Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres (AFI Film Readers) [1 ed.] 1138054372, 9781138054370

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Fantasy I Animation

This book examines the relationship that exists between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Animation has played a key role in defining our collective expectations and experienc·es of fantasy cinema, just as fantasy storytelling has often served as inspiration for our most popular animated film and television. Bringing together contributions from world-renowned film and media scholars, Fantasy/Animation considers the various historical, theoretical, and cultural ramifications of the animated fantasy film. This collection provides a range of chapters on subjects including Disney, Pixar, and Studio Ghibli, filmmakers such as Ralph Bakshi and James Cameron, and on film and television franchises such as Dream Works' How to Train Your Dragon(2010-) and HBO's GameefThrones(2011 -). Christopher Holliday teaches Film Studies and Liberal Arts at King's College

London, UK. Alexander Sergeant is a lecturer in Film and Media Theory at Bournemouth

University, UK. He previously taught Film Studies at King's College London, UK.

Previously published in the AF! Film Re aders series Edited by Edward Branigan and Charles Wolfe Psychoanalysis and Cinema E. Ann Ka plan Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body Jane Gaines and Charlott e Herzog Sound Theory/Sound Practice Rick Altman FJ!m Theory Goes to the Movies

Jim Collins, Ava Preacher Collins, and Hilary Radner TheorizingDocumentary

Michael Renov Black American Cinema

Manthia Diawara Disney Discourse Eric Smoodin Classical Hollywood Comedy

Henry Jenkins a nd Kristine Brunovska Kamick The Persistence efHistory Vivian Sobchack The Revolution Wasn't Televised Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin Black Women FJ!m and Video Artists Jacq ueline Bobo Home, Exile, Homeland

Hamid Naficy

Violence andA meni:an Cinema J. David Slocum Masculinity Peter Lehman Westerns Janet Walker Authorship and Film David A. Gerst ner and Janet Staiger New Media Anna Everett and Joh n T. Caldwell East European Cinemas Anik6 Jmre Landscape and Ftlm Martin Lefebvre European Film Theory Trifonova Temenuga Film Theory and Contemporary HollywoodMovies Warren Buckland World Cinemas, TransnationalPerspectives Nata5a0urovifova and Kathleen Newman Documentary Testimonies Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker Slapst1i:k Comedy Rob King and Tom Pa ulus The Epti: Ftlmin World Culture Robert Burgoyne Arnheim/or Ftlm andMedia Studies

Scott Higgins Color and the Moving Image Simon Brown, Sarah Street, and Liz Watkins Ecocinema Theory and Practice Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt Media Authorship

Cynthia Chris and David A. Gerstner Pervasive Animation Suzanne Buchan The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture

Tom Brown and Belen Vidal Cognitive Media Theory

Ted Nannicelli and Paul Taber ham Hollywood Puzzle Films

Warren Buckland EndangeringScience Fiction Film

Sean Redmond and Leon Marvell New SJ/ent Cinema Paul Flaig and Katherine Groo Teaching Transnational Cinema Katarzyna Marciniak and Bruce Bennett

FantasyI Animation Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres

Edi ted by CH RISTOPHER HOLLIDAY AND ALEXANDER SERGEANT

I~ ~~o~~~~n~~~up NEW YORK AND LONDON

Fl

American Film Institute

First published 20 18 by Routledge 7 11 Third Avenue, New York, NY 100 17 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, l\'lilton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is a111i11pni1t ofthe Taylor &- Francis Group, a111iiforma busliiess © 20 18 American Film Institute

The right of the editors to be ident ified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors fortheir individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writ ing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be t rademarks or registered t rademarks, and are used only for identificat ion and explanat ion without intent to infringe. Library ofCongress Catalog1i1g-1i1-Publicat/011 Data A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 9 78-1-1 38-05437-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-3 15-1 669 1-9 (ebk) Typeset in Spectrum by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

list offigures and tables acknowled1PJ1ents introduction: approachinr fantasy/animation christopher hol/Jday and alexander sergeant part one ontoloJY and spectatorship 1. wonderlands. slumberlands and plunderlands: considerin& the animated fantasy pau/we//s 2. pierre mac orlan's "social fantastic" and disney animation barnaby dicker 3. in the face of... animated fantasy characters: on the role of baby schemata in the elicitation of empathic reactions me1keuhrig 4. fantastical empathy: encounterinr abstraction in bret battey's sinus aestum (2009) lt!/y husbands

s. the reality offantasy: VFX as fantas matic supplement in rame of throne.s (2011-) bentyrer part two authors and nations

6. contextualizin& Iotte reinirer's fantasy fairy tales caroline ruddelf

7. fantastic french fox: the national identit;y ofle roman de renard(1941) as an animated film franci.s m. agnoli 8. the "iconoclast of animation": counter-culturalism in ralph bakshi's

fantasy films alexander .sergeant

9. animating japan: the fantasy films of studio ghibli su.san/ napier

10. british social realism as wonderland fantasy in electricit;y (2014) caro/yn rickards

part three culture and industry

11. "loved the animation. hated the CGI": how audiences responded to digital effects in the hobbit films (2012-2014) martin barker

