Cartooning/Animation and Interpretation

After reading the two comic articles written and illustrated by McCloud and Sousanis, I came away with one similarity between the comics, and it is the interpretation of conceptual thinking versus perceptional thinking. I started out by reading “The Fifth Dimension” by Sousanis, and I was utterly confused to say the least. I know about the fourth dimensional tesseract and how time plays a role when adding a fourth dimension, but trying to under a fifth dimension of imagination via comic was very hard to grasp. Sousanis brings in the notion that “Both binding agent and action, imagination allows us to span gaps in perception” (Sousanis, 91). This notion of perception being a building block once combined with agency to get a sense of surrounding and meaning through an image. This idea of only have perceptual thought as a building block to the ultimate idea of imagination (conceptual thinking), is the idea that propels this comic strip along. Once reading McCloud’s article on the notion of identity and thought going back and forth between types of thought it was easier to understand Sousanis and the Hiroshima animated videos. “Our identities belong permanently to the conceptual world.

They can‘t be seen, heard, smelled, touched or tasted. They’re merely ideas. And everything else – At the start – belongs to the sensual world, the world outside us” (McCloud, 40). This quote is what solidified imagination as the fifth dimension with regards to our perception guiding all theoretical thoughts that we have, but once the base notion of experience and thought is established, then from there our brains run with the possibilities of all the different realities that can be simultaneously taking place at the same time as the reality that we are currently in. It’s like a dream, one cannot have physical feelings in a dream unless they have experienced it before; however, our brains can take similar experiences that we have had in life and make a fake memory in order for us to think it is actually happening. Flying is something many people dream about yet no one has flown without other objects acting upon them so the brain takes experiences like the swing set and other factors to make the perception of flying happen.

The two animated videos of the bombings of Hiroshima were created to invoke different thoughts within the viewership of the videos. “By de-emphasizing the appearance of the physical world in favor of the idea of form, the cartoon places itself in the world of concepts” (McCloud, 41). This quote is prevalent in both videos but mainly in the one entitled “ANIMATION DEPICTING HIROSHIMA BOMB ATTACK” because they paid less attention to the actual detail in the cartoon and more on the concepts of what happened in the video.

This is in contrast to the video “Hiroshima A bomb attack animated” in the sense of realism. “Through traditional realism, the comics artist can portray the world without – and through the cartoon, the world within” (McCloud, 41). The use of more detail in the video showing the same event steers viewers thought about the actