Put simply, for me animation has always already, never not, cornered the market on the universe and all within it, what I have called ‘the nutty universe of animation’, all the more so now in its form of hyperanimation, animation post-animation, post all forms of animation, including cinema as form of animation, hence post-cinema, indeed post- film.Īs I posited it for the first time in 1991, in my Introduction to The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation, animation’s purchase is ‘transdisciplinary, transinstitutional, implicating the most profound, complex and challenging questions of our culture, questions in the areas of being and becoming, time, space, motion, change-indeed, life itself’. The paper takes as mandate the epigraph to his book La Transparence du Mal: Essai sur les phénomènes extremes (1990), published in English as The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (1993): ‘Since the world drives to a delirious state of things, we must drive to a delirious point of view.’ Īs well, this essay draws forth from and extends my claims in my Introductions to my two animation anthologies and a number of my essays over the last 27 years theorising animation: that animation is not just a form of film but all film is a form of animation, that animation is not delimited to film or film as such but is always already, never not, transdisciplinary, transinstitutional, transtechnological and transmedial-put simply, all the arts, sciences, technologies and media are forms of animation-that for decades animation has been surpassed by animation’s morphed hyperreal form- hyperanimation-that today animation as hyperanimation comes forward as the most compelling, pervasive, singular process of the contemporary world, and that, in putting animation at stake, what hyperanimation likewise puts at stake is life itself and death itself, motion itself and nonmotion itself, indeed the human and its world, its reality. The essay draws upon the work of my mentor Jean Baudrillard on the passage of second order reality-what people think of and take as ordinary, quotidian reality-into third order what he calls hyperreality, another name for which is virtual reality, what Baudrillard also calls ‘integral reality,’ ‘tele-reality,’ reality in ‘high definition,’ not an alternate reality but a ‘new’ ‘reality,’ a ‘reality’ with at once too much and too little reality, a pure, total and empty ‘reality,’ a ‘reality’ without, in a word, ‘reality.’ Theory, from Greek theoria, is speculating.Īnd for many, if not all, of you, this essay may seem very ‘nutty.’
This essay is theoretical, speculative, highly so. He who has no shadow is merely the shadow of himself-Jean Baudrillard The real…erases itself in favour of the more real than the real: the hyperreal-Jean Baudrillard
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