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of the machine and the human body, while at the same time
Cf-ifC erasing the borders that separated them. The result was that
<,o:v'!-- human capabilities were augmented through fusion with
V'" stY" 0 the machine. Even before the development of modem CGI
\' k: equivalents to the rotoscope, this fusion became both a site
o of celebration and of anxiety as the borders between organic
and inorganic dissolved, as the authors of the articles in this
issue point out. But technologies such as the rotoscope and
Rotoshop do not simply fuse the machine with the human.
When this animated image is mapped over live-action footage
through rotoscoping, this issue's contributors (and others
before them, such as Alan Cholodenko) observe not only of a
kind of leakage, but a simultaneous presence of the drawn and
the photo-indexical, in which the rotoscoped or Rotoshopped
body is not so much fused with the human body as it is mapped
over it. Indeed, it is this fluctuating nature of co-presence, or,
as Jose Capino puts it "the appearance and disappearance of
the real body's image beneath and between its traces," that
makes these representations such a fruitful field of enquiry.
This issue's contributors are not proposing a field theory
of the negotiations between the synthetic and the photo-
indexical in media. They discuss a small area of concern
regarding the ontological integrity of the human subject or
of concepts of realism. There remain many other questions,
such as those posed in this issue by William Schaffer, who
deals with issues rising from Pixar's Toy Story and Toy Story
II in terms of Pixar's integrated response to the possibilities
of digital aesthetics, animated characterisation and marketing.
I appreciate being given the opportunity to guest edit
this issue of Animation Journal, and I wish to thank the
contributors for demonstrating the increasingly high level
of theorization that is the new norm in Animation Studies.
1 "An acting Oscar for an animated character?" The National Post
5:61 (9 Jan 2003): AI; James Cowan, "Is Gollum worthy? " The
National Post 5:61 (9 Jan 2003): BI-2; P.J. Huffstuffer and Alex
Pham, "Making Gollum," The Ottawa Citizen (31 Dec 2002): F8, F6.
2 Kristin Thompson, "Implications of the Cel Animation
Technique," in Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath, ed., The
Cinematic Apparatus (New York: St. Martin's, 1980), 106-20.
3 Deitch, Gene, "Animation - WhattheHeckIsIt? ," Animation WorldMagazine,
online at http://mag.awn.com/index. php3? 1 type=pageone&artic1e-no=6
4 Donald Crafton, "The Henry Ford of Animation: John Randolph Bray," and
"The Animation Shops," in Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898-1928
(Cambridge,MA.:MIT, 1982), 137-216; Mark Langer, "The Disney-Fleischer
Dilemma: Product Differentiation and Technological Innovation," in Annette
Kuhn and Jackie Stacey, ed., Screen Histories: A Screen Reader (Oxford:
Oxford University, 1998), 148-63; Leonard Maltin, Of Mice and Magic:
A History of American Animated Cartoons (New York: Plume, 1980),80.
Animation Journal, Volume 12,2004
7
CADAVER OF THE REAL: ANIMATION,
ROTOSCOPING AND THE POLITICS OF THE BODY
by Joanna Bouldin
Introduction
Over the past decade movie fans have been bombarded with
films that utilize cutting-edge computer animation technology to
create remarkably realistic worlds. Films such as Terminator 2
(1991 ), Forrest Gump (1994), Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
(2001), and The Lord o/the Rings (2001) have essentially blurred
the line between live-action and animation. They depict worlds
in which the real and the fantastic are virtually indistinguishable,
in which history loses its permanence and becomes subject to
digital revision, and in which the human and animated body
merge in interesting and sometimes terrifying ways.
1
This paper
explores the relationship between animation, live-action film,
and the everyday material world. Although animation is often
associated with children, fantasy, and the imagination
2
, I argue
that animation constantly negotiates its place between reality
and fantasy. Animation is, in fact, intimately connected to the
very real, very grown-up world of sex, race, and the politics
of the body.
This paper begins by theorizing the ontology of the
animated image-its 'being-ness' -the stuff of the animated
body. Comparing the ontological status of the photographically
recorded image, with its powerful ability to conjure the
physical presence and materiality of the original object or
individual, to the animated image, I argue that animation I /
also possesses a kind of ontological and phenomenological V
presence or thickness. Although often fantastic, animated 1\
bodies are far from fake. Bugs Bunny, Betty Boop, Lara
Croft-these are not simply flat, imaginary bodies lacking
in substance and matter, but bodies that acquire a certain \/
thickness and density; bodies that are experienced by viewers'f.\
as if they have a certain somatic reality.
In order to understand these animated bodies and their
complex relationship with lived bodies, this paper focuses on
the traditional animation technique of rotoscoping. Analyzing
the Fleischer Studio short Betty Boop's Bamboo Isle (1932), I
demonstrate how the animated body gains 'body' by drawing
on (and being drawn on) other bodies that boast more flesh
and substance. Ultimately, this paper addresses the political
implications of animation's relationship to the 'rea1'3 in terms
of the construction of race, gender and the body.
Animation Journal, Volume 12,2004
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The Animated and The Actual: Indexicality and The
Ontology of the Animated Image
Few would deny that the animated image lacks the privileged
relationship to 'reality' attributed to more automatic processes
such as photography. Throughout its 165-year history, the
photographic image has inspired a great deal of speculation
regarding the relationship between the image produced and
the bodies that it represents or captures. Does the photographic
image bring the body closer to the viewer, or is it a symbol of
the body's absence? In his famous essay, "The Ontology of the
Photographic Image," Andre Bazin describes the photographic
process as involving a transference of reality from the original
object to its copy. This process allows the image to, in an almost
literal or material sense, become the original.
Only a photographic lens can give us the kind of image of the object that is
capable of satisfying the deep need man has to substitute for it something
more than a mere approximation, a kind of decal or transfer. The photographic
image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and
space that govern it. 4
In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes makes this material
connection or transference even more explicit. He observes,
"The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent.
From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which
ultimately touch me ... A sort of umbilical cord links the body
of the photographed thing to my?aze: light, though impalpable,
is here a carnal medium ... " In this evocative description
of photographic spectatorship, Barthes deploys the potently
sensuous and somatic metaphor of the umbilicus to describe
the physical relationship that is established between referent,
representation, and viewer.
It is important to note that Bazin and Barthes describe
the photographic copy's proximity to the original, and thus
to the 'real', in sensuous and material terms, rather than
purely visual or aesthetic terms. The visual accuracy and
exact correspondence between referent and image is less
important than the indexical nature of the representation.
This indexicality - the physical contact or material connection
with the original- is what gives the image its powers, not its
verisimilitude. Bazin writes, "no matter how fuzzy, distorted,
or discolored, no matter how lacking in the documentary
value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very
process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is
a reproduction; it is the model. ,,6
The peculiar presence that is (re )created in photography
also has been discussed in the context of live-action film
Animation Journal, Volume 12, 2004
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by cinema scholar Steven Shaviro.
7
In The Cinematic
Body, Shaviro critiques psychoanalytic film theory, which
conceptualizes the film experience as founded on a structuring
lack (a primordial division between body and image, between
the real and representation), and he offers an alternative
model. Shaviro suggests that the film experience should be
understood in terms of presence as opposed to lack. Rather
than removing or absenting the object, film perpetuates the
object and brings it into material proximity to the viewer.
Citing Maurice Blanchot's claim that "the image is not a
representational substitute for the object so much as it is -like
a cadaver-the material trace or residue of the object's failure
to vanish completely," Shaviro contends that the cinematic
image is "not a symptom of lack, but an uncanny, excessive
residue of being that subsists when all should be lacking. ,,8
Following Blanchot, Shaviro argues that the cinematic
image possesses, "a fugitive, supplemental materiality" that
"haunts the (allegedly) idealizing process of mechanical
reproduction. ,,9
In animation - and especially drawn animation - there is a
fundamentally different relationship between the object and the
image than is the case with photography or live-action film. The
animated image not only typically lacks the verisimilitude of the
photograph, but the immediate, indexical connection described
by Bazin and Barthes does not exist. These observations beg the
question, if animation does not require an original object, can
the animated image ever be the cadaver of Blanchot's musings,
the body/image haunted by a fugitive materiality, a persistent
residue of the 'real'?
