Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Nikolas Paras
DePaul University
paras.nikolas@gmail.com
THE ANIMATED CARTOON, in its mature form, can be the most facile and elastic form of graphic art.
Since the first Cro-Magnon Picasso hacked etchings on his cave wall every artist has longingly sought the ideal
medium-one that would contain within its structure color, light, expanse, and movement. The animated cartoon can
supply these needs. It knows no bounds in form or scope. It can approach an absolute in technical realism and it can
reach the absolute in abstraction. It can bridge the two without taking a deep breath.- Chuck Jones, Music and the
Animated Cartoon
This is clear when one attempts to define the cartoon film; if it belongs fully to the cinema, this is because the drawing
no longer constitutes a pose or a completed figure, but the description of a figure which is always in the process of
being formed or dissolving through the movement of lines and points taken at any-instant-whatevers of their
course. The cartoon film is related not to a Euclidean, but to a Cartesian geometry. It does not give us a figure described
in a unique moment, but the continuity of the movement which describes the figure.- Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1 The
Movement-Image
This above quote from French philosopher Gilles Deleuze marks the extent to which he
explicitly engages the subject of the cartoon or animated film. Despite having extensively written
on the subject of film, for the most part the issue of animated film stands out as an omission in his
work. Even within the secondary literature as there are only a few in-depth engagements joining
Deleuzes thought and animation. It shall be shown that this forms a significant hole in Deleuzes
engagement with film. It is often within certain animated works that Deleuzes concepts of the
movement-image and the time-image make themselves most forcibly present. In particular I shall
focus on the work of the great 20th century animation director Charles Chuck Jones, most famous
for his work as an animation director for Warner Bros, and specifically one of his great works the
1953 short Duck Amuck.
Before approaching Jones specifically, it would be good to examine the above passage in briefly.
Deleuze is not wrong, technically speaking, in the passage, but this claim needs some fleshing out.
For the sake of simplicity and space, what follows will be mostly limited to what is termed
traditional animation, i.e. hand-drawn animation, since also to attempt to account for computergenerated animation (both in three-dimensional and two-dimensional forms) as well as other types
of cinema which have typically been grouped with animation such as stop-motion would occupy too
much space. What Deleuze seems to be saying is that in animation there still exist moments which
possess no independent relationship to one another, but rather an ordinal relationship. By Ordinal
relationship is here defined as having a necessary and ordered relationship between anterior
and/or posterior cells eg; if one looks at an individual cell of Gertie the Dinosaur or Steamboat
Willie it has necessarily a relationship to the cells which are anterior and/or posterior to it.
Animation must exist in the context of a sequential series of images which create the impression of
the movement of bodies.
So animation requires that there be some continual flow of a series of images, but these flows can
take different forms. For example, a cell from Steamboat Willie might exist in a relationship of
belonging as a member of an ordinal sequence of drawings but it can still exist by itself and
present itself even while isolated from the whole. =This allows for the potential of a unique moment
in certain circumstances and thus poses a problem for Deleuzes very brief touching of the subject.
This is not to say that Deleuze is strictly wrong about what he says about animation in the passage;
it is more that there are potentialities for animation that are not yet accounted for. The quote from
Jones at the beginning accounts for this in a way that Deleuze hadn't anticipated in Cinema 1:
namely that the elasticity of the cartoon short does not restrict it wholly to elasticity but extends
enough that it can negate its own elasticity. Such is the potential in animation, then, that it is capable
of abolishing its own differences from live-action for the sake of originality through repetition.
Nonetheless this description of animation can function as an example of what Deleuze calls the
movement-image. A good working definition of the movement-image is provided by Richard de
Brabander:
The movement-image proceeds by narratological and linear incisions and references. Action sequences have a
(chrono)logical order which is represented through actions in an spatial configuration. Whether the film starts
with a present situation the character is confronted with, or with a flash-back or a flash-forward is not of much
importance. Relevant is that in the movement-image past, present and future are clearly distinguished from
each other. The spectator immediately recognizes whether a scene refers to something that has happened in
the past or alludes to something that is going to happen in the future1
2 This is not to say that the time-image was necessarily wholly absent in animation. For example
Emile Cohls great experimental piece Fantasmagorie from 1912 could be said to embody certain
aspects of the time-image. Whether it does is a topic for another discussion;what is of concern right
now regards a general emergence of the time-image in animation, not its absolute genesis.