Other Worldly Normalities: One Frame at a Time

“Thus it is that the cinema is a very odd rectangular room, at the end of which, on a two-dimensional screen, one sees the projection of a three-dimensional space” (Foucault, 1967) Animation, and in particular stop-motion, goes beyond the cinematic experience that Foucault refers to. Through an analytical review and curated selection of short animations it will put forward the idea that animation, and in particular the proposed films, Apodemy (2012), Echo Some Reflections (1972) and First Animation (1980), is at its core concerned with the meta-physical and the boundaries of realities, whilst its presentation of “other spaces” is heterotopic along with the action of viewing animation. It is animations role to create spaces that are ‘other’, a real space that is meticulously laid out to represent the physical, the concrete. These films also play, with the ambivalence of the audience as to what is ‘real’ by undoing and recompiling our world into its otherworldly normalities.

The curated sort reel of animation invites us to adopt a more phonological approach to our viewing of the genre as we observe these fantasmic spaces. They invite us to wander through worlds appearing to lack limit or real physical end that unsettle our sense of reality and play with “the anxiety of space” (Foucault, 1967) They break the boundaries of reality through technique as we see the interplay between the ‘real’ and impossible reality through the mirror that disturbs and disrupts our experience of time, leaving us to question where we are not, an ‘unreal’ and virtual space that opens up behind the surface of the screen.