The beings in the second series, on the other hand, have to change their plane of existence in order for their reality to grow: they are possibles or virtual, at first, and then they change their manner of being in order to become more real. In every case, the general problem is the same: how to make what exists more real?
― David Lapoujade, 2021, The Lesser Existences: Étienne Souriau, an Aesthetics for the Virtual
Mickey Mouse proves that a creature can still survive even when it has thrown off all resemblance to a human being. He disrupts the entire hierarchy of creatures that is supposed to culminate in mankind.
― Walter Benjamim, 1931, Gessamelte Schrifte, (note fragment unpublished during his lifetime)
Stopping in the 1970s, “Hybridity” as the fifth and final chapter is less of an end point than a certain realization of the artifice, plasticity, and technology that [H. G.] Wells and [Jacques] Loeb envisioned as the future of the human relationship to living matter as well as of the “catastrophic” situation that Georges Canghuilhem (following Kurt Goldstein) saw in life subjected to the milieu of the laboratory.
― Hannah Landecker, 2007, Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies
Lovecraft’s racism is grounded in his dread at the supposed mutation, alteration or denaturing of what he regards as the ideal human form.
― Steven Shaviro, 2021, Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life
I am getting more and more embarrassed to say that for me experientially and artistically – 2021 – was the year of the New Temporealities: The Xenogenesis of SF show at the Rezidenta Scena 9 Bucharest, Romania. Part of this long goodbye was my inability to deal with a show that has been so tricky, so slippery and vacillating between existence and non-existence during the last 2 or 3 years or so of my life. Together with poet and curator Vasile Leac and Romanian comic book artist & researcher Alexandru Ciubotariu I was involved in giving it shape and a bit more reality. It is not a show that does not dwell on the nostalgia industry even if it features a large selection of Romanian SF pulps. It had many implicit and explicit historical sources, some more obvious than others, including a wink to a work by Afrofuturism pioneer & SF author Octavia Butler: Xenogenesis trilogy (written and published in the US btw 1987-89 during the last years of Socialism in Romania).
If Eastern European Ufology and ex- or post- Soviet eastbloc SF productions mean anything today it is not because of their unavoidable neo-brutalist and retro-futurist allure. Nor is it because they embraced this totalizing version of the future or encouraged a narrative of triumphant progress, so typical of mid XX century SF, both East and West. I would argue, that eastbloc SF is not so remote (far away, a source of nostalgia for impossible futures), but may give us more insights into our present day’s geopolitical rifts & sclerotic developments. As ‘the end of history’ narrative is being quickly superseded by a new freeze and a hardening polarization of a multipolar world, we seem to have lost the ability to look for porosities across boundaries and accept that technological transformations are never complete nor total. Where can we still find such cohabitation or track transmutations, transitions and morphings? What collective processual dream-work can we support, cherish and allow for?
Maybe the best is to learn from deceptively simple examples. One such key example, is a drawing sequence made by Alin Răuţoiu for Timpuri Noi/New Temporealities show. I see this drawing as both a storyboard (to be potentially animated) and as a continuous search for missing memetic links within the uncanny valley’s of mediologic epigenetics. What could appear whimsical and slapdash is a transformation exercise in metamorphics. It’s a potential guiding principle that will perhaps help us trace or elaborate on what it means to encourage Souriau’s ‘lesser existences’ out of the frugality of fugitive planning (Fred Motten & Stephano Harney 2013) at every step of the production process, following the anti-logistics of the sketched and the rudimentary. As such every rudiment is an appeal to first principles. What would a (critical) nobrow theory and continuing practice of animated species look like today when 10 million animated stickers inundate WeChat daily?
An animated theory should be animated by all of these changes and still leave room for continuous development, elaboration or affect-ability, a potpourri of remix culture under various forms of media ‘miscegenation’, be they by-products of either CGI or critters of biocybernetic post-reproduction (W. J. Thomas Mitchell). Instead of being paraded inside the fungible NFT complex sold at art auctions, underfed by Patreons, or ending up just as the next AR/VR headset promise, we have to wonder what happens next. What happens after the job pitch is finished, ie – at the threshold of what you might or do not actually control or own. What goes on at the borderlines of individual contributions for who knows what deadlines, clients, or small initial circle of initiated fans or friends. Does the shipwreck stay shipwrecked, pwned, eternally land-locked on a YT channel or released into a completely different media ecosystem?
