Conference Program

9.30am – 10am REGISTRATION

(Building 901, foyer)

11.10am – 11.30am MORNING TEA

(Building 903/Rooms 1139-1141)

1pm – 2pm LUNCH

(Building 903/Rooms 1139-1141)

3.30 pm – 4pm AFTERNOON TEA

(Building 903/Rooms 1139-1141)

5pm – 6pm SUNDOWNER

(Building 903/Rooms 1139-1141)

6pm – 7pm MIAF SCREENING by Malcolm Turner, MIAF Executive Director

(Building 901/Lecture Theatre G43)

7pm CONFERENCE DINNER

(Shanikas Restaurant, Berwick )

10.30am – 11am MORNING TEA

(Building 903/Rooms 1139-1141)

12.30pm – 1.30pm LUNCH

(Building 903/Rooms 1139-1141)

Michael Daubs, University of Western Ontario

2.30pm – 3pm AFTERNOON TEA

(Building 903/Rooms 1139-1141)

4.30pm – 5.30pm BOOK LAUNCH: Alan Cholodenko’s Illusion of Life 2

(Building 903/ Rooms 1139-1141)

5.30pm-7.30pm SCREENING: ABRACADABRA

introduced by Grant Stone

(Building 901/Lecture Theatre G43)

Abstracts (in order of presentation)

Keynote Address

Battlefields for the Undead – Re-assessing Animation Studies, and other Romantic Interludes…

Professor Paul Wells, School of Art and Design,
Loughborough University
Email:P.Wells@lboro.ac.uk

This presentation will attempt to address the current field of animation studies, looking at its development, and some of the points of address and analysis of the animated form from a range of perspectives. It will seek to offer some challenging, and hopefully, contentious views about how animation might be viewed, discussed, and studied.

Taking some of the presiding critical metaphors in moving image analysis about the ‘end of cinema’, ‘the end of history’, ‘the haunted screen’ and ‘death to animation’, this discussion will look at the competing constituencies seeking to define animation and its significance in the contemporary era.

In the light of a suspicion that while a high degree of technical convergence has occurred in relation to the production of animated imagery of all kinds, there is still little convergence of the various ‘cultures’ invested in it. Each culture speaks differently and with a differing version of the history, outlook and status of the form. As a consequence of this view, the paper will suggest some inclusive models of approach including the ‘poli-voiced’, the ‘multi-register’, and the ‘new historiographic’ as ways to resist schisms between the critical and cultural agendas informing animation and its academic, popular and commercial identity.

Offering views on among other things, King Kong’s penis, the pigs in Halas & Batchelor’s ‘Animal Farm’, ‘the frilly knickers’ of computer generated imagery and special effects, and ‘re-imagining’ the art of animation in new contexts, the address seeks to offer a provocative ‘dialogue’ with current concepts and combative colleagues.

Professor Paul Wells is Director of Animation in The Animation Academy. He has published widely in the field including Understanding Animation (Routledge 1998), Animation and America (Rutgers University Press, 2002) and Animation:Genre and Authorship(Wallflower Press, 2002). He has also made a Channel Four documentary called Cartoons Kick Ass and three BBC programmes on British Animation, as well as an educational video on Special Effects for the British Film Institute.

Further, he has curated a touring exhibition on Animation, which first appeared at the Children’s Cultural Centre in Dublin, and has selected programmes of animated films for various Festivals across the world. Paul is also a writer, broadcaster and theatre director. He has published on the horror film, British cinema, popular music, comedy, and performance; made numerous radio and television programmes including the Sony Award winning six part radio history of the horror genre, Spinechillers, and the Open University set-text, Britannia ­ The Film; and written for soap opera, television comedy shows, and theatre, including his own adaptations of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Damon Runyan’s On Broadway stories.

Professor Wells’ research interests remain in animation, comedy and broadcasting, and he welcomes researchers and collaborators in these fields.

(THE) DEATH (OF) THE ANIMATOR, OR: THE FELICITY OF FELIX
PART 1: KINGDOM OF SHADOWS

Alan Cholodenko, University of Sydney

This paper argues the singular importance of animation not only to film but to contemporary culture and culture as such and the singular importance of death to animation, hence to film, contemporary culture and culture as such.

In terms of film, I will journey back to the advent of cinema and Maxim Gorky’s first significant review of it. For us, his experience of cinema as being in the Kingdom of Shadows bears profound relation to animation, indeed for me to what I have termed the animatic, as figured in my notion of the Cryptic Complex. I will also elaborate profound new insights regarding animation based upon a reengagement with Tom
Gunning’s canonical article An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator.

In terms of contemporary culture, I will draw upon the characterisations of the fundamental myth (Taihei Imamura) and fundamental fantasy (Slavoj Zizek) of contemporary culture as the return of the dead, making the fundamental myth/fantasy of contemporary culture that of animation or rather, reanimation‹the uncanny return/reanimation of the dead as living dead.

In terms of culture as such, I will draw upon Jean Baudrillard¹s notion that at the very core of the rationality of our culture…is an exclusion that precedes every other, that of the dead and of death, a for me animating exclusion (like all exclusions for me) that I will argue makes death very model of the animatic and very animator of film, contemporary culture and culture as such.

