The Worries of the World(s): Cartoons and Cinema
The Worries of the World(s): Cartoons and Cinema
Introduction: The Animated Debates on "Worlding"
Core Debates: Cinema and Media Studies scholars extensively debate:
Animation's connection to "the world" and its capacity to fabricate "worlds."
The relationship between singular and plural conceptions of the concept of "world."
The problem of "worlding" in animation is further complicated by debates about the very definition of "animation."
Defining Animation:
Broad View: Scholars like Suzanne Buchan, Paul Wells, and Maureen Furniss highlight that "animation" is a broad term encompassing a wide variety of media practices. While they share movement, they profoundly differ (e.g., vs. , hand-drawn vs. computer animation).
Generalized View: Other scholars, including Lev Manovich and Alan Cholodenko, argue for generalizing animation to encompass all cinema as an umbrella term.
Essay's Purpose: To map the contours of these debates about worlding in cinema and media theory and explain why their stakes become particularly prevalent at specific historical moments.
Keywords: Child’s world, Alternative Reality, Political Imagination, Plasmaticness, Play.
The Problem of "Animation"
Significance: Recent debates focus on animation's connection to the physical world and lived reality (related but not synonymous terms), exploring the political, aesthetic, and affective significance of its fabricated/imaginary worlds and the singular/plural ideas of "world."
Historical Neglect: Historically, animation has often been ignored as an inconsequential or childish practice. Donald Crafton (1982) noted early cartoons were often regarded as "dustbin" material, and later ignored or relegated to "film-buffism."
Imprecise Terminology:
Suzanne Buchan (2014) describes "animation" as an "imprecise, fuzzy catchall that heaps an enormous and historically far-reaching, artistically diverse body of work into one pot."
Steve Reinke (2005) observes that prominent writers on animation often provide "partial or inconsistent definitions."
Divergent Definitions:
"Animation" as Umbrella Term: Theorists like Alan Cholodenko and Lev Manovich have productively asserted "animation" as an all-encompassing term for all cinema.
Tom Gunning's Nuance (2014): Suggests bifurcating the term into two meanings:
"animation"1: Refers to "the technical production of motion from the rapid succession of discontinuous frames, shared by all cinematic moving images." This technical aspect is shared by all film.
"animation"2: Refers to "moving images that have been made to move, rather than movement automatically captured through continuous-motion picture photography." This form involves direct creation of movement.
Gunning argues that "animation"2 allows for greater experiences of play, fascination, and wonder, rooted in "a fundamental manipulation of time." It provides a stronger sense of a world that has been animated, rather than merely recorded.
Hybridity and Pervasiveness:
Animator George Griffin (2013) notes animation's complexity: it incorporates and hybridizes many media practices and is exhibited in diverse venues (cinema, TV, online, art galleries, public spaces, "urban forbidden zones").
Suzanne Buchan (2013) emphasizes animation's pervasive nature: "As screens become part of everyday life… animation will increasingly influence our understanding of how we see and experience the world visually."
No Single History: "Animation" cannot belong to a single history due to its broad array of media, technologies, venues, and uses. While its world-making is varied, there are specific historical moments when its ability to make, change, or record the world became particularly significant.
War of the Worlds: Political Utopianism, Play, and the Plasmatic Image
Post-WWII Context: Following World War II, where animation was used for propaganda, some film critics viewed the relationship between animation and live-action cinema as a "war of the worlds."
Serge Daney's Critique: French film critic Serge Daney (1992) personally saw animated movies as "something other than cinema," even "a bit the enemy," deeply preferring the "emotion—fear and trembling—in front of recorded things."
Stanley Cavell's Ontology of Film:
In The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (1971), American philosopher Stanley Cavell prioritizes the recorded over the drawn image.
He defines cinema as a "succession of automatic world projections" (Cavell 1979, ).
Cinematic projections, for Cavell, differ from the world primarily temporally, allowing spectators to heighten awareness of a world existing beyond the self.
