Ontology, Aesthetics, and Cartoon Alienation

121 Pages·2017·1.03 MB·English

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Film, Media & Theatre Theses School of Film, Media & Theatre
Summer 7-31-2018
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Wolfgang Boehm
Georgia State University
Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/fmt_theses
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Boehm, Wolfgang, "Animating Social Pathology: Ontology, Aesthetics, and Cartoon Alienation." Thesis,
Georgia State University, 2018.
doi: https://doi.org/10.57709/12579651
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Animating Social Pathology: Ontology, Aesthetics, and Cartoon Alienation

by

Wolfgang Boehm

Under the Direction of Professor Greg Smith

ABSTRACT
This thesis grounds an unstable ontology in animation’s industrial history and its plas-
matic aesthetics, in-so-doing I find animation to be a site of rendering visible a particular con-
frontation with an inability to properly rationalize, ossify, or otherwise delimit traditionally held
boundaries of motility. Because of this inability, animation is privileged as a form to rethink our
interactions with media technology, leading to utopian thought and bizarre, pathological behav-
ior. I follow the ontological trend through animation studies, using Pixar’s WALL-E as a guide. I
explore animation as an afterimage of social pathology, which stands in contrast to the more lu-
dic thought of a figure such as Sergei Eisenstein, using Black Mirror’s “The Waldo Moment.” I
look to two Cartoon Network shows as examples of potential alternatives to both the utopian and
pathological of the preceding chapters.
INDEX WORDS: Animation, Aesthetics, Ontology, Cartoons, Utopia, Technology, Film studies,
Media studies, Walter Benjamin, Television.
Animating Social Pathology: Ontology, Aesthetics, and Cartoon Alienation

by

Wolfgang Boehm

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Arts
in the College of the Arts
Georgia State University
2018
Copyright by
Wolfgang Boehm
2018
Animating Social Pathology: Ontology, Aesthetics, and Cartoon Alienation

by

Wolfgang Boehm

Committee Chair: Greg Smith

Committee: Jennifer Barker
Angelo Restivo

Electronic Version Approved:

Office of Academic Assistance
College of the Arts
Georgia State University
May, 2018
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I could not have written this without the support, advice, and help of the Film, Media &
Theatre faculty and staff. Also, of course, my friends and family. Thank you!
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................. v
TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................................................................ vi
LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................ vii
1 INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................ 1
2 BLURRED ONTOLOGY ........................................................................................... 9
3 CARTOON PATHOLOGY, ANIMATED ALIENATION ................................... 26
4 DEATH AND THE ANIMATING APPARATUS .................................................. 58
5 GENDER, RACE, AND PLASMATIC UTOPIA ................................................... 82
6 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................ 102
ENDNOTES................................................................................................................... 106
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1 ............................................................................................................................. 16
Figure 2 ............................................................................................................................. 30
Figure 3 ............................................................................................................................. 62
Figure 4 ............................................................................................................................. 76
Figure 5 ............................................................................................................................. 79
Figure 6 ............................................................................................................................. 86
Figure 7 ............................................................................................................................. 86
1
1 INTRODUCTION
When Sergei Eisenstein first described the early work of Walt Disney, he wrote that the
animator provides spectators “a momentary, imaginary, comical liberation from the timelock
mechanism of American life. A five minute ‘break’ for the psyche, but during which the viewer
himself remains chained to the winch of the machine.”1 With this sentence, Eisenstein character-
izes a problematic in animation studies that persists in the present day. Can a product of such a
rigorous, industrialized practice contain liberatory potentials? When stated broadly, this issue
echoes questions regarding the relationship between the economic base and cultural superstruc-
ture and the self-undermining logic of capitalism. In this thesis, I hope to respond to these ten-
sions not from an industrial or historical analysis, but from an ontological and aesthetic one. This
requires tracing the ironic relationships between this industrial practice and animation’s puzzling
ontology. Animation studies is a body of theory that revolves around various paradoxical or op-
posing ontological categories: animation and automation, mechanism and animism, or, perhaps
most importantly for this project: “the motion of life” and “the life of motion”2 described by
Alan Cholodenko. These ontological conundrums inform animation’s aesthetic practices and
thus, by my utilization of Walter Benjamin’s work, its political dimensions. I use Over the Gar-
den Wall (2014), The Lego Movie (2014), and WALL-E (2008), as well as select episodes from
the television programs Adventure Time (2010-) and Black Mirror (2011-) to highlight iterations
of how these ontological and aesthetic qualities give rise to utopian orientations towards technol-
ogy’s role in our social and political lives. These texts likewise highlight the tension between this
utopian register and the peculiar way social pathology is rendered as pathological behavior in
cartoon animation. I demonstrate how these texts act to underscore the role of animated motion