Reviews 99

need to reconceptualize media in spatial, architectural terms; the

chapter on videogames is particularly strong in this regard. And
Wood’s faith in the emergence of new flavours of agency within
the cogs and gears of (allegedly) determinate media forms is
inspiring. But by skating around key questions, the book ends up
achieving something less than it strives for. How ‘new’ are new
media, really? What role do the user’s historical position and
viewing competencies play in our response to interfaces? Is the
‘digital’ something exclusively of this time, an artefact of current
technologies, or is it something more enigmatic and subjective: a
dream that haunts all of our media encounters? In foregrounding
these concerns but not always pursuing them, Digital Encounters
plants the seed for further investigation.

References
Collins, Jim (1994) Architectures of Excess. London: Routledge.

Bob Rehak is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at

Swarthmore College, where his research and teaching focus on new
media, visual effects, and animation. His work has appeared in the
Video Game Theory Reader (Routledge, 2003), Film Criticism, and
the second edition of the Cybercultures Reader (Routledge, 2000).
He blogs at graphic-engine.swarthmore.edu. [email: brehak1@
swarthmore.edu]

Alan Cholodenko (ed.), The Illusion of Life II: More Essays on

Animation. Sydney: Power Publications, 2007. 576 pp. ISBN
0-909952-34-5

Alan Cholodenko’s massive (and long-awaited) ‘sequel’ to his

ground-breaking 1991 anthology, The Illusion of Life: Essays on
Animation, provides many pleasures among the great diversity of
its 16 essays, most drawn from papers delivered at the Second
International Animation Conference in Australia (The Life of
Illusion), held in Sydney in March 1995. Topics range from
Japanese anime to flight simulation, from character licensing and
the industrial economy of animation to the theoretical implications
of Porky Pig’s stutter for animation as a whole, from ‘wet dreams’
of Pamela Anderson and the Little Mermaid to the less humid
conjunction of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology and Ralph
Bakshi’s rotoscoping. Indeed, there is something here for anyone
interested in both traditional and contemporary animation as well
as in its variety of forms and genres (including ‘live-action cinema’
itself).
100 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 4(1)

Despite its pleasures, however, The Illusion of Life II is daunting

to read – let alone to review. This is not only because of the new
volume’s length (according to Paul Ward, at its launch in
Melbourne, someone referred to it as the War and Peace of
Animation Studies) – or because ‘sequels’ rarely live up to the
novelty of the ground-breaking work they follow and, thus, bear
the weight of inordinate anticipation. It is also because, in this
instance, fulfillment of such anticipation is greatly forestalled by
an Introduction of nearly a hundred pages (including end notes),
in which Cholodenko has chosen to review the book himself – as
well as to review his first anthology, a range of pertinent litera-
ture, and, further, reviews of his first anthology. In one sense, this
is apposite (and amusing), given Cholodenko’s Derridean bent: his
particular form of logorrhea (full of repetitions and reversals of
phrasing) is informed by the pleasure – and anxiety – produced
by differánce, the deferral of meaning (and its animation) that
means one is always trying to catch up with or go back for it, that
means one’s meaning (which is also another’s) is always going to
be misunderstood and needs restating, revising, and (sometimes
interminable) revisiting. In another sense, however, the introduc-
tion is troublesome: it is so insistent on overstaying its welcome,
on repeating (defensively) the theoretical and critical lessons
offered in the first volume, that it becomes uncomfortably abject.
Certainly, as a pioneer whose theoretical work on animation began
far ahead of its time and audience, Cholodenko has suffered intel-
lectual isolation and scholarly neglect (from both Animation
Studies and Film Studies) and is, perhaps, in the habit of over-
stating his case. (Indeed, given his singular – and often lonely –
status, I feel like a ‘traitor’ voicing any criticism of this present
volume.) Nonetheless, and just as certainly, Cholodenko is also in
great part responsible for the widespread growth and current
sophistication of Animation Studies. Thanks to him, for some time
now, theorizing animation and emphasizing the inherent inter-
disciplinarity of Animation Studies have not needed a lengthy
defence or preamble to justify or explain the work at hand.
But preamble and defence we get. As a result, the volume’s
Introduction also claims too much for many of the essays to follow,
particularly their wholesale embrace of ‘post-structuralist’ method-
ologies: unfortunately, the expectation this sets up later leads to
questions about the editorial selection of several non-theoretical
and more historically-inflected essays and diminishes their value
to the volume as a whole. This claim does particular disservice to
the volume’s first essay, Kosei Ono’s ‘The Long Flight of Manga
and Anime: The History of Comics and Animation in Japan’, a rela-
tively useful (if now often-rehearsed) ‘overview’, but it also makes
one question the inclusion of Fred Patten’s meticulously-
researched ‘Simba versus Kimba: The Pride of Lions’, which reads
 Reviews 101