12. from buzz to business: hollywood. fantasy and the computer-animated film industry christopher ho//1day

13. high fantasy meets low culture in how to train your dragon (2010) .sam summers

14. the evolution of reproductive fantasies: an interdisciplinary feminist analysis of disney's tangled (2010) samantha langsdale and .sarah myers 15. "enterthe world": iames cameron's avatar (2009) and the family-

adventure movie peter kriimer

selected bibliography list of contributors about the american film institute

figures and tables

figures 1.1 Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland. 1.2 Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland 1.3 Jan Svankmajer's 2.1 The Grasshopper and the Ants. 2.2 TheGrasshopperandtheAnts. 2.3 The Grasshopper and the Ants 3.1 At her initial appearance Lyra is staged as heroine of the fantasy film The Golden Compass 3.2 Shift in character by shift in facial expression? Puss in Boots displays baby schema onlv to lull his antagonists into a false sense of security. 3.3 "Toothless": baby pet or evil predator? 4.1 SinusAestum. 4.2 SinusAestum. 4.3 SinusAestum. 4.4 SinusAestum. 4.5 SinusAestum. 5.1 Desire: the actor on a motion base (with the green screen plate added to on-location footage}. 5.2 Fantasy: adding the wire frame for the computer-animated mammoth. 5.3 lntegration: the completed image. 6.1 The Adventures ofPrince Achmed. 6.2 TheAdventuresofPnnceAchmed. 7.1 Le Roman de Renard. 7.2 Le Roman de Renard. 7.3LeRomandeRenard. 8.1 Wizards. 8.2 Wizards.

8.3 Wizards. 8.4 The Lord ofthe Rin,f'S.

9.1 Nausicaaofthe Va/leyofthe Wind. 9.2 CastleintheSkv 10.1 Electricity 10.2 Electricitv 10.3 Electricity 11.1 Reasons for seeing the films by relation to proportions rating them "Excellent." 11.2 Labeling of the films by relation to proportions rating them "Excellent." 12.1 Brave negotiates the merger between Disney and Pixar through its status as a fairy tale fantasy. 12.2 Princess Merida is witness to the fantastic "intrusion" in Brave 12.3 Wreck-it Ralph as an "immersive" fantasy. 13.1 Stoick leads the Viking army into battle. 13.2 Hiccup's inventions and innovations are in conflict with the Viking hegemony. 14.1 Tanfled 14.2 Tanfled 14.3 Tanffed

tables 11.1 Proportions of"Excellent" ratings bv format of viewing of each film. 11.2 Frequency of mentions of keywords among all English-language participants.

acknowledgments

Fantasy/Animation would not exist w ithout the support of the following individuals and institutions. Thanks must go to the volume's fantastic co ntributors, who bough t into the collection's research goals and produced fifteen chapters of which we should all be immensely proud. The AFI film reader series editors Edward Branigan and Charles Wolfe were instrumental in shaping the collection into its published form, as were Christina Kowalski and the Routledge editorial team. Amy M. Davis, Edward Lamberti, Chris Pallant, and James Walters enthusiastically supported the project at its formative stages, and the help of our research assistant MirandaMungai was invaluable in seeing the project to its completion. Christopher and Alexander would also like to thank Bournemouth University and King's College London, and their families, friends, and partners for their unwavering support. To take part in the conversations t hat this book begins, visit fantasyanimation.org.

introduction approaching fantasy/animation christopher holliday and alexander sergeantgy

It seems obvious and self-evident to speak of a relationship between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Many of the canonical works of fantasy cinema have been animated, whether in the form of the enduringly popular fairy tale adaptations produced by the Walt Disney Studio (Snow White and the Seven Dwaifs [David Hand, 193 7], Cinderella [Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson and Hamilton Luske, 19 SO], Frozen [Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, 2013)), or in the recent turn towards high fantasy filmmaking in Hollywood franchises such as Harry .Potter (2001-2011), The Chronicles ef Narma (2005- 2010) or The Hobbit (2012- 2014), which depend on the latest advancements in CGI animation. Many pioneering animators have similarly drawn from pre-existing works of fantasy fiction to expand the unique technical capabilities of the animated medium. Ray Harryhausen drew from Greek myths and legends in his stop-motion work onJason and the Argonauts (Don Chaffey, 1963) and Clash q/the Titans (Desmond Davis, 1981), as well as the folklore of the Arabian nights in The 7th Voyage ef Sinbad (Nathan H. Juran, 19 58), just as Czech experimental animator Jan Svankmajer adapted the works of Lewis Carroll in his 1987 film Alice. High fantasy epic Willow (Ron Howard, 1988) was the first Hollywood film to incorporate advances in digital morphing technology created by George Lucas• Industrial Light & Magic company, while Steven Spielberg's recent blockbuster The BEG (2016) - based on the 1982 fantasy novel by Roald Dahl- employs motion-capture performance techniques within its extensive armory of visual effects. Animation has continued to play an important role in defining our collective expectations and experiences of fantasy cinema, just as fantasy has often served as an inspiration throughout the rich legacies of animated

