The Poetics of Shakespearean Animation

The bias of Shakespearean films—the now dominant sources of experience with Shakespeare in performance—has been mostly towards visual realism and psychological detail. Complex personalities, definite and convincing settings, and the immediacy and consistency of the dramatic illusion characterize many adaptations produced since the revival of the genre in 1990s. There are exceptions, of course, and one of them has attracted relatively little attention so far: animated Shakespeare. How can animators possibly “perform” Shakespeare? How does their approach to the texts differ from that of film actors? Are there recurring ideas and scenes in the plays that lend themselves particularly well to animation? And is there a sense in which the appeal of animation could be similar to the appeal of early modern performance? These are the questions that my article seeks to answer in order further to consolidate animated Shakespeare as an important subject for studies of Shakespeare in performance.

The very notion of animation as a mode of performance might perhaps seem controversial. The animated figures, puppets, and cartoons have no consciousness or agency of their own and the origin of “performance” in animation—the performance of the animators themselves—always remains hidden. It is here, in the agency of the animator that takes place between the shots, where Norman McLaren, one of the most distinguished independent animators, locates the essence of his art and the origin of meaning in the medium, rather than in the actual visual information on each individual shot: “How it moves is more important than what moves [. . .] what the animator does on each frame of film is not as important as what he or she does in between” (Wells, Animation 7). McLaren thus defines animation as an essentially performative art rather than a derivative form of fine art.

Donald Crafton goes even further in his most recent book, Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief and World-Making in Animation, where he explains and demonstrates how cartoon characters themselves could be considered performers in their own right. Their “acting style” evolved over the course of the first half of the twentieth century from “figurative” performances of stock characters to the “embodied” performances suggestive of developed and unique personalities (15–57). Just as animation was becoming more and more life-like as the decades passed, so the live-action features embraced the potential of animation. With the rapid development of CGI (computer-generated imagery) technologies at the end of the century, live-action performances turned into digital material that could be enhanced by computer animation.¹ Animation and live performance have become communicating vessels and therefore my first note of caution must be that although the two are often discussed separately, animation can no longer be treated as an ontological or aesthetic antithesis of live action cinema.

While the language of animation keeps borrowing from that of live-action films and vice versa, however, the characteristic narrative strategies of these forms are still distinct enough to merit the investigation of fully animated adaptations of Shakespeare along the lines outlined above. When it comes to Shakespeare, animators have to confront in their studios the same gaps, indeterminacies, and unresolved silences that the actors and directors face on stages and film sets, but their interpretations and creative solutions could still be much less bound by the imperatives of realistic representation, which are here understood to include the pursuit of psychological depth, spatiotemporal coherence, and the maintenance of a convincing illusion. Making use of suggestive transformations, visual shortcuts, and actions free from consequences, the work of the animators can exploit many of the non-realist elements of the plays that the live-action films tend to downplay: ornate rhetoric, alternative methods of characterization, the elasticity of time and space, and opportunities for improvisation.

As the live-action adaptations of Shakespeare become more and more reliant on computer animation—Julie Taymor’s The Tempest (2010) is an exemplary case—the question of whether the technology inspires interest in these non-realist elements or whether it actually serves the goals of realistic representation gains weight. My focus here, however, is rather more straightforward. By examining fully animated films relying...