The Animatic Apparatus

Reviews / Votes

At once theoretically dazzling and fearless, The Animatic Apparatus shows how the production of life in animation deconstructs ontology as such: "There is no death in animation, because there is no being, no existence, to begin with." But an-ontology is not the end of living. Instead, carefully tracing how the medium of animation has come to operate as a supermedium, Levitt finds animation to be the key not only to modelling the contemporary condition but also to formulating an ethical relation to it. Animation offers nothing less than a toolkit for new assembling of lives upon the active void of contemporary media. -- Thomas Lamarre, University of Chicago With subtlety and elan, Levitt compellingly animates an historical journey with dolls, puppets, automata, replicants and artificial life to secure the case for "an-ontology." Media, in the form of novels, films, images, cartoons, screens, robots, and other automata are recursively part of the "human" condition such that distinctions between life and artificial life or intelligence and AI are ultimately unsustainable. Levitt's inspired pursuit of a mediology of technology and metaphysics demonstrates that whatever we are, our emergence is bound up with the simulacrum, and that animation is at least as real as the real itself. What's more, our ethics and our politics must come from that condition. -- Jonathan Beller, Author of The Cinematic Mode of Production, Professor of Humanities and Media Studies and Critical and Visual Studies, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY What if Mamoru Oshi's 2004 anime Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is not just a midnight cult film, but the secret template for nearly all of 21st century technoculture? In The Animatic Apparatus, Deborah Levitt convincingly argues that this is actually the case. "Images possess their own forms of vitality," ones that cannot be easily distinguished from our own. -- Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University, author of Connected: Or, What It Means to Live in the Network Society