On Styles of Theorizing Animation Styles: Stanley Cavell at the Cartoon's Demise

In 1974 Stanley Cavell contentiously stated that "cartoons are not movies." If that claim was strange when it was first made, it reads like a museum-piece curiosity today, tantamount to the archaism that movies could not be art. Such an unequivocal divide between "cartoons" and "movies" now plainly seems irresponsible and dangerous, and not merely because of a general desire to study animated films more closely.

With the material basis of film becoming, as D. N. Rodowick has put it, "ungrounded" ("Elegy" 93) by digital technologies, the place of animation within film's history is being broadly reconsidered. New boundaries are being drawn in a need to account for the rise in animated feature films, the prominence of CGI effects in live-action features, and the now-common practices of DV shooting, Avid editing, and so on. Crudely put, there is a pervasive sense that we need to know what animation is so that we can know what a movie is.

Because the revived interest in animation has largely been provoked by digitization, questions of animation tend to be asked in what we might call digital terms. With the apparent sea change in film history from an older indexical commitment to reality to the new possibilities of algorithmic manipulation, animation arises as a problem largely because of the consequent need to place it somewhere within this old/new model. In these terms one can argue, as Rosalind Krauss has, that because computers have "overtaken photographically based cinema," the distinction between "'movies' and 'cartoons'" has all but collapsed ("The Rock" 32). Conversely, one can follow Rodowick and Mary Ann Doane in claiming that cartoons, as drawings on celluloid sheets that had to be photographed, fall into the older regime of indexically based cinema (Rodowick, Virtual Life 121-22; Doane 148-49). Either way the terms remain more or less the same, based on a presupposed opposition between old and new modes of representation.

A subtle but widespread problem with this line of thinking is that animation effectively gets collapsed into one category or the other, a kind of passenger in the larger vehicle of film history. It becomes easy to forget that animation itself has a history because it is not thought to be a historically variable form of its own—only an existing option for film technology, a possible counterexample.

One alternative means of addressing our present conception of animation is by looking back to animation theory's past through Cavell's remarks on cartoons. If it does not seem ludicrous now to claim that all movies are animation (as Lev Manovich and Alan Cholodenko have), then it is worth asking why a philosopher found it reasonable less than forty years ago to say that no movies are animation. That puzzlement—roughly put, why might cartoons not be movies?—provides the inquisitive force for the present essay. I do this not to defend Cavell as a pioneering animation theorist (he was not) but to clarify what he means by the concept "cartoons." Clarifying Cavell may shed some genealogical light on what we mean by "animation" today.

If tracing a relation to animation's history through a committed realist like Cavell seems counterintuitive, this is because realism is generally thought to be responsible for film theory's long-standing neglect of animation. Tom Gunning has called that neglect one of the great scandals of film theory, and he lays blame primarily at the feet of an excessive emphasis on the camera's photographic powers: "Is it not somewhat strange that photographic theories . . . have had such a hold on film theory that much of film theory must immediately add the caveat that they do not apply to animated film?" (34). Cavell's infamous dictum reads like a "condemnation" of the form (in Krauss's words), indicative of a general willful ignorance.

But Cavell's relation to cartoons turns out to be considerably more nuanced. Extrapolating the reasons behind and consequences of his remarks requires placing him in a tripartite relation with realist film theory, "traditional" cartoon theory, and the state of cartoons...