INTRODUCTION

While it is commonplace to find “movement” and “motion” as vital principles within definitions of animation’s affective power and unique form of representation, discourses of “rhythm” offer potentially illuminating ways of framing the medium’s ability for endowing objects and characters with life and expressiveness. Rhythm is foremost an elusive concept that may be initially constituted by and through individual objects or audiovisual forms exhibiting a rhythm (music, poetry, language). However, since the early 1990s it has also emerged as a distinct interdisciplinary methodology in the form of rhythmanalysis, which interrogates specific natural, cultural, and technological processes of existence through their connections to rhythm. The conflict between what Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier term cyclic rhythms (natural, biological, cosmic rotations = fundamental) and linear rhythms (timetables, schedules, calendars = quantified) structures our involvement with advanced industrial capitalism, as we become subject to “the perpetual interaction of these rhythms with repetitive processes linked to homogenous time.” Our everyday engagement with such micro and macro cycles of experience—from seasonal “earthly” variations in organic rhythms to the institutionalization of monotonous repetition via the segmentation of labor—ultimately frames rhythm as an increasingly socio-political problem because “everyday life remains shot through and traversed by great cosmic and vital rhythms.” However, Ryan Pierson also speaks to animation’s potential for “rhythmic relations,” patterns and figures, asking of rhythm why it might be so “capable of containing the potential for chaos in deformation.” Indeed, for many animators, artists, and practitioners “all animation and action are based on rhythm,” particularly given the ways that time and duration are managed and measured as part of cartoon production. Yet if the default understanding of animation is that it persuasively presents images of life, force, and motion, then a turn to rhythm and its analysis can potentially help to organize and further elaborate upon the medium’s defining preoccupation with movement, but also the interaction between characters and the variant energy of their sentient animated bodies.

This chapter observes the implications of thinking through rhythm in relation to animation by examining filmmaker Richard Linklater’s animated feature films Waking Life (2001), a series of vignettes following the dreamlike wanderings of an unnamed young man; and A Scanner Darkly (2006), an animated adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1977 science fiction novel set in a dystopian future America struggling under the weight of a drugs epidemic and invasive surveillance technologies.