows a concept of expansion through decentralization, both in terms of the subject of animation and the place from where one speaks. Decentralization is considered in relation to how our understanding of the contemporary artwork, including animation, is formed, de- and re-formed through transforming and widening socio-political grounds. Addressing the complexity and hybridity for grasping the evolving layers in the field of anime, the dialogues with Deguchi and Yamamura gather questions and responses particularly about the status of experimental work, social change, the institutional and non-histories, seen as manifestations of incomplete historical understanding. Links are drawn between experimentation and time rupture, drawings and their shifting status in society, institutions and traditional statements, and social sentiments and animation’s intrinsic qualities. The text concludes with a summary of the conversations, including valuable statements that have been made, which open out the research subject for further debates.
doi: 10.1177/1746847710391227
Animation March 2011 vol. 6 no. 1 55-71
From Pictorial Collage to Intermedia Assemblage: Variations V (1965) and the Cagean origins of VanDerBeek’s Expanded Cinema
Andrew V. Uroskie
Department of Art, 2224 Staller Center for the Arts, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794-5400, USA, andrew.uroskie@stonybrook.edu
Abstract
Post 1964, after a half-dozen years pursuing an increasingly successful career as an independent producer of animated films, Stan VanDerBeek began to devote himself to a more performative and interdisciplinary practice he termed ‘expanded cinema’. This article contends that the most significant moment and motivation in this transition was the artist’s close collaboration with John Cage and Merce Cunningham in the production of Variations V, and that an examination of VanDerBeek’s Movie-Mural in the context of that production helps us to understand the important role played by his former Black Mountain College teachers in the genesis of this vision. The author proposes that an interdisciplinary rhetoric of ‘assemblage’ in this period can help bridge the aesthetic and conceptual gap between the artist’s early practice of collage animation and his later turn to expanded cinema and intermedia performance.
doi: 10.1177/1746847710368329
Animation July 2010 vol. 5 no. 2 223-241
In Memory of Meishu Film: Catachresis and Metaphor in Theorizing Chinese Animation
Weihua Wu
School of Television and Journalism, Communication University of China, 1#, Dingfuzhuang East Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100024, People's Republic of China, weihua.wu@gmail.com
Abstract
This article looks at historical catachresis and cultural metaphor in producing and theorizing Chinese meishu (fine arts) film in relation to the socialist, artistic discourses of the ethnic/national style. By investigating some of these issues raised by the Chinese School, the author explores the conceptualization and constitution of meishu film as a powerful metaphor for producing nationalist identity. This identity brings visual arts and the socialist nation-state discourses into a shared space to recreate Chinese aesthetics in animation filmmaking. The author argues that the Chinese meishu film, identified as a unique, nationalized cinematic form in Chinese visual history, conceptualizes and mediates the national/ethnic style, as well as constituting a discourse-based aesthetic school that has helped it survive within socialist culture and politics.
doi: 10.1177/1746847708099741
Animation March 2009 vol. 4 no. 1 31-54
The Spiritual—Functional Loop: Animation Redefined in the Digital Age
Kenny Chow Ka-nin
Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Y715 School of Design, Hung Hom Kowloon, Hong Kong, sdknchow@polyu.edu.hk
Abstract
Can animation bring life to the computer? Can the computer take animation to a new horizon extending from cinema and visual art? This article starts with a scrutiny of the conventional definition of animation and its connection to the continuum of liveliness, followed by an examination of the two furthest points on that scale: lively movement, which is spiritual; and inorganic movement, which is functional. The author shows that, in the digital age, movement of various degrees of liveliness can be significant and meaningful through a wide array of motor—sensory functions. This brings about a new notion of materiality, which constructs an innovative meaning of animation. The author then argues that, when combined with the unique functions of the computer, animation can find a shortcut between the two extremes of liveliness: spirituality and functionality. Therefore, the field of animation could benefit from an expansion of its digital attributes. Finally, the author discusses a corpus of artefacts created in different historical periods and different media that exemplify the spiritual—functional loop.
doi: 10.1177/1746847708099742
Animation March 2009 vol. 4 no. 1 77-89
Technologies of Perception: Miyazaki in Theory and Practice
Susan J. Bigelow
Chofugaoka 4-31-9, Chofu-shi, Tokyo, 182-0021, Japan, bigelow77@triton.ocn.ne.jp
Abstract
The current Western fascination with Japanese animation can be understood in relation to the experience of the digital in cultural production that opens new avenues of understanding about the self-as-subject. Visualization to engage with the image in interactive, virtual environments involves relinquishing control to recognize the individual as emerging through the unique pattern of their relationships, both human and non-human. This reality is articulated in Eastern philosophical notions of interrelatedness and pre-reflective thinking, what Marshall McLuhan called `comprehensive awareness'. The Japanese animator Miyazaki Hayao draws on a Zen-Shinto religious imaginary to empower the individual to relinquish the self. As an alternative politics to the moral confusion of the post-modern age, his practice demonstrates that Walter Benjamin's gamble with cinema is in play.
doi: 10.1177/1746847708099740
Animation March 2009 vol. 4 no. 1 55-75
Christophe Thouny
Review: French Lunning (ed.) Mechademia, Volume 1: Emerging Worlds of Anime and Manga. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. 184 pp., 32 b/w and 13 col. illus. ISBN 0—8166—4945—6 $19.95
Animation July 2008 3: 212-217, doi:10.1177/17468477080030020703
