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My final work is talk about a girl leave her cat went to UK alone feels lot of loneliness emotions. I want to visualize the emotions of loneliness in a long-distance relationships background.

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artistic lineage： I think that I position myself as an animator, and I want to my final work can reflect some of my current feelings and emotions and my state at the time of creating the work. In my animation works, I will put the audition language and whether it can resonate with the audience first.

So in my final work I took into account the fact that I had left my home country to come to the UK alone. I wanted to combine some of my own experiences to create an experimental music animation to visualize the emotion of loneliness in a long-distance relationship.

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Some animation film Comment and How to use

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Some animation film Comment and How to use

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I would refer to the emotional references of the animated short Father and Daughter for its emotional portrayal, the sense of loneliness as well as the sense of longing is something I'd like to learn about.

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父亲乘船离开，女儿在海边等他归来渐渐老去。有那么一天...奥斯卡金像奖短片《父亲与女儿》

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Michaël, D. W. (2000). Father And Daughter. [animation]. Available at: https://youtu.be/YDxlShoMuX0?feature=shared (Accessed: 1 November 2023).

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父亲乘船离开，女儿在海边等他归来渐渐老去。有那么一天...奥斯卡金像奖短片《父亲与女儿》

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My Partner Lives in My Phone | Directed by Lily Ahree Siegel & Hugh Clegg

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My Partner Lives in My Phone | Directed by Lily Ahree Siegel & Hugh Clegg

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"People think of animation only doing things where people are dancing around and doing a lot of histrionics, but animation is not a genre. And people keep saying, 'The animation genre.' It's not a genre! A Western is a genre! Animation is an art form, and it can do any genre. You know, it can do a detective film, a cowboy film, a horror film, an R-rated film or a kids' fairy tale. But it doesn't do one thing. And, next time I hear, 'What's it like working in the animation genre?' I'm going to punch that person!" Brad Bird (2015)

Brad Bird couldn't say it louder and clearer, after his words there is not too much to add. Nevertheless, as an animator, lecturer and researcher, I may not punch you if I hear "animation is a genre, especially for kids." Rather, I will expose some good reasons why I still find that animation is underestimated by the academy and the lay audience when its power goes beyond that of live-action movies.

Animation can be the bridge between arts and sciences, body and mind, reason and emotion; these cannot be separated, and need each other like we need both hemispheres of our brain, equally important, to properly function. What if I tell you that by watching and working on animated movies we can change our perspectives, learn all kinds of content, and visualize impossible realities that still are virtual concepts in our minds. We can rehearse from pilot programs to complex surgeries, enhance our cognitive skills and creative learning, use it in therapy, education, sciences and probably more territories where overall, we learn through storytelling. Yes, it is so, animation can be an excellent media to learn and regulate our emotions, understand different perspectives and be more conscious about our realities. Scientists such as Dan Siegel, Richard Davidson, Uri Hasson, among others, led studies showing how our brain changes through experience and how movies affect it, connecting us through empathy and compassion. We learn more and better in a state of flow, when we play, repeat, trust in teams, listen to stories that make us remember and experience cause and effect.

Animation is all about repetition, mimic, acting, focusing our attention, etc. It is a very plastic mix-media, extremely rich in techniques that include basically all kind of artistic expressions: illustration, painting, comics (sequence, fragmentation), sculpture (3D, puppet), drawing, music, theatre, acting, filmmaking language... This is part of its success together with its power of abstraction and symbolism, as a language itself. Let's recall that this art form is a primitive communication tool already present since the beginning of Humanity, in the Upper Paleolithic caves of Altamira or Chauvet (France, ca. 30000 BC). Scholars such as Marcos Nadal (University of Vienna, 2014) believe those caves were like cinemas, where the tribe rehearsed a situation like hunting.

Where I work, at the Animated Learning Lab, Denmark, we use animation as a social emotional learning media to practice emotional intelligence and the neuroplasticity of our brain. We connect cognitive, affective neuroscience with animation through the creative process of making animated films. We obtain a pleasant experience as we learn something, changing our brain by experiencing new worlds, feelings, situations, or by re-creating them from the past. It can cultivate a wise and sensitive mind, helping to develop critical thinking, questioning beliefs, feelings and actions, since we embodied characters' mind-sets and emotions.

We encourage artists and scientists to use the knowledge of producing animated movies to change our perception, to learn and reflect about life as a meditation practice, in order to understand the Self and the external world. We can use its potential to rewire our brain, re-write and preserve our story, our history, memories, and even cultural identities. Animation is transformation, thoughts and emotions in action; animation is not a genre, it is a NeuroplasticArt Media of communication.

*Animation as NeuroplasticArt media. Term coined by Inma Carpe for the Phd research on animation and neuroscience conducted between The Animation Workshop, Denmark and the University Polytechnic of Valencia, Spain.
References:
Amidi, Amid. (2015). Animation Is Not a Genre: Oscar Edition. [online] Cartoon Brew. Available at: http://www.cartoonbrew.com/ideas-commentary/animation-is-not-a-genre-oscar-edition-109504.html [Accessed 5 April 2016].

Bedford, A. (2014). Animation for Attention and Comprehension. [online] Nielsen Norman Group Journal. Available at: http://www.nngroup.com/articles/animation-usability/ [Accessed 5 April 2016].

Davidson, R. (2012). The Emotional Life of Your Brain. New York: Plume.

Gal, R., and T. Hendler. (2015). Forking Cinematic Paths to the Self: Neurocinematically Informed Model of Empathy in Motion Pictures. [online] Research Gate website. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gal_Raz2 [Accessed 5 April 2016].

Hagin, B. and R. Gaz. (2015). E-Motion Pictures of the Brain: Recursive Paths between Affective Neuroscience and Film Studies. [online] Research Gate website. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270887194_E-Motion_Pictures_of_the_Brain_Recursive_Paths_Between_Affective_Neuroscience_and_Film_Studies [Accessed 5 April 2016].

Miller, G. (2014). Cinematic Cuts Exploit How Your Brain Edits What You See. [online] Wired Science. Available at: http://www.wired.com/2014/09/cinema-science-film-cuts/ [Accessed 4 May 2015].

Chin, N. (2004). Teaching Critical Reflection through Narrative Storytelling. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 10 (3), pp. 57-63.

Ramachandran, V.S. (2012). The Tell-Tale Brain. London: Windmill books. 2012.
Born in the Mediterranean, Inma Carpe is living and working abroad between her home based in Denmark and Los Angeles. She is an experienced freelancer visual development artist, animator-lecturer specialized in short formats and pre-production, splitting time as a production assistant at film festivals. She is currently working and researching how animation and visual literacy improve self-development and communication (emotions-beliefs) based on art productions experiences, connecting cognitive/affective neuroscience with film making/storytelling.

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Animation, A Neuroplasticart* Media of Visual Thinking and Emotions

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"People think of animation only doing things where people are dancing around and doing a lot of histrionics, but animation is not a genre. And people keep saying, 'The animation genre.' It's not a genre! A Western is a genre! Animation is an art form, and it can do any genre.

