| Taking into account the many ways in which animation and the animated body intersect with our everyday lives---from cartoons, to video games, to medical imaging technology---this dissertation explores the relationship between animation, live-action film, and "the real" or "the actual." Although animation is commonly relegated to the realm of childish fantasy, reinforcing a false separation between the "imaginary" world of the animated, and the more "serious" realms of live-action film and "real-life," I argue that the animated and the actual cannot be so easily separated. Considering specific technologies that blur the boundaries between these media and modes of experience (specifically, the early animation technology of the rotoscope, as well as contemporary computer-animation practices) and exploring a wide range of examples from throughout the history of animation (from the racialized body in Betty Boop cartoons of the 1930s, to the use of computer-animated maps for the U.S. Invasion of Iraq in 2003), I demonstrate that animation engages in a powerful discursive project that challenges the imposition of artificial boundaries between "reality" and "fantasy."; This project finds its theoretical foundation in the phenomenological film theory of Vivian Sobchack and Steven Shaviro, in theories of indexicality and mimesis discussed by Andre Bazin, Roland Barthes, and Michael Taussig, and in social constructionist and psychoanalytic discussions of the body, found in the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, Julia Kristeva, and Mary Douglas.; Despite the fact that animation has been trivialized within academic circles, the stakes of this project are actually quite high. This dissertation does not simply take up the task of correcting the disciplinary, commercial, and artistic marginalization animation has suffered, but rather it explores the ways in which animation engages with, questions, and shapes our legal, political, aesthetic, and corporeal realities. As the following pages will illustrate, the realm of "the animated" extends well beyond Saturday morning television and Hollywood special-effects films, into the world of bodies, sex, abuse, racism, work, and warfare. |
