The basics: What is “animation”?

The second of these is fairly straightforward, and largely overlaps with common understandings of what an animation is. The first suggests a very wide range of different artistic and production techniques that can be used to create animations. Even before film, flip-books and other gadgets could create the illusion of movement in images. And even in films with no CGI whatsoever, special effects, make up, costumes, optical illusions, and even decisions around how to frame a shot or what perspective to film from mean that there is a layer of artificiality between the people, objects or places being shown and what the viewer perceives.

So the idea that CGI constitutes a form of animation might make it hard to categorise certain films, though as Khun and Westwell point out, hybrid forms of film have existed for almost as long as film itself. For instance, in some films animated sequences are interspersed with live-action sequences, or hand-drawn animation is used to augment filmed material, as in the ‘penguin’ sequence in the classic film Mary Poppins (Stevenson, 1964):

While the animated parts of the above sequence are obvious, the CGI elements in other films or series may be less so, particularly in recent years. In the Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian (Favreau, 2019) an LED light stage was used to film real human actors (with some props) in front of CGI backgrounds, as explained in this video:

The Mandalorian is clearly not a cartoon, but is it an animation, when the majority of what we see (by screen area covered at least) when we watch it is computer-generated? And if we can consider both films and TV/streaming series to be animations, what about much shorter formats, such as short-form online videos or even GIFs?

Although it is not necessarily easy to map out the boundaries of animation, it may instead make sense to think of films as existing on a spectrum, from those that aim to only show a faithful visual representation of what a viewer might see if they were positioned where the camera is (as promoted by the DOGME 95 Manifesto calling for realism in films, see Roberts, 1999) to fully animated films where “every pixel of every frame has been created, and there is thus very little room in animation for accidental visual stimuli.” (Unger & Sunderland, 2007)

On the whole, perhaps this is not such an issue for researchers who wish to study gender and language in animation. If you carefully describe your data, be it drawn from feature films or GIFs, and consider how the constraints and possibilities of the form you are studying might affect the phenomena you are interested in, the question of whether something is or isn’t an animation may become a moot point. The material in GLARe should help you analyse many different kinds of films and related forms. Please consult the other ‘basics’ posts (on gender and on language), and look out for upcoming posts on multimodal approaches, visual representations of gender, and animation vs. live action!