The Double Sense of Animated Images. A View on the Paradoxes of Animation as a Visual Language

Abstract

Representation in the visual arts, such as cinematography – and in particular animation – contains a degree of ambivalence because they reconstruct the continuity of movement as the result of a visual trick, indeed the term moving picture contains a contradiction, linking stillness and motion in the same sequence. While this paradox remains dormant in most live action films, in animation it acquires what I term in this paper, a “double sense”, the duplication of a virtual image.