Abstract
This issue starts with an article on a major proponent – some would say prophet – of new media practices as they emerged in the mid-to late 1980s. Zbigniew Rybczyński’s innovatory body of works, including animation, have inspired generations of artists and he is firmly established in the canons of experimental filmmaking. His technical virtuosity is wide-reaching, evidenced by the international award-sweeping Tango, including the Oscar for Animated Short Film in 1983. This was the year he emigrated to the USA (and he has since moved back and forth across he Atlantic), where his musical methods and experimentation made a significant contribution to the emergent visual culture of music video. However, it is his earlier work with non-digital filmmaking that is the subject of Olga Bobrowska and Michał Bobrowski’s ‘Overcoming the Limits: Zbigniew Rybczyński’s “Celluloid Period” Revisited’. They begin by setting the tone in the introduction that draws analogies between the 2024 Annecy Festival’s inclusion of AI-generated animation and the audience furore that was caused by Rybczyński’s Tango (that won the 1981 Grand Prix) as not being an animation film. After reviewing the attention the artist and his works received after that film and his emigration from Poland, their aim is to contextualize earlier work made in what they call his ‘Polish period’ of analogue filmmaking in the 1970s political Zeitgeist period. Setting out a clear analytical methodology and rationale, they propose three temporal periods of the artists’ creative development, to focus on the first one of the title. Through close analyses of films, evaluation of their technical finesse and aesthetic qualities, they also provide insights into Rybczyński’s conceptual visions and how they translate into the films, all the while reminding us of the constraints and socio- and film-political contexts of the times.
A major contribution of the article, in English, that they modestly call a ‘surplus value’, is their referencing of Polish film criticism and writings on Rybczyński. The authors inform us that anthropological perspectives have a strong tradition in Polish film scholarship ‘where experimental cinema is approached as a cultural testimony or as a record of a particular civilisational moment’; a model worth emulating in film scholarship. In this way they have written a comprehensive article on a singular artist and, in a return to the controversy of Tango, they also provide some technical details on how it was made.
The development of film philosophy since the early the 20th century arose from notable contributions and interventions from Hugo Münsterberg, Rudoph Arnheim, André Bazin and Béla Balász, among others (Lucy Bolton’s forthcoming (2026) The Feminist Film Philosophy Reader will expand this list considerably). Its momentous rise in the 1980s had significant consequences for our understanding of film and the spectator’s experience of it. Our next two articles engage with aspects of and debates around animated documentary; both work with philosophical concepts and audience experiences afforded by animation of a spectrum of recorded realism and subjectivity.
The first article is related to Rybczyński’s technical feats with celluloid and the medium-specific controversy around Tango, yet with an interest transcending the limitations of photoindexicality in terms of animated embodiment and documentary filmmaking. In their ‘Animating Embodied Memories: An Inquiry into Medium-Specificity of Animation in Greatness Code (2020)’ Xiangying Chen and Nur Zaidi Bin Azraai work with Gotham Chopra’s live action animation hybrid sports documentary shorts series to explore how the animation elements that augment and enhance the live-action film can embody multimodal lived bodily experiences through what they term ‘haptic palimpsest’ that temporally references layers of history. Their multidisciplinary methods include specific visual methodologies, embodied Film Studies and Phenomenology, and Neurosciences. Their investigations take them through discussions of digital and non-virtual materiality, kinaesthetic experiences and abstract animation, and they pay attention to sound in the films. Working specifically with two episodes, and invoking conceptual metaphor theory and embodied simulation theory, they turn to the audience’s reception and how the film communication and sensory images of the athletes’ bodies and the animated function are framed in neuroscientific research. Debates around animation, representation and documentary serve a discussion of the visualization of memory and, throughout the article, specific moments in the films and their emotional qualities are described in detail to explicate the reasoning for the analyses of animated embodiment.
In ‘Outer Worlds: Animated Documentary and Critical Realism’, Marc Bosward’s central philosophical premise is that of critical realism (CR) to position animated documentary in response to what he calls ‘the current crisis of fidelity and representation’ (to which digitally created animation contributes as well). After a critical review of relevant scholarship, he elaborates on the relatively recent development of the philosophical concept to set up his analyses of documentary animation to propose their capacity for transitive knowledge of intransitive objects. Using a method metaphorically explained through properties of an iceberg with reality at many levels – the objectivist strand is above the water line, with the depths under water unobserved – Bosward calls on two fallacies (errors in reasoning): the aesthetic and the epistemic, and engages in theoretical debates around truth, subjectivity and ontology, emphasizing the social aspect of CR in terms of production of knowledge, suggesting an intersubjectivity at play in viewing the well-suited animated documentaries of his analyses that test his proposals. These concepts are brought to bear on language and representation and on what is there, and not there, in the world, and how animation can enable this, as well as how imagination is implicated when we move from the empirical towards stratified realities. His theoretical framework expands and interrelates as the article develops its argument that animation operates as a transitional object, between imagination and the outside world: that it is transphenomenal. As he concludes, Bosward reminds us of the urgency of visibility, of who (and with AI, what) is deciding what we can and can’t see, and what is seen and not seen, in power and social structures: in the concomitant ethics of this, documentary can be a powerful mediator.