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Animation is a time-based image-making practice that can change our ideas, experience, and view of the world. Both metamorphosis and metaphor are powerful means to realizing this capacity. In the broadest sense, metamorphosis can be characterized as a striking change of something, which in animation often appears as a visual transformation. Being one amongst the different meaning-structures under the general term 'figurative meaning', metaphor strongly influences language, human thought, and the visual arts because it can generate a new understanding of common ideas. Members of the Society for Animation Studies' Special Interest Group (SIG) Figurative Meaning and Metamorphosis in Animation came together online to discuss the potential relations between these two areas of study since, at first glance, the terms metamorphosis and metaphor seem to refer to quite distinct phenomena.

Michael Dudok de Wit: Please let me share a few quite personal and subjective thoughts and conclusions on the subjects of metaphors and metamorphoses. These thoughts come mostly from my experience as an animator and filmmaker, and from my observation of my close collaborators. Watching films at animation festivals, I tend to focus more on the individualistic, artistic films, where exploration and the subjective are highly valued, and less on mainstream animation. Over the years, I have happily worked in both domains, moving gradually from mainstream to individualistic projects and not the other way round.

Regarding the description of metaphor, I am comfortable with the one mentioned by Gabrielle Dulys, "a comparison between two (conceivably) dissimilar things", but I prefer the first line of Aristotle's famous definition: "metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else" (1984, p. 251). That line applies to verbal communication, and for the art of animation, I would adapt it to something like: metaphor consists in giving the thing an expression that belongs to something else.

When we look at metaphors in verbal language, we have to make a distinction between a new metaphor and an established one, sometimes called a dead metaphor. A new metaphor is creative and takes us by surprise, which is usually enjoyable. It can instantly improve our understanding of something, or it can bring life to a familiar subject. It can affect our emotions. But soon the surprise wears off. The original meaning of the word is largely forgotten, while the meaning of the metaphor itself becomes gradually normalized. If the metaphor survives, it becomes a word or an expression that is so well integrated into everyday language that we may not even realize that we are dealing with a metaphor. Examples are: I see what you are saying; it was hell; her eyes were shining; understanding and even the word metaphor itself.

The English language is rich with established metaphors, and we simply can't talk about abstract things, about our feelings, about taboo subjects, about hidden subjects, and about totally new subjects without the use of metaphors. According to linguists Lakoff and Johnson (2003; 1999), all meaning is essentially metaphorical. Interestingly, psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist (2012) points out that new metaphors are understood by the brain's right hemisphere, while established metaphors are understood by the left hemisphere.

As has been mentioned by Carmen Hannibal and Gabrielle Dulys, a metaphor is like a metamorphosis. I agree with that comparison when I think of new metaphors because something in our beliefs or in our understanding goes through a transformation. How often do we come across new metaphors, though? Meanwhile, established metaphors are used in abundance, I can't see them as metamorphoses. The transformative effect, if it has ever occurred, is already long gone.

However, some established metaphors preserve an essence of the original meaning of the word, in a subtle way. For example, when I hear the term of affection honey, as in "Honey, I'm home", the word does not remind me of the actual substance of honey, but somehow, there is still a subtle quality, like a faint memory of the original meaning of the word, and the same applies to many other metaphors. Swear words and insults are striking examples. The sound of the word plays a role too. I find it difficult to be very precise about this faint memory.

But even so, regarding verbal communication, there is a huge difference between the initial, temporary impact of a metaphor and the life of that metaphor afterwards. Also, when we start digging a bit into the origins of metaphors, we realize that we can't separate our use of metaphors from our expression of reality; they are the same.

While I am talking about the English language, I have observed the same in several other European languages and a Japanese-English translator confirmed to me that the same applies to the Japanese language. I can't imagine how any verbal language can possibly exist without metaphors.

I think that the same distinction between new and classic metaphors applies to the art of animation. However, animation is much more complex because it can use several modes of expression, such as acting, design, film editing, storytelling, music and sound effects, as well as dialogue of course. According to my latest count, an animated film can communicate through up to thirteen modes of expression simultaneously, each one using metaphors in its unique way. On top of that, the interactions between the different metaphors are full of creative possibilities. The distinction between old and new metaphors in animation is therefore much less clear than in verbal communication.

A few examples of established metaphors in animation are: tweeting little songbirds, typically representing happiness; sharp, exposed teeth, typically representing evil; standard manual gestures used by the characters; a particular manner to position the character, small-sized in the center of the screen to represent loneliness; a slow cross-dissolve between scenes, indicating the passing of time, for instance, and discordant music, symbolizing fear.

Figure 1. A still from The Red Turtle © 2016 Studio Ghibli, Wild Bunch, Why Not Productions, Arte France Cinéma, CN4 Productions, Belvision, Nippon Television Network, Toho.

What is special about animation is that an old metaphor can easily be recycled into a new metaphor since it can be expressed in a new style with fresh originality. I believe that filmmakers are conscious of many of the metaphors in their projects, and of the chemistry between the metaphors, partly because they are keen to be aware of them and they have the time to explore them, and partly because they are helped by their collaborators. But nobody is capable of clearly seeing all the metaphors while they are making a film. This is not only due to the sheer volume of metaphors, but also to the difficulty in identifying them because so many of them are fluid, indistinct, elusive, or open to interpretation. Instead, filmmakers work with many metaphors - I would guess most of them - on an unconscious level, relying on their intuition, their feeling, as they usually call it. This feeling can, at its best, function as an efficient and accurate guide for the filmmaker, and importantly, it can also be recognized by the filmmaker's collaborators. At its worst, the feeling is faint, fuzzy, and unstable.

Instead of the term unconscious, I like the term semi-conscious because creative people are conscious that something feels right, that something is working, but they may not know exactly why. They may discover the reason at a later date, or they may never know it. With my own films, it has happened quite a few times. Typically, in the two-year period following their completion, I would have sudden insights into the meaning of certain symbols that were used in the film. These moments of insight always fill me with awe for the creative process. They strengthen my belief that many symbols come from the unconscious, in particular the collective unconscious.

Just as most metaphors are created semi-consciously, most metaphors in a film are perceived semi-consciously by the spectators because they can feel them, as it were.

As I just mentioned, metaphors are often hard to identify because they are indistinct or open to interpretation. They can cancel each other out or change each other. Colors are good examples. All colors can have metaphoric value, including blacks, greys, and whites. But when we watch a film, do we know which colors are metaphoric and which are not? Often, we don't even know if we are perceiving a metaphor or not, like we are often unclear about metaphors in verbal communication.

Figure 2. A still from The Red Turtle © 2016 Studio Ghibli, Wild Bunch, Why Not Productions, Arte France Cinéma, CN4 Productions, Belvision, Nippon Television Network, Toho.

Metamorphoses in the art of animation can be used for their entertainment value, for their narrative value, or for their metaphorical value, or all three at the same time, of course. The entertainment qualities are obvious. These are typically surprise, shock, humor, visual elegance, exoticism, and magic. I am generally referring to the surreal, supernatural metamorphosis, popular in fairy tales, mythology, and fantasy, where a character or an object undergoes a profound transformation, such as a pumpkin turning into a carriage ( Cinderella, 1950), Chihiro's parents turning into pigs ( Spirited Away, 2001) and the transforming head in Bill Plympton's short film Your Face (1987). The narrative value is quite obvious too, I believe. The metaphoric value, however, is a bit more elusive, but when it is there, it can be profound. Hayao Miyazaki for instance is a master at creating interesting metamorphoses that touch us on a deeper, symbolic level.

