570812

research-article2015

ANM0010.1177/1746847715570812AnimationPierson

Article

Whole-Screen Metamorphosis
and the Imagined Camera
(Notes on Perspectival
Movement in Animation)

animation:
an interdisciplinary journal
2015, Vol. 10(1) 621
The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permissions:
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DOI: 10.1177/1746847715570812
anm.sagepub.com

Ryan Pierson

University of Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Abstract
This article uses a special kind of distortion of spatial orientation in animation, which the
author calls whole-screen metamorphosis, to problematize the relation that theories of camera
movement often assume between a camera and its world. Recent developments in digital imaging
have prompted confusion among scholars as to whether or not it makes still sense to talk about
camera movement since, in many cases, real cameras were barely used (as in Gravity) or
not at all (as in Frozen). The author argues that this confusion is frequently misguided: camera
movement, as a tool of critical analysis, has always been based on a phenomenology of perspectival
movement, regardless of any use (or non-use) of a real camera. However, animators sometimes
play with perspectival movement in ways that undercut the more fundamental impression of a
cinematic world, effectively metamorphosing our relation to it. Two kinds of this metamorphosis
are explored. One, found in Norman McLarens Blinkity Blank, creates a Gestalt switch of our
impression of space; the other, found in Caroline Leafs The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa, dissolves
the sense of ground that is needed to support an impression of world, in a kind of becominganimal of the camera. These phenomena point to a need for more nuanced accounts of relations
between live-action, animated, and digital images.
Keywords
animation, camera movement, digital media, film theory, metamorphosis

The camera in quotes

The camera, once a cornerstone of film theory and criticism, has become an oddity today. In
becoming digitized, it seems to be able to do more spectacular things more convincingly than ever
before; but in so becoming, it seems to have stopped being, strictly speaking, a camera.

Corresponding author:
Ryan Pierson, University of Pittsburgh, 501 Cathedral of Learning, 4200 Fifth Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 5260, USA.
Email: ryp1@pitt.edu

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Pierson

An especially clear example of this can be found in Gravity (Alfonso Cuaron, 2013). In a
sequence early in the film, protagonist Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) has just detached herself from
the broken arm of her shuttle, and the camera follows her into deep space. As Stone is drifting, she
is tumbling over herself like a rotating planet, and as the camera approaches her, it begins, seamlessly, to tumble with her; approaching closer, it passes through the glass of her helmet, studying
her eyes as they dart frantically; approaching even closer, it turns itself around to look outward,
darting about as Stones eyes were just doing, at the space that it was comfortably occupying a
moment ago. The camera then slowly detaches itself from her, turning back to face her, passing
back outward through her helmet, and letting her float away. The shift in scale, the varieties of
movements, and the ability to pass through things and occupy her viewpoint all underscore the
drama of Stones powerlessness. More than this, though, they underscore the power of the camera.
It asserts a breathless freedom from exactly those laws of physics that are threatening her.
Yet it isnt clear that camera is the right word to be using here. In Gravity, the actors faces (and
sometimes their bodies) are the only things that were actually shot with a camera. The rest is
computer-generated. To describe thousands of digitally composited events as a single camera
movement seems, at least at first blush, like an abuse of language: we seem to be attributing powers
to the wrong thing. How can we even talk about a camera when, as Lev Manovich (2001: 305) puts
it, cinematography [has become] subordinated to 3-D computer animation? Manovich himself is
careful to qualify these cases of computer animation in terms of a virtual camera, an abstract idea
of a point-of-view moving through imaginary space. Donald Crafton (2012) makes a similar qualification in the case of cartoons. For Crafton, the term camera has no diegetic function in a cartoon. He reserves the term for talking about what happens when cel-painted figures are photographed
against static backgrounds. When he describes bizarre perspectival movements, in moments where
something like a finite point of view is acknowledged, he puts the term camera in quotes: the
camera pans to follow the figures (p. 172); Minnies mouth opens wide and swallows the camera (p. 173).
Both Manovich and Crafton try to solve the problem of language with a trick of vocabulary or
grammar, but neither solution is satisfying. If, say, we described the Gravity sequence with the
word virtual in front of every use of the word camera, or if we put quotes around the term or its
movements the virtual camera then slowly detaches itself from her, turning back to face her
it hardly feels like weve addressed the issue. The change feels cosmetic. It acknowledges that
we want a concept that does the work of the word camera, but it does not address the work that
the original concept was doing.
Neologisms and grammatical finessing do not help here, but the fact that we feel a need for them
points to a deeper problem for film scholarship today. Camera movement has long been theorized
as essential to film aesthetics, but the camera has, we feel, become more animated. I mean animated here in two senses: in the technical sense that it is produced synthetically rather than
recorded photographically, and in the sense that it has the kinds of strange powers that we normally
attribute to cartoon characters. Consequently, we dont quite know how to talk about the moving
camera. We are lost.
How to find a way out of this? One solution might be to simply keep using the term camera
as-is. Faked perspectival movement might be more common than it was in decades past, but its
hardly new. A camera that passes through a helmet feels spectacular, but cameras have been passing through walls for decades (as in, for instance, Gertrud [Carl-Theodor Dreyer, 1964] when
Gertrud first enters her new lovers apartment). We might say that the digitized camera only makes
apparent something that was always true: that camera movement is a term of convenience and its
proper use does not entail that a physical camera was moved. Following this line of argument, there
would be no hard-and-fast distinction between a live-action camera and an animated camera. All

