Fictional World-Building in Animation and/as Writing Pedagogy

During the 2020-21 academic year, I convened a module on writing that used the significance of representation in fictional worlds (a key element of both fantasy storytelling and animated media) to guide undergraduate students through the challenges of writing across disciplinary boundaries. Aside from predominantly creative or practice-based programmes, the majority of assessments in a university degree are, of course, rooted in students’ ability to communicate in a range of written forms. But in the case of a Liberal Arts education (including the BA programme in the department at King’s College London), this means an additional level of intellectual mobility across disciplinary conventions, divergent prose styles or uses of evidence, and even audiences, as students must perform through specialised modes and forms of writing that typically vary by subject area. However, as I explain to the students, critical questions that have supported the scholarly investigation into (and experiences of) “fictional worlds” across contemporary media culture actually mirror the craft of much academic writing, which like the design and depiction of a convincing world is no less shaped by issues of legibility, language, clarity, and style. Indeed, if a persuasive fictional world is constructed via a set of communicative actions, narrative techniques, a fixed premise, and a degree of believability, then so too an academic assignment must be built from similar kinds of narrational actions, styles of writing, an argument that identifies the stakes (to make its readers care), and structures and logic that ensure readers ‘buy’ the argument as it is presented. In short, writers must inhabit the world of their writing to understand how its pieces fit together.

This blog post therefore engages the question of world-building, worldliness, and worldhood by showing in practice how animation might be used as a rich case study for thinking about fictional world-building and the spectators’ interpretive act. I revisit here one particular class on the Liberal Arts module on writing - focused on the fictional world of Pixar’s 2009 computer-animated film Up (Pete Docter, 2009) (Fig. 1) - and how I asked questions of its animated environment to stimulate students into reflecting on their experience of, and approaches to, writing. I have found that by selecting one seemingly undramatic shot from an animated text, students can begin to understand the rhetoric of fictionality via the assumptions or ‘leaps’ they are able to make about the circumstances of this animated world. In doing so, they are able to think through the many communicative (visual, narrative) actions, styles, and techniques involved in the construction of representational environments, and (hopefully!) apply such elements to the very ‘world’ of their own writing.

As a number of scholars have already informed us (Pavel 1986; Walton 1990; Mackay 2003), fiction often provides fragments from which we are invited to “compose a world” (Perkins 2005, 26). When confronted with a world in novels, poems, films, television, paintings, or videogames, the interpretive act involved in the world-making process is such that a text’s fictional world becomes progressively (and vividly) created in our imaginations. V.F. Perkins notes “the malleability of the image” of the world “is in a reciprocal relationship with the seamlessness and continuity that the image can evoke in our minds” (2005, 26). Philosopher Nelson Goodman similarly proposes that a fiction’s stylistic and formal elegance allows us to conjure frames of reference that emerge from the “shared” experience of, and grounding in, the empirical world, which comes to bear on what kinds of conclusions we can (and do) draw about fiction and its worlds. Goodman argues that “Much but by no means all worldmaking consists of taking apart and putting together, often conjointly: on one hand, of dividing wholes into parts and partitioning kinds of subspecies, analyzing complexes into component features, drawing distinctions; on the other hand, of composing wholes and kinds out of parts and members and subclasses, combining features into complexes and making connections” (1978, 8). To demonstrate to students the possibilities for “making connections” in the design of fictional worlds (and to get students later down the line to think about the value of “composing wholes” in the planning of their assignments), I use one single shot from Pixar’s Up to show how far we can go in terms of interpretation of the film’s worldly constitution.

Fig. 1 - Pixar’s Up (Pete Docter, 2009).

Fig. 2 - A selection of Up’s wordly elements.