like a legal brief as it compares Disney’s 1994 The Lion King with
Osamu Tezuka’s 1965–6 Jungle Emperor (aka Kimba the White
Lion in Western syndication) to prove the former an outright ‘rip
off’ of the latter, and Ben Crawford’s ‘Intertextual Personae:
Character Licensing in Practice and Theory’, a very good essay on
mainstream industrial and marketing practices that never quite
develops its titular theory.
Despite this (literally) off-putting initial strategy and its organiz-
ation into unnecessary, imbalanced, and eccentric sections (the
first anthology did not have – nor need – any), The Illusion of Life
II is filled with riches. Indeed, some of the essays are quite bril-
liant in their ability to raise broad theoretical issues and illuminate
them through provocative and unexpected meditations on particu-
lar animated characters, styles, and genres. The first section of five
essays, ‘Japan’, opens with Ono’s aforementioned overview of
manga and anime. Pauline Moore’s ‘When Velvet Gloves Meet Iron
Fists: Cuteness in Japanese Animation’, unpacks the function of
‘cuteness’ in Japanese anime as distinguished from cuteness in US
animation through a fascinating cross-cultural analysis that
includes discussion of Japanese mother/child relations. Jane
Goodall’s ‘Hybridity and the End of Innocence’, usefully compares
Japanese and American animation’s differences in the post-war
period and their contemporary hybridity through the lens of
William Blake’s dualistic view of ‘innocence’ and ‘experience’.
William Routt’s ‘De Anime’ looks at Battle Angel Alita to consider
the relation between animation and soul and between body and
machine (these topoi are also the subject of the volume’s conclud-
ing essay by Cholodenko). The section’s last – and finest – essay
is Philip Brophy’s ‘Sonic–Atomic–Neumonic: Apocalyptic Echoes
in Anime’. Continuing his brilliant work on the relation of sound
and animated image, Brophy draws ‘sound models’ and ‘scenes’
from a range of anime texts to argue that the genre mobilizes
sound to effect and figure both the metaphysical dynamism of
movement and energy and their physically consequential, world-
changing, and often apocalyptic reverberations. As he persuasively
demonstrates: ‘Anime’s audio-visualization of energized spaces,
surfaces, instruments and beings . . . posits ways in which the
latent can be manifested, the potential realized, and – most impor-
tantly – the sonic visualized and the visual auralized’ (pp. 206–7).
Although, because of its primarily philosophical focus, rather
oddly placed in the volume’s second-, three-essay section titled
‘The United States’, Freida Riggs’s ‘The Infinite Quest: Husserl,
Bakshi, the Rotoscope and the Ring’ stands out for the way in
which it illuminates philosophy through animation and animation
through philosophy. Bringing both the post-structuralist phil-
osophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and the constitutive
phenomenology of Edmund Husserl into unlikely but productive
102 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 4(1)

conjunction with Ralph Bakshi’s use of rotoscoping in his The Lord

of the Rings (1978), Riggs emphasizes animation’s essential but
ever-changing hybridity and, moving between phenomenology
and animation as two modes of the same thought, teases out the
latter’s always-changing but on-going commitment to both
enacting and figuring adventures not of ‘being’ but of ‘becoming’.
This section also contains Richard Thompson’s ‘Pronoun Trouble
II: The Missing Dick’, which contrasts post-Second World War
Warner Bros. animation through looking at differences in ‘charac-
ter stability’ in the work of Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones, as well
as a fascinating essay by Edward Colless, ‘Between the Legs of the
Mermaid’. Colless riffs (sometimes psychoanalytically) from erotic
fantasies evoked by images of Pamela Anderson in Baywatch to
Hans Christian Andersen’s and Disney’s quite different versions of
The Little Mermaid’s nether regions (no mention here of Ariel’s
seashell bra); however, fascinating as it is, the essay seems less
concerned with animation as such than with animation conceived
most broadly in the movement of erotic imagination. The third
geographically-focused section of the volume, ‘Japan and the
United States’, consists only of the aforementioned essay by Fred
Patten pitting Kimba against Simba. (Given many other compari-
sons between Japanese and US animation in the ‘Japan’ section,
one wonders why it was so isolated.)
At this point, section four, ‘The “Expanded” Field of Animation’
begins – its essays suddenly – and unequally – divided among
‘subsections’ A, B, and C. Rex Butler, whose brilliant essay ‘The
Illusion of Illusion’ (co-authored by Keith Broadfoot) appeared in
Cholodenko’s first anthology, offers the sole contribution to
subsection A: ‘Live Action and Animation’ (although Riggs’s essay
on rotoscoping in an earlier section also deals with this conjunc-
tion). The title of Butler’s ‘Allegories of Animation: Schindler’s List,
E.T. and The Lion King’, suggests his complex essay’s rather
scattered meditations on live-action/animation hybridity (its most
provocative evocation being the hand-coloured and animated red
coat of the recurrent little girl in Schindler’s List, 1993). These are
enlisted more to illuminate the Spielberg film than to elaborate on
what is a truly fascinating topic: the allegorical use of animation
in live-action cinema as a form through which to externalize
psychic cathection and sublimation. (In this regard, Butler’s final
turn to the all-animated The Lion King is somewhat puzzling.)
Subsection B, ‘Video and Computer Games, the Electronic, Digi-
tally Animated Mediascape, the City, Flight Simulation, the Military
and War’ (a title that makes one’s head swim in its catch-all breath-
lessness) contains the only two essays in the volume that deal (to
different degree) with computergraphic animation and simulation.
David Ellison’s ‘Animating Architectures: Panic Styles for Troubled
Cities’ is an interesting essay that moves across arcade games,
 Reviews 103