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uses of perspectival movement, real or animated, would be included under a notion of camera
movement that defines a camera not as a physical entity but as any thing which takes a view of a
world. Given the recent interest in the concept of worlds from a variety of angles, from digital
media scholarship to animation studies to phenomenological film theory, this seems like the most
palatable solution (for examples, see Buchan, 2006; Sobchack, 1992; Steinberg, 2012; Wolf, 2012).
This article will argue against that solution, at least in certain cases. For some kinds of perspectival movement in animation, it is not helpful to refer to a camera moving through a world. These
cases instead bring the concept of a world into question. I call these cases whole-screen
metamorphoses.
The basic idea is this. In order to feel like we are going somewhere, we need to feel like we
are somewhere. Whole-screen metamorphosis makes it difficult, if not impossible, to locate
ourselves in this way. That difficulty is accomplished by changing the terms on which we view
the space. Under whole-screen metamorphosis, the question of where we are threatens to become
groundless.
Instances of this are rare, but they are worth exploring in light of the confusion over live-action
and animated film in the digital era. Discussions about contemporary relations between live-action
and animation tend to be variations of the question, is cinema becoming more like animation?
Films like Gravity seem especially important for these questions, because calling it an animated or
a live-action film is an open question (Debruge, 2013). I want to move away from questions like
this, because their answers tend to be less informative than they seem to be. They tend to assume
an extremely broad, almost vacuous, idea of what animation is. For one thing, its easy to forget
historical specificity when asking such questions. Even if we could conclusively say that Gravity
is an animated film, what does this say about animation, other than that it sometimes resembles
live-action film? It is more productive to pursue specific questions about how particular animation
techniques function. Whole-screen metamorphosis provides one such avenue of inquiry.
More importantly, what the technique of whole-screen metamorphosis points to confusion
over a world and our place in it has implications for how we think about the divide between liveaction and animation more generally. Film theory tends to characterize the difference between
photographically-based cinema and digitally-based or animated cinema as a clear choice between
types of worlds. Photographically-based cinema, the arguments tend to go, acknowledges this
world; animated or digital cinema imagines other worlds (see Andrew, 2010; Koch, 2009;
Manovich, 2001; Rodowick, 2007). Whole-screen metamorphosis fits into neither kind of world.
This has ethical and political consequences. (Which is to say that the ways we think about how
to act in the world depend on what we think a world is.) Theorists who favor photographicallybased or realist cinema tend to embrace its contingency, its unknowns, its ability to surprise us.
Theorists who favor the digital or animation often take it to express a longing for another kind of
world, an effort to change the world by putting new ideas into it. That is: both of these positions
use world as a way of thinking about where change comes from. Whole-screen metamorphosis
reverses this relation. It uses change to think about world.

Being somewhere
Given our present anxiety over the status of the camera, one might think that studies of camera
movement have always assumed a realist aesthetic or ontology. This is not the case. In fact, our
current theoretical accounts of camera movement can be traced back to the modernist reaction
against realism in the 1960s and 1970s. Two critics who were instrumental in articulating the goals
of modernist film theory, Nol Burch and Annette Michelson, fiercely celebrated camera movement, but they did not use it to emphasize the indexical relation between a physical camera and its

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view. Instead, Burch and Michelson find camera movement significant for its formal features. For
them, the original act of recording is irrelevant.
For example, Michelson (1969: 59) writes that the trolley ride in Sunrise (FW Murnau, 1928)
that takes us from country to city in a single shot carries the spectator away along the protagonists
journey to redemption and, simultaneously, toward a spatialized understanding of narrative form
itself. The trolley ride was shot with miniatures, but Michelson does not treat it as a special effects
shot: she treats it as a camera movement, on a par with a camera movement in Ivan the Terrible
Part I (Sergei Eisenstein, 1944). What matters for her is the effect of being moved from one place
to another, the phenomenology of perspectival movement.
Several subsequent theories of camera movement can be called phenomenological. David
Bordwell (1977) defines the moving camera purely as a perceptual effect. Vivian Sobchack (1982)
treats the camera as another body that we recognize as exploring a films world. Edward Branigan
(2006) defines the camera more generally as a conceptual tool that viewers make use of as necessary. Daniel Morgan (2011) defines a certain kind of moving camera as a moral observer, free to
comment on characters but unable to help them.
Each of these accounts emphasizes different qualities of camera movement. (If, for example, we
follow Bordwell, we may note the virtuosic changes of scale in the Gravity sequence as formally
satisfying, independent of the narrative; if we follow Morgan, we may interpret the cameras virtuosity as, ironically, able to sense Stones fear but powerless to do anything about it.) But what
ultimately matters for all these accounts is that the camera expresses something in its movement
that we can feel. This point is instructive for thinking about the kind of work we expect from a
concept like camera movement. The purpose of the concept is not to state an empirical fact about
a camera operator who moved a piece of machinery. The purpose is to give form to certain qualities
of film experience. Camera movement is a critical tool used to distinguish styles from each other,
to note strange sensory effects, and to interpret films. If we were to say that every camera ever used
on a film was a moving camera, on the grounds that the Earth underneath it was revolving around
the sun, or if we were to say that no camera ever really moves because it is always passively part
of a dolly or a crane or a human body thats moving it, then the concept would become useless.
When critics inquire into the nature of camera movement, it is with an eye toward effects, not
causes.
Building on this, it seems that the awkwardness-of-fit between the live-action camera and the
animated camera is a false problem. Differences between the two are not to be found in accounts
of their respective modes of production but in descriptions of how they look and function, in how
our perspective moves relative to the space that envelops it. We might formalize this and say tentatively that, inasmuch as animation creates a diegetic world, it automatically performs the same
perceptual and expressive functions in its use of perspectival movement, inasmuch as we recognize
it as such, that we already attribute to live-action film. On this account, the camera does not need
to exist in animation. It only needs to be somewhere, relative to what we see.
For some animated films, this understanding of camera movement works exceptionally well. In
particular, it captures the intuition that camera movements in live-action/effects hybrids like
Gravity and in all-CGI films like Frozen (Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, 2013) have a similar feel,
a sense of freely traversing a sensuously rich environment. Take, for example, a shot from Frozen.
During the ice-storm climax, we start on an overhead medium shot looking straight down at our
hero Kristoff; he is slowly trudging through the snow to rescue Anna. But where is Anna? The
camera offers a concrete answer to that question: it shoots upward several hundred feet, soars laterally over what feels like miles of empty terrain, then finally finds Anna shivering and floats down
to meet her. As in Gravity, the dramatic tension of the shot depends on the camera going places that
the characters cannot. (The change of scale underscores this power.) Some hand-drawn animated

