With a philosopher’s eye: A ‘naive’ view on animation

Animation has never been a subject that has attracted much interest from philosophers. Indeed, one is hard-pressed to find any examples of philosophers working centrally within the discipline who have directly addressed the topic of animation. Someone like Thomas Lamarre, who must surely be counted one of the leading theorists of animation, comes from outside philosophy even though he also draws heavily on philosophical ideas and sources. Often when animation is directly addressed by philosophers, it is from within discussions of film or visual aesthetics (and frequently only as part of some larger discussion – e.g. Cavell, 1979, or Deleuze, 1986), or else, more commonly, in terms of the philosophical content for which particular animated works are taken as the vehicle (this seems especially true of the volumes in the Philosophy and Popular Culture series that address animation, e.g. Irwin et al., 2001, and Steiff and Tamplin, 2010). Often animation itself appears as a field onto which already existing philosophical approaches and concerns can be projected and inscribed – and to some extent this is true, notwithstanding its groundbreaking position in the field, of Alan Cholodenko’s seminal