The next two articles share an interest in what are termed classic films; one from the capitalist Classic Hollywood period and four from China made in the state-run studio in the 1960s during the People’s Republic of China’s Maoist revolutionary period.
At the mention of Chuck Jones’ (1953) short Duck Amuck, many of us recall in our mind’s eye the capers and increasingly sado-masochistic antics of Daffy and his animation stand creator/nemesis (Bugs) revealed only at the end: ‘Ain’t I a stinker?’ As the absurdity and impossibility of his travails increase, we feel for Daffy (and are, secretly, cathartically relieved it’s him, not us). In his ‘Alive and Lifelike: Theatricality and Animation (through Duck Amuck)’, Hans R. Vermy observes that the performance of animated figures like Daffy or Betty Boop enjoy academic attention, less is given to the animated spaces in which some of their performances take place – analogous to theatrical spaces of vaudeville, and dance hall and the theatricality of cinema – and how these structures affect them. A critical review of authors that shows theatricality may be at odds with performance is followed by a discussion of the terms ‘theatricality’ and ‘animation’ and how Film Studies is making progress in cinematic theatricality. Vermy then presents a framework of methods to approach his subject and the film of his title; after reflecting on performance, referencing Donald Crafton here and elsewhere, the focus is on five elements of theatricality. Early prehistories and histories of animation and their links with vaudeville and theatre performances offer an opportunity to see interchanges and shared developments with theatre history, labour politics, studio and stage designs, and the inherent unnaturalness and artificiality of theatre and animated performance (while, not mentioned, the deus ex machina of theatre bears comparison with the immortality of cartoon characters). Vermy’s project temporally spans from Classic Hollywood cartoons to contemporary times. His conclusion includes reflections on how the animated interfaces of social media and screens, and the uncertainty and instability of the digital and virtual, provoke a crisis of theatricality that demands new tactics. In terms of animated (lifelike) and theatrical (live) bodies, Vermy’s article bears some relation to Xiangying Chen and Nur Zaidi Bin Azraai’s article on animated documentary and embodiment.
Publications and advances in scholarship in English on Chinese animation mean increased access and exposure to a national cinema that is in an ongoing process of defining itself and being defined. An important legacy of Chinese animation is its employment of fine art techniques like ink painting, which is imbued with high cultural meaning and national identity, as a method to use animated techniques from the West to demonstrate Chinese identity. Four such films created at the Shanghai Animation Film Studio (SAFS) are the basis of Sean MacDonald’s ‘Receiving the Classics: The Curation of Ink Painting Animation in the Early People’s Republic of China’. MacDonald first explains his particular use and expansion of the term ‘curation’ (which generally means a curatorial process for selecting artworks to be shown in institutions) as a method to understood how these came to be made, and who was involved in this cultural production process affected by the sociopolitical conditions and ideologies. In his survey of the SAFS development and key works produced at the time that made use of other culturally relevant references (material and intangible), MacDonald explains how these worked in terms of a network of cultural production, in contrast to other types of political systems or economic systems of capitalism. Involvement in the ink painting films’ stylistic and content-related design, cultural production and dissemination ranged from art academies to educational institutions, technical political departments, Central Government ministers and funders. In the historical unravelling and stitching together of how these four films were made and how they served political purposes and policies, his article both enlightens us on the state-run studios and points out areas upon which light is yet to be shed. Nuances of language and meaning are important; MacDonald also provides us with a English interpretation of the term ‘classic’ from the Chinese – jingdian – and questions the classification of the four ink painting animations as representative of the studio, and whether there may be other films in the studio’s archive that could qualify as such.
Reviews
Animation Studies’ publishing on production and histories of national animation and world animation in the academic lingua franca is increasing and Iskandar Zulkarnain reviews a recent addition: Omar Sayfo’s Arab Animation: Images of Identity (2023). He offers insights into three interconnected approaches and aspects that Sayfo employs throughout his book: the visual, the narrative and the linguistic, the latter revealing nuances between usage of Classical Arabic and local language and dialects. Zulkarnain provides an overview of the chapters as well as praise for its interdisciplinary approach (that has some shortcomings) that contributes to its explorations of the five Arab identities Sayfo categorizes in political and cultural landscapes in the Middle East and North Africa.
ChatGPT and LLMs can be fast and effortless methods to adapt a work of literature into a film script or project. However, what this method cannot do is communicate the experience of what is involved in adaptation from the point of view of artists, experts and professionals. Anahita Fazaeli reviews filmmaker Hannes Rall’s Adaptation for Animation: Transforming Literature Frame by Frame (2020), with details of structure, practice and theory-based methods, and the organization of chapters working with interviews, as well as a focus on independent animation films. Fazaeli summarizes the author’s aims and points out the important roles artistic research and creativity play in developing an adaptation.