filmmaking. Ye t if fantasy films are usually animated, and usually animated films are fantasies, then the obviousness of this connection is perhaps deceptive, obscuring rather than highlighting the complex set of possible relationships that can exist between fantasy and animation. The wealth of animated fantasy film and television produced within different national media industries supports the no tion of a fundamental connection between fantasy and animation. However, treating this connection as fixed, inherent or a priorihas the potential to downplay the rich cultural, historical and aesthe tic dimensions of the animated fantasy. Fantasy/Animation confronts the continuing affiliation and presumed obviousness between fantasy and animation, not taking for granted their interrelationship or degrees of synonymy, but instead providing a range of critical frameworks that place studies of fantasy and animation in a productive dialogue. The collection examines the socio-historical conditions that have provoked the production of animated fantasies, and maps the current state and impact of the animated fantasy film within contemporary c1Ulture. Across each of its chapters, authors interrogate whether animation naturally lends itself to fantasy given its specific properties (or vice versa), and ask the question of whether it is necessary to employ animation to produce fantasy. Fantasy/Animation therefore advocates a way of approaching the animated fantasy that treats fantasy and animation as reciprocal media, mediums and genres. It contends that there is a correlative relationship between studies of fantasy and animation that has yet to be established in existing academic discourse. Fantasy/Animation traces the theoretical, historical and cultural paradigms that have support ed the separate, yet inseparable, relationship between fantasy and animation.

fantasy and animation? two terms in contemporary film culture In 2008, the American Film Institute (AFI) published ten lists of the top ten films in ten classic film genres. Entitled "10 Top 10," these lists were commissioned to showcase the popularity and diversity of Hollywood

cinema over the past century, celebrating the greatest films in the categories of"Animation," "Fantasy," Gangster," '"Science Fiction," "Western," "Sports," "Mystery," "Romantic Comedy," "Courtroom Drama" and "Epic."l The inclusion of "Animation" and "Fantasy" on this "10 Top 10" highlights the significant role that both categories have played within the popular reception of Hollywood cinema. The most recent entrants on the AFI's list of the greatest gangster (Pulp Fiction [QtUentin Tarantino, 1994)), courtroom drama (A Few Good Men [Rob Reiner, 1992)), western (Un.forgiven [Clint Eastwood, 1992)) and romantic comedy (Sleepless in Seattle [Nora Ephron, 1993)) films date back more than 20 years. However, the lists of the greatest animations and fantasy films gesture towards the dominant production practices of what Kristin Thompson refers to as contemporary Hollywood's "franchise age:·i Combined together, t hey contain the only productions to appear across the AFI's entire "10 Top 10" to have been released since the year 2000 (The Lord o.f the Rings: The Fellowship o.f the Ring [Peter Jackson, 2001 ), Shrek [Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson, 2001], Finding Nemo [Andrew Stanton, 2003)). Alternative Top 10 lists of the most popular or most commercially successful films of all t ime provided by the online forums JMDBandBoxOfficeMl?losimilarly high light the cultural visibili ty these dual film categories of animation and fantasy have enjoyed among audiences. The Lord o.f the Rings: The Return o.f the King (Peter Jackson, 2003), currently number 8 on the !MD/ls list of highest-rated films, is adapted from the final part of the epic fantasy trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien, a writer whose work Brian Attebery describes as falling "like a great meteorite into the stream of American fantasy."-' Relying on CGI technology to bring Tolkien's secondary world of Middle-Earth to life, the film drew from the latest innovations in motion-capture in the construction of Goll um, whose design and movement was created purely through animation processes ..1 The narrative of Avatar Oames Cameron, 2009), the highest-grossing film of all-time according to Box O.fjice Ml?/O, evokes the romantic sagas of Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne that were so influential on twentieth-century US fantasy literature) · Fans also campaigned for Avatarto be considered eligible for the Academy Award for Best Animation; with an estimated 60-80 percent of its footage captured through computer animation technology.§. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (David Yates, 2011) (#8 on Box Office

Mojo) was adapted from J.K. Rowling's bestselling fantasy literature series. In depicting the magical elements of its source novel, the film mixed practical effects such as models and miniatures with a heavy use of digital imagery. This is also true of Beauty and the Beast (Bill Condon, 2017) (#10), a part reimagining of the well-known Disney animated feature and part readaptation of the original fairy tale. All of these productions can therefore stake a claim for being both fantasies and animations, their two identities combining together to create their indu strial, cultural and aesthe tic impact. If the AFl's decision to include both .fantasy and animation on their list of ten classic film genres was hardly controversial given the prominence of both within contemporary Hollywood cinema, then the decision to separate them into discrete categories appeared simultaneously at odds with their strongly intertwined histories. The AF! defined animation as a genre "in which the film's images are primarily created by computer or hand and the characters are voiced by actors:•! Fantasy, by comparison, was described as a genre "in which live-action characters inhabit imagined settings and/ or experience situations that transcend the rules of the natural world."~ In suggesting, somewhat arbitrarily, that fantasy cinema has to be rendered through live-action, the AF! definition tacitly acknowledged that, withou t this distinc tion, many films that featured in the animation category might equally be considered as works of fantasy cinema. Indeed, the AFl's Top 10 "Animations" included films such as Pt:nocch1o(Norman Ferguson et al., 1940) and Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, 1991). Both are adapted from fairy tales, which scholars of fantasy literature often refer to as "taproot" sources for the modern fan tasy genre ..2. Beauty and the Beast was reviewed at the time of its release not just as an example of popular animation but also as a "fairy tale" and "childre n's fable." 10 Similarly, despite the AFl's assertion that live-action photography was a prerequisite to classify a work of fantasy, the Top 10 "Fantasy" films contains The Lord efthe Rings: The Fellowship ef the Ring and King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933). In the original review of the latter, Vani?tydescribed the film as a pure "exhibition of studio and camera technology," and a great amount of focus was paid to how it used a "highly imaginative and supergoofy" plot to allow for the display of Willis O'Brien's stop-motion animation.11 Rather than clearly disti.nguishing between "Animation" and