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films may accomplish a similar effect by redrawing their backgrounds with every step of perspectival movement. Osamu Tezukas Jumping (1984), in which we inhabit the point-of-view of a figure who rises higher with every jump, creates a breathtaking sense of moving through the air with
a drawn surface that is constantly changing with our perspective.
However, this point has not really dissolved the problem. It has moved it. The term camera has
been relieved of its empirical burden; now it only has to be a view of a world. But this shifts the
burden of explanation to world. What does the concept of world do?
World plays a large part in the philosophies that underlie each of those theories of camera movement mentioned earlier. Sobchack takes her cues from Merleau-Ponty; Branigan from a mixture of
Wittgenstein and cognitive science; Morgan from Stanley Cavell and his implied mixture of
Wittgenstein and Heidegger. (I take Bordwells theoretical commitments to lie most closely with
Branigan.) Each of these thinkers means slightly different things by the term. For Merleau-Ponty
(2012), our world is always already open to us through our perceptions of it. For Wittgenstein
(1953), a world is built up from the normative functions of ones language. For Cavell (1969, 1971,
1979), a world is forged as a kind of moral act against the temptations of solipsism. There are some
implicit disagreements between them (on, for example, the question of there being one or many
worlds). But what binds these philosophers together is their emphasis on descriptions of experience. Its that emphasis that makes all of these theories of camera movement phenomenological.
As such, these accounts all define world in the same basic way: as a field of related possible
actions. (The field may be literal or metaphorical, as in the concept of language-games that
Branigan invokes, which imagines the use of words as moves on a chessboard.) There are two
criteria at work here. First, as a field, the world must exceed our view of it. It must continue beyond
our horizon; some part of it must remain hidden from us. Second, a world must work as a structural
invariance that defines what kinds of actions may take place within it. A world, in sum, surrounds
us and supports us.
These two criteria help clarify why camera movement is such a powerful tool in articulating a
cinematic world. Perspectival movement activates what Nol Burch (1973) calls offscreen space,
demonstrating that there is always more of the space than what we can see. It also, as Bordwell
(1977: 2223) and Branigan (2006: 7273) point out, activates the kinetic depth effect: objects
appear fuller when we view them from multiple angles. Parallax contributes as well. These cues
give the impression of a field that can be traversed. At the same time, our very ability to see perspectival movement implies a stable structure through which the camera travels. This structure has
recognizable laws, like gravity and inertia. That the characters are subject to these laws (Stone
cant stop drifting, Kristoff cant fly) makes the cameras defiance of them all the more thrilling.
From here it would be a small step to claim that every perspectival movement, by definition,
articulates a world of some kind. The very term perspectival movement implies as much. We need
a point of view beyond which we cannot see. The movement of that point of view is only recognizable relative to something stable namely, the world itself. But the matter is more complicated
than this. We need to contend with the possibility of an animated world whose parts are not all
related, a world that is not open in the ways we expect from live-action and CGI.
Take the example of the turntable camera that the Fleischer studio used in the 1930s. This apparatus places cel-animated figures into miniature three-dimensional sets: flat-color figures share
space here with finely-shaded drawings or sculpted objects. When we follow a character walking
from one place to another, the set rotates to create a parallax effect and a limited range of focus. Yet
these effects do not yield the impression of a camera that can fully explore the space. Instead, as JP
Telotte (2010) argues, the effects seem decorative. This happens partly because actions are limited
to the horizontal plane, which makes the change of perspective look like a platter being rotated.
More disturbingly, different materials in the shot give us conflicting visual cues, which make light

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and color seem to obey different laws depending on the object. We see, in Telottes words, a double space. These worlds run parallel to each other but they do not touch (pp. 79112). Even if cel
characters acknowledge the miniatures this happens in Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Babas Forty
Thieves (Dave Fleischer, 1937) when Popeye and company stop at a three-dimensional traffic light
it feels like a momentary rupture, not like a world opening itself up for us.
Disneys multiplane camera avoids some of these discontinuities. Layers of drawings are moved
at different distances and speeds relative to each other; there is no rotating platter to make the space
feel encircled on itself, and there are no 3D objects. But contradictions persist: the backgrounds
have subtle gradations of tone, while the color of the moving figures remains uniform. This yields
a strange sense of deepening and flattening the image at the same time. Planes of setting and planes
of action seem to have different properties, creating a series of incomplete worlds stacked atop
each other like cards in a deck. (This is a consequence of the separation of planes in cel animation
more generally; see Thompson, 1980, and Lamarre, 2009: 344.)
This does not necessarily mean, however, that films like Fleischers Forty Thieves or Disneys
The Old Mill (Wilfred Jackson, 1937) do not depict a world. The question here is one of use or
access to the worlds various parts, and not the structural integrity of the world itself. These worlds
have strange rules. Some things are possible and some things are not: Popeye can perform feats of
superhuman strength, but he cannot touch the out-of-focus bag in the foreground. Thomas Lamarre
(2009: 9) calls instances like this multiplanar worlds. They do not imply a complete lack of relation between layers of an image but a peculiar distant relation. Our mode of exploring these worlds
is always in some way lateral, regardless of how fine the differences between layers. We can think
of different materials sharing a space, like cel-painted figures and three-dimensional objects in the
same shot, in the same way that Lamarre thinks of different planes: as being contiguous with each
other but not totally accessible to each other. As such, it still makes sense to call these instances
camera movements, in the customary sense.
However, a world is not just a matter of access, use, or specific actions: it is a matter of support.
That support, which Ive described as a structural invariance, does not always hold up. To demonstrate
how this happens, I need to take a detour through another animation technique: metamorphosis.

