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dc.contributor.authorGeal, Robert
dc.date.accessioned2018-03-14T15:31:11Z
dc.date.available2018-03-14T15:31:11Z
dc.date.issued2018-03-01
dc.identifier.citationGeal, R. (2017) 'Animated Images and Animated Objects in the Toy Story Franchise: Reflexively and Intertextually Transgressive Mimesis', Animation, 13 (1) p.69
dc.identifier.issn1746-8477
dc.identifier.doi10.1177/1746847717752588
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/2436/621182
dc.description.abstractThis article explores how animation can manipulate a reflexive intertextual framework which relates to religious prohibitions on artistic mimesis that might replicate and threaten God’s creative act. Animated films are most intertextually reflexive, in these terms, when they narrativize the movement of diegetic objects from another medium which also transgresses God’s prohibition: sculpture. In the media of both sculpture and animation, the act of mimesis is transgressive in fundamentally ontological terms, staging the illusion of creation by either replicating the form of living creatures in three-dimensional sculpture, or by giving the impression of animating the inanimate in two-dimensional film. Both media can generate artworks that directly comment on these processes by using narratives about the creative act which not only produce the illusion of life, but which produce diegetically real life itself. Such artworks are intensely reflexive, and engage with one another in an intertextual manner. The article traces this process from the pre-historic and early historic religious, mythic and philosophical meditations which structure ideas about mimetic representations of life, via Classical and Early Modern sculpture, through a radical proto-feminist revision crystallizing around the monstrous consequences of the transgression in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and finally into film and more specifically animation. The article culminates with a relatively detailed account of these processes in the Toy Story franchise, which is a heightened example of how animation can stage a narrative in which ostensibly inanimate sculpted toys move of their own volition, and of how this double form of animation does this reflexively, by ontologically performing the toys’ animating act. The animated films analysed also engage with the transgressive and monstrous consequences of this double form of animation, which derive from the intertextual life of those narratives that challenge God’s prohibition on mimesis.
dc.language.isoen
dc.publisherSage
dc.relation.urlhttp://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1746847717752588
dc.subjectanimation
dc.subjectFrankenstein
dc.subjectintertextuality
dc.subjectmimesis
dc.subjectontology
dc.subjectPygmalion
dc.subjectreflexivity
dc.subjectreligion
dc.subjectsculpture
dc.subjectToy Story
dc.titleAnimated images and animated objects in the Toy Story franchise: Reflexively and intertextually transgressive mimesis
dc.typeJournal article
dc.identifier.journalAnimation
dc.contributor.institutionUniversity of Wolverhampton, UK
dc.date.accepted2017-12-31
rioxxterms.funderuniversity of Wolverhampton
rioxxterms.identifier.projectUoW140318RG
rioxxterms.versionAM
rioxxterms.licenseref.urihttps://creativecommons.org/CC BY
rioxxterms.licenseref.startdate2018-03-13
dc.source.volume13
dc.source.issue1
dc.source.beginpage69
dc.source.endpage84
refterms.dateFCD2018-10-19T08:32:40Z
refterms.versionFCDAM
refterms.dateFOA2018-03-13T00:00:00Z
html.description.abstractThis article explores how animation can manipulate a reflexive intertextual framework which relates to religious prohibitions on artistic mimesis that might replicate and threaten God’s creative act. Animated films are most intertextually reflexive, in these terms, when they narrativize the movement of diegetic objects from another medium which also transgresses God’s prohibition: sculpture. In the media of both sculpture and animation, the act of mimesis is transgressive in fundamentally ontological terms, staging the illusion of creation by either replicating the form of living creatures in three-dimensional sculpture, or by giving the impression of animating the inanimate in two-dimensional film. Both media can generate artworks that directly comment on these processes by using narratives about the creative act which not only produce the illusion of life, but which produce diegetically real life itself. Such artworks are intensely reflexive, and engage with one another in an intertextual manner. The article traces this process from the pre-historic and early historic religious, mythic and philosophical meditations which structure ideas about mimetic representations of life, via Classical and Early Modern sculpture, through a radical proto-feminist revision crystallizing around the monstrous consequences of the transgression in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and finally into film and more specifically animation. The article culminates with a relatively detailed account of these processes in the Toy Story franchise, which is a heightened example of how animation can stage a narrative in which ostensibly inanimate sculpted toys move of their own volition, and of how this double form of animation does this reflexively, by ontologically performing the toys’ animating act. The animated films analysed also engage with the transgressive and monstrous consequences of this double form of animation, which derive from the intertextual life of those narratives that challenge God’s prohibition on mimesis.


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