Chapter Six:

Of Mice and Mimesis

What of the very special case of animation? Disney did not make live-action movies until

much later in the history of the medium. Why study Disney if the point is about live-action

cinema? This chapter is concerned with distinguishing the modes of live-action cinema and

animation, but any consideration of animated cinema must address the modes, contexts, and

conditions of live-action cinema because of animation’s dependence on cinema’s theaters,

technologies, and studios. In early cinema, animation and live-action features coexisted on the

film bill, forcing live-action and animation into competition. This competition presented

animation with a significant dilemma due to cinema’s spatialization of time. A seven-minute

animated short, typical in the early-days, requires over 10,000 drawings. This giant magnitude

necessitates numerous animators and a large, coordinated industrial production, especially given

the number of steps involved in the process. Unfortunately, seven minute openings to the film

bill received only a small portion of the proceeds, most of which are reserved for the much

longer main feature. The amount of capital and labor necessary to produce an animated short

were not justified by the small profits. For Disney and other animators, time and money were

running out. By the late 1920s, animation was in economic crisis and on the verge of extinction.

Disney needed a new strategy. Because they depended on cinema’s theaters to circulate their

product, they adapted to the conditions of cinema. Declining economic prospects led Disney to

borrow heavily from the cinematic mode, particularly encouraging the company to pursue their

own full-length features and move away from the less profitable animated shorts filled with gags

and graphic narrative. Thus Disney began producing full-length features, employing many of the

same narrative and cinematographic devices of live-action movies. In particular, this

development was enabled by the invention of the multi-plane camera which gave a sense of

depth to the two-dimensional drawings. With the multi-plane camera, animation begins to imitate

the modes of seeing of cinema, enabling a transposability that alters the diegetic space in relation

to the viewer space through montage and alternating points-of-view.

In short, animation began borrowing modes from live-action cinema.1 Animation and

cinema, then, remain intricately connected to the point where Panofksy may be too hasty in

categorically dividing them. Indeed, Paul Watson warns against an “artificial opposition”

between animation and cinema due to their intertwined histories, techniques, and coexistence

even in the same film.2 Animation provided some technological precursors for cinema, paving

the way for the film camera with the invention of devices including the praxinoscope, zootrope,

and stroboscope. To Watson it is therefore more appropriate to see live-action as a form of

animation. “(B)oth create an illusion of life through what is first and foremost an animatic

apparatus.”3 The relationship between cinema and animation is undoubtedly more complex than

a strict opposition. Both instruct in a mode of seeing similar to the daydream. Both work through

a dialectic whereby viewers see discontinuous images as a continuous narrative. And both

control viewer time; the continuous flow of images requires a reception in distraction.

Given these similarities, we could consider animation as training for watching live-action

movies. With the widespread practice of weaning children on animation, this conclusion is not

far from the truth. Yet people can learn the cinematic mode without the assistance of animation.

There is more to the story than seeing animation as merely a precursor to film or, like Watson,

contending that all film is animation. Animation deserves study as a medium of its own, one

encouraging a different mode of perception, especially because many theorists ignore animation

or, like Benjamin, tend to conflate animation and cinema. Instead, we should carefully

distinguish the modes of cinema and animation before further detailing animation’s mode of

animistic mimesis through an analysis of Disney’s 1940 film Fantasia.

Modes: From Cinema to Animation

The conflation of live-action and animated cinema ignores some differences in the mode

accompanying animation (although animation’s mode is, at times, imitated in live-action as

well). Between the two mediums, the perception of time is different because the content of

animation is not material reality. Animation is not composed of spatialized moments captured in

snapshots. The snapshots take place much later in the process, after the drawings that give the

illusion of movement are already completed. These drawings never moved; they were never

moments in time. Instead, animation creates the illusion of cinematic time through the projection

of still-drawings. Animation is the artistic imitation of cinematic motion. Its content is

fundamentally different, as said by animator Alexandre Alexeieff, “Contrary to live-action

cinema, animation draws the elements of its future works from a raw material made exclusively

of human ideas, those ideas that different animators have about things, living beings and their

forms, movements and meanings.”4 Panofsky must except “the very special case of the animated

cartoon” because the content is not “physical reality.”

In this way the animatic apparatus is different from the cinematic, and hence the “message” of

animation is not that we are subjects of the camera. No one can infer from the existence of

animation that a live-action camera exists. Indeed, the praxinoscope and other “flip-book”

projection devices historically precede the movie camera. The movements might look similar to

real life, but there is an interpretative process at play nonetheless. The audience is almost always

aware that these are illusions, not actual moments and movements. It is difficult to imagine that

these drawings might gaze back and might capture our moments as well. Further, viewer’s can

hardly imagine they are witnessing the real person behind the role as they do with live-action.

Whereas the viewer might think they experience the real Will Smith in one of his roles, the idea

that they see the real Mickey Mouse is nonsensical. The viewer records moments of Smith’s

time; they create Mickey’s existence. Rather than becoming the screen for recording, the viewer

becomes the animating force through which moments of time are constituted.

In the cinematic mode, the economy is defined by the poles of projection and recording; the

viewer looks like a camera and acts like a screen. The cinematic mode moves between projection

and recording, between projector and screen. Therefore, I argued that the diegetic space comes

out into the viewer space, making the viewer into a screen and requiring their continual recording

to follow the “whole” of the film.5 In animation, since it employs the cinematic mode, the viewer

likewise must project and record. But animation adds a mimetic mode, forming a new economy.

In the mimetic mode, since the viewer is not recording moments of time, the viewer enters the

screen and creates the impression of life. The viewer shifts roles from a passive recorder to an

active creator of time. Animation requires that the viewer construct an illusion of life from

objects without life. In short, the mimetic mode is a form of metaphoric seeing as—seeing

drawings as full of life, expressing a personality and emotion of their own. Similar to Watson,

Stefan Kanfer contends that an “illusion of life” is an inadequate definition of animation because

all film gives this illusion. Although I agree that film portrays an illusory life, I still hold to this

definition because live-action creates the illusion from life, from moments in time. Animation

creates an illusion of life from drawings which never live in time. The difference is subtle yet

important for the way animation shapes cultural perceptions and communicative habits.

Animation trains viewers in a mode of seeing where they see the synchronized movements

and sounds of drawings and, through a kind of metaphoric comparison, envision life in those

objects. In other words, the viewer sees the semblance of movement and invests the moving

figure with the feelings of life. Barthes describes a similar dual transfer process in relation to

photographs which capture the viewer’s attention: “In this glum desert, suddenly a specific

photograph reaches me; it animates me, and I animate it. So that is how I must name the

attraction which makes it exist: an animation.”6 Although Barthes is concerned here to

distinguish photography from cinema, his reference to animation further distinguishes the

cinematic and mimetic modes. He argues that in cinema the image is already animated, already

brimming with captured moments of time and life. Neither animation nor photography meets this

criterion. Photography captures a that-has-been. Animation creates an illusory life from the

never-will-be. Barthes quotation shows why the mimetic mode best exemplifies the –ability

unique to animation, what I call transferability. Transferability is a dual transfer unique to

animation: the image animates us (we see similarities through the sound and movement) and we

animate it (we play, enter into its world and give it our life).

Further developing this notion of transferability should help distinguish the cinematic mode

from Disney animation’s mode of animistic mimesis. In one sense the cinematic mode aims at a

transfer—the transfer of the audience into the diegetic world. Even before cinema, a similar

transferal occurred in literature. Yet animation’s sheer number of transfers makes it perhaps the

exemplary medium of transferability since the process involves numerous surface transfers from

idea to drawing to photograph to film to the screen. Additionally, animation involves another

sense of transfer that makes transferability a property unique to Disney animation.

This second sense of transfer deserves some clarification. Both the definitions and

interpretations of transfer contain two very different notions. The first notion of transfer is the

conveying of content from one surface to another, such as photographing or tracing a drawing,

both key steps in the animation process. This notion is associated with stamping, impressing,

hammering, tracing, or depressing. Many accounts identify the fundamental role of transfer in

animation. Eisenstein claims that the appropriate word for this process is transposing because

Disney “transports into one world what he has seen in another, into the spiritual world, what he

has seen in the physical world.”7 Disney director Dave Hand describes the transfer as the

movement from intangible story (surface #1) to tangible image (surface #2) and declares, “Our

entire medium is transference of thought.” 8 Actually, this is a great simplification of the process

because animation requires a large number of surface transfers. Typically at Disney, the transfer

moves from the story to the storyboard, a series of preliminary sketches hung vertically and

arranged horizontally in narrative order to help visualize the story’s coherence. Then from the

storyboard, the animator transfers the narrative action into rough drawings. The rough drawings

are transferred into “pencil tests” where the animator projects the rough drawings in sequence to

see if the movement is working to their liking. The rough drawings and pencil tests are then

transferred by assistant animators to the full drawing, including all of the “in-between” drawings

that give the illusion of continuous movement. Tracers then transfer the full drawings onto

celluloid film, including the transfer of ink and color onto the cels. The cels are then transferred

to film by shooting a series of photographs in the proper order. Through the projector, the film is

finally transferred to the screen.9

The second notion is transfer in the sense of passing from one person to another. Disney

director Hand concludes his realization about animation’s reliance on transfer with the statement

that “picture presentation is clearer than any other means of transferring thought from one person

to another.”10 This transferal of thought, idea, and emotion is the ultimate goal of Disney’s art,

according to animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.11 Disney animators measure the

picture’s success by whether the audience “reads” the idea or “feels” the emotion.12 The studio’s

biggest worry at the release of Snow White was whether the transferal would be completed and

the audience would be moved. Employees reported that they knew they had a hit when the

audience was “bursting into spontaneous applause,” “bouncing up and down” in their seats, and

even crying with the dwarves as they mourn Snow White’s poisoning.13 So, in the second sense,

transfer refers to audience response and is the primary goal of animation. In Walt’s words, “The

most important aim of any of the fine arts is to get a purely emotional response from the

beholder.”14 According to Thomas and Johnston, this transferal to the audience is crucial to the

illusion of life: “[Animation] is capable of getting inside the heads of its audiences, into their

imaginations. The audiences will make our little cartoon character sad—actually, far sadder than

we could ever draw him—because in their minds that character is real. He lives in their

imaginations.”15 We might think of this second notion of transfer as the process of reception

whereas the first indicates the mechanics of production.

In both senses of transfer, the initial content to be transferred is assumed to be the idea-image.

