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175 THE CARTOON CORPUS If cartoons were flesh, pornography would have to be reinvented. Pornography uses the body—its aura, its texture, its materiality, its morphology—to choreograph physical possibilities imagined through the dormant state of the inert (repressed) corpus. In this sense pornography animates the body into heightened states of arousal, erection, and expulsion. It actualizes all that can be desired of the body. Cartoons similarly employ the body to explode with latent libidinal energy, choreographing physical impossibilities imagined through the actual state of the innate (expressed) corpus. Yet cartoons perform this function all the while refuting the body’s fleshiness. Indeed, the hypergraphic flatness of cartoons diverts the erotic gaze to the razed ground of flat-painted blocks of color devoid of depth. Flesh is depicted as if to claim that there is no body onscreen: just a shape, its outline, and its shadow. The depiction of the human body in western cartoon form seems predicated on this fundamental contradiction—one that is firmly lodged in the ideology and ontology of the cartoon form. Procedures like compositing live actors or rotoscoping have consequently been deemed transgressive and have tended to be viewed as corruption or abuse of the animation art form. The implication is that the body is to be drawn and imagineered rather than photographed and actualized . Linked to nineteenth-century ideals of Romantic mimeticism, the human form is to be evoked, idealized, and posed like the painted nude. This critical standpoint replicates the most conservative of binaries: that showing something through the act of photography is a blunt strategy compared with the suggesting 9 Auralis Sexualis How Cartoons Conduct Paraphilia Philip Brophy 176 Philip Brophy of something through any nonphotographic act. This mantra brackets bourgeois ideals of aestheticism from eroticism (nonpornographic sensualism) to drama (nonviolent action). Cartoons—irrefutably evidencing their lowbrow genealogy in every squiggly move—repulse Romantic mimeticism. Forgoing the poetic for the ribald, they have consistently and strategically mocked the purer pursuits of form. Cartoons are not, however, exempt from the sexual semiotics of their apparition. The history of American classic cartoonography is rooted in an aversion to any actuality of the body’s corporeality. Looking at many an apparently innocent cartoon from the first half of the twentieth century, one can see the human form swathed in a voluptuous rendering. The sexual lacing of flora, fauna, and machina abounds, from the pulped fluidity of their physics to the paragynecological extremes of their motion dynamics. It remains hard to reconcile the flagrant aura of these scenarios enjoyed by children and families. And even though it is easy to discern all sorts of aberrant textuality in cultural flotsam from bygone eras, the fauxretro viscosity of gleaming CGI Hollywood blockbuster animation behaves in identical fashion. The CGI grail for realism paradoxically sends it screaming from rendering any flesh in its kiddie cornucopia, yet it evidences eerily tactile precision in its texture-mapping of plastic, fur, jelly, and other faux materials born of twentieth-century petrochemical development. Indeed, the material headiness of a sex shop stocked with purple silicone dolphin dildos and neonpink fur-lined crotchless panties looks remarkably similar to the candy plasticity of contemporary CGI family animations. The fact that cartoons are comical and hysterical merely creates a noisescape of interference to distract from their sexualized base. All bodily figuration invokes the registering of one’s own form, and the practice of animation necessitates one confronting oneself with how one will engineer a form for the self. The body not only has to be drawn; it also has to be rendered, mobilized, and voiced. Far from practicing any animistic doctrine, cartoons sublimely create the most artificial projection of the self—all the while capturing the neurological and psychosexual vibrations of the body more than any photo/cine-camera could achieve. In this sense their relation to the body is akin to choreographed dance. Just as dance creates physical metaphors of how the earthbound might escape gravity, cartoons dance with equivocal transformative energies. In doing so, cartoons arguably abstract the body into an inhuman reflexive contortion of what could be termed “animamorphism”: rather than imbue animals and objects with human traits and behavior, they convey animalistic states of existence in humans through refusing recognizable codes of identification. The cartoon corpus is thus the form born of such a state. Its near-century’s worth of imagery has consistently foregrounded a sexual tonality in the form’s handling of its materials, leaving it open to a wide...

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