Abstract: W
ith reference to selected animated features and shorts from the past sixty years, and focusing mainly on Frank Miller’s graphic novel related film, this paper is questioning the ever-growing impact of animation techniques on representation and story-telling. The emphasis is laid on the interaction between live actors, their personae, their fictional existence, their digital parts, and the animated environment they are immersed into. To some extent, Miller reinvents the cinema of the origin; or does he barely pay homage to it in some original yet doomed aesthetic option?Biographical statement: Pierre FLOQUET teaches English, and is associate professor at IPB, Bordeaux University. He wrote his PhD thesis in 1996 on linguistics applied to cinema, focusing on Tex Avery's comic language. Since then, he has organized several Avery retrospectives and conferences, and been a juror at festivals. He has widened his interests to live-action cinema, participating in books and journals both in France and abroad. He edited CinémAnimationS (2007), and published Le Langage comique de Tex Avery in 2009. This paper continues research on characters in animation (two related publications so far), to be developed in a focus on Burton’s animated female characters.