couragepunch:

This is something by way of an extremely belated response to a post on Ha Neul Seom.

In his 2009 post gaguri contrasted Japan and America in terms oF animation style - dividing them into ‘modernist’ and ‘classical’ - the expressive and the realistic, if that’s not dumbing it down too much. On…

Actually, the money quote is this:

It’s perhaps because of this inherent admixture of an accidental modernism into our experience that only extreme forms of creative animation, or creative non-animation, jolt us out of our customary surrender to anime’s modulated unreality. If only for a moment, the absolute oddballs challenge us. They show us some of the artifice in what we normally consume. Hopefully after such a moment of challenge we can still allow ourselves to slip into a new world. Perhaps it’ll be a place where even the most madcap of modernist expressions is quite real, and even a budget-forced pause can be meaningful.

This post is an excellent piece of apologetics for pauses, or still “animation.” Honestly I never thought of things in these terms. Coburn displays very keen observation and an insight that delights me to no end.

In my own post in tribute to the late Kon Satoshi, I explain why I am so devoted to animation as a craft and form of entertainment. It’s because I love illustrations, and in animation I get these at a rate of twenty four frames per second. Now sometimes, thanks to Coburn, I realize how I enjoy how it stays still for a while, to linger on a frame…

It isn’t just a means to let me enjoy an image, due to the dynamics of linear sequential time in telling a story, it becomes a moment.