The discovery of zero

Metamorphosis is perhaps the most-often cited feature of animation. The most famous account of
it comes from Eisenstein. His notes on Disney are a crucial point in the shift in his own theoretical
agenda, from a concern with inserting as many conflicting elements into a film as possible to a
concern with organic wholes. This organicism finds its epitome in 1930s Disney. Disneys characters, as per Eisenstein (1988: 2), enjoy an absolute freedom from all categories. That is, they seem
to have the power to turn into anything they wish. When drawn figures transform when Mickey
Mouse stretches his arm to hit a piano note, or when ocean waves turn into boxing gloves they
seem to give form to our own primitive desire for formlessness. The result is a feeling of no longer
being restricted by the physical laws that ground our own bodies.
It is important to note that metamorphosis as such does not always imply the sense of freedom
or power that Eisenstein attributes to it. When Mickey stretches his arm, the arm is doing exactly
what Mickey wants it to, in pursuit of a specific goal. Moreover, the arm can always change back.
These two properties of the action, intentionality and constancy, are precisely what enable us to
recognize cartoon metamorphoses as acts of freedom or power. These events exaggerate the control that we have over our own bodies.
Metamorphosis need not always work in this way. It can become its own kind of rigid control
over a body, as happens in The Flying Mouse (David Hand, 1934) when the titular mouse grows

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freakish wings and, to his horror, finds that he cannot get his old body back. (He eventually does.)
Such instances still partake in Eisensteins broad logic, a victory of magic over mechanism, but
metamorphosis need not be magical either. Animators may use it as a shorthand for illustrating
general processes, as UPA co-founders John Hubley and Zachary Schwartz (1946: 363) argue. This
kind of metamorphosis children turning into soldiers, soldiers to graves often carries an
instructional function to illustrate ideas or broad trends. As such, it typically acclimatizes us to
modern mechanism, instead of resisting it. It makes no sense in Hubley and Schwartzs example to
ask whether the children are exploiting a power to turn into graves. Animators can also use metamorphosis to make comparisons. Emile Cohl does this in Les Joyeux Microbes (1909), when cells
turn out to resemble the social types after whom they are named.
The first two kinds of metamorphosis call these concrete play with a sense of identity that
underlies the transformation. The body may obey the personality, or it may work against it: either
way, the personality remains. The other two cases call them abstract work differently. They
establish relations between separate things, operating from a principle of distinction. In concrete
metamorphosis, we attribute properties to a thing that, in some attenuated sense, remains constant.
In abstract metamorphosis, the constancy of a thing is not an issue. In fact we are not dealing with
things at all, but generalizations. We might utter with wonder that there seems to be nothing that
Mickeys body cannot do; but it makes no sense to say that of Cohls remarkable microbes. This is
because the microbes dont really do anything. They do not effect change.
What would happen, though, if there were cases when constancy was an issue in concrete metamorphosis? What if, say, throughout the transformations in Duck Amuck (Chuck Jones, 1953),
Daffy had no awareness of being transformed, no sense that he was being toyed with, no memory
of what had just happened at any given time? As it stands, Duck Amuck gets its jokes from Daffys
constant personality: the animator, Bugs Bunny, can change any number of things about Daffy, but
he cannot stop him from being Daffy. If Daffys personality was changing with the transformations, rather than trying to resist them, then we may wonder whether there was such a thing as
Daffy in the film.
This imaginary case raises a different set of issues than those raised by typical cartoon metamorphoses. Whats at issue here are not pleasures of freedom or power but questions about the nature
of identity and change. We have stopped dreaming about escapes from the strictures of this world
and started wondering how the world works.
As historian Caroline Walker Bynum (2001: 19) argues, change is the test, the limit, of all
denotations of the term identity. Bynum notes that scholars in 12th-century Europe pondered
questions of change and identity in nature and religion, such as the mystery of bread turning into
Christs body. Metamorphoses in animation tend to treat change itself as either decorative (while
leaving a substantive core intact: think again of Mickeys reversible arm-stretching), or as a series
of substitutions of one essence for another. But in some cases of animation, we can wonder just
what kind of change is taking place. In Gerrit van Dijk and Monique Renaults Pas Deux (1988),
for example, we see a pair of dancers morphing into famous figures. The nature of these changes
is unclear. When Mickey Mouse dips Eve and quickly changes into Fred Astaire, who then pulls
her back up, we can wonder whether it was two different things, Mickey then Astaire, who performed the same action or whether it was a single underlying substance, a MickeyAstaire unit,
that changed its appearance.
Attributions of change, like motion, are relative. To say that we never step in the same river
twice, or to say that reincarnation is a form of life that persists after death, implies requirements for
what change and persistence consist of. It also requires reference to a particular aspect of what is
persisting or changing. In other words, we fit our accounts of change into a supporting structure, a
world. As Nelson Goodman (1978: 9) argues: Identity or constancy is identity with regard to what

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it is within that world as organized. Metamorphosis, like motion, makes sense by our relying on
an invariant structure. A world in which nothing is anything like anything else, or a world in which
everything is exactly like everything else, is not a world.
I left off the discussion on camera movement by saying that camera movements must be supported by a world. The cases of metamorphosis Ive described so far require a similar support, a
ground against which we can attribute change or constancy to a figure. What happens, then, when
the support itself, the ground, changes? How do we talk about that?
Consider Norman McLarens Blinkity Blank (1955). In the film, which is animated by McLaren
directly etching lines onto a black filmstrip, two birdlike figures, one blue and one pink, antagonize
and tease each other. The bird-figures move in quick, reduced gestures against a black background
whose value is undefined.
The term undefined needs explaining, for it is crucial for the remarkable change that comes. I
do not mean undefined here in the sense of being unclear, but in the more precise mathematical
sense of lying outside a given domain of inquiry in the sense that undefined is the result of trying to divide by zero. (Zero is, of course, the absence of value, but it still bears at least the possibility of value: dividing by zero yields the value undefined because the operation is nonsensical.
One cannot ask how many absences of value there are in any number [except zero].) The black
emulsion, in other words, has no bearing on the space that the figures occupy. We see the black, but
we do not see it as anything. If we were to ask what is happening in a black corner of the frame,
the proper answer would not exactly be nothing, as we might answer of, say, an unoccupied doorway in a feature film. In the latter case, the doorway still puts limits on what might happen within
it, it has a structural value. A better answer in the case of the black emulsion would be a shrug, or
a suspicion that weve asked the wrong question. There would be no way to gauge an answer to it.
It would be like asking what lies underneath a geometric figure in a textbook, or what lies in the
space between a photograph and the caption printed below it. We could make up any answer we
want (invisible elves; another, more interesting, caption; etc.), but no answer would satisfy us,
because no answer could possibly matter.
This undefined status of the black emulsion changes at the climax of the film, when the figures
mate. The screen becomes occupied by some debris that starts small, around the center of the
frame, and grows larger as it swirls toward the edges of the screen. All the while, the birds flash
before us in forms that recall earlier moments in the film. These figures now seem to be flying
forward through the air, and we seem to be flying with them.
The effect here is one of deep surprise ontological surprise, even. It differs from the multiplanar movements of cel animation, in that McLaren is manipulating a single homogeneous surface.
Once the movement-into-depth begins, there is no sense that any portion of the space is closed off
from us. Yet the effect also differs from that of Frozen or Jumping. In those cases, the camera may
be moving or stationary at any given time, and when the camera begins to move, it doesnt exactly
surprise us. In Blinkity Blank before the shift into perspectival movement, the distinction between
a stationary and a moving camera has no purchase. To say that the camera was stationary, and then
started moving, does not capture the sense of ontological surprise here. It is more like deep space
did not so much as exist before the movement into it.1
This is because the way that we see the black background has changed. Instead of an undefined
value, it has the clear value of an empty, and therefore traversable, space. It has consistency. It
holds place. It is as if zero has been discovered.
Whats happened here is not really a camera movement but a Gestalt switch: a dramatic shift in
the way that a picture is organized. Very little in the picture has changed, and yet it seems wholly
different. The effect is not that of exploring a world that is already open to us but of suddenly leaping into another kind of world altogether. The ground is not where we thought it would be or is