He famously stated that the screen "screens me from the world it holds… And it screens that world from me… That the projected world does not exist (now) is its only difference from reality" (ibid., ).
Cavell's Rejection of Animation:
Alexander Sesonske questioned where Disney's animated worlds fit into Cavell's theory.
In a 1979 postscript, Cavell asserted that animated cartoons "has nothing to do with projections of the real world" (ibid., ).
He acknowledged conviction in such worlds was achievable (ibid., ) but found them lacking "real laws" and character's ability to "avoid, or deny, the metaphysical facts of human beings" (ibid., ).
Cartoons, for Cavell, do not arise "from below the world" like "real movies" (ibid., ); movies are of the world, cartoons are merely in it.
He rejected the idea that Hollywood films and cartoons are "not that different" (ibid., ).
Cavell begrudgingly allowed cartoons to constitute "a child’s world" that "remains an ineluctable substratum of our own, and subject to deliberate or unlooked for eruption" (ibid., ).
Despite his singular view of "the world," this brief acknowledgment suggests a human subject navigating different worlds. For film theorists, animation makes these inter-world movements more visible.
Animation's Pre-1937 Utopian Promise
Catalyst for Change: Between WWI and WWII, European theorists explored how cartoons might catalyze change in the "real world," by highlighting the interplay between the audience's shared space and individual inner worlds.
Post-WWI Hopes: WWI had diminished faith in technological utopias. Yet, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, carton animation—with its multiple world-renderings, metamorphosis, and playful attitude (akin to Gunning's "animation"2)—seemed to foster openness to alternative world structures.
Cultivating Political Imagination: Animation, particularly cartoon animation, was believed to cultivate the political imagination of mass audiences through:
Comic invention.
Endless stretching and squashing of time, space, and bodies .
Creation of characters functioning as collective dream spaces.
Context of Desperation: These utopian/revolutionary claims arose in specific historical circumstances of extreme poverty and violence, where bodies, landscapes, and laws were threatened, destroyed, and technologically rebuilt.
Alternative Realities: Animators can draw viewers into alternative realities that blur boundaries between:
Form and formlessness.
Life and death.
Human and non-human.
Possible and impossible.
Known and unknown worlds.
Examples:
Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away: Depict children accessing magical spirit worlds largely unavailable to adults.
Peter Lord and Nick Park's Chicken Run: Chickens defy humans, become politically active. Queer theorist Jack Halberstam (2011, ) interprets this as "a Gramscian structure of counterhegemony engineered by organic (chicken) intellectuals." (Halberstam's analysis focuses on narrative/character, less on animation aesthetics).
Focus on Aesthetics: Many earlier utopian discussions focused on particular audiovisual aesthetic experiments that often predated and even resisted feature-length narrative films.
The "Punctuation Point" of Snow White
Shift to Realism: Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs marked a critical turning point.
Esther Leslie (2002, ) argues that before Snow White, animation celebrated freedom from fixed form. Afterward, feature-length animated films:
"Reinstitute the laws of perspective and gravity, and lead a fight against flatness, while producing traditional dramaturgical characters."
No longer "explode the world with the surrealistic and analytic dynamite of the optical unconscious."
Distanced animation from avant-garde art, which used fragmentation and disintegration to reveal the constructedness of the social world, ripe for transformation.
Modernist Affinities (Pre-Snow White): Prior to this move toward realism, radical media theorists often saw early cartoons as having affinities with experimental and abstract modernist art.
These theorists focused on mutating visual forms and their relationship to soundtracks.
They considered the perceptual impact of animated "eye-music" that altered audience perception by scrambling traditional sensory organization and blurring sound/image distinctions. Such experiments aligned animation with revolutionary politics.
Tension in Animation Styles: There was tension between animators pursuing modernist abstraction (e.g., Walter Ruttmann) and those focused on narrative (e.g., Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed).