Although animation exists in a very different relationship
to the 'real' or the 'actual' than photographic representation,
I argue that the animated image is simply a different kind of
corpse. Like live-action film, animation is also haunted by a
'supplemental materiality' that forges connections between
the 'real' and its representation, between the actual and the
animated. The material and sensuous connection between image
and original is maintained in animation, albeit in a complicated,
morphed and multiplied form. Rather than relying on the single,
material body of the original, as in photography, the animated
body draws upon multiple originals-from models to voice
actors to the animators themselves.
The complexity of this body, in terms of its materiality and
its relationship to the 'real', raises a methodological dilemma
for animation scholars. Given the multiple and hybrid status of
the 'real' in animation, how should one perform an analysis of
the animated body? Elizabeth Bell's work on Disney provides
Animation Journal, Volume 12, 2004
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10
an important first step towards understanding the complicated
layering and accruing of meaning and matter that occurs in the
construction of the animated body. In her article, "Somatexts
at the Disney Shop: Constructing the Pentimentos of Women's
Animated Bodies," Bell explores the "semiotic layering" of
the multitextual iconographies involved in the construction of
Disney's women:
Disney's animated women are pentimentos, paintings layered upon painting,
images drawn on images, in a cultural accumulation of representations ..
. as the painting accrues, with layers of contemporaneous film and popular
images of women, live-action models for characters, and cinematic
conventions of representing women, the levels become increasingly coded
and complex. 10
Although Bell's analysis is useful and it begins to address
the complicated nexus of images and bodies that are at play
in animation, the problem is that it fundamentally remains an
analysis of representation and signification. What follows in
this essay is an analysis that deals not only with the semiotic
layering of images, but with a somatic layering of bodies and
various registers of materiality and reality.
Betty Boop provides an excellent example of this material
complexity and somatic layering. Noting the hybrid nature of
Betty's animated physique, Norman Klein observes that the
Fleischer animators drew from diverse experiences for their
inspiration. He notes the various types of bodies, media, and
materialities that coalesce to become Betty Boop:
[Her] body was a traced composite-a traced memory-of women [the
Fleischer animators] saw along the way. Her garter was like those favored
by Hoochi Koochie dancers so popular at burlesque and dance parlors. She
slouched her back like a flapper at a speakeasy. Her banjo eyes and her bounce
were copied from the moves of vaudeville singer Helen Kane. Her head
bobbled like a Coney Island kewpie doll shaking on a spring. 11
However, the animated body is hybrid in yet another way.
Not only do animators draw upon multiple references for the
creation of the animated body, but the body that we, as viewers,
experience is also radically hybrid and mUltiple (particularly
the commercially produced animated body). These bodies are
aggressively cross-marketed and they permeate multiple social
spaces. We consume these bodies not only through films or
television, but through comic books, video games, thrill rides and
'happy meals' at fast food restaurants. As a result, the animated
body evokes a hybridized materiality that fuses bodies, media,
and technologies, and plays with and blends different registers
of the 'real' and the 'fantastic'. The animated body exists as
a complex and constantly shifting assemblage formed from
Animation Journal, Volume 12,2004
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connections with a wide array of cultural phenomena, biological
bodies, technologies and media. Thus, although animation may
not achieve the same indexicality or verisimilitude oflive-action
film, real bodies and actual material experiences are an intimate
part of our understanding of animated ones.
The Rotoscope
The rotoscope is an animation technology/process that is
particularly appropriate for exploring the question of animation's
relationship to the 'real', the somatic layering of the animated
body, and the haunting materiality of the animated image. The
rotoscope is a hybrid technology that fuses photographic motion
picture technology and traditional drawn animation techniques.
Invented by Max and Dave Fleischer in 1915, the rotoscope
was designed to facilitate the production of fluid, life-like
animation. In his patent for the device, filed on 6 December
1915 and granted on 9 October 1917, Max Fleischer wrote:
Animated hand executed pictures, or as they are termed, moving picture
cartoons, as now produced by the usual methods, are recognized as having
their distinctive advantages and desirable features but they usually are
not life-like. An object of my invention is to provide a method by which
improved cartoon films may be produced, depicting the figures or other
objects in a life-like manner, characteristic of the regular animated photo
pictures. 12
In order to avoid the mechanical, unnatural jerkiness that
was characteristic of much animation produced at the time,
this process allowed the motion of real human bodies to be
reproduced in animated form. The rotoscope projects original
live-action footage frame-by-frame onto a transluscent
drawing board, thereby allowing animators to trace each
frame of the motion, securing the realism of their animated
segments.
The language of the patent suggests that a primary function
of the rotoscope is to eliminate the mechanical and control the
fantastic nature of the animated body. The notion of the animated
body as out-of-control is addressed by Anne Nesbet her article,
"Inanimations: Snow White and Ivan the Terrible." Highlighting
Disney's juxtaposition of realistic human characters with more
stylized, metamorphic characters in Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs (1937), Nesbet observes that some animated characters
are more metamorphic or "plasmatic,,13 than others. In an
effort to insure the 'realism' of Snow White's character, Disney
brought in a dancer to act as a rotoscope model. Nesbet argues
that this was done to keep the plasmatic animated body in check,
to control and contain its potential unruliness. The flesh-and-
blood model serves as guardian of realism and as a concrete
Animation Journal, Volume 12, 2004
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tie to the viewers' world.
14
Nesbet's comment regarding the
"concrete tie" that the human model provides to the viewer's
world is suggestive of the power of the indexical, material link
that is established between bodies in animation and, in particular,
rotoscoped animation.
Enchantment and Possession: The Magic of Mimesis
In addition to the concept of indexicality, another useful
theoretical paradigm for analyzing the nature and ontology
of the rotoscoped body is the concept of mimesis. Although
numerous scholars, including Walter Benjamin, Theodor
Adorno and Roger Caillois, have discussed mimesis, Michael
Taussig's observations on the mimetic faculty in Mimesis and
Alterity are particularly suggestive. Unlike the photography
and film theorists discussed above, Taussig does not limit
his discussion of mimesis to photographic technologies of
reproduction but rather he explores the nature of the mimetic
faculty more generally. In his preface, Taussig defines the
mimetic faculty as "the nature that culture uses to create
second nature, the faculty to copy, imitate, make models,
explore difference, yield into and become Other." 15
To discuss the "magic of mimesis," Taussig turns to the
once-celebrated work of 19th century anthropologist James
George Frazer, author of The Golden Bough. Frazer distinguishes
two great classes of magic associated with magical charms and
fetishes, both of which relate to mimesis. He writes,
If we analyze the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will
probably be found to resolve themselves into two; first, that like produces
like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and second, that things which
have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a
distance after the physical contact has been severed. The former principle
may be called the Law of Similarity, the latter the Law of Contact or
Contagion. 16
Contextualizing his discussion of the mimetic faculty within
this analysis of magical and shamanistic practices, Taussig
focuses on the idea that the copy is believed to share in or
acquire the power and properties of the original. 17 Reminiscent
ofBazin's and Barthes' s remarks on the indexical image, Taussig
observes that the magical power of the mimetic copy is rarely
dependent merely on the degree of realism or lifelikeness it
achieves. He argues, "What makes up for this lack of similitude,
what makes it a 'faithful' copy, indeed a magicallii powerful
copy ... are precisely the material connections ... ,,1 Informed
by this observation regarding magical mimesis, Taussig sees the
mimetic faculty more generally as drawing on a similar kind
of magic. Like a magical totem, amulet, or figurine, mimesis
allows the copy to draw on the power of the original.
