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Filmic Consciousness, Gendering Spacetime, and the Rupture of Animation
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.
Preconstituted panel The papers on this panel will explore and elaborate key theoretical approaches to animation in terms of death.
Death is a subject which has not only never had a panel dedicated to it at SAS conferences (as far as research reveals), it has not even had more than a few papers dedicated to it at them. Yet this subject, so foregrounded in and by not only cinema but Western culture as to form one of the two privileged foci of both, is likewise, it will be claimed, privileged by animation. Panellists: Alan Cholodenko (chair), Janeann Dill, Michael Dow, Freida Riggs (see individual entries for details on each presentation).
Lines of convergence: the rhetoric, materiality and disciplinarity of the line in defining ‘animation’
Abstract: A
lthough definitions of animation begin from an affirmation of its diversity, the rhetorical force of the dominant definitional tropes of ‘line’ and ‘drawing’ raises the problem of material specificity. This is what Norman McLaren does in his reflections on his own (canonical) ‘definition’ of animation as ‘not the art of drawings that move but the art of movements that are drawn’, insofar as ‘static objects, puppets and human beings can all be animated without drawings…’ This paper will argue that the rhetorical effects of ‘the line’ recur, unacknowledged and problematically, within recent quasi-ontological definitions of animation as the ‘animatic’.
Biographical statement: Richard Stamp teaches cultural studies, film and philosophy at Bath Spa University. He is interested in ‘theorising’ animation in ways that combine an attention to the diverse materiality of animated media and the (inter)disciplinary formations of ‘animation studies’. The present paper is part of a project on ‘thinking through’ animation that takes issue both with dominant trends in ‘animatic’ theory and with recent so-called ‘pragmatic’ rejections of it. He is one of the editors of Film-Philosophy, an Open Humanities e-journal, and has recently co-edited work on Slavoj Zizek and Jacques Rancière.
“The Three Ps in Coraline: Postfeminist, Psychoanalytic and Postmodernist approaches to the Animated Film”Abstract: This 
paper contributes to the study of methodologies and theories in animation studies because it offers an extremely complex and alternative approach to animated narratives. This paper is focused exclusively on the theoretical underpinnings of the narrative structure, which makes of Coraline (2009) a very extraordinary movie. In addition, research encourages animators to emphasize the convergence of a strong theoretical narrative structure with modern animation techniques.
Biographical statement: As a woman currently working in animation, this study contributes to my future because it is strongly related to my current area of research. As I have analyzed in Coraline, the role of female figures as protagonists in the animation industry is dominated by a male presence in both the production of the film and in the characters on the screen. I believe Coraline is exceptional because it is one of the few movies emphasizing the female perspective in animation. I am developing a short animated narrative as my thesis project for getting my MFA at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. This movie combines hand-drawn film animation, HD video and 3D animation. My thesis includes additional research focused on the integration of old traditional media with digital media and its meaning on current animation. In addition, I work as a teaching assistant at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale for the undergraduate students in 3D animation. In the future I would like to combine teaching with working as a technical director in the animation industry.
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.