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it more accurate to say that the ground is not where it was before? On what grounds can we say that
we occupy the same space before and after the perspectival shift, simply seeing it in a new way?
On what grounds might we say instead that the world itself has changed? And if it has changed, on
what grounds can we say that its the same world only different? Or, must we say that it is so different that it has effectively been substituted for another world?
This vertiginous strangeness is characteristic of Gestalt switches. It comes from the sense that
something has changed without our having a means of orienting ourselves in relation to the change.
This is why camera movement is not the appropriate term here. The term camera movement
does not capture the experience because the term depends on an invariant structure against which
we can gauge our own movement. Here, the structure itself has changed shape. Its better described
as a whole-screen metamorphosis, and its perceptual concerns are distinct from those of customary
perspectival movement. What perspectival movement depends on for its sense of scope and power
a stable world is exactly what whole-screen metamorphosis brings into question.
This doesnt mean that the change leaves us with no way of talking about it at all. The change
is brought about by the birds mating and producing an offspring. Something new is brought into
the world and it changes that world in unforeseen ways. But if we place too much emphasis on the
narrative status of the event, we would be led to a facile (and troubling) interpretation of this
change as a blind affirmation of heterosexual love and procreation. It would also, I believe, be an
unfair one, given McLarens own homosexuality and his career-long lack of interest in romantic
love or family except as occasions for formal play.
Instead, it is useful to note the kind of context in which the experience of a Gestalt switch is
typically invoked. Wittgenstein (1953: 194) takes the Gestalt switch as the prototypical example of
the dawning of an aspect. Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Kohler uses something like this phenomenon, which he calls insight, when he describes the problem-solving behavior of apes: a
solution to a problem seems to come all at once and it changes the whole field of behavior for the
ape (cited in Ash, 1995: 157158). Thomas Kuhn (1962) uses the Gestalt switch to describe discoveries that shift scientific paradigms. For Kuhn, these changes are so totalizing that in their
aftermath, scientists effectively work in a different world than the world in which theyd worked
before (p. 118).
In other words, Gestalt switches are often invoked to describe discoveries in the world that
change that world, or change ones sense of that world. The vertigo in the switch is accompanied
by a feeling of wonder, of new possibilities opening up. The switch into deep space in Blinkity
Blank offers a sense of liberation in just this way. It is not a cartoon sense of freedom from strictures; that latter freedom amounts to an absence of consequences. It is the establishment of new
consequences that demand to be explored.
McLaren had a lifelong interest in animations educational possibilities. This conviction was a
common theme of much of mid-century animation, and it often entailed translating messages into
visual symbols. (Hubley and Schwartzs [1946] advocacy for abstract metamorphosis is a symptom of this.) McLarens use of the Gestalt switch takes this conviction a step further: despite not
having any overt educational content, it formalizes the means by which we come to see the world
in new ways. McLaren demonstrates here what it is like to have an insight.
The change works as a kind of sensuous formalization of Kuhns idea of intellectual progress as
evolution-from. Kuhns notion of paradigm shifts notoriously makes impossible the idea of scientific progress as a steady accumulation of information or a development toward a fixed goal (like
truth). Nonetheless, we do not have an equal choice among paradigms. Once we have learned
modern mechanics, we cannot see a falling stone in the same way that an Aristotelian would (Kuhn,
1962: 170178). Although the direction of scientific inquiry, for Kuhn, is not teleological, it is
nonetheless irreversible. The direction of our perceptual change from undefined-space to

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zero-space is irreversible in the same way. If McLaren had made the switch in the other direction,
from zero-space to undefined-space, there would be no effect we would simply read the flatness
as a stationary viewpoint.
We can call McLarens use of whole-screen metamorphosis here perspectival movement, but
not in the way that a camera movement is. It is a movement of perspective itself. It is characterized
not by a sense of bodily mobility but a thrill of deep discovery that is somehow both internal and
external in nature. Although it doesnt offer the same assurances of constancy that camera movement offers, it nonetheless retains the kind of rigidity that we expect from a world. It is a leap from
constancy to constancy. The ground is not where we thought it was, but it is still somewhere.
However, there is another way of using whole-screen metamorphosis that does not even retain this
assurance, wherein the ground threatens to melt away.