Animation Journal, Volume 12, 2004
x
13
The rotoscope, an early 20
th
century mimetic technology,
takes its power from a similar kind of sympathetic magic. Like
Barthe's photograph, the rotoscope facilitates an indexical
transference of reality and materiality from an original body
into its filmic copy, and then again into its animatedincamation.
Like Taussig's magical mimetic totem, the rotoscoped image
draws its power from its contagious contact with an original.
Through this "material connection" the rotoscoped animated
body is able to conjure the uncanny, supplemental presence of
an absent body, the body of the original. Borrowing from the
substance of that body, this connection thickens the animated
body, bringing it in closer proximity to the 'real' .19
This notion of the animated body borrowing from, or
appropriating the flesh of an original body is also re-affirmed
in the language that surrounds animation technologies such
as the rotoscope. The very name of the rotoscope's recent 3D
incarnation, motion capture (known by some in the trade as
"Satan's rotoscope"), implies this kind of relationship between
animated and real bodies. It is motion capture. It is 'captured
performance' - the term 'capture' imparting a sense of a body
detained, a human motion snatched from one realm and secreted
off into another, the actual body, or at least its trace, held prisoner
by the animated.
Norman Klein's comments on rotoscoping are particularly
relevant to this analysis of the animated body because his
approach acknowledges the sensuously evocative nature of
the medium and conceives of animation as having a kind of
materiality, a body, a thickness and texture. In an analysis of
KoKo the clown, Klein writes:
Of all the Fleischer characters, Koko was rotoscoped the most often. By 1933,
it gave him a phantom presence, too often invaded. Graphically, rotoscoping
leaves scars-something too human, a bit too lithe, subtle but plain to see.
Koko practically inhabited two bodies at once, from a cartoon clown who
shuffled (buttery head, sacklike body) to a leaner man who ran gracefully
(more angles to his chin; a stiffer spinal column). Koko was designed to
be haunted, wrapped in a billowy cloth that was ideal for a ghost dancing
between bodies ... 20
In this description, Klein clearly identifies the presence
of two bodies, the mingling of two corporealities within
Koko's animated frame. The rotoscope allows his body to be
possessed, haunted, or invaded by the "too human" presence
of the performer in the original live-action footage.
This dual presence, this corporeal haunting, this
cadaverous persistence of the original body insinuates a kind
of ontological ambiguity and uncertainty into the animated
body. What is the 'stuff' of this body? Is it purely imaginary/
Animation Journal, Volume 12, 2004
14
fantastic/animated? Is it live-action? Or is it some strange,
exciting, or disturbing combination? Multiple levels of reality
are intersecting in Koko's body, multiple bodies merging to
become the animated body. Is it even possible to pin down
or isolate the animated body here, dancing as it is between
bodies of such fundamentally different sorts?
The Monstrous and the Mundane: (Re )Producing the
Body in Rotoscoped Animation
Evidence of the ontological ambiguity of the rotoscoped
body can be found in the responses of critics and viewers since
the origins of rotoscoped animation.
21
Indeed, commentators
rarely fail to identify an uncanny, jarring quality to rotoscoped
animation. This body stands out, the realism of its form and
motion undermining itself, making the rotoscoped body seem
unreal and unbelievable within the plastic physics of an animated
universe.
Some have responded to this uncanny and unnatural body
with disdain and, at times, even vitriolic condemnation. Despite
the worldwide commercial and critical success of Disney 's Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs, the highly realistic, rotoscoped
human characters drew significant criticism. Although many
viewers cheered the incredible naturalism of Snow White,
Prince Charming and the Wicked Queen, there were others
who levied passionate critiques of Disney's new realism. Al
Hirschfeld was particularly displeased with the human characters
in Snow White. Comparing Snow White to a ventriloquist's
dummy and describing Prince Charming as her "cardboard
lover," Hirschfeld argued these figures unsuccessfully and
inappropriately attempted to imitate "factual photography. ,,22
In addition to intensely negative responses, the rotoscoped
body also has generated honest confusion. As reported in the New
York Times on 5 February 1939, Disney received an astounding
number ofletters from viewers inquiring whether there were any
live characters in Snow White. Commenting on a letter sent to
the Disney offices, the Times author condescendingly notes:
A housewife who argued against her husband's better judgment sent in the
following letter:
To settle a family argument please tell us whether or not three characters in
"Snow White" were real people or were drawn by your artists. I maintain
that Snow White, the Prince and the wicked Queen were all real actors, but
my husband says I'm crazy. He always says that when we disagree, so please
settle this for us.
23
In this case, we can see a viewer grappling with the aesthetic
and ontological ambiguity of rotoscoped animated bodies.
Animation Journal, Volume 12,2004

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The irony of this Times article is, of course, that rather than
being crazy and obstreperous, as the author implies (i.e.,
being unable to distinguish fantasy from reality and failing to
submit to her husband's "better judgment" on the matter), this
housewife has accurately picked up on the hybridization of
media that marks these rotoscoped bodies.
24
In "The Rotoscope, Freakery and the Uncanny," Mark
discusses the sense of unease that this ambiguity can
provoke using Freud's notion of the Uncanny. 25 Langer suggests
that this uneasiness is generated, at least in part, by the co-
existence or co-presence of the natural, living, organic human
originally captured on film and its animated, technologized
incarnation (the product of a mechanical, inorganic process).
This doubled body is a hybrid and interstitial figure that exists
in. the "liminal zone between live-action and animation, or
between biology and technology. ,,26 U sing the work of George
Bataille, Bruno Bettelheim, and Sigmund Freud, Langer
suggests that this corporeal incongruity is disturbing, or at least
unsettling. 27 This haunted or possessed, incongruous body - part
man, part machine, or perhaps more accurately both man and
machine-ruptures the "fixed social borders separating the
human from the machine through the co-presence of biology
and technology. ,,28
I would add, however, that the rotoscope not only bridges and
blurs the man/machine divide, but it also provides the potential
for other kinds of interesting (or unsettling) combinations.
Although the rotoscope was designed to capture 'natural'
movement, it is important to note that the original, 'natural'
body does not always correspond in any direct way to the final
animated product. Not only do animators exaggerate, abstract,
and transform the original motion to create more plasmatic
and cartoony figures, but they can also make interesting and
unusual combinations and substitutions. Indeed, this creative
use of an original already was imagined by Max Fleischer as
he wrote about this process in his patent in 1916, "The method
possesses advantages in depicting a wide range of grotesque
characters or objects. Thus, for example, a dog, masked by the
representation of a horse's head may be photographed in action,
the final result begin motion pen drawings of what to
be a miniature horse going through a performance." 9 Thus
a whole horizon of amusing or monstrous combinations and
corporeal incongruities open up, all made possible by this
hybridizing and miscegenetic technology.
It is important to clarify that the uneasiness generated
by the incongruous, monstrous, cyborg body can be read
Animation Journal, Volume 12, 2004



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16
in two ways. First, it can be seen as evidence of social
anxiety about the dissolution of supposedly natural identity
categories such as male/female, white/non-white or
human/non-human. However the viewer's awareness of the
hybridity and 'unnatural' state of the rotoscoped body also
can be understood as serving a more subversive function. By
highlighting the co-presence of the original body and drawing
attention to the constructed and uncanny nature of these
bodies, the films eschew easy viewer identification with the
rotoscoped characters, forging a kind of psychic or emotional
distance between the two. This distance, I argue, opens up the
possibility for critical reflection on the nature of this body and
bodies in general. As Langer observes, the spectatorial unease
generated by the rotoscope can help challenge hegemonic
constructs of the 'natural body' as well as blur traditional
media/generic distinctions between animation and live-
action.
