The Animated World is a regular feature spotlighting animation from around the globe.
Joy Street (Suzan Pitt, 1995).
When T.S. Eliot famously asked “Do I dare to eat a peach?” in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, he was alluding to social and bodily anxiety, and the sticky traps that can ensnare the unsuspecting. Eliot’s J. Alfred finds a reason to be anxious about even the most mundane objects or situations—though eating in public (especially syrupy fruits) is a common anxiety. And while a peach should be an innocuous, enjoyable object, in practice a ripe peach can spontaneously turn an ordinary person into a spectacle. Or so Eliot and others assume. Anxiety is a powerful and nebulous force that affects most people some of the time, and some people all of the time, and whether or not it is generated by body issues, it is always felt in the body. Unlike fear, anxiety is generally not motivated by imminent danger, but rather the anticipation of what might happen. As such, anxiety has a purchase on the imagination, creating fantasies that both inhabit and inhibit us. Fearing what might happen, we are forced to ask the question “do I dare…?” over and over again.
Animation is similarly a projection of the mind—an artform that specializes in adapting and often radically reinterpreting reality. This makes it an ideal space for expressing and unraveling anxieties, and a realm in which to face (or deface) them as well. Already in the 1920s, the Fleischer brothers’s Out of the Inkwell series vented creatively about it. One of the series’ major conceits was animator Max Fleischer’s constant distress at trying to frantically force his animated creation Koko the Clown back into the inkwell as the character repeatedly escaped from two-dimensionality to cause trouble in reality. The existential anxiety created by an animated drawing let loose in the world—one with its own agenda—suggests that we give birth to our own chaos: Koko is an anxious object given shape by Max’s mind. And that Max never seems to learn describes well the chronic nature of the problem. The unknown can be terrifying, but perhaps embodying the amorphous matter of anxiety in an animated avatar is a good way to transform it. Giving birth to one with an elastic body and a penchant for mischief can provide an invigorating alternative to suffering.
This metaphor of birth is a telling one, and creating an alternate self in the external world (whether child, double, or avatar) allows for the unique transformation of bodily anxiety. Depicting internal anxieties in the external world is a staple of Expressionism—and Edvard Munch’s Scream (1893) remains a classic embodiment of generalized anxiety. But projecting internal anxieties into external objects can also create a compelling space for imaginary play. Feelings can be projected from the body and personified in a kind of metaphorical birth. That actual birth is a reality particular to women’s bodies (whether it happens or not) perhaps explains why many contemporary female animators (such as Anna Budanova, Shiva Sadegh Asadi, and Renata Gąsiorowska) and their forerunners (like Caroline Leaf and Suzan Pitt) have faced bodily anxiety so memorably with their transformative stories.
Two Sisters (Anna Budanova, 2021).
Anna Budanova, an animator born in Ekaterinburg and based in Paris, examines anxiety as the externalization or splitting off of the self in a variety of ways in her work. Two Sisters (2021) is the most melancholy of her three films. The film is beautifully drawn and painted, with the feel of a grainy woodblock print balancing meaning between the figurative and abstract and evoking German Expressionism. Its story of siblings in conflict is clearly metaphorical—the two sisters are also doubles, one projected from the other. This is introduced visually at the beginning of the film when one woman seems to suddenly emerge from the body of the other. The first woman is clearly anxious, making rules, anticipating and fearing change and the unknown, and forbidding traveling into the wild forest nearby. The second sister, the externalized double, breaks those rules and explores the wilderness and falls in love with a man she meets there. When the siblings are alone, they are in tune with each other, and their bodies are elastic, joyful, and brave (evoked in movements based on Japanese Butō dance). But when the double discovers love with another, the sister self becomes jealous and follows her twin like a shadow, trying to find the same love. Once rejected, however, she burns down the forest, remaining alienated from her own self, an anxious body forever split in two.
Anxious representation is pushed away from human form in Budanova’s film The Wound (2012) with mixed results in resolution. It tells the story of a young girl whose social anxiety and sense of difference and shame creates and nourishes what becomes an almost overwhelming identity. After being ridiculed at a party, the girl runs home and scribbles on the floor, creating a shape that comes to life, morphing until it settles on the visage of a cute sketchy creature who is a version of herself. She hugs this externalized and personified creature, taking care of it, and it comforts her as well; yet as she gets older, it feeds on her, becoming more demanding, consuming her life. The film moves back and forth between her life as an older woman, still living with this anxious being, and moments from the past that reinforced her wounds of rejection and shame. Her anxiety is also depicted in the film by making her body larger than life at times, magnifying a body dysmorphia—the sense of her body as bigger, out of place—its dimensions reflecting both a desire to be noticed and the fear of being made into a target. In the end it seems her animated anxiety has all but overwhelmed her, and even the collection of family photographs around her is defaced, inaccessible, and illusory when compared to the reality of her deepest and most cultivated connection.
The anxieties depicted in The Wound are amorphous, even nefarious in shape and substance—making them more difficult to express and understand. Their tenuous forms dissolve the stable outlines of figurative representation, making it an accurate embodiment of what cannot be named or understood, only felt. It is, therefore, in the tradition of the Kafkaesque—of the sickening perception that what is true about the world cannot be named or understood, but is certainly unwelcome and uncanny. Caroline Leaf’s Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa (1977) helped establish this tradition in animation. It is a perfectly rendered Kafka adaptation, eerily depicting self-alienation as literal transformation into a grotesque insect body. Gregor Samsa’s anxious feelings are so intense they become external facts—visible not only to himself but everyone around him. But he remains trapped in his anxious body, unable to project or transform it—rather, it changes him.
