Some Thoughts on Theory–Practice Relationships in Animation Studies
Paul Ward
Perhaps even more so than film and media studies more broadly, animation studies has always enjoyed a productive fluidity between theory and practice and much animation scholarship is written by people who are also animators. Ward, in this article that was originally published in animation: an interdisciplinary journal in 2006, provides an important analysis of this relationship between theory and practice in animation studies that focuses on ‘communities of practice’ and argues that animation studies is an interdisciplinary field and must be understood as such.
Introduction
The relationship between practice and theory is especially acute in the field of Animation Studies. This is due to the notions of craft and artistry that are attached to animation as an activity, and also the fact that animation is so diverse. Animation is at one and the same time a rich, multifaceted activity, seemingly existing in many different places at once, and it is an intuitive, magical process. Both of these factors make attempting to pin down animation in a theoretical way – to understand what is going on and why – an extremely difficult enterprise.
In this article I am going to make some tentative moves towards a more critical understanding of how theory and practice relate to one another in this rich and vibrant area. I shall do this by examining animation in relation to some concepts derived from education and pedagogy. Certainly with animation studies, the assumption often seems to be that learning the craft is the most vital thing, and the way that animation is talked about and theorized is therefore shaped by a specifically craft (some would say vocational) mentality. This is all very well – after all, what is animation without people to actually do the animating? – but tends to close off some of the more interesting critical avenues. Animation as a craft becomes too easily ‘attached to’ or placed in the service of particular paymasters. If animation really is as diverse and exciting a field as the rhetoric tells us, then we need to ensure that it is allowed to flourish as well as it can. This means being alive to every possible theoretical (as well as practical) possibility, and attuned to how theory and practice are inter-related.
With this in mind, I am going to discuss animation as an intersecting, discursive field, and draw upon three main concepts. First of all, I shall concentrate on Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger’s (1991) notion of ‘legitimate peripheral participation’, which is derived from their work on ‘socially situated learning’. Secondly, I shall talk about the notion of ‘critical practice’, drawing in particular on the recent work of Mike Wayne (2001) in this area. Finally, the concept of ‘recontextualization’, as proposed by sociologist of education Basil Bernstein (2000), will link discourses about animation – and especially how it is seen as a craft, and taught and learned as such – to broader and very important debates about pedagogy. These debates are central to understanding how animation practice actually functions.
Animation as ‘legitimate peripheral participation’
One of the key theoretical and practical considerations for anyone trying to offer an outline of animation – as a mode of practice, a pedagogy, a knowledge area – is its multi-sitedness. That is, how can we discuss a wide range of people, doing what can appear to be very diverse things, as if they constitute a coherent group? Animation as a category includes the cartoons produced during the classical Hollywood era by studios such as Warner Brothers, MGM, Disney and the Fleischers, the formal experiments of Norman McLaren, the surreal worlds of Jan Švankmajer and the Quay Brothers. It also encompasses those who engage with animation techniques in order to capture, analyse or otherwise render particular types of motion or specific spaces – e.g., physical fitness instructors might use motion capture software as a tool to analyse a runner’s movements or architects might construct a virtual version of a planned building. Therefore it is important to recognize that there is diversity within the category of animation, while at the same time concentrating on how particular participants interact with and coincide with one another in very specific material contexts. There will be occasions when people actively involved in different aspects of animation will come into each other’s orbit. This may lead to one-off discussions, disputes and collaborations, or may lead to an ongoing/permanent engagement. The point is that the interaction and engagement is not a static thing or a simple exchange but is something that is in flux and any learning and communication that occurs is ‘socially situated’. I am using this term in Lave and Wenger’s (1991) sense, and they explain the related term ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ as follows:
Legitimate peripheral participation provides a way to speak about the relations between newcomers and old-timers, and about activities, identities, artifacts and communities of knowledge and practice. It concerns the process by which newcomers become part of the community of practice. A person’s intentions to learn are engaged and the meaning of learning is configured through the process of becoming a full participant in a sociocultural practice. (p. 29)
Therefore, people will position themselves in relation to knowledge communities by thinking through what they do and think to what others – perceived to be already part of the knowledge community in question – do and think. Lave and Wenger’s underlying point is that all learning (not simply school-based teaching) is a social activity and we therefore need to grapple with social context in order to understand this. For Lave and Wenger, all activity (potentially, at least) involves learning; I would suggest that they are correct in this assumption, but that for actual learning to take place there has to be some critical reflection on the activity and the fact that something is being learned. In terms of animation it is easy to discern how Lave and Wenger’s concepts are useful. Certain activity might be central to one specific inquiry, yet peripheral to another. How it is viewed depends on the relative position of the person viewing it, and the activities in which they are engaged (Ward 2003). To rephrase this in a way that makes it more germane to the current discussion, someone’s engagement with animation might be deemed peripheral by certain others, until there comes a time when (due to specific socio-historical circumstances) that engagement moves to become more central. As Lave and Wenger (1991) make clear, ‘peripheral’ and ‘central’ are of course relative terms, not concrete ones, and it is the dialectical relationship between participants and contexts that produces meaning. As they say: ‘Agent, activity, and the world mutually constitute each other’ (p. 33).
