On Styles of Theorizing Animation Styles: Stanley Cavell at theCartoon's Demise

Ryan Pierson

The Velvet Light Trap, Number 69, Spring 2012, pp. 17-26 (Article)

Published by University of Texas PressDOI: 10.1353/vlt.2012.0009

For additional information about this article

Access Provided by Concordia University Libraries at 02/23/13 3:19PM GMT

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/vlt/summary/v069/69.pierson.html

Ryan Pierson 17

n 1974 Stanley Cavell contentiously stated that “cartoons are not movies.” If that claim was strange when it was first made, it reads like a museum-piece curiosity today, tantamount

to the archaism that movies could not be art. Such an unequivocal divide between “cartoons” and “movies” now plainly seems irresponsible and dangerous, and not merely because of a general desire to study animated films more closely. With the material basis of film becoming, as D. N. Rodowick has put it, “ungrounded” (“Elegy” 93) by digital technologies, the place of animation within film’s history is being broadly reconsidered. New boundaries are being drawn in a need to account for the rise in animated feature films, the prominence of CGI effects in live-action features, and the now-common practices of DV shooting, Avid editing, and so on. Crudely put, there is a pervasive sense that we need to know what animation is so that we can know what a movie is. Because the revived interest in animation has largely been provoked by digitization, questions of animation tend to be asked in what we might call digital terms. With the apparent sea change in film history from an older indexical commitment to reality to the new pos-sibilities of algorithmic manipulation, animation arises as a problem largely because of the consequent need to place it somewhere within this old/new model. In these terms one can argue, as Rosalind Krauss has, that because computers have “overtaken photographically based cin-ema,” the distinction between “‘movies’ and ‘cartoons’” has all but collapsed (“The Rock” 32). Conversely, one can follow Rodowick and Mary Ann Doane in claiming that cartoons, as drawings on celluloid sheets that had to be photographed, fall into the older regime of indexically based cinema (Rodowick, Virtual Life 121–22; Doane 148–49). Either way the terms remain more or less the

I

On Styles of Theorizing Animation Styles:

Stanley Cavell at the Cartoon’s Demise

ryan pIerson

The Velvet Light Trap, Number 69, Spring 2012 ©2012 by the University of Texas Press, PO Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819

same, based on a presupposed opposition between old and new modes of representation. A subtle but widespread problem with this line of thinking is that animation effectively gets collapsed into one category or the other, a kind of passenger in the larger vehicle of film history. It becomes easy to forget that animation itself has a history because it is not thought to be a historically variable form of its own—only an existing option for film technology, a possible counterexample. One alternative means of addressing our present con-ception of animation is by looking back to animation theory’s past through Cavell’s remarks on cartoons. If it does not seem ludicrous now to claim that all movies are animation (as Lev Manovich and Alan Cholodenko have), then it is worth asking why a philosopher found it reasonable less than forty years ago to say that no movies are animation. That puzzlement—roughly put, why might cartoons not be movies?—provides the inquisi-tive force for the present essay. I do this not to defend Cavell as a pioneering animation theorist (he was not) but to clarify what he means by the concept “cartoons.” Clarifying Cavell may shed some genealogical light on what we mean by “animation” today. If tracing a relation to animation’s history through a committed realist like Cavell seems counterintuitive, this is because realism is generally thought to be responsible for film theory’s long-standing neglect of animation. Tom Gunning has called that neglect one of the great scandals of film theory, and he lays blame primarily at the feet of an excessive emphasis on the camera’s photographic powers: “Is it not somewhat strange that photographic theories . . . have had such a hold on film theory that much of film theory must immediately add the caveat that they do not apply to animated film?” (34). Cavell’s infamous dictum reads like a “condemnation”

18 Stanley Cavell at the Cartoon’s Demise

of the form (in Krauss’s words), indicative of a general willful ignorance. But Cavell’s relation to cartoons turns out to be con-siderably more nuanced. Extrapolating the reasons behind and consequences of his remarks requires placing him in a tripartite relation with realist film theory, “traditional” cartoon theory, and the state of cartoons at the time of his writing. Ultimately, what makes Cavell’s thoughts problematic is not his belief that cartoons aren’t mov-ies but the moment when “cartoons” are replaced with “animation.” This moment comes well before the rise of digital imagery in feature films.

In 1971 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sci-ences issued a change of terminology in the rules of their awards to animators. Since 1932 a category had existed for Best Cartoon, but in 1971 the category changed to Best Short Subject, Animated Film, a slightly modified version of which exists today.1

The term “cartoon,” of course, denotes something more specific than “animation.” We tend to think of the latter term as a catch-all for any kind of movement on film that is present in projection without having occurred in a unified event of recording.2 It specifies something like a medium—a technical basis for artistic practice—but suggests no stylistic or generic rules. (This is the intuitive definition upon which Lev Manovich relies when he claims that, “born from animation, cinema pushed animation to its periphery, only in the end to become one particular instance of animation” [302, original emphasis].) In contrast, a cartoon—as audiences had known it for most of the twentieth century—implied a fairly tight connection between three elements: (1) a particular animation technique (a series of drawings on celluloid sheets), typically utilizing (2) a special aesthetic mode or set of conventions (the comic and/or child-friendly), produced for (3) a delimited spatial and temporal arena of presentation (a one- or two-reel item on a theatrical program).3 When AMPAS changed its language, it was addressing a complex set of problems. We can surmise that the nominees in this category by 1971 could no longer appropriately be called cartoons, but the reasons for the change were not merely a desire to choose a broader term. Moreover, even if the reasons were this simple, we would still be left without an explanation of why the term “cartoon” had held sway for so long. Not only were insti-tutions like the International Animated Film Association

