Footnote #8 - Plasmaticness
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 #8 offers a brief detour to the abridged and incomplete animated writings of Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein from the 1940s, and in particular his notorious concept of “plasmaticness” that he argued was a way of understanding the appeal and attraction of Walt Disney’s cartoon images. Listen as Chris and Alex discuss the historical, political, technological, and aesthetic dimensions of “plasmaticness” and the term’s relationship to the Hollywood “rubberhosing” style; the “irresistible changeability” of Disney’s reforming bodies and how, for Eisenstein, such figures momentarily took spectators back to a pre-conscious mode of existence; Disney’s own artistic shift away from plasmatic impulses towards a “hyper-realist” sensibility; and the contemporary digital afterlives of Eisenstein’s animated approach to transformation, character, and movement.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
Suggested Readings
Eisenstein, Sergei. 1986. Eisenstein on Disney. Trans. Jay Leyda, London: Methuen.
Power, Patrick. “Animated Expressions: Expressive Style in 3D Computer Graphic Narrative Animation.” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 4, no. 2: 107–129.
Sobchack, Vivian, ed. 2000. Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick Change. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.