At the production level, an image is transferred through many steps to the screen. At the

reception level, a mental idea is transferred from artists to audience. This dual content of idea-

image might remind the reader of Plato’s eidos, most famously represented in his allegory of the

cave. Eidos connotes both idea and image and indicates the ideal forms Plato sees as the abstract

models for all true human thought. Indeed, the model of communication as transfer is Platonic at

root, as recognized by several commentators. Historian Neal Gabler contends that Walt

concretized his ideals from the “Platonic images in his head.”16 This prospect can be horrifying

to academics who have sought a way out of Plato’s cave. As Karen Klugman gasps, “The world

is falling deeper and deeper into a vortex of simulacra …. Worse than being trapped in Plato’s

cave, we are now stuck in Pluto’s doghouse.”17

The comparison to Plato does not end with the content of the transfers, however, but extends

to the process as well. In the allegory of the cave, people never perceive the eidos directly; they

only get rough approximations as the image is projected into shadows on the wall of the cave.

Humankind’s access to truth remains inevitably partial, based on distorted shadows. There is a

similar distortion and limitation at play in animation. We might think of animated characters as

shadows cast on the screen from the artists’ or storytellers’ thoughts. Due to the number of

transfers and the material limitations of each, some ideas and images are difficult if not

impossible. Instead, the animator must distort through caricature and exaggeration in order for

the audience to approximate the idea-image. Transfers require simplification, typification, and

exaggeration. Subtle actions, fine lines, and complex motivations or emotions are ruled out by

the difficulties of transfer. Animators must draw in thick and dark lines so they remain

identifiable after tracing, inking, coloring, copying, photographing, and projecting on the screen.

Directors rely on dynamic and typified characters so that their actions and motivations could be

easily interpreted by the audience. Storytellers simplify narratives and avoid complex emotions

so that the primary ideas were conveyed. The delicate and the subtle, whether in image or idea,

are not the best material for the animated form. Thus Thomas and Johnston call animation a

crude medium, concluding:

The cartoon drawing always had been a very simple and direct graphic form, and whether it was for social comment or just amusement it had to present a unified, single idea with nothing complicated, extraneous, or contradictory in its makeup. When the cartoon was transferred to film these elements still applied, and nothing was drawn that was not part of the idea. Background, costume, character, and expression were all designed for succinct statement.18

The entire technical evolution of animation, all the way to the highly-naturalistic computer

generated images of today, is the attempt to overcome this limitation. Animators constantly seek

to redefine what is considered animatable, what is bold and distinct enough for transfer. Only

transferable images can enable the audience transferal as well, can enable Mickey Mouse to

come alive in and through the audience’s imagination.

Transferability, the –ability to transfer semblances to a surface and to transfer audiences into a

fantasy world, is very similar to what some scholars call mimesis. In one of the most insightful

looks at Disney’s commercial success, Maria Wickstrom illustrates the central importance of

1 One caveat is necessary. Just as there may be multiple modes of cinema, so too does animation include a diversity of potential modes. Not all animation will be received and produced according to the features of animistic mimesis outlined here. Some animation mingles with live-action cinema or pursues other experimental forms in ways that trouble my description. 2 Paul Watson, "True Lye's: (Re)Animating Film Studies," Art & Design Magazine, no. 53 (1997): 46.3 Ibid.: 49.4 Quoted in Paul Wells, Understanding Animation (London ; New York: Routledge, 1998), 7.5 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, 2 vols. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986).6 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 20.7 Sergei M. Eisenstein, "Chapter Ii," in Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1986), 39.8 Quoted in Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, 1st ed. (New York: Disney Editions, 1981), 81.9 This is a simplified and too top-down version of the process. In actuality, the transfers often moved in both directions. A particularly good drawing would shape the story, or a failure at the tracing stage would require a new drawing. I will return to this point later in the discussion.10 Ibid. Kozlenko provides another example: ”What takes place before our eyes on the screen, takes place similarly in our dreams, and the pleasure we get from witnessing how easily Mickey Mouse, for instance, solves the most difficult problems in an almost haphazard and miraculous way, is a pleasure transferable to ourselves.” William Kozlenko, "The Animated Cartoon and Walt Disney," in The Emergence of Film Art; the Evolution and Development of the Motion Picture as an Art, from 1900 to the Present, ed. Lewis Jacobs (New York,: Hopkinson and Blake, 1969), 247.11—“Conveying a certain feeling is the essence of communication in any art form. The response of the viewer is an emotional one, because art speaks to the heart. This gives animation an almost magical ability to reach inside any audience and communicate with all peoples everywhere, regardless of language barriers.” Thomas and Johnston, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, 15. Also see P. 19.12 Thomas and Johnston say the consideration of “does it read” was a primary one. See Ibid, 23.13 Reported by and quoted in Neal Gabler, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 2006), 272.14 Ibid., 172.15Thomas and Johnston, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, 19.16 Gabler, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, xv.17 Karen Klugman, "Reality Revisited," in Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World, ed. Project on Disney (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 28.18 Thomas and Johnston, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, 23. The “crude medium” statement can be found on p. 69.

mimesis. Borrowing Benjamin’s notion of mimesis, she describes mimesis not as the relationship

of an original and a copy but as a transfer between them, where one mimics in another surface

(their body) what they see with their eyes. This imaginary experience “helps us to understand the

profound pleasure humans are able to take in the play of the real and the made-up.”19 Mimesis

blurs the boundary between self and object, turning each into a plastic and adaptable form. In

such mimetic modes of seeing, the connection to animation is apparent: “A mimetic relation to

the world … is a ‘spiritualized’ world, with animals, plants, and humans miming, becoming one

another, giving the self away, into an exchange with otherness….”20

Benjamin’s reflections should help elucidate the economy between semblance and play of the

mimetic mode. Benjamin points out the close connection between a mimetic mode and children.

Children are the most able to see with “pure eyes” and engage in an economy of semblance and

play crucial to the mimetic mode.21 In other words, children often see through the mimetic mode;

they notice similarities in objects and then project their life into that world in order to play.

Benjamin states, “Children’s play is everywhere permeated by mimetic modes of behavior, and

its realm is by no means limited to what one person can imitate in another. The child plays at

being not only a shopkeeper or teacher but also a windmill and a train.”22 In the economy of the

mimetic mode, the child sees similarities in objects and then imagines those objects as existing in

a world of their own, animated and full of life, into which they might project themselves in order

to play. The crucial difference between the cinematic and mimetic mode is a reversal of 19 Maurya Wickstrom, "The Lion King, Mimesis, and Disney's Magical Capitalism," in Rethinking Disney : Private Control, Public Dimensions, ed. Mike Budd and Max H. Kirsch (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 101.20 Ibid.21 Walter Benjamin, "A Child's View of Color," in Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913 - 1926, ed. Marcus Paul Bullock, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996), 51. Benjamin says the two poles of the mimetic mode are semblance and play. See ———, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version," in Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935-1938, ed. Michael William Jennings and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002), 127.22 Walter Benjamin, "Doctrine of the Similar," in Selected Writings: Volume 2, Part 2, 1931 - 1934, ed. Marcus Paul Bullock, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996), 694.

direction; rather than the images coming out into the viewer space for their recording, the viewer

enters into the diegetic world to invest it with life and emotion. Benjamin gives an example from

children’s books:

The objects do not come to meet the picturing child from the pages of the book; instead, the gazing child enters into those pages, becoming suffused, like a cloud, with the riotous colors of the world of pictures. Sitting before his painted book, he makes the Taoist vision of perfection come true: he overcomes the illusory barrier of the book’s surface and passes through colored textures and brightly painted partitions to enter a stage on which fairy tales spring to life.23

Benjamin’s memories of his childhood provide an abundance of examples for this mimetic

mode. Benjamin recalls the similarities he saw in the Berlin of his childhood and the play that

these similarities afforded. The mimetic mode allowed him to create worlds from courtyards,

Market Hall, cabinets, and hiding places. It allowed him to see life in telephones, snow, soap

bubbles, and the moon. One of his favorite examples was the otter at the zoo.24 His description of

the character would fit perfectly in a Disney movie. The otter was “a pampered animal,” “the

sacred animal of the rainwater” complete with a “temple” and always occupied with the affairs

of the deep. “And it would whisper to me of my future, as one sings a lullaby beside the

cradle.”25 Another example, perhaps even more reminiscent of a Disney movie and certainly

illuminating of the mimetic mode, is his family’s cheap Chinese porcelain:

But of all the things I used to mimic, my favorite was the Chinese porcelain … just as if I already knew the story …. The story comes from China and tells of an old painter who invited friends to see his newest picture. The picture showed a park and a narrow footpath that ran along a stream and through a grove of trees, culminating at the door of a little cottage in the background. When the painter’s friends, however, looked around for the

23 ———, "A Glimpse into the World of Children’s Books," in Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913 - 1926, ed. Marcus Paul Bullock, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996), 435.24 ———, "Berlin Childhood around 1900," in Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935 - 1938, ed. Marcus Paul Bullock, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996).25 Ibid, 366.

painter, they saw that he had left them—that he was in the picture. There he followed the little path that led to the door … and disappeared through the narrow opening. In the same way, I too … would be suddenly displaced into the picture. I would resemble the porcelain which I had entered in a cloud of colors.26

In this sense, the mimetic mode reverses the transfer of the cinematic mode. Rather than

projecting the diegetic space into the real viewer space, rather than using the viewer as a surface,

the viewer becomes the writer, projecting themselves into the diegetic space so that they might

inscribe. As Benjamin says, “The child inhabits them … Children fill them with a poetry of their

own. This is how it comes about that children inscribe the pictures with their ideas in a more

literal sense: they scribble on them.”27 Similarly in animation, the viewer fills in so much of the

detail that they feel they are participating in the image-world. Obviously, in the animated

cartoon, the viewer must not only fill-in the detail of the characters but must also participate in

the action by seeing life where there is none. The animated motion picture thus materializes the

mimetic mode. Viewers see life-like semblances in the drawing’s motions and sounds and then

play with the semblances by lending the drawings their life and emotion.

Whereas the cinematic mode reminds us of the images we project, animation reminds us of

our childhood; it shows anew how to give life to objects, how to animate the inanimate through

our daydreams, how to turn couch pillows into a fort or mud into pies or sticks into swords or

stuffing into animals or mice into men. Rather than witnessing the reproduced movement of

animate beings, viewers perceive objects as animated. This is a different experience than either

people watching or the feeling you are being watched. There is a difference from the cinematic

mode’s relating of camera-subject to other camera-subjects. It is a relationship of camera-subject

26 Benjamin, "Berlin Childhood around 1900," 393.27 Walter Benjamin, "Old, Forgotten Children's Books," in Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913 - 1926, ed. Marcus Paul Bullock, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996), 411.

and object. It is closer to fantasy but still draws upon the actual emotional responses of the

viewer and is thus a form of imaginative daydreaming.

