Animating Space: From Mickey to WALL-E

Conclusion

253 CONCLUSION One of the underlying assumptions driving this study, this history-thatis -not-quite-a-history, is that we have generally neglected to recognize the extent to which animation is a spatial art. It occurs in a special sort of space that is not quite the human world but that seems to aspire to that status—thus animation’s historical efforts at adding depth and dimensionality, at crossing the borders of live-action cinema, even combining human and animated worlds. And it finds a key attraction in its capacity to enliven space, to give spirit to the things that have been created there—“things” that have often rivaled our live-action movie stars in popularity and that now, as rotoscoped or motion-captured “vactors ” or “veractors,” even threaten to supplant them. Because of that spatial orientation, animation also lends itself to spatial analysis, to thinking through much in the fashion that Vidler has done with late modernist art, architecture, and film, and that Virilio has undertaken with his extended diagnosis of the postmodern world as a realm noteworthy for its lack, for a “lost dimension.” In fact, in drawing together those two vantages—vantages that effectively span the historical trajectory of animation—we might even read cinematic animation in part as a symptomatic measure of cultural change: as a tool for exploring and experimenting with the new spaces of the modern world, and for responding to and perhaps even countering the anxiety-producing dissolution of those spaces in more recent times. Of course, taking this sort of spatial approach is hardly new. We might recall that Walter Benjamin linked mechanical reproduction, and especially that represented by the cinema in its various forms, to a pointedly modern impulse “to bring things ‘closer’ spatially” (223), and that he subsequently employed that spatial conceit as a way of explaining the ongoing shift from cult value to exhibition value in the arts. As we have several times noted, the art critic Herman Scheffauer saw film, particu- Animating Space 254 larly in its more stylized forms, as blazing a path into new dimensions, as providing a way of representing, and thus helping us to see, a “stereoscopic ” cultural reality. More recently, David Harvey, in his study of the postmodern compression of time and space, has turned specifically to film to demonstrate what he terms “the conceptualization and meanings ” that attach to this historical compression (308). And more directly related to our discussion of animation is the fact that Norman Klein concludes his study of the popular seven-minute cartoon, once a characteristic feature of the movie experience, with a similar focus. He describes the “peculiar kind of architecture” into which animation had begun to evolve in the 1930s, with its “cartoon layouts [that] look like sound stages” (248), traces how in the 1950s “a kind of architectural significance was applied increasingly to cartoon imagery” (250), and eventually suggests that American animation has today found its fulfillment in yet another kind of architectural thinking, in the structures of the Disney-style amusement parks and their carefully controlled points of view, forced perspectives, and collapsing of spaces. It thus seems that such spatial conceits have already served others well in thinking about the movies, modern culture, and, as a reflection of both, animation. In this study that same conceit has also provided us with a way to help provide some balance to our thinking about animation. Much of the history of the form has previously been written from what I have termed—following Donald Crafton’s lead—a figural perspective, from considerations of the artists who have found ways of inserting themselves into their work and of the signature characters that have captured our imaginations and, in the process, become such effective corporate logos. We might note that in 1954, on the first episode of his landmark Disneyland television series, Walt Disney, even as he was introducing plans for his new theme park and thus announcing a whole new corporate direction, what Klein might describe as the new frontier for animation , pointed out that his audience should “never lose sight of one thing, that it was all started by a mouse.” It was hardly a necessary reminder, particularly since for many years critics had been trying to draw links between Disney and his early “star,” a figure that, Klein notes, “is unquestionably the most broadly marketed film image of the twentieth century” (55). But Disney’s comment was significant because it reaffirmed the value of such...