Why are surreal metamorphoses more popular in the art of animation than in the other branches of the film industry? Firstly, animation has a vaster choice of creative tools. Secondly, while a surreal metamorphosis is generally challenging for the spectator who tries to believe the character, or tries to believe the solidity of the objects, animation is good at inviting the spectator to suspend his or her disbelief.

One striking and rather unique use of metamorphoses in animation is the animated transformation from one scene to the next, I mean where the complete screen undergoes a hand-animated metamorphosis. This expression is used beautifully in many films, like the shorts by Caroline Leaf (for instance in The Street, 1976) and Frédéric Back (for instance in The Mighty River, 1993). We appreciate seeing these metamorphoses, I believe, because they have elegance and originality. They also contribute in a unique way to the fluency of the storytelling.

We are used to seeing cuts between scenes, and we appreciate their dynamic efficiency, amongst other things, but standard cuts are hard, aggressive, like small shocks, both on the visual and the narrative levels. Animated transitions between scenes on the other hand are loved for their organic, flowing quality. The animators often choose to use curved or semi-circular movements. In my experience, just like the movements of a great dancer can touch me emotionally, so can the movements of a beautifully animated transition between scenes.

Apart from the surreal metamorphosis, there is also another kind of metamorphosis in the art of animation, the non-surreal kind, let's say the realistic kind. Unlike surreal metamorphoses, realistic ones are more ubiquitous and natural. They can be political, like someone's change from conservative to progressive, social, cultural, psychological, religious, etc. and I am also referring to the transformations occurring in nature and in everyday life. For instance, the change from day to night is a metamorphosis, and so are the change of a bare tree in winter to a leafy tree in spring and the one from childhood into adulthood. Waking up from sleep can be seen as a subtle example of metamorphosis and so can walking through a gate into an open space. If we are interested in subtle metamorphoses, we notice an abundance of examples.

The interesting thing is that realistic metamorphoses are not necessarily seen by the creators and by the spectators as metamorphoses. They can be seen as an expression of growth or decline, as an evolutionary process, or simply as part of a narrative language. While the surreal metamorphosis is usually easy to identify because it is bizarre, the realistic metamorphosis can be harder to discern because it is less surprising and the beginning and the end can be imprecise. The metaphoric value can therefore be less clear as well.

We can identify certain metaphors and certain metamorphoses in animation, as we can identify other elements in animation, and we can study them and draw conclusions. Identifying them and judging them can also be of great value during the process of creating a film. This focussed approach takes place on one level. Meanwhile, on another level, we can be aware of the bigger perspective, the more inclusive, holistic perspective where all the separate elements are interdependent, ideally blending together organically into a rich, seamless whole.

I suggest that most spectators have a preference for the holistic perspective because they choose to abandon themselves to the film, in order to identify more easily with the story and with the emotions. It is different for the filmmaker. In my case, when I am working on a film, or even on a single illustration, I am switching back and forth between both levels all the time, often many times per minute (it is actually hard to observe the frequency because any notion of clock time is absent when I am active on these levels). It is almost as if I am two modes of consciousness working in tandem on the same project, and both modes are totally indispensable. I have the impression that this approach of observing both the individual elements and the whole is the most common approach used by filmmakers.

I truly believe that we are all profoundly attracted to metamorphoses in films, but why are we? They are very much part of our existence: the realistic metamorphoses in everyday life and the surreal ones in our dreams and in our imagination. There are several reasons why we are attracted, and the deepest one I can think of so far is that most of us want our lives to grow, we want our lives to become more just, more meaningful, more fulfilling, or just happier. We basically want to experience some kind of profound transformation, and expressions of transformation in films remind us of that, consciously and unconsciously. On a subtle level, they can even encourage us, inspire us and make us wiser. This applies to both surreal and realistic expressions of transformation in films.

Just to be clear, as much as we are attracted to change, transformation, and the unknown, I believe that we are also attracted to the opposite: stability, order, and the known. The two opposites belong to each other, and each one of us negotiates in his or her unique way the dynamic between these opposites.

My conclusion so far on the relationship between metaphors and metamorphoses in animation is that metaphors can have a transformative, metamorphic effect on our understanding and metamorphoses can be metaphors. The three subjects, metaphors, metamorphoses and animation, are huge, however. I find the chemistry between them fascinating, but too complex to come to simple conclusions.
The authors are interested in your thoughts. Please leave a comment below.
Also, don't forget to check out the blog on September 27th for part 3 of the roundtable!
References
Aristotle (1984). The Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle. Intro. by Edward P.J. Corbett. The Rhetoric trans. by W. Ryhs Roberts, The Poetics trans. by Ingram Bywater. English, 1st. New York: Modern Library College Editions.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh. The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors We Live By. With a New Afterword. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

McGilchrist, I. (2012). The Master and His Emissary. The Divided Brain And The Making Of The Western World. Reprint edition. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

ichael Dudok de Wit grew up in the Netherlands and has lived in London since 1980, directing independent animated films and tv commercials. He specializes in hand-drawn animation and his shorts have won numerous international awards, including an Oscar and a BAFTA award in 2001 for Father and Daughter. His most recent project, the feature-length film The Red Turtle, was a Wild Bunch/Studio Ghibli co-production, made in France with Prima Linea Productions. The film won the Special Jury Prize, Un Certain Regard, at Cannes Film Festival in 2016 and was nominated for an Academy Award in 2017. Michael also illustrates children's books, and gives talks on animation at universities in the UK and abroad.

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A Virtual Roundtable on Relations Between Metaphor and Metamorphosis (Part 2)

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Animation is a time-based image-making practice that can change our ideas, experience, and view of the world. Both metamorphosis and metaphor are powerful means to realizing this capacity. In the broadest sense, metamorphosis can be characterized as a striking change of something, which in animation often appears as a visual transformation.

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Animation is a time-based image-making practice that can change our ideas, experience, and view of the world. Both metamorphosis and metaphor are powerful means to realizing this capacity. In the broadest sense, metamorphosis can be characterized as a striking change of something, which in animation often appears as a visual transformation. Being one amongst the different meaning-structures under the general term 'figurative meaning', metaphor strongly influences language, human thought, and the visual arts because it can generate a new understanding of common ideas. Members of the Society for Animation Studies' Special Interest Group (SIG) Figurative Meaning and Metamorphosis in Animation came together online to discuss the potential relations between these two areas of study since, at first glance, the terms metamorphosis and metaphor seem to refer to quite distinct phenomena.

Carmen Hannibal: I found what Michael said very helpful to gain an understanding of the concepts from different approaches other than purely theoretical debates and academic discourse. This approach from the industry side of things greatly helps to show me how animators and filmmakers themselves may struggle with and/or deal with the topics. It also makes apparent how they seek inspiration and new theoretical frames to try out different things, such as their own conceptual ideas and practical considerations. This, in turn, generates dialogue and fosters what comes to mind for the viewer and the maker.