"Fantasy," the AFl's two lists instead read as somewhat anxious attempts to separate a broader collection of films that transcend the rules of the natural world via technologies that run contrary to the indexicality of celluloid photography. For Katherine A. Fowkes, the history of fantasy filmmaking is one that "thrives" on innovations in special effects, an admission that bears out how the critical exploration of the fantasy film has regularly footnoted the place of animation within the industrial and technical developments of the genre.11 What the "10 Top 10" ultimately presents, then, is not a list of fantasy and a list of animation, but two lists in which the entries on each might equally claim to be both fantasies and animations. It is as if the two storytelling forms are so intertwined that to speak to the specificity of one necessitates a methodological or rhetorical shutting down of the possibilities of referring to the other, their mutual identities only showcased when they are prised apart in often less than satisfactory means. The solution to this problem of th e collision or coalescence between fantasy and animation as viable categories might be to simply collapse the two together and create a universalizing genre of the "animated fantasy." From Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) in which "the animator interacts with a playful brontosaurus" to the labeling of Harryhausen as "a maker of animated fantasy films" to the work of French filmmaker Michel Ocelot, the term "animated fantasy" has enveloped a host of films and filmmakers across cinema history.11 The term has also accounted for a range of animated films that traverse more experimental categories, forms, styles and modes. The uncanny stop-motion works of Svankmajer have been considered by Michael O'Pray as touchstones of animated fantasies, just as the term has found increasing critical traction when discussing more orthodox eel-animated features produced by major North American studios (notably Disney).ll Pointing to the elasticity, abstraction and subversive potential for the animated medium in service of fantasy elements, the term "animated fantasy" is therefore a hybrid label that is used as a broad descriptor for a wealth of fantasies that are animated, or at least contain animated components, and animated media that falls under the auspices of fantasy. But the "animated fantasy" is not only a largely unquestioned category, bu t it is also a label that contravenes the complex genre status of its very constituent parts.

The Afl's distinction between fantasy and animation comes abo ut as part of an effort to classify them as separate film genres. Defined primarily for the technological means it achieves the phenomenon of movement in contrast with other "photographic" forms, animation is instead better understood in the context of narrative cinema as a storytelling medium or form. Daniel Goldmark argues that "animation is not a genre; it is a technological process that creates a particular (highly idiosyncratic) means of visual representation."ll The existence of categories such as the animated documentary is just one example of the diverse ways in which animation is utilized as a "representational strategy."li Nowhere are the "representational" possibilities of animation more evident than, ironically, in the context of fantasy cinema. Neil Coombs argues that animation "allows the film-maker to create effects that cannot happen in live action filming."!1 The desire of fantasy scholarship to establish a coherent identity for a concept of "the fantasy film" as a response to its post-2000 resurgence is supported by the role of animation within its visual repertoire. Yet the contribution of inventive animated techniques to fantasy reflects the view that the latter's own representational diversity is "best served" by the animated medium. At the same time, scholarly efforts at defining fantasy as a coherent and stable "genre" likewise recognize the difficulty of such an activity given the diversity of examples that might be included within such a category. Emerging out of folkloric storytelling forms as part of a romantic response to post-enlightenment culture, the fantasy genre lacks the kind of codified set of "semantic/ syntactic" features required of other film genres. 18 Sometimes separated from horror or science-fiction to form a genre of "fantasy" associated with ideas of wonder, and other times conflated with these alternative genres to form a solitary category of the cinefantastic, the descriptive label of fantasy carries with it a "fuzzy" set of audience expectations and narrative patterns that defy precise categorization.li This has caused some scholars to reject the idea that fantasy is a genre, preferring instead to label it as a "mode" or "impulse" found across multiple media rather than as a clear-cut category. 20 There are many types of fantasy- some fully animated, others not animated at all- as filmmakers turn to different ways to tell stories visually that allow them to represent onscreen the

transformative and mutative relationship this storytelling mode has to our own reality. If animation is available t o all genres rather than existing as a separate genre, and fantasy is a storytelling impulse of which traces can be found in almost all forms of narrative, t hen the relationship between fantasy and animation becomes so far-reaching as to risk obfuscation.

fantasy or animation? questions of history and historiography The so mewhat fraught relationship between fantasy and animation within twenty-first century media culture reflected in the AFI's "10 Top 10" speaks to a broader iss ue at stake within both the popular and critical discourse that surrounds these two overlapping mediums and modes. Fantasy and animation share enough of a historic relationship that separating them out entirely into two completely distinct categories fails to articulate a key component of their cultural identity as it is handled by contemporary scholarship. Within the field of animatlon studies, the medium's potential to resist frameworks of photographic realism- coupled with its unique material properties- has fueled a common critical tendency to assume animation and fan tasy as naturally and irrevocably entwined. For J.P. Telotte, animation holds an "invariably fantastic aspect," while Donald Crafton cements animation's credentials as a "fantastic medium" by noting how cartoon characters operate within "fict ional worlds that we believe in, all the while knowing them to be fantastic.".ll The mobilization of fantasy as an adjective to pronounce animation reinforces a central alliance between the imaginative forms of engagement required of fantasy fiction and the possibilities engendered by the animated medium. However, just as animation enables the production of fantasy cinema as its driving mode of expression, fantasy has become a convenient way of describing the ontological register of the animation (in all its forms). When Kenneth Gross speaks broadly of the "fantasy of animation," the synonymy between the two terms plays out as a critical assumption rooted in the non-photographic, frame-by-frame identity of a medium distinct from live-action image production. 22 The fantasy of the animated fantasy is thus a fundamental

product of the medium, not wholly understood through the versatility of its creative expression but rather qualified further still via its ontological distinctiveness. This perhaps explains why the presence of animated sequences and characters in ostensibly non-animated (and non-fantasy cinema) often functions as an inter-1.ude that speaks to the connotations between the animated medium and these wider discourses of fantasy. Theorists of fantasy cinema often acknowledge the importance animation has played as a medium capable of depicting the kind of scenarios associated with the genre. Jacqueline Furby and Claire Hines describe animation as a medium that affords filmmakers greater "creative possibilities and techniques for crafting [...] some memorable fantasy films."23 David Butler credits animation in its various guises (stop-motion, eel, CGI) with providing a solution to the challenge presented to fantasy filmmakers to construct richly ornate "worlds and spaces in which their narratives take place." 24 Matt Kimmich similarly describes animation as a medium that "would seem ideally suited to adapting fantasy novels to film."25 Within the power structures that support these critical assumptions, animation is able to qualify and legitimize fantasy cinema, substantiating a kind of narrative practice that, as James Walters attests, remains highly "fragile, ephemeral and volatile."26 Yet the ass umed naturalness of fantasy's interrelationship with animation belies the methodological complexities in identifying a part icular production as a fantasy, an animation, or even an animated fantasy. Speaking towards the relationship between fantasy and animation without addressing specific areas of intersection between the two media forms, or the nuances and complications embedded within that very intersection, fails to address what is ultimately at stake in that dialogue. Fantasy and animation stretch beyond singular commercial categories of the animated fantasy film to embrace a broader set of intertwining aesthetic concerns. Given contemporary trends in the Hollywood film industry towards the greater incorporation of CG! and an increasing reliance on franchises drawing from pulp comic sources and high fantasy literature, it is important to speak with accuracy a·b out what constitutes an animated fantasy. However, it becomes difficult to do so without highlighting the less than harmonious manner in which fantasy and animation operate, sometimes combating one another and competing for attention, other times

coalescing to negate the distinctiveness and specificity of either category. The tensions underscoring the assumed status of fantasy and animation as natural bedfellows within contemporary film cult ure have a strong precedent. In his history of early animation practice, Crafton accounts for the development of animation by looking back to proto-cinematic photographers such as Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge.27 Expressing a fascination with technologies that created the illusion of "drawings that move," these pioneers produced proto-typical visions of animation that inspired later filmic versions of the same aesthe tic phenomenon, wherein the illusion of movement wo uld be achieved by running a succession of still drawings through a projector in a way that paralleled the development of live-action, cell uloid photography.28 Charles.Emile Reynaud, who displayed his early form of animation, the "praxinoscope," for the audiences of his Theatre Optique in Paris between 1877 and 1879, developed shorts in which both his representational and abstract drawings would come to life to either visualize the world pictorially, or else to break free from a mimetic .relationship to illustrate animation's potential towards "abstraction." 29 The emergence of filmic animation early on in the history of cinema seemingly had a twofold effect. First, it allowed those interested in the technological capabilities of the animated medium to experiment with its representative potential. Second, it afforded greater creative possibilities for storytellers and performers working in theatre, stage illusions and early forms of screen entertainment such as the magic lantern and popular phantasmagoria shows. This dual, and perhaps competing, interest in animation as a technology and as a storytelling device is evidenced in the careers of numerous early filmmakers.}. Stuart Blackton produced some of the earliest examples of stop-motion (Humpty Dumpty Circus [ 1898)) and hand-drawn animation (The Enchanted DrawJng[ 1900}}, in which onscreen performers in the mold oflightning sketch artists presented the formal construction of animation directly to the camera. However, Blackton also produced works such The ThievJng Hand (1908) and A Midsummer Night's Dream (1909) at the Vitagraph studio in Brooklyn, which are neither animations nor "trick" films in the fullest sense. Both films instead present the Sheffield-born filmmaker's alternative interest in fantasy narratives, with non-animated special effects used in service of a particular