Resonance with Fairytales and Slapstick: Narrative genres like fairytales and folktales still convey formal audiovisual surprises (e.g., unexpected character transformations). Pioneers of animation and film slapstick shared connections (e.g., Disney admiring Buster Keaton, Keaton admiring Winsor McCay). Crafton (1982, ) notes McCay's Gertie "revealed the possibility of the medium."
Animation, Psychological Space, and War
Inner and Outer Worlds: In the early th century, Anthony Vidler noted a growing awareness of inner psychological space that influenced how the physical world was seen and depicted.
Mediating Self and World: Animation played a complex role in navigating the space between the world "outside" and the newly emphasized world "within" the self.
Animators like Winsor McCay depicted territories physically shaped by the projection of interior landscapes.
Impact of WWI: The phenomenon of "shell shock" demonstrated how interior landscapes were shaped by the technological destruction of World War I.
Animation both responded to and was part of the modern war machine.
Propaganda filmmakers pioneered the "strange temporality" of animated maps in WWI, creating speculative views to sway public opinion by visualizing projected victories and enemy invasions.
Animation became a vehicle for audiences and intellectuals to grapple with and inhabit a changed world.
Walter Benjamin’s Foreign Bodies: Animated Dreams and Nightmares
Mickey Mouse and Modernity: In a 1931 fragment, the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin uses Mickey Mouse to illustrate how war changed the body's place in the world.
Benjamin's grim tone acknowledges humor and play's role but highlights the severity of the modern condition.
In a world where technology removed limbs then replaced them with prosthetics, Benjamin observes in Mickey Mouse cartoons: "here we see for the first time that it is possible to have one’s own arm, even one’s own body, stolen" (Benjamin 1931, ).
He argues these films show "mankind makes preparations to survive civilization," and their popularity stems from the public recognizing "its own life in them" (ibid., ).
Miriam Hansen's Interpretation:
Miriam Hansen (2012, ) clarifies Benjamin's view: this recognition isn't about "representational verisimilitude" but about films "lending expression to salient aspects of modern experience through hyperbolic humor, kinetic rhythms, and plasmatic fantasy."
Benjamin avoided romanticizing a pre-modern, uncontaminated natural world, instead finding in Mickey Mouse a dialectical figure embodying both destruction and survival in modernity.
Hansen (ibid., ) states Mickey Mouse films engage technology as a "hidden figure," hyperbolizing "the historical imbrication of nature and technology through humor and parody." Animated miracles appear "improvised out of the bodies and objects on the screen, in a freewheeling exchange between animate and inanimate worlds."
Beyond Hierarchy: Benjamin bypasses the Hollywood hierarchy of live-action over animated film (Hansen ibid, ). For him, both Mickey Mouse's body and the screen actor's body complicate the human-thing relationship in the modern world.
Hansen compares these to Franz Kafka's characters, for whom the body becomes the "most forgotten alien territory" (ibid., ). These allegories reveal alienating modern conditions and offer a utopian path to survive the self as a foreign world.
"The Work of Art in the Age of Its Reproducibility" (1935/1936):
Benjamin's speculative position, written under increasing fascist threat that led to his suicide in 1938.
The Role of Play: Play, central to Benjamin's thought and linked to animation/slapstick, takes on profound importance.
Benjamin (1928, SW 2.1, ) suggested repetitious play enables subjects to: "gain possession of ourselves," "transcend ourselves in love and enter into the life and the often alien rhythm of another human being," and "transform a shattering experience into habit."
Optical Unconscious: The film camera reveals "hidden details in familiar objects" and a "vast and unsuspected field of play [Spielraum]," leading to the discovery of the "optical unconscious" (Benjamin 1935, ).
Collective Dream: Through the optical unconscious, "the individual perceptions of the psychotic or the dreamer can be appropriated by the collective perception of the audience." Mickey Mouse, like the onscreen actor, becomes a figure of "collective dream" (ibid., ).