Figure 1. A shot from Father and Daughter © 2000 CinéTé Filmproductie bv, NL and Cloudrunner Ltd, UK.

Michael Dudok de Wit: From my experience as a filmmaker, most animators work without exploring the philosophical and theoretical perspectives on animation very much, other than the need to put into words and communicate one's intuitions, creative choices and become more conscious about processes. I used to share this approach for a while, but I have changed gradually, because I wish to articulate my more subtle feelings with team members and because I am curious. Animation is a culture and an art form that touches us deeply if we are open to that, and I want to understand that. Thanks to this virtual roundtable, I have been looking a lot at my thoughts on these subjects and at the gaps in my conscious understanding. The subject of metamorphosis is also new to me as an observer, although I have created many in my work where I simply know what feels right and what feels wrong. However, observing and asking why a metamorphosis is present as a choice is very stimulating to me. My opinions on the subject are not conclusive and my exploration is still an ongoing process.

Figure 2. A shot from Every Possible Utterance (2019) by Johannes DeYoung.

Johannes DeYoung: I have just finished reading Dan Torre's book Animation - Process, Cognition and Actuality (2017), which has focused my thoughts on the relationship between movement and form. The cognitive approach presents a model for how perceptual information is processed in distinct parallel streams - that is, perceptual information related to motion, form, and color are processed separately, while understanding is actively constructed from the component parts. Semir Zeki writes about this in great detail in his book Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (1999). One part of Torre's book that has captured my imagination relates to the kind of metaphors that can happen in assigning meaning to something like abstract movement. Marianne Simmel and Fritz Heider's " Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior" (1944) is a famous example of this phenomenon, in which a circle moves in relation to a group of lines (which form a kind of box structure) and two triangles, without sound. Despite a lack of sound and pictorial representation, a relationship is implied through the movement of shapes. The triangles appear to move in pursuit of the circle - an oppositional relationship is suggested. From this, I find it compelling how motion can be completely divorced from form. Meaning is not inherent in any action but is rather assembled through a rebus-like arrangement of component parts. For example, how we might recognize the motion of a friend at a great distance or in silhouette, or how we might assign gender to a motion. This relates to the cognitive phenomenon of processing and storing information, which can also factor into artistic decision-making. As such, the theory informs creative actions. I do not consider this an overwrought relationship, where the creative and artistic choices are made explicitly in relation to the theoretical texts. But, in some instances, the theory informs the creative process. Besides my interest in these subjects from a historical and a theoretical point of view, I am personally interested in how they inform my own practice. In my practice, I am interested in the unique ability within animation to deal with metamorphosis, distinct from live-action filmmaking insofar that it seems inherently part of animation practice since its early days, before cinematic storytelling. I pursue interdisciplinary approaches in expanded cinema working collaboratively with experimental sound artists and theatre artists. My angle into these projects is through animation and through bringing life to the forms we are representing. I also find connections between other fields where it becomes meaningful to think about what certain relationships entail, where we find ways for sound and moving images to meaningfully relate, for instance. This was the case for the project Every Possible Utterance (2019) at Pittsburgh MuseumLab where I collaborated with a collection of artists to enact an intermedia happening. We made a central display with projection-mapped surfaces, with a live band in the middle and performers off-stage, who drove animations that were projected onto the displays. The animation in this work is performed improvisationally through motion-capture, image-sound synthesis, and live mixing of pre-built animated elements. I am especially interested in the ability of animation to relate complex and evolving ideas through transformation, how distinct elements like motion and form combine to create meaning, and how complex ideas may be coded in symbols and iconography, whether literary or pictorially.

Carmen Hannibal: In regard to the relationship between theoretical texts and creative choices, it is for me one thing to talk about ideas and knowledge in an academic context that has specific discourses and requirements than to talk about the exact same ideas that one may pick up from any creative pursuit or any common sense approach to things. The difference lies in how much freedom you have to talk freely about these subjects. In an academic setting you are being judged on your knowledge, how you obtain, organize, and disseminate that. Whereas outside that specific context people are not necessarily that rigorous and suspicious of what you are saying or writing. Many of the insights that we can all arrive at are maybe the same - you do not have to be an academic to have great ideas. However, what is required of you to articulate the same ideas is just measured in a different way. This difference can sometimes get confusing. As Michael has pointed out earlier, animators know what they are doing in their practice. They do not have to have read a lot of theoretical texts to understand certain concepts. But there are just different requirements for how one is supposed to 'pick up' knowledge, whether you are a maker and/or an academic. This relation between theoretical texts and creative choices is therefore not necessary in a particular order or in some sort of hierarchy.

I have a background in character animation, and I started in animation school with the goal of becoming a world-famous animator. But my critical questions started to creep in, and I decided that I could not work for anybody who could not account for these questions. I then realized that the place to openly ask these questions is not in the industry but in an academic setting because there you are allowed to ask very basic things such as: what is storytelling? From my experience as an animation student at that particular school, I was trained to do other things than ask theoretical questions. I was supposed to be concerned with other tasks and critical thinking was pushed to the side in the program, which made some sense from an educational point of view. However, from my student experience point of view, it was frustrating to talk with fellow students because they were not curious about questioning the same things as me, although they knew about these aspects and were dealing with them to make animations and to come up with good ideas. For me, one of the insights from animation school was that there were some significant differences as to how we get to the same ideas. This area of discussion fascinates me because there is not always a simple answer to the entanglement of the conscious and the semi-conscious. I am also fascinated by how spectators - those who are not makers or academics - perceive meaning from the films. The scientific pursuit of disentangling these areas is maybe slightly false and maybe more about finding a fine balance between explanation and understanding.

Michael Dudok de Wit: Actually, some of my colleagues have expressed a genuine worry that too much philosophical reflection and too much questioning may have a negative impact on the creative flow. Speaking for themselves, they may be right, but it is not a worry that I share. It is crucial to me that my questioning is motivated by a passionate curiosity, almost as if I don't have a choice. But meanwhile, it is not my experience that this questioning of how things work and how things affect us is interfering with my capacity to create.

Johannes DeYoung: I consider the relationship between critical, analytical, and creative processes, and what such relationship entails. For instance, I believe that creative flow warrants analysis. Like what it means when ideas and practice are in a state of creative coupling, where an artist is not consciously preoccupied with those relationships. There is surely a theoretical framework that informs that phenomenon. Like Michael, I also hear from some colleagues and peers that they do not want to engage in an overtly critical mode of thinking while in the creative process and act of making. Analysis may come at a different time, maybe upon reflection, or it happens in anticipation of what is going to be made. But there is a time when the studio door closes and the creative process happens, and that is often an entirely separate process from critical analysis. I have experienced pushback from students when introducing theoretical texts into practice-based classes, which I find puzzling. The important factor for students seems to be that they prefer to spend time in the creative flow that is experienced while making, rather than reflect upon and critically examine their media consumption habits. Personally, I find the balance between theoretical and practical approaches to animation to be very interesting and rewarding.

