Figure and Force in Animation Aesthetics by Ryan Pierson (review)

Abstract

It is practically a commonplace to say that the subject of animation is marginal in the field of film studies. Indeed, animated films, sometimes called “cartoons,” have often been deliberately excluded from consideration, understood as an unassimilable exception and contrasted with the primary object of analysis—the live-action film, the photographic recording of “real” physical events unfolding in time and space. In Ryan Pierson’s engaging and informative book, Figure and Force in Animation Aesthetics, he seeks not only to reveal the significance of animation but also to show how an “aesthetics” of animated film may provide a more powerful conceptual framework for film studies and film theory more generally, as the basis for a more informative stylistic analysis of cinematic representation broadly conceived. In this respect, perhaps the most important sentence in his book comes in an endnote, where he declares, “I do not wish to define a rigid separation between animation and live-action” (163, n. 1). Yet it is just such a rigid separation that has arguably characterized much of film studies and film theory. Pierson’s book is an important contribution to the more general argument, especially relevant in the so-called “digital era,” that any fundamental distinction between animation and live-action must be discarded, or at the very least reconsidered. By thinking of animation as Pierson proposes, as “an art of coordinating sensory units into perceptible figures and forces,” as “experiments in the possibilities of sensory organization” (4), he provides a powerful means for doing so. Pierson would perhaps not go so far as to say, as Rudolf Arnheim did in 1938, that “the film will be able to reach the heights of the other arts only when it frees itself from the bonds of photographic reproduction and becomes a pure work of man [sic], namely an animated cartoon or painting.” Pierson seeks to reveal the full creative powers of the animator in order to establish the aesthetic bona fides of the animated film, but he is not interested in simply declaring animation superior to live-action, as a crude rebuttal to those who have judged it inferior. He carefully describes and analyzes some of the most significant techniques in animation, focusing specifically on animation of the mid-twentieth century, stressing the importance of that era as “the period in which ‘animation’ as we currently define it—that is, animation as opposed to the more limited term