Likewise, the animated mode is different from literature because in it, like film, the viewer

dreams through objects from the outside world, not through words experienced internally. The

viewer space still mingles with the diegetic space. But like literature and much more so than

cinema, animation gives more control to the viewer. With animation, viewers are not bound by

the actions of others, either being watched or watching us. They can daydream through objects

which are more significantly subject to the audience’s inscription. Of course, live-action cinema

can use objects to symbolize and convey meaning. Kracauer contends that this is unique to

cinema over the theater; film can concentrate attention on objects through close-ups, equipping

viewers with sensitivity to the meaningful possibilities of objects.28 Although objects may

express meaning in live-action film, they never move without the aid of trick-photography, CGI,

models, or drawings that are all related to animation. Both may use objects to speak meanings;

the difference is that only animation gives movement to the inanimate and thereby allows the

viewer, through the mimetic mode, to envision life in objects.

The fundamental techniques of live-action and animation illustrate the modal differences. The

primary technique of film is editing. The camera records everything in front of its lens, including

things out of place in the narrative world such as boom mikes and the backsides of studio

facades. If the actor does not project the correct emotion, another take is ordered. After shooting

the film, the director and others sit down with a massive amount of footage and shrink it to the

desired length. From hundreds of hours, the film is reduced to a few. The editor cuts out the bad

acting (hopefully), the misplaced objects, and all of the mechanical apparatus that might give

28 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 45.

away the artifice. They then splice together, through montage, a motion picture of ever-shifting

points-of-view. Editing exemplifies the artistic, creative element of cinema. The editor primarily

engages in cutting, slicing, subtracting, and splicing.

Animation, in contrast, is an additive art; editing plays a secondary role. The camera enters

the picture at the final stage, after transfers from drawing to celluloid. The camera rarely captures

the unnecessary, and its world is not full of boom mikes and other inconveniences burdening the

filmmaker. The gestural acting can be perfected from the start; it does not require multiple takes.

Editing is not responsible for constructing the motions, as when the filmmaker moves the

audience through the diegetic space. In animation, drawings constitute the motion; they produce

the illusion of motion where there was none before. Directors can edit out those illusions which

do not convey the desired result, but this process occurs much later and is not the creative

element but more like redacting a paper. After editing, a movie never looks like what the crew

members experienced on-site. After editing animation, the differences are much less significant.

Once again, the cinematic mode is composed of acts of recording and editing; animation and the

mimetic mode are composed of acts of recognition and creation.

Recognition and creation are just one part of the economy of the mimetic mode I have

outlined here. The economy is composed through a series of dialectics, forming a whole chain of

metaphoric structures including recognition-creation, semblance-play, surface-emotion, and

synchronized movement-life. Only through this metaphoric economy does perception of an

animated film (at least of the Disney variety) exist. Of course, someone may refuse to play, may

reject the emotional investment. This does not eliminate the economy but simply short-circuits

the mode. A mode is a structural possibility, an –ability, existent whether or not it is actually

materialized. As a perceptual possibility, animistic mimesis is a particular mode of

communication as transfer, one exemplified in Disney’s critically acclaimed movie, Fantasia.29

The Mimetic Mode in Fantasia

“So the explanation for the huge popularity of [Mickey Mouse] films is not mechanization…; nor is it a misunderstanding. It is simply the fact that the public recognizes its own life in them. —Walter Benjamin.30

In this section, I examine Fantasia to illustrate five characteristics of the mimetic mode: its

distinctness from mere copying, its synaesthetic experience, its blurring of the boundaries

between subject and object, its magical nature, and how this magic relies on auratic objects. The

mimetic economy of semblance and play articulates to a system of metaphoric tensions,

including the tensions between subject and object, body and image, and the transfers of surface

and affect. Disney’s popularity is not simply mechanization (the novelty of their techniques) or

misunderstanding, the audience being duped into supporting counterproductive ideologies.

Disney’s popularity is the popularity of this mode—seeing our own life in the images.

Before proceeding, a few words need to be said about the choice of Fantasia. Since its release

in 1940, Fantasia’s critical acclaim has steadily grown to the point where many consider it an

animated masterpiece. The choice of Fantasia was not made, however, because of its popularity

but because of the heated dispute it brewed. At the time of its release, Fantasia was a box office

flop and faced mix reviews from critics. In particular, music critics lavished scorn on the effort,

most feeling that the cheesy and simplistic images distorted the music’s power. The lines

between high and low culture seemed to be eroding; in fact, they were impossible to locate in an

animated film that deployed a performance from one of the most respected orchestras in the

world, Stokowski’s Philadelphia Orchestra. Some critics fought against the erosion, lambasting

29 Walt Disney, "Fantasia," (USA: Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2000 (1940)).30 Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 3, 1935-1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edward Jephcott and Howard Eiland (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2002).

Fantasia in favor of “true” art. Perhaps the harshest critic, Dorothy Thompson, caused quite a

stir when she declared Fantasia was a “nightmare,” “brutal and brutalizing,” that made her feel

“as though I had been subject to an assault.”31 She concluded, “All I could think to say of the

‘experience’ as I staggered out was that it was ‘Nazi.’ The word did not arise out of an obsession.

Nazism is the abuse of power, the perverted betrayal of the best instincts, the genius of a race

turned into black magical destruction, and so is Fantasia.”32

Thus Fantasia provides an instructive moment in the cultural changes being wrought by the

spread of cinema and animation, particularly the blurring of high and low culture and the

changing notion of art detailed in Chapter Seven. Although I take issue with Thompson’s claims,

she points here to the second reason for my choice of Fantasia by referencing magic. Magic is

intimately related to the mimetic mode, as we shall see, and Fantasia most fully represents this

mode because it relies primarily on devices unique to animation rather than borrowing heavily

from the narrative codes of cinema and literature. Most of the scenes in Fantasia do not rely on

the cinematic mode, employing less montage, less narrative progression, and less oscillation of

viewpoint in favor of a frontal camera angle more similar to the theater. Further, Fantasia lacks

dialogue and plot, featuring images inspired by and synchronized with classical orchestra pieces

such as Bach’s “Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor,” Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite,”

Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” and Beethoven’s “The Pastoral Symphony.” Fantasia is a

musical term referring to free-form music, and Fantasia is much more free-form than the typical

Disney movie which relies on plots, characters, and other cinematic devices. In Fantasia, figures

move to the music, often dancing as with the ballet of hippopotami, alligators, and ostriches in

the scene set to “Dance of the Hours.” Sometimes abstract forms predominate, transforming

31 Quoted in Steven Watts, The Magic Kingdom : Walt Disney and the American Way of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 118.32 Ibid.

color and contour to produce constantly shifting, amorphous imagery as in the introductory

segment, “Toccatta and Fugue.” A couple of the sections include an identifiable story, such as

the concluding scene “Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Marie” and the most famous scene, “The

Sorcerer’s Apprentice” starring Mickey as the apprentice. Yet the lack of dialogue, the episodic

organization, the frontal camera angle, and the emphasis on the music all indicate the difference

between Fantasia and a typical live-action or Disney-animated movie.

By relying less on cinematic devices, Fantasia comes the closer than most Disney movies to

expressing the differences between animation and cinema and will thus help explicate the

mimetic mode. As John Canemaker says, “If animation does best what can’t be done in live-

action, then Fantasia is a lasting testament to its most extraordinary and lasting

accomplishments.”33 Other scholars have noted how Fantasia is intimately related to the practice

of animation, but their analysis has lacked a media theory lens, focusing instead on the content of

the movie. For instance, Susan Willis writes an insightful piece based on the claim, “Simply put,

Fantasia is an allegory of animation.”34 I am more interested in describing the formal features of

Fantasia because I see the film as a materialized allegory for animation. This allegory does not

re-present animation through figural means, but presents and embodies its magic. Animation

speaks for itself, so to speak. In other words, the mimetic mode is fully present in Fantasia; the

formal features invite the reader to complete the transfer, to enliven the motion, to share the

communion. Therefore, Fantasia offers the ideal text to explicate the mimetic mode, specifically

the five features of animistic mimesis. The formal features cue the audience to a certain mode of

reception; the mode guides their interpretation.

33 Quoted in the audio commentary. Disney, "Fantasia."34 Susan Willis, "Walt Disney's Los Angeles Suite," Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 87.

Instead of the formal and technical features of the animation, most analysis of Disney has

focused on the narrative and character content. Thus some might object that Fantasia is too

atypical to be a representative example of the “Golden Age,” full-length Disney movies. Yet a

brief look at the narratives from these features reveals that the characteristics of animistic

mimesis also drive their choice of narrative. Specifically, three characteristics of animistic

mimesis covered in the following section stand out in all of the narratives: the syanesthetic

process, the blurring or hybridity of characters, and the emphasis on magic. The synaesthetic

fusion of sound and sight has correctly been recognized as a major reason for Steamboat Willie’s

success, sparking the famous career of Mickey Mouse. Likewise, the synchronization of music

and sound with character gesture plays a central roll in all of the classic Disney features,

including Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937), Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941), Bambi

(1942), and Alice in Wonderland (1951). Many of the songs from these features became popular

hits in their own right. Additionally, each narrative features hybrid characters prominently,

including the dwarves in Snow White, the half boy-half puppet Pinocchio, the flying elephant

Dumbo, talking animals throughout Bambi, and numerous mythical and mysterious characters

such as the Mad Hatter, the ever-late rabbit, the hookah smoking caterpillar, and the Queen of

Hearts in Alice. Finally, each narrative contains plenty of opportunity for the portrayal of magic,

such as the magic turning Pinocchio into a real boy, or casting a spell over Snow White, or even

the magic of nature, replete with talking animals and flying elephants. Indeed, while the

characters and narrative content of Disney features should not be ignored (and certainly has not

been by numerous scholars), it seems that Disney chooses narratives that are most conducive to

the formal and technical features of animistic mimesis. Thus despite the atypicality of Fantasia,

its emphasis on animation helps isolate the characteristics of the typical Disney mode, the mode

of animistic mimesis.

