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Daniel Morgan, Towards a natural history of animated backgrounds, Screen, Volume 61, Issue 2, Summer 2020, Pages 296–305, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjaa028
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Extract
Writing about animation is still dominated by what Scott Bukatman calls ‘the ur-text for animation studies’, Sergei Eisenstein’s commentary on Disney.1 One can enumerate historical and institutional reasons for this enduring attraction: Eisenstein’s credentials as both a filmmaker and a film theorist; his unabashed enthusiasm for animation; his claims for its philosophical importance. Taken together his writings have often served to justify the pursuit of what was long a marginalized area within film studies. On a more conceptual level Eisenstein provided a key model for how to think about animation, one focused on how the movements of animated bodies exceeded their given forms. Bodies expand, stretch and drastically change shape. He calls this fluidity of form ‘the plasmatic’, which involves ‘a being of a definite form [… yet one] which behaves like the primal protoplasm, not yet possessing a “stable” form, but capable of assuming any form’.2 Much of his work on animation was devoted to the question of why audiences were drawn to such dynamism, and perpetual fluidity, of form.