However, although the rotoscope offers potentially
liberatory possibilities in terms of deconstructing problematic
corporeal and media boundaries, such subversive potential is
not a necessary or inherent product of rotoscoping. Indeed,
as Langer astutely points out, films can either foreground the
co-presence of the rotoscoped body (thereby enhancing the
resulting spectatorial unease) or they can obscure the use of
the rotoscope and repress its unsettling double. The films of
the Fleischer Studio, particularly those made in the early 1930s
such as Minnie the Moocher (1932), Snow White (1933), The
Old Man of the Mountatin (1933) and Betty Boop's Bamboo
Isle (1932), belong to the first category. In keeping with their
long tradition of self-reflexive animation, these Fleischer
cartoons were designed to accentuate the viewer's awareness
of the rotoscoped body and its corporeal co-presence by openly
referring to the human body upon which it was mapped.
In the early 1930s, Langer observes, most of the individuals
rotoscoped for Fleischer films were celebrities and, as in the
case of such films as Minnie the Moocher or Betty Boop's
Bamboo Isle, they were rendered immediately recognizable
to viewers through the use of live-action footage integrated
into the cartoon. Other films, such as Snow White (which used
rotoscoped footage of Cab Calloway for a sequence of Koko
as a dancing ghost), are more oblique in their reference to the
original actor. In this film there is no introductory footage of
Calloway. However, Langer notes that by 1933 "Cab Calloway's
dance moves were so well-known to audiences of the 1930s, that
the indexical reference was unmistakable. ,,30 Indeed, although
black entertainers were heavily featured in the animation of
Animation Journal, Volume 12,2004
17
the 1930s, according to Henry T. Sampson, Cab Calloway
appeared with the greatest frequency, constituting 26% of all
appearances of black entertainers. 31 Capitalizing on the curiosity
of rotoscopic reincarnation, the Fleischer's use of popular and
easily recognizable entertainers ensured that viewers would
recognize the 'real' human within the animated version.
32
In addition to the use of celebrity figures and integrated
live-action footage, the Fleischer Studio utilized overt publicity
to incite audience interest in their new process of rotoscoping.
In 1919 and 1920, a series of articles and ads on the Fleischers
and their new "mystery process of lifelike action,,33 appeared in
Moving Picture World and the New York Times. Slowly releasing
information about the new technique throughout these years, the
Fleischer's generated an aura of mystery and suspense around
the rotoscope-their "dark secret" for "astounding perfection
in animation" - finally revealing the basics of the process in
an article in the New York Times in September of 1920.
34
Disney, the Fleischer's major rival through the early 1940s,
also utilized the rotoscope, however Disney films fall into the
second category -i.e., they are films that suppress the viewer's
awareness of rotoscopic co-presence.
35
In his autobiography
Talking Animals and Other People, ex-Fleischer and Disney
animator Shamus Culhane discusses the challenges that the
animators faced as a result of Disney's decision to include
realistic human characters. These characters, he explains,
needed to move regally, gracefully, and and they needed
genuine acting ability. According to Culhane, Disney hired live
actors to be used for rotoscoping, including local dancer Marge
Belcher. 36
Disney's use of and approach towards rotoscoping was
very different than the Fleischers. Disney worked very hard to
suppress evidence of the use of the rotoscope. Not only did the
copious publicity for Snow White fail to mention the Studio's use
of the rotoscope and live models
37
but, Langer notes, viewers
never saw any live-action footage of Marge Belcher (or the other
live models), nor did they hear her voice on the soundtrack.
Both the original human body as well as the technology used
for its transcription into animation were rendered invisible.
Disney's suppression of the inherent hybridity of the
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rotoscoped body and the co-presence of the original body . I t
was clearly related to the studio's interest in maintaining the <;tvEt-<'"f
emotional connection between viewers and the film's main l.kA- \r
characters. Disney believed that realism was essential for
viewer identification and emotional involvement, thus the
naturalism of his human characters was carefully protected.
By suppressing evidence of the constructed and artificial nature
Animation Journal, Volume 12, 2004
18
of these characters, the 'natural' human body (in this case a
body over-determined by the markers of age, race, class, and
gender) was protected from the potentially deforming logic
of animation. Rather than highlighting the body as a site of
potential transformation and cultural complexity, "Disney used
rotoscoping to reinforce boundaries between male vs. female,
old vs. young, freakish vs. natural, and so on.,,38
Disney's deployment of an unprecedented realism and the
suppression of the ambiguous ontology of the animated body
in Snow White encourage viewers to embrace these human
characters as 'real' . Indeed, the reality status of these characters
is enhanced even further when they are juxtaposed with the
decidedly less-real characters that populate Snow White's
universe, including the dwarves and highly anthropomorphized
woodland creatures. The viewer's untroubled identification
the human characters and their apparently stable, unified,
\. e-" natural bodies does not allow the distance necessary for critical
r reflection. Viewers are not given the space or perspective to
,-.)" grasp that these 'real' characters are also constructs; they are
discouraged from reading these bodies as effects of power, as
the products of the patriarchal, white, middle-class, hetero-
normative prerogatives that guided Disney's (re)constructiono f
bodily reality. Just as unnatural or unlikely as the dwarves in the
enchanted forest or as Cab Calloway's spectral performance in
Minnie the Moocher, Snow White and Prince Charming are also
fantasies, simply of a more mundane nature-fantasies about
the bodily performance of gender, race, class, and heterosexual
romantic love.
In addition to protecting the physical and emotional
realism of his animated human characters, Disney's strategy
further naturalizes the supposedly 'real' bodies upon
which they are drawn. Not only do Snow White and Prince
Charming embody certain cultural fantasies, but they are also
built on real bodies that are products of these same fantasies.
By suppressing the co-presence of these original bodies,
however, they remain shielded from a potentially critical or
self-reflexive spectatorial gaze.
The idea that the 'real' bodies we inhabit and encounter in
our everyday lives are not simple, natural entities, but rather are
the product of complex social processes has been discussed at
length by social constructionist scholars such as Michel Foucault,
Judith Butler, and Elizabeth Grosz. They argue that the body
is not a pre-existing entity or a passive medium, but rather it is
actively and continually constructed through social interaction.
In Bodies that Matter, Butler proposes thatthe body, in a material
sense, must be rethought as an effect of power. Matter is not
Animation Journal, Volume 12, 2004
19
simply "stuff," it is the result of a process of sedimentation or
materialization. For Butler, the materiality of bodies is produced
through the performative citation of power and the repetition
of its regulatory norms.
39
In Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Elizabeth
Grosz examines the wide range of techniques of social inscription
that our culture uses to bind subjects to specific social positions
and relations. As she explains, these techniques vary in terms
of visibility, permanence, and violence: social institutions such
as prisons, hospitals, and psychiatric institutions confine and
supervise bodies; norms and morphologies group bodies into
categories such as male/female, black/white; practices such as
diet, fashion, exercise, posture, and make-up alter its exterior. As
Grosz explains, "culturally specific grids of power, regulation,
and force condition and provide techniques for the formation
of particular bodies.,,40 Like Butler, she argues that these
inscriptions do not merely adorn a pre-given body; rather they
constitute the very biological organization of the subject.
41
Elizabeth Bell's study of Disney women provides a
useful illustration of the various forms of power and social
inscription and that have trained, shaped, and organized
the supposedly natural bodies upon which Disney built its
adolescent heroines. As Bell observes, the bodies of Disney's
first three heroines-Snow White, Cinderella (1950) and
Sleeping Beauty (1959) - were all based on the live-action
bodies of professionally trained dancers.
The formal carriage of the animated heroines is constructed on the bodies of
actual women, shaped by the strenuous rigors and artful artificiality of classical
ballet. Classical dance has always maneuvered natural body positions into
unnatural ones ... Borrowing the forms of classical dance and grafting them
onto teenaged fairy-tale heroines, Disney artists ask viewers to elide from
established and elitist conventions for spectatorship to the animated, politically
"innocent," and popular conventions of song and dance.
42
Bell's analysis illustrates quite clearly how cultural markers of
race, class and gender can infiltrate the animated body through
its already over-determined 'original'.