Maned and Macho (Shiva Sadegh Asadi, 2017).
Iranian filmmaker and painter Shiva Sadegh Asadi speaks to this tradition of anxious deformation, but like Budanova, her protagonist expels her anxieties. In Maned and Macho (2017) a young girl struggles to overcome her anxious anticipation of a violence she cannot clearly define. Her feelings erupt as animals, which she seeks to hide but cannot. These animals mark her as different, making her an easy target. But as they also clarify the wild, scarcely identifiable parts inside her, they offer the power to oppose terror, find release, and preserve her self. Like Kafka and Leaf, Sadegh Asadi visualizes anxiety as non-human but projects it from her body. By externalizing it, she preserves the human. Like Budanova, it is both part of her and not, so she is not controlled by it.
Budanova’s Among the Black Waves (2016) further explores how embodying feelings as non-human avatars is a possible antidote to anxiety. It is the story of a selkie who is caught by a man and subsequently has a child with him. The film highlights the fact that both the woman and the natural world are being conquered and controlled, with the figure of the selkie joining them together. The selkie is a shapeshifter moving between seal and human forms, so when the man steals her seal skin, she is trapped in an anxious state of not-being. Alienated from her community, her wild nature, and her world, her anxiety is keenly expressed in her otherworldly face as she flees from the harsh human gazes surrounding her. For the selkie, the anxieties about her bodily form are not just superficial—she has lost her essence, after all—but the antidote is in fact skin-deep. When her daughter—who is everything she is not in the human world: curious, fearless, comfortable—finds and returns her seal skin, she can finally reunite with her true self and ocean home. Though her liberation ironically comes from a union with what restrains her (a human being), she is still the originator of her own liberation. Her daughter contains the transformative potential to free the imaginative realm from its anxious human captivity, to set it free. And understanding her mother’s dual nature will hopefully open her eyes to the anxious bodies around her—both human and inhuman—a vision she can share.
Suzan Pitt’s iconic Joy Street (1995) demonstrates this same power of imaginative projection. A dark tale about a woman at the end of her rope, Joy Street contrasts the depths of depression with a rather goofy figure from animation history that is resplendently elastic and joyful. The film incorporates both Expressionism and realism—much like G. W. Pabst’s classic Joyless Street (1925)—as well as surrealism and magical realism. When the woman in the film passes out in bed after cutting her wrists, the cartoon mouse on an ashtray she had been staring at comes to life. Resembling an oddly dressed Mickey Mouse, the little creature traverses the woman’s apartment in all its rubbery, ridiculously resilient glory. When it touches her, it freezes in place, and her tears of sorrow and anxious fearful imaginings emerge from its body in a river of ugly images. Drained of color, it grows in size so it can carry her from her home. The film then bursts into a surreal, rubber hose, hylozoic tribute to the comedic wonderment of 1930s American animation. During this extended fantasy sequence, the creature heals the woman’s body and mind with its essential liveliness, saving her from both literal and emotional death. In the end, this animated avatar helps her free herself from her anxious distortions and loss of hope. She is able to see the world anew, not because she makes it do so, but simply because it is in its nature to bring joy.
Pussy (Renata Gąsiorowska, 2016).
Polish animator Renata Gąsiorowska’s Pussy (2016) focuses on personifying and externalizing one part of the body as a helpful way of disrupting the narrative of anxiety with something cheerful, unexpected, and fully liberating. No stranger to voicing anxiety, her early film Traps (2012) creepily embodies amorphous fears in a way one cannot soon forget (from giant bugs to strange growths and prehensile plants). Anxieties about being trapped, consumed, and even loved are given full reign in this forest of the imagination. But the liquid imagination of Pussy moves in the opposite direction, reclaiming women’s sexuality and bodily self-love despite the anxious body. The animation style may be simple, but the conceptual embodiment is revelatory—our bodies can also make us happy. The woman in the film finds onanistic pleasure because she personifies her pussy as a joyful, experimental, and cute little creature that enjoys some sensuality in life. Moving past the anxieties that attempt to ensnare her, the woman pleasures herself into an animated psychedelic dreamscape built for one. That such transformative imagination in animated beings exists already bodes well for anxious bodies in the future!
Near the end of Prufrock, Eliot bemoans: “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me.” His anxious narrator hears, but does not understand the realm of the imagination or the lure of an unexpectedly wild, mythic space and what it can provide. Perhaps he feels, like the man in Among the Black Waves, that he must control it first. But imagination has little to do with control. In that sense, one should not just wait to hear the mermaids sing, but rather sing to them as well. Speaking to the imaginary and wild realm allows it to give voice in turn. Imagination is a gift that can only be received if it is understood as such. In the case of anxiety, creating an imagined body to process or commiserate or release anger or fear, rather than being consumed by it, is a hopeful venture. And animation is ideal for this, bringing something to life from the self but outside the self—like Koko—with the freedom to shape it free from the constraints of reality. Animated avatars allow for the confrontation of anxieties face-to-face, encouraging transformation and delight and, just possibly, bringing peace.