[-empyre-] Greetings!

[Timothy Murray]

>Thanks, Tom, for providing such a precise summary of your theory of 
>the movement of animation.

Could you say a little more about "the multiplanar image" and also 
elaborate on how it anticipates the digital image?

Thanks so much.

Tim

>Hello,
>
>Since Renate has already introduced me, I am happy to bypass 
>self-introduction and throw out some ideas about animation.
>
>
>Since my research on animation is centred on movement, I thought 
>maybe to begin with a few words about what I think is at stake in 
>looking at animation in terms of movement.  When I begun writing 
>about animation, I was surprised at how rarely people have actually 
>explored the question of movement in animation.  We often sing the 
>praises of movement in animation, and it is pretty much assumed that 
>the attractiveness of animation comes of movement.  Yet a sustained 
>discussion of movement has been largely avoided.  This is a shame 
>because I think that animation creators think first and foremost 
>with movement.
>
>Discussions of animation usually dwell on image (formal) analysis or 
>the 'illusion of life.'  The illusion-of-life approach calls 
>attention to the potential for an experience of the uncanny that 
>arises when something that is supposed to be inorganic or inert 
>comes to life.  In other words, in both approaches, there is a 
>general bias that animation is a matter of adding movement to images 
>or things that are already out there.  Movement is treated as 
>secondary to image, as a supplement to it.
>
>But in animation (as in cinema) movement is something in itself. And 
>moving images are not illusions of movement.  They are real 
>experiences of movement.  In other words, if we rely on a 
>real/unreal or real/illusion divide, we won't get very far in 
>understanding animation (or cinema or video games).
>
>Once we give priority to movement, it becomes clear that we can't 
>confine movement in animation to character animation.  In fact, I 
>think that too much attention has been focused on character 
>animation rather than the force of the moving image. If we begin 
>with the force of the moving image rather than with the gaps between 
>frames, we see that animation is as much an art of compositing as it 
>is of animating bodies.  In fact, I would argue that animation gives 
>priority to compositing (the movement between layers within images 
>that then becomes spread across frames) over character animation 
>(based on the movement between or across images).  In this respect, 
>because it is based on what I like to call the multiplanar image, 
>so-called traditional animation anticipates the dynamics of the 
>digital image.  This is especially true of limited cel animation.
>
>It is precisely for this reason that animation can frequently said 
>be subsuming cinema today-as Lev Manovich has famously noted. But 
>this is not a matter of the formal properties of animation (as is 
>often supposed in new media studies) but of an 'animetic machine' 
>that harnesses a specific potential of the moving image.
>
>It is on this basis that I think we can understand both the ubiquity 
>of animation today and the crucial role that it plays in media mix.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Tom
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>empyre forum
>empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>http://www.subtle.net/empyre


-- 
Timothy Murray
Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
A. D. White House
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853