“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, January 8, 2012

Velocities of Ecocriticism Liveblog

Ursula Heise, “Ecocriticism and Animation.”

Animated film has been one of the most important aesthetic genres in ecological aesthetics: Disney, Miyazake. Very little critical attention, in film studies or ecocriticism.

Common critiques are of sentimentalism or sanitization, and the underwriting of conservative social ideologies.

No attention to the specificity of the medium.

Animated film erases the distinction between human beings, nonhumans and inanimate objects. Flexibility of material bodies. Antirealist devices. At odds with environmentalist thought therefore? But Ursula will show how they are resonant with ecocritical thought!

Industrial societies reflect on the agency of objects throughout the twentieth century. Speaking and acting animals. Early twentieth century push to industrialization made machines look more lively.

Apostrophe, pathetic fallacy, personification. Ruskin condemned it. Ecocriticism has defined itself obliquely in relation to that. Aldo Leopold: thinking like a mountain. Christopher Mains: western art and philosophy assumes the only speaking subjects are humans. Neil Evernden: the pathetic fallacy is not a fallacy at all. If you put humans back into the landscape, it's simply animate.

Thing power and new materialists. Bruno Latour: heterogeneous networks. Bill Brown, Barad, Bennett.

Animation as a visual translation of these nonhuman agents. Question of anthropomorphism. Brown and Bennett have sought to discourage the idea that humanlike intentionality should always provide the template. In a lot of animations human agency does provide the template. In other cases it emphasizes different kinds of agency.


Princess Mononoke (Miyazaki). Speaking wolves, animals possessed by demons. Kami, tree spirits. Forest spirit. Does not bring them to a harmonious conclusion but to a sort of coexistence.

Aubier and Patar, Panique au village (2009), stop motion. A plastic horse. Confuses category of human and animal.

Animated film mobilizes traditions that give objects agency. Hardwired into the technique of animation.

Plasmaticness of animation: Eisenstein. Utopian form that offers an alternative to the oppressions of mechanization and rigid social order. Leyda, Eisenstein on Disney.

The predator–prey relationship is what is so often at stake in plasmaticness. Food retains its agency. What is being explored here is an ecological relationship. A good way to think about species, which does regenerate itself through the demise of individuals.

Isao Takahata, Pom Poko: plastmaticness across species. Tanuki, shapeshifters that disturb the workers. Forced to integrate into urban lifestyle. Tired at work because they're animals trying to retain their shape. Nature as a dynamism that becomes socialized. Reinforced through different styles: realist, cartoon-like Disneyesque, traditional Japanese. Culturally filtered plastmaticity.




3 comments:

Bill Benzon said...

I'm surprised I missed this one, Tim, as animation is one of my main interests and I've written at least one post explicitly in animation and OOO, Cartoon Metaphysics, and there's this one here, Animation and the Sentient Text. I've blogged a ton about Miyazaki. Here, for example, is a catalog of Miyazaki's use of animals.

And Disney, Disney too. You gotta' get around whatever reservations you have about Disnification or Disney, Inc. because Disney's Ink & Paint are more important and deeper. It's not that there's no reason for concern, there is, lots of it. But, first, look at the ink (and thank the women whose hands put it on celluloid). Start with the Nutcracker Suite (and here, where it's packaged with The Sorcerer's Apprentice, which, BTW, can be read as a gloss on Fordism) episode of Fantasia. It's the most gorgeous piece of film ever made, and from the minds of women, too! not only the hands.

If weird's you style, check out Pink Elephants on Parade. It's elephants all the way down, baby! And then we've got Miyazaki's pig man, Proco Rosso. Talk about weird objects, what do you do with Road Runner, where signs and things trade places in tricky ways?

Lotsa weirdness goin' on.

joehay2 said...

See the 2011 text on animation and ecocriticism: That's All Folks? Eco-critical Readings of American Animated Features (U of Nebraska).

Bill Benzon said...

Thanks for the reference!