My topic in this essay is the animated moving picture, particularly in film. I think there lies a benefit in reading animated moving pictures with Marshall McLuhan's theories in mind because of the specific media-based quality of these theories. Animated films reflect the very regime of film, which is the visualization of motion. On the one hand, every film obtains a quality of animation because every movement in film is an optical illusion. On the other hand, there is a wide range of movies whose very aesthetic quality lies in their appearing to be ‘artificial’. Animation in its semantic variance unifies the possibility of ‘animating’ something by ‘giving it a soul’ with that more mundane aspect of making it appear live on screen by means of colours and lines, digital algorithm or objects and also sound effects.

First of all I want to explain why I chose the topic of animation. Regarding the latest films that have appeared on the screen, we can see many of them ‘blurring boundaries’ between animation and so-called live-action movies. Animated movies influence their audience emotionally and even intellectually in the same way live-action movies do. An example, albeit a rather clichéd one, would be Bambi, where the audience is confronted with the moving death of a ‘drawn’ character.