The Joyous Reception: Animated Worlds and the Romantic Imagination

The Joyous Reception: Animated Worlds and the Romantic Imagination

Rachel Kearney

Abstract: This essay contends that Romantic notions are relevant to animation associated with twentieth century aesthetics. By focusing on the metamorphic contour of Disney, and digital media's ability to blend indexical and software-based data, a concurrence is suggested between the formal qualities of these images and the Romantic process of mind. Approached through the theories of Eisenstein, Schelling and Coleridge, it is proposed that the imagination's dialectical synthesis, a reunion of subject and object, is symbolically revealed in the animated form. This ultimately allows an active communication between viewer and image, one that reflects the Romantic experience of joy.

The 'world' I wish to suggest for animation is one of the imagination, specifically one that corresponds with 19th century Romantic notions of the creative mind. Although it may appear historically incongruous to place such an interpretation on an art form associated primarily with Modernist or Postmodernist ideologies, what I wish to promote in this essay is the idea that the Romantic Imagination, its function and product, can transcend apparently opposing cultural contexts and operate within different technologies.

The Romantic aesthetic conveys a sense of unity, a symbolic loss of division between the mind and the ontological, within the formal qualities of the image. Its appeal is not based merely upon a lack of the quotidian in content, or the special effect, but on a formal construction that enables a deep communication between the image and viewer; a revelation of unconscious thought activity. Richard Coyne has stated that 'the twentieth century is every bit a Romantic age represented through ... the entertainment and leisure industries that pervade mass media'. It is within animation produced for mainstream distribution and culture that I intend to search for this aesthetic, firstly through an examination of the cel animation of Disney, and secondly by extending these notions into films that digitally integrate live action and software-based animation.

Cel animation is sometimes considered to be a subversive medium. Due to its graphic freedom from the rational and indexical, it has sometimes been connoted as an anarchic comment upon modernist society and culture, a 'world upside down'. In the case of Disney I will argue that subversion is present but unconsciously produced: it is identifiable in its retreat from society rather than an engagement with it, the signification of a Romantic unity rather than the fragmentation of Modernism. These elements are also present, I believe, in the theoretical approach taken by Sergei Eisenstein in his work on Disney. I will therefore employ Eisenstein's notions of the 'plasmatic' and the 'ecstatic'. These will be read into an aesthetic that is comparable to the early 19th century German Romanticism. The Romantic notions I will focus upon here are ideas surrounding the artist as genius, notions of the dialectic as the essence of evolution and freedom, and the reunion of man and nature in the face of mechanistic alienation.

Eisenstein himself had undergone a theoretical shift in the 1930s, moving away from mechanism in his theoretical and filmic approach towards organic modes. During the 1920s, Eisenstein's work had reflected the dominant ideology of Leninist dialectics and a Pavlovian physiology, treating the mind as a materialist function, a reflex manipulated by his concept of montage. In 1931 however, following the 1925 publication in the Soviet Union of Engels' Dialectics of Nature, and a shift towards Hegelian idealism at the Soviet Writers' Congress, Nicolai Bukharin warned against the mechanisation of 'spiritual life'. This ideological shift, in conjunction with implementation of Socialist Realism's 'revolutionary romanticism' (which, as Margaret Rose has pointed out, is never wholly differentiated from the original), and Eisenstein's own reading of James Joyce, led Eisenstein to reformulate his approach towards one of organic unity. This theoretical combination of biology, mind, and art however suggests to me an earlier philosophical approach, that of the late 18th and early 19th century Romantic aesthetics and German 'Naturphilosophie'.

Eisenstein identifies his organic aesthetic in a range of artistic styles and epochs, from Mayan architecture to the paintings of Goya, however in his essays on Disney he not only locates this universal aesthetic but also defined a cultural cause for it. As Thomas Elsaesser has noted in his work on German Expressionist film, this style reified Romanticism as 'the expression of a frustrated desire for change'. German Romanticism in general has been interpreted as a retreat of the mind from social immobility and technological alienation, and Disney's content reflects this. His use of European folklore and rural settings suggest the Romantic immersion in nature. In relation to the work of Disney Eisenstein was to express a similar point; that this animation and its animism was a flight from the mechanised constrictions of American life. He argues that the Silly Symphonies shorts (Walt Disney, USA, 1929–1939) are a response to 'the age of American mechanization' and are 'a glimpse of freedom within a capitalist state'. He goes on to compare 'America and the formal logic of standardization' 14 with 18th century Europe's 'restrictive and artificial life', caused by the rationalist division of man and nature. Here, 'man was confined to his soul, and the whole soul was allotted to reason ... separated from matter'.

The freedom that Eisenstein confers on the animation of Disney can then perhaps be compared to the reading of Romanticism as a reaction to the restriction and division of the 18th century. For the German Romantics of this period, mind and nature were conceived of as being fundamental elements of a greater whole, Johann Gottfried von Herder arguing that they should be viewed as a dissoluble unity, 'one interpenetrating, all animating soul'. The aim of the Romantic movement...