For example, classically trained cel animators will have close connections to those who work in the same area, but a particular project might bring them into collaboration with animators working in other forms of animation, such as computer rendering, direct animation or clay animation. As they move away from their specific community and interact more with the other community, working practices will be questioned, challenged, may become entrenched and so on.1 An interesting example of this kind of movement is outlined by Brad Bird, director of The Iron Giant (1999) and The Incredibles (2004). He was asked during an interview about his time working as a consultant on the television series The Simpsons, and he points to the ways in which different working practices can be channelled and changed. Bird states:
When I first got into it, the visual language of television animation was very, very rudimentary. There was a standard way of handling things … When I got in there with the storyboard artists, they were approaching things that way because that’s the way they were trained. I said, ‘No, come on, man! We’re doing a take on The Shining here. Let’s look at how Kubrick uses his camera. His camera always has wide-angle lenses. Oftentimes, the compositions are symmetrical. Let’s do a drawing that simulates a wide-angle lens’ At first they were completely bewildered, and very soon they were into it. I said, ‘Look, we can’t spend a lot of money on elaborate animation, but we can have sophisticated filmmaking’. (quoted in Robinson 2004)
Here, the entrenched working practices of television animation come into contact with someone who is thinking in terms of a rather different approach, and how animation might usefully be related to other forms of expression. The specificities of different communities of animation practice are usefully compared in Bird’s statement; he is asking the animators to think carefully about the broader interrelationships at play, and something that was previously not done then becomes a distinct possibility, something that was peripheral becomes more central.
In terms of animation studies and its relationship to other knowledge areas, we can see a similar process at work. For instance, as one researches particular areas, one will encounter and engage with different communities of practice or nodes of animation inquiry. For example, the teaching and researching of animation of the classical Hollywood era ostensibly requires a radically different approach and set of collaborators than does animation’s application to the development of new techniques in Sports Science or Veterinary Medicine. However, while these clearly represent very different communities of practice in Lave and Wenger’s (1991) meaning of the term, they are all engaging with animation in some shape or form. Furthermore, animation’s multifaceted character is what needs to be explored by drawing out the way it links such apparently unrelated communities of practice. A traditional Film Studies-inflected approach to animation, and sports science- and veterinary medicine-inflected approaches to animation appear, on the surface, to have very little common ground (apart, that is, from their use of/interest in animation). Yet I would argue that the commonalities not only go much deeper than they appear, but that this common ground is precisely the terrain on which we need to build. Thus, debates about realism and representation in Hollywood cartoon animation might take us into an analysis of naturalistic drawing styles, studios’ use of live-action film to help artists capture ‘natural’ movement and use of devices such as the rotoscope. It was common practice, for example, for classical-era Disney animators to use a range of techniques and technologies to ensure that character movements were as realistic as possible – see ‘The Uses of Live Action in Drawing Humans and Animals’ in Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston’s book Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life (1981: 319–366). Likewise, although its acceptance as an animation technique is somewhat more contested, the rotoscope was invariably used to help capture the specificity of human movement in an animated context. The fact that the resulting animation often looked strange, eerie, or out of place emphasizes both the difficulty of rendering naturalistic movement in animation and the importance of rotoscoping and other motion capture technologies from the perspective of animation studies research (see Bouldin 2004; Ward 2004). It is precisely the interstitial qualities of animation that relies on pre-capturing or previsualizing movement that makes it of such interest – whether we are talking about the very first uses of the original rotoscope by Max Fleischer in his Out of the Inkwell cartoons, or more recent use of motion-capture technology in animating Tom Hanks’s multiple performances in The Polar Express (2004).