(ASIFA) and the National Film Board (NFB) of Canada supporting a variety of forms that made noncartoon animation harder to ignore, but when the 1970s began there were scarcely any proper cartoons left to celebrate.4 Throughout the 1960s American studios that had once produced works like Gerald McBoing Boing (Bobe Cannon, 1950) and Duck Amuck (Chuck Jones, 1952) either shed their animation divisions or closed entirely (see Maltin 274–77, 306–08, 321–22, 342–43). Only television studios and Disney were producing anything like cartoons. The same year that AMPAS changed its language, Stanley Cavell published his second book of philosophy, The World Viewed. It was both a work of film theory and a continuation of Cavell’s other concerns about ordinary language, skepticism, and art. Cavell was partly driven to write about cinema by a conviction that movies, as a medium that turned the neutral recording process of photography into a populist art form, had interesting things to say about problems to which he had gestured in his first book, Must We Mean What We Say? (1969). For Cavell it was not a given or a necessity that photographic representation would give rise to a popular art form, but the fact that it had happened made movies important to study as an art form (Cavell, World Viewed 14–15)—it made the movies what they are. To make his case for what makes the movies significant, Cavell provides a basic definition of them as “automatic world projections” (World Viewed 72). He arrives at this definition under the influence of Erwin Panofsky and Andre Bazin, who (with others like Siegfried Kracauer) can be said to form a tradition of realist film theory. Re-alist film theorists locate film’s essential property as an art in its reliance on the photographic camera’s ability to mechanically capture the world in front of it. Particular accounts vary, but the overriding theme of these theories is that the camera places us within a relation to “real-ity” not forthcoming in the other arts. As Noël Carroll has noted, Cavell forms the last major act of realist film theory (9). One might say that after Cavell it was no longer desirable to put such faith in the camera. One reason for this is that such faith in the camera seems to disqualify any nonphotographic moving image from being film art. (As if to confirm this suspicion, Cavell’s book contained no references to animation at all—either to any specific cartoons or to animation’s in-strumental possibility.) With the growing academicization of film theory, obvious counterexamples were difficult to

Ryan Pierson 19

ignore. Douglas Lackey, reviewing the work in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, uses this point as his opening objection: “First of all, Cavell’s claims, and Panofsky’s and Bazin’s, do not apply to animation or to abstract films” (271). Alexander Sesonske, in the Georgia Review, makes Mickey Mouse a central challenge to Cavell’s theory: in the case of Mickey, unlike such movie stars as Humphrey Bogart, the camera’s automatic capture of reality simply has no place in any explanation of his appeal (563–64). Reality is nowhere to be found. In animation the record-ing apparatus supposed to guarantee reality is perverted to capture things that never existed (and never could exist). The problem of animation is intended not only for Cavell but for the people he is citing. Any theorist who proposes photography as the essence of film will run into this problem. Animation’s place in the general objection to realist film theory is one obvious example among many. As the point being made only concerns film’s instrumental basis, there is little of the same need to speak of specific examples of cartoons as there is of specific feature films. It is enough to mention Mickey, Popeye, and so on (or some abstract films, as Lackey does with Hans Richter and Eggeling) to get the gist of the argument. Animation works as a placeholder for a more general theoretical neglect of manipulation or artifice in filmmaking. Reality, the objection goes, is not so essential to cinema as it seems to be. Lackey mentions nothing in particular about cartoons, choosing to point out that Cavell’s use of the word “ontology” should apply to all possible films—not just the narrow set of Hollywood talk-ies he is valuing. Sesonske makes the point quite bluntly, using language that purposely inverts Cavell’s descriptions of photographic ontology:

Neither these lively creatures nor their actions ever existed until they were projected on the screen. Their projected world exists only now, at the moment of projection—and when we ask if there is any feature in which it differs from reality, the answer is, “Yes, every feature.” Neither space nor time nor the laws of nature are the same. There is a world we experience here, but not the world—a world I know and see but to which I am nevertheless not present, yet not a world past. (World Viewed 563–64, original emphasis)

Cavell was given a chance to respond to Sesonske’s objection and redact (or significantly revise) the place of photography’s relation to reality in his theory of film. But instead Cavell uses Sesonske’s example to defend his photographic ontology. He does this by first splitting the