Michael Dudok de Wit: I believe that one situation which pushes some people to reflect more is when they reach a block in their creativity. Although I do not have any statistics on this, I suspect that it happens to many creative people sooner or later, more than we realize. I am talking about blocks that last for months, not just a few days when we suffer from exhaustion, but long periods when we fear that we may not come out of this creative void. We start asking ourselves: What is creativity? Why is this not working? How about trying out something else? What do I really want to express? And that is when we become more reflective. In my case, this was part of my evolution. As a young animator, I just wanted to create and in my animation course, which was a very basic course in the south of England, there was zero questioning of anything we did. It was just about the technique and about somehow finding out stuff by ourselves. For me, the serious questioning also began because I started teaching things that I knew from my experience, but that I had never really discussed before. That woke up something in me, and moreover, I became interested in aspects of the industry that previously had not drawn my attention.
The authors are interested in your thoughts. Please leave a comment below.
Also, don't forget to check out the blog next week for part 4 of the roundtable!
References
Heider, F., & Simmel, M. (1944). "Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior". In American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 57(2), pp. 243-259.

Torre, D. (2017). Animation - Process, Cognition and Actuality. London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Zeki, S. (1999). Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.

Carmen Hannibal is a Ph.D. candidate in Animation at the Royal College of Art and the convenor for the Society for Animation Studies SIG Figurative Meaning and Metamorphosis in Animation. Her research project 'The Living Metaphor in Animation' critically examines theoretical debates that lie in the intersection between animation studies, metaphor studies, and modern hermeneutics to aid the analyses of analog and digital experimental animated shorts. She has published in mediaesthetics - Journal of Poetics of Audiovisual Images, Animation Studies, and the online educational resource platform Fantasy/Animation.

Michael Dudok de Wit grew up in the Netherlands and has lived in London since 1980, directing independent animated films and tv commercials. He specializes in hand-drawn animation and his shorts have won numerous international awards, including an Oscar and a BAFTA award in 2001 for Father and Daughter. His most recent project, the feature-length film The Red Turtle, was a Wild Bunch/Studio Ghibli co-production, made in France with Prima Linea Productions. The film won the Special Jury Prize, Un Certain Regard, at Cannes Film Festival in 2016 and was nominated for an Academy Award in 2017. Michael also illustrates children's books, and gives talks on animation at universities in the UK and abroad.

Johannes DeYoung ​​is a multidisciplinary artist who works at the intersection of computational and material processes. His moving-image works have been exhibited internationally in major galleries and museums in countries such as Spain, Taiwan, Germany, USA, Canada, Ireland, and Australia, as well as being featured in The New York Times, The New York Post, The Huffington Post, and Dossier Journal. He is Assistant Professor of Electronic and Time-Based Media at Carnegie Mellon University. He previously taught at Yale University School of Art (2008-2018), where he was appointed Senior Critic and Director of the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, and at the Yale School of Drama, where he was appointed Lecturer in Design.

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A Virtual Roundtable on Relations Between Metaphor and Metamorphosis (Part 3)

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Animation is a time-based image-making practice that can change our ideas, experience, and view of the world. Both metamorphosis and metaphor are powerful means to realizing this capacity. In the broadest sense, metamorphosis can be characterized as a striking change of something, which in animation often appears as a visual transformation.

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Animation is a time-based image-making practice that can change our ideas, experience, and view of the world. Both metamorphosis and metaphor are powerful means to realizing this capacity. In the broadest sense, metamorphosis can be characterized as a striking change of something, which in animation often appears as a visual transformation. Being one amongst the different meaning-structures under the general term 'figurative meaning', metaphor strongly influences language, human thought, and the visual arts because it can generate a new understanding of common ideas. Members of the Society for Animation Studies' Special Interest Group (SIG) Figurative Meaning and Metamorphosis in Animation came together online to discuss the potential relations between these two areas of study since, at first glance, the terms metamorphosis and metaphor seem to refer to quite distinct phenomena.

Johannes DeYoung: Technique is such a big factor in the education of animation studio practice. Yet, regardless of the process involved, I foremost consider intention and the construction of meaning through active decision-making at the moment of creation. Technique and mechanics are important, but only in their service to ideas. Michael, how do you do that for yourself and how do you communicate it to others once you have committed to an idea and you are in that 'channel' to see the idea through?

Michael Dudok de Wit: I enter a zone that is highly creative, a zone of feeling and intuitive thinking. But I step out at regular intervals; I literally sit back, I become rational, and I question all the decisions that I have just made to see whether the ideas really fit. Some of the nicest ideas are very quickly rejected because they simply do not fit. They are kept for later reconsideration. I'm talking about the activity of creating stories, but it is the same process with the creativity and the clarity of my animation and when I'm working with film language. When I work side by side with a colleague and we both look at the same things, like when we are aiming to untie a knot in the story or aiming to improve the elegance of the film language, we try things out and we talk. Some of these exchanges are highly intuitive but not very articulate. Others are the opposite, where we are very articulate but we are uncomfortable with just feeling the solution. This has taught me a lot. My solution to communicate my vision to others is simple: I do the script, storyboard and animatic by myself, and it is in a visual style that is relatively close to the final design and the final layout. When the animatic is completed and the production team is assembled, my collaborators should receive a strong idea of my vision thanks to the animatic. With our feature The Red Turtle (2016),I skipped the storyboard phase and I worked years on the animatic, first alone and then with just a few very strong collaborators.

Figure 1. Animated video mural © 2021 Johannes DeYoung.

Johannes DeYoung: In relation to my own experience, I am always thinking of ways to introduce improvisation and chance. Like automatic drawing or writing from Surrealist methodologies to bring life into practice. Since so much of animation practice is dedicated to bringing life to some form on the screen or on the page, the relationship is important to me, and I am always interested in hearing how other artists and practitioners approach studio practice.

Michael Dudok de Wit: I am very much into the traditional step-by-step process in animation. I have colleagues and friends, such as Paul Bush and Steven Subotnick, who do more of what Johannes describes. Such as introducing new processes, in which they do not know where they are going, but where the process will inform them. I like to compare it to music because I often compare filmmaking to creating music. There are some forms of music, such as improvisational jazz, where the musicians may explore the unknown, not just variations on familiar themes, but much further than that, and there too, the process will inform them. I much admire this fast, improvisational approach to animation, but it lies outside my experience. It must be highly stimulating for Johannes' students to try new techniques or approaches, such as switching hands and interacting in an unusual way with other people, because they are in a phase where they have to find out who they are in relation to a creative occupation and what their unique skills are.

Carmen Hannibal: Michael, I noticed that you wrote about 13 'modes' in animation. Based on my own research, I have a very different view, but I would like to hear from you if one of those modes could be sound or music.

Michael Dudok de Wit: Yes, these would be two modes. One is sound, another is music. There is storytelling, acting, design, music, choreography, editing...

Carmen Hannibal: Colours?

Figure 2. The Red Turtle © 2016 Studio Ghibli, Wild Bunch, Why Not Productions, Arte France Cinéma, CN4 Productions, Belvision, Nippon Television Network, Toho.

