Animation: Body and mind
Warner Bros, Polar Express (Film Still), 2004
Our ideas of the world and how we experience it relies much on the way we animate. To understand this we need to look at how one animates in the first place and the importance of imagination and emotion in our experiences. How we, as the spectator, are as crucial as the image itself, and how animation impacts us every day.
To understand animation, we must first understand images as vehicles of transformation. Images are dynamic forces with a dynamic effect. We might think of an image as anything visual, as a picture, or as a mental image. What is also important to distinguish, is that the ‘image’ «is defined not by its mere visibility but by its being invested, by the beholder, with a symbolic meaning and kind of mental ‘frame’».[1] Images have a certain power of effect on the beholder. Images make us move, literally or figuratively. They make us cry, fear, laugh, and love. They thereby have the ability to transform us as people.
For the image to contain such power, it must have a spectator. And this spectator must be able to animate, or bring to life, the image as if it were a living thing. How this spectator invests him- or herself in the image, is guided by their place in history and their cultural upbringing. The ways how we read images and image perception are different from person to person. Our ideas of the world, and our ideas about ourselves, will influence how we animate. The image will then come to life in different ways depending on different spectators.
Carpenter, John, Halloween (Film Still), 1978
We can see this clearly in the horror genre. The effect fear can have on a person is to imbed itself in our minds and conjure up fantasies or hallucinations of the source of that fear. Whatever monster we see on the screen (often being a form of animation itself), takes hold of us, and lives within us. We animate the idea of the monster, willingly or unwillingly, long after the movie is finished. For some, this animation is strong and visual while for others it is short-lived and unreal. For some, it might not even happen, as not everybody is affected by this genre.
On one hand, images require material media while they are also actualized in our bodies and minds. We incorporate images in ourselves and our desires, our mannerisms, and our memories and perceptions. Then we carry the image, we give it existence. It is only in this act of projecting ourselves onto the picture that we in a sense draw the image out from its medium and the image comes alive. It then lives somewhere between the spectator and the external world. In this sense, we feel that the image, in this case, the monster, might exist. Our minds trick us into believing. What happens when we come into contact with those entities, such as a horror film, is an act of animation.
Cartoons, from Teletubbies to Frozen, even to animated films with age restrictions, are something the majority of us have brought with us in our luggage from our early childhood days and throughout our lives. Here the lines on the screen are being manipulated and moved in a way that seems more or less life-like. The success of the animation relies on where in the spectrum of ‘realness’ it lies. Too mechanical, and we expose the illusion for what it is; a two- dimensional drawing. Too real, and it falls into the uncanny valley, making it uncomfortable and too close to home. Animation companies try to balance this, but as technology develops they are continuing to get nearer and nearer to the line that «can instill horror or can bring about laughter».[2] From the first animated film til today’s digital society, we have become accustomed to the animated figure. What was considered shocking and disturbing for us a decade ago no longer affects us. Therefore the uncanny valley is pushed further and further toward the real.
Encyclopædia Britannica, graph of uncanny valley, 2023
We are also animated whilst we animate. Going back to the example of the horror movie, we can learn more about how we react, and how we act on that reaction. Provided that we are capable of animating the monster, we project while we are projected. Children are especially capable of doing so, as their minds are still so open to impressions. Our minds conjure up a fake reality, based on the story in the movie. It blurs the real from the fantasy, the physical from the imaginary. This idea in our head that the monster will come and take us, creates a physical reaction in our body. We start to sweat, our heart rate goes up, and sometimes we hyperventilate, etc. This is when we are being animated by the animation. The monster only exists in our heads (and in the movie), and it is only us animating this monster that makes it alive in the first place.
The act of animation includes a wide variety of concepts. It is the way we bring something to life. Whether that is through images or ideas, it happens to all of us and makes our lives richer because of it. From horror films to cartoon animation, we shape our lives around them. Or rather, they shape us.
[1] Belting, Hans. Likeness and Presence. A History of the Image Before the Era of Art. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago & London, 1994.
[2] Eisenstein, Sergei. Eisenstein on Disney. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1986.