intended force of the animation objection into two types of examples: momentary manipulations of feature films (like effects, painted sets, and editing) and cartoons. The former examples, Cavell maintains, count as acknowledg-ments of the photographic apparatus and so confirm his theory (World Viewed 195–99). The latter examples disown the specificities of photography and thus simply do not count as movies. Cavell then offers a set of general remarks intended to distinguish cartoons from films (167–73). Cavell’s second move, the claim that cartoons are not movies, seems a bizarre contention. Yet a realist project like Cavell’s is not so opposed to a serious investigation of animation as it may appear to be. Separating cartoons from movies allows Cavell to maintain his commitment to a photographic ontology and at the same time calls forth an idea of animation that for decades fit very comfortably with the idea that cartoons were not movies: “[Sesonske’s remarks] do not prove that my claims are false except on the assumption that cartoons are not movies. . . . But on my assumption (which I no doubt should have made explicit) that cartoons are not movies, these remarks about their conditions of existence constitute some ex-planation about why they are not movies” (World Viewed 168, original emphasis). Note that Cavell does not say “animation lacks a true cinematic ontology” or some-thing similarly worded to call attention to differences of instrumental basis. Instead, he retains the connotations of two specific instances of film’s technological use, with their respective conventions and examples. Even when he gives an apparently ontological definition of cartoons as “animated world projections” (173), it is not intended to be a simple differentiation of instrumental basis. In-stead he draws distinctions in criticism between notable features of feature films and notable features of cartoons. Ontology, for Cavell, is a matter of the historical significance of a medium. That significance, he claims, can only be defined by selectively noting what instances of film thus far have been significant—which means doing criticism. He states in his defense of a photographic ontology: “The common appeal to technological properties is caused in part by a sense that the sheer power of film is unlike the power of the other arts. I share this sense, and I agree that this power is essentially related to film’s technology. But the aesthetic role of this technology is [not] specified by studying it apart from its specific achievements in signifi-cant films” (164, original emphasis). Cavell’s point is that, in defining an ontology of film, one needs to begin with

20 Stanley Cavell at the Cartoon’s Demise

a particular corpus of significant films, knowing full well that what counts as a “significant film” can never be fully agreed upon and that definitions can change over time (see also Cavell, “Music Discomposed”). Against a more broadly inclusive definition of film, Cavell contends:

The declaration of film’s essence I had heard most frequently was that it consisted of “light and movement.” That seems the natural, the only, answer to the isolated and persistent question, “What is the essence of the medium of film?” Since the answer seems to me more or less empty, I take the question to be more or less the wrong question to ask. In particular, I have seen no objects consisting essentially of light and movement (and essentially of nothing else) that have struck me as having the force of art. And since the objects of film I have seen which do strike me as having the force of art all incontestably use moving pictures of live persons and real things in actual places, I began my investigation by asking what role reality plays in this art. (World Viewed 164–65, original emphasis)

Cavell’s attraction to realist film theory is defined not by any apparent a priori standard but by an explanatory force it seems to hold over what has made a group of films so powerful. As Cavell puts it, the photographic presentation of reality onscreen is an “automatism,” but automatism in his terms has a dual meaning. It refers first to the automatic nature of the photographic process: what makes photog-raphy a unique development in the history of art is the absence of the human hand in its creation. Second, the term means a set of conventions that collectively make up an art form: historically variable standards by which artists practice their art as it is understood at any given point in time (Cavell, World Viewed 101–08). Recent interest has been piqued in Cavell’s concept of automatisms as a way to talk about medium specificity across the arts in a more variable way than essentialism allows (see especially Krauss, “Voyage”; Rodowick, Virtual Life), and the concept of automatisms is important in the way it brings out the unfixed nature of cinema’s history and future that Cavell emphasizes (see World Viewed 60–62, among other places). But the idea of automatism as conventions offers nothing as yet about why he emphasizes the camera over other possible automatisms. Cavell argues that the camera’s automatism has been special in defining the particular power of the movies (“the sense that the sheer power of film is unlike the power of the other arts”). Though the subtitle of The World Viewed, Reflections on the Ontology of Film, is a tribute to Bazin, “ontology of film” more specifically means “power of the movies.”5

If we consider realist film theory as relying on a notion of photographic representation as a power that moving pictures as such may or may not make use of (rather than something like a natural affinity or an a priori standard), the motivations for Cavell’s remarks on cartoons become more clear. Like such realists as Bazin, Kracauer, and Panofsky, Cavell is at least as interested in criticism as he is in theory—or, better put, in a kind of theory that emerges from acts of criticism. It is exactly this imperative to criticism that drives Cavell’s notes on cartoons. Cavell does not flatly claim that cartoons aren’t movies and move on; following this claim is a carefully presented set of critical remarks that attempt to describe an ontology of cartoons’ power. When he remarks on unified tendencies of animation, he does so with the aim of keeping animation separate from photography as well as with the aim of describing what makes animation special. This means isolating the features that make particular examples in the history of animation worth talking about. For the body of work familiar to Cavell, that overwhelmingly means American cartoons. Cavell is effectively following another tradition of thinking, a set of consistencies in observations by critics and theorists that loosely make up a widely held idea of what cartoons were capable of doing and what made them interesting.6 These consistencies add up to what I shall call the plasmatic account of animation. I call it the plasmatic account because its most robust expression is found in Sergei Eisenstein’s concept of the plasmatic, a theoretical term developed in his notes on Disney. Eisenstein located the primary aesthetic significance of Disney’s practice in his figures’ particularly elastic quali-ties: horses’ necks and legs stretching, ocean waves sud-denly transforming into boxing gloves, characters who combine traits of multiple animals, and so on. These wonders are said to have the same essential attraction: “a being represented in drawing, a being of a definite form, a being which has attained a definite appearance, and which behaves like the primal protoplasm, not yet possessing a stable form and which, skipping along the rungs of the evolutionary ladder, attaches itself to any and all forms of animal existence” (21). Eisenstein identifies this attraction as the plasmatic: the “rejection of once-and-forever allotted form, freedom from ossification, the ability to dynamically assume any form” (21). As academic interest in animation has grown, plasmat-icness has been considered a major factor in a number of

