Making the World Move: Review of Figure and Force in Animation Aesthetics

Abstract

Making the World Move:Review of Figure and Force in Animation Aesthetics Dan Bashara (bio) Ryan Pierson. Figure and Force in Animation Aesthetics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 204 pages. $105 hardcover. $41.95 paperback, $40.99 e-book. How does animation move, actually? What are the specific dimensions of its movement, and how do we perceive the things that are doing the moving? What makes one figure hold together while another seems to dissipate or fall apart? These are the questions at the core of Figure and Force in Animation Aesthetics, Ryan Pierson's illuminating exploration of animation aesthetics. To answer these questions, Pierson delves deep into Gestalt theory: "animation is considered here as an art of coordinating sensory units into perceptible figures and forces. Style in animation emerges, in part, from how units coordinate with each other" (4). His description of these "sensory units" is meticulous, and what emerges from this book is an expanded understanding of what it is to move and of what that movement might mean to us if we are prepared to see it. The strength of this approach to animation studies is, in Pier-son's hands, immediately apparent. Figure and Force brings together disparate approaches—precise descriptions of independent animation practice, deep reckoning with theoretical giants, and inspired and poetic philosophical interpretations—to overturn our sense of [End Page 264] what animation does to us and for us as we perceive it. And there is a logic to this method; throughout the book, "formal problematics are likened to philosophical ones" (9). In practice, this likening offers readers a way to bring the rigid and abstract schemas of gestalt "perceptual arrays" down to the ground, into the body, and even into the soul. (If you detect a hint of mysticism in this account of Pierson's book, you'd be right; what shines through is his belief in what animation can do, his reinvestment of the medium with something that often feels like magic.) This is a notable extension of animation history's long engagement with ideas of metamorphosis and change, which Pierson views as "an upending, disorienting, unpredictable prospect. If we bring our attention to these kinds of change, which occur not at the level of character but at the level of perception and organization, we will see that animation has powers of metamorphosis far beyond those we have imagined" (13). Each chapter uses a central case study to link a particular animation practice to a philosophical concept. In chapter 1, Pier-son visually scours Claire Parker and Alexandre Alexeieff's Night on Bald Mountain (1933), linking pinboard animation's shadowy forms with the idea of exposure. This chapter is packed with ideas, linking Émile Cohl's and Winsor McCay's early experiments in animating smoke, Francis Bacon's disintegration of faces, and Sergei Eisenstein's celebration of the plasmatic line. As these pieces move into place, Pierson's method comes alive; when we arrive at Night on Bald Mountain, we have the unshakeable feeling that we are seeing something entirely new, something we don't have words for yet. And it's a thrill to watch Pierson assemble the vocabulary: dehiscence, rolling grain, forces that deform space like a wave. As he lays out the philosophical importance of pinboard animation's style—by the very nature of the medium there are no outlines—we are treated to a reversal of Eisenstein's theory of the plasmatic line as an experience of freedom and liberation whereby we have dissolution or, in Pierson's terms, exposure. As Pierson argues, "exposure elicits from us an uneasy acknowledgment that we occupy two worlds at once: the world of things … and the world of forces, where the resistance that grounds our thingness has no purchase and events become collective" (37). By the end of the chapter, we find ourselves in ontological vertigo. Is a body a thing? What even is a thing? We thought we knew, but this work of animation has just dropped a question mark into our conceptual certainty. Chapter 2, "Walk Cycles," plays with the ideas of autonomous and externally controlled motion—the unique stylistic gesture of a character's gait and...