Carmen Hannibal
"I theorise, I analyse things"

The Living Metaphor in Animation: language, images and the transformational function

I am in my thesis disputing current theoretical explanations of the way metaphors occur in moving images. I do this by focusing my analyses of moving images on works that until now have been overlooked as useful examples of metaphors in existing frameworks to evidence and thus validate their approaches. One example of these works is the contemporary digital animation Auto (2016). As a consequence, this has limited our understanding of what metaphors might be experienced as and look like in experimental animations.

It is, therefore, necessary first to address the theoretical underpinning and methodological strategies for the proposed approaches to film metaphors. I am doing this through textual analyses of the literature on metaphors in language and moving images. This allows me to present corrective critique to a set of central debates about the methods that are used.

Following this review, I establish a new hypothesis for how novel metaphors may occur in animated images. My hypothesis draws from French philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s original account of "living metaphors" (2003:358) in symbolic and metaphoric language and Russian filmmaker and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein’s twofold notion of "plasmaticness" (1986:21) that he argued to have observed in Disney’s early hand-drawn animations.

This hypothesis is then tested and developed through frame-by-frame analyses of the formal aspect of image sequences in hand-drawn animations, experimental celluloid films and contemporary digital image manipulations. These analyses are then recontextualised within a hermeneutic phenomenological methodology.

As my contribution to knowledge in the field of Animation Studies I propose a new theoretical framework to explain the extent to which selected digital animations can be considered metaphorical.

References:
Auto (2016). Directed and produced by Conner Griffith. RISD Senior film. Available online at cgriffit.myportfolio.com/auto. Uploaded to Vimeo.

Eisenstein, S. (1986)[1940]. "II [Kratovo], 21. IX. 1940". In Leyda, J. (ed.) Eisenstein on Disney. Translated from Russian by Alan Upchurch. Seagull Books: Calcutta.

Ricoeur, P. (2003)[1975, Le Seuil: Paris]. The Rule of Metaphor. The Creation of Meaning in Language. Routledge: London