No matter what flavor is today’s NFT securitization lobby is currently selling about eternal ownership, no matter how well-trained is the ‘right-click save’ (flight)- potential and reflex, it is more and more clear that the private has always been subjacent. More fundamental than the private is the issuing forth, or what philosopher and mathematician A N Whitehead called ‘passing on’ (PR, 213). According to Whitehead this passing on has been generally dismissed or simplified, as Western philosophy kept zooming in just on the final segment, carving out the private, unable to give due attention to these alien arrivals and abductions. This meant ignoring what it means to be abducted or for what. Afrofuturism has once and for all transformed our understanding of abductions as colonial and of slaves being abducted and escaping even morphing while overboard into Drexcya’s underwater civilisations.
How did you change onboard? How does this action take precedence over private satisfaction? Privacy is important only in the sense that it cannot be primary, but ulterior. Thus, this unity of aesthetic appreciation is immediately felt as private only after the ‘passing on’. This growing-with togetherness of this concrescence (the ‘real internal constitution’ of actual entities in ANW’s cosmological scheme) leaves its imprint on satisfaction, even if we fail to acknowledge it.
Characters will mutate long after they left the paper or the Wacom tablet. There is always a non-zero chance that cartoons will exist and outlive the initial tastes or prejudices or even go against those initial impulses or particular predilections (‘yours’ at the times of their making), or commissioned workdays. Stuck as we are in a 21st c global capitalist over-work world, we can see on a daily basis how imaginary productions everywhere end up getting locked and chained or ‘promoted’ inside corporate structures, reduced to upcycled creative products inside humongous franchises of totalitarian copyright regimes and franchise systems.
How could we delineate and uncover further examples of pop gene-transfer phylogeny and how can we confabulate about or adopt an evolutionary perspective on such memetic entity vivacity that would make transformism a given?
Evolutionary biologist/paleontologist Stephen J. Gould has been my reliable guide through most of the thickets and brambles of biological history and evolutionary theory. Gould is maybe at his best when tempering the deterministic excesses of neo-Darwinism just-so stories with dialectical aplomb. Even if some might have been taken aback by his daunting polemical side and his constant diatribe, he did with passion, being a dedicated bibliophile going back to primary sources, letting the forgotten history of biological ideas bear upon what we could call a block history of life sciences (orthodox biological history rewritten mostly by biologists themselves). He was a critical Darwinist that traced various brands of ‘scientific racism’ following the historical routes of biased statistical analysis, unrepentant IQ pseudo-science, racist craniometry etc. all the various “mismeasure[s] of Man” that seem to pervade algorythmic capitalism nowadays. With the same analytic rigor, he took on Disney’s most famous creation in his seminal (characteristically witty and encyclopedic) short essay Biological Hommage to Mickey Mouse (initially published as Mickey Mouse Meets Konrad Lorenz in the 1979 issue of Natural History Magazine from what I can trace).
Gould wrote this essay on the occasion of Mickey’s 50th anniversary in 1979. He would go on to observe a hitherto simple and (till then) ignored tendency: how the Disney mascot got younger over the years. He uncovered a process of underacknowledged accelerated rejuvenation. In spite of its (venerable) chronological age, the syndicated cartoonists drawing the cartoon made him younger and younger. His spring of youth is not solely artistic, because Stephen Gould points out to what he calls a biological illusionism at work whenever artists (in a conscious effort and under supervision one might suppose) apply to Mickey M. certain morphological changes that over the years made him more well-behaved, ‘civilized’ and cutesy in character. In his words:
“the magic kingdom [Disney] biological illusionist trades on a biological illusion–our ability to abstract [reify?] and our propensity to transfer inappropriately to other animals the fitting responses we make to changing form in the growth of our own bodies.”