Ryan Pierson 21

pleasures in a number of different kinds of animation as well as in animation in general.7 I want to focus, however, on historicizing these appeals as they arose out of critical observations made about American cartoons (in particu-lar, Disney’s early 1930s sound cartoons). A tradition of plasmaticness as describing the appeal of cartoons relies at least as much on the conventions and techniques of the “golden age” of animation (especially the fact that they were drawn and not, say, animated puppets in the vein of Ladislaw Starewicz) as it does on the more general fact that the cartoons were nonphotographic. What one finds across this tradition is an implicit agreement with Cavell’s claim: that cartoons were special precisely because they did things that the movies didn’t do.8

Along this line of thinking, cartoons emerge from a basis fundamentally different from that of traditional feature films (which require photographic techniques), and this basis in turn gives rise to an entirely different vo-cabulary of pleasures. Panofsky’s essay “Style and Medium in the Motion Picture” (from which Cavell directly draws many features of his own theory), even in its attempt to define the working materials of the film artist as “reality as such,” notes that cartoons do not fit the standard: “The cinema, with the exception of the animated cartoon . . . organizes material things and persons into a composition by the artist’s mind, by the actual manipulation of physical objects” (83). While Panofsky regards the painted sets of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari as avoiding the problem of reality, cartoons bypass that reality into an entirely new realm that seems to give cartoons an equally important (yet distinct) place in film history. Cartoons for Panofsky represent “a chemically pure distillation of cinematic possibilities” (75). The logic of the cartoon’s ability to “animate, that is to say, endow lifeless things with life,” gives it an ability to “[effect] a metamorphosis, and such a metamorphosis is wonderfully present in Disney’s animals, plants, thunderclouds, and railroad trains” (84).9 Cavell similarly characterizes the figures we find in cartoons as “animations, disembodiments, pure spirits,” as if the three were interchangeable (World Viewed 170). Two interconnected assumptions mobilize the plas-matic concept. First, cartoons carry an inherent promise (or sometimes a threat) of freedom from the physical laws of our world, and this promise is thought to be underwrit-ten by their difference from live-action movements. Second, the root of this appeal to the spectator is explained by reference to modes of belief or understanding that are

neither modern nor mature—modes that are, somehow, a persistence of things we believed in as children or gods to whom we appealed before modern science. Gilbert Seldes claims:

[S]omething in the form itself is a satisfaction to us. And that satisfaction, I think, is the childish one which the movie as a whole had from the beginning. . . . It is the pleasure in magic, in seeing the impossible happen. . . . The animated cartoon shows us in movement something naturally inert, and it is essentially the satisfaction of magic that we get out of it. (102)

Eisenstein celebrates Disney’s films in such a way that the sense of freedom in the animation goes hand in hand with an (historical and developmental) age before the onset of objective categories: “Disney (and it’s not acci-dental that his films are drawn) is a complete return to a world of complete freedom (not accidentally fictitious), freed from the necessity of another primal extinction” (2–3). Elsewhere he directly claims, “The very idea, if you will, of the animated cartoon is like a direct embodiment of the method of animism” (44). Cavell’s remarks follow these same assumptions. He claims to explain animation’s appeal in terms of its world being “animistic. There is, of course, no general problem of achieving conviction in such a world; it taps perhaps the most primitive convic-tions about the world” (World Viewed 169). Presumably, our willingness to see a world in anthropomorphic terms enables us to take cartoons as expressing emotions more simply and purely. The simplifications of childlike anthro-pomorphism set the stage for many other qualities Cavell finds in cartoons: “[Cartoon bodies are] totally subject to will, and perfectly expressive” (170), and “[c]artoon tenderness and loss is tenderness and loss maximized, or purified” (171), and so on. Cavell as a realist is paradoxically able to fit comfort-ably with the plasmatic tradition of cartoons because the two traditions can be said to follow the same style of considering ontology as power: a set of stylistic uses of a medium used in particularly significant ways. As such, the notions of freedom invoked by the idea of plasmat-icness are peculiarly suited to the form of cartoons and not necessarily the more general medium of animation. Plasmaticness is not guaranteed by the instrumental basis of animation but has to be used by the cartoonist in rela-tion to a set of conventions. Plasmaticness, somewhat like the question of “reality” for realists, operated as a theoreti-cal and a critical tool. It provided a means of explaining