The Characteristics of Animistic Mimesis

The first characteristic of animistic mimesis is more of a clarification than a formal feature:

the mimetic mode is not a simple imitating or rote copying. This clarification is necessary

because the term mimesis is a conflicted one in Western thought, and I am seeking to clarify a

specific mode of communication in cinematic animation, what I call animistic mimesis. There is

a heritage of thought, extending from Plato to Romanticism to Kurt Cobain, where mimesis is

seen as copying and condemned for being unoriginal. This perspective is inherently

reductionistic for it reduces a wealth of communicative practice to a simple judgment of

imitation. Instead, there are a wide variety of types of mimesis, and they should be studied

independently. Animistic mimesis, for one, is most certainly not a rote copying. It works,

instead, through an economy of imitation (semblance) and creation (play).

Take Fantasia, the very idea of imitation here is confounded. What is imitating what? Are the

images imitating the music? Most of the music critics who detested Fantasia seem to think so.

Of course Fantasia would fall short when viewed in this light; how could anything look as

beautiful, ominous, or peaceful as the highly-revered music sounds? Of course, looks and sounds

can be comparably beautiful or frightening, tormented or contented. The point is simply that

images are not sound waves. Fantasia is inherently a translation, not a mere imitation. Fantasia

is a sort of video remix of the music, not an orchestral performance. Judging Fantasia’s

combination of images and sounds only according to the standards of the music seems, at best,

extremely stingy and at worst, suspicious. What images could possibly meet the expectations and

live up to these esteemed sounds? Not everyone saw through the eyes of music critics, however.

Many accepted the invitation to animistic mimesis and helped complete the transfer. For them,

Fantasia was not only about the music but was a total sensory experience.

This total-sensory experience is the second characteristic of animistic mimesis. The magic of

Fantasia is the transfer of sight and sound into a synchronized, synaesthetic whole. Synaesthesia

means the transfer from one sensory input to another. Animistic mimesis is more a fusion of

sight and sound than either independently. Viewers do not simply hear the music; they see it as

alive. They do not see images alone; they see figures compelled and sometimes created by the

music itself, as in “Tocatta” when the orchestra’s silhouettes transform into abstract bands of

color, rolling hills, and violin clouds. Separating the fusion of sight and sound is impossible. The

impossibility of separation irritated many music critics who felt they could no longer hear the

music because it was drowned out by images.35 Yet it is precisely the fusion of sound and

movement that encourages the viewer, engaged in the mode, to see the figures as full of life.

Disney represents this synaesthetic fusion through the image of the Sound Wave appearing

after the intermission. Deems, the narrator, introduces the audience to the Sound Wave, a white

straight line shimmering nervously. Deems claims he “ran into” Sound Wave around the studio,

a kind of “shy” fellow, but he soon realized Sound Wave is someone “very important” to

Fantasia, an “indispensable member” whose great possibilities almost nobody had noticed.36

This is because, as Deems tells us, every beautiful sound creates an equally beautiful picture

when traced into a Sound Wave. Deems then proceeds to use Sound Wave for an audience

tutorial. Sound Wave demonstrates some sounds from high to low pitches, each with different

colors like the distinctness of brass, string, and percussion instruments. Sound Wave turns

yellow-green, with wide loopy waves for the harp. The violin makes him fuzzy, like television

35 See the criticism by Margaret Kennedy in 1942, quoted in Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 2002), 192.36 Disney, "Fantasia."

static, with sustained and vibrating yellow-red lines. Sound Wave becomes wide and flat, with

multiple folds that look like hot dogs when the bassoon blows. The cymbals explode in yellow,

rapid, erratic, shocking, loud lines. Sound Wave embodies Fantasia’s fusion of sight and sound,

and Deems insists on its importance in order to instruct the audience in the preferred mode.

Yet there is more to the synaesthesis of animistic mimesis than the fusion of sight and sound

represented by Sound Wave. Disney pursued a synaesthetic experience, not simply a caricature

of sound-image transfers. Disney realized that the orchestra would not sound as full and beautiful

coming out of the mono-speakers of 1940s America, since mono lacks the range of left to right

that a live orchestra possesses. Disney engineers worked to develop stereophonic sound to

imitate this left to right movement, and what they called Fantasound debuted with Fantasia.

Disney spent a reported $85,000 per theater to equip them with Fantasound, and thus Fantasia

only debuted in the first run in some twelve theaters.37 The principles of Fantasound are the basic

principles of stereo sound commonly used today. Fantasound surrounds and envelops the

audience, producing sound that moves from front to back and left to right. With dimmed lights

and enveloping sound, the audience was in for a fully sensory experience, furthering the fusion

of sight and sound.

The fusion of visual and aural sensations attempts to produce a transfer in the second sense—

the audience’s emotional transfer, the giving of life. In this sense, animistic mimesis is more

about touch than either sight or sound or even their fusion. This is not the physical sensation of

touch but emotional touching—an inner stirring, disturbance, or e-motion. It is this sensation we

refer to when we say we were touched or moved by a piece of art or a particularly powerful

experience. It is an emotional touch experienced when the first transfer reaches its mark and the

audience reaches out to greet it and thereby completes the transfer.

37 As reported in Walt Disney, "The Making of Fantasia," (USA: Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2000 (1940)).

The total-sensory experience helps evoke this emotional touching by encompassing the

audience in the scene. The fusion of sensory inputs adds to the similarities the audience perceives

between the (fake) drawings on the screen and their own (real) life experiences. The synaesthetic

experience enables the audience to feel a profound sense of connectedness and thus encourages

them to complete the emotional transfer. This explanation helps clarify a rather perplexing claim

made by McLuhan. He states, “It begins to be evident that ‘touch’ is not skin but the interplay of

the senses, and keeping in touch or getting in touch is a matter of a fruitful meeting of the senses,

of sight translated into sound and sound into movement, and taste and smell.”38 Of course,

McLuhan is not denying the existence of a sense of touch produced by skin touching another

surface. He is pointing to another experience of being touched, an emotional experience, and,

importantly, he connects this experience to a sort of synaesthetic transfer. As he proposes, “It

may very well be that in our conscious inner lives the interplay among our senses is what

constitutes the sense of touch. Perhaps touch is not just skin contact with things, but the very life

of things in the mind?”39

Touch is a useful metaphor for this internal emotional stirring because even the physical,

external sense of touch is a dual process of transfer. “To touch the coarse skin of a tree is thus, at

the same time, to experience one’s own tactility, to feel oneself touched by the tree.”40 In Disney

animation, the physical sense of touch is one sensory input noticeably lacking, but the fusion of

other senses helps simulate the synaesthetic, embodied experience of everyday life. Psychical

experience is never simply sight or hearing or touch or smell or taste in isolation; all exist in

relationship, and simulating this relationship encourages the viewer to transfer themselves into

38 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet Books, 1964), 67.39 Ibid, 105.40 Ibid, 68.

the diegetic world. It enables an economy through which audiences can see moving and

sounding drawings as life.

In almost every aspect, Fantasia is aimed at producing this emotional touching through a

synaesthetic experience. The music selections convey an emotional tone, moving the audience

from the edge of their seats to floating in the air with flittering of the flutes. Scenes move from

dusk to dawn, from fall to summer and from the beginning of time to the present, all common

vehicles of emotional metaphor. Visually, the characters are ominous or reassuring, graceful or

gangly, playful or mischievous, curious and naïve, wise and vengeful. Each signals clearly the

emotion with which the audience is supposed to greet their presence. Viewers (are cued to)

sympathize with the curious and naïve apprentice Mickey. They respect the wise and vengeful

Sorcerer. They shrink in fear at the sight of the mountain top transforming into the giant stone

demon Chernabog. They admire the power of nature represented by the white-clad, feminine

fairies whose every touch enlivens the trees, flowers, mushrooms, and pools of water. They pity

the shy, neglected, and nervous Sound Wave, and they awe the tremendous violence and power

of Tyrannosaurus Rex and Stegosaurus.

Even the dominant themes of Fantasia reflect common emotional advice, such as “do not take

oneself too seriously” in the parody of ballet through dancing hippos and “hope rises with the

new day” in the ballad of Ava Marie following the nighttime rule of Chernabog. The more

abstract episodes without identifiable themes also express emotion through a synaesthetic

transfer. “Toccatta and Fugue” perfectly represents the blending of senses to cue an emotional

response. In the scene, shadowy silhouettes of the orchestra are cast on a white dome wall above

and behind the real orchestra. The orchestra’s and conductor’s silhouettes slowly bleed into and

blend with the new images forming on the wall. The musicians transform into abstract images of

rolling bands of color and cloud-like formations. Eventually, some of these abstract images begin

to resemble the music in turn, with animate cloud-violins and bow strings stroking to the music

as they float above the scenery. Each change in the music produces changes in the images.

Tocatta and Fugue is the opening act, and the Sound Wave is the introduction after the

intermission. Each launches a kind of audience tutorial, instructing members to experience the

synaesthetic blending of music and image through a mimetic mode.

Another central element of the synaesthetic experience is color. In fact, color is a crucial

aspect of the experience of synaesthesia, often known as “colored hearing.”41 The “Rite of

Spring” episode exemplifies Disney’s use of color. The scene visually tells the story of the

natural history of the earth, from the expanding universe that forms the stars of our galaxy to the

chaotic volcanic beginnings of earth to the age of the dinosaur. In “The Rite of Spring,” color

does not simply fill the lines of the figures but instead it spills over and leaves traces; in other

words, color transfers from one surface to another. Comets leave trails of sparkling light in the

dark universe. Radioactive purple clouds hover over the atmosphere, seeming to infect their

surroundings through their radiance. Bubbling and exploding lava splashes light on the

surrounding rocks, filling the entire screen with a red tint. Swirling grey gasses lighten the scene

before exploding in bursts of red, orange, and yellow. Stormy white winds mix with the red

environment to form purple wafts. Water bubbles and mutating amoeba create shifting blues and

greens in their liquid milieu. Dinosaurs change color as they cover their faces with dirt and food,

or dip into the water, or when rain bounces off their skin. Lightning fills the screen with a flash

of transparent white.

41 Esther Leslie reminds us that “synaesthesia was also known as ‘coloured hearing’, and colour was often its most sriking cloak.”Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant-Garde, 252.

All of these examples illustrate the important interplay between light and color. Darkness

casts an ominous shadow over the colors, muting them in grey, whereas bright lights bring out

the colors. Light and dark enable the transfer of color between figures. As new shades of light

like lightning, fire, or the refraction of rain emerge, the colors change. Therefore, water and fire

play a crucial role in the movement of light and hence color. Water, smoke, and fire exist in

every scene in Fantasia. As fire flickers and sparks, as water ripples and drips, the light sources

are refracted and reflected differently, making the colors of the figures bleed, blend, and

transform. Color transfers through the medium of light. The colors do not stand alone but instead

blend and mix. The colors touch each other while at the same time being touched. The color

visualizes the communication between self, other, and environment. This contrast between light

and dark, reflected in the colors, further conveys the emotional tone.