Benjamin hoped cartoon audiences could meet in Mickey Mouse's "shared dream" to "redeem the world." He even controversially suggested cartoon violence might therapeutically prevent real violence: "the forced development of sadistic fantasies or masochistic delusions can prevent their natural and dangerous maturation in the masses" (ibid., ).
Despite knowing Disney's proximity to fascism (Hansen 2012, ) and laughter's unpredictability, Benjamin argued/hoped for the world-saving power of comedy and cartoons: "Collective laughter is one such preemptive and healing outbreak of mass psychosis" (Benjamin 1935, ).
Nuanced View of Violence and Evolution:
Benjamin understood that animation (like play/habit) held potential for both happiness and horror, and could reinforce acceptance of violence (Benjamin 1936, SW 3: , n. ).
It's inaccurate to caricature Benjamin as a naïve cartoon-lover, contrasted with Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment ([1944] 2011) view that cartoons accustom spectators to violence (e.g., "Donald Duck in the cartoons… receive their beatings so that the spectators can accustom themselves to theirs"). Hansen (2012, ) advocates a "stereoscopic view" of their perspectives, as all three noted how cartoons' function evolved.
Adorno and Horkheimer recognized cartoons "were once exponents of fantasy against rationalism," granting "mutilated beings a second life" ([1944] 2011, ), while Benjamin (by 1936) understood fascism's appropriation of "revolutionary" innovations, prompting him to revise his essay and remove much of the utopian Mickey Mouse material (Benjamin 1936, SW 3: , n. ).
Benjamin's Personal "Dream-World": His 1938 diary entries show his "dream-world" offered little escape, reflecting his suffering and exploration of being/suffering in a world where sound, images, writing, land, and the biological body were interconnected.
Kirsten Ostherr (2013, ) demonstrates that since the late 1920s, the biological body was understood through hybrid medical moving-image practices combining hand-drawn animation, live-action footage, stop-motion of cadavers, and text labels.
A 1938 dream entry, after remarking he "probably wouldn’t live much longer," describes a terrifying landscape perceived as both a physical map and a desolate terrain of writhing capital letters, identified as "the labyrinth of my auditory canal" and "a map of hell" (Benjamin 1938, SW 3: ).
Beyond Mimesis: The common critical focus on animation's mimesis and realism limit understanding of how lived worlds are made. Benjamin's diary entry offers a view of the world coming into human consciousness through the intertwining of dreams, perception, matter, and thought, where graphic images and words entangle with the physical earth and body, making the world felt.
Sergei Eisenstein and the Quest for Freedom
Resonance with Benjamin: Miriam Hansen (2012, ) notes similarities between Benjamin's response to Mickey Mouse and Sergei Eisenstein's "obsession with Disney’s fire imagery in The Moth and the Flame."
Both rejected the notion of a fixed world; Disney's animation provided a framework for imagining radical change.
Eisenstein's "Plasmaticness" (1940-1941): Writing in fragmented form under Stalinist uncertainty, Eisenstein found in Disney's fluid animated characters an "ecstasy and lack of stability," akin to fire and music.
He described this as "a sensing and experiencing of the primal ‘omnipotence’—the element of ‘coming into being’—the ‘plasmaticness’ of existence, from which everything can arise" (Eisenstein 1988, ).
Drawing on Heraclitus, Hegel, and Lenin, Eisenstein connected animation to fire and ecstasy, capturing primal "coming into being" experiences (including the world's creation) that exceed the image while yearning for capture.
He posited "phenomena with poly-formic capabilities." Referencing Engels, this dynamism is an integral, fluid component of "the unity of the whole system of the world" (ibid., ), not separate from a finite physical world.
Eisenstein wrestled with the "irresistible ‘attractiveness’" of this "plasmaticness," where "a being of a definite form" could assume "any form" (ibid., ).