22 Stanley Cavell at the Cartoon’s Demise

why the typical cartoon needed a different vocabulary of description than the typical feature film, a more or less unified means of explaining how the vocabulary fit together (i.e., why different features of cartoons needed each other), and a means for judging cartoon work and explaining instances of dissatisfaction with it. Panofsky criticizes Snow White for introducing uninterestingly rigid human figures (not coincidentally, animators relied heavily on rotoscoping to capture Snow White’s charac-ter) that fail to live up to the cartoon’s promise (83). For Eisenstein, Disney’s 1940s work lacked the appeal of the Silly Symphonies and fell from the free, anarchic, and comic to the “utilitarian—instructionally technical—‘thematically mature’—progressive” (64, original emphasis). Plasmaticness as a primarily comic form was an assur-ance that, unlike the real world, nothing was at stake. Any physical transformation could be taken back. (Compare Eisenstein: “Disney’s beasts . . . have the habit of stretch-ing and shrinking, of mocking their own form” [4] and Cavell: “[Horror movies] play upon the fear that cartoons laugh at—irreversible metamorphosis” [171].) A freedom from consequences determines the particular way in which impossible things are possible for cartoon forms. Recognizable figures easily overcome the limits of our own physical world in recognizable ways. Cel animation was peculiarly suited to these powers for two reasons. First, drawn lines, for the most part, have no texture of their own. Forms and spaces are not naturally suggested by lines and colors themselves but by artists putting them into combinations that suggest definite figures, and the space within a cartoon’s world is determined almost entirely by lines and colors. This gives a cartoon world a homogeneity and harmony in which it can make intuitive sense for a character to stretch his neck or for waves to turn into boxing gloves. (Part of the wonder in plasmaticness lies in the deceptive simplicity of such transformations.) Second, the dominance of cel anima-tion created an aesthetic homogeneity across cartoons as a whole, a more or less unified type of world in which these types of actions could take place. (Exceptions to this like George Pal’s Puppetoons and the Fleischer studio’s tabletop backgrounds are almost never mentioned as significant examples of cartoons.) The homogeneity of cel animation made for an easy transfer of qualities and expectations across diverse studios. These conditions—of cel animation as a homogeneous world and of a relative homogeneity of traits across cartoons—allowed for a

stable appeal of plasmaticness, a set of rules that made it possible to recognize cartoon characters as breaking our rules. Neither audiences nor astute critics nor animators had to make a new rulebook from scratch with every new cartoon. The technical-support automatisms of line drawings were made use of in significant ways to create convention automatisms of gags, anthropomorphic animals, image-sound relations that blurred diegetic sound with incidental music, and so on, allowing a spectator to partake in the pleasures of an animated world projection.10

But in the time of Cavell’s own writing the cartoon waned as the dominant form of animation when Cavell was writing, and so waned the shared set of technical and conventional bases that had once made plasmaticness so powerful. (The trend did not abate when Cavell’s remarks on cartoons were added to a new edition of The World Viewed in 1979.) With the rules of traditional cel anima-tion becoming apparent as one of many options in the animator’s vocabulary, it became more interesting to note the multiplicity of techniques that counted as animation rather than the vision of an impossible world. Early hints of this shift were already visible in the sensation caused by United Productions of America’s flatter, more modern-ist designs in the 1950s. UPA’s characters, backgrounds, and movement schemes emphasized sensory qualities of color and line over a unified impression of figures freely moving through a homogeneous space.11

UPA’s success with audiences and critics—the most notable since Disney (Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons 537)—was short-lived but prophetic. Independent animation, resisting the puerile comic associations of animation and with institutional backing from the newly formed ASIFA, capitalized on the looming economic anxiety over cartoons and made forcefully clear just how extensively animation as such did not need to depend on a comic mode, or a stable set of characters, or even drawing. With the decentering of cel drawing from animation came an implicit problem of defining animation more as closer to something we might call a series of automatic technique projections. In the United States this shift took two major forms. First was the new variety-program format of exhibiting animated shorts, which had its roots in a special ASIFA-sponsored exhibition at the Los Angeles County Mu-seum of Art (“Animation Show Slated”). The show was a resounding success and later became the International Tournée, an annual selection of animated shorts for lim-

Ryan Pierson 23

ited but nationwide theatrical exhibition in the United States (see Cohen). These programs saw themselves as representing the state of animation as a serious art and so made a point of showing several kinds of animated forms from several different countries—an implicit demonstra-tion that “animation” could not be summed up as any one technique (and certainly not as “cartoons”). Second was a new significance of mixing techniques of animation in a single film, effectively creating a kind of animation that refused to obey its own rules. This mixing can be most readily seen in a film largely credited with reviving (however briefly) popular inter-est in animation: George Dunning’s Yellow Submarine (1968).12 What I want to illustrate with this film is not that it single-handedly changed the way everyone thought about animation nor that its mixing of styles became a dominant aesthetic that replaced cartoons (it did neither). What’s important about Yellow Submarine is that, in its self-conscious assessment of the animator’s options before the spectator’s eyes, it makes sensually apparent a dwindling reliance on cartoon plasmaticness and a growing emphasis on technical diversity and visual novelty. As animation critic Michael Barrier noted in his devastating review of the film, its disjunctive heterogeneity of moments was a sign of everything that, by traditional cartoons’ standards, was wrong with the state of animation:

What’s happening on the screen is not animation in the classic sense—convincing movement—but design for design’s sake. The stiff, artificial animation is appropriate in that it never interferes with our awareness that we’re looking at brightly colored, often eccentric drawings. The visual effects are some-times arresting . . . but Yellow Submarine is a narcissistic peacock of a movie. . . . Its unprecedented deluge of artistic borrowings helps conceal its artistic poverty. (“Reviews” 38–39)

