Review: BAFTSS Animation SIG Posthumous & Posthuman Animation Online Seminar
Fig. 1 - Posthumous & Posthuman Animation Online Seminar.
Last week the BAFTSS Animation SIG presented another stellar online event. This time the SIG offered to explore the uncanny territories of posthumous and posthuman animation. Organized by Dr. Sam Summers (Middlesex University) and featuring works-in-progress by a doctoral student Alice Giuliani (University of West London) and Dr. Christopher Holliday (King’s College London), the Posthumous & Posthuman Animation seminar took place on Zoom on May 10th 2023 (Fig. 1). Despite its short format, the event was packed with insightful observations about the nature, aesthetics, politics, and ethics of postmortem and de-aging animation, as well as speculations on what it means to literally re-animate deceased and living bodies on screen.
Alice Giuliani kicked off the event by presenting a part of her doctoral research in the talk “De-Aged and Resurrected Bodies: Re-Animating the Posthuman in Digital Cinema” (Fig. 2). Setting a context for her work, the scholar mentioned being generally interested in the question of how digital cinema relates to the current post-human conditions and a discourse of critical posthumanism. To tackle this question, Giuliani examined the instances of digital renditions of real actors’ bodies, such as an animated avatar based on late Philip Seymour Hoffman in Cécile B. Evans’ Hyperlinks or It Didn’t Happen (2014) and de-aged characters of Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019). Using these examples as case studies, Giuliani argued that the digital technology capable of bringing the deceased individuals to life and transform 70-year-old actors into their younger selves can be seen as evidence of the contemporary culture’s investment in the construction of the posthuman.
Fig. 2 - Alice Giuliani - “De-Aged and Resurrected Bodies: Re-Animating the Posthuman in Digital Cinema”.
In her talk, Giuliani offered a rigorous analysis and rich interpretations of the introduced media texts. Specifically, she described the Evans’ project as commenting on the ever-developing nature of “the relationships between humans and technologies, digital image-bodies, animation, and life.” Reciting the beginning of the short film, Giuliani described the confusion expressed by its digital character. The animated avatar, unmistakably recognized as Hoffman, refuses to acknowledge his resemblance to the deceased actor. Instead, he introduces himself simply as Phil, reflects on his existence in the given digital space, and asks the audience not to accuse him of his visual uncanniness. In discussing (non-)Hoffman’s postmortem appearance in Hyperlinks, Giuliani thus pointed out that the film is not really about him, but about all of us – the humans living in a digital age. It discusses the effects of living in hyper-mediated environments. In Giuliani’s words, “the film animated a number of digital lives and addresses many material variations of posthuman life as traversed by the digital and its many forms.” Moreover, it comments on the consequences of the proliferation of body-altering and death-defying technologies in contemporary cinema and visual media.
With that, the scholar offered a critical overview of the history and theory surrounding similar types of these technologies’ applications. Drawing on the vast body of cinematic examples (e.g. Oliver Reed’s appearance in Gladiator (2000), Carrie Fisher posthumously starring in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)), Giuliani described the current state of film as post-cinema which seems destined to constantly navigate the “conditions and imaginaries of life” as the life itself becomes “highly mediated and assembled with digital technologies” (Giuliani). Building off Deborah Levitt’s theorizations, Giuliani reminded the audience of a philosophical tension that exists in film as its images, and especially images of de-aged and deceased actors, become “haunted by the afterlife of the body” (Levitt 2018, 17). In real life, the scholar argued, the body possesses “finitude and death” which opposes the “eternal life and … deathliness” of their cinematic representations (Levitt 2018, 17). She then proceeded to discuss The Irishman and its paradoxical attempt to narratively reconcile with the inevitability of death while technologically reviving its actors. De-aging effects in The Irishman, Giuliani argued, were created specifically to support the stars’ performances, letting them embody their characters without any physical limitations (i.e. prosthetics). In the film, then, de-aging “replicated the method acting process” as it facilitated the actors’ mastery over their bodies. What is important to note – and what Giuliani highlighted in her talk – is the gender bias of such technology. As it has historically been mostly trained on male actors’ performances, the female bodies that go through cinematic de-aging, experience anxieties around such transformations rather than a celebration of their uniqueness and agency.
Fig. 3 - Christopher Holliday - “The Posthumous Voice in Hollywood Animation”.
