FLUX AND FURRY

Animation, as any Wikipedia reader knows, is ‘the 
optical illusion of movement’, whether achieved 
through photographing drawings, moving clay models 
and recording the tweaks frame by frame, drawing 
directly on film or devising models digitally. But the 
definition is a weak one, or only a starting point. Not 
only animation but all film/video proceeds by generating an ‘optical illusion of movement’. A recording 
device samples fragments of the world, repeatedly 
biting a moment of time from its flow. Later the resulting still frames of a film or video strip are cranked 
or streamed into motion, generating a second-order 
re-creation of the motion of which they had once been 
part. Furthermore, to define animation as ‘the optical 
illusion of movement’ makes it impossible to think of 
animated stillness – perhaps rightly so. But, in one way 
or another, there is much stillness in animation: from 
the aforementioned individual cels or frames at animation’s root to the static backgrounds that accompany 
a scene’s main action; from production storyboards to 
those moments, occasioned by the narrative or gag, 
when everything has to stop. This must be qualified: 
it is true only inasmuch as stillness can ever be said 
to exist and is not itself something of an illusion. It 
is, after all, a question of scale whether the movement 
that inhabits all things is perceived and, in addition, the 
perceiving eye itself is always in movement. Moreover, 
what animation or any cinematic production presents 
is not simply an illusion of movement. It is movement itself: movement of the image data through the 
projecting mechanism, which produces movement on 
the screen. There is, indeed, an animation technique 
that explores vision’s contingency and the relativity of 
stillness and movement through the extreme extension 
of time. Bullet time or time slice or view morphing 
stills the scene or object within the flow of the film 
or moves it only at extreme slowness, while our view 
of it changes constantly, as the visions of multiple 
cameras are sequenced. Thereby a frozen moment of 
time is stretched out, presenting us not so much with 
an example of the optical illusion of movement of an 
object but rather with the perception of movement 
itself in motion.
http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/pdf/highlight_estherleslie152.pdf