Academic Presentation: The Traced Performance

The Traced Performance: Rotoscope in The Case of Hana and Alice

Computer graphic imagery (CGI) has blurred the aesthetic boundaries between animation and cinema in the digital era.[1] For instance, what does perceiving character “body” mean in the cinema when the figures are modeled and motion-captured with a 3D software? Does mise-en-scene matter for performance body? The digital version of rotoscoping, the technique that was created a century ago, makes the definition of the animated body even more complicated.[2] Donald Crafton’s theory of the performance of and in animation opens the door of considering the aesthetics of animation from the perspective of its performativity.[3] In this paper, I argue that, as a form of animation, digital rotoscoping provides a performing style that is different from 3D motion-capture animation and abstract animation. Through the analyses of the performance of and in rotoscopic animation, I present the features and significance of the performing style of blending the realistic and the abstract, which creates an “in-between” style. Using Shunji Iwai animated film, The Case of Hana and Alice (2015) as an example, I analyze how digital rotoscopic animation creates an in-between style with the character and mise-en-scene performances.

In contrast to Gottesman’s The Rotoscopic Uncanny, which explores the aesthetics of rotoscopic animation from the political and ideological perspectives, I underline the performative perspective of digital rotoscoping and explore how the performing style creates a different form of aesthetics from 3D motion-capture animation.

[1] Zachary Samuel Gottesman, “The Rotoscopic Uncanny: Aku No Hana and the Aesthetic of Japanese Postmodernity,” Animation An Interdisciplinary Journal 13, no. 3 (November 2018): 192.

[2] Gottesman, Rotoscopic Uncanny, 193.

[3] Donald Crafton, Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-Making in Animation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

* This paper was presented at Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference, Albuquerque, NM, February 2020.