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Trans-Borders: Focused on Morphological Flexibility in the Animation

Soojin Lee 1

1이화여자대학교 이화인문과학원

ABSTRACT

This article aims for an examination of animation, which is considered deeply connected with cartoons and the cinema, and searches for common features among these three things. These three media can be summarized as “serial images of the narrativity”. Meanwhile, we can define animation through the following sentence: The art that handles the invisible gap between one frame and another frame, and also deals with “the drawn motion” without drawing the motion. Animation established an identical aesthetic domain between the cartoon and the cinema, covering both sides. This article focuses on this point, that the process of animation makes for creative results between the two media. Each side of the above-mentioned “borders” also has interesting features in the process. This article therefore tries to explain the creative form between frames, and also inspects for the “morphological flexibility” that occurs in the “liminal space” by analysing two animations by Georges Schwizgebel (1944~), a Swiss animation director: La jeune fille et les nuages(2000) and L’homme sans ombre (2004). Schwizgebel has studied “Metamorphosis” (especially in animation, it means the transformation of shape) for 30 years and created 14 remarkable works. Here is a simple example of metamorphosis: A woman’s dress changes gradually into a cloud. In live-action movies, only a digital post-process can make such a progression. But in animation, it can be made by drawing multiple images that gradually change one image into another image. This gradual interconnecting is one of the unique things about animation. The meanings of metamorphosis are created by the relationship between a frame and the one following it. Meanwhile, Schwizgebel has paid special attention to “inter-frame-constructed descriptions” of shape. The meaning of an independent frame is not important, but only the meaning finally reached through serially arranged images. The style of Schwizgebel’s work in realizing metamorphosis ultimately results in producing the flexibility of a shape. This article summarizes that process of metamorphosis that constructs the aesthetic filling the liminal spaces between borders. The isolated images usually present fragmentary values, but the images unified by metamorphosis can create many other varied values, so his animations can be considered as unusually creative works.

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* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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