The Mastery Machine: Digital Animation and Fantasies of Control

Abstract

For decades, the notion of the creator's absolute control over the drawn image has remained a staple of animation discourse, and the advent of computer animation has recently reinvigorated this discussion. The animated science fiction features Metropia (Tarik Saleh, 2009), Metropolis (Rintaro, 2001, and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (Hironobu Sakaguchi and Motonori Sakakibara, 2001) engage utopian daydreams and articulate anxieties about the high degree of artistic mastery facilitated by advanced technology. Using these three films as case studies, this text examines computer-animated futuristic urban spaces as architectures of control. It discusses digital bodies as products of animators' increased mastery over mimetic representations of the human form and explores the ways in which computer animation foregrounds its technological and artistic control over the image as a feat to marvel at. In doing so, this analysis highlights the evolution of the dream of the omnipotent creator into a fantasy of omnipotent machinery, while also foregrounding concerns about the possible danger of technology undermining animators' labor and making it obsolete in the context of contemporary production practices.The notion of absolute creative control of the animator over the image is often evoked in discussions of drawn animation (other forms of animation, such as puppetry and stop motion, raise a separate set of questions which will not be addressed here). Past scholarship has regarded cel animation as endowing the director with a degree of mastery over the film unmatched by other cinematic modes. For instance, Paul Wells (1998: 228) has argued that 'a completed animation represents an example of an entirely controlled environment which is a symbolic space wholly predicated on the whim, intention, and bravura of the animator.' It is this emphasis on the individual in the production of drawn animation that has given rise to fantasies of all-powerfulness, of the

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