Footnote #46 - Multiplanarity

The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!

Footnote #46 responds to a listener email by focusing on the speeds and spaces of the “multiplanar” image, a term theorised in Thomas Lamarre’s writing on anime and its techniques which looks at how motion is able to divide animated landscapes into different planes of action. In this episode, Chris treats Alex to a rundown of Lamarre’s work on multiplanarity via the author’s citation of the optical logic of foreground and background spaces in relation to the window of a moving train; the particular geometric perspectives of anime against the graphic “hyper-three-dimensionality” of contemporary computer-animated film; the perspectives and “scalar relations” afforded by developments in the multi-plane camera; and how the defining animetism of anime “focuses less on realism of depth than on realism of movement.”

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Suggested Readings

  • Lamarre, Thomas. 2009. The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

  • Telotte, J.P. 2010. Animating Space: From Mickey to WALL-E. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

  • Wood, Aylish. 2006. “Re-animating Space.” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 1, no. 2 (November): 133–152.

FOOTNOTE PODCASTChristopher Holliday and Alexander SergeantSPECIAL EFFECTS, VISUAL EFFECTS, TECHNOLOGY, SPECTACLEComment