Anamorphic Consciousness and the Animated Baroque
Saige Walton, University of Melbourne
E-mail: snw@unimelb.edu.au

Recently, art historian Barbara Maria Stafford called for an inter-disciplinary ‘soma poetics’ to help rejuvenate the study of aesthetics across media. Such an approach would need to take into account the etymology of  ‘aesthetics’ as it derives from aesthesis, which, for the early modern period, signaled a sensory type of knowing.

In recuperating aesthesis, this paper pays special attention to the Baroque’s longstanding relationship with animation and anamorphoses. In transmuting one substance into another or animating a series of images into the sensuous impression of movement, the baroque calls attention to the virtuoso craft of the animator and its embodied impact. Anamorphosis, like film animation, creates a balancing act in the viewer that appeals to a physical and mental acrobatics with the power of illusionism.  The animated effect is simultaneously grounded in our sensuous and cognitive experience.

Although the sensuous turn of scholarship across the disciplines has attended to the diversity of embodied experience, a theoretical split between sensation and cognition or thinking and feeling, remains.  This paper argues that the baroque might prove useful to a more sensuous appreciation of film animation, especially in terms of how technologies of anamorphosis relied on the embodied intelligence of their beholder. What we lack, as Stafford reminds us with her call for a soma-poetics, is a
more richly ‘combined’ take on the embodied self and different aesthetic forms.  By concentrating its analysis on the animated baroque, both historic and filmic, this paper argues for how brain, body and feeling do not exist as separate monadic states but inhabit the same material core.

Articulating Trauma

Dirk de Bruyn, Deakin University
E-mail: dirk@deakin.edu.au

American animator Robert Breer’s playful short quickly moving animations ‘research'(MacDonald, 1992: 17) the perceptual experiences of cinematic reception that are generally ignored and buried by the industrial model of film production. They are rich in technical innovation and resist the narrative expectations of an audience weaned on entertainment films. As ‘a movie is not a thought; It is perceived’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964) these films are read here as about ‘making sense’.

Breer has been credited with introducing the first visual bomb to cinema in his loop film Image by Images I (1954), Two animations by Robert Breer are examined: 69 (1968 5 minutes) and Fuji (1974 10 minutes). 69 as a metaphor for a system that collapses and Fuji as an articulation of that embodied seeing required for train travel.  Just as one cannot grab each object in the landscape at the speed of train travel nor can one grab or understand each frame that is presented to the retina of a Robert Breer film.
Using a phenomenological framework informed by Merleau-Ponty and Vivian Sobchack, it is argued that Breer’s work has the capacity to illuminate the nature of trauma in a way not otherwise open to critical analysis. The flashback is identified as a specific traumatic effect apparent in these films. Breer’s own thinking about his films and his methods of construction are examined and compared to a number of structural characteristics of trauma.

Sazae-san to Nana: A Longitudinal Study of the Images of Women as Represented in Postwar Japanese Anime

Carol POON Man Wai, Tohoku University, Japan
E-mail: poonmw@gmail.com

Anime not only entertains audiences on the surface, it even stimulates audiences to work through certain contemporary issues in a way that older art forms cannot.  In addition, Well (1998:23) has described Anime as a powerful means to understand contemporary Japanese society and culture, via the images, movements, story and language it contains.  In this way, it may be like other media; such as advertising, movies, TV programs or music, which are often used as “text” for “decoding” societal structure and values.  In this paper, I adopt the view that anime is a fruitful medium for capturing the prevailing issues that intersect our every day activities, as well as the shifting of images in a constantly changing society.  As anime is a useful mirror into contemporary Japanese society, it may offer a path of insight for us to understand the reality or distortion of reality of the Japanese today.  One of the claims of various studies have been that women in Japan have undergone great changes: in terms of both their possibilities and their (mediated) images since the end of World War 2 (Yonezawa; 1980: 12). One assumption in my work is that if anime is actually a reflection of the structure and values of society, then the changes of women images have undergone will certainly appear in anime, as well.
Therefore, the overall aim of this paper is to analyze the content of anime in order to determine whether there have been changes in the images of women regarding Japanese since the beginning of (and through) the post war era.  Finally, if there have been changes, then what kind of changes has been taken place.

Making Things New: Regeneration and Transcendence in anime

Mick Broderick, Murdoch University
E-mail: m.broderick@murdoch.edu.au

Many commentators on anime have foregrounded the apocalyptic nature of Japanese animation, often uncritically, deploying the term to connote annihilation and mass destruction, or a nihilistic aesthetic expression (e.g. Phillip Brophy, Helen McCarthy). To date, Susan Napier’s work is the most sophisticated examination of the trans-cultural manifestation of this Judeo-Christian theological and narrative tradition, yet her framing is limited by discounting a number of trajectories apocalypse dictates. For example, Jerome Shapiro argues convincingly that the millennial imagination, as a subset of apocalyptic thought, is closer to the Japanese spiritual understanding of heroic mythology.

This paper will apply the various strains of apocalyptic discourse across a range of anime (e.g. Nausicaa, Ghost in the Shell, Spriggan, Metropolis, Evangelion, Appleseed) to consider the utopian teleology that the chaotic,
transitional period heralds (the ‘middest’ as Frank Kermode describes it) in order to create a pathway to a new order, or to return balance in a corrupt and moribund world, often through transhumanist technological hybridity or psychic/supernatural human evolution.

Learning from the Golden Age of Czechoslovak Animation: The Past as the Key to Unlocking Contemporary Issues

Lucie Joschko and Michael Morgan, Monash University
E-mail: Lucie.Joschko@infotech.monash.edu .au,
 Michael.Morgan@infotech.monash.edu .au

The post 1989 privatization of animation studios and subsequent withdrawal of government funding are commonly considered as some of the most significant factors contributing to the current decline of Czech animated films. This paper argues that a number of additional factors associated with the post 1989 change of political regime impacted on the development of Czech animation production. These factors include 1) the change of themes due to the removal of the Communist regime as the common antagonist, 2) fragmentation of Czech audience due to new methods of distributing content, 3) external competition resulting from the lifting of restrictions on importing animated films from the West, and 4) economic censorship pressuring artists and producers to ensure financial success.
In examining the history of Czech animation industry during and after Communist regime, the authors present an outline of the conditions of Prague Spring in 1968, during which the Czech animated films further elevated their international reputation and experienced exponential growth.

From these conditions, a theoretical framework is developed that constitutes a set of criteria in order to guide the provision of assistance to the struggling Czech animation industry today. In a wider context, this research will encourage other afflicted areas of Czech arts and culture, as well as other post-communist countries, to evaluate how changes in censorship, new distribution methods, increased competition and market forces have affected the quality and viability of their work over the past decades.

Checking out a Czech Animator: How Michaela Pavlatova both incorporates and rebels against the Czech animation tradition

Miriam Harris, Unitec, New Zealand
E-mail: mharris@unitec.ac.nz

Hailed as one of the most exciting contemporary animators, with an Oscar nomination and numerous awards and accolades to her credit, Michaela Pavlatova has decided after years spent teaching in San Francisco and at Harvard University, to be based for the foreseeable future in Prague. Such a return to her native country might signal the embracing of characteristics particularly unique to Czech culture and the highly esteemed Czech animation tradition, yet Pavlatova cannot be easily pigeonholed. On one hand she can be aligned with the surreal sensibility evident in Jan Svankmajer’s work, or the delicate nuances expressed by characters in the animation of Jiri Trnka, yet her approach also displays a vision that is uniquely female, and which often combines poignancy with a hilarious irreverence.  

The theme of communication between the sexes, whether it be awkward or euphoric, is frequently employed by Pavlatova. In her 1991 animation, ‘Words, Words, Words’, which was nominated for an Oscar, actual words are never spoken, but are embodied through symbols and body language to articulate whole personalities, shared histories, and relationships that are either budding or fizzled out long ago. In her most recent animation, the 2006 ‘Carnival of Animals’, both animals and people inhabit the same erotically charged space with no differentiation created between the species, so that the vernacular phrase ‘bonking like bunnies’, is literally realized.

It could be said that such symbolism is useful for an animator whose mother tongue is an Eastern European language; motifs rather than definitive Czech words universalize her subject matter, and the recurring theme of romantic relationships is an age-old concern shared by all cultures. Yet an East European attitude, however generally that may be defined, is also present in her work. I consider such an attitude to be one of rebellion against existing structures, whether that be coded in terms of symbols in order to defy the Communist strictures of censorship in the past, or one that expresses an outright anarchy. This ‘attitude’ pervades the films of East European animators such as Priit Parn, Jan Svankmajer, Jan Lenica, and Jiri Trnka. 

My paper will explore the issues outlined above by referring to a variety of Pavlatova’s animated films, and semiotic theorists such as Roland Barthes and the text/image theorist W.J.T. Mitchell.   

The “Svankmajer” Touch

Cathryn Vasseleu, University of Technology, Sydney
E-mail: c.vasseleu@uts.edu.au

Czech Surrealist Jan Svankmajer was banned from making his extraordinary animated films for seven years after completing Leonardo’s Diary in 1972. During that time he turned instead to experimenting with tactile art. He worked with graphics, ceramics, everyday objects and poetry, in collaboration with artist Eva Svankmajerová, a painter, ceramicist, and writer. The pair produced sculptures, portraits, “alternative” natural history cabinets, mixed 2D/3D collages, and poems. They called these various artworks “tactile experiments.” Commentators have made reference to this period when noting how touch is integral to Svankmajer’s idea of filmic experience. The distinctive, audiovisually “tactile” dimensions of all his films, particularly those made after he returned to filmmaking have attracted much critical attention — The Fall of the House of Usher (1981), Dimensions of Dialogue (1982), The Pit, The Pendulum and Hope (1983), Alice (1987) and Little Otik (2001) —  among them. The tactile experiments themselves, however, have not been studied by film/animation scholars as artworks in their own right, nor has their intrinsic value to the artist been analysed in detail. Focussing on Svankmajer’s turn from film to tactile art (instead of the other way round), this paper proposes that Svankmajer devised a way of “animating” tactility during the period he experimented intensively with tactilism. It was here, while observing how static objects of all sorts can kindle feelings by analogy, that the artist gained a unique understanding of the relation between poetic metamorphosis and the communicative powers of touch.