kind of narrative that defies physical reality. The same is also true of Walter R. Booth, a filmmaker who collaborated with Robert W. Paul to produce both The Magic Sword (1901)-a fantasy film re-telling of an Arthurian legend featuring elaborate splicing and dissolve effects but no animation- and Britain's first animated film The Hand ef the Artist (1906), which alongside Blackton's The Enchanted Draw;~similarly prioritizes the presentation of stop-motion effects. Across their respective careers, then, Blackton and Booth are both animators and fantasists. Taken as collective wholes, their filmographies reveal a dual in terest in a specific technology (animation) and a storytelling form (fantasy), while simul taneously rdlecting the interplay between them. Yet these early works are ultimately difficult to claim outright as examples of animated fantasy films, because these filmmakers do not always combine fantasy narratives with animated technologies, but show willingness to produce either fantasy or animated films. The overlapping interests in animation and fantasy displayed across early cinema necessitate a process of historical narrativization, which can lead to a splitting of or prioritization between the two terms. Depending on which account of these screen practices one reads, early films and filmmakers are referred to in remarkably different ways. Marina Warner describes cinema as a medium imbued with a "haunted and magical psychology from its beginnings," emphasizing the links between early cinema and the interest in spiritualism reflected in late nineteenth-century theatrics.10 This account of screen history is echoed by Walters, a fantasy scholar who stresses this underlying and widespread cultural interest in spirituality into which animation played an important role by allowing filmmakers to produce a kind of spectacle whose experiential possibilities lay beyond the otherwise rational world.ll Studies of animation, however, typically offer an alternative narrative that spotlights the animated medium as a technological breakthrough, and thus as bound up with the rational, scientific speculations of post-enlightenment industry. For Esther Leslie, the early optical machines such as Reynaud's "praxinoscope," which used colored strips and fixed internal mirrors, were a revolutionary "technological form" that necessarily combined with the "science of eye movement" by relying on the limitations of human vision to convincingly register fluid motion (the persistence of vision).12 Firmly

embedded within the technological and scientific narrative of early film practice, animation has been cited as a key moment in this chronology of moving images. As multiple genealogies of animation explain, the arrival of the medium emerged out of cinema's chaotic pre-history of experimentation with apparat us of visual ill usion, which, combined with the emergent North American print media industry and the comic strip, helped to plot the trajectory of early cartoonal form . If the relationship between fantasy cinema and animation has been historically intertwined since their mutual inception, then that crucial site of primordial encounter is often addressed through a critical lens that favors one term over the other. This approach to fantasy oranimation, in which one of these categories is provided with a certain agency and authority, is epitomized in the scholarly reception of Georges Melies. Melies is often situated as the cinematic forefather of screen fantasies, referred to by David Robinson as the "father of film fantasy," and by Hans Richter as the "father of fantastic film." 33 Alec Worley similarly describes Melies' technological innovations as a practical solution for "the camera to keep up with his inexhaustible imagination."34 Such accounts of Melies foreground his narrative productions, rather than placing his entire filmography within the context of Tom Gunning's seminal assessment of this early "cinema of attractions." 35 In studies of animation, Melies has occupied a somewhat ulterior identity as a technical innovator or inventor, referred to by Crafton as the "Lighting Cartoonist of French Cinema," and by Leslie as the first individual to "make an art of objects moving."36 As such, Me lies is presented not as a fantasy filmmaker, but as a practitioner of "fantastic effects." Focusing on Melies' "trick" films and downplaying his efforts in storytelli ng, Richard Neupert li nks Me lies' films to his previous occupation as a magician and operator of a magic lantern theatre. 37 In such animated accounts, Me lies' status as a pioneer of early cinematic effects is ultimately prioritized and situated in front of his particular narrative choices that have helped identify the early French filmmaker alongside both the Fiene theatrical genre and as a maker of fantasy cinema. 38 Melies is portrayed as a technical craftsman who experimented formally with the cinematic apparatus. In a manner that restages wider debates surrounding the relationship between narrative and spectacle in early cinema, Melies' contribution to animation and fantasy is