Such use of color enables two formal effects that signal the economy of semblance and play.

First, color allows Disney to address one of the dilemmas of their early animation: the lack of

depth. The shifting colors suggest depth through the use of shadowing. In fact, Disney frequently

muted the background colors in order to make the foreground figures stand-out and seem more

dynamic.42 Through the use of shading and shadows, Disney’s use of color enables their images

to have a higher semblance of life.

Second, the color paints the scenes with an emotional tone. Color is one of the many sensory-

channels tapped into in pursuit of an emotional transfer. The colors become purely emotional;

they portray the narrative conflict and cooperation between figures. The red glare of lava

conveys an angry and violent tenor, and the ominous shadow of Chernabog fills the screen with a

dark grey fear. This color is not so much seen as it is felt like music. In Esther Leslie’s words,

42 Richard Neupert, "Painting a Plausible World: Disney's Color Prototypes," in Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom, ed. Eric Smoodin (New York: Routledge, 1994), 112.

“Scene by scene, whole sections of Fantasia were colour-keyed… All the colours were keyed

psychologically, matching the changes in emotions being expressed by the actions.”43 In a sense,

Disney’s color is living; it is fully animated. For instance, in the “Pastoral Symphony,” the

rainbow goddess streaks across the sky and the colors of the rainbow stain the air and drip onto

the ground and into the water, further coloring the landscape. This color moves, bleeds, seeps

and stains. It lives on its own, outside the boundaries of the figure of the rainbow. The emotion

of the figure transfers between figures through the play of their colors.

In these two functions of Disney’s use of color—realistic depth and emotional tone—we

once again see a distinct dialectic at the heart of animistic mimesis. The dialectic is between

actual similarities and pleasurable play. The color enables a better illusion of depth, providing

the sense of realism, while at the same time enabling an imaginary fantasy world where emotions

show themselves distinctly, in living color.

Disney was one of the first Studio’s to use color in this manner. Animating color was the

crucial development leading to public and critical acceptance of color pictures. Many 1930s

movies that attempted to use the newly developed Technicolor process were a box-office and

critical failure. The public seemed to prefer black and white movies, and the huge expense of

Technicolor was a significant factor limiting the emergence of color.44 Some critics went so far

as to claim that color was destroying cinema’s ability to be an art form. In a 1938 New York

Times article, Robert Edmond Jones correctly diagnosed the problem. He argued, “Black –and-

white thinking still dominates the screen” because movies lacked color composition as artists

understand it.45 Rather than attempt to use color for artistic purposes, directors were judging

43 Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant-Garde, 286.

Technicolor a success if the audience simply did not notice it. The basic problem was that

Hollywood was not making color pictures “but colored pictures.”46 Movies added color after the

fact, like filling within the lines on a children’s coloring book. This relied upon a static notion of

color, one inappropriate for the moving picture.

Disney’s use of color would change Hollywood practice. Disney signed an exclusive rights

agreement with Technicolor and premiered their first color short entitled “Flowers and Trees” in

1932. Not surprisingly, the film was a huge success, and Disney was hailed as one of the first

studios to use color effectively. Disney’s colors moved and, hence, helped move the audience.

Jiminy Cricket, for instance, featured 27 different shades to match the changing light and the

changing moods.47 Jones concludes, “This movement, this progression of color on the screen is

in itself an utterly new visual experience, full of wonder. The color flows from sequence to

sequence like a kind of visual music and it affects our emotions precisely as music affects

them.”48 Today, Disney continues to be cited as a model for the use of color.49

Disney’s use of color compares to Benjamin’s theory about children’s view of color. Children

have to be taught to color within the lines. Their colorings spill over and mix with other colors.

Thus they see color as animated not as a deceptive cloak or artificial addition. As Benjamin

states, “Color is single, not as a lifeless thing and a rigid individuality but as a winged creature

that flits from one form to the next. Children make soap bubbles.”50 Children are attracted to

44 See Robert Edmond Jones, "The Problem of Color," in The Emergence of Film Art: The Evolution and Development of the Motion Picture as an Art, from 1900 to the Present, ed. Lewis Jacobs (New York: Hopkinson and Blake, 1969). Neupert, "Painting a Plausible World: Disney's Color Prototypes." J. Michael Barrier, The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 89-90. J.P. Telotte, The Mouse Machine: Disney and Technology (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008).45 Jones, "The Problem of Color," 206.46 Ibid.47 Ibid, 269.48 Ibid, 208.49 Neupert, "Painting a Plausible World: Disney's Color Prototypes," 116.50 Walter Benjamin, "A Child's View of Color," in Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913-1926, ed. Michael William Jennings and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996).

soap bubbles and magic lanterns because they like the ways colors shimmer and change intensity

under the light. Colors bleed and blend; they transfer from one figure to another. Color is not

about form for children; color is pure mood, expressing children’s pure receptivity. In Disney,

color is this total sensory experience, an emotional movement accompanying the transfer.

To sum, animistic mimesis, as a mode of transferability, invokes an emotional touch through

the pathways of a synaesthetic experience. From color to music to figuration to theme, Fantasia

presents and cues this total-sensory experience. “Walt gave it to you with all your senses

involved, except smell, and he was always working on that,” remarks animation historian John

Culhane.51 Although physical touch, taste, and smell are not present, the other sensory inputs

fuse in order to produce an emotional response from the audience. Michael Taussig, in his

masterful work on the mimesis of the Cuna Indians, explicates the experience:

Furthermore, the senses cross over and translate into each other. You feel redness. You see music. Thus nonvisual imagery may evoke visual means… You may also see your body as you feel yourself leaving it, and one can even see oneself seeing oneself—but above all this seeing is felt in a nonvisual way. You move into the interior of images, just as images move into you.52

Disney considered piping smells into the theater during Fantasia, providing further testament

that a total-sensory experience is Disney’s aim and mode. One can only wonder what smells they

would have chosen, but many scholars argue that smell is one of the most powerful sensory

routes to animistic mimesis. Bronislaw Malinowski, in his widely-known work on the practices

of magic by people he terms “savages,” contends that smell “is the most important factor in the

laying of spells on people.”53 Magic is perceived to be the most potent when it enters through the

nose. Horkheimer and Adorno concur: “Of all the senses, that of smell… bears clearest witness

to the urge to lose oneself in and become ‘the other.’ … When we see we remain what we are;

51 Quoted in Disney, "The Making of Fantasia."52 Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), 57-58.

but when we smell we are taken over by otherness.”54 Smell touches and moves emotionally to

repulsive disgust or pheromone-lust. Disney’s aim, then, to encourage the viewer to become the

hippo, to enter the screen, would be well served by making the aural-visual fusion include smells

as well. Although never implemented, the fact that they pondered it can be considered in the light

of their aim to fulfill the synaesthetic characteristic of animistic mimesis. The more complete the

sensory-experience, the more immersed the audience, the more likely they are to experience the

touching of animistic mimesis’ transfer.

Smell also helps clarify the third characteristic of animistic mimesis, the blurring of the

boundary between self and other. Smell blurs the boundary of self and other because an

emanation from the other enters into the self through the nose. Smell transfers; with a whiff, a

person becomes “taken over by otherness,” as Horkheimer and Adorno say. The total sensory

experience of animistic mimesis is a sense of communicative nirvana, a feeling of contact

assuring participants that communion has been achieved. It is a dual transfer between self and

other. What occurs in animistic mimesis is a blurring of self and other through the dual transfer.

Fantasia continuously portrays the boundary crossing between self and other. Shapes and

figures repeatedly morph. In “The Nutcracker Suite” what appears to be seaweed turns out to be

a goldfish while what seems to be lifeless leaves floating with the wind turns out to be tiny

dancers performing a ballet in the air. In “Toccatta and Fugue,” the orchestra transforms into

shadowy silhouettes that then merge into shifting images which eventually take the form of notes

and instruments. Walt Disney described the effect as “like something you see with your eyes

half-closed” or like something you see on a shadowy, dark night.55

53 Bronislaw Malinowski, The Sexual Life of Savages (in North-Western Melanesia) (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1929), 449.54 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1972), 184.55 Quoted in the audio commentary. Disney, "Fantasia."

Fantasia frequently employs shadows and silhouettes, as figures morph from shadow to

substance and back again. Take the example of Mickey chopping the animated broom into bits, a

scene shown only in shadow. After Mickey splinters the broom, the world of shadows comes to

life. In shadow, we see each of the splinters grow to full size and come alive, unleashing an

uncontrollable army of laboring brooms. Shadows once again evince the dual transfer. Shadows

blur the division between figures since a shadow is cast from one figure onto the next and often

subsequently transforms into a new shape itself. Shadows which appear to be one thing often

turn out to be another, a perceptual experience responsible for many children’s nightmares.

Shadows transfer from one figure to another, and their amorphousness allows an abundance of

opportunities for the recognition of similarities and the imaginary entrance into a world of

shadows. The phrase “play of shadows” demonstrates the blurring of boundaries of animistic

mimesis and points, once again, to a dialectic of similarity and play.

The main characters represent such boundary-blurring hybridity as well. Centaurs, top-half

human and bottom-half horse, star in “The Pastoral Symphony.” A centaurette servant named

Sunflower is part African human, part donkey, and two attendants to Bacchus are part

Amazonian, part zebra. Fairies, demons, unicorns, flying horses, cherubs, sun gods, and rainbow

goddesses express both human and supernatural characteristics. Fish, leaves, amoeba, and fungi

move in a human manner, with apparent purpose and intent. Such anthropomorphism is common

in animation; many theorists note the continual tendency to the animistic. Eisenstein, in fact,

attributes Disney’s appeal to the attractiveness of a prelogical animism. He follows A.N.

Veselovsky’s definition of animism: “We involuntarily transfer onto nature our own experience

of life, which is expressed in movement, in the manifestation of a force directed by a will….”56

56 Quoted in Sergei M. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda, trans. Alan Upchurch (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1986), 53.

Yet this is not only a transferal of human qualities to animals, but a dual transfer from animal to

human and human to animal, “the substitution of man by animal, and of animal by man.”57 I

attempt to indicate this dual process through the specific phrase animistic mimesis—the human

and animal, the self and the other, mutually exchanging. Eisenstein compares this dual transfer to

the Borro Indians who believe that they are simultaneously humans and parrots. He sees the

process as “the very earliest, most ancient type of metaphor—directly motory.”58 In other words,

the merging of self and other is sensed through the perception of motion and a metaphoric

comparison to (human) life. Viewers see movement as the expression of life, envisioning the

characters “moved by an innate, independent, volitional impulse.”59 In animism there is no

differentiation between subject and object; the two, as with the Borro Indians, are seen as

indivisible. Disney’s hybrid characters embody this indivisibility.

Perhaps the best example of this blurring of subject and object and human and animal is

Disney’s most famous character—Mickey Mouse. In popular commentary, two questions are

often raised: Is Mickey a mouse or a man? And, Is Mickey a man or a woman? Mickey lacks

many of the typical gender markers, and his falsetto voice led many to raise the gender question

and even to suggest that Mickey was homosexual. The clearest indicator that Mickey was

supposed to be a heterosexual male was Minnie, whose affections Mickey pursues zealously in

many of the early shorts. Mickey and Minnie were drawn the same way, but Minnie featured

skirts, high-heeled shoes, eyelashes, and feminine mannerisms to signify her as woman.60

Mickey’s ambiguous gender becomes more distinctly male through the contrast with and pursuit

of Minnie, but the very confusion indicates the tendency of animation towards hybridity.

57 Ibid, 52.58 Ibid, 56.59 Ibid, 54.60 See the comments of Disney animator Fred Moore, in Wells, Understanding Animation, 204.

Most viewers probably assume Mickey is a heterosexual male, “But is Mickey a Mouse?”61

E.M. Forester raises this perplexing question, quipping, “Certainly one would not recognize him

in a trap.”62 The earlier, flatter Mickey was more recognizably mouse, but still featured many

human characteristics. Other than the ears, Mickey appears human. He walks upright on two

legs. He speaks English. He wears clothes. He throws baseballs, fixes engines, flies planes, and

steers boats. In Fantasia, we see him attempting to avoid work and using (magical) technology

to lessen his load. In fact, Mickey’s evolution to a new, squash-and-stretch form (discussed more

in the following chapter) is first debuted in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” After the design

changes, he begins to look more like a child, with gigantic, signature mouse ears. He wears more

clothing, including shoes and gloves, and begins to rely more on facial expressions rather than

physical gags for meaning. He gets Pluto, and whoever heard of a mouse with a pet dog?

Yet the dual transfer of animistic mimesis indicates that Mickey nevertheless remains a

mouse and a human, indivisibly so. His mouse-like body provides the surface for the transfer of

movements, and his movements and voice then provide the metaphoric vehicle for the audience

to see life. Thus this process is not simply animism in the sense of attributing human

characteristics to animals. In Disney animation, audiences do not attribute human characteristics;

the characters possess human characteristics. They move and sound like humans while looking

like animals. From this similarity in movement and sound, the audience sees the blurring of self

and other, human and animal. The human becomes mouse as much as the mouse becomes

human. This is why animation tends towards animal characters and why animators continue to

struggle with depicting humans. The movements of human characters never quite match up to

the familiar expressions of actual humans, leaving the artifice too bare. Thus Disney struggled

61 E.M. Forster, "Mickey and Minnie," in The American Animated Cartoon: A Critical Anthology, ed. Danny Peary and Gerald Peary (New York: Dutton, 1980), 239.62 Ibid.

mightily with portraying Snow White, and even today animators have the most difficulty

drawing humans. There is no magic in seeing a human character move like a human like there is

in seeing a mouse mischievously disobey their master Sorcerer.

Benjamin compares mimesis’ morphing hybridity to the world of dreams, claiming that the

cinematic apparatus unveils the optical unconscious: “The ancient truth expressed by Heraclitus,

that those who are awake have a world in common while each sleeper has a world of his <sic>

own, has been invalidated by film—and less by depicting the dream world itself than by creating

figures of the collective dream, such as the globe-encircling Mickey Mouse.”63 The boundary

crossing between self and other is indeed a dream-like process unbound to the strictures of

everyday reality. The process is magical, magic being the fourth characteristic of animistic

mimesis. The boundary crossing and blurring of subject and object takes place through magic.

Schickel reminds us that the magic is a common Disney trope.64 When Disney’s corporate

marketing suggests that all one needs is magic to achieve their dreams, this is truly hucksterism

par excellence. Yet inside the animated world, magic is not an assertion but a living presence.

“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” features a master magician and Mickey Mouse in training. Mickey

dons his master’s magical hat and orders a broomstick to come to life and haul water to complete

Mickey’s chores. In the hands of the apprentice, the magic backfires and almost floods them out

of house and home. The master returns just in time to save the day and scold Mickey, assuring us

that magic in the right hands is productive and beneficial. “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” was

originally planned as a stand alone short, but the idea inspired Disney to pursue the full-length

Fantasia. As the inspiration for Fantasia, the scene exemplifies the repeated connection between

magic and the boundary-crossing of animistic mimesis.

63 Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version," 118.64 Richard Schickel, The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art, and Commerce of Walt Disney (New York,: Simon and Schuster, 1968).

Indeed, magic flourishes in every scene. The narrator discuses the magic of Fantasia in the

preface to each episode, particularly the introduction of Sound Wave. Likewise each scene seems

internally animated by a magic of its own. In “The Rite of Spring,” it is the magic of the science.

Deems claims that “science wrote the script” for this tale of Earth’s evolution.65 “The Nutcracker

Suite” represents the magic of nature, embodied in the flying fairies whose touch brings all of

nature alive. “Toccata and Fugue” expresses the magic of music, “The Pastoral Symphony” the

magic of Greek gods and legendary beasts. “Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Marie” portrays the

black magic of demons and the white magic of saints. In all the scenes, magic is repeatedly

represented by a sparkling effervescence which trickles out when magic touches the object. So,

when the fairies contact the leaves or the flowers, sparks spring out and then the plants come to

life. Even the package for the DVD repeats this technique, featuring Mickey the apprentice with

hands outstretched and sparks surrounding him. Underneath the images and text on the box,

subtle luminescent star-shaped holograms appear when turned to reflect the light.

The drawing techniques further illustrate the connection to magic. The techniques of follow-

through, anticipation, and exaggeration are similar to the gestures of magicians. Anticipation

visually prefigures a coming movement, and follow-through culminates the ending of the

movement. The animators hold the anticipatory and anterior movements for a few frames to

ensure the audience reception of the gesture. Each technique exaggerates movements in order to

make them highly expressive. The gestures become clear and distinct, making them easily

imitable. This imitability is a necessary part of magical transfer; the audience repeats the ritual

gestures performed by the magician to unleash the magical effects. By imitating the means, the

audience hopes to complete the transfer of magical ends. David Abram explains the importance

of ritualized gesture for the magician:

65 Disney, "Fantasia," 163-64.

The magician, for instance, may make the magic palatable for the audience by following the invisible coin’s journey with the focus of his own eyes, and by imaginatively ‘feeling’ the coin depart from the one hand and arrive in the palm of the other; the audience’s senses, responding to subtle shifts in the magician’s body as well as to the coin, will then find the effect irresistible. In other words, it is when the magician lets himself be captured by the magic that his audience will be most willing to join them.66

Once again, we see the dual process of transfer, from magician to gesture and audience to

magician. This ritualized form of movement makes imitation possible. It is then up to the

audience to play along. Viewers see the anticipation and follow-through (the semblances to real

movements) and then interpret the emotion. The techniques are similar to what Brecht describes

as the theatrical gestus, often translated into English as gest. The gest refers to both “gist” and

“gesture” but gesture broadly conceived since Brecht includes music, language, facial

expression, gesture, posture, and staging as possible means for showing the gestic. Brecht states,

“‘Gest’ is not supposed to mean gesticulation: it is not a matter of explanatory or emphatic

movements of the hands, but of overall attitudes. A language is gestic when it is grounded in a

gest and conveys particular attitudes adopted by the speaker towards other men.”67 In short, the

gest is a series of performed actions that express the gist of an attitude. Brecht insists on the

necessity for clearly expressing the gest, so that “the spectators’ interest is directed purely

towards the characters’ attitudes.”68 As a result, he prescribes a simplification of the gest through

the aesthetically significant and typical performance. In other words, the gest is an attempt to

make the gesture quotable, that is, iterable and therefore imitable as well.

This description of gest readily compares to magic, ritual, and the animistic mimesis of Disney

animation. Anticipation, follow-through, moving holds, and exaggeration make the gestures of

66 David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996), 58.67 Bertolt Brecht, "On Gestic Music," in Brecht on Theatre; the Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (New York,: Hill and Wang, 1964), 104.68 ———, "Criticism of the New York Production of Die Mutter," in Brecht on Theatre; the Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (New York,: Hill and Wang, 1964), 83.

the characters simple, typical, and significant. These techniques create movements clearly

expressing the character’s attitudes and emotions. The “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” scene portrays a

clear narrative through such typical and simplified gestures. The scene begins with the sorcerer

raising his arms upward as if lifting a heavy object; as he does, smokes rises up and transforms

into a butterfly. Then, the sorcerer tickles the smoke downward like he is cramming it back into

the skull from which it emerged. When the sorcerer leaves, Mickey pulls his arms to his chest

(anticipation) and thrusts them forward rapidly, shaking his hands and alternating his fingers like

he is stroking a piano (follow-through). As he does so, the broom comes alive. Then, Mickey

mimes picking up two buckets and walking, and the broom follows by actually picking up the

buckets and marching to the well. Satisfied, Mickey falls asleep and dreams that he climbs to the

pinnacle of a mountain to exercise his magic. He turns his palms upward and swings his arms in

an upper-cut motion, prompting the waves to rise up and crash against the mountain side,

synchronized with the crash of the cymbal. Mickey awakes to find the lodge flooded due to the

broom’s diligence. Unfortunately, he does not know the gesture to make the broom stop. Hands

palms-out with arms extended as if to say halt does not work. He decides to chop up the broom

with an ax, and after splintering it into numerous pieces, he leans against the door and exhales in

relief. The splintering of the broom creates an army of brooms, however, and we see his face

switch quickly from satisfaction to horror. Luckily, the sorcerer returns in time to save the day,

gesturing to stop the brooms and then scolding his apprentice with a glare and a wag of the

finger. Following the gestus, the audience sees Mickey move from curiousness to self-

satisfaction to fright to relief to horror and finally to embarrassment.

Brecht would perhaps take issue with this comparison, since he is concerned with promoting

an epic theater whose gest is primarily social. Indeed, the distinctly consumerist aims of Disney

animation are anathema to Brecht, who desires to transform theater into a pedagogical agency for

dialectical materialism. Thus Brecht distinguishes different kinds of gest, preferring the social

gest which “is chiefly interested in attitudes which people adopt towards one another, wherever

they are socio-historically significant.”69 The aim of the social gest is to produce an alienation-

effect in the audience, denying their empathetic identification with the characters by tearing

down the fourth wall and revealing the characters’ and the play’s socio-historical construction.

