Introduction

Abstract

AbstractThe above epigraph to Marquez’s autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale, highlights the difference between the actual past and the past kept alive in memory. It is not so much that we remember what happened in the past per se, but by way of remembering and sharing our memories, we create a narrative of that past. The stories that we tell of our lives (as well as the ones that we choose not to tell) are the building blocks of the identities we fashion of ourselves as well as of our communities. It is in this sense that the memories we recount are constitutive of what Marquez calls life. By foregrounding the role of remembering in the construction of identity, the epigraph encapsulates one of the fundamental precepts of memory studies, namely that memory is more than a mere recollection of what actually happened in the past. Rather, it is a “fluid and flexible affair,” as Bond et al. (2018, 1) assert, a performative practice mediated through various modes of recounting such as places, rituals, as well as a variety of textual, visual, and other sensory media (Bal et al. 1999; Erll and Rigney 2009; Plate and Smelik 2013). Animation is one of these media. Whether made in pencil, paint, clay, paper, or sand, through the use of pin-screen or the landscape, with puppets or created by computer, what different forms of animation share is “the capacity for plasticity,” as Dobson et al. (2019, 8) recently observed. It is this plasticity, combined with the freedom animation offers to escape from the indexical qualities inherent to film, that makes it a particularly productive mnemonic medium. This book sets out to explore this dimension of animation.