Michael Dudok de Wit: Not so much. That would be part of the set design. There is the mode of movement, which reminds me of experimental dance, and which is not the same thing as acting. Like, what kind of movement do you choose, the angular, the round movement, the subtle, amplified, organic, etc. There is dialogue. Then there are two more, which I cannot remember right now. I am aware that I am using the modes symbolically, metaphorically, although not exactly in the same manner because sound has different limitations than choreography, for instance, since it is very expressive in one way, but not in other ways. All the modes are symbolic to me. Design is obvious because it is pure drawing. Storytelling is also obvious, and so is verbal communication. Music is too. The use of timing, however, is more subtle; although it is very rich in creative possibilities, it is harder to identify the symbolism of timing.

I am also aware that the modes are interacting with each other so that music can contradict what you see visually, especially when you see something very dramatic. A classic example of this is Akira Kurosawa's film Ran (1985), which contains a battle scene where we see soldiers attacking a castle. Instead of using drums for sound effects or dramatic music, he uses classical music that is relatively not dramatic. I recently saw the same technique used in a Russian film named Dear Comrades (2020). Here, the two symbols contradict each other in a similar manner and that can create a very interesting effect when it is used consciously. When it is created by mistake, it may weaken the film. As a creative person, I feed on mistakes big time, because creating a film is non-stop trial and error. When it is too predictable and too planned, it does not satisfy me. I need to try something new, find out what is not working and why it is not working, or be surprised etc. The trial-and-error method, together with serendipity, allows for incredible discoveries.

I originally wanted to be a musician and this may explain why the notion of timing that we understand in music, the narrative improvisation in music and the rich emotions that we can express in music are all the time in my mind whilst working on a film. Although I play blues myself, I do not want to make films about blues music. But there is a similarity, especially in regard to timing, the highly sophisticated timing of music and the highly emotional timing of music, which I also find in animation.

Carmen Hannibal: In regard to the connection between animation and sound and music, I now work within an academic context wherein I first and foremost look at metaphor from a theoretical perspective. I am very interested in what metaphors are, how they work as phenomena in themselves and how they are applied to and understood in writing and images, still and moving. Partly inspired by existing writings on the subject, such as Suzanne Buchan's (2011) take on visual and cinematic metaphor in stop-motion animation. When it comes to discussing music, my question is more at an abstract level when I am asking, what is sound? Is it part of the film; is it a necessary part of the film? Is it part of creating meaning in film? For me, having looked at sound and metaphor and meaning creation, it is a component that I have taken out of the equation because it is very complex. I also think that in terms of a theoretical point of view these modes belong to a certain approach to how meaning is created, which one can make counterarguments for because it is based on how we create and perceive knowledge. It is for that reason an epistemic question when we are asking, do we perceive the film as sensory inputs of different modes? Or do we perceive the film as a whole? And, with the latter, therefore, understand the film as a more general experience of a way of existing? I suggest two texts as a good starting point to think about these questions. The first is the article, "Metaphor and the Categorization of the Senses" (2009), which is a philosophical discussion that my second supervisor Clive Cazeaux wrote. The second is the book chapter "Cinematic Metaphor as Poiesis: The Movement-Image as Starting Point" (2018), from linguist Cornelia Müller and film scholar Hermann Kappelhoff who discuss how we can start to perceive the images. Can we divide them into modes or modalities? How could we start to perceive meaning? What is the starting point for discussion?

For me, the questions about animation, sound, meaning, and metaphor are already very controversial from a metaphor theory point of view. As soon as we talk about how sounds can help to construct metaphors, we also have to ask, what is the epistemic basis to support that theory? Because that will determine how we then analyze and discuss how meaning is created within a specific work. These approaches are theories, they are very abstract, meaning that you can approach the same film with different theories and get a completely different analysis. This is in part why I am doing my research, in so far that I want to demonstrate that there is already a theory that is being used, but that there is also another theory that we can explore and exploit to get a grasp on these questions. My take on the relationship between animation and music and sounds then really depends on what we are looking for, how we understand the film and how we want to break it down and analyze it. If we want to watch films, we watch them. But if we want to understand them from a theoretical point of view, we have to somehow have some theoretical conceptual 'hooks' to start from. I think that sounds do play an interesting aspect in animation, yet the question is, how do we describe these as an entity? And how does that entity then play into the larger discussion on metaphorical meaning-making?

I believe that these questions also pertain to the whole question about whether we can pin something down that is part conscious and part subconscious. That is again part of the whole dynamic between trying to explain something and trying to understand it at the same time, which is somewhat always interconnected. This way of addressing the dynamic is something I draw from the hermeneutic traditions that I am using in my research project, which centers around that continuous question that Paul Ricœur (1976) takes up about how to explain things to understand and to understand in order to explain. In regard to Michael's point about getting more of an application out of some of that theoretical thinking, especially the book chapter, "Cinematic Metaphor as Poiesis: The Movement-Image as Starting Point" (2018) builds around more concrete analysis of specific films. I think that one thing is a philosophical debate about metaphor and another thing is to take some of that discussion into a context and explain how these theoretical insights then work in film.

Michael Dudok de Wit: The older I get, the more sensitive I become to metaphors, although I do not have a clear explanation as to why that is the case. It is a wonderful sensitivity and I am much in awe of the symbolic value of everything in life. I notice that I sometimes see symbols where other people do not, and I try to understand what the differences are between my own perception and the more general perception of symbols, metaphors, signs, and analogies.
References
Buchan, S. (2011). The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Cazeaux, C. (2009). "Metaphor and the Categorization of the Senses". In Metaphor and Symbol, Vol. 17(1), pp. 3-26.

Müller, C., & Kappelhoff, H. (2018). "Cinematic Metaphor as Poiesis: The Movement-Image as Starting Point". In Cinematic Metaphor Experience - Affectivity - Temporality, pp. 19-39, in collaboration with Sarah Greifenstein, Dorothea Horst, Thomas Scherer and Christina Schmitt, Volume 4 in the series Cinepoetics (English edition) ed. by Hermann Kappelhoff and Michael Wedel. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.

Ricœur, P. (1976). Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. 2nd ed. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press.

Carmen Hannibal is a Ph.D. candidate in Animation at the Royal College of Art and the convenor for the Society for Animation Studies SIG Figurative Meaning and Metamorphosis in Animation. Her research project 'The Living Metaphor in Animation' critically examines theoretical debates that lie in the intersection between animation studies, metaphor studies, and modern hermeneutics to aid the analyses of analog and digital experimental animated shorts. She has published in mediaesthetics - Journal of Poetics of Audiovisual Images, Animation Studies, and the online educational resource platform Fantasy/Animation.

Michael Dudok de Wit grew up in the Netherlands and has lived in London since 1980, directing independent animated films and tv commercials. He specializes in hand-drawn animation and his shorts have won numerous international awards, including an Oscar and a BAFTA award in 2001 for Father and Daughter. His most recent project, the feature-length film The Red Turtle, was a Wild Bunch/Studio Ghibli co-production, made in France with Prima Linea Productions. The film won the Special Jury Prize, Un Certain Regard, at Cannes Film Festival in 2016 and was nominated for an Academy Award in 2017. Michael also illustrates children's books, and gives talks on animation at universities in the UK and abroad.

