Animation and automation, or, the incredible effortfulness of being

Abstract

This essay explores the shifting historical etymology and vexed meanings of ‘animation’ as the term entails both movement and life (one often, but not always, the sign of the other) and is expanded by its encounters with technology. Indeed, the distinction between movement and life becomes increasingly ambiguous as animation is transformed first by automated mechanical processes that replace human movement and labour and then by what seem to be autonomous electronic technologies that also appear to have lives of their own. In this regard, Disney-Pixar's computer-animated <it>WALL-E</it> (2009) serves as a particularly apposite and complex tutor-text. Nostalgic for human life and movement yet dependent for their reanimation and redemption on two robots in a future that will have been, <it>WALL-E</it> dramatizes (often self-reflexively) the dialectical entanglements of moving images and animate entities, the constitution of life, liveness and liveliness, and the shifting of agency from increasingly inert human bodies to increasingly energetic and inventive machines.