Disney, in contrast, aims for this sort of empathic identification with Mickey that Brecht hopes to

alienate. Yet the comparison remains apt nonetheless because Brecht admits that empathy is a

necessary part of the social gest. His explanation further clarifies the mode of animistic mimesis,

and its connection to the quotable or imitable gesture:

The actor applying [the alienation effect] is bound not to try to bring about the empathy operation. Yet in his efforts to reproduce particular characters and show their behavior he need not renounce the means of empathy entirely. He uses these means just as any person with no particular acting talent would use them if he wanted to portray someone else, i.e. show how he behaves. This showing of other people’s behaviour happens time and time again in ordinary life (witnesses of an accident demonstrating to newcomers how the victim behaved, a facetious person imitating a friend’s walk, etc.), without those involved making the least effort to subject their spectators to an illusion. At the same time they do feel their way into their characters’ skins with a view to acquiring their characteristics.70

Brecht also helps us isolate the fifth characteristic of animistic mimesis. He says about the

socially gestic actor, “As a result everything put forward by him has a touch of the amazing.

Everyday things are thereby raised above the level of the obvious and the automatic.”71 Here

again we see how the mode of animistic mimesis is aimed at an emotional touching, which for

Brecht is ideally the discomfit affected by the alienation effect. The gest employs a wide variety

of visual and aural means to achieve this emotional touching. But this is simply repeating what

69 ———, "On the Use of Music in an Epic Theater," in Brecht on Theatre; the Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (New York,: Hill and Wang, 1964), 86.70 ———, "Short Descirption of a New Technique of Acting Which Produces an Alienation Effect," in Brecht on Theatre; the Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (New York,: Hill and Wang, 1964), 136-37.71 ———, "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting," in Brecht on Theatre; the Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (New York,: Hill and Wang, 1964), 92.

has already been established about animistic mimesis, that is, the use of synaesthetic experience

to achieve an emotional transfer. In this quotation, Brecht’s emphasis on objects—those

“everyday things” elevated above the level of the banal—is more important for delineating the

fifth characteristic of animistic mimesis. Taussig also points to the importance of objects in

mimesis ranging from voodoo dolls to hair to beloved trinkets. Objects are the necessary

mediator for the magic of a boundary-crossing transfer. They provide the surface onto which the

magic is transferred and from which the audience transfers their feelings. Objects provide the

meeting ground for the magical blurring of self and other.

Disney depicts the magical objects through some simple visual techniques. We might say that

Disney draws the invisible aura of these magic objects. They do so by drawing tiny effervescent

sparks emanating from the magical objects. So, the Sorcerer’s hat glows and sparkles when

Mickey thinks about donning it. The fairies’ wands emit similar sparks that transfer the magic

from figure to figure. Rocks and flowers and brooms and Sound Waves seem to shimmer and

quake when touched by magic, as if awakening from a deep slumber. Greek gods throw lighting

bolts, and Chernabog sprinkles dust to awaken his demon soldiers. These objects are portrayed as

critical mediums for the exercise of magic. Mickey, it seems, cannot make the broom spring to

life without donning the hat. The Sorcerer’s skull from which the smoke emanates represents

another such object, and smoke and other gasses, since they transfer between and even through

figures, are another common way that Disney portrays the aura of magic.

It is not only that Disney endows certain objects within the screen with a magical aura.

Disney also conveys the idea that all of the objects on the screen are magical, whether or not they

sparkle. This magic stems from the object’s ability to move and appear lifelike despite our

knowledge that they are simple drawings. Mickey, centaurs, dancing hippos and mushrooms,

demons, Greek gods, fairies, and dinosaurs are all magical characters as well as being objects. As

Eisenstein says (ellipsis his):

We know that they are … drawings and not living beings.

We know that they are … projections of drawings on a screen.

We know that they are … ‘miracles’ and tricks of technology, that such beings don’t

really exist.

But at the same time:

We sense them as alive.

We sense them as moving, as active.

We sense them as existing and even thinking!72

In other words, the very existence of animated images is magical, a magic that occurs through

the medium of objects, namely photographs of drawings. Thus in an oft-repeated anecdote in

animation studies, when Chuck Jones told a child that he created Bugs Bunny, the child insisted

on the independent existence of the character, correcting him by saying “No, you draw pictures

of Bugs Bunny.” In the child’s eyes, Jones was only responsible for the drawings not the auratic

character itself. Jones might make the character move and speak, but Bugs had his own life, in

the eyes of this child. This child correctly recognized that, although Jones might be responsible

for the surface transfer, their own emotional transfer means that Bugs and Mickey have a life

which goes well beyond the control of any animator or studio. Bugs lives in the child’s mind, not

on the film on which he is drawn.

This final feature is tied to yet fundamentally different from Benjamin’s depiction of the aura

of works of art. For Benjamin, works of art gain their aura through the cultic practices of ritual

employing them. That is, by the continued use of these objects in cultural and religious ritual, the

72 Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, 55.

object is endowed with an aura, similar to the way the child gives life to Bugs. The auratic object

“bears the mark of history to which the work has been subject.”73 This description means that the

aura does not reside in the object but is the product of the relation between the viewer and the

object, clarifying what Benjamin means when he says that the aura is a “unique apparition of a

distance, however near it may be.”74 The distance is the “strange tissue of space and time” that

the viewer perceives in the object; the fascination not with the Mona Lisa’s eerie form, say, but

with the knowledge that so many other eyes have looked upon this singular piece of art.75 The

distance is one of time, the accumulation of so much history through ritualistic repetition. The

nearness is one of space; this distance in time persists no matter if we rub noses with Mona

Lisa’s canvas.

Benjamin contends that mechanical reproduction, and film in particular, betokens the decay

of the aura. Without the trace of prior viewings, no object can have an aura. Since the products of

mechanical reproduction lack this trace, they necessarily lack aura. This is the crucial difference

between Disney’s portrayal of the aura and Benjamin’s concept. It makes no sense for the viewer

to see accretions of other looks on the sorcerer’s hat. When I look at my copy of Fantasia, it is

difficult if not impossible for me to believe that other people have seen that very same hat. My

DVD is a copy, one without an original, singular history. Thus Benjamin would deny that the

sorcerer’s hat (or more precisely, the dots of light that make an image of the sorcerer’s hat on my

television screen) has any aura.

Of course, some scholars challenge Benjamin’s argument that the auratic mode dissipates

with mechanical reproduction, pointing to the cultic rituals formed around all sorts of mass

produced commodities.76 This is not my dispute. My point is to distinguish Benjamin’s auratic

73 Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version," 103.74 Ibid., 104-05.75 Ibid, 104.

mode from the mode present in Disney. Whereas Benjamin’s aura comes from the viewer’s

relation to the object, Disney inverses the priority. Disney’s aura literally emanates from the

object, and the viewer only has to open their eyes to see it. The object’s aura does not require

participation in or knowledge of the cultic history. Disney portrays these objects as inherently

magical, needing only the viewer’s—nay, any viewer’s—participatory transfer and emotional

investment. Disney wants to bring the viewer near, whereas Benjamin’s aura relies on a distance.

Thus we can buy a Mickey doll but the Mona Lisa remains priceless. And indeed, lest we foget,

buying is exactly the aim of Disney and the frequent result of the mode of animistic mimesis.

Animistic Mimesis and the Commodity Fetish

While both live-action and animated cinema train audiences in a mode of perception similar

to the daydream, how people daydream in these modes, and thus the cultural implications of the

mode, are different. Cinema teaches a subject-focused daydreaming based on an economy of

recording and editing. Animation teaches an object-focused daydreaming based on an economy

of recognition and creation. In both, the audience sees like a camera, projecting and recording.

But in cinema, viewers record moments of time; in animation, the viewer creates those moments.

In live-action, people see existent life; in animation, they imagine life. Animation thus spreads a

mode of perception in which the viewer constructs daydreams through objects. Animistic

mimesis is a mode whereby audiences perceive objects as animated and animating; it is enabled

by a transferability of semblance to the image and of emotion to semblance.

Animistic mimesis draws on the pleasures of such daydreaming—namely, its perfectability.

Looking and recording as a movie camera requires conscious editing and tedious waiting for the

right moment containing the living movements that might trigger a daydream. The cinematic

76 For one example, see Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).

mode depends upon an external life. Animated perception requires only an object. The viewer

can see semblances in objects and invest those semblances with life, if they simply give in to the

illusion. And in these illusions, viewers play less the role of the recording camera or the screen

and more the role of a god. For Eisenstein, this was precisely the source of Disney’s pleasure;

that ability to treat all reality as composed of plastic materials ready for the viewer’s shaping.

The utopian nature of such animated vision should be noted and not dismissed. It explains the

source of desire motivating the continued viewing of animation and the ongoing translations of

the mode of animistic mimesis. Animistic mimesis supplements the materialism of cinema, as in

the Panofsky quotation above, with a desirable idealism. But there are some dystopian

implications as well. Indeed animistic mimesis, the mode in which the viewer transfers life to

objects, can be seen as the mode of Marx’s commodity fetish. The emphasis on magic may

remind the reader of Marx’s take on the “mysterious” character of the commodity, “abounding in

metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”77 His description of a commodity table seems

ripped straight from a Disney movie:

But as soon as [a table] emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.78

Marx described the commodity fetish as the “mystical character of the commodity” whereby

it comes to represent spiritual values and cultural meanings beyond its use-value.79 Consumers

fail to see the conditions of production, the labor and human relations that go into making the

product, and fetishize the commodity. Consumers subjectify the commodity instead of valuing it

for its objective qualities, what Marx calls its use-value. For instance, people do not value

77 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, 3 vols., vol. 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1976).78 Ibid.79 Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 164.

clothing for protection and warmth but instead see meaning in a pair of designer jeans. Marx’s

example of a table with a wooden brain, standing on its head and dancing, seems to presage the

coming of Disney animation. In fact, Marx makes the connection to a mode of communication as

transfer explicit:

Through this substitution, the products of labor become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time supra-sensible or social. In the same way, the impression made by a thing on the optic nerve is perceived not as a subjective excitation of the nerve but as the objective form of a thing outside the eye. In the act of seeing, of course, light is really transmitted from one thing, the external object, to another thing, the eye. It is a physical relation between physical things. As against this, the commodity-form and the value-relation … have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity…. It is nothing but … the fantastic form of a relation between things.80

In a sense, Marx distinguishes between use-value and the commodity fetish based on a

difference between the two forms of transfer. Use-value, like vision, is an objective relationship,

an impression transferred from object to the surface of the eye. Marx states, “In order to become

a commodity, the product must be transferred to the other person, for whom it serves as a use-

value, through the medium of exchange.”81 The commodity fetish, on the other hand, is a

subjective relationship, whereby the consumer transfers a fantasy onto the commodity. Marx

describes the commodity fetish as an appearance, supra-sensuous, imaginary, the “fantastic form

of a relation between things.”82 The commodity fetish is a kind of emotional or spiritual transfer,

the “conversion of things into persons.”83 Thus he proposes that the most apt analogy comes

from the realm of religion. “There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures

endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the

human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands.”84

80 Ibid., 165.81 Ibid., 131.82 Ibid, 165.83 Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 209.84 Ibid., 165.

In this description, the commodity fetish can be readily compared with animistic mimesis.