At the same time, the sports scientist or veterinary researchers might be examining how motion capture devices and digital imaging can help them in their research. The various techniques for gathering data on how athletes move in specific contexts is of obvious relevance to sports science, but the application of these data in broader contexts, using animation technology, is of potential use to anyone with an interest in kinesiology (the study of human movement). Animation used in one context could therefore be of use to physiotherapists, medical staff, people working within robotics – the list could be extended. Veterinary studies of animal locomotion, often using the same technology as that used in some sports science contexts, and that used for motion capture in Computer Animation and Games Design – for example, the Qualisys ProReflex 3D Motion Analysis System – have clear value to animal husbandry and training, but the information gathered in such a context can again be more broadly applied. The underlying questions being asked in this instance by apparently unrelated communities of practice (film studies, sports science, and veterinary medicine) are actually very similar. They have to do with the clear and accurate capturing of motion via specific animation techniques – and, despite their differences (indeed, I would maintain, because of them) there is a lot to be learned from a critical dialogue between them. In this respect, animation has the potential to usefully collapse some of the boundaries that still exist between broadly Arts and Science orientations. We need to keep in mind that apparently stable knowledge areas or disciplines should be more accurately thought of as interacting communities of practice: they may overlap a great deal or not at all; they may have practitioners who collaborate a lot or rarely. What is certain is that it is in the process of actively engaging with different contexts that one learns anything. It therefore follows that knowledge about something is produced by constantly critically (re-)evaluating what that something is, and how it relates to its (many) contexts.
Animation and critical practice
In his recent work examining media production practices Mike Wayne has developed a useful typology of cultural practitioners. Although he does not refer to animation specifically, his typology can clearly be applied to animation. As Wayne (2001) says, his aim is to explore ‘different modes and ambitions of being self-conscious about what it means to understand cultural production’ (p. 30). By this he means there are different extents to which one can be self-conscious about one’s work, existing on an overlapping continuum, but characterized by attention to specific domains, namely the ‘process of production, the text itself and the context of production and consumption’ (p. 30). In a moment, I shall suggest how people working in animation might be located on this continuum. First of all, we need to summarize the main points on the continuum. At one end is the reflexive practitioner, who is able to reflect on the production process, but with a tendency to focus on the minutiae of this, often leading to a debilitating concentration on technology to the detriment of other factors. The theoretical practitioner, on the other hand, tends to dwell on the importance of the text as the site of meaning. As Wayne points out, though, ‘being able to discuss how an editing sequence constructs meaning is not the same as being able to situate the text within a broader context of power’ (p. 30). This brings us to the most desirable form of practitioner – and the most difficult to produce and sustain – the critical practitioner. They are ‘able to interrogate the politics of representation. This requires a movement from the text … to context’ (p. 31). A truly critical practitioner is therefore someone who is willing and able to think through the implications of what they do, and place it in its social, historical and political contexts.
It seems clear from the wealth of points raised in email exchanges I have had with colleagues engaged in animation studies and animation production that Wayne’s typology is especially useful.2 I think this has to do with the way that animation is often subsumed within other theoretical or disciplinary structures, and also with how much of the discussion of animation centres on the role of technology. Animation’s overlapping relationship with film and other media has meant that the theoretical paradigms applied to these other areas are often applied to animation, without first fully thinking through how animation’s theory and practice might inform them.
