14 - The Worries of the World(s): Cartoons and Cinema
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 February 2021
Summary
Abstract
In recent years, Cinema and Media Studies scholars have hotly debated animation's connection to “the world”; its capacity to fabricate “worlds”; as well as the relationship between singular and plural conceptions of this concept. The problems of worlding in animation are further complicated by parallel debates about what we mean by the term “animation” to begin with. Suzanne Buchan, Paul Wells, and Maureen Furniss, among others, have made clear that this broad term encompasses a wide variety of media practices. Though these may share movement as a common denominator, they differ profoundly from each other. At the same time as these scholars call for greater attention to specific media practices (e.g. for distinctions between 2D and 3D animation, or hand-drawn and computer animation), other scholars, including Lev Manovich and Alan Cholodenko, have argued instead that animation should be further generalized to encompass all cinema as an umbrella term. In the course of this essay, I will attempt not only to map the contours of cinema and media theory's animated debates about worlding, but also why the stakes of these debates become particularly prevalent at specific historical moments.
Keywords: Child's world, Alternative Reality, Political Imagination, Plasmaticness, Play
The Problem of “Animation”
In the last few years, Cinema and Media Studies scholars have hotly debated animation's connection to and investment in the physical world and lived reality (related but not synonymous terms). At stake, in part, is the political, aesthetic, and affective significance of this form's fabricated and sometimes imaginary worlds, as well as the relationship between singular and plural conceptions of the very idea of “world.”
Yet, within a longer history of the study of moving images, many scholars have tended to ignore animation as an inconsequential, even childish, area of practice. Writing in 1982 of early film animation, Donald Crafton suggests, “Film distributors (and alas, until recently, film collectors) tended to regard these cartoons as material better suited for the dustbin than for any other repository. More recently, film scholars have tended to ignore early animation or to condemn it to the domain of film-buffism” (Crafton 1982, 4-5).
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- World Building Transmedia Fans Industries , pp. 253 - 271Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2017