The Politics of Animation and the Animation of Politics

Abstract

This article demonstrates how political inquiry can guide the study of animation. It proceeds by investigating animation's minor status within film and media studies and then the expansion of its definition and conceptual associations. This expansion has philosophical implications, which are explored in this article through the work of Jeff Malpas and Bruno Latour. By examining how these philosophers discuss animation and animated examples -puppets, in particular -this article demonstrates a shift from thinking of animation as expressing mastery and illusion to thinking of animation as expressing transformation, heterogeneous action, and distributed agency. This shift challenges philosophy's opposition to rhetoric, poetics, and technology, and in turn challenges modern binaries between nature and culture, science and politics, reality and artifice, facts and fetishes, and it presents the world as animated. The author argues that this idea need not obfuscate the many different moving-image technologies that have been designated animation or cinema, and contends that some of these, such as animated cartoons, directly engage the confusion about animation caused by modern binaries. This argument proposes studying animation through multiple modes or lenses in order to prevent dominant realist modes of inquiry from stifling the uncertainty and pluralism that are central to animation's capacity for political expression.

Rocko’s Magic Capitalism: Commodity Fetishism in the Magical Realism of Rocko’s Modern Life

“…The theories of Imamura represent a promising starting point for the postcolonial study of animism and animation since he contextualized hegemonic forms of animation within Western capitalism. Herhuth (2016) traces even more nuanced connections between animism, animation and colonialism by locating animation within the relationship between the colonizer and colonized and suggesting that animation be considered from a plurality of ontologies, in a sense marking an entry point into the decolonization of animation theory. The depiction of animism in Rocko’s Modern Life highlights the need for further critical scholarship into how animism is interpreted and contested in a diversity of animated works.…”

“…Narrative agency is not simply located in human forms, but in the energies of perception and volition that course through everything. Without explicitly drawing a connection to magical realism, Herhuth (2016) sees animation as a colonial refutation of indigenous animist fetishism. He builds from Latour’s (1999, 2005) actor-network theory, in which Latour suggests that puppetry is ‘anti-fetishist’ because it reveals nonhuman agency to be an illusory trick mastered by humankind.…”

Life Remade: Critical Animation in the Digital Age

“…And finally, we hope this collection of articles serves to further the already rich examination of the politics of more traditional forms of animation in the current digital age. This special issue thus builds upon recent scholarship that has already begun to contend with animation’s expanded presence and its inherent political and critical significance, including Suzanne Buchan’s (2013) insightful explorations of the contemporary ‘pervasiveness’ of animation, Karen Beckman’s (2014) call to finally bring animation out of the ‘margins’ of film theory, and last year’s excellent special issue of this journal edited by Eric Herhuth (2016) addressing ‘The Politics of Animation’, from labour conditions to national identity formation.…”

Editorial

“…A number of our authors have examined the political ramifications of animation and, in 2016, Erich Herhuth guest edited a Special Issue on ‘Animation and Politics’. In this issue, he posed the question ‘How can political enquiry guide the study of animation?’ (Herhuth, 2016: 4) and provided a framework for the articles that explored ‘the nexus of animation and politics in at least two directions: the politics of animation and the animation of politics’ (p. 5).…”