Dick Tomasovic's 'Le corps en abîme' Explores Animation and Mortality

Dick Tomasovic's book 'Le corps en abîme', published by Éditions Rouge profond, defines animation cinema as a zone of acute ambivalence where the body is continually threatened with erasure without the process being fully completed. The work examines the distinction between the animated, artificial body and the living body, drawing on films and analyses. Tomasovic notes that 'animare' means both 'to give life' and 'to do with death', referencing the danse macabre. The figurine, originating from puppetry and automata, embodies a paradoxical life where persistence is thwarted by artificiality, further accentuated by digital animation according to Pixar technicians. The fear of inertia is a key theme, threatening both the drawn or modeled body and the entire animated image. The book addresses the body in abyss, where animated imagery can integrate death into its intimacy, assimilating alterations up to the self-destruction of the film material through the radical involvement of the animator's body.