It also meant, conversely, that a whole new vocabulary of possibilities was being opened up against the restrictions of traditional cartoons, as the Los Angeles Times celebrated: “[Yellow Submarine] is a funny, fascinating, whiz-bang, untiringly inventive tour de force through everything that has mattered and glittered in the op art, pop art, art nouveau, way out, way in, cool, hard-edge, psychedelic, poster-style, mixed media world of graphics and design over the last decade or so. It is also a glossary of anima-tion techniques, including some perfected just for this film” (Champlin 33). Though the film frequently makes use of character transformations and transmogrifications, the emphasis

is on shifts in design rather than characters constructed to visually move as freely as possible. One moment from the film that clarifies this problem occurs in the vi-sual rendition of “Eleanor Rigby” early in the film. The film’s titular submarine sails across the drab cityscape of Liverpool, where various anonymous figures perform repetitive activities in the foreground. The figures are not line drawings but animations of newsprint photographs. In contrast to the Disney and Warner Bros. characters whose bodies never get in the way (where the medium of drawing gives rise to its own autonomous world), the whole point of “Eleanor Rigby’s” animation (shown through the figures’ newsprint texture) is that these fig-ures can’t move: they are all surface. Their movements are choppy and rigid, and deliberately so. They don’t look like moving people but like moving photographs. What’s appealing in these figures is not any freedom of move-ment they display (they resemble automatons, in keeping with the song’s subject matter of trapped souls) but the fact that such a crude switching of poses looks like it’s movement at all.13

Disney’s short A Symposium on Popular Songs (Bill Justice, 1962), ostensibly a more mainstream example, provides an even more extreme display of techniques colliding with each other—a framed series of songs in different musical genres (ragtime, country, etc.) whose differences are reflected in the visual style that animates each song. While a conventional-looking cartoon duck (Ludwig von Drake) introduces each song to loosely motivate it, the variety of styles is clearly the main at-traction. Every song, in fact, is presented in a radically different design, with multiple materials being used: paper cutouts, bits of string, and even vegetables are animated. No song looks like it could possibly belong in the same universe as any other song. The short is an anthology of techniques, a virtuosic display of what animation can do beyond cartoons. Cavell’s plasmatic account assumes our involvement in cartoons to turn on a childlike or primitive conviction in a world that operates according to animistic rules. As these examples clearly show, an impression of animation need not rely on such a world, or a “world” at all. Animated movement can even make a game out of separating its visual impressions from a coherent world in which they might belong. The heterogeneity of styles made newly apparent seems to have a different basis for its pleasures: a sensory basis rather than conviction in a world. While

24 Stanley Cavell at the Cartoon’s Demise

that conviction persists in many examples of animation today, it seems we can no longer take it for granted in the same way.

Cavell’s remarks on cartoons prove strange and narrow not because of what he says but because of when he says it. Both he and Sesonske lack a set of tools to address the transformations in animation taking place under their noses. Strictly plasmatically speaking, animating paper shapes or clay could not be different in kind from ani-mating a drawing. Any explanatory weight plasmaticness might carry to another animated form would be acciden-tal, subsuming the specificities of paper shapes or clay to a power that drawings already have. Cavell and Sesonske argued about cartoons when the history of animation could no longer be told solely through cartoons. To consider this history is to take seriously the problem that animation is not limited to any one technique. While this fact has always been trivially known, it acquired a particular significance and urgency with the demise of cartoons; animation as we understand it today is para-sitic upon this fact. Contemporary accounts that tend to collapse together questions of animation and digital manipulation, or animation and photographic indexical-ity, ignore precisely this fact. Such accounts implicitly rely on a history of animation wherein cel cartoons are simply replaced by CGI features and effects as the dominant form.14

While CGI and computer processes are clearly the most common forms of what we call animation today, they are not constitutive or exhaustively descriptive of it. As the crop of 2009 features—the puppets of Coraline (Henry Selick) and Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson), the cel drawings of The Secret of Kells (Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey) and The Princess and the Frog (Ron Clements and John Musker)—has recently made evident, there is a considerable stake in keeping diverse forms in play. While it’s tempting and useful to think of these films as resisting the pervasive force of computer animation (even as most of them use computers in the production process), they also make up a more complex and dynamic terrain of animation that has long been ungrounded.

About the Contributor

Ryan Pierson is a PhD candidate in the English department at the University of Pittsburgh. His dissertation investigates issues of percep-

tion in the history and aesthetics of animation. He has been published in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies and in Critical Quarterly.

Notes

A version of this essay was presented at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in March 2011. Thanks to my fellow panelists (Dan Bashara, Paul Flaig, and Scott Bukatman) and to the audience for thoughtful discussion and comments. Special thanks are due to Dan Morgan and Mal Ahern for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

1. The change of terminology is clear from the 1970 Academy Rules to the 1971 Rules. Compare pp. 17–18, section 18, both editions. Rule 4 in the 1970 edition states: “Short subjects may be submitted in two classifications: a) Cartoons, of 3000 feet or less, utilizing animation or other cartoon techniques as the basic medium of entertainment. b) Live action subjects of 3000 feet or less, utilizing live action tech-niques as the basic medium of entertainment.” Rule 3 in the 1971 edi-tion states: “An award shall be given for the best achievement in each of two classifications: a) Animated films of no more than 3000 35mm feet, or the equivalents in 70mm or 16mm, utilizing animation as the basic medium of entertainment. b) Live action films of no more than 3000 feet, or the equivalents in 70mm or 16mm, utilizing live action techniques as the basic medium of entertainment” (emphasis added).