Fluid mechanics
Consider the trademark sand-on-glass technique used by Caroline Leaf. In the 1960s, Leaf developed a technique that used beach sand on a light table. Instead of photographing a series of individual drawings, Leaf would manipulate the same body of sand over time, photographing its
changes step by step, adding or taking away sand as necessary. Like McLarens scratch technique,
Leaf works with a single homogeneous surface. Every detail exists on the same ontological level.
But rather than start from scratch with every frame, Leafs sand technique allows her to change
certain portions of the frame and leave others intact. This, in turn, allows her to fill the frame with
a considerable amount of detail (compare with McLarens spare figures), while leaving the surface
open to itself in a way not available to multiplanar animation.
In her first film, Sand, or Peter and the Wolf (1969), Leaf uses the frame-by-frame continuity of
materials to move the narrative forward. By changing the shape of the sand, she could have the
same materials offer, say, first a view of the wolfs body in profile, then a close-up of the wolfs
face, using metamorphosis as a kind of dissolve to mark different shots of a scene. (This is not quite
abstract metamorphosis, since it does not generalize or illustrate anything, but it is not concrete
either; it is a formal shorthand.) We recognize a single volume of sand altering itself to look like
one thing, then another. The change is decorative. There is a clear separation between the properties of the sand and the properties of the wolf.
My focus here will not be on that film but a later film, The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa. This
film makes some use of the shifting-sand-as-dissolve technique. But much more prominent is the
use of sand for perspectival movements. When applied to perspectival movement, the shifting sand
does not quite carry over into the diegesis, but the effect is nonetheless more than decorative.
One of the films most intricate movements will illustrate this point. Gregor, who has found himself transformed into a large bug, is shut inside his unlit bedroom. He has crawled to the door so that
he can hear his sister playing the violin in the living room nearby. After a cut, we are in the living
room viewing Gregor in close-up through a crack under the door. Then we fly backwards through
the entire living room to the opposite wall, to find the sister playing, the mother knitting, the father
reading; then, without a cut, we start moving again, swooping back around the room in a horizontal
arc at eye-level, as if to see Gregors family from the point-of-view that Gregor longs to inhabit.
At first blush, this example seems more straightforward than Blinkity Blank. Leaf does not
appear to change the rules of the space on us. She even seems to prefigure the contemporary liberated camera in several ways. We take in all 360 degrees of the room. We do things that the human
body, and even a 1970s handheld camera, cannot do. We nestle up against the doorcrack at floorlevel. When we fly back from that position, we just barely miss the music stand and the mothers

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head. (In this regard it resembles an animated steadicam.) But do we get the sense of a space that
transcends our view of it? It isnt clear how to answer this.
For one thing, the space is unstable. Over the course of the shot, the mothers ball of yarn
changes in size and location. Sometimes it looks large, sometimes small. And in the first several
frames that we see it, it does not match where the ground seems to be in relation to the chair: it
floats above the floor and then settles down. Moreover, when we swoop back to the door, the sisters body becomes insubstantial and blends in to the wallpaper. Because the space changes with
our view of it, we find it impossible to concretely locate ourselves within it. (We can see that the
father is next to the mother, but were not sure what that would mean here.) The potential points
of reference are fuzzy, gelatinous. Which means, since to be a point is to be exact, that they are
hardly points at all.
In fact, the whole notion of points here seems inappropriate. This is because of the peculiar
effect that the sand technique has more generally on the perspectival movement. Because Leaf only
moves a little bit of sand at a time, there are several portions of the grain that stay the same, while
our view of the whole is supposed to be changing. Often the same patch of sand will stand for one
area of space, then another, then another. For example: in the last several frames of our flying
backward, we see the wallpaper pattern on the far wall, but as we keep moving backward and the
figures keep getting smaller, the wallpaper remains constant. Additionally: a white patch on the
music stand will, at one moment, indicate the edge of the stand. Then, after a few frames, the same
patch will indicate a highlight toward the middle, the edge having wandered elsewhere. Each of
these shifts can count, on its own, as a Gestalt switch. But unlike Blinkity Blank, they do not add
up to any consistent organization. They are placed randomly throughout the frame. Looking at the
way that a part changes does not give us a clear picture of a change in the whole. Any point in the
frame may change at any time. Or it may stay the same. And there is no guarantee that any change
or constancy at any one point is a change or constancy relative to the larger area.
This is a different experience from a sudden switch into deep space. McLaren used the ambiguity of black to take us from blank space to empty space; Leaf makes the screen teem with details.
She gives us no real sense of empty space or distance. There is simply too much to keep up with.
We do not feel a ground suddenly shifting beneath us. We do not even feel something rigid enough
to qualify as a ground. It feels more like moving through a fluid. There is little, if any, resistance
nothing to press against. We sink into it. Even when we move upward, it is as if we are being
swallowed by something.
Clearly, this change requires a different model. We find one, appropriately, in Deleuze and
Guattaris study of the films source material, Kafkas writings. Particularly useful is Deleuze and
Guattaris (1986) description of becoming-animal. Becoming-animal, they argue, is a strategy for
escaping a rigid structure. One resists an oppressive power not by running away from it, or by
fighting back, but by going limp so limp that the process tends to be described as a change in state
of matter, as losing shape altogether. Superficially, this may seem like cartoon metamorphosis, a
freedom that Eisenstein calls plasmatic. But there is a key difference: whereas a plasmatic thing
is free from worldly consequences while still inhabiting a recognizable world, becoming-animal
changes the world itself. Becoming-animal makes the world as fluid as its subject (pp. 1213). The
world, as Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly emphasize, becomes a world without fixed forms.
Consequently, the kinds of perceptual segmentation that make possible any appeal to, say, a wholesale Gestalt switch part/whole relations, the figure/ground distinction, and so on segmentations
that also ground phenomenologys own descriptions of being in the world become useless. When
Gregor becomes-animal, it is as if he had boiled himself into a soup and boiled all the solid parts
of his surroundings with him.