These observations on the constructed and political nature
of the 'original' body in Disney animation, however, raise
new questions regarding Fleischer animation. Complicating
the overly simplistic opposition my previous argument set
up between the Fleischer and Disney studios' use of the
rotoscope (overt vs. invisible, potentially subversive vs. socially
conservative), I would add that even the overtly rotoscoped
animation of the Fleischers exists in a politically complicated
relationship to 'reality' and 'real' bodies. Indeed, recalling the
previous discussion of the ontology of the rotoscoped body and
Animation Journal, Volume 12,2004
"i
20
the phenomenology of rotoscoped animation (i.e. the ability
of this indexical and mimetic technology to forge a material
connection between original and copy that is sensed by viewers),
it could be said that the Fleischers' use of the rotoscope may
be guided by a fundamentally conservative logic.
Rather than highlighting the constructed nature of the body
and positing new and liberating corporeal configurations, it
could also be argued that the viewer's awareness of the presence
of an original reifies that first body as 'real' or 'natural'. The
juxtaposition established by the co-presence of these two bodies
encourages viewers to read the live model's body as the original
and the animated version as the copy; the photographically
recorded body is 'real' and the drawn body is 'fake'. In
addition, by creating an animated body with body, with density
and thickness, the rotoscope creates (or re-creates) a sense of
bodily interiority. It posits this original as a foundation of reality,
as a kernel of corporeal truth, as the supposedly 'natural' and
material core of the animated body. Thus in these cases the
rotoscope does not simply allow traditional constructions of
the human body to enter into animation (e.g. Snow White or
Prince Charming), but it asserts their reality on a fundamental
and ontological level.
The preceding pages theorized the rotoscoped body - its
ontological status, its relationship to the 'real' or 'everyday',
as well as the viewer's understanding and experience of this
body. And, as has become readily apparent, there are a number
of different and potentially contradictory ways this body may
be sensed and interpreted. Although rotoscoped animation is
always engaging with 'real' bodies in intimate and material
ways, the manner in which the technique is deployed as well
as the film's narrative context will necessarily effect the
viewer's understanding of the status of the rotoscoped body.
While projects that attempt to theorize a particular technology
or spectatorial experience must remain relatively speculative, in
what follows I provide a specific example of how these theoretical
speculations can serve as the basis for a new methodology for
analyzing rotoscoped animation.
Case Study: Betty Boop's Bamboo Isle
43
Although Disney's use of the rotoscope, and the patriarchal,
white middle-class 'reality' that his animated films naturalize,
demand an ideological and political analysis, the Fleischer
films discussed in this article also draw on and perpetuate
particular constructions of "the real," especially regarding the
gendered and racialized body. The 1932 Fleischer short, Betty
Boops Bamboo Isle, which uses both the rotoscope as well as
Animation Journal, Volume 12, 2004
21
integrated live-action/ animation, provides an excellent example
of the somatic layering of the rotoscoped body as well as the
complex play between 'the real,' the fantastic, and the material
that it creates.
The cartoon begins with a brief segment of live-action
footage featuring the Royal Samoan Orchestra and an
unidentified female Samoan dancer. In the animation that
follows, Bimbo, a curious boy/dog character (and one of the
Fleischer's earliest stars), sets off on an expedition from New
York to a remote island in the South Seas. When he reaches
his exotic destination, he discovers and falls in love with Betty,
who performs in this episode as an island maiden (with all the
signifying trappings, including a grass skirt, a strategically
placed lei, and slightly tinted skin). By smearing his face with
mud and donning native attire, Bimbo temporarily tricks the
'savages' who discover him.44
Posing as a tribal leader, Bimbo joins the natives in their
revelries and has a chance to ogle Betty as she performs a sexy
dance on the picturesque island beach. Although Betty is not
typically rotoscoped, the Fleischer animators used the original
live-action footage of the dancer to rotoscope this dance scene,
thus Betty'S body and movements directly mimic the dance the
viewer saw moments before performed by the actual Samoan
dancer.
The juxtaposition of live-action and animation in Bamboo
Isle is typical of the Fleischer studio, although this -Gr
r
cartoon is not the most sophisticated example of their innovative S'.J
treatment of integrated live-action/animation. Their "Out of
the Inkwell" series, starring Koko, is filled with examples
of incredibly self-reflexive films. In these cartoons the little
animated clown hops off Max Fleischer's drawing board and out
of his animated universe into the live-action world of the studio
and beyond. This tendency to wander has, as Michael Frierson
observes, the effect of disrupting the viewer's understanding
of filmic space by collapsing Koko's cartoon world, which the
viewer understands as less real, into the adjacent photographic,
live-action world of the Fleischer Studio.
45
Although the use of live-action footage in Bamboo Isle is
not as complex as in the Koko films, when used in conjunction
with the rotoscoped animation a disorienting effect similar to
that described by Frierson is achieved. The framing footage of
the Royal Samoan Orchestra sets up the realms of the animated
and the actual as separate, with distinctly different ontologies,
existing on different registers of reality. However, the rotoscoped
body of the dancer (whose name, as we learn in historical
scholarship on the Fleischers, was Miri) causes a leakage of
Animation Journal, Volume 12,2004
22
one realm into the other. Betty's mimetic dance involves both
an imitation of and contagious contact with an original 'real'
girl. The indexical connection between original and copy forges
a material connection between Miri and Betty, collapsing any
clear distinction between live-action and animation or between
the 'real' and the fantastic. The ontology of Betty's animated
body shifts, haunted by the supplemental materiality of her
rotoscoped original. 46
We must take this analysis a step further, however, if we
want to fully understand how the rotoscope participates in the
politics of the real. As I argued earlier, the rotoscope does not
simply conjure a body that merges the animated with a neutral,
natural, pre-existing reality; rather, it draws on a specific version
of the real, which the process then posits as a core, a base, an
original. So the question is, what is the 'reality' that form the
basis for Betty's rotoscoped body?
A closer look at the lead-in footage of the Royal Samoan
Orchestra and their dancer can help answer this question.
Although this live-action section is essentially publicity
footage of a popular music group, once it is set in the context
of the cartoon's overtly colonialist narrative it is re-framed
and re-coded: the status of the performance shifts from the
amusing to the anthropological, and the status of the body
shifts from entertainer to ethnographic image. Like an excerpt
from an anthropological documentary, this footage displays
Miri (the 'authentic' Samoan) as the racialized, Ethnographic
body-nameless, half-dressed and exotic. Not only does this
footage educate us as to how the Ethnographic body moves, it
v:v allows the audience the thrill of verifying the authenticity
UVJ Betty's performance later in the film. The documentary
quality associated with the photographically recorded images
\ <; tethers the animated extrapolations of the racialized body to
the 'real' body of the Primitive.
The ability of the Ethnographic body to travel across genres,
from science to art to popular culture, has been explored at
length by Fatimah Tobing Rony in her book The Third Eye.
This book examines the systematic objectification of non-
western indigenous peoples that occurred in early twentieth
century representations of "the primitive" - in particular their
representation in scientific, documentary and popular film. 47 The
dark bodies of the peoples represented in these films (i.e. the
Ethnographic) are constructed as exotic and savage, as lacking
both historical agency and psychological complexity, and as
representative of an early evolutionary stage in the history of
humankind. 48
Animation Journal, Volume 12, 2004
23
Although the inherently non-indexical, non-objective nature
of animation would seem to place it at odds with the purportedly
scientific goals of ethnographic cinema, Rony's work helps us
understand the dialogic relationship between these genres and
allows us to situate animated representations of a racialized
Other in a larger historical and cinematic context. 49 However,
Rony also makes a number of observations in her study of
early anthropological films, particularly the 'science films' of
Felix-Louis Regnault (1863-1938), that are directly relevant to
this analysis of the live-action and rotoscoped footage in Betty
Boop's Bamboo Isle.