2. See Charles Solomon, “Animation: Notes on a Definition,” Solomon, Art 9–10.

3. This is a rough summation of the features of the Hollywood cartoon that contributed to the “trivialization” of the form of ani-mation in opposition to live-action feature films accounted for in Thompson (see esp. 110–11).

4. The International Animated Film Association is typically ab-breviated according to its French name, the Association internationale du film d’animation (ASIFA). The group was formed shortly after the first animation festival in Annecy in 1960 (“What Does ASIFA Mean?” 1). The NFB’s animation division predates the formation of the ASIFA by ten years, already making it difficult to locate a clean split between an age of “cartoons” and an age of “animation,” but the NFB benefited greatly from the film festival structure and international prestige offered by the ASIFA. The two were engaged in a mutual relationship wherein the NFB had the resources to make the kinds of films the ASIFA valued, and the ASIFA enlarged the arena in which work from the NFB could be shown and celebrated.

5. This is heavily drawn from Carroll’s account of realist film theory in his essay “The Power of Movies.” Carroll notes that one key func-tion of the attribution of “realism” to a film, theoretically, “is meant to explain the power of movies” (78). Crucial for my purposes is the idea that a medium gains its significance from accounts of its power. Carroll, while self-consciously disregarding any attempt to explain the movies’ power with recourse to its material basis, nevertheless is drawn to certain significant features that not only make moving images into movies but are made possible by moving images and hence do follow a certain line of medium-specificity. Speaking of a “power of movies” rather than an “ontology of film” for Carroll can be an account of what makes film worth talking about in certain general ways without a priori assuming that film itself has any natural affinities or essential traits in a strong sense. I want to suggest that what draws Cavell to realist film theory is precisely that its “ontology of film,” in Cavell’s

Ryan Pierson 25

case and to varying degrees in other realists, is nothing but a “power of movies.” The notion of power is a significant relation between consis-tencies of aesthetic style and the instrumental basis of the medium in question. (Carroll is talking about a specific set of conventions worth explaining, what he calls “Hollywood International” [79].)

There are, of course, differences between the two invocations. For Carroll the “power” he wishes to explain is the mass appeal of movies, and he explains their appeal with the movies’ ability to tell stories with a clarity and immediacy not available to literature or opera. For the realists, film’s significance is instead related to the cultural significance of photography as a peculiarly modern kind of visual representation.

6. See Wells 10–18. While Wells does not baldly state that there is such a consistency in thinking about cartoons as I argue here, he draws on a number of critics and theorists more or less interchange-ably to construct a specific picture of what cartoons were thought to typically do. For a more European and politicized version of this tradition, see Leslie.

7. Some examples include Vivian Sobchack’s essays on Final Fan-tasy: The Spirits Within and WALL-E (“Final Fantasies,” “Animation,” respectively); Suzanne Buchan’s exploration of the Quay Brothers’ Street of Crocodiles, which argues that puppet animation relies on an appeal of “omnipotence,” a term taken from Michael O’Pray’s study of Eisenstein’s plasmaticness; Keith Broadfoot and Rex Butler’s argu-ment for a Deleuzian ontology of animation by way of plasmatic-ness; and Tom Gunning’s “Moving away from the Index,” which uses plasmaticness to describe a nonphotographic realism in which spectators can participate in the movements generated by animation and special effects.

8. By pointing out a plasmatic tradition across thinkers, I am positing something analogous to a tradition of realist film theory. By “tradi-tion” I mean a delineated group like one that Malcolm Turvey has specified as the “revelationist tradition” (of Jean Epstein, Bela Balazs, Dziga Vertov, and Kracauer—see Turvey, Doubting Visions). The term is essentially a heuristic tool for the purposes of historical and theoretical classification of shared claims, assumptions, and/or styles of thinking.

9. I rely here on the final version of Panofsky’s essay, first pub-lished in 1947. This is the version most heavily anthologized in film textbooks and the version that Cavell himself read. This version contains various expansions (like Panofsky’s added remarks on sound in Disney) and a reversal of his position on Caligari, at first praised as an expressionist masterpiece but later considered an aesthetic dead-end. For more on the history of Panofsky’s essay and Cavell’s debts to it, see Levin.

10. Sobchack makes a subtle endorsement of this point of plas-maticness’s specificity to certain techniques over others when she states her preference for Willis O’Brien’s King Kong, Jan Svankmeyer, and the Quay Brothers over protean figures (“Animation” 390–91). Sobchack explicitly states that the former examples, through their very imperfections of movement and design, make clear an effort to move, but it is equally significant that all her examples are puppet animation. What I take this to mean is that in the case of puppets it is difficult to appeal to the same pleasures of being unburdened by one’s body. The sight of moving puppets seems dictated more by the texture and materiality of their bodies than by lines of kinetic force running through them. With some rare exceptions in George Pal’s Puppetoons, puppet animators do not squash and stretch their characters. If puppets had become the dominant animation form rather than drawings on celluloid sheets, animation theory would likely look very different.

