VIRTUAL London Heritages Conference

Abstract

Gertie the Dinosaur (circa 1915), produced by Bray-Hurd Process Company, is one of the earliest animations that employed the celluloid technique to accelerate the production of animations. The transparency of plastic allowed only the moving parts to be redrawn, which liberated the hands of the animators from painstakingly drawing every single scene and background for each frame. Here, I recognize the spatio-temporal depth from a thin layer of plastic bearing a drawing of a dinosaur. This largely comes from the disjuncture and collision of different times and spaces embodied by the respective visual representation and the material. The dinosaur and plastic are situated at the extreme ends of Earth’s timeline. One marks the inception of geological time—so ancient that we could indexically observe it through fossilized forms found in sediment. The other floods within the modern-contemporary era, prone to constant adaptation, alteration, and shape-shifting through chemical synthetic practices. They are at odds with each other, each with distinct categorical qualities. Animation appears to provide the only negotiating fantastical ground where the meeting-out-of-joint can take place, because, as Esther Leslie suggests, animation is an “an obscured realm in which all unexplained and magical, illogical events occur.” This raises the question: So does the meeting of dinosaur and plastic only speak of a fantastical world that has no relation with Earth’s geological time and space? I argue the seemingly illogical conjunction beckons toward a physical object—plastiglomerate—which functions to breakdown the barrier between animation and our physical reality.