Beyond Uncanny: Breaking from the Styleguide

Rachel Walls, University of Technology Sydney
E-mail: spoon1@optusnet.com.au

When we watch animated serials and films, we view characters and backgrounds that have been designed with great care, and are employed frame after frame by a multitude of animators. The characters are drawn off a style sheet or guide; which defines what that character looks like, how it moves and reacts, and this is in most cases adhered to strictly. However, there are certain genres of animation where deviation from the styleguide is used to create an emphasised sense of the uncanny.

Breaking away from the normal styleguide has become a common practice for some, and still isn’t on the cards for others. And while it’s less common than not, the usage of intentionally ‘messing with’ the style, proportion and perceived physical/articular capabilities of the animated character – is on the rise.

The paper aims to disclose the power of this comedic device.

The uncanny and the robot in the Astro Boy episode “Franken”

Katherine Buljan, University of Sydney
E-mail: kbul4523@mail.usyd.edu .au

In the story of “Franken”, by Tezuka Osamu, a humanlike robot named Franken terrifies humans. Franken, however, is on a hunt for scrap parts to rebuild his own malfunctioning system while searching for his lost friend. This paper tackles the question of whether Franken evokes a feeling of the uncanny by exploring the horror that is highly imbued in the story. Consequently, the essay suggests that while Franken is depicted as producing an uncanny effect on the human characters in the story, he fails to elicit a similar feeling in the viewer of the animation. In other words, there is the depicted uncanny but not, in Freud’s terms, the experienced uncanny.

The discussion further observes that the reasons why Franken fails to stimulate any sense of uncanniness are found in the way the animation is directed. The paper concludes with the exploration of these reasons and highlights how this animation avoids stimulating an uncanny effect in order to suit children as its primary audience.

Directed by Kazuya Konaka, “Franken” is a 20-minute-long episode of the Japanese animation series Astro Boy, released in 2003. It represents an intriguing confluence of Western mythological and literary references, while simultaneously incorporating an element from Japanese religious tradition, more precisely, the native Shinto religion. With its sophisticated use of these references, coupled with a masterful use of 2D animation, “Franken” delivers an interesting story about humans and robots.

Flowerpot Men: The nature and perception of the haptic image in the stop-motion animated productions of Brian Cosgrove and Richard Hall

Cordelia Brown, RMIT University, 2006
Email: cebrown@orcon.net.nz

Haptic or tactile vision is a process by which the viewer experiences the sensation of touch through vision alone and has been applied to the cinematic image by philosopher Gilles Deleuze and more extensively, film theorist Laura Marks. This research aims to better understand the distinct qualities and popular appeal of the haptic image in relation to stop-motion animation. It is a continuation of a prior study by the author that identifies the existence of tactile perception in two contrasting styles of stop-motion animation. The motivation behind this was to acknowledge underlying haptic traits inherent to stop-motion animation. In doing so, a number of devices were established that identify the modes of tactile/haptic viewing that occur via the production and reception of stop-motion animation. As the haptic image is based on the concept of perception this research desires to better understand and situate the audience in relation to it. It builds on the beginnings of prior research asserting that this form of animation’s haptic sensibility is especially relevant to child audiences. As a result, a selection of films from production company Cosgrove Hall are analysed due to their extreme popularity with child audiences and their bold and consistent stylistic aesthetic. It will also be argued that the appeal of a highly tactile viewing experience lies in its ability to simulate something of the developmental play process of their audience age group. The assertion that the haptic image can simulate a physically present tactile experience suggests a potential for audience perception to develop into a more participatory and less voyeuristic visual experience.

Facial Expressions for Effective Communication of Emotion in Animated Characters

Andrew Buchanan (RMIT AIM MA Graduate)
E-mail: andybuchanan@gmail.com

Animators have traditionally communicated emotion in their characters via ‘symbolic’ or ‘artistic’ facial expressions. This symbolic representation differs from actual human facial expressions which can include spontaneous expressions – those driven by emotion -as well as deliberate expressions. These human expression types can provoke a range of unconscious emotional responses and reactions in those who witness them.

This research investigates traditional approaches as well as current facial animation techniques for communicating emotion to the audience through facial expression. Additionally, the use of formalised frameworks such as Paul Ekman and Wallace Firessen’s Facial Action Coding System (FACS), are explained and assessed for their use in the creation of emotionally communicative facial expressions in dramatic animation.

The paper provides a review of the history of animated facial expressions, as well as the development of the scientific understanding of non-verbal communication and the role of facial expressions in inter-personal interaction.