The expression of self and singularity of certain actors’ performances was also a theme addressed by Dr. Holliday in his presentation “The Posthumous Voice in Hollywood Animation” (Fig. 3). While Giuliani focused more on the visual aspects of the afterlife animation, Holliday shifted the conversation to the audio realm. He started by discussing a 2013 Disney short Get a Horse! Featuring Mickey and other famous Disney supportive characters, the film reflects on the collision of cel and digital spaces. In doing so, Holliday argued, the film follows the trend of the recent Disney releases that sends a message of the studio’s Golden Age return. Basing his analysis on the aesthetic trends in the 2010s Disney productions, Holliday asserted that they have created an “accumulative effect of qualifying Disney’s emergent digital style with a more classical register” (Holliday). In this context, Get a Horse! became an instance of a particularly nostalgic evocation of Disney’s history as it implemented altered archival recordings of Disney himself alongside Mickey’s voice artist Jimmy MacDonald. As Holliday elaborated, these posthumous voices followed the general tendency of re-animating performances of deceased actors in film. In Disney’s particular case, they also added to the overall nostalgic quality of the studio’s contemporary animations.
In what followed, Holliday addressed the ways in which the addition of posthumous sound intensifies the nostalgia for the classical era of the American studio animation. The scholar mentioned two recent reboots of the Hollywood cartoons – Tom & Jerry (2021) and SpaceJam: A New Legacy (2021). Apart from relying on the classical animated characters and storylines, both films, as Holliday pointed out, employed the “sampling, re-editing, and reconstruction of stars’ presence as a new form of life after death.” Connecting to Giuliani’s discussion of uncanny posthumous appearances, Holliday argued that “the audio-traces of star sound permitted the animated bodies to become uniquely disembodied and embodied all at once.”
Grounding his work-in-progress in an existing scholarship on voice in cinema, Holliday suggested approaching an animated star voice as an expressive technique. As stars’ voices are often the only elements connecting their performances to their animated characters, the preservation of their recorded voices becomes a prominent issue for animation producers. As Holliday described, voice recordings often live independently of their animated heroes due to the production processes which require creating vocal performances prior to the actual animation. The voice then becomes edited, purified, and stored in an archive “with a degree of sonic sterility.” Technological developments in voice recording (i.e. increased storage capabilities, new audio mixing techniques, the portability of recording devices and sound samplers, and an ability to reuse and remix different voice streams in new files) allow animation studios to create a catalogue of performances that can be used retrospectively and even posthumously. Some examples of remixed posthumous voiceworks include Paul Newman’s appearance as Doc Hudson in Cars 3, the film that was released almost a decade after the actor’s death, and Don Rickles’ recordings for Mr. Potato Head in Toy Story 4, released two years after the artist’s passing. According to Holliday, his trend of posthumous voicings adds to the cultural moment of “new cinephilia” (Elsaesser 2005, 36) which is marked by the desire to re-edit, re-mount, and preserve the authentic and original storylines, characters, and genres in film. Holliday then concluded that while posthumous voiceworks complicate voice acting in the age of mechanical reproduction, they nonetheless function within the durable historical trajectory of creating archives of fragmented performances. In other words, such audio citations of deceased voice artists create a bridge between the traditional and new image-making forms and work to resurrect the rich legacy of Hollywood animation studios.
Overall, the Posthumous & Posthuman Animation seminar offered new avenues of enquiry in the contemporary developments of animated representations. Raising questions around cultural implications of the use of new image-making technologies, both speakers highlighted contemporary anxieties and concerns that cinema must tackle in the age of AI-generated content. The BAFTSS Animation SIG thus keeps joining ongoing discussions in the field of animation studies and creating a space for deeper conversations about the role that animated media plays in the current cultural moment.
**Article published: May 19, 2023**
References
Elsaesser, Thomas. 2005. “Cinephilia, or the Uses of Disenchantment.” In Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, edited by Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener, 36-40. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Levitt, Deborah. 2018. The Animatic Apparatus: Animation, Vitality, and the Futures of the Image. Winchester, Hampshire: John Hunt Publishing.
Biography
Anastasiia Gushchina is a PhD candidate at the department of Communication, Media and Film at the University of Calgary. Her PhD project tentatively entitled “The Stuff of Reality”: Towards a Materialist Theory of Animated Documentary examines techniques and production processes of independent animated documentaries of the 1990s-2010s. She presented at multiple international conferences and published her work in Senses of Cinema and Fantasy/Animation. Her research interests include film and animation theory, film philosophy, and documentary practices in visual arts. You can find Anastasiia at @asgushchina on Twitter (https://twitter.com/asgushchina) and at Anastasiia Gushchina (https://www.facebook.com/nastya.gushchinaa/) on Facebook.