Gould goes on to quote both ethologist Konrad Lorenz and Charles Darwin’s remarkable work Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals published in 1878 as examples of “evolutionary continuity of emotion, not only of form”. Animal cuteness is welcome as it elicits companionable behaviors or care and protection in us, almost as handy and mischievious as our propensity to abstract or reify. Yet, we cannot deny that there are also unwanted secondary effects to the neoteny ‘fad’, specifically in regards to our tendency to be choosy and culturally select for the attractively cute and banish the “sharpie” as Stephen J Gould might say. In Edmund Burke’s 18th-century patriarchal aesthetics of feminity, “angularity” (the sharpie) is being chastised, as part of an ideology of essentialist feminity where beauty was used to promote “docility and powerlessness”. In thousands of years old process of domestication (which should not be thought of as exclusively human-directed or unidirectional), breeding and selecting cuter and cuter companion species such as pet dogs etc. was enviable (taking my cue here from Donna Haraways companion species turn), yet most of the time this has also entailed a number of un-wanted or secondary a/effects directed towards other non-human species. One a/effect has been the exclusive focus on so-called “charismatic” other-than human species. One side of which is the utter domination of the large, furry and big-eyed emoji online/offline species online and in our hearts and minds and our unkindness, disgust or indifference towards everything that does not fit the pattern: the slimy, the wormy, the multi-legged or the faceless. Our ‘Invertebrate Welfare’ seems wanting when as Jonathan L. Clark and others have concluded – we tend to morally divide living things into different categories at the intersection of sociozoologic and phylogenetic scales, divisions that tend to separate the charismatic megafauna from those “whose deaths [ought to be] ethically disregarded.”
In fact, Hollywood (and Disney franchise by extension) is full of “unloved ones”, monstrosities predominantly taking only insectile or invertebrate form. This might be one of those dubious mammalian lineage core values (although duckbill dinos also seem to have cherished it). This is based on our cultural (mammalian?!) inflected attachment towards creatures or objects that exhibit similarity to us or to what we consider universal cuteness – read as intrinsic worth – and would get automatically cared for, cherished, invested in and integrated into human values and culture (or so the legend goes). Related to this – we have co-produced and ensured associated life-long troubles for the very pets that have been pushed by cutesy human selective pressures (and increasingly commercial consumer ones too) into an array of growing horrific afflictions, specifically linked to certain predilect pedigree breeds. In a heart-rending expose, Esther Woolfson depicts what she terms “unhealthy” relationships driven by fashion, commercialism and aesthetic preference:
“Blood, kidney, gastrointestinal and neurological ailments are common many King Charles spaniels, griffons and chihuahuas suffer from the spinal-cord destroying syringomyelia, caused by having skulls too small to accommodate their brains. It is a condition that has increased greatly over the past 20 years, and continues to do so.”
Darwin, himself was an avid and life-long admirer of earthworms – a truly uncharismatic yet very important and largely invisible keystone species. As Esther Woolfson dutifully mentions, Darwin has been using the generation-long experiences of animal breeders (especially pigeon breeders) in developing his theory of natural selection. He also remarked on the fancy breeder’s extraordinary results and was fascinated by how such pigeon extremities as Columba livia came to exist.
Besides other things, part of what made his evolutionary theory so radical at the time was his synthetic approach in uniting several radical ideas plus “re-assigning the responsibility” for shaping living forms to living organisms themselves (Jessica Riskin 2020). Early evolutionists, as well as Darwin’s Darwinism, were not only in direct opposition with Natural Theology, finally getting rid of a species-shaping rational Creator – but more importantly came to accept that various “living agencies” played an increasingly larger transforming role, resulting in a shift of emphasis on the transmutation and transformation of species as an ongoing potentially infinite process. In the old, pre-Darwinian paradigm there was no newness, no surprise metamorphosis where one thing could be transforming into something else over geological time and there was also no notion of ‘deep time’ for this to happen. Species-being was mostly immutable, a string of close-fitting monads, all well poised on a chain-of-being with created unchanging species leading up from worms to cutesy angels in a sequence where nothing was supposed to change, to digest its own brains, mutate-shapeshift or forever disappear(!).
