The Plato's Cave of Animation

I think, when we look at what Detheux is saying in "Prozac or Kyosaku", that is, that we should question the established modes of aesthetics, we must consider the question first outside of animation, as it applies to the general ideas of the human mind. If we are to question the authority of aesthetic, we must understand that aesthetic is here to serve our minds.

All western, and most modern eastern music, serves the same aesthetic rule, Pythagorean tuning. I'm not an expert in music theory, but the basic idea is that before Pythagoras, it was hard to write down music. This isn't because notation didn't exist, it is because the idea of a set pitch representing a note was completely unheard of. Things were just done to what sounded good. Pythagoras came up with the idea that notes should be evenly spaced frequencies of sound waves. The problem was that this wasn't the way it always had been, so music was slightly off from the natural place of the notes, as our ears hear them, but over time, our ears got used to Pythagorean tuning, and now all music rests on this principle.

In Plato's Cave, we get a pretty good idea of why new ways of seeing are so hard to give onto others. If you're not familiar with Plato's Cave, here's a pretty good animated version:

So, to relate that to animation as a mode of communication, let's consider the elements of Plato's Cave as they relate to our perception of Disney. We are all blindingly used to two forms of animation, Disney and Warner Brothers's exaggeration, and the broader field of representation, which includes Claymation,Special Effects CGI, and, to an extent, animatronics. Representation works because it's real to us. Gumby lacks most of the big principles of animation that mandate movement, but we still believe Gumby because it is representative of something. Disney exaggerates because it's two dimensionality is not real to us, and it gains credibility through exaggeration. These styles are all we ever know in animation, and the idea of anything else is impossible in our brains. But if we did find something different, it would be impossible to describe it to others. To completely divorce ourselves from Mickey and Gumby, we would have to first throw out all the rules. Then we could try to find new ways of perceiving movement.  Perhaps we could play upon our persistence of vision? What would happen if some happy modernist made an animated film at 5 frames per second? Wouldn't the strobe-like animation be enough to be different? Except that won't work, because there isn't an audience for strobe lights with pictures. In order to play on our perception of motion, perhaps we should look at making animation at 60 frames per second?  Here is an example of the effect of frame rate on animation, and even from a simple animation, we see a major difference, what if subversion is as easy as making our animations more fluid?

This isn't quite what Detheux was going for though. Simple changes like this are post-modern, and I think what is desired is a more modernist rejection of all things Disney. As with the modernist art movement, rejecting one thing (western art, Disney) just gives us more of something else that already exists (African art, Gumby).