Animation

While there have been some illuminating studies on animation as objects of study, its relationship to the living and the deceased, and a focus on otherwise marginalised productions in the global south, how anthropological insights might inform the making of an animation have yet to be substantively considered. How can the two terrains – of animation as graphic medium and anthropology as ethnographic representation – effectively be brought together? A fitting topic to optimally explore this medium of motion is with respect to the processes and experiences of human migration - its relevance and poignancy becoming even more piercing when that migration is forced due to violence and is met by incremental violence of various kinds along the way. By focussing on a looped three minute zoom animation on the stories of Eritrean refugees, North Star Fading (2018), this chapter highlights how zoom animation enabled by digital programming pose very distinctive issues about imagery, sound, subjectivity and sensory experience that contrasts markedly with animation that is created and reproduced on the non-zoom planar surface (positivenegatives.org/story/north-star-fading). We do not so much as watch and listen, but we enter the animation. We too are drawn in.