Similarly, the rationalizing and instrumental trajectory of discourses of technology tends to mean that animation as a practice is often placed in a problematic relationship with those very technologies. The value of critical practice is that it interrogates those potentially problematic relationships rather than taking them at face value. The concept of critical practice is also invaluable because it dovetails with the notion of legitimate peripheral participation. As people’s activities will depend on the specific material context in which they are operating at any particular moment, it is important to discuss this within a framework that places emphasis on their ability to critique their shifting practices. The critical practitioner in the field of computer animation, for example, would ideally be attuned to the possible applications of what they do, across the broad spectrum of arts and sciences alluded to earlier. It is certainly the case that the categories Wayne suggests can overlap, or rather, that a person can occupy different positions according to their conditions of practice at any one moment. To go back to a point raised earlier, I think we can take Wayne’s typology one step further by stating that there can be a high degree of mobility in how people engaged with animation might be defined and define themselves. For instance, there are a considerable number of people whose teaching of animation practice, for one reason or another, seems to fall into the reflexive practitioner category. In other words, they concentrate on the production process and particularly ‘the technology of cultural production’ (Wayne 2001: 30, emphasis added). My point here would be to stress that the discourse of many courses tends to be instrumentalist in nature. Another way to put this would be to say that these courses are more or less vocational in the way they concentrate on the mastering of techniques and technology. Indeed, the technology is often seen as the main selling point of the courses.
Despite the fact that an animation teacher might well fall into the reflexive practitioner category in terms of their day-to-day teaching, it is evident (from email discussion group exchanges) that many of them are also acutely aware of debates and issues that would seem to be the preserve of theoretical and critical practitioners. One email respondent states ‘conceptually, I feel that Animation Studies means the study of animation, inclusive of both theory and practice. What I do professionally is teach animation practice’. This is an example of the tension noted earlier – i.e. that someone might have a set of ideas (‘conceptually’) about something, yet be required to do only one part of that something in the course of their (educational) job. Also evident from this comment is the discourse of a ‘profession’; that there are certain duties and responsibilities that someone in this position must fulfil. Namely, that someone could have a personal view about what constitutes animation, yet that view might not (be allowed to) feature in their actual teaching. Someone might personally be a highly sophisticated critical practitioner in Wayne’s sense of the term, yet they recognize the pragmatic dimension of their teaching, and this will mean that their teaching is more or less reflexive (again, in Wayne’s sense of this term, reflecting predominantly on the production process, and the related technological issues and debates).
It certainly seems to be the case that the concerns of a reflexive practitioner feature in a lot of animation courses. But they are often in tension with the impulse towards being a more critical practitioner. Evidence of this can be seen in a recent extended debate in the Animation Journal discussion group about the role of computer technologies in animation courses. There will always be a tendency towards the fetishization of technology in those courses that are predominantly merely reflexive, simply because what is being reflected upon is the production process (rather than, as Wayne (2001) argues, the broader theoretical and contextual dimensions). A question posted by a member of the group (actually a dissertation working title) prompted a discussion of the role of computer technology. The question was ‘are computers in danger of putting “the cart before the horse” in relation to human resource training in the animation industry?’ A lively discussion ensued, with a consensus seeming to form around the idea that knowing the ‘basics’ is more important, and should be seen as a prerequisite for using any form of computer technology. One contributor states:
I find the cart and horse analogy is accurate since there is a worship of technology and a suspicion of anything ‘artistic’ in a great many computer animation courses … Fortunately there are students who are aware of the disproportionate emphasis on technology and who have honed their ‘traditional’ skills.
The general thrust seems to be that ‘the horse’ (creativity) must go before, or lead, ‘the cart’ (the computer technology). The important thing is then seen to be a careful and considered reflection on how the new technology impacts upon the traditional way of doing things.
What is missing to a great degree here though is anything that moves the debate beyond the merely reflexive level. The fact is, a majority of the contributors simply discuss the new technology in a fairly simplistic ‘is it better than what we had previously?’-type way (with most reaching a conclusion of ‘no, not really’, or rather, ‘no, not without building upon what we had previously, rather than replacing it’). There is little theorizing of the broader contextual issues at stake. One contributor edges towards this important ground though:
There is a very strong pressure (from students and institutions) for animation curricula which focus mostly on technology. I think this is in part a consequence of how difficult 3D technology still is for most students. It is also because it is more difficult to assess and quantify the artistic side of animation than the technical aspects. I don’t like the cart and horse analogy, because it implies that one thing necessarily comes before the other or dominates. I think that you will find that the best schools always include both, and they walk side by side. You don’t find architects debating if their students should learn either to make buildings stand or be expressive – both are fundamental.
