Abstract: T
he digital character of film production constitutes a new set of social relations and a new commodity fetishism able to render the real and fantasy worlds for costs far less than photorealist film. I will compare the social relations of animation production before the digital turn, in the works of Norman MacLaren and George Griffin, to James Cameron’s Avatar. Drawing on Marx, and on Deleuze’s method of linking perceptions, affections and actions, I will focus on how spacetime is gendered in animation in these works to form a specifically filmic form of consciousness through identification in kinship systems.Biographical statement: Mark Bartlett is the North American editor of animation: an interdisciplinary journal, a member of the Manipulated Moving Image Cluster at the University for the Creative Arts, UK, and an Associate Lecturer at The Open University. He is completing a book on Stan Vanderbeek, and curating two exhibitions on him to open in the US in 2011. Bartlett’s work focuses on the intersections between technology, aesthetics, epistemology, and sociopolitical interpretation. His paper derives from a resistance to the technological determinism that often leads to the erasure of the social and political aspects in film studies.