According to Rony, early anthropology was defined by
an obsessive desire to "see 'difference' " and to establish
iconographies for recognizing difference. ,,50 Nineteenth century
anthropologists turned to the body in their search for the perfect
index of race, the visible mark of difference that would allow
them to classify people in a racially hierarchical taxonomic
schema. French anthropologist and scientific filmmaker Felix-
Louis Regnault believed that the reality of race was located in
movement. 51 For Regnault, "the' savage' has no real language:
the scientist will inscribe his language-a langage par gestes
(language of the body) common to all 'savages' - into film. ,,52
Rony argues that Regnault's films reduced the Ethnographic
body to movement itself; his Ethnographic subjects were
rendered as shadows, mere silhouettes or pictographs. They
were "turned into ciphers, their faces indistinct," their bodies
made abstract and mechanized, reduced to a kind of graph or
writing on film. 53
The rotoscope, especially as utilized by the Fleischers in
the jazz-influenced films of the early 1930s, including Snow
White, Minnie the Moocher, OldMan o/the Mountain, and Betty
Boop's Bamboo Isle, functioned according to a very similar
logic as these so-called science films. During this period, it was
the bodies of entertainers of color, such as Cab Calloway and
Miri, that most often wererotoscoped.
54
As in Regnault's films,
these bodies were stripped of much of their particularity and
subjected to a kind of abstraction and mechanization, reduced to
their essential, recognizable movements. Their movement - the
purported essence of race, according to Regnault- was then
inserted into animated bodies lending them, I would argue, a
kind of bodily racial authenticity.
In Bamboo Isle these essential movements enhance the
authenticity of a body that has also been given overt signs of
race (i.e. Betty's tinted skin). In the case of Cab Calloway's
films, however, movement is often the primary indicator of
the character's racial identity. The animated body into which
his motions are planted - a walrus, a wild mountain man, a
Animation Journal, Volume 12,2004
24
ghostly Koko-is stripped of outward markers of race; the
animated' skin' of the Ethnographic is replaced and deracinated
and his original, racially marked body undergoes a kind of
erasure. Thus, in these films the index of movement remains
the' authentic' residue of race. In both these cases movement - a
quality audiences were trained to understand as an accurate
indicator of race - allows the animated body to become legible as
authentically and actually racialized. Drawing on the contagious
or contaminative power of the mimetic image- the image that
requires both imitation and contact - the rotoscope allows these
bodies to be contaminated by the 'reality' of race.
In addition to her observations on movement and the
racialization of the Ethnographic body, Rony also argues
that a close association developed between the Ethnographic
body in film and the 'authentic' or the 'real'. Reviewing the
history of early anthropological films, Rony notes that the
Ethnographic was consistently coded as more 'real', more
'natural', and more 'authentic' than the urban, overly-refined
white European body. In fact, Rony suggests that it is the very
presence of the Ethnographic body - a body that serves as a
guarantee of the 'real' - that lends the Ethnographic film its
aura of truth. 55 Beyond testifying to the reality of the body or
the reality of race, the presence of the Ethnographic testifies to
the objectivity of the image and the very existence of the real.
Thus, even when the Ethnographic body appears in the context
of mass entertainment and the medium of animation, it retains
its ability to authenticate and to anchor images to the real.
The coupling of the Ethnographic body - a signifier of
authenticity - with the indexical, mimetic recording technology
of the rotoscope creates a kind of doubling of truth value, a surplus
of the 'real' . There is something about this body - with its excess
of the 'real' - that is irrepressible and saturates even the fantastic
medium of animation. The rotoscope allows the Ethnographic
to penetrate the animated body, exceeding its confinement in
live-action film and resurfacing in a more plasmatic form. The
ontology of the other primitives that populate the animated island
is substantially different than the rotoscoped body ofBetty IMiri.
Whereas these other more exaggerated and plasmatic figures
are clearly making reference to a set of familiar images of the
savage Ethnographic Other, the rotoscoped figure, which creates
an indexical, material, sensuous connection to the original body,
allows the Ethnographic to materialize in animated form in a
more literal sense. The heightened proximity to the original body
discussed earlier in this essay now applies to the Ethnographic
body, bringing with it all its powers of authentication and its
tie to the 'real'.
Animation Journal, Volume 12, 2004
25
These observations prompt a number of questions: among
them, what purpose or function does the co-presence of the
Ethnographic body serve in the context of this cartoon, and how
does the presence of the rotoscoped Ethnographic body shift
the phenomenological experience of the cartoon viewer?
One possible explanation is that this choice reflects a general
cultural drive to consume the Ethnographic. Rony has called this
desire fascinating cannibalism, a term that reflects the mixture
of fascination and horror associated with the West's obsessive
consumption of images of a Primitive Other.
56
This obsessive
consumption of the Ethnographic body takes place in a wide
range of cultural venues, from ethnographic films to horror flicks,
from World Fair expositions to natural history museums, from
anthropology to animation. If, as I have argued, the rotoscope
brings the original body in closer proximity to the viewer (in an
ontological and phenomenological sense) then this technology
allows a more intimate, more satisfying kind of consumption
than the traditional drawn animated body would allow.
It is essential, however, to also consider the politics of
this particular genre of specular consumption, namely the
viewers' eroticized consumption of the female Ethnographic
body. The ethnographic framing in this cartoon provides a
legitimate excuse for Betty's topless performance (It's not
-smut, it's anthropology!). However this framing does more
than provide a socially acceptable excuse for Betty's alluring
dance on the beach. It also re-creates one of the most common
scenarios in the genre of Ethnographic film: the dance of the
indigenous woman, her naked or semi-naked body revealed
to the hungry gaze of the colonial camera. Historically, this
body was constructed as exotic, primitive, and unquestionably
available for the viewer's erotic consumption.
In the case of this particular cartoon, the spectatorial
pleasure in the erotic experience of the racialized female body
is heightened by the phenomenological shift in the viewer's
understanding of this body. The Fleischers' overt use of the
rotoscope alters the ontological and material status of Betty's
body. The viewer is aware of her unseen but present double.
The viewer can sense that the animated body is possessed or
haunted by the lingering materiality of the original, drawing
on its power through a form of 'sympathetic magic' in order to
bestow upon Betty a kind of corporeal authenticity and carnal
density. The Ethnographic-a body already reduced to pure
movement, pure corporeality and coded as erotic and available
in the cultural imagination - is brought in closer proximity to
the animated body. The rotoscoped racialized body, despite
its relative lack of realism, becomes a fleshy body designed
Animation Journal, Volume 12, 2004
26
for fleshly consumption. The libidinal draw of Betty Boop's
already hyper-sexualized animated body is magnified and
transformed when she can also invoke the 'real' flesh of the
Primitive. Additionally, however, by positing the authentic
Ethnographic as the unseen, material core of 'reality' in the
animated body, the rotoscope not only collapses the actual and
the animated, but also simultaneously reasserts a particular
version of the reality of race and the body.
Conclusion
Although animation has long been a powerful and prevalent
medium, recent developments in computer animation and digital
imaging technology have ushered in a new age in which the
animated plays an increasingly intimate role in our experience
of 'reality'. Indeed, from video games to military simulations,
from virtual actors to medical imaging systems, the relationship
between our bodies and virtual ones has become increasingly
intertwined. Given the influence and intimacy of this connection,
it is critical that scholars examine this relationship and attempt to
account for the ways in which viewers construct their experiences
of both the animated and the actual.