What was previously regarded as artificial, and unnatural, in the sense that it was against nature’s very rules of segregation and immutability happened to be the key to speciation and the formation of new species. Thus, important preparative experimental work done by pre-Darwinian biologists such as Joseph Gottlieb Kölreuter (1733-1806), enriched today by our increasing recognition of non-European horticulturalist historical encounters, show us how the first clear demonstrations of how artificial hybridization primed us to finding all that hybridization ‘out there’, part of the general process of “transmutation” of species. Kölreuter’s experiments settled once and for all the dispute between the “old doctrine of special creation” and the “new special creation” (proposed in Linné later writings) where hybridization did not result in sterility automatically or revert to its fixed place in the old chain-of-being. From a biological theoretical point of view it is almost as if hybridity and species transmutation could not exist in nature, that is before Kölreuter started describing his experiments in alchemical terms. Alchemy was then certainly more available as a conceptual storehouse of experience, knowledge and ideas than nowadays. Alchemy accepted processual happenings, and it was easier to switch from an accepted transmutation of elements or metals to the transmutation of living species in historical time. It is no accident that the theory of the transmutation of species gets its initial spur from the mutability and promiscuity of inorganic matter, itself manifesting a protean life of materials that are in fact more predisposed to procreate and admixt than the doctrine of “new special creation” would have admitted. In his writings Kölreuter pics up on the creation of intermediates, of what we could call sequential composite forces that co-mingle and like salt crystals produce an (excluded) third:
From the union and commingling of these two materials, which occurs most intimately and in an orderly manner according to a definite relationship, there arises another of an
intermediate sort, and which consequently also possesses an intermediate
composite force, arisen from those two simple forces, just as through the union
of an acid and an alkaline substance a third or intermediate salt originates.
(Kölreuter (1763), § 1.)
Yet Kölreuter’s hybridization experiments and writings got unduly forgotten for nearly 100 years, and his work was only later vindicated by further experiments with more accuracy and statistical rigor by Mendel (1865) whose work was in his turn forgotten and re-discovered around the 1900s by botanists such as Hugo de Vries (1848-1935), Carl Correns (1864-1935), and Erik Tschermak (1871-1962). This attention to developmental pathways, the search for the epigenetic laws of form and a penchant for morphogenesis constitute in themselves an alternative tradition and cluster of related concepts in the history of biology.
In the light of this conceptual history of biology – cartoon evolution is thus only a very recent example of a (more-than-human) transmutation of the animated species. As Stephen J Gould only half-jokingly pointed to – our symbolic gestural repertoire gets transferred via new mechanical means of reproduction and circulation. The best example for this is probably Kawaii-ism (from Japanese かわいい or 可愛い, variously translated as ‘lovely’, ‘loveable’, ‘cute’, ‘adorable’) that is here to stay, and we could even say that it has become one of the most pervasive online and offline trends, integrated and distributed universally by emoji texting and animated stickers. It has also bifurcated to include kimo-kawaii (a mixture of cuteness & grossness) and guro-kawaii (more on this extreme kawaii hybrid see below). We do not have to appeal to naturalization of Kawaii-ism and universal cutefication to recognize how neotenous mammalian evolution has been subsumed into late-capitalist commercial consumer culture. We should also be able to also historicize the origins of kawaii in Japan’s 1970s and 1980s and 90s subcultural milieu – as a condensation of bubble gum aesthetics and technological prowess under the waning star of the Japanese bubble economy. In the West cultural critics have had varying responses to the increasing cutesyfication of images, cartoons and worldviews. Darko Suvin, a well-known 1970s literary critic and a key theoretician of Science Fiction acidly remarks in his recent “Blagoevgrad Theses”(2018) that cutification was always the sworn enemy of modernism and a further example of totalitarian “happy endings”, because an “invasive” ideological continuity of Disneyfication is the proper realm anti-utopianism where – “No work, no dirt, not even unregulated nature are permitted to be shown here, all must be predictably, manageably cozy (though in fact these illusions are produced by underpaid and precarious people working).” For Suvin, cuteness cushions and suffocates everything, never allowing in turn progressive estrangment to disalienate us:
This is here coupled with a restless rage, at times sensational and always cute, for addictive consuming as a new anchor for collective unanimity in lieu of radical disalienation. The cuteness is diametrically opposed to cognitive Modernist poetry from Baudelaire on, where “sensuous refinement… remains free of cuteness (Gemütlichkeit, coziness).”[Defined by a Hollow]
Probably today cuteness is so pervasive that we fail even to give its due. As part of the increasing gamification and cheeryfication of overwork regimes in daily life, we have to assume that cuteness is non-innocent but also much more varied than previously suspected. These emojis and animated stickers are also a collectible visual part of an evolving online political language. It is harder and harder to abstract them from the important role kawaii- (cutesy) aesthetics played in countless, regional, hand-drawn infographics or targeted governmental approaches (in the rare cases where such action was unanimous) designing friendly approaches to COVID 19 prevention methods during the pandemic.
Today, instead of fears of ‘infantilization’ we have to pay increasing attention to how cuteness plays an increasingly important role not just in ‘covering up’ an untenable situation but also a response to the current polycrisis situation or as a subversive marker, be it during protests, climate-change caused heat-waves or pandemics caused by zoonotic spill-overs and environmental destruction, or simply when one is caught in traffic during interminable traffic jams.
All my life I have been supporting public transport everywhere, and have been using public transport whenever I could. Some years ago, between announcing the bus stop station, during traffic jams, a closed bus line video feed in Bucharest would display lots of cutesy innocent animals and pets, a welcome furry mental distraction to the pressures of the day. Of course, this seemed to take a vindictive turn, an increasingly annoying dimension that came as a punishment (if the contrast was too glaring) making one choke on digitized furry balls. The soporific function fails and the playfully, cutsy, furry veers our cognitive-perceptual world into overdrive. There is no way an overwork situation could be cutified. So sometimes cutification may achieve exactly the opposite of its proposed balmy, innocent effect.
Transformism under generalized cutefication and required kawaiism can get one across filters and content moderation (human or algorithmic), so there is increasingly a tendency to hide or repackage toxic online content under less aggressive and a more acceptable facade. This process was well established during subreddit /r/place experiment initiated by none other than Josh Wardle. For an exceptional in-depth article on that phenomenon written by Alin Răuțoiu (the purveyor of this article’s main drawn example of transformism), easily translated by Google translate, go here. There is also maybe something innately subversive in cartoonish in overt cuteness, be it guro-kawaii or not, and thinking only in terms of an anaesthetic, we risk ignoring its subversive potential for mayhem, brutality, and sadism (see Happy Three Friends adult animation web shorts starting with 1999). In response to this contradictory potential as well as the gory cartoonishness of fully animated life, artist Ciprian Homorodean has even done a video in 2005 casting his friends as the three happy friends:
Picking up on the original animated shorts, Homorodean and his own friends do a reenactment of a very bloody online cartoon. The body horror of disembowelment or dismemberment – typical to the cringe “image world” of animation spills overboard. If everything is replaceable and leaves no room for off-screen or on-screen distances, then every violent act, even staged brutality between friends on a campfire night might feel very disturbing, especially if cast as mere cartoonish mayhem. No matter how increasingly cartoonish things have gotten, if we are to follow Walter Benjamin’s initially enthusiastic analysis of an early rambunctious, non-cute, misbehaving (even sadistic) Mickey Mouse’s in Steamboat Willie by W Disney and Ub Iwerks (1928), we have to also include his later 1930s writings in which he retrospectively acknowledges how this collectively innervated, animated, channeled brutality could spill over into fascism for real.
