Deleuze and the Duck: The role of the time-image in the

cartoons of Chuck Jones

Nikolas Paras

DePaul University
paras.nikolas@gmail.com
THE ANIMATED CARTOON, in its mature form, can be the most facile and elastic form of graphic art.
Since the first Cro-Magnon Picasso hacked etchings on his cave wall every artist has longingly sought the ideal
medium-one that would contain within its structure color, light, expanse, and movement. The animated cartoon can
supply these needs. It knows no bounds in form or scope. It can approach an absolute in technical realism and it can
reach the absolute in abstraction. It can bridge the two without taking a deep breath.- Chuck Jones, Music and the
Animated Cartoon

This is clear when one attempts to define the cartoon film; if it belongs fully to the cinema, this is because the drawing
no longer constitutes a pose or a completed figure, but the description of a figure which is always in the process of
being formed or dissolving through the movement of lines and points taken at any-instant-whatevers of their
course. The cartoon film is related not to a Euclidean, but to a Cartesian geometry. It does not give us a figure described
in a unique moment, but the continuity of the movement which describes the figure.- Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1 The
Movement-Image

This above quote from French philosopher Gilles Deleuze marks the extent to which he
explicitly engages the subject of the cartoon or animated film. Despite having extensively written
on the subject of film, for the most part the issue of animated film stands out as an omission in his
work. Even within the secondary literature as there are only a few in-depth engagements joining
Deleuzes thought and animation. It shall be shown that this forms a significant hole in Deleuzes
engagement with film. It is often within certain animated works that Deleuzes concepts of the
movement-image and the time-image make themselves most forcibly present. In particular I shall
focus on the work of the great 20th century animation director Charles Chuck Jones, most famous
for his work as an animation director for Warner Bros, and specifically one of his great works the
1953 short Duck Amuck.
Before approaching Jones specifically, it would be good to examine the above passage in briefly.
Deleuze is not wrong, technically speaking, in the passage, but this claim needs some fleshing out.
For the sake of simplicity and space, what follows will be mostly limited to what is termed
traditional animation, i.e. hand-drawn animation, since also to attempt to account for computergenerated animation (both in three-dimensional and two-dimensional forms) as well as other types
of cinema which have typically been grouped with animation such as stop-motion would occupy too
much space. What Deleuze seems to be saying is that in animation there still exist moments which
possess no independent relationship to one another, but rather an ordinal relationship. By Ordinal
relationship is here defined as having a necessary and ordered relationship between anterior
and/or posterior cells eg; if one looks at an individual cell of Gertie the Dinosaur or Steamboat
Willie it has necessarily a relationship to the cells which are anterior and/or posterior to it.
Animation must exist in the context of a sequential series of images which create the impression of
the movement of bodies.
So animation requires that there be some continual flow of a series of images, but these flows can
take different forms. For example, a cell from Steamboat Willie might exist in a relationship of
belonging as a member of an ordinal sequence of drawings but it can still exist by itself and
present itself even while isolated from the whole. =This allows for the potential of a unique moment
in certain circumstances and thus poses a problem for Deleuzes very brief touching of the subject.

This is not to say that Deleuze is strictly wrong about what he says about animation in the passage;
it is more that there are potentialities for animation that are not yet accounted for. The quote from
Jones at the beginning accounts for this in a way that Deleuze hadn't anticipated in Cinema 1:
namely that the elasticity of the cartoon short does not restrict it wholly to elasticity but extends
enough that it can negate its own elasticity. Such is the potential in animation, then, that it is capable
of abolishing its own differences from live-action for the sake of originality through repetition.
Nonetheless this description of animation can function as an example of what Deleuze calls the
movement-image. A good working definition of the movement-image is provided by Richard de
Brabander:
The movement-image proceeds by narratological and linear incisions and references. Action sequences have a
(chrono)logical order which is represented through actions in an spatial configuration. Whether the film starts
with a present situation the character is confronted with, or with a flash-back or a flash-forward is not of much
importance. Relevant is that in the movement-image past, present and future are clearly distinguished from
each other. The spectator immediately recognizes whether a scene refers to something that has happened in
the past or alludes to something that is going to happen in the future1

Animation as movement-image is simply composed of a set of events and images existing in a

priorly given chronological order. The movement-image film is one in which the characters exist
within a world that is such that they act in response to the world as agents and in the course of a
narrative confront and solve problems that they find.
In addition to the potential for animation to be not as necessarily in flux as Deleuze described, there
is also a potential for it to become even more radically in a state of flux and becoming. Jones
himself pioneered a specific technique which embodies this, namely that of smear animation or
limited animation. Smear animation, which first appeared in the 1942 Jones short The Dover
Boys, depicts the animated figures not in a series of complete fluid movement but rather a sudden
abrupt burst or jump. This contrasts with more traditional and common technique of full
animation. For example, one form of the technique of full animation is rotoscoping, popular in
early Disney films such as Snow White or Peter Pan; this technique consist of filming a scene using
live actors in costume, then having the animators trace over the movements of the actors so as to
create as life-like movement of the characters as possible. Full-animation is not limited to
rotoscoping, for example the Disney short Skeleton Dance (1929) short obviously did not trace live
humans to depict the dance of skeletons,but is still an example of full animation because there was a
1 Brabander, R. D. (2001). "In Between Cinema and Literature." Hedendaagse Verbeelding:
Reflecties Op De Beeldcultuur.

desire to have the movement appear realistic, whether

or not the objects depicted were realistic or not.
Smear animation on the other hand dispenses with the
notion of trying to capture something that is a realistic
flow of movement. In smear animation the figures
exist in one state and then abruptly jump into another
state and in between there is no attempt to capture a
fluid movement, rather the exact opposite. The smear
cells are disjointed, self-contradictory and meaningless outside of the actual flow of the narrative.
Instead of depicting a snapshot of a body in motion, the cells show malformed bodies with multiple
heads or eyes with radically inaccurate and contradictory proportions. These cells do not depict
images of movement or of a character transforming through movement but rather depict the
transition of points in time. Hence the phenomenological impact of smear animation is that the
figures seem to instantly jump from one state to another.
Smear animation discards the movement-image which can be seen as embodied in animation by
rotoscoping as well as other types of full animation by providing a series of images of time rather
than images of a flow of movement. In full animation the cells represent individual points of linear
movement, with the aim being to represent a smooth continual flow of movement. In smear
animation however the cells represent, rather than individual points of movement on a linear line,
points of heterogenous time on a line. So where in the image of full animation the cells ABCD
will represent time-points 1234.. in the narrative; in smear animation cells A, B, C will stand for
non-linear points such as with the smear cells standing a state of qualitative difference such that
instead the time-line may look more like 14 instead. In a single smear animation cell the
figures may become multi headed, and heterogenous with regards to themselves. The cells
contradict the very figures depicted and thus no longer represent the process of real-movement of
bodies in the same way as before.
Jones films and shorts can be seen as representing a shift in animated film from the movementimage to the time-image.2 In live-action films, Deleuze marks the general emergence of neo-realism

2 This is not to say that the time-image was necessarily wholly absent in animation. For example
Emile Cohls great experimental piece Fantasmagorie from 1912 could be said to embody certain
aspects of the time-image. Whether it does is a topic for another discussion;what is of concern right
now regards a general emergence of the time-image in animation, not its absolute genesis.

in post-WW2 Italian cinema as evidence of a shift in live-action films from movement-image to

time-image. Deleuze defines neo-realism