Art in Motion: The Aesthetics of Animation

Rather than begin by talking about the lecture, I'm going to talk about one of the questions that someone asked afterwards and then work backwards. Someone asked: "Why does animation speak to us differently than live action?" Dr. Leeper answered that the materials involved in animation create a distance between us and the work that allows us to be touched by it. I'll buy that. I think that live action, by its nature, reflects us too closely. Live action is closer to what our eyes see and animation is closer to what our minds see. That's not to say that live action can't be used to speak to people in the same way as animation, but it might seem like more of a stretch. Donald Hudson said that: "...art helps me understand myself by questioning me rather than merely affirming me." Animation and live action are both used by the mainstream media to affirm us, because affirmation means money, and they both can be used to question us (in films like World of Glory and Father and Daughter). But animation inherently has a kind of narrative distance that live action filmmakers have to work a little harder to create, which can make the questions easier to ask by helping us "see into the eternal, into the invisible" (Makco Fjuimura).