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I want to emphasize that this kind of transformation does not apply to the character of Gregor
himself in Leafs film: he remains too anthropomorphized for that. But the transformation does
describe what happens to our point of view once it starts moving. As long as our view is fixed, there
are no problems of orientation. Despite the drag-effect of the sand and the perspectival distortions
(Leaf is fond of exaggerating depth), we remain stable. This is because we can easily distinguish
the fixed elements from the moving elements. But when the perspective itself moves, it is as if that
fixity had never existed, and we have to adjust to a different mode of seeing, a mode in which a
fixed pattern of sand does not mean a fixed feature of the world. The movement of perspective
triggers an ungrounding of world. It nearly comes apart before us.
This dissolution is never complete. The diegesis does not totally give way to mere grains of sand
swirling on a surface. (That does happen when Leaf uses the sand to approximate editing in Peter
and the Wolf; when that happens, we detach the sand from what it represents and wait for it to form
another picture, at which point the story can continue.) But we do seem to be approaching something else, another kind of world, one of constant flux, one wherein the problem of induction is not
an exercise in skeptical thought but a practical problem that applies everywhere to everything we
see. (The problem of induction, first articulated by David Hume, is an overlapping point of concern
for both Deleuze, see 1991 and 1994: 7075, and Nelson Goodman, 1983: 5983.) An environment
like this can hardly be called a world, at least in the sense of a field of possible action. It would
be just as well to use the word stuff or amorphous mass. There is no basis on which to intend
anything like an action, only a flow to submit to.
This more or less reverses the effect of McLarens Gestalt switch. There, the world changes
before us in a way that, so to speak, makes the camera possible. Here, the camera, once it starts
moving, ceases to have the powers of a camera. It ceases to be in a world that has the boundaries
and distinctions that would make its movement possible. There is a double change here. The camera changes the fabric of the world by setting itself in motion. But once it changes the world, it
nearly melts into it, immediately relinquishing those powers.
Stanley Cavell (1979: 127) claims that the camera is outside its subject as I am outside my
language. His claim functions in the same way as the claim I made earlier, that the camera must be
somewhere. He means that the intentionality of the camera, its directedness, is analogous to the
intentionality of our own perceptions, thoughts, and actions. The remark is a caution against empty
gestures of self-reference, like holding the camera up to a mirror: for Cavell, this reflexive gesture
does not yet say anything, it is a cinematic equivalent of the contentless statement I am I. But his
deeper point is that in order to say something, a subject (and a camera) must stand apart from the
statement that the subject intends. It is just this separateness undergirding intentionality that a
world in flux denies. This is why the perspectival movement in Samsa has a strangely passive quality to it. It is also why Deleuze and Guattari (1986) insist that becoming-animal is a step toward the
dissolution of the subject altogether. In the final step of this process, which they call becomingcollective, there is no more separation between an agent and what it intends. There is no more separation between a speaker and what the speaker says, or between a speaker and other speakers. In
other words: no more intentionality, no more agency. A world that becomes fluid once we move
through it and which liquefies us in the process is a world that simply happens to us. It is a world
in which I am not I anymore, because I is no longer I. It is a world in which there is only a there is.

Being lost
In both of these cases, perspectival movement is played with in such a way that we get lost if we
want to talk about a moving camera. This difficulty has nothing to do with the fact that neither
filmmaker moved a camera. (Leaf worked with a stationary camera, McLaren never even used

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one.) Instead, it is because the concept of a moving camera does not adequately address the sense
of movement to which the films appeal. The very term camera movement implies a finite movement over a field of possible action. That term loses its relevance when the notion of possible
action changes or disarticulates.
These anomalies are important to keep in mind when we wonder at the contemporary cameras
powers to make live-action feel more like animation, as happens in Gravity, or make animation feel
more like live-action, as happens in Frozen. What makes this overlap possible? It is not enough to
point to the powers of computers, as contemporary theories tend to do. The overlap only occurs
when the terms of live-action and animation are sufficiently shared to articulate the terms of a
stable world that exceeds and supports our view of it. Frozen demands that we feel the vastness of
a traversable space, just as much as Gravity does. We need to know exactly where we are. Or, if we
lose our way, we need to know what we require to find our way again.
The whole-screen metamorphoses Ive described depend on a different kind of thrill. It is a feeling of ones world becoming unfixed. Where do we place this sensation, how do we make sense of
it? It is not the same as the appeal that film theorists like DN Rodowick and Gertrud Koch attribute
to digital manipulation or animation as such. That appeal, according to those accounts, is one of
imagination. It is an extension of plasmaticness, a feeling of empowerment: we are not satisfied
with the world as it is, so we escape into worlds of our own. Whole-screen metamorphosis doesnt
work like that. We are forced to orient ourselves to changes that are unforeseen and outside of our
control.
This condition, counterintuitively, seems closer to what is often ascribed to realist film aesthetics. According to realist accounts, photographic images are special because, having been produced
automatically, they cannot be controlled by any artist. They exceed the imagination of the artist
because contingencies always come up. These contingencies force us, in turn, to be more open, to
realize that part of the world will always remain mysterious to us. Dudley Andrew (2010: 42) calls
this a cinema of discovery; Daniel Morgan (2006) calls it one of acknowledgment. In both cases,
the point is to emphasize our general experience as coming from something external to ourselves.
That experience describes something like what Ive emphasized in whole-screen metamorphosis: McLaren creates a thrill of discovery, Leaf creates an experience that almost erases the distinction between ourselves and the world (and so might be taken as efforts to restore our relation to
the world). But we cannot call these instances realist either, any more than we can call them cartoony. This is because the realist and cartoonist accounts differentiate themselves by means of a
rigid divide between our internal world (the world of imagination) and our external world (other
objects and other people), and that divide is exactly whats being undercut here. The problems of
whole-screen metamorphosis are not problems of choosing this world or another world. They are
problems of change or novelty as such. They are problems of organization.
Here its worth recalling the 12th centurys fascination with the ontology of change. Why were
alterations of all kinds, from digestion to the Eucharist to religious conversion, such urgent matters? Because, Bynum (2001: 2627) argues, medieval Europe was itself changing, in ways that
made the world seem less well-known than it had seemed before and that made social roles seem
less fixed. Contact with other civilizations and newly available works of Aristotle were forcing a
shift in what the world was thought to be especially, in the case of Aristotles works, a reckoning
with the idea that change could give rise to something wholly new, rather than proceeding as a step
in a predetermined plan or as a mere rearrangement of existing parts. New career opportunities led
thinkers to consider identity itself as unfixed, as changeable, and, implicitly, as arbitrary.
Both Thomas Kuhns invocation of the Gestalt switch and Deleuze and Guattaris concept of
becoming-animal are efforts to think through problems of this sort. Kuhn describes what it feels
like to discover something new. It comes with a demand that we, in our search for constancy as