At first, the above shot seems relatively undramatic given the plot of the film, which tells the story of an elderly pensioner, Carl Fredericksen, who attaches hundreds of helium balloons to his house to rip his home from its foundations and embark on a journey to the mythical land of Paradise Falls. But this is a synopsis of the narrative, rather than a description of the world, though a film’s world and its narrative are different even if they do overlap, and perhaps provide the context for each other. The chosen shot is from the beginning of the film, and is unspectacular in terms of what it is conveying. At the same time, it remains highly loaded in ways that allow us to start to think through what elements define its fictional world, and perhaps the processes of sense-making that go into implicitly understanding the illusion of a continuous world in animation (and, for that matter, in fantasy) (Fig. 2). Even at its most mundane, there are options and implications for how we read such a moment – after all, “we do not have to see how the action occurs to understand it as having taken place in its world, and thereby to know something of its character (Perkins 2005, 26). There is always more to see beyond the frame – a space ‘out there’ – that might remain “out of sight” but, thanks to the assumptions we can make about a cohesive fictional world, is never entirely “out of mind” (Perkins 2005, 22). The fact that Up is a computer-animated film built from digital code is significant in this respect. The ontology of the shot is virtual wireframes and computer graphics, but its fictionality rests on representations, details, and fragments from which we make ‘worldly’ assumptions. We might say too that given we know Up is an computer-animated film, our imagination of the world is even independent from the means of representation.

Perhaps the most obvious element to the world of Up connoted by the shot is the presence of gravity, with the helium balloons used by Carl allowing for the floating of his house in ways that suggest an adherence to our physical laws. In fact, without such rules the balloons would surely not be required, but the character in the world knows its conditions enough to be able to make that judgment. Such conditions of the world support the jeopardy of the narrative – what goes up must come down, and the climax of the film (which involves a fight aboard an airship) obtains its impact from knowing the stakes of what should happen if you fall. The brief citation of gravity here informs our experience of the drama to follow later in the film. A smaller detail sitting atop the house is that of the weathervane, indicating certain meteorological conditions related to weather, but presumably that such conditions in the world are changeable. The weathervane also proposes the suitability of weather conditions that make balloons tied to a house a viable mode of transport. The direction of the weathervane tells us which direction the wind is blowing, but also that wind might be just one of the conditions in this world. In fact, the glimpses of sunlight pouring through the space in the buildings on the left – if not the shadows they’re casting and the refractions of light – suggests as much. In this world, then, we also have sun.

Another key clement in this shot are the cars – they tell us about a thriving automobile industry, of industrialization and modernity, of technological development. This is a world with a transport system, and with roads. But if it has a transport system, we can guess that it has a transport industry for car production. Indeed, there is more than one car parked here, so we are probably right to assume that there is a system of mass production in place here. What other industries are there? Textiles? After all, who is mass-producing all those balloons? What about the construction industry? There are buildings being constructed to the left, and roadworks taking place in the centre. We are seeing traces of manual labour. If there are roadworks too, then there is presumably traffic causing wear and tear to the roads, which must have come from excessive use and which require maintenance. Based on the towering skyscrapers, this is a modern urban city, so excessive traffic and travel makes sense. The roadworks also tell us this fictional world has a history before we arrived or entered into it. The new buildings currently under construction suggest a future, but the maintenance of the roads implies longstanding use in the past. Offscreen is therefore not just offscreen ‘space’ but offscreen ‘time’ too (Perkins 2005, 25) – this is because narratives, stories, and plots ‘begin’ but the world does not. The narrative decides when we are to intervene into the life cycle of a world, not the other way around.

Roadworks might also imply legislation – local councils, meetings, and motions that must be passed (or rejected), just as the building works presuppose designers and architects, as well as planning permission. So now we have socio-cultural relations, alongside the assumption that if there are labourers there are probably trade unions protecting workers rights and, with it, accompanying patterns of exploitation. On the right, there are trees newly planted – again suggesting a fictional world with a past, so that they will grow long after we leave this fictional world, even if we do not get to see them come to blossom. The fact they are green and healthy suggests flora and fauna are similar to our world, rather than this being a space of ecological devastation (like Pixar’s previous film, Wall-E [Andrew Stanton, 2008]). The soil is evidently fertile rather than barren, allowing for the growth of foliage, or at least making the decision to plant the trees not a terrible or misguided one. But it is clear that there is a claim being staked here by Pixar’s animators and artists for horticulture, even if it is not a central element of the narrative (after all this is a film about a house tied to balloons, not the incremental growth of a tree).

