The Animated Cartoon (and, More Generally, the Cinema Envisaged as a Mobilization of the Absurd)

Abstract

This essay, first published in 1925, argues for the absurd to be taken as the fundamental principle for animation, if not all film. To this end, Bofa, a graphic artist and critic, draws on and idiosyncratically updates Henri Bergson’s theory of laughter in order to show ways that live action can learn from animation.

KEYWORDS:

• Gus Bofa
• Henri Bergson
• animation
• film
• caricature
• the absurd

Notes

1. Emmanuel Pollaud-Dulain, Gus Bofa: l’enchanteur désenchanté (Paris: Cornélius, 2013).

2. “Les ‘Bibendum’ Politiques” cartoon, Le Rire 406 (12 November 1910). See John Adcock, “Life and Work of Gus Bofa (1883–1968),” blog, 〈http://john-adcock.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/life-and-work-of-gus-bofa-1883-1968.html, accessed 1 December 2015.

3. Two special issues of the journal 1895, both edited by Valérie Vignaux, have looked closely at Cohl, O'Galop, Lortac and their associates. See: 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze 53 (special issue, 2007: “Émile Cohl”); and 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze 59 (special issue, 2009: "Marius O'Galop/Robert Lortac. Deux pionniers du cinéma d'animation français”).

4. Francis Lacassin, “Aux écoutes de l’ombre,” in Pierre Mac Orlan, Images du fantastique social [Les Cahiers de Pierre Mac Orlan, No. 13] (St-Cyr-sur-Morin: Les Amis de Pierre Mac Orlan/Musée des pays de Seine-et-Marne, 2000), 13.

1. Perhaps if the animated cartoon had been more successful, amid these enormous difficulties, it would have arrived at more interesting results and fulfilled a more honorable artistic role.

2. Editor’s note: Bofa’s meaning here is ambiguous: are we dealing with the visual translation of that which we know about the abstract into the concrete? Or are we dealing with the visual translation of that which we know about both the abstract and the concrete?