The different types of human responses to facial expressions are explained, which include environmental expectation, behavioural expectation and empathic response. It is this generation of empathy which can be particularly effective in the communication of emotion. The paper also considers the communicative value of microexpressions, both in human communication and its potential for application to animated characters.

The paper suggests that the implication for animators is a requirement for a deeper understanding of unconscious, non-verbal communication. The paper includes practical methods for utilising formalised scientific research findings to create facial expressions for animated characters which can effectively communicate emotion to the audience, and compares the benefits of this unconscious communication to the use of traditional symbolic and artistic expression types.

Animating Antarctic landscape

Lisa Roberts, University of New South Wales
E-mail: lisa@lisaroberts.com.au
www.antarcicanimation.com

Antarctica today is known mostly through the work of outsiders. Writers, photographers, film-makers, visual and performing artists, are sent briefly down to bring us back impressions. It is important to understand what is happening in Antarctica for an understanding of our future. Scientists and support personnel who work in Antarctica can show us its landscape from many perspectives. Such knowledge of Antarctica spans the scientific and the aesthetic, the physical and the psychological.

This presentation shows how public dialogue can occur between and with an Antarctic community and artists. Animation, the visual language of change, can be used to respond literally and metaphorically, to the written, visual and aural texts of those who work in Antarctica. Examples include 24 days, an animated Antarctic journal (Roberts 2003) which demonstrates how an individual’s response to Antarctic landscape is shaped by an understanding of other perspectives. The on-line Antarctic Thesaurus and Journey will contain and animate multiple perspectives of Antarctic workers.

The aim of this research is first to collect evidence of what the scientists, and others who have worked in Antarctica, have observed and responded to in the landscape; second to devise an on-line animated interface through which to engage viewers with both the science and poetics of the data. Animation will be used to increase understanding of changes in Antarctic landscape as identified in the records and accounts provided by Antarctic base workers – the people who have studied it, and physically endured a full year of its changing landscape. 

COLLAGE AESTHETICS IN ANIMATION
Moon Sun Lee, RMIT University
E-mail: mmmmss@hanmail.net

Many animators, musicians, sculptors, and painters have started to use digital techniques for the creation of art, while some artists try to keep traditional techniques. The development in computer technology has brought sophisticated computer software. That enables artists to create digital images that look similar to handmade artworks. The software platforms have both advantages and disadvantages. How can one create collages using digital media? In digital collage animation, what kind of collage do artists use, how do they express what they feel, how do they add paper, nail, wood or wire on the canvas represented on the monitor? In this research, I will trace and investigate techniques used from the beginning of collage making to create animations with traditional and digital collages.  I intend to analyse how these artists used materials and study collage images that have been made using traditional and digital techniques.

Animation and the Trace

Michael Roseth

For the last few years I have been working with a style of animation influenced by South African artist William Kentridge. In this technique images are animated by sequencing a series of charcoal drawings and erasures drawn onto one sheet of paper. One of the effects is that an animated charcoal trace is left from the imperfect erasures. I will use Derrida’s notion of ‘the trace’ as a way of talking about this process animation. The paper will be from the point of view of a maker, rather than a theoretician. If there are the means I would like to talk to visual examples.*
Derrida may have appropriated the term ‘the trace’ from Emmanuel Levinas however he developed it as an idea that worked into his program of unraveling the history of Western phylosophy, and analysing how meaning is constructed. Derrida developed a number of idiomatic terms, such as ‘differance’, ‘hinge’, ‘aporia’ and ‘play’, which work together to show how the relational movement of signs/images/marks in space and time give meaning to a sign system. Briefly stated, Derrida’s trace is that thing/no-thing that works the articulating moments of a text or narrative; that animates the space between signifiers and lends the possibility of meaning to the sign. In its absence it gives life to signification. The trace is the other of the sign, what is not said by the sign, both prior to the onset of meaning and left over by the chain of signification. **
These ideas seem to me to be applicable to a process of constructing narrative through animating charcoal drawings and erasures. When working with a series of drawings each consecutive image, or frame, bears the mark or the trace of each previous image. In this way the identity of each image is constituted by the trace of its difference. The sequencing of the frames open the narrative, but it is the articulating moment-movement between each frame that gives rise to the possibility of meaning.
This paper will draw out these ideas, making literal and metaphoric connections between philosophy, animation, and moving images generally.

The Hybridisation of the Moving Image: Film, and Digital Special Effects

Mark Power, Monash University
E-mail: mark.power@infotech.monash.edu .au

Both animation and live action films, enabled by the invention of motion picture technology, quickly evolved clearly defined dramatic forms, terminology, and classifications that enabled the interpretation and critique of these particular forms. Although special effects were developed concurrently, through techniques such as manipulation of the camera and film exposure, the introduction of digital special effects technology has changed the nature of ‘special effects’ in fundamental ways. No longer is a special effect seen only as an adjunct to a live action film, in fact in movies such as ‘The Matrix’ and ‘300’ the effects themselves are a constant presence on screen and constitute an integral element of the story. Animation developed its own distinctive aesthetic from the film form, for example the cartoon and stop motion genres. In terms of the relationship between animation and special effects, movies such as ‘Final Fantasy’ and ‘Polar Express’, are examples of how animations can now approach more and more closely the recreation of live action film aesthetics. This paper examines the new hybridisation of film and animation genres through special effects technologies that have become possible through the medium of digital processes. It proposes that movies such as ‘A Scanner Darkly’ represent a new and unique medium for which new dramatic forms, terminology, and classifications need to evolve to enabled interpretation and critiques of these particular productions.

