Animating Action: Changing the World With Anime, Rituals, and Robots

How do humans invest nonhuman entities with agency, personhood, and feelings? Responding to calls to reconsider human-nonhuman relations in a time of global polycrisis, Animating Action offers a novel framework for imagining connections between animated matter and political action. Rather than studying animism as a specific cultural tradition distinct from supposedly non-animistic cultures and their putatively disenchanted worldviews, the authors argue that practices of animation are universal, even as they stress that specific methods of animation differ according to time and place.

Drawing on their expertise in the history of science, religious studies, media studies, and the environmental humanities, the authors present a new theory of animation as action. Through cases from contemporary Japan, Vietnam, and elsewhere, they investigate how humans make persons through rituals, use the technique of compositing to construct worlds in illustrated films, and evoke feelings and associations to forge a sense of intimacy with robots. Additionally, they show how humans deanimate entities that have become unruly, dysfunctional, or unwanted.

These concrete practices have political consequences. Animated films may encourage audiences to accept the environmentally destructive status quo, while robotic designs may naturalize and reinforce harmful gender hierarchies and biases. But animating practices also hold transformative political potential: a person-making ritual may give animals voice in courts of law, and the very techniques roboticists use to evoke positive feelings in human users can provide fruitful models for resisting the harmful effects of technologies that manipulate users by emulating agency and empathy.

Animating Action does not simply advocate an alternative worldview or story. Rather, it shows how people can deploy existing animation techniques to change the world for the better. It offers both a call to action and a model for how to instigate transformative change.