Introduction

Increasingly, popular and innovative films of every stripe, from Avatar to Tree of Life, have come to rely on the ever-more-seamless and frequent appearance of computer-generated imagery (CGI), animation, and other visual effects. Unlike earlier eras, in which animation and live-action productions could be easily separated and differentiated, we find ourselves living in a time in which a great number of films now blur distinctions between live action and animation, effectively altering the contexts in which we conceptualize "animation." As filmmaker Bob Sabiston, interviewed for this issue, deduces, "Once [Terrence Malick]'s using it, it's everywhere."

In this age of increasingly integrated animation, CGI, and digital visual effects—in films, video games, web-based content, and television—this issue of the Velvet Light Trap interrogates ever-evolving notions of animation as they pertain to the history of cinema, from the cel to RotoShop. In particular, we present changing notions of animation as a set of technologies and techniques used to enhance or displace live-action cinema. Today's overwhelming question could be framed thusly: How do we understand "animation" today, in light of the increasing application of techniques growing from traditional animation, as it proliferates across all cinematic media platforms and narrative styles?

The essays in this issue examine animation within a critical historical context by focusing on a few of the ways that concepts of filmmaking and animation have changed in relation to one another and, indeed, continue to change. To this end, two of the authors here revisit early concepts of animation, while two others specifically analyze the more contemporary influence of digital filmmaking on animation. Their aim is not merely to define or even redefine animation or live-action filmmaking in a restrictive way. Instead, by looking closely at films as diverse as Bambi, Yellow Submarine, Kung Fu Panda, Toy Story 3, and The Adventures of Tintin, our authors grapple with topics that arise from the careful consideration of animation amid evolving considerations of the form: critical functions of space and realism in animated films, the critical distinction between "cartoons" and "animation," the materialit(ies) of digital animation, and the significance of the neither-nor synthetic worlds of motion capture.

Taking as its subject an early, paradigmatic example of Hollywood animation, Casey Riffel's "Dissecting Bambi: Multiplanar Photography, the Cel Technique, and the Flowering of Full Animation" attempts to disentangle the coupling between spatial realism and the discourse of naturalism established in the years leading up to the first wave of Disney feature films. Riffel examines the technological advancements that allowed for the fragmentation of the animated image into multiple, discrete layers as exemplified by Bambi (1942). Through exploitation of the spatial properties of the cel technique, Walt Disney Productions could promote a particular version of naturalism in animation. This essay exposes Disney's "realism" as a historical construct in which the move toward supposed fidelity, both of animal anatomy and spatial depth, merges with the establishment of a hegemonic "style" of animation.

In "On Styles of Theorizing Animation Styles: Stanley Cavell at the Cartoon's Demise," Ryan Pierson interrogates a chapter in animation scholarship's conceptual history by arguing that Cavell's remarks on cartoons, which foregrounded a tradition of plasmaticness, were espoused just as cartoons had begun to vanish from the movies. The closing of the major cartoon studios and the growing importance of heterogeneous techniques (in such works as Yellow Submarine) precipitated a conceptual shift from the dominant paradigm of "cartoons" to the more general idea of "animation" in the 1960s and 1970s, leaving Cavell unable to account for his present moment. Pierson's essay therefore provides another historical example of how the changing conceptualization of animation provides an antecedent for a reenvisioning of the form similar to that provoked by today's digital filmmaking environment.

Digital animation is itself taken up in "Kung Fu Panda: Animated Animal Bodies as Layered Sites of (Trans)National Identities," Hye Jean Chung's argument for a new understanding of the materiality of digital filmmaking that focuses on the computer-generated bodies of Dream-Works' animated film from 2008. According to Chung, Kung Fu Panda allows for the identification...