Plasmaticness and Constraint: While often appreciated for its utopian dimensions, Eisenstein's theory of the plasmatic must be understood in context:
The attraction to the flame's mutability emerges when freedom is extinguished. He asks who is attracted to plasmatic forms: "He, of course, who more than anyone else, lacks its fascinating traits: and foremost—freedom of movement, freedom of transformation, freedom of the elements" (ibid., ).
"A passion for fire" is characteristic of "regressive conditions" and known in psychiatry as "pyromania" (ibid., ).
Eisenstein's critique of repressive societies includes modern America and th-century Japan but implicitly extends to the Soviet Union under Stalin.
"In a country and social order with such a mercilessly standardized and mechanically measured existence, which is difficult to call life, the sight of such ‘omnipotence’ (that is, the ability to ‘become whatever you wish’), cannot but hold a sharp degree of attractiveness" (ibid., ).
Aesthetic Possibilities and "Pre-logical" Psyche:
Eisenstein explored the aesthetic potential of these protean forms, including new sound-image correspondences (ibid., ) and access to a "pre-logical" psyche.
This pre-logical state could override logical objections to "belief" in omnipotent creatures/worlds: "We know that they are… drawings and not living beings… But at the same time: We sense them as alive. We sense them as moving, as active. We sense them as existing and even thinking!" (ibid., ).
Despite Disney animations becoming "utilitarian—instructionally technical" during the war (ibid., ), Eisenstein still found wonder and ecstasy in them. However, he emphasized that the spectator's attraction to the plasmatic was rooted in "the world around the author—an inhuman world," a world of social constraint (ibid., ).
Imperfect Tense: Animation in the Age of the Anthropocene
Bazin and the "Image Fact" (Post-WWII): French film critic André Bazin (1948, post-WWII) lauded filmmakers whose style didn't alter the "chemical composition" of the physical world, which he, like Cavell, conceived as governed by "the law of gravity."
In this context, animation's world-building might seem like interference or deception. However, Bazin also showed wonder and interest in Disney's conjured worlds (Beckman 2014, ).
The "image fact" was central to Bazin's ethical postwar cinema. He believed humans were just one "fact" among others, not deserving a priori pride of place (Bazin 2005, ).
The Anthropocene: Nearly years later, scientists like atmospheric chemist Paul Cruzen and others suggest a fundamental shift in the human-geological relationship.
While the International Commission on Stratigraphy and International Union of Geological Sciences still classify us in the Holocene (a warm geological epoch that began years ago after the last ice age), there's a growing interest since 2000 in the idea that we are now in the Anthropocene, where humans act as a geological force (Stromberg 2013).
Animation's Role in a Destructive Age: The question arises: does animation still help us imagine how to contain our self-generated destructive forces, as it did in the 1930s?
Animated Data: Animated data is an example of a renewed "salvational mode of image-making" in the environmental context.
The HeadsUP! Project, founded by digital media artist Peggy Weil, invites designers to visualize global issues for a square foot digital signboard in Times Square.
For example, in 2012, Richard Vijgen developed an animated map using GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) mission data to visualize rapidly changing global groundwater levels.
Assertion of "Vertical Power": While these animations can appear as direct appeals from the earth, Lisa Parks points out they also assert "vertical power," reflecting unequal distribution of privacy and access to data (e.g., fluctuating natural resources, migrating bodies).
Animation and the "Imperfect Tense":
Cavell and Bazin valued cinema for projecting a "world-that-has-been" at a specific time and place. Animated data, by contrast, condenses and systematizes continuous pasts into patterns for future predictions.
Animation has the capacity to evoke an "imperfect tense" by visualizing continuously repeating experiences that shape our sense of the world.
It can disrupt our indifference to the "general pattern of being on the verge of catastrophe" (Arielle Azoulay 2008, ), particularly structural forms of violence that, through repetition, fail to be newsworthy, as long as immediate death is averted.
Although Cavell saw cartoons as "not of this world" due to character invulnerability, there's a resonance between our world's worst aspects and the absence of death, demanding more animated thought and action.