Brando Returns: Re-Animating the Dead

Lisa Bode, University of Queensland
E-mail: l.bode@uq.edu.au

In the month prior to the release of Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns (2006), a brief QuickTime promotion circulated on the internet, linked through blogs, emails, and entertainment and technology news websites. It was labeled “Marlon Brando reprises his role as Jor-El in Superman Returns…with a little help from Rhythm and Hues”, with commentators describing it as both “creepy” and “cool”. It promoted less the film itself than the process of digitally re-animating footage of the dead actor, originally filmed in 1978, soliciting our wonder at the amount of otherwise invisible money, labour and technology required to bring a dead actor “back to life”.

In this paper I want to focus on the rhetorical use of image and sound in the clip: the persistent clinical percussion; the way we see Brando’s transformation from animate to inanimate and back to animate again; and the way that the figure and voice of the animator is strangely absent. I will examine the ways it contributes to a broader ongoing discussion within the English-speaking media about the possibility and desirability (or otherwise) of using digital animation techniques to ‘resurrect’ dead screen actors. In relation to this broader discussion, I will also consider Brando/Jor-El’s place in the film’s diegesis. Like Sir Lawrence Olivier’s reanimation as Dr Totenkopf in Kerry Conran’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), Brando is playing a character who is long dead, and who appears to us already mediated, in a recorded message from the past. I will argue that in different ways, the promotional clip and the place of re-animated dead actors in the respective worlds of these films, speak to a persisting ambivalence about technology and animation as means to overcome the finality of death.

Final Fantasy or The Incredibles? Animation and the Uncanny Valley

Matthew Butler and Lucie Joschko, Monash University
E-mail: matthew.butler@infotech.monash.edu.au
 lucie.joschko@infotech.monash.edu.au

It is clear that in an age of computer-driven technical advancement in animation, physical realism of animated characters can be achieved. Animated movies have embraced this heightened realism, arguably culminating in the release of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (Chris Lee Productions, 2001). The film, although a technical marvel, was a critical and commercial failure.
The Incredibles (Walt Disney Pictures, 2004) provided a stark contrast to Final Fantasy. Rather than rely on an ultra-realistic aesthetic, the human characters featured grossly exaggerated physical characteristics. This could be considered strange in an industry able to achieve such realism, however the film proved to be an outstanding critical and commercial success.
How does a film such as Final Fantasy, clearly a technical triumph, suffer in comparison to the bright, “cartoonish” qualities of The Incredibles? Much has been discussed in cinema studies regarding a perceived decline in quality of contemporary film screenplays. In many cases a lack of true emotional engagement is highlighted and in the example of Final Fantasy this may well be the case. But shouldn’t the realistic aesthetic of Final Fantasy allow us to at least engage with characters to a greater extent?
This paper will examine the aesthetic qualities of the two films as a precursor to considering problems with the shift toward “ultra-realistic” animation. The notion of “aesthetic engagement” will be considered, focusing on two primary ideas that offer arguments against more realistic depiction in animation: Human Perception and “The Uncanny Valley”. Proposed by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970, the Uncanny Valley charts the emotional response of humans to robots and other non-human entities. Although proposed over three decades ago, the theory has definite application to contemporary animation studies, helping highlight that today’s computer technology may indeed be no match for a well-crafted story and characters.

Saving the World from Banality: Animated Superheroes and the Everyday Post 9/11

Amanda Third, Murdoch University
Email: a.third@murdoch.edu.au

In the 2004 animation, The Incredibles, the enemy the family of superheroes ostensibly face is the scorned Incrediboy turned evil mastermind and technology fetishist, Syndrome. However, this paper argues that the film also identifies another powerful ‘enemy’ within mainstream Western society – that of the monotony (and accompanying structures of authority) of ordinary everyday life. Through an analysis of The Incredibles, this paper comments upon transformations in the representation of the animation superhero in the post-September 11, 2001 context. I posit that the contemporary superhero manifests as one site through which Western cultural anxieties specific to the post-9/11 context are negotiated. In doing so, I investigate animation’s capacity to mark out a terrain through which to deal with Western culture’s deepest fears.

Drawing upon Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre’s theorisations of the everyday, I argue that the key ‘achievement’ of the attacks of September 11 on New York and Washington was to expose the ‘everyday’ as the (potential) space of the enemy. That is, 9/11 politicised the everyday by forcing the recognition that it is precisely the routinisation and predictability of the everyday within Western culture that constitutes the conditions of terrorism’s possibility. 9/11 identified the everyday, not terrorists, as the seed of destruction inherent in Western postmodernity.

