Review: Discover Animation: Art, Legacy, Memory and Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play

As the forenote to The Third Act of Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play warns:

Fig. 1 – Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play.

Every story ends on a dark and raging river.

And in the act of watching the play unfold, so too are we, the audience, cast into this strange new story, floating in a mass of visual and textual signifiers that are at once familiar and strange.

On the sunny summer evening of 17th June, it was Cambridge Visual Culture’s (CVC) great pleasure to host three scholars with especial knowledge and understanding of the world of animation from which the Mr. Burns play had sprung. Together with our colleagues Gabrielle James and Luke Dell at ADC Theatre, the theatre famous for Footlights and the many illustrious names it has produced, we set out to start a conversation about the essence of art, legacy, and memory as a way of celebrating their staging of the production.

Our triptych of speakers was made up of Carleigh Morgan, Dr Joe Sutliff Sanders, and Tyler Shores - each of whom have a unique connection to the medium of animation and the study of the visual more broadly. During the course of their roundtable, we voyaged through the aesthetic, intertextuality, intermediality and influence, labour and production, and violence and the visual.

The event was deftly chaired by one of the show's directors, Joshua Robey, who had earlier that day submitted his Master's dissertation, in the middle of his show's run. Such is the pleasure of working in a university that you come across not only researchers with significant passion and enthusiasm, but also students whose work ethic and capacity for really innovative thinking is quite astounding. Josh did a fantastic job of navigating the trickiness of showcasing multiple perspectives in a relatively short amount of time, whilst highlighting the good bits and capitalising on the really complex, gnarly, and essential components of content. A core part of CVC's mission is to support the work of Early Career Researchers at Cambridge, and reversing the role of Chair and Speaker provides a really interesting opportunity for new modes of research. Take a Master's student, and ask them, in their own voice, to engage and manage the verbiage of three seasoned researchers and you get something quite exciting.

New ways of working, thinking, and narrating our histories inform the work of the scholars here assembled, and a general understanding of their work gives a view onto the kind of discussions that we had in the run up to and during the event itself. Tyler was the initiator of the famous University of California philosophy course on The Simpsons, has appeared in an episode of the Simpsons, and, it transpired during the course of the event, did research in the show’s studios: watching the actors and animators collaborate to create a vision and dialogue for the now pervasive visual language that is The Simpsons’ legacy. Tyler also had the opportunity to attend a different performance of Mr. Burns almost a decade earlier, in San Francisco. Seeing this new production of the play – which opens with survivors in the immediate aftermath of a post-apocalyptic disaster and societal collapse – felt acutely more relatable after our own collective experiences of COVID-19 lockdown life.

Carleigh, based in Cambridge Film and Screen, has just finished her PhD on the relationship between labour and materiality in cinematic animation, one aspect of which is an analysis of how animators, consciously and unconsciously, visualise the labour of their work by virtue of the very nature of animation itself. This idea led to a debate about mediality - in the context of the play that this event celebrated, how and in what ways does movement of a story from one medium to another change not only form, but also meaning. Take, for example, violence, which is abundant in the Simpsons. How and in what ways does our interpretation of violence change when it is staged in live action?

Finally, Joe, who also supervises Tyler’s PhD, brought to the table his body of thinking on comic book illustration and animation. He is currently working on a monograph, to be published next year, on comic books in US libraries, and the role of the teen librarian in the diversification of library collections’ holdings. He has also masterminded the creation of a graphic novel collection at his college, Lucy Cavendish, about which Neil Gaiman wrote, “we've come a long way! And it tells us all how far comics have come that an 800-year-old University wants to start a collection of Graphic Novels.” During the course of the event, we were treated to images from Batman: The Animated Series (Eric Radomski & Bruce W. Timm, 1992-1995), on which Joe has published, and learned more about the wider art historical influences on this series, such as art deco, which added an additional dimension to our discussion around intermediality.

Fig. 2 – The Q&A with Harry Shearer.

So, there was rich expertise on show, but also a diversity of disciplinary perspectives, and from within that illuminating conversation three aspects of these researchers’ perspective stood out to me: that fairness, gentility, and passion inform their work as much as the creators before them.

Amongst the themes that came up during the roundtable discussion were the decision to centre a play on the future of humanity’s collective memory on one single episode from the longest-running sitcom in history (750 episodes at time of this writing, and still counting). During the original creation of Mr. Burns, playwright Anne Washburn had considered other sitcoms such as Friends (David Crane & Marta Kauffman, 1994-2004) and Cheers (Glen Charles, Les Charles & James Burrows, 1982-1993), but The Simpsons’ trademark parodying of so many different forms of culture and popular culture made it the perfect vehicle for commenting upon the complex relationship between art and legacy and memory. Consider, for example, one of our favourite lines from the show: “Meaning is everywhere. We get Meaning for free, whether we like it or not. Meaningless Entertainment, on the other hand, is actually really hard.” One of the major questions throughout each of the play’s three acts is the role of story and shared memory as a means of holding society together, culminating in the “Cape Feare” episode of The Simpsons having reached a kind of mythical, operatic status.

Finally, it was with great joy, and the affordance of Tyler's super Simpsons network that we were able to finish the night through the invocation, through the means of modern technology, of Harry Shearer. Our roundtable finished with a Q&A in which the speakers, Harry, and audience were enmeshed (Fig. 2). WiFi woes aside, we were able to talk The Simpsons, legacy, memory, and the visual in the company of a practitioner of the visual arts. And what a joy that was. Our evening finished in fellowship, around the ADC Theatre bar tables, with glasses of wine aplenty (as well as Marge Simpson-themed cocktails).

So, whilst many stories end on dark and raging rivers: this one was concluded on the proverbially bucolic bank of community. Here’s to many more years of cross-disciplinary research!

**Article published: July 7, 2023**

Biography

Cambridge Visual Culture (www.cvc.cam.ac.uk) is a cross-disciplinary research network that supports research on the visual at the University of Cambridge. Queries about the network can be made to Dr Gushurst-Moore, the CVC Coordinator, at: alg82@cam.ac.uk.