This contribution certainly makes some interesting points, not least stating that the analogy used suggests that one part of the equation is actually driving the other. Extending the analogy, we could think of the horse as creativity and the cart as the technology (whether this is computer technology, as it is being debated here, or pen and paper which, lest we forget, are a form of technology too), but add that the practitioner will usually be seated in the cart and drive/control it. Not only that, but they will drive/control the technology by actively using their creativity. This reformulation places human agency back in the frame: this is something which is in danger of being effaced entirely (by people who see the technology as the main driving force), or talked about in insufficient terms, that is, couching it only in terms of creativity or artistry, which can tend to imply a transcendental realm, where only people with the requisite artistic temperament can comment on things. The cart, in this analogy, is a vehicle, so of course it has to be guided somewhere. But a lot of people in this debate were talking as if merely placing the horse and cart in the correct positions was all that was needed and forgot that both horse and cart are nothing without a real, human agent, actively bringing both creativity and technology under control of their practice (under specific conditions).
In other words, the creativity and the technologies that allow the expression of that creativity must be seen as existing in a dialectical relationship. This sees neither one as dominant or prior to the other (falling into either a technologically determinist trap, or one that sees artistry as transcending material conditions), but recognizes that they feed off one another. Developments in computer technology, for example, have arguably produced a good deal of poor animation,3 where the tendency has been to hope that the ‘flashiness’ of the new technology will distract. However, it is vital to note that this is a factor whenever any new technology arrives on the scene; it takes time for the technology’s limits and possibilities to be fully mapped and realized. This is not helped by inevitable hyperbole that accompanies new technologies. For instance, recent developments in digital video – an extremely cheap way to generate broadcast-quality images that are eminently manipulable – have led some commentators to talk of the ‘end of Hollywood’. Such statements are absurd and it only takes a cursory look at the evidence to see that any new developments in an area will make some sort of impact, but that they will usually be adapted to or subsumed by the existing power structures (see Bolter and Grusin 1999).
Returning to the cart-and-horse analogy, one respondent offers this observation about special effects wizards, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM):
ILM used to have an example of bad animation from a fictional ‘Cee Student’ which displayed everything bad, dumb, and ugly sent to ILM from students who think learning software (and not even all that thoroughly) is all that is required to be hired by a big 3D company. It was apparent from the fictional ‘reel’ that the good people at ILM have had to look at a lot of crap, and as a result are resentful.
In an information packet that can be downloaded from ILM’s web-site is the following regarding the position of character animation: ‘Character Animators are generally from a traditional hand-drawing “cel” animation background who now take a computer modelled character or object and bring it to life via the computer.’
Translation: horse first, cart second.
Here we have the view of one of the cutting-edge special effects and animation studios and it is clear that they see the technology as a means to an end and not the end in itself. Their belief is that there is a foundation of good practice (as seen in the reference to ‘a traditional hand-drawing “cel” animation background’) and that this is mobilized in the context of cutting-edge computer technology. This mobilization of a specific discourse in a new context is an example of what educational theorist Basil Bernstein referred to as ‘recontextualization’. A good example of such recontextualization in relation to animation is the recent work of Bob Sabiston and his updating of the principles of rotoscoping via his computerized ‘Rotoshop’ software (e.g. Waking Life 2001). The traditions and foundations of rotoscoped animation, where live-action footage was traced over and animated one frame at a time, meant particular working practices and training: the personnel needed to be trained ‘cel’ animators to work in this context. The Rotoshop system has been designed so that not just computer experts can use it, and people from other animation and broader art traditions have worked on Sabiston’s films. In some cases, even people who have no animation background to speak of have successfully used Rotoshop. This not only demonstrates how the principles of one animation tradition can be mobilized in another, using new technology; it has also caused debate (and some controversy) over how animation is actually defined and who can legitimately be called ‘an animator’ (Ward 2004: 41–44).
Technology’s impact on animation, and the way that animation has had to change due to commercial pressures, is therefore one of the key areas in need of analysis. This is something that Keith Bradbury, Lecturer in Animation at Queensland College of Art (affiliated to Griffith University in Australia), has commented on regarding the role of animation practitioners and scholars.4 Bradbury asks the question ‘is animation a new skill or an old skill?’ He continues:
Essentially I think … that animation’s identity has been fractured by its need to attach itself [and] locate its practice within other commercial industries. The educational neglect of animation … has further compounded animation’s identity as either Disney or special effects or advertising. Advertising has special needs of animation and thus contain[s] its use. Discrete courses on traditional animation practice are rare and thus for a generation of people animation is a skill that needs to be re-discovered not simply revived.
