Animating Goethe

Metamorphosis is frequently cited as an inherent feature of animation, but scholars who make this claim have routinely disregarded the influence of Goethean morphology on animation practice and theory. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s initial conception of morphology, as outlined in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, has had a significant effect on our understanding of the transformative nature of animation. In this article, the author engages with the theory and practice of figures including Sergei Eisenstein, André Bazin, Alla Gadassik, Caroline Leaf and others in order to insist upon animation’s critical but hitherto unacknowledged role in an ongoing history of morphological reception. Morphology’s sensitivity to the continuous coming-into-being of form allows us to think through, in newly productive ways, the intrinsic practices, aims and intimations of animation, not to mention the sometimes vexed discourse about its place in cinema studies.