11. Michael Barrier’s Hollywood Cartoons partly attributes the death of the cartoon’s aesthetic golden age to the rise of design principles over principles of convincing character movement. While he does not discuss noncel animation techniques or nonstudio animation, he points to an important decline in the reliance on plasmaticness as it had been a defining trait of earlier cartoons.

12. See Maltin 346–47; Solomon, Enchanted Drawings 259–60.13. Another symptom of this emphatic change is that the film’s

designer, graphic artist Heinz Edelman, designed the characters of the Beatles with an eye toward angular shapes and distorted design rather than with a specific eye toward how the characters would smoothly move. This caused weeks of problems for the animators in getting proportions and timing straight. See Warga.

14. Krauss makes this assumption explicit when she claims that Cavell’s remarks on cartoons were made irrelevant by “the radical restructuring of [animation] with the advent of video and computers” (“The Rock” 13). Such techniques were being experimented with, notably in television graphics, but were not dominant in the 1970s to a degree that they were radically restructuring animation. To account for this lack of dominance Krauss resorts to teleologically describing video and computers at the time as “the historical fate of the medium that was even then appearing on the horizon” (13n11).

Works Cited

“Animation Show Slated at Museum.” Los Angeles Times 17 Nov. 1965: C15.

Barrier, Michael. Hollywood Cartoons. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.———. “Reviews: Where the Yellow Went.” Funnyworld 12 (1970):

38–39.Broadfoot, Keith, and Rex Butler. “The Illusion of Illusion.” The Il-

lusion of Life: Essays on Animation. Ed. Alan Cholodenko. Sydney: Powers Books, 1991. 263–98.

Buchan, Suzanne. “The Animated Spectator: Watching the Quay Brothers’ ‘Worlds.’” Animated “Worlds.” Ed. Suzanne Buchan. Eastleigh, UK: John Libbey Publishing, 2006. 15–38.

Carroll, Noël. “The Power of Movies.” Theorizing the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 78–93.

Cavell, Stanley. “Music Discomposed.” Must We Mean What We Say? Updated ed. 1969; Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 180–212.

———. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. En-larged ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1979.

Champlin, Charles. “Beatles and Blue Meanies.” Los Angeles Times 10 Nov. 1968: Los Angeles Times West 30–33.

Cholodenko, Alan. “The Animation of Cinema.” Semiotic Review of Books 18.2 (2008): 1–10.

Cohen, Joan. “The International Tournée of Animation—Talking with Prescott Wright.” The American Animated Cartoon: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Danny Peary and Gerald Peary. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1980. 290–95.

Doane, Mary Ann. “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity.” differences 18.1 (2007): 128–52.

Eisenstein, Sergei. Eisenstein on Disney. Trans. Alan Upchurch, ed. Jay Leyda. London: Methuen, 1988.

Gunning, Tom. “Moving away from the Index.” differences 18.1 (2007): 29–52.

26 Stanley Cavell at the Cartoon’s Demise

Krauss, Rosalind. “The Rock: William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection.” October 92 (2000): 3–35.

———. “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. London: Thames and Hudson, 2000.

Lackey, Douglas. “Reflections on Cavell’s Ontology of Film.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 32.2 (1973): 271–73.

Leslie, Esther. Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant-Garde. London: Verso, 2002.

Levin, Thomas Y. “Iconology at the Movies: Panofsky’s Film Theory.” Yale Journal of Criticism 9.1 (1996): 27–55.

“The Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents its first inter-national animated film exhibition . . .” Exhibition program. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2–5 Dec. 1965.

Maltin, Leonard. Of Mice and Magic. Rev. ed. 1980; New York: Plume Books, 1987.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2002.

Panofsky, Erwin. “Style and Medium in the Motion Picture.” The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History. Ed. Angela Della Vacche. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2003. 69–84.

Rodowick, D. N. “An Elegy for Theory.” October 122 (2007): 91–109.———. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007.Rules for the Conduct of the Balloting, 43rd Annual Academy Awards, for

Achievements during 1970. Los Angeles: Academy of Motion Pic-ture Arts and Sciences, 1970.

Rules for the Conduct of the Balloting, 44th Annual Academy Awards, for Achievements during 1971. Los Angeles: Academy of Motion Pic-ture Arts and Sciences, 1971.

Seldes, Gilbert. “Disney and Others.” New Republic 8 June 1932: 101–02.

Sesonske, Alexander. “The World Viewed.” Georgia Review 28.4 (1974): 561–70.

Sobchack, Vivian. “Animation and Automation, or, the Incredible Effortfulness of Being.” Screen 50.4 (2009): 375–91.

———. “Final Fantasies: Computer Graphics Animation and the (Dis)Illusion of Life.” Buchan, Animated “Worlds” 171–82.

Solomon, Charles. Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989.

———, ed. The Art of the Animated Image: An Anthology. Los Angeles: AFI, 1987.

Thompson, Kristin. “Implications of the Cel Animation Technique.” The Cinematic Apparatus. Ed. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath. New York: St. Martin’s, 1980. 106–20.

Turvey, Malcolm. Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.

Warga, Wayne. “‘Submarine’ Departs Tradition.” Los Angeles Times 1 Nov. 1968: F19.

Wells, Paul. Animation and America. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2002.“What Does ASIFA Mean?” Graffiti: Special Animation Art Festival Is-

sue (1981): 1.