Johannes DeYoung ​​is a multidisciplinary artist who works at the intersection of computational and material processes. His moving-image works have been exhibited internationally in major galleries and museums in countries such as Spain, Taiwan, Germany, USA, Canada, Ireland, and Australia, as well as being featured in The New York Times, The New York Post, The Huffington Post, and Dossier Journal. He is Assistant Professor of Electronic and Time-Based Media at Carnegie Mellon University. He previously taught at Yale University School of Art (2008-2018), where he was appointed Senior Critic and Director of the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, and at the Yale School of Drama, where he was appointed Lecturer in Design.

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A Virtual Roundtable on Relations Between Metaphor and Metamorphosis (Part 4)

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Animation is a time-based image-making practice that can change our ideas, experience, and view of the world. Both metamorphosis and metaphor are powerful means to realizing this capacity. In the broadest sense, metamorphosis can be characterized as a striking change of something, which in animation often appears as a visual transformation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Animation is a time-based image-making practice that can change our ideas, experience, and view of the world. Both metamorphosis and metaphor are powerful means to realizing this capacity. In the broadest sense, metamorphosis can be characterized as a striking change of something, which in animation often appears as a visual transformation. Being one amongst the different meaning-structures under the general term 'figurative meaning', metaphor strongly influences language, human thought, and the visual arts because it can generate a new understanding of common ideas. Members of the Society for Animation Studies' Special Interest Group (SIG) Figurative Meaning and Metamorphosis in Animation came together online to discuss the potential relations between these two areas of study since, at first glance, the terms metamorphosis and metaphor seem to refer to quite distinct phenomena.

How are metamorphosis and metaphor related?

Figure 1. The figure of a man transforms into a bird in the Scott Free logo. Animation by Gianluigi Toccafondo. © 1998 Scott Free Productions.

Gabrielle DuIys: I feel like metaphor is a kind of metamorphosis. By this statement, I do not mean to essentialize this relationship or imply a level of hierarchy between the two words. After all, there are many instances in which the two phenomena are beautifully and indistinguishably folded into one another. A notable and obvious example is the use of the metamorphosis in the Kafka classic of the same name to analogize absurdity itself with the experience of Gregor Samsa transforming into a bug. If we take metaphor at its most basic and fundamental definition, it is essentially a comparison between two (conceivably) dissimilar things ( Britannica 2017). This act of comparison isn't necessarily one of metamorphosis or transformation (though you could argue that even the act of applying a new value or framing onto a subject necessarily results in a change). However, it appears to me that an experience of metamorphosis occurs as we begin to shift our perspective in how we examine the original subject through this kind of comparison. For example, when we describe someone as having a 'sharp wit' (a metaphorical phrase that has been normalized in our everyday speech), we are associating abstract notions of intelligence with images and sensations of sharpness, perhaps, eliciting feelings of jabbing, piercing, and penetration. Yet, when we conceive of the word 'wit' on its own, at least in my mind, we do not necessarily associate the word and its meaning with this same level of evocative and, at times, palpable imagery described above. In that regard, metaphor forces the thinker to transform their thought and elevate the object or idea from its natural or assumed state. It challenges us to rethink our world beyond face value. It would, then, make perfect sense that metaphor tends to have such an intertwined relationship with art, as it is most commonly an artistic device utilized by artists of all types as a vehicle to challenge our ideas, experiences, and expectations.

Figure 2. An outline of the difference between metaphor and metamorphosis according to Andy Buchanan. © 2021 Andy Buchanan. All rights reserved.

Andy Buchanan: I think that in both cases, the artist, or writer is seeking to evoke a transference of properties from one entity onto another. A metaphor may achieve this without transforming the object of perception directly. So additional concepts might be evoked through narrative elements, structure, or voice. And I think metamorphosis achieves this more directly - the new concepts are evoked by an actual transformation of the perceptual object. I do not think this necessarily implies that metamorphosis is less subtle.

I am unsure about the implications of different media and media techniques and how they might integrate with this idea. I have often thought of (and described) metamorphosis as a medium-specific property of animation, at least in its actual, visual manifestation. I have struggled to uncover significant counterexamples. It demands time as a substrate upon which the transformation is written, as well as some material properties that allow an unconstrained transformation. But it seems that metaphor can be deployed in any narrative form, and perhaps even more broadly than that (such as metaphors expressed in musical themes) and perhaps even in media without temporal dimensions (such as metaphor delivered in color schemes, shape design, and so on).

Carmen Hannibal: The definition of a metaphor as "a comparison between two (conceivably) dissimilar things" is one amongst other possible definitions of metaphors from academic literature. My question is, therefore, what school of thought the definition of metaphor is drawn from?

However, Gabrielle has a very interesting point in that "metaphor is a kind of metamorphosis". As they mention in relation to language, the use of metaphors may greatly affect our capacity to think about (and I would add, to understand) the world, insofar that we experience a change to our way of thinking (metamorphosis) about how we come to perceive "the object or idea" when we "examine the original subject through this kind of comparison". To a large extent, I would agree with this function of metaphor to describe reality anew with additional information. Whereby the sudden change to our perception of reality caused by the metaphor is understood informally as an idea about a transformation in thought and perception, similar to the biological process of metamorphosis in the natural world. In my doctoral research, I am focusing on Paul Ricœur's (2003) take on novel metaphors in written language, which he presented as the solution to an absurd predication at the level of the sentence. For Ricœur, the change to the point of view comes not from a comparison between two words and their associations. He argues instead that it results from a fitting response by the reader to the tension between two opposing interpretations of the meaning of a sentence.

The question is now, as Andy suggests, to what extent does this change in our thinking relate to the idea of metamorphosis more generally in relation to the visual and to that of moving images? I believe that both Gabrielle and Andy provide great insight. The function of metaphors can indeed be studied in its own right. So can the idea of change in terms of 'metamorphosis' in thought and vision without necessarily granting any metaphorical implications. However, the change, metamorphosis, to our perception of reality that results from linguistic metaphors hold much potential for investigating how we come to understand moving images, such as animated images. The reason that these two terms are put together in this SIG is, of course, to initiate such discussion as we are having right now in the hope to discover productive intersections between moving images and comprehension that arises from figurative uses of language and visual images. Not only metaphor alone.

Finally, I would propose that if Ricœur is right in saying that "with metaphor we experience the metamorphosis of both language and reality" (1973, p. 111), then we may also be required to consider metamorphosis, a change, in terms of visual images. That is to say that we do not only need to understand the change, metamorphosis, of thought and perception, but we will also need to identify the visual metamorphosis, the visual change, in moving images that demonstrates the metaphorical. Which is different from metamorphosis as 'merely' an aesthetic effect. More specifically in terms of how metaphors as a 'strange predicate' from a Ricœurian tradition may occur in moving images is, of course, still open for debate.

Erwin Feyersinger: In addition to what you have all said about how metaphors involve transformations, I want to point out that we can also look at how metamorphoses are used as (conceptual) metaphors in animation. I distinguish, in narratological terms, story-level metamorphoses from discourse-level metamorphoses (Feyersinger 2017, pp. 103ff.), and, while these two types of metamorphosis are connected in animation and the latter can be used to represent the former, metaphors work differently in the two cases.