For Suzanne Ngai, a professor of English at Stanford, the cute merits our attention in more ways than one. The cute is part of a new, unduly ignored and alternative categoreal aesthetic scheme of taste and feeling that does not fit very well with the old habits of Baudelaireian “sensuous refinement” mentioned by D Suvin above. She has dedicated years to recovering ‘minor’ non-cathartic aesthetic categories such as the cute, the zany and the “merely interesting” from their largely subdued, background position in tandem with the rise and their pervasiveness as moodboards of today’s contemporary culture. The cute, zany and interesting only recently found a place in scholarly texts, with older, more prominent objects of study such as the sublime, the beautiful, the ugly or the estranged getting all the press and critical attention. In fact her much-quoted and reproduced essay “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde” (2005) completely seems to upstage Darko Suvin’s focus on a ‘manly’ tradition of modernism, of meritorious art history, whose neurotypical stance seems diametrically opposed to any furtiveness, cushioning or creeping aesthetic stealth. This triad, in the words of Benjamin Lytal review of Ngai’s book Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting – defines a thoroughly cartoonish way in which we work (zany), exchange information (interesting) and consume (the cute). Cuteness as the dominant aesthetic of consumer culture is to be found everywhere – and for Ngai is the result of another important hybridisation: that of high art and mass culture.
At first glance, Alin Rautoiu’s 2021 animated phylogenesis of the Pepe the Frog based on Matt Furie-invented character, it’s animated logic so to say, appears to operate the same way as Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno‘s 1999 celebrated emancipation of the Japanese AnnLee anime character by ‘releasing’ it back into the art world (in view of Ngai’s avant-garde history of the cute). Their whole project’s critical reception mostly focused on its artistic or collaborative aspects, how it has questioned copyright laws or how it manages to reconfigure the art world’s traditional logic of exhibition. Here I would attempt some key distinctions. For one, taking AnnLee and ‘releasing’ it into the art world has insured her (untimely?) immurement as a short-lived artworld media star. Deborah Levitt pointedly remarks in her concise and dense work The Animatic Apparatus: Animation, Vitality, and the Futures of the Image (2017) why Huyghe and Parreno’s “traditional conception of autonomy” fails to grasp such interdependency that is key to the puppet/animator marionette theory introduced by Heinrich von Kleist in 1810. Accordingly, we should recognize that AnnLee is both autonomous from and linked to, living as a node, a product of “interoperative vitality” (Levitt) both alien and recognizable. Her ‘death’ was then also an outcome of cutting her off from the media ecosystem that supported her.
Pepe the Frog is already for good or for worse a living part of the Moodboard Industrial Complex (following Krish Raghav on Chaoyang Trap) and how the ‘*felt* is *said’ and as such the artworld can never constitute its final mausoleum. In contrast, after purchasing the rights to the AnnLee secondary character, artists Huyghe and Parreno have been ‘liberating’ the pop character of the anime by stripping it of nearly all of its kawaii pop characteristics, releasing it into the art world only after recreating it as an eminently ‘alien’ figure with completely opaque, almond-shaped gray pupilless milky eyes. AnnLee’s de-cutification process could be perceived as a standard modernist gesture – accomplishing progressive estrangement à la lettre, but only as to release it within the confines of the artworld.
If we care to observe Pepe the Frog’s past or future frog-leaping around from platform to platform, from one moodboard to another, from one context to another, we can never ignore the various degrees of transformation. On the platforms of Western digital folklore, Pepe’s misadventures have garnered attention for being the stand-in for the most virulent strains of Internet culture’s right-wing/alt-right complacent and toxic potential (anti-semitism, racism, misogyny). However, this mostly tends to ignore Pepe’s adventures in the realms of the Sinosphere (particularly on Weibo) or why it has not been overtly weaponized over there. I am taking my cue here from a Radii China article by Chloe Yorke from 2020 that details the life of Pepe or rather “Qixi frog” that became a strain of Internet “sang” (丧) dark humor during the Qixi Festival (similar to the Valentine Day). According to Chloe Y. “Qixi frog” is available as a virtual service on Chinese e-commerce platforms Taobao and Pinduoduo, and has been trending on Chinese microblogging Weibo as a general symbol for disillusioned youth facing constant pressures from family to succeed, excel, and find a partner or marry. Alin Răuţoiu’s Pepe evolution drawing – functions as a repository of sorts, superseeding the usual reaction- or coping mechanism- driven older memes or sticker packs and becomes more like the latest, more dense and narrative filled stickers that function almost like a strip. According to critic and translator based in Beijing – Jaime who is a regular contributor on Chaoyang Trap, Chinese sticker packs harken back to literal New Year’s eve sticker posters (年画, nianhua) “people used to put up on their walls and doors for vibes.” These were low forms of contemporary folkloric Chinese art made by anonymous new year picture makers single iconic images that could pack a lot of detail and encapsulate the dynamism and tumult of an era’s aspirations, from daily life to people’s expectations, gossip and current fads.
