Reading Response: Some Observations Pertaining to Cartoon Physics
I wonder about what the future will hold for cartoon physics. It seems to me that the extremely exaggerated style of cartoons on display in Road Runner has somewhat fallen out of fashion, there are, of course, extreme examples largely confined to adult-orientated animation, but even the strangest or most ambitious of …
Reading Response: Some Observations Pertaining to Cartoon Physics
I wonder about what the future will hold for cartoon physics. It seems to me that the extremely exaggerated style of cartoons on display in Road Runner has somewhat fallen out of fashion, there are, of course, extreme examples largely confined to adult-orientated animation, but even the strangest or most ambitious of children’s animation generally sets rules and follows them. Bodies have weight and the anarchy of classical cartoon physics feels muted; instead, narrative content has become more absurd, a different sort of anarchy that appeals more to logic than the senses perhaps (in that we understand what is going on is weird rather than confused by the illogic of the world itself).
Bakutman points to the rise of digital animation as a potential explanation for this (312) in that the technology has been so designed around realism that it naturally lends itself to creating realist animation. He brings up the absurd internet comedy videos that use the video game engines to create outlandish animations that conform somewhat to traditions of cartoon physics, and questions how these would be perceived at a larger scale (i.e. in a game that uses a non-real style). One answer is the 2014 PC game Goat Simulator where the player controls a realistic looking goat attempting to destroy a city.
The game’s primary mechanic is illogic (here, the developers have intentionally not fixed any glitches in the game and set no boundaries on physics, meaning the goat will frequently bounce off of walls and accelerate to absurd speeds). So does Goat Simulator work to subvert the logic-driven world of realistic animation? Sorta! It gets old very fast. Some game theorists have proposed that games exist to blur our lines between the player and the screen (inherent in the nature of interaction), and perhaps what makes this cartoonishness fall flat is that it fails to blend that line, it fails to ever put the player into the absurdity because so little of it makes sense.
The question raised by this trend towards realism is what is lost without cartoonishness? (I can’t believe I’m getting into this but…) I feel that there is a way in which cartoon logic ties itself into something I’ve been using to describe Guy Maddin’s 2012 experimental short Only Dream Things: an expanding tapestry of consciousness. The film is an abstract depiction of the process of remembering someone (itself constructed only from the home movies, photos, and recorded conversations/songs of Maddin’s late brother), where images blend together in service of new images (dream images?). There is an extent to which Maddin is creating a more actively experienced sense of a person than merely showing us images of him would create. He is remaking his memories, and that is where cartoons tie in.
The anarchistic illogic of the cartoon world creates in us a sense of a universe driven by our own senses (remaking the universe!). I was struck by Bukatman’s asking, “is it stranger that these cartoons didn’t seem all that strange in the first place?” (301). Cartoons are more felt than they are understood. Things happen in cartoons because they seem like they can happen in cartoons. Just like Maddin’s film, in focusing on how it feels to perceive rather than on depiction, cartoons are creating a world beyond our own. There is an essential barrier of separation (perhaps like that barrier between mind and body?) in the audience’s relationship to the screen and cartoon logic exploits this to emphasize its own dreamness (i.e. a train comes from off screen because anything can exist in the off-screen world).
Damn, this response got out of hand.