Both involve a dual sense of transfer that endows objects with an imaginary or fantastical life.

Yet animation and cinema raise some quarrels with Marx here because, as we have seen,

animistic mimesis involves both types of transfer. Seeing a movie is partially a physical

relationship between physical things; but it is also a supra-sensible experience in the imagination,

an experience of emotional transfer. So, are movies a fetish or a real physical connection? The

pleasure and emotion derived from movies are real, existent. The pleasure motivates continued

daydreaming according to Campbell. Does this make movies’ use-value equivalent to their

exchange value? If I paid eight dollars for a movie and it made me laugh hysterically, did I get

my use-value and my money’s worth? What if I was bored to tears, but it helped me avoid

interaction with the in-laws? Movies are fantastic forms but real experiences, often enjoyable,

meaningful, and even potentially critical and, as Marx desired, world-changing.

Yet we can not deny that movies are also a fetish. Motion pictures actively edit out the

production process and they hide the exploitation of labor evident from the numerous strikes in

Hollywood during the 1930s and 40s, including a particularly nasty one at Disney. Moreover,

movies are also commodities. Movies seem, on one hand, the prime example of a fetish. On the

other, film and its industry are an undeniable and pervasive part of our contemporary cultural

reality. Even if Mickey exists only in the imaginations and feelings of the audience, he continues

to exist nevertheless and cannot be wished away.

Such complexity requires an alteration in Marx’s take on the fetish. For Marx, exchange is the

dominant medium; the simple fact of being a commodity makes the object into a fetish. When a

commodity is exchanged on the market, it becomes a fetish. “As soon as they are produced as

commodities,” objects of labor obtain an exchange-value, which is the source of their fetish.85

85 Ibid.

Obviously, we cannot fault Marx for somewhat simplifying the commodity during its early

nascence, especially since all critical scholars since work in his shadow (and I thank Derrida for

the reminder).86 Exchange-value surely plays a role in commodity fetishism; exchange is a

fundamental condition of fetishism and the commodity’s price and circulation add to the fetish.

Yet commodity fetishism predates capitalist exchange markets. Further, attributing the fetish to

exchange does not provide a compelling reason for the proliferation and vast expansion of

consumerism seen in the 20th century. How can we explain the voracious and encompassing

nature of modern fetishism? Or, as Campbell asks, what accounts for the persistent, insatiable

desire to consume that marks modern consumerism?

The answer is obviously related to the spread of commodity fetishism. But fetishism requires

a particular mode of perception. The commodity fetish is an appearance, a mode that enables a

perspective, a shift from state to stance.87 Marx is concerned with critiquing this perspective, one

he finds widespread amongst his contemporaries. Yet Marx offers no explanation for the

constitution of this perspective, other than to connect it to the fact of exchange. The only way to

account for these changes in perspective, as well as leave open the possibility of future change, is

by assuming that a culture has sources which teach, spread, and remind people of various modal

possibilities. Marx’s comparison to religion drives home my conclusion. Religious fetishism

does not spread simply due to the existence of religious institutions anymore than commodity

fetishism can be said to spread simply because of the fact of exchange. Religion requires training

in modes of perceiving, through ritual and other practices that serve as persistent reminders. For

such consumer insatiability, there has to be a desire to daydream through objects, a desire built

86 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).87 This perspective, or shift from state to stance, can be seen when Marx says, “There is an antithesis, immanent in the commodity, between use-value and value… between the conversion of things into persons and the conversion of persons into things; ….” The status of things is perceived as personified. The status of people are perceived as things. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 209.

up through established habits of communicating. Consumerism requires training and constant

reminders. Consumerism needs sources that provide instruction, opportunity, and actualization of

various modal possibilities. Animation provides one such source. Animation is both a constant

reminder of the possibility of daydreaming through objects and training for the extension from

one commodity (animated movies) to others (like daydreams experienced with all variety of

Disney purses, watches, toys, and costumes).

Thus, rather than describing commodity fetishism as the inevitable result of exchange,

commodity fetishism is better described as the mode of daydreaming through objects. In a

culture attuned to display, aware of watching and being watched, people dream about projecting

themselves and objects become a valuable aid. From fashion to automobiles to home furnishings

to websites, all of these objects are part of a person’s possible image. They give them life and

motion. Exchange makes available a much greater diversity and quantity of objects for

daydreams, but it does not initiate the practice of daydreaming through objects nor can it account

for the rapid and far-reaching dissemination of the commodity fetish in the 20th century. Instead,

both these earlier and later practices are translations of a mode of daydreaming through objects.

Seeing commodities as figures endowed with their own life is the mode of commodity fetishism,

just as it is the mode of animistic mimesis. Animistic mimesis in Disney animation is simply a

more recent iteration. The child who imagines a real mouse crawling in their backyard as Mickey

and the one who plays in Disney’s commodified world of coloring books and silver screens are

illustrating, through the translations, both the kinship and the difference in the modes.

The differences matter greatly, however, and must not be forgotten since they help account

for the dilemma of insatiable modern consumerism. The main difference is related to the

distinction between Benjamin’s aura and Disney’s portrayal of auratic objects. The distinction is

important because, stripped of history and made to reside in an object, Disney’s aura encourages

commodity fetishism. It is not simply that Disney portrays their objects as magical while hiding

the vast industrial apparatus necessary to produce them. The consumer often knows that a

gigantic industrial process lies behind the commodity but still acts as if they do not know, similar

to Eisenstein’s point about knowing animation is not real and yet still sensing the characters as

alive. Animistic mimesis encourages one to see the commodity as animated (full of life) rather

than the mere product of industrial movements by providing a motivating desire to perceive

through this mode. The mimetic mode generates a desire to participate in transfer through the

mediation of Disney’s commodities. It trains audiences in the pleasure and magic of perceiving

objects as animated and animating. Animistic mimesis reminds us of the pleasures of play, of

transferring into fantastical worlds and blurring ourselves with the other. It may be a single tear,

a hearty laugh, or shriek of terror but it is at those moments of emotional transfer that both the

animated characters come to life and the desire to daydream through objects is bred.

Corporations have seized on this desire for emotional transfer and run with it, often to the

detriment of democracy, labor, and the environment. If consumers experience an emotional

connection, through a synaesthetic experience, consider it to be a magical experience, and

believe the objects are necessary to the experience then Disney has won. Disney controls and

profits from the animated characters which are perceived to be the magical source of the aura.

Thus animated figures represent the ultimate commodities because they are so ready for surface

transfer. Mickey’s plastic nature allows him to rapidly cross national boundaries, carried along in

the forms of movies, hats, shirts, watches, bags, costumes, toys, games, music, radio, television,

and even tattoos. Animistic mimesis seems to be the ideal mode to spread the perceptions of an

unbounded, plasmatic commodity fetishism.

Wickstrom concurs that this mimetic mode is crucial to Disney’s success. She contends that

Disney seizes on the proclivity of children to engage in this mimetic mode. When such a mode

becomes part of consumer habits, the possibilities for commodity fetishism are endless. The

commodity provides the object and the consumer, through mimesis, projects life into it. No

wonder the strong love for Disney exhibited by children, or the strong connection between

Disney and the commodity fetish in the eyes of many critics. It is also no surprise that

corporations view children as valuable markets and seek to train them early in the habits of

consumerism, one of which includes the mode of animistic mimesis and its penchant for

daydreaming through objects. Animation spreads the mimetic mode necessary for the existence

of contemporary commodity fetishism. Wickstrom summarizes:

By creating environments and narratives through which spectators/consumers are interpellated into fictions produced by and marketed in both shows and stores, entertainment and retail based corporations allow bodies to inhabit commodities and so suggest that commodities, in turn, can be brought to life… In this scenario, it is not through the commodity, but as the commodity that experience apparently takes place. Animated when a consumer steps into the as yet unembodied costume, the commodity then appears to take on a life of its own.88

Animistic mimesis, that mode whereby an audience envisions life in objects, is a materialized

idealism, a collective dream of the perfectibility of our images, and thus an extremely ripe

“message” for the American dream, that old stand-by ideology of consumerism. If cinema

produces habits of contorting ourselves in front of cameras, animation teaches us that we can

bring objects to those cameras to craft images. A more perfect “message” for consumerism, the

corporations that peddle such dreams, and the defenders of the American dream can hardly be

imagined. Viewed in this light, Benjamin’s more positive outlook on the decay of the aura seems

suspect. Yet we must not dismiss Benjamin’s insights so quickly. The value for commodity

88 Maurya Wickstrom, "Commodities, Mimesis, and the Lion King: Retail Theatre for the 1990s," Theatre Journal 51, no. 3 (1999): 284, 91.

fetishism is only one way of interpreting animation and the mode of animistic mimesis. Both also

contain the seeds of a utopian desire, the belief in transferability, the possibility of bridging the

inevitable gap between self and other. In fact, as detailed in the following chapters, animistic

mimesis results in some contradictory translations. In the cultural debates over Disney and

consumerism, animistic mimesis provides the materials for the constitution of a constellation of

metaphors. Seeing Disney animation through the mode of animistic mimesis readily articulates

to a model of communication as transfer and its series of metaphors. Proponents defend Disney’s

magic, its emotion, and its boundary crossing as the work of an Uncle genius, full of harmless

play appropriate for children. Opponents fear, instead, a watering down of true artistic genius

and the spread of childishness to the culture at large. Rhetors have struggled to translate the

cultural landscape to comprehend what is happening to our children, our artists, and our dreams.

As we shall see, transferability, and hence Disney, is heaven to some but hell to others.

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