This paper explores the relationship between the animated,
the photographic (or live-action filmic), and everyday
understandings and experiences of the 'real'. Drawing on
phenomenological theories of film spectatorship and the filmic
image, as well as theories of indexicality and mimesis, I argue
that animation calls upon the power and physicality of real bodies
and actual material experiences to create an ontologically and
phenomenologically dense body. The rotoscope is a traditional
animation technique that offers a particularly telling illustration
of how the 'real' -or rather that which is constructed and
construed as 'real' - is able to possess the animated body,
haunting its frame with what Shaviro dubbed a "supplemental
materiality. "
In Mimesis andAlterity, Taussig suggests that mimesis is not
simply the ability to copy and imitate, but it is also that which
allows us to "explore difference" and "yield into and become
Other. ,,57 The mimetic process of rotoscoping is deployed in
various and often ambivalent ways in an exploration of corporeal
difference. As Langer argued, depending on the degree to which
the rotoscope 's uncanny co-presence is suppressed in a particular
film, rotoscoping can be more or less liberatory in terms of its
challenge to or consolidation of traditional constructs of the
body. However, as Bamboo Isle illustrates, the logic that guides
our experience of rotoscoped animation can problematically
re-assert the reality of the original- in this case the 'reality' of
Animation Journal, Volume 12, 2004
27
the Ethnographic. Ultimately, I believe this kind of analysis is
important because we can never full y understand the politics of
animation and the animated image without fully understanding
the ways in which it draws on and informs the politics of the
real.
1 For more on the relationship between animation and live-action see Alan
Cholodenko, "Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Or the Framing of Animation,"
in The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation, ed. Alan Cholodenko (Sydney:
Powers Publications in association with the Australian Film Commission,
1991); Mark Langer, "The End of Animation History," in Society for
Animation Studies Newsletter (Society for Animation Studies, 2002);
Thelma Schenkel "The Circle of Illusion: Self-Referential Animation,"
TrickfilmlChicago' 80, ed. Camille Cook, Frances Gecker, Sharon Russell,
Carol Slingo. (Chicago: Film Center School of the Art Institute of Chicago,
1980); and Paul Ward, "Animation Studies, Disciplinarity, and Discursivity"
F
003
), online at http://www.reconstruction.ws/032/ward.htm .
A number of specific historical developments in the American
entertainment industry led to a consolidation of the link between animation
and children. One such development was the rise and dominance of the
Disney Studio, which created a perception of animated features as 'family
entertainment'. Jayne Pilling, A Reader in Animation Studies (London:
John Libbey, 1997), xi. The link to children was further solidified in the
1950s, as animation developed on the television screen. By the 1960s and
1970s the vast majority of animated cartoons were relegated to children's
programming hours, filling the Saturday morning and after-school slots.
Over the past few decades this rather limited conception of animation has
been somewhat expanded. In the late 1980s, with the success of features
such. as Who Killed Roger Rabbit and series such as "The Simpsons" and
"Ren & Stimpy," a resurgence of more explicitly adult-oriented animation
occurred. In addition, scholars and media theorists have engaged in much
more serious critical analysis of the medium.
3 In this paper I use the terms 'reality' or the 'real' interchangeably with
'actuality', 'the actual', and 'the everyday'. Although these terms must be
understood in the context of a large body of theoretical and philosophical
discourse on the 'real', for the purposes of this paper I use this term to
refer to that which is understood to be the real, that which is taken for the
reaL I assume that this is already a constructed, historically contingent, and
fluctuating concept.
4 Andre Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," in What is
Cinema? VoL 1 (Berkeley: University of California, 1967), 14.
5 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1980),81.
6 Bazin, 14.
7 Other scholars who have discussed the materiality of the filmic image
and the somatic nature of film spectatorship are Vivian Sobchack and
Laura Marks. Frustrated with theories of film spectatorship that fail
to acknowledge the somatic element of spectatorship and the haptic
nature of the filmic image, these authors approach the subject from a
more phenomenologically informed and materially invested theoretical
perspective. Their work provides a useful foundation for thinking about
what Sobchack calls the "somatic intelligibility" of images, namely the
ways in which images - in our case, both cinematic and animated - become
sensually legible to viewers; the ways in which they are experienced and
understood not simply through vision but in a fully embodied sense. See
Animation Journal, Volume 12,2004
28
Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film
Experience (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992), and Laura Marks, The Skin of
Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham: Duke
UP, 2000).
8 Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota, 1993), 16.
9 Shaviro, 25.
10 Elizabeth Bell, "Somatexts at the Disney Shop: Constructing the
Pentimentos of Women's Animated Bodies," in From Mouse to Mermaid:
The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture, ed. E. Bell, L. Haas, and L. Sells.
Indiana UP, 1995), 108.
1 Norman Klein, "Animation and Animorphs," Meta-Morphing: Visual
Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change, ed. Vivian Sobchack.
University of Minnesota, 2000), 27.
2 Max Fleischer, "Method of Producing Moving Picture Cartoons" (United
States Patent Office, 9 Oct. 1917) page 1, lines 1O-2l.
13 "Plasmatic" is a term coined by Sergei Eisenstein to describe the
powerfully primal metamorphic animated line in early Disney animation.
See Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda (London: Methuen, 1988).
14 Anne Nesbet, "Inanimations: Snow White and Ivan the Terrible," Film
guarterly 50:4 (Summer 1997),25.
Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses
(New York: Routledge, 1993), xiii. In his beautiful and provocative "history
of the senses", Taussig spins an unlikely web from diverse phenomena,
thoughtfully weaving together the historical and theoretical trajectories
of photography, anthropology, magic, and colonialism, mounting a broad
historical argument regarding the role of mimesis in Euro-American
colonialism.
16 Taussig, 47. To illustrate the first class of class of magic--that of Imitation
or Similarity--Frazer cites numerous examples of testimonials in which a
charm, fetish, figurine or effigy is seen has having power over or drawing on
the power of the original body/object. The second class of magic - Contact or
Contagion - involve magical practices that require body parts or possessions
of the individual targeted for magical intervention, including hair, nails,
semen, footprints, etc.
17 Taussig, 47-48.
18 Taussig, 57.
19 The idea that the rotoscope brings substance to the body in animation is
also supported by the way bodily weight is discussed in reviews of rotoscoped
animation. One of the few animators who have openly and extensively
explored the aesthetic possibilities of the rotoscope is Ralph Bakshi. In an
interview in Rolling Stone following the release of his animated Lord of the
Rings (1978) and Wizards (1977), Bakshi suggested that, even more than for
its ability to create realistic motion, rotoscoping was useful for creating the
effect of weight. "In animation things tend not to have weight. One of the
things in Rings is that when a character steps he has weight. That's what a
live-action character has. You feel the weight; you feel the realism." Ralph
Bakshi,RollingStone (23 Jan 1979),32. This is a suggestive comment because
it highlights the degree to which a sense of weight is integral to realism, but
it also alludes to the fact that a viewer's understanding of 'realism' is not
simply a visual experience, but something one senses and 'feels', engaging
the body of the viewer.
20 Klein, 27. In this quote Klein is specifically referring to Koko's final,
extended performance as a ghost singing "St. James Infirmary Blues" in the
Fleischer's 1933 Betty Boop in Snow-White, a film that used rotoscoped
footage of Cab Calloway.
Animation Journal, Volume 12,2004
29
21 A 1919 full-page advertisement for Goldwyn-Bray Pictograph in The
Moving Picture World highlights the ambiguity of rotoscoped animation when
it describes the new Fleischer cartoons as follows: "A Wonderful new type of
cartoon, made under completely new processes, by which such astounding
perfection in animation is reached that people cannot believe they are made
from drawings." Goldwyn-Bray Pictograph ad, The Moving Picture World
F3 Aug 1919), 1059.
2AI Hirschfeld, "An Artist Contests Mr. Disney," New York Times, 30 Jan
1938, 154.
23 Thomas M. Pryor, '''Snow White' Sidelights," New York Times, 5 Feb
1939, X4.
24 The irony, of course, being that this "crazy" housewife was astutely
picking up on the blending of animation and live-action that was used to
create these characters.
25Langer points out that the uncanny is deeply bound up with the notion of
the double. For Freud, the uncanny is both real and unreal, both present and
absent, both living and non-living. The rotoscoped body is simultaneously
not human (not real), and, as Norman Klein observes, almost 'too human.'
26 Mark Langer, "The Rotoscope, Freakery and the Uncanny," unpublished
Society for Animation Studies Conference (2002), 5.