rarely considered together, but rather prised apart in service of a particular methodology or historical narrative. He can eitherbe the man who first used animation to tell cinema's early fantasy stories, or the man who first used fantasy stories to develop pioneering animation techniques. Melies seemingly cannot be both without questions arising about which of these two identities take ascendency, which is the medium and which the mode, which is the method and which is the result . The push-pull relationship between the categories of fantasy and animation continues throughout particular moments where fantasy filmmaking and animation appear both historically entwined but critically divided. The term "fantasy" has been aggressively applied and understood in the context of the Walt Disney studio and their popular animated feature films. It is not hard to locate fantasy as a keyword in the summation of the expectations and requisites of the Disney studio. Henry A. Giroux argues that "Fantasy abo unds as Disney's animated films produce a host of exotic and stereotypical villains, heroes and heroines." 39 In a later piece on Disney animation, Giroux continues that "Animated fantasy and entertainment appear to collapse into each other," while Steven Watts argues that in the 1940s, Disney became a "fantasy factory" producing "traditional fantasy themes." 4 From Adrian Bailey's 19 87 book Walt Disney's World efFantasy to Janet Wasko's Understanding Disney, which is subtitled The Manefacture ef Fantasy, a common set of critical ass umptions have continually allowed scholars to position Disney feature animation in the throes of fantasy. Embedded deep within fantasy's connection to Disney animation, the animated fantasy as a critical label is often split along the fault lines of form and content. When animation historian jerry Beck celebrates Disney's Dumbo (Sam Armstrong, Norman Ferguson et al., 1941) as an "animated fantasyand unfettered imagination- at its finest," the formal elements of the animated medium are coded as an enabling tool functional to the aims of fantasy.il Animation is therefore a style as it is applied to a set of available principles, codes and conventions that seemingly define and give shape to screen fantasy. Within these power structures, fantasy becomes consolidated as a fictional storytelling form (what Furby and Hines describe as coming in "myth, legend and fairy tale" 42 ) ready, and requiring, further degrees of animation and visualization. Fantasy embodies not the medium

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but the modal outcome of animation as the illusion of movement. Animation is now the adjective of fantasy, a way of describing the production and realization onscreen of "fantasy's imaginative terrain." 43 Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein make this distinction clear in arguing that in Disney animation, "virtually any aspect of a historical narrative can be colored as fantasy, as a world of enchantment and narrative seduction no matter the content of the tale." 44 Fantasy filmmakers, including Disney, gravitate towards and work within fantasy traditions by virtue of their medium. The animated fantasy thus becomes the animation o.f fantasy, a reverse arrangement that represents the building (and "coloring") of fantasy worlds or narratives in a medium that is itself"fantastic," but which must remain an art fully in service of fantasy storytelling. Many other figures openly occupy a critical middle ground between the categories of fantasy and animation. BcJ>th Svankmajer and Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki appear in Fowkes' discussion of the evolution of fantasy cinema, while Harryhausen is both a "stop-motion animator" and an effects artist who "helped found whole schools of fantasy film to follow." 45 As a figure that frequently appears across critical histories of fantasy and animation, Harryhausen's credentials as an animator are often in flux, frequently placed subservient to or as a contributing factor towards his legacy as "essential to the development of fantasy film."46 Yet within animation studies, Harryhausen's fantasy narratives are largely downplayed, and (perhaps inevitably) replaced with a greater focus on his intricate and inventive stop-motion techniques. For Paul Wells, Harryhausen's "dinosaur animation" in The Animal World (19 56) is an animated effect (within a predominantly live-action context) that obtains significance through its anatomical accuracy, precision of movement and as an upshot of Harryhausen's methodical "drawing an d painting [of) live animals in zoos."47 As "profoundly influential on the next generation of animators," Harryhausen's artistry is rooted in his development of effects animation, and his creative partnership with stop-motion animator Willis O'Brien. 48 Within these competing traditions, Harryhausen (like Melies) is thus either a pioneer of the fantasy narrative's renowned storytellers, or an effects animator who merely exploited the possibilities of fantasy to hone his animated artistry. Czech puppet animator JiFi Trnka is another leading figure in the

animation industry "well known for his fantasy films."49 In the case of Trnka and his mentee Bretislav Pojar, it was the versatili ty of the animated medium that was once again entirely appropriate to achieving the enchantments of fantasy. Both animators worked primarily in stop-motion, and were central to the re-emergence of puppet animation in post-war Czechoslovakia following the pre-war successes of Karel Dodal and Prague's Atelier Filmovych Triku (AFIT) studio. Giannalberto Bendazzi argues that for Trnka and Pojar, "three-dimensional clay animation presented the same opportunities for metamorphosis an d surreal invention that animated drawings had always offered to an author's fantasy.'' 50 Both filmmakers thus harnessed the fantasy of animation through the malleability of the material, turning to stop-motion as the only way of making concrete the fantasy of their imagination. German animator Lotte Reiniger shares with both Melies and Harryhausen something of a do1Uble identity, subjected to a critical approach that seeks to cleave fantasy from animation at the same time as the two are presented as inextricably connected. Reiniger's The Adventures ef Prince Achmed/Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (19 26) is, for Lucy Fischer, both "an animated movie" and "also a fantasy/fairy tale."ll Whereas the animated identity of The Adventures of.Pnnce Achmedis elaborated in light of Reiniger's "work done with silhouetted cutouts moved against painted backgrounds," its status as a fantasy is accounted for by its narrative of otherworlds and folkloric storytelling structures. 52 This split definition achieves two aims: it suggests both fantasy and animation's historical proximity to each other through the work of an individual filmmaker, while at the very same time denying their entangled nature by registering Reiniger as having not overlapping but dueling identities. The durability of such critical ass umptions is at once challenged by the tension that assumes the relationship between fantasy and animation to be relatively interchangeable and as no less analogous to oil and water. Contemporary film and media scholarship should therefore be tasked with finding a methodology to speak to the fantasy and animation connection that removes the tensions brought to bear within contemporary discourse, and avoids the risk of both arbitrarily separating them apart or conflating them together. The stakes of what i t means to identify animation as a medium of fantasy encounters resistance with the very diversity of an art