This comment is useful as it points to how a knowledge area and its related practices can be impacted upon by social/material forces. Bradbury is implicitly arguing that the emergence of specific courses, where training will be at the forefront, is the result of shifts in the perceived function and uses of animation (as a set of textual artefacts). This could be characterized as a ‘we need more people who can’ approach – which is to say, a form of instrumentalism. This ultimately has the effect of undermining the pedagogic and epistemological underpinnings of the knowledge area, as it is seen increasingly as mere ‘training’ for an already delimited set of options – in Bradbury’s example, ‘Disney or special effects or advertising’. Also interesting is the contention that an arena such as advertising, having a role for animation to play, tends to try and keep animation playing that role, and therefore itself has a role in defining what animation actually is. This is a similar argument to that of Thompson (1980) or Ward (2000) on the place of animation within an institutional structure such as Hollywood – that is, it does X well, so it should only do X.
Bradbury’s key point (see note 4) is ‘that animation’s identity has been fractured by its need to attach itself [and] locate its practice within other commercial industries’. This is something that really warrants extra thought – the idea that a cultural practice can be fractured in this manner. It is a point that goes some of the way to explaining why some educators or artists working in animation might have a personal view that would make them fit into the critical practitioner category, but that they recognize the reality of their material conditions of practice, and this results in them playing out the role of reflexive practitioner. As I have tended to argue throughout this article, the reflexive practitioner, in the sense I am using it, is likely to be someone who thinks long and hard about the technology and tools at their disposal, but does not take that thinking the one (or more) step(s) further to actually critique their conditions of practice and the wider power structures in which they operate. This is why the notion of critical practice is crucial for animation: it needs to offer a critique in order to define itself, but also in order to negotiate its place in relation to the reconfiguring of digital technologies and aesthetics. As Bradbury makes clear, it is easy for animation as a field and set of practices to become fractured, and this possibility has been increased by the rapid diffusion of new media technologies, where animation is a considerable presence. Animation studies’ relative youth as a putative (inter-)discipline makes it all the more important that those involved retain a critically informed overview of all the areas where animation has a stake.
The new facility at Brunel University called BitLab5 was developed initially as an Electronic and Computer Engineering facility to help with teaching and research into multimedia. Recent and ongoing developments have explored the ways in which the facility could be used to increase the connections between arts- and technology-based teaching and research. At present BitLab deals with a great deal of animation-related work, but the vast majority falls under the umbrella of science in the sense that it is scientific applications that use animation (engineering applications, systems analysis, computer modelling and so on). However, there are clear applications for other knowledge areas to exploit, whether they are Performance Studies, Film and Media Studies, Robotics, or even Biology, Sports Science, and the like. My point here would be that what connects these diverse knowledge areas is animation. These communities of practice are engaging with animation on some level, and this is what can give us some critical purchase on both the communities and animation as social phenomena. I have outlined elsewhere the ways in which animation should be considered a discursive field, operating in a number of places (Ward 2003). What we see happening in a facility such as BitLab is animation becoming a potential catalyst for the critical practice I have referred to earlier. We have a situation where a variety of disciplinary knowledges are coming together, in a context where they have traditionally been separate: the arts–science–technology interface at Brunel is something that is still in the process of becoming established. The common ground that teachers, researchers and practitioners are finding is animation: whether issues of digital performance, 3D rendering, how new technology impacts upon narrative and more traditional time-based media, the predictive power of modelling programmes, the use of motion capture devices for a plethora of reasons – all of these applications are concerned with animation. As well as underlining the reasons why a sense of critical practice is important, this also means we have to attend to the notions of recognition and community and how they are inflected in debates about disciplines.6 As established disciplinary boundaries are transgressed, we need a way of critically evaluating what is happening and the social uses to which such practice is being put (hence the need for critical practice). We also need to be able to map and predict specific points of contact (hence the need for a theory of academic community in the face of such apparent diversity). Again, Lave and Wenger’s (1991) conceptual framework is useful, as it outlines questions of community, but more specifically addresses these notions of centrality, peripherality and what happens when the new meets the old.