I just love the above example of contemporary nianhua. It is as if the Monkey King’s iconic character – from the Chinese classic Journey to the West joins China’s bid for the stars.
Storming the Heaven‘s is here literalized, it is actually happening on board and under zero-gravity conditions. The impudent Sun Wu Kong is also a masterless master of Transformism. As practiced by the procesual monkey, transformism itself transforms from being an eminently imprecise art into becoming a way to deal with insurmountable odds. It evens out the field, it allows multiplications, camouflage, mimetism and replication, scaling up or scaling down. If mystical, transformism is a slapstick sort of mysticism, a fooling around with infinity and finitude. During his adventures, the monkey indulges with impunity in the ‘forbidden’ Peaches of Immortality. From guardian of the gardens he’s infiltrating the Heavenly Yellow Emperor banquet uninvited. A certain childish artlessness goes hand in hand with thousand yr old life extention, traditional fruits and flowers that also abound onboard a children’s ‘toy’ spaceship. Under the guise of what some might call naive nativity, utopianism, a lucky star, you can see how an entire imagery of prosperity & future-present bloom is attainable to the adventurous zeal that seems to animate the indomitable monkey. Her transformer skills are an inherent part of her trickster figure, helping her to escape the most inhospitable environments (being boiled, sautéed, steamed, boiled, pickled, etc), getting in trouble, pious, yet never bowing down its head or accepting a ‘given’ socially (earthly = heavenly) given place. The nianhua depicted above conveys this feeling, to be at ease among stars while supporting another journey, this time a result odlf joint efforts and space-faring programs.
Finally A.R. – Pepe the Frog transformation is a repository that includes the image of the alien – accomplishing a critical and unrecognized historical metamorphosis because we tend to paste over. The extraterrestrial more often than not coincided in Western EN SF media narratives (movies, literature, ufology, etc.) with the Western Democracies Big Other: the Commie Red Scare infiltrator. From its very beginnings, since the US late 1940s, UFO mania started up under the sign of ideological intrusion and space race challenge. Right from Kenneth Albert Arnold’s sightings near Mount Rainer the image of extraterrestrial has been over-coded with that of the faceless ‘Charlie’, the expressionless other, the regimented, uniformed, political other, and culturally xeno-. UFO mania didn’t just happen to coincide with the fear of infiltration and indoctrination from the outside. Both were part of a Cold War’s SF imaginary where aliens are generally depicted as brainwashing/body-snatching entities, taking over the minds and bodies of normal freedom-loving citizens that would never dream of harboring an inner alien or (God forbid!) an inner commie. Paradoxically the more the frog goes neotenic with the use of techniques of defamiliarization – eyes growing larger and wider, cuteness does not lead to powerlessness but a certain irreducible strangeness that might help us question why this is disturbing or what ideologies are challenged by this transformation. This ultimate animatic transformism acknowledges and deflates all these geopolitical panics that are becoming more and more present nowadays, allowing their common historical nature to manifest as a vivid memetic mutation in front of our newly aquired alien eyes.
Selected Bibliography
Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde by Esther Leslie, Verso 2004
Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film by Daniel Mourenza, Amsterdam University Press 2020
The Animatic Apparatus: Animation, Vitality, and the Futures of the Image, Zero Books 2018
On Communism, Science Fiction and Utopia: The Blagoevgrad Theses by Darko Suvin, 2018
A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse by Stephen J. Gould 1979
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