form that envelops traditional eel-animation, object animation, stop-motion puppetry, and contemporary digital cinema. The prevalence of "animation" and animated media across moving image cult ure is suitably matched by the dualities and ambiguities that the term "fantasy" continues to carry within contemporary scholarship. Indeed, in her history of Art Nouveau in the cinema, Fischer compares The Adventures ef Prince Achmed with the British animated fantasy Yellow Submanne(George Dunning, 1968), a film that, in its colorful re-telling of The Beatles' popular music, stakes out very different representational territory than the sorcery, demons and witchcraft of Reiniger's silhouette animation. It is clear that the fantasy of animation, if not the animated fantasy, straddles a diverse range of meanings, approaches, styles and production contexts. It is the purpose of this collection to fully exploit the entanglement of fantasy and animation as both competing and complementary media, mediums and g enres. We seek to situate animation and fantasy together in ways that do not hierarchize or prioritize the parts of the animated fantasy whole, but which instead place each category on a more even and equal footing.

fantasy/animation: the corrective possibilities oftheslash Fantasy/Animation considers the historic persistence of animation and animated media within fantasy cinema, the dimensions of fantasy within the ontology of animation, and the shared ·c ultural associations between fantasy and animation in contemporary culture. The collection argues that the fantasy and animation relationship should be conceptualized not as an "and" or an "or," but as a dialectic of"fantasy/animation." This is a term we utilize to qualify animation's multiplicity of forms (experimental, narrative, features and shorts) and diversity of s.tyles and techniques (traditional celanimation, computer-generated). It also signals a new methodology for approaching how notions of "fantasy" (as impulse, as genre, as spec-tatorial act) operate across film and television within a range of national contexts. We identify the "slash" that appears between fantasy and animation in our collection's title not as a fixed divide, or as a device that rhetorically forces

two terms together, bu t as a fluid channel through which fantasy and animation are permitt ed to intersect, collide and intermingle. This permission to exchange is writ large t hroughout the collection's aims and research goals, assembling together researchers who have hi ther to worked within the respective fields of animation or fantasy, have interests in fantasy and animation, and who have been tasked with excavating the inclusive value that "fantasy/ animation" offers future considerations of a relationship that has, to date, been assumed, pre-s upposed or obfuscated. The collection's first section, titled "Ontology and Spectatorship," tackles the fan tasy/ animation intersection t heoretically, employing a range of critical frameworks to interrogate ho w these two media forms overlap at both a formal and experiential level. In Chapter 1, "Wonderlands, Slumberlands and Plunderlands: Considering the Animated Fantasy," Paul Wells provides a taxonomy of the deployment of fantasy in animation by analyzing multiple adaptations of Lewis Carroll's Alice books. He compares and contrasts Disney's eel-animated cartoon, Tim Burton's CG adaptation and Svankmajer's stop-motion rendering of the classic fantasy text. Wells gives special attention to the idea of fantasy as a transformational system, and how this enables animation practitioners to make literal psychological and emotional states that become the particular agencies of fantasy in animated cinema. In Chapter 2, "Pierre Mac Orlan's 'Social Fantastic' and Disney Animation," Barnaby Dicker considers a difficul t, yet compelling, theory of fantasy articulated by Mac Orl an (pseudonym of Pierre Dumarchey, 1882- 1970), which stretches across animation, literature, photography, and other graphic and plastic arts. Taking Mac Orlan's essay on the social fantastic with its case study, Disney's Silly Symphony The Grasshopper and the Ants (Wilfred Jackson, 1934), this chapter underlines how Mac Orlan's under-acknowledged theory provides rich insights into the fantasy/ animation intersection. In her Chapter 3, "In the Face of ... Animated Fantasy Characters: On the Role of Baby Schemata in the Elicitation of Empathic Reactions," Meike Uhrig applies a theoretical methodology taken from cognitive and evolutionary psychology, examining the different manifestations of faces and facial expressions of animated fantasy characters. Uhrig considers the way animation is used to imbue fantastical figures with a powerful ability to evoke empathy and the potential effects of these physiognomies for the character-spectator-relationship. Lilly

Husbands adopts a phenomenological approach to fantasy/ animation in her Chapter 4, "Fantastical Empathy: Encountering Abstraction in Bret Battey's Sinus Aestum (2009)." Husbands embraces a definition of fantasy located within the capacity of abstract animation to engage our imaginative faculties to make sense of its unusual stimuli. Drawing on Laura U. Marks' explication ofhaptic visuality and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception, Husbands articulates a theory of abstract computer animation spectatorship, wherein works such as SinusAestumcompel our imaginations to find new ways of grasping and feeling into abstract moving images. In Chapter 5, "The Reality of Fan tasy: VFX as Fantasmatic Supplement in Game ef Thrones (2011-)," Ben Tyrer embraces a definition of fantasy similarly rooted in spectatorial experience, employing Lacanian psychoanalysis as its key theoretical methodology. Examin.ing the "making of" featurettes that accompany the popular series' DVD re1eases, Tyrer argues that the creation of VFX seq uences in Game