With this understanding, I argue that The Incredibles’ critique of the monotony of the everyday can be understood as an articulation, or a working through, of an increasing anxiety about the vulnerability of ordinary people and the fallibility of the everyday as a mechanism of ‘safety’ and ‘security’ in the Western world.

Flashimation: Cultural Exchange Between Television and New Media

Michael S. Daubs, University of Western Ontario, Canada
Email: mdaubs@uwo.ca

On October 15, 1997, Spumco, an animation house formed by Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi (commonly known as John K.), produced the first instalment of The Goddamn George Liquor Program after experimentation with Marcomedia’s animation and interface development program Flash.  This cartoon, the first ever produced solely for the web, launched a new style or genre of animation which has since earned the unofficial nickname of “Flashimation.” 

Since then, Flash animated cartoons such as Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law have appeared on television, initially in the form of adult-oriented programming including cartoons produced for the Adult Swim block of programs on Cartoon Network (United States) and The Detour on Teletoon (Canada).  These initial examples of Flashimation on television combined Flash animated segments with more traditional animation processing techniques.  More recently, children’s cartoons completely produced within Flash, such as Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, have also debuted.

This paper will examine the brief history of Flashimation, tracing its origins to “limited” cell animation of the 1950-1960s United States, its development on the web, and its appropriation for use on television in North America.  Then, drawing upon the work of television and new media scholars such as Spiegel, Williams, and Manovich, this history will be used as a framework to posit explanations for the appearance of this formerly web-specific genre on television.  Finally, this discussion will be used as a foundation for broader mediations on the exchange between television and new media and the cultural implications of this interaction.

Behind the Flash Exterior: scratching the surface of online animated narratives

Peter Moyes, Griffith University
E-mail: p.moyes@griffith.edu.au

The flattened simplified graphics and limited animation of Flash online creations that recall 60s and 70s cartoons for TV, stand in stark contrast to the photo-realistic forms and naturalistic movement of high-end 3D computer realisations. Celebrated for its ease of use, its affordability, its enhanced dissemination, Flash has become the ‘people’s choice’ in animation software. Its widespread use and apparent simplicity (its aesthetic associations with pop culture ‘toons) however, veil sophisticated modes of reception. Just as the animations of the Zagreb School and UPA with their pared down graphics, stylised forms and limited movement are now feted as unique animated expressions, so too flash animations can be appreciated for exploiting medium-specific narrative effects via reflexive strategies and interactivity.

This paper will argue that despite outward appearances (simple graphics and limited animated movement), Flash can engage an audience in more complex relations with the text through active participation (via interactivity and reflexivity) than more passive modes of reception as engendered by high-end realist animations. Flash animations activate imagination in the audience by offering cues rather than an immersive experience; in distancing an audience space is provided for critical reflection.

 An example will be sought in Flash animation’s applications in online narratives for young children where simple visuals and interactive functions are employed to engage an audience in active participation and learning opportunities.

The arguments of Chris Lanier (The Aesthetics of Internet Animation, 2000), Lev Manovich (Computer Simulation and the History of Illusion, nd) and Daniel Vaughan-Palmer (Participatory Media: Visual Culture In Real Time, 2004) will be taken up in proposing that, with all things Flash, less is more, and a Brechtian distance enhances audience experience.

Children’s Animation in Taiwan
Zhi-Ming Su, Griffith University
Email:  jimmysu2000@gmail.com

The majority of people in Taiwan live in the region of the western plain with smaller aboriginal communities living in the mountainous region of the east. Aboriginal children in the remote eastern regions receive fewer educational opportunities and resources than children in the rest of the country.

The first Animation Institute in Taiwan was established at the Tainan National University of Arts in 1998. Since 1999 several graduate students have worked as dedicated volunteers offering their professionalism and enthusiasm to the education of the aboriginal children of the eastern mountains of Taiwan. 

Animation combines art, music, drama, performance, story telling, and entertainment and is therefore an excellent method with which to approach art education. The children benefit by not only developing their animation skills but by having fun as well.

The Animation Institute provides animation production facilities for cutouts, drawing, clay and pixilation animation. Through a foundation grant established by the local government, animation workshops are held in different elementary schools during summer and winter vacation each year. The workshops have become an exciting twice yearly event for the both the children and their teachers who learn from each other’s experiences.

This paper will discuss the social and educational benefits of these Taiwanese Animation Workshops for Aboriginal Children.

SQUASH, STRETCH, ANTICIPATE, FOLLOW-THROUGH: Animation Education In The Global Marketplace

Andi Spark, Griffith University

Balancing the expectation and need for a comprehensive education experience with the desire and economic imperative to do it as quickly as possible in an increasingly diversified field is the contemporary challenge for educators worldwide.

Squashing everything into a one, two or three year curriculum, Stretching resources and expertise to try and cover all the territory (with limited funding & support), Anticipating where we’ll be in five or ten years (technologically, socially and economically), and Following-through by delivering on what we promise (to the industry and the cultural market) – how can we be all things to all people?

With reference to historical structures of the animation business, the current increasingly expansive definition of ‘animation’, and using the analogy of the hallowed ‘Principles of Animation’, this paper examines the current approach and pedagogy of animation education internationally, and poses questions about future strategies and methodologies required to encompass the task.

Use of Traditional Narrative strategies in 3D computer Animation

Yen-Jung Chang, RMIT University

Email: S3130956@student.rmit.edu.au

3D computer animation is a relatively young media for storytelling compared with 2D animation and can benefit from the use of narrative strategies associated with traditional animation forms Animation as a unique art form has its particular set of narrative strategies for the presentation of stories. In this paper, I will explore how traditional narrative strategies can be used to create innovative and original 3D computer animations. This paper investigates how these narrative strategies can be employed and to what extent these strategies have been applied to the production of 3D computer animations. Some key findings indicate that the application of these narrative strategies in 3D computer animation is diverse. Some narrative strategies such as condensation have been applied to 3D computer animation story telling in a similar manner as found in traditional animation forms. Other strategies such as choreography used in 3D computer animations are far less rich and diverse compared with traditional animation forms. Strategies such as associative relations are rarely utilized in 3D animation production. Nevertheless, they are potentially powerful tools for 3D computer story telling and technically easy to apply. For narrative strategies such as metamorphosis, the ability of computer algorithm could be a limitation for how it can be used in 3D computer environment. Technical issues in 3D production process for the application of these narrative strategies are also examined and possible solutions are proposed to widen the application of these strategies. I will present a work in progress to illustrate how traditional 2D animation strategies may be translated to 3D works.

Animated Microworlds: 3D Visions of Possible and Impossible Creatures Based on SEM (Scanning Electron Microscopy) Images

Tom Chandler, Monash University
E-mail: tom.chandler@infotech.monash.edu .au

The capabilities of three-dimensional (3D) technologies are well known for their contributions to animation in blurring the divide between what is perceived as real or impossible. They do this best when they present a convincing vision of reality that enables unexpected ‘special effects’ to be believed. The realism of these creations is often based on their close adherence to the ‘photorealism’ of the world around us, implying that the rendered image appears as if it had been captured by a camera. While most people are familiar with the way in which 3D software can be used to digitally model artificial forms such as architecture and machines, but many 3D artists and animators are also labouring at the more demanding exploration of re-creating the complexity of intricate organic forms.

One emerging area of investigation is the digital modelling and rendering of environments based upon the largely unseen world of Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) images. From Antonie Van Leeuwen-hoek’s first glimpses of ‘very many little living animalcules, very prettily a-moving’ under a mid 17th century microscope to the computer generated images in modern medical visualisations, there lies a ‘photorealistic’ reality which is all around us but always invisible.

While instructive animations of incredibly small things have become an integral part of medical visualisation, science still awaits the invention of animated ‘nano’ camera to move around and in-between miniscule objects. For the time being at least, 3D animation allows us to step into a world beyond the duplication of organic forms into a digital space where the unexpected is possible.

This paper will present recent research into 3D animations of images of the microscopic world and how such endeavours might be meaningfully extended to animation studies.

Digital special effects and the loss of visual paradox

Rosemary Woodcock, Deakin University
E-mail: rosemary@deakin.edu.au

A comparison between War of the Worlds (2005) and the special effects strategies used in its 1957 counterpart suggests that the experience of film-watching has been shifted, with the introduction of seamless digital compositing, to a novel constitution of filmic space. Special effects as used in mainstream fantasy sci-fi films operate by way of a convergence of post-production methodologies (such as digital matting and compositing) and narrative intentions (such as depicting impossible or other-worldly events). The imaginative scope of narrative film may seem advantaged by this convergence: virtually any scenario can be depicted in robust, photo-realist ways. However, I argue that ‘high-end’ digital strategies used to represent the impossible, instead impose a narrowing of the perceptual and, therefore conceptual (paradoxical) possibilities of filmic space.
Borrowing ideas from the phenomenology of M. Merleau-Ponty (esp. Eye and Mind), the paper investigates how narrative imagery is visualised, through 3D digital effects, to construct manifestly apparent spaces. Merleau-Ponty’s reflection on the ‘enigmatic’ nature of visual perception suggests how a methodology might be developed to address the question whether space, as given technologically (through the agency of digital photo-realism), is different in fundamental ways to space given ‘notionally’ (through various conventions of filmic imagery). I argue that digital special effects strategies typically overlook and even circumvent an important aspect of visual observation; one that Merleau-Ponty describes as ‘already paradoxical’ in nature .

TO ONTOLOGY AND BEYOND

Dr Bill Schaffer, University of Newcastle

This paper will attempt to displace current debates concerning digitality and the ontology of film by differentiating between the uses and implications of traditional animation, traditional rotoscoping, digital rotoscoping, performance capture, and digital keyframing in recent films. It will argue that attempts to determine an ontological opposition between analogue and traditional film are massively complicated – perhaps to the point of being rendered untenable – by the fact of animation. Films discussed will include Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006), Gerrit van Dijk’s Frieze Frame (1991) and I Move, So I Am (1998), Robert Zemeckis’ Polar Express (2004), and Gil Kenan’s  Monster H