building façades, and various kinds of screens to lay out the public
pervasion – and perversion – of animation in a period of global
panic and violence; nonetheless, its focus on animation as such is
negligible. Much more focused on animation and theoretically
specific is Patrick Crogan’s brilliant ‘Logistical Space: Flight Simu-
lation and Virtual Reality’. Although by now somewhat technologi-
cally dated, Crogan’s detailed descriptions of flight simulations and
his theorization of the way in which its (military) animation
reduces information to an abstract – and ethically dangerous –
logic is even more relevant now than when the essay was origi-
nally written. Drawing upon Paul Virilio’s notion of ‘logistics’,
Crogan describes the way in which a logic reduced to logistics
through removal of ‘inessential’ information leads to a cultural
mode of thought that collapses the boundaries between ‘the
military and civilian spheres of economics, politics and culture’ (p.
372). Crogan’s essay is one of the best in the volume. Following
this, subsection C, ‘Animation in the Entertainment Industry’,
contains only one essay: the aforementioned work on character
licensing by Ben Crawford.
The three essays in the fifth – and final – section of The
Illusion of Life II are neither more nor less theoretical or general
than many others in the volume, yet they are singled out under
the (rather bemusing) category, ‘More General Theoretical Pieces
on Animation’. All three are excellent but, out of all of them, the
first is my favourite (indeed, of the book): Annemarie Jonson’s
‘Porky’s Stutter: The Vocal Trope and Lifedeath in Animation’.
Looking at sound in a way that parallels Brophy’s essay early in
the volume, Jonson notes the many speech ‘impediments’ figured
in animated films and uses the ‘vocal trope of the stutter to think
animation itself . . . as a figure that bridges the threshold
between, reveals the compossibility or undecidability of, both
vivification and deanimation, life and death, the animate and
inanimate’ (p. 425). Working primarily through Freud and Derrida,
Jonson’s complex deconstruction of the ‘intervallic’ and ‘aporetic’
logic made manifest by the ‘in-between’ of the animated stutter
is not only witty and profound but also clearly written. William
Schaffer’s ‘Animation 1: The Control Image’, draws on Deleuze’s
theory of the ‘time–image’ to productively explore the differences
between the frame-based nature of animation and shot-based
nature of live-action cinema. Unlike the live-action filmmaker,
the animator exercises extraordinary control at a micro-level, at
which ‘the relationship between successive frames [is] conceived
as any-instants-whatsoever in the movement of the whole’
(p. 462).
The final essay is Cholodenko’s elegant ‘Speculations on the
Animatic Automaton’, which begins with a history of animation as
a vexed concept that, entailing both life and motion, has been
104 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 4(1)

employed (and divided against itself) in animistic and mechanis-

tic philosophies and their relation to technology as ‘animatic
apparatus’. Writing that ‘there is always something technological
“in” and “of” the human . . . a technological other, double’ (p. 491),
he goes on to explore the radical (and impossible) aspirations of
that technological other (here, cinema) – pointing out its inevitable
failure insofar as ‘bringing, or coming, “to life” is not equivalent
to life’ (p. 508). This last essay is followed by two Appendices, one
an annotated chronology relating to Patten’s essay on
Kimba/Simba, the other the programme to ‘The Life of Illusion’
conference that provoked most of the essays in the book.
Overall, The Illusion of Life II is an extremely valuable collec-
tion. Indeed, despite its flaws – the overly-long Introduction, the
odd organization, and a general lack of attention to computer
animation – the volume’s essays contribute greatly to the inter-
disciplinary discipline of Animation Studies and should be added
to the bookshelf of anyone seriously interested in thinking through
animation both philosophically and theoretically.

Vivian Sobchack is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Film,

Television, and Digital Media, and former Associate Dean at the UCLA
School of Theater, Film and Television. She was the first woman
elected President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and is
on the Board of Directors of the American Film Institute. Her essays
have appeared in Film Quarterly, Film Comment, Quarterly Review of
Film and Video, camera obscura, and the journal of visual culture and
her books include An Introduction to Film (Longman, 1997); The
Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton
University Press, 1991); Screening Space: The American Science
Fiction Film (Rutgers University Press, 1997); and, most recently,
Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (University
of California Press, 2004). She has also edited two anthologies: The
Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event
(Routledge, 1996) and Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the
Culture of Quick Change (University of Wisconsin Press, 1999).
[email: sobchack@ucla.edu]