What Can an Animated Body Do?
PHILM numero 6, anno V, 2026 [OPEN]
What Can an Animated Body Do?
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What Can an Animated Body Do?
In Émile Cohl’s famous 1908 short film Fantasmagorie—often considered the first animated film in the history of moving images—white lines drawn on black cardboard come to life. In the opening scene, a man in a projection room is partially blinded by a voluminous feathered hat. Plucking the feathers becomes a gesture of “seeing better”: the removal of a “real” obstacle that blocks the phantasmagorias projected on screen.
Taking up this metaphor, the upcoming issue of PHILM aims to explore the notion of animation as a rupture from the constraints of indexicality that typically anchor filmic recording. Here, animation is not limited to cartoons or CGI character creation, but is understood as a process inherent to any moving image—whereby a sign can “become animated.” Yet in what way, and within what space?
If something becomes animated, it does so within a hybrid and liminal space: an anarchic and schizophrenic zone of the image’s two-dimensional field. Animation marks the site of a chaotic “overcrowding of signs,” such that only through the superimposition of differing poses can something take form, move, and be perceived as alive. Within this theoretical framework, animation is no longer a genre, but an event internal to the moving image—a process that can emerge in cinema as well as in animated films. Telling examples include the use of lettering in cinematic expressionism, the insertion of extraneous images into filmic space, or the framing of filmic situations such as posters or textual references to other films. While cinema and animation may appear structurally distinct, many cinematic trajectories are marked by their capacity to venture into territories proper to animation, breaking loose from the constraints of screen-bound realism. The digital and the rise of special effects have further blurred the boundary between cinema and animation, enabling new phantasmagorias to emerge. But what continuities and divergences persist between digitally generated phantasmagorias and those created through animated drawing? To what extent has contemporary cinema, with its special effects, intercepted—or perhaps betrayed—that “threshold within the threshold” unique to the animated line? What can an animated body do, in contrast or in proximity to a filmic one? And how might such inquiry reshape our understanding of the image itself, whose frame—rather than functioning as a constraint—comes to host asymmetric elements (drawings, letters, ideograms, or pictograms) that continually rearticulate its status?
PHILM therefore invites contributions that explore the relationship between animation and filmic images, extending beyond the genres of cartoon or anime, to identify the theoretical implications that the concept of “animation” holds for the construction of moving images.
Selection Procedure
Please send an abstract of a maximum of 1000 characters (including spaces) by the 1st of September 2025 to the editorial board address: philm.redazione@gmail.com, indicating the title of the proposal, the section of the journal in which you intend to participate (Scritture or Tracce) and a short biography of the author. Proposals will be evaluated by the editorial board and the results of the selection will be communicated, by email, by the 30th of September 2025. Selected contributions must then be submitted by May 2026 and will be subject to dou-
ble-blind peer review.
Contributions, written and composed specifically for the journal, must fall into one of the following sections:
* Scritture: in-depth essays dedicated to the specific theme of the single issue, between 25000 and 30000 characters in length (including spaces and notes);
* Tracce: shorter articles, dedicated to individual films or video-art works which are linked to the theme of the issue but between 15000 and 20000 characters long (including spaces and notes).
The volume is expected to be published by the end of 2026.