A story-level metamorphosis involves the transformation of a diegetic character or object into somebody or something else, as, for example, in stories about Pygmalion, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or She-Ra. As these metamorphic events can be represented with various visual and non-visual media, they are not unique to animation. Even in animation, they can happen offscreen. Regardless of the medium, these stories and their constituents can be seen as complex metaphors for human experiences, such as creativity, creation, use and abuse of power, loss of control, desire, psychological problems, and much more.

It is, however, with discourse-level metamorphosis that animation unleashes its full potential. A discourse-level metamorphosis in animation is the transformation of the visual representation itself, in the extreme case regardless of what the images signify. This notion of metamorphosis is what Andy has referred to as 'visual manifestation' of metamorphosis and includes what Norman M. Klein (2000) has termed 'ani-morph' in Vivian Sobchack's book Meta-Morphing (2000). Discourse-level metamorphoses are especially interesting when the interpretation of what the images represent becomes ambiguous, multistable, or even paradoxical. Animated images can thus become metaphors for everything that changes, everything that is dynamic, transient, unstable, or uncertain - on a small and large scale. This capacity of animation to give a concrete visual expression to all kinds of changes is one of the reasons why animation can be such a powerful, versatile, and insightful form of communication.

An animated metamorphosis furthermore enables a seamless connection of distinct visual elements, which can also be used in the case of metaphors, for example, in an in-depth exploration of one metaphor as the film displays various aspects of the source of the metaphor. A common conceptual metaphor used in animation is "life is a journey", which offers a rich conceptual frame for condensing the life stages of a human being into ever-changing events along a journey (Forceville & Jeulink 2011). As Carmen shows in her analysis of Signe Baumane's 2014 film Rocks in My Pocket (Hannibal 2017), a visual metaphor is sometimes introduced by a metamorphosis - in her example, when the head of a character turns into a light bulb to signify intelligence. Similarly, metamorphosis makes a fluid change from one metaphor to the next possible, or, in the terminology of conceptual metaphor theory, a metamorphosis of the source domain that expands and changes how we understand the target, i.e., the subject of the film (Forceville & Paling 2018, p. 116).
The authors are interested in your thoughts on the initial question and their responses. Please leave a comment below.
Also, don't forget to check out the blog next week for part 2 of the roundtable!
References
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia (2017). "Metaphor". In Encyclopedia Britannica, URL: https://www.britannica.com/art/metaphor. Last accessed 1 September 2021.

Feyersinger, E. (2017). Metalepsis in Animation: Paradoxical Transgressions of Ontological Levels. Heidelberg: Winter.

Forceville, C., & Jeulink, M. (2011). "The Flesh and Blood of Embodied Understanding: The Source-Path-Goal Schema in Animation Film". In Pragmatics & Cognition, Vol. 19(1), pp. 37-59. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.19.1.02for.

Forceville, C., & Paling, S. (2018). "The Metaphorical Representation of Depression in Short, Wordless Animation Films". In Visual Communication, Vol. 20(1), pp. 100-120. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1470357218797994.

Hannibal, C. (2017). "Subjective Perspective as Creative Metaphor in the Animated Film". In mediaesthetics - Journal of Poetics of Audiovisual Images, Vol. 2. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17169/mae.2017.63.

Klein, N. M. (2000). "Animation and Animorphs". In V. C. Sobchack (Ed.), Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

Ricœur, P. (1973). "Creativity in Language: Word, Polysemy, Metaphor". In Philosophy Today, Vol. 17(2), pp. 97-111. DOI: 10.5840/philtoday197317231.

Ricœur, P. (2003). The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language. Trans. from French by Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin Czerny and John Costello. 3rd edition. London: Routledge.

Sobchack, V. (ed.). (2000). Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Buchanan is an animation artist and animation researcher, originally from Melbourne, Australia, where he earned his Ph.D. from RMIT University (Plasmatic: Improvising Animated Metamorphosis, 2016), and is currently assistant professor of Computer Graphics Technology at Purdue University. Buchanan's scholarship and creative work explore the potential of digital animation for creative exploration and expression, combining studies in the history and theory of experimental art and animation with contemporary practices in the latest digital applications.
Gabrielle Dulys is a non-binary animation scholar and artist who will be starting as a MEXT Graduate Research Scholar at Yokohama National University this fall. They received their Bachelors from the University of Chicago and a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Their work straddles the boundary between practice and theory, with theoretical interests primarily in Japanese animation, the Other, performance, and gender.
Erwin Feyersinger is the co-director of the Research Center for Animation and Emerging Media in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany. He is the initiator and one of the coordinators of the interest group AG Animation of the German Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft (Society for Media Studies). His current research focuses on data visualization, science communication, film studies, and animation studies, following semiotic, cognitive, and narratological approaches. He has published several books on animation, including the monograph Metalepsis in Animation: Paradoxical Transgressions of Ontological Levels.

armen Hannibal is a Ph.D. Candidate in Animation at the Royal College of Art and convenor for the Society for Animation Studies affiliated SIG Figurative Meaning and Metamorphosis in Animation. Her research project 'The Living Metaphor in Animation' critically examines theoretical debates that lie at the intersection between animation studies, metaphor studies, and modern hermeneutics to aid the analyses of analog and digital experimental animated shorts. She has published in mediaesthetics - Journal of Poetics of Audiovisual Images, Animation Studies, and the online educational resource platform Fantasy/Animation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Virtual Roundtable on Relations Between Metaphor and Metamorphosis (Part 1)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Animation is a time-based image-making practice that can change our ideas, experience, and view of the world. Both metamorphosis and metaphor are powerful means to realizing this capacity. In the broadest sense, metamorphosis can be characterized as a striking change of something, which in animation often appears as a visual transformation.

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Half Asleep 2018 5min16sec One room, two half bodies, a silent relationship. My graduation film at the Royal College of Art 2018. PASSWORD:halfawake Half Asleep from Caibei Cai on Vimeo.

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vimeo扒Animation by Decick Wycherly, 视频播放量 1207、弹幕量 0、点赞数 99、投硬币枚数 28、收藏人数 83、转发人数 4, 视频作者 纳尔齐斯捞我, 作者简介 花、太阳、雨和你，相关视频：Tomatoes，【波比的游戏时间】你要干什么，The Bigger Picture，【坦克动画】德国巨鼠回归，【坦克动画】两败俱伤（熟肉），怪谈收容所，帮分身稳固身份《一只龟的进化史》十八集，Service，HORSE，Plea by Max & Laura Braun

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https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_erWxmLgiaJD-_AcESBYXSBEzCcn1DrT/view?usp=drive_link

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when the silence comes | liang-hsin-huang

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by Jacques Drouin — 1976

A particularly creative example of the pinscreen animation technique, this film is about an artist who steps inside his painting and wanders about in a landscape peopled with symbols that trigger unexpected associations.

Production : National Film Board of Canada (nfb.ca)

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湿らない 腐らない おいしく まろやか (前畑侑紀) / Stay with Me (Yuki Maehata)