Animation as a recontextualized discourse
As noted earlier, different tendencies and skills within animation can come into conflict with each other (e.g. the notion of so-called traditional drawing skills and cutting-edge technology supposedly replacing them). It is also the case, as Bradbury suggests, that animation as a (set of) practice(s) has had to attach and locate itself within a range of other contexts. This brings us to Basil Bernstein’s (2000) concept of ‘recontextualization’: this refers to when and how specific pedagogic discourses are relocated and transformed by their use in other contexts (pp. 41–63). The teaching of particular filmmaking or animating skills will be inflected differently in different courses: the ‘same’ skill will be recontextualized according to whether it is being taught in a vocational training course, a theoretically inclined course, a film-related course or a multimedia-related course. Clearly, recontextualization can have a commonsense meaning and seem deceptively straightforward. But it is important to understand that such apparently obvious terms are often misunderstood, or their complexities are glossed over, and it is especially important we analyse such terms carefully in as rich and diverse an area as animation.
One of Bernstein’s key theoretical innovations was to suggest that the way social practices (such as teaching, forms of cultural production) are classified and framed has ideological implications (Bernstein 1973, 1977). To take the example of strong classification and strong framing, the argument would go something like this. Strong classification works on the basis of a rigid separation of different types of particular social practices, clearly demarcated from one another. In the case of animation, the suggestion would be that it has its own logic and methods and it should be learned and dealt with as an autonomous discipline. Animation would encounter clearly recognizable animation problems and would use animation methods and procedures to solve them. The implication is that there should be a perfect fit between the kinds of knowledge problems encountered and the methods and practices used to engage with them, and that such a fit, by definition, means that the same knowledge problems cannot be engaged with (or solved) using different methods and practices. The converse is equally true: particular methods and practices can only be applied to the specific knowledge problem in question, not applied to a range of other problems.
Weak classification, on the other hand, approaches the situation differently, by working on the basis that there are inevitable overlaps, and that the fit just alluded to is a fantasy. This approach will engage with particular research problems and issues, but take into account anyone who has something interesting to say on the matter, rather than exclude someone because they are not part of a recognized disciplinary community. Exploring issues in animation might therefore involve listening to a range of researchers and students from a number of different disciplinary backgrounds. The focus becomes the actual epistemological problems (i.e. what counts as valid and interesting knowledge in this context?) rather than some notion of disciplinary purity. Clearly these are difficult issues when viewed in the full context of higher education, that messy place where competition for research funds, recognition from one’s peers and so on can mean nailing one’s colours to a particular mast as a matter of convenience. Yet, for animation studies (and a good many other knowledge areas, not least film and media studies), the weakly classified route seems to be the most fruitful one to explore. The central dilemma to be addressed is how the strong classification mindset tends to reproduce particular hegemonic discourses and practices. If the general tendency is to see knowledge areas as existing in a strongly classified relationship – where disciplines are separated from each other – then very often only certain (kinds of) answers will be sought and legitimated. This is because only certain people are seen as able to answer those questions.
Mark Langer has addressed some of these issues in relation to animation in his polemical essay ‘The End of Animation History’ (2001). The essay focuses on how the distinction between animation and live-action has dissolved to such an extent that we need to rethink the ways we approach both of them as objects of study (indeed, approaching them ‘both’, i.e. as distinct ‘objects’, is part of the problem). Langer’s argument is not so much that animation has ceased to be useful as a critical category, but that those thinking about animation need to be attuned to a broader set of debates than is usually the case. He states:
The entire nature of the relationship between the animated image and the live, real-world spectator is something that is being renegotiated by technology, but that renegotiation is being ignored by scholars in animation studies in specific and film studies in general. [However,] this is not to say that it is being ignored by scholars elsewhere.
Although not said in so many words, Langer is pointing out how the strong classification of animation knowledge problems perhaps means that some very apposite answers are not being heard. We can no longer afford to look at animation history (and included here is animation theory and all other variants) as a highly specific (which is to say, strongly classified) knowledge area. People who are researching animation can and should learn things from philosophers, engineers, those in performance arts, computing and so on. In short they should follow a pathway of weak classification. This will always be the ultimate test: Is what someone is arguing coherent and of interest, rather than ‘does this belong in animation studies?’ I would suggest this approach needs to be developed in a way that foregrounds the critical potential of animation: we can recognize the diverse material contexts in which animation operates, but in tandem with this we need to also develop a critical perspective that can respond to this diversity.
