Abstract:
This paper proposes Adolfo Bioy Casares’ influential novella La invención de Morel (Morel’s Invention 1940), generally regarded as a metaphor of cinema, as fundamentally a singular metaphor of animation. Moreover, the paper will connect the novel with H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) and Anthony Lucas’ animated film The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello (2005), focusing on their fascination with the re-fabrication of nature. The paper proposes the special association between animation and invention and argues and demonstrates a critical idea for animation studies: (re)animation is the seminal subject of fiction. Biographical statement: María Lorenzo Hernández teaches animation at the Department of Design, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (Spain). In 2006 she obtained her PhD in Fine Arts. She presented papers at the 19th SAS Conference in Portland (2007) the National PCA/ACA Conference in San Francisco (2008), and the 21st SAS Conference in Atlanta (2009). The current paper continues her line of research connecting literature and animation that began with her ‘Visions of a Future Past. Ulysses 31, a Televised Re-interpretation of Homer’s Classic Myth’, published in Animation Studies, the SAS e-journal. She is also an animation filmmaker.