There is a society progressively being built here in our minds beyond the edges of the frame. What about the architectural style of the buildings, or the electricity that powers them? Can we suppose rules related to law enforcement (probably, if there are right and wrong places to park), as well as prisons for misdemeanours (perhaps even miscarriages of justice), police, criminals, banks, and communication systems. There will necessarily be attitudes to both law and law-breaking – perhaps mapped onto generational conflict between adults and teenagers? Maybe such tensions between generations can also be used to rationalise specific voting patterns too?

There are lots of other things we might say about this shot from Up, including what leaps we can make depending on whether this is a residential area, or mainly office space. The former suggests families and generations, and cultures of rituals and customs, while the latter suggests again professional businesses and industries (which might be prosperous, or about to go bust). Of course, I say leaps when these are not really leaps at all, but rather relatively safe assumptions rooted in what we see based on our knowledge of the “relevant data” (Perkins 2005: 24). There are, of course, consequences we cannot predict about this fictional world. How long have the cars been there? I see no residents’ permits, or indeed parking tickets, but then again this could be a weekend when such restrictions have been relaxed. Have the roadworks stopped due to locals protesting at the noise, or industrial strike action? The relevance of these innumerable potential consequences are left to us to speculate, or to try and attribute to something we see.

Part of the challenge for us as interpreters of animated worlds (and those of fantasy too) is, perhaps, to draw on information that is not necessarily laid out for us clearly and openly, but that is nonetheless accessible through what is ultimately made visible. This allows us to make those conceptual or interpretive links between small details glimpsed only partially and our broader knowledge of the fictional world. Fictional worlds built of words and images are, as Perkins states, always “zones of possibility,” and he notes that “the fictional world poses a relationship between all that we can assume and all that we cannot, or cannot yet know” (2005, 26). Such “zones” are founded upon what we as spectators judge to be important and what details can be left assumed, and then have this process of selection confirmed by the narrative. It is in these terms that I have found fictional worlds to be a useful pedagogical tool for encouraging students to reflect on the ‘layout’ of their own writing habits, and what it means to engage with the coherency, completeness, and consistency of a written argument. To think about fictional worlds as a concept (how such worlds adopt, adapt, or invert the culture, languages, characters, facts, and historical narratives of the real-world) is a matter of understanding its particular conditions, which thus becomes well-suited to (inter)disciplinary writing that must be similarly persuasive, convincing, and credible. As Tynan Sylvester states, “A well-constructed fictional world is a puzzle of relationships and implications. […] An incoherent world, in contrast, is a jumble of disconnected details. These details may be individually interesting, but they fail to interrelate (2013, 89). When my students are encouraged to look closely at this singular image from Up and the detailed world it signifies, such charges of credibility become appropriate to the demands of their own academic writing, particularly given that its success is so often measured - like the very worlds of fantasy and animation - by its own internal connections and exchanges.

**Article published: June 17, 2022**

References

Goodman, Nelson, 1978. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.

Mackay, Margaret, 2003. “At Play on the Borders of the Diegetic: Story Boundaries and Narrative Interpretation.” Journal of Literacy Research 35, no. 1: 591-632.

Pavel, Thomas G. 1986. Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Perkins, V. F. 2005. “Where is the world? The horizon of events in movie fiction.” In Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film, edited by John Gibbs and Douglas Pye, 16-41. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Sylvester, Tynan, 2013. Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences. Cambridge: O’Reilly.

Walton, Kendall. 1990. Mimesis as Make-believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Biography

Christopher Holliday is Lecturer in Liberal Arts and Visual Cultures Education at King’s College London, where he teaches Film Studies and Liberal Arts and specializes in Hollywood cinema, animation history and contemporary digital media. He has published several book chapters and articles on digital technology and computer animation, including work in Animation Practice, Process & Production and animation: an interdisciplinary journal (where is also Associate Editor). He is the author of The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), and co-editor of the collections Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres (Routledge, 2018) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: New Perspectives on Production, Reception, Legacy (Bloomsbury, 2021). Christopher is currently researching the relationship between identity politics and digital technologies in popular cinema, editing a book on the multimedia performativity of animation (with Dr. Annabelle Honess Roe), and can also be found as the curator and creator of www.fantasy-animation.org.

Read more on Fictional Worlds: