ANIMATION

Defining animation

The author begins his theoretical study with a definition of animation as »everything that people call animation,« thus paraphrasing Dino Formaggio’s definition of art being »everything that people call art«, and proceeds to explain the etymology of animation stressing its historical-contextual nature. At the beginning, term animated referred to every film (i.e. animated photographies as opposed to static), while animated cartoon started spreading after E. G. Lutz’s 1920 book with the same title. Term animation resurfaced in European expert circles in the 1950s, the same circles that initiated the founding of ASIFA (1962), which defined animated film as different from »automatic registering« conducted by film, »in animated film things happen for the first time«, which was changed some twenty years later in the negative form asserting that animation was every cinema product that »was not a simple registering of real life with the technique of filming 24 frames per second.« However, the author continues to question whether animation is a »genre«, since genre is created within a (film) expression (for example, western within live action cinema); animation also features similar or same »genres« (western, SF, adventure, etc.), so the author places it shoulder to shoulder with its sister cinematography including production, genres, distribution and presentation. Animation developed from film trick: frames were shot one by one, and in between the shots objects were moved thus creating the illusion of movement, they were animated — intimate definition of animation is that it instills into objects, shapes and abstract characters not movement, but soul. Plausibility, the psychological foundation of live action cinema — due to the obviousness of characters and environments — and the resulting viewer identification is very unlikely in animation because of the evident »unrealness« of drawn, designed, and modeled pictures; that is why viewers accept animation. Still, what are the boundaries of animation? Is time lapse photography animation? Is virtual reality animation? Is an intervention in the digitally recorded picture in a motion picture in the post production also animation? Precisely due to all these unresolved questions, the initial, apparently tautological definition of animation reveals it as a historically inconstant category.

Giannalberto Bendazzi