The concept of recontextualization as outlined by Bernstein can be usefully compared with that of ‘remediation’ (Bolter and Grusin 1999). This latter term is proposed as a way to understand what happens when new media emerge, with Bolter and Grusin arguing that, far from new media simply replacing existing media forms, what happens is that the new refashions the old. The different media enter into a relationship of co-existence characterized by the interrelated logics of immediacy and hypermediacy:
Although each medium promises to reform its predecessors by offering a more immediate or authentic experience, the promise of reform inevitably leads us to become aware of the new medium as a medium. Thus immediacy leads to hypermediacy. (p. 19)
This is certainly the impulse we see at work in relation to some recent computer graphics (CG) animation, where the attempt to render in CG imagery a photorealistic human leads to the viewer becoming more aware of the mediation at work. In Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (Hironobu Sakaguchi, Moto Sakakibara 2001), for example, there is a paradox evident in the rendering of the human characters – they are at one and the same time too real and not real enough; the viewer knows he or she is watching an animated film, but there is an indeterminacy about the human figures that leads to a heightening of the mediation. What appears to be an attempt at immediacy (i.e. increased transparency and realism) results in hypermediacy (i.e. increased opacity and noticeability of the medium itself). While Bolter and Grusin are talking about media (and, inevitably, technology), I believe it is useful to think about discourses and ideas in a similar way. If we are to move towards a truly interdisciplinary way of conceptualizing animation, it is important to ensure that we are being as critical as possible, yet open to the very wide range of disciplinary voices that come together in animation’s name. The logic of weak classification demands this, and the recontextualization of animation-related discourses in a variety of contexts implies that we need a hypermediated awareness of the potential of animation studies as a discipline, rather than a belief in its immediate or transparent nature.
Conclusion
As animators and animation scholars work within their specific material contexts, producing certain artefacts, using certain technology and so on, they form strategic alliances. Animation is far too diverse to be simply categorized as one single entity, and it is in the attention to the specific working practices, alliances and recognitions between diversely situated people that the particular character of animation will emerge. It is for this reason that I have pointed in this article to the three conceptual frameworks of legitimate peripheral participation, critical practice and recontextualization. Each of these concepts addresses the complex ways in which discourses and sets of knowledges overlap and interact. They openly acknowledge how different people might use the same discourses, but do so in what appear to be entirely different contexts.
As Wayne’s (2001) typology of practitioners makes clear, the critical practitioner is someone who is able to identify and reflect upon the occasions when such recontextualization of discourses is occurring. I would add that such a critical thinker will also be attuned to the ways in which he or she is participating in communities of practice (to use these terms in Lave and Wenger’s [1991] sense). The fact that animation exists at the conjunction of a very wide range of discourses – about film, fine art, philosophy, technology, aesthetics, individual expression, among others – means that it takes and recontextualizes those discourses, but also that it, in turn, is taken and recontextualized. A critical reflection on what animation is and what it might be – its conditions of practice and the many different contexts in which it operates – therefore requires that we understand how specific knowledges are positioned by and in relation to other discourses, and how these discourses are in turn positioned by animation. It is this dialectic that is at the heart of animation and all of the knowledges that it has a hand in producing.
Notes
1 Communities of practice can of course be a negative force in the sense that people can retreat into them if they feel threatened.
2 The emails are mainly drawn from the Animation Journal e-discussion forum at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/animationjournal/; (you have to join the moderated group in order to view the message archive), plus some personal email exchanges.
3 The idea of ‘poor’ animation is of course a value judgement that requires explanation and contextualization. Discussions of ‘poor’ animation in relation to debates about technology usually invoke a lack of ‘traditional’ animation ability (i.e. the ability to draw, or the ability to move an audience with storytelling and character construction), and suggest that a fetishization of technology occurs in place of this lack of ability.
4 These comments were made in a personal email to the author.
5 BitLab is the name for the Brunel University Information Technology Laboratory, a state of the art facility which includes a range of animation related technology and software, including a motion capture suite, render farm and 3D scanner.
6 On ‘recognition’ in the sense I am using it here, see Taylor (1995); on ‘community’ and how it impacts on academic and disciplinary behaviours, see Becher and Trowler (2003) and Lave and Wenger (1991).
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