7 The disturbing incongruity of the doubled, rotoscoped body is
reminiscent of the other border-crossing and border-defying figures Langer
has used in his work on the rotoscope, namely the "freak" and the "cyborg."
See Mark Langer's "The Freak Show Cultural Tradition in Animation,"
unpublished paper, Society for Animation Studies Conference (1998) and
"Cyborgs Before Computers: The Rotoscope as Prosthesis," unpublished
Society for Animation Studies Conference (1999).
8 Langer, "The Rotoscope, Freakery and the Uncanny," 8. Given the
inherent hybridity and potential monstrosity of the rotoscoped body, it is
not surprising to discover rotoscoped animation embedded in narratives
that pick up on this quality. Langer notes this trend in the Fleischer
films of the early 1930s-for example I'll Be Glad when You're Dead,
You Rascal You (1932) and The Old Man of the Mountain (1933)-in
which the rotoscoped body is constructed as fearful, spooky, unnatural
or supernatural. Other more recent films, such as Ralph Bakshi's Lord
of the Rings or Richard Linklater's Waking Life (2001) also capitalize
on the inherently uncanny nature of rotoscoped animation. Bakshi used
rotoscoping to achieve a kind of 'reality and unreality' that would allow
him to turn J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy novels into images. This connection
between narrative and aesthetics was also imp011ant to Richard Linklater
in his decision to use interpolated rotosocoping for Waking Life, a film that
explores the relationship between our waking life and the fluid reality of
the dream state.
29 Fleischer Rotoscope Patent, page 1, line 45-52.
30 Langer, "The Rotoscope, Freakery and the Uncanny," 6.
31 Henry T. Sampson, That's Enough, Folks: Black Images in Animated
Cartoons, 1900-1960 (London: Scarecrow, 1998), 148.
32 In addition to the visual co-presence established through rotoscoping,
the easily recognizable voice of Calloway was also very important in
establishing the viewer's perception of co-presence.
33 "Fleischer Advances Technical Art: Puts Life Action Into His Wonderful
Series of Animated Pen Drawings, "Out of the Inkwell," The Moving Picture
World (7 June 1919), 1497.
34" The Inkwell Man," New York Times (13 Sept 1920), 2l.
35 Shamus Culhane is among those who contradict the claim that only live-
action reference footage was used in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, not
Anin1ation Journal, Volume 12,2004
30
rotoscoping. See Shamus Culhane, Talking Animals and Other People (New
York: St. Martin's, 1986), 158-59.
36 Culhane, 158.
37 According to Walter Lantz, "The prince and princess of Disney's
fable were drawn by means of a rotoscope, by which real humans were
photographed going through the required motion." Lantz says that this
literal system resulted in two faults. First, it produced a jittering movement
that contrasted with the fluidity of the animation, Second, the human
characters were too accurate to be seen beside the caricatures. Walter Lantz,
"Late Summer in Hollywood," New York Times (4 Sept 1938),101.
38 Langer, "The Rotoscope, Freakery and the Uncanny," 7.
39 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"
York: Routledge, 1993), 15.
Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism
Indiana UP, 1994), 142.
1 Animation is a medium that is very relevant when thinking about the
constructed, fantastic nature of the body, as it is a medium that inherently
replicates this kind of corporeal construction. The animated body is
necessarily a construct and the product of power. Each image is the product
of a conscious decision. Animation offers the ultimate technology for
corporeal inscription, for a kind of writing of the body. Frame-by-frame,
the animated body emerges through the repetition of certain artistic and
cultural regulatory norms guiding the animator. Rotoscoped animation,
then, represents the intersection of two kinds of constructed body, two
different modes of organizing and inscribing the body.
42 Bell, 111.
43 Joanna Bouldin, "The Body, Animation and The Real: Race, Reality and
the Rotoscope in Betty Boop," in Conference Proceedings for Affective
Encounters: Rethinking Embodiment In Feminist Media Studies, ed. Anu
Koivunen & SusannaPaasonen (University ofTurku, School of Art, Literature
and Music, Media Studies, Series A, No 49). E-book online at www.utu.fi/
humlmediatutkimus/ affective/proceedings. pdf.
44 Another productive approach for this cartoon is through the concept of
blackface. Scott Bukatman has argued that, especially in the context of
Jewish identification with black perfOlmance styles, rotoscoping can be
seen as another example in a long history of cinematic minstrelsy. See
Scott Bukatman, "Taking Shape: Morphing and the Performance of Self," in
Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change,
ed. Sobchack, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2000).
45 Michael Frierson, "Clay Comes Out of the Inkwell: The Fleischer Brothers
and Clay Animation," Animation Journal (Fall 1993), 5.
46 In this example the clear borders between the animated and the actual are
revealed to be permeable, allowing two-way traffic from one to the other.
There is a kind of "contaminative logic," to use Alan Cholodenko's telm,
in which the real body is infested with the animated and the animated is
haunted by the real. Alan Cholodenko, "Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Or the
Framing of Animation," The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation, ed. Alan
Cholodenko (Sydney: Powers, 1991),224.
47 Thus Rony argues that Ethnographic cinema is the "broad and variegated
field of cinema which situates indigenous peoples in a displaced realm,",
a field that includes such disparate genres as science, art, and commercial
entertainment films (rather than solely those films traditionally associated
with Ethnography). Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema,
and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham: Duke UP, 1996),8.
48 Rony, 7. Although ethnography is a practice that can be done by or on any
group, Rony argues that, at least in the popular imagination, the category of
Animation Journal, Volume 12,2004
31
ethnographic film is still associated with the racialized body.
49 For example, images of the native islander similar to those in Betty
Boop's Bamboo Isle (1932) were very common in films of this period.
A few examples include: In the Land of the Headhunters (1914), Goona
Goona: An Authentic Melodrama of the Isle of Bali (1932), and Tabu: A
Story of the South Seas (1931).
50Rony, 32.
51 While Regnault believed that the movement of the body would reveal
the truth about racial difference, other nineteenth century scientists such as
Paul Broca and Cesare Lombroso believed that characteristics of the body
itself, such as the size of the skull or the shape of the ear, would provide the
evidence the 'natural' inferiority of certain peoples. See Stephen Jay Gould,
The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981).
52 Rony, 58. Given his interest in movement, it is not surprising then that
Regnault would tum to the fledgling cinema of science. As Rony observes,
film not only allowed an improved means for studying Regnault's index of
choice (i.e. movement), but film is also an inherently indexical technology
(like a footprint, the filmic image is evidence that the person had been there).
Thus for Regnault, film was "the ultimate apparatus for positivist science,"
allowing the scientist to decompose movement into a series of images for closer
inspection, expanding the capabilities of the unassisted eye, and facilitating
the growth of an ethnographic archive for future scientific investigation. "To
Regnault, film was better than the referent." Rony, 47-48.
53 Rony, 49-58.
54 Interestingly, while there are quite a few cartoons from this period in
which entertainers of color are rotoscoped, there are no films in which
easily identifiable white entertainer depicted in the introductory live-action
footage is then reintroduced in rotoscoped form. In Rudy Vallee Melodies
(1932), Rudy Vallee, a popular white singer, appears as himself; he retains
his unique identity as an individual and an entertainer. In contrast, Cab
Calloway and Miri appear either as generic "natives" (Betty as the "island
maiden") or their movements are implanted into new and completely
unrelated bodies (such as Cab's reappearances as a ghost, a clown, and a
wild mountain man). In both cases, the racialized body of the entertainer is
denied historical, cultural, and personal specificity.
55 Rony, 72.
56 Rony, 10.
57 Taussig, xiii.
Joanna Bouldin received a Ph.D. in Visual Studies from
the University of California, Irvine in June 2004. Her
dissertation, "The Animated and the Actual: Toward a
Theory of Animation, Live-Action, and Everyday Life,"
demonstrates the ways in which animation engages with,
questions, and helps shape our legal, political, aesthetic,
and corporeal realities.
2004 Joanna Bouldin
Animation Journal, Volume 12,2004

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