Beyond Fiction: Animation, Society, and Theories of Reality

“Beyond Fiction: Animation, Society, and Theories of Reality” seeks to study and analyze animation as a form that constitutes and mediates psychological and social realities. The project will look at how animation and the emergence of VR could lead to future questions of existence and the meaning of reality itself. The project draws from philosophical inquiries, such as the “Make-Move” theory from Jeff Malpas and Bruno Latour, as well as Actor-Network theory. Drawing from these theories and methodologies, this paper explores animation’s formal and technical components, analyzes the use of the medium in popular culture, and speculates into the future of the medium as it meshes with human society itself. I have divided my research presentation into three areas of inquiry: how animation has been constituted as a medium, how it has been utilized as a medium to affect society’s behavior (utilizing World War Two and the Coronavirus Pandemic as specific examples), and how modern advances in animation as a medium, such as virtual reality, lead to philosophical and ethical questions related to morality, immortality, and the meaning of life