Editorial

Abstract

This issue brings you a set of interdisciplinary articles in unanticipated dialogues with each other, often through a long view, of histories of art, natural science and (pre-) cinema. For this reader, there is also an undercurrent throughout of pioneering media (an)archaeologist Zielinski’s (2006) Deep Time of the Media, that should be required reading for all interested in animation – and cinema as a whole – before and after the invention of photochemical processes. Zielinski’s challenges are to ‘an anemic and evolutionary model [that] has come to dominate many studies in so-called media’ (p. vii) and to a dominant orthodox historiography (pp. vii–viii). He is clear that the field of media archaeology ‘faces numerous issues to evolve histories of technologies, apparatuses, effects, images, iconographies, and so forth, within a larger scheme of reintegration in order to expand a largely ignored aspect of conventional history’ (p. ix). As an academic journal, we also encourage authorship that engages with expanding our field, including in the ways Zielinski proposes. Some of the articles in this issue develop ontological, media-archaeological or philosophical approaches to our understanding of animation and move beyond the concept of the illusion of life often used to define the form. Others are seeking distinctions and new ways to approach specific sets of works or techniques, apparatuses and technologies. Most engage with the phenomena described by Colin Williamson of magic ‘hidden in plain sight’ that is the main title of his (2015) monograph, that ‘focuses on the “long” shared history of magic and the cinema’ (p. 18). The journal’s scope, since 2006, is to address all animation made using all known (and yet to be developed) techniques, from 16th-century optical devices to contemporary digital media. Considering the direction and expansion that Animation Studies has been taking in recent years, it is time to responsively expand our scope into a longer-reaching techno-scientific and historical past and, with paradigm-shifting, disruptive new technologies into the speculative future. In the late 18th century, as one of a number of movements following on from the European Enlightenment and challenging its rational restraint, the German Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) was known for its focus on subjectivity and emotions. A key figure in this music and literary movement was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; yet this polymath’s contribution far exceeded the arts, with wide-ranging – what we would now call interdisciplinary – investigations into everything from colour theory to the natural sciences. One of the latter is the focus of Zeke Saber’s ‘Animating Goethe’ in which he takes one of the main terms used to describe a defining feature of animation – metamorphosis – to unfold and complicate this through Goethe’s aesthetic, philosophical and scientific considerations of the botanical phenomenon of morphology. Saber’s aim is ambitious: to propose a theoretical framework that is tailored to the practices, processes and experiences of animation film. After a brief sweep of definitions, Saber arrives quickly to his topic, first unpacking some of Goethe’s key statements and findings in Goethean morphology and the Urpflanze as an epistemological tool for the arts and humanities. Then animation itself is under scrutiny, and Saber unfurls tendrils of Goethe into animation studies, technological and stylistic 1163421 ANM0010.1177/17468477231163421AnimationEditorial editorial2023