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such, leave behind what we used to think of as constant. Deleuze and Guattari describe new
arrangements of political power. Their concepts, originally meant to be weapons against the existing social order, have increasingly come to describe networks of forces into which we are already
born (see Deleuze, 1992; Galloway and Thacker, 2008).
In the face of these kinds of changes, we often feel lost. I submit that the experience of worldaltering perspectival movements in animation is valuable because it gives expression to the heady
excitement and the profound difficulty of being lost in a world that is in flux. This sense, I stress,
is distinct from the cartoony sense of molding the world to our desires and from the realist sense of
openness to the world. It is closer to a sense that there might not be a world.
What might this sense entail? For an answer I turn, in closing, to a form that readily accommodates whole-screen metamorphosis: commercials.
Two recent ad campaigns in particular have made liberal use of the technique. The first is Fords
Rant ad series for its F-series truck. These ads illustrate features of the truck with a series of
graphic tableaux, transitioning between them with a number of perspectival shifts in scale and
direction, and often using Gestalt switches (for example, a truck pulling cargo in silhouette is
flipped on its side to become the negative space of a gas pump handle). All this occurs, in each ad,
within a single continuous take that does not add up to any coherent sense of space.
The other campaign is IBMs Smarter Planet series. Some of these ads use graphic switches
similar to the Ford ads, but others use three-dimensional computer imagery. One of them depicts a
swarm of data particles that morph into city skylines, surgeons at an operating table, and so on,
illustrating the functions of IBMs data analysis services all accompanied by perspectival shifts
along a cloudy background that move us into, behind, along, underneath, and away from the
things we are seeing. Like the Ford ads, there is no interest here in establishing a space through
which we might intentionally move. Instead, the ads repeat, over and over, the feeling of being
moved, the sense of having to reorient ourselves. The changes come at us quickly, and they are far
more disorienting than anything in Blinkity Blank or Samsa. IBMs data-particles ad fits seven
spatial transformations into 30 seconds. One Ford ad fits in 12, or a change every two and a half
seconds. However, somewhat in the manner of Leaf shifting her sand in Peter and the Wolf or the
abstract metamorphoses of Hubley and Schwartz, the ads dont place their substance in the perspectival changes. The changes only serve to connect the concepts being explained by the voiceover narration. Each tableau neatly synchronizes itself with a statement being made by the narrator.
The changes get our attention, but we dont remember them. What we remember are the products,
the services, the concepts.
In other words, whole screen metamorphosis is used here in a way that is potentially more confusing the terms of the space are perpetually, not just temporarily, in flux but kept under control
with the narration, relegated to the status of decoration or rhetorical device. They operate like
expensive PowerPoint slide transitions.
We can take the control being exerted over whole-screen metamorphosis here in a couple of
ways. One way would be to take it as indicating the will to power that Rodowick (2007: 172174)
attributes to digital imagery more generally. This will, he argues, is the loss of a desire to know the
external world. It turns inward, poring over imaginative worlds that it can manipulate. Under this
description, whole-screen metamorphosis would be a nearly perfect expression of a digitally-based
desire for control, effectively blocking out anything we cannot wield that control over.
Another way is to take it as part of a longer history of animation in commercials, and commercial television itself, as an attempt to commodify desire. Here, we could rely on David Joselits
(2007: 324) notion, following Paul Virilio, of social arrangements as bearing a potential for the
trajective. The trajective is a principle of unceasing movement that cannot be contained and, in
the manner of Deleuze and Guattaris metaphors of liquidity, undoes any attempts at differentiation

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or boundaries. For Joselit, televisions history of animating commodities marks an attempt to

objectify the trajective, to make desire settle on solid things. Under this description, whole-screen
metamorphosis would express corporate entities hailing our trajective potential, only to ossify it
into a product (a truck) or a brand entity (IBM).
Both interpretations are appealing, but they miss the point of the technique. The point is not
desire. The point is disruption.2 The segments of space in the commercials are not quite coherently
linked, but there are no breaks between them. The segments share a logic, but the logic can only be
provided by the soundtrack and the product or brand in question. Superficially, these commercials
have a utopian air about them. We see nothing like a need to exert effort anywhere. But this is not
because all our desires have been magically met. It is because the terms of the space have been set
in ways we cannot understand, because we could not so much as articulate what we might want
inside them. We have to be guided through them. This creates an undercurrent of claustrophobia in
these spaces underneath the sense of plenitude, a sense that these places are disturbingly limited in
their scope, a sense that we dont want to be in these worlds because we will never feel at home in
them. The sound covers up the fact that we have no idea where we are. It may no longer make sense
to talk of a where here. Only to a feeling of perpetually being moved elsewhere.
To puzzle over whether in the digital age, perspectival movement without a camera is still camera movement, Ive argued, is to puzzle over a false problem. More puzzling, and in greater need
of being puzzled over, is perspectival movement without apparent perspective.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit
sectors.

Notes
1.

2.

The moment contains an obvious echo of the famous perspectival effect in Winsor McCays Little Nemo
in Slumberland (1911): when Nemo and Galatea ride off into the distance on a dragon, the white of the
page acquires a volume that it didnt seem to have before. I would argue, however, that McLarens shift
is more startling, for two reasons. First, in Nemo we are not traveling into the space, only watching the
figures move farther away. Second, McLaren is using open figures, while McCay uses closed figures.
Television has long relied on animations power for getting our attention by disruption. It was the reason
that Sesame Street included so many animated segments in its efforts to keep children watching (Lesser,
1975: 111112). Sesame Street was consciously imitating the disruptive rhythms of television. This disruption, a consequence of spot advertising, forms the phenomenological basis of Raymond Williamss
(1975: 90118) notion of television programming as flow.

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Author biography
Ryan Pierson is a Visiting Lecturer in the Film Studies Program and English Department at the University of
Pittsburgh. He has written on animation history, classical film theory, video arcades, 3D aesthetics, and cognitive film theory for The Velvet Light Trap, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Critical Quarterly, and The
Funambulist. His current book project concerns postwar animation and problems in the psychology of
perception.

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