What is animation’s relationship to the real? Much of animation scholarship – from Eisenstein’s glowing affection for ‘plasmatic[ness]’ to the newly codified photoreal (46) – dedicates itself to the pursuit of this question, probing the structures and ontologies of our inherently fantastic medium. As comprehensive as these critiques are, however, the vast majority refuse to question animation’s greatest obstacle to reality: the screen. Like its live-action cousins in film, most animation remains bounded by a flat plane, unable to interact with the tangible dimensions of our landscape. The advent of projected animation (a lamentably untheorised field!) explodes these boundaries, as the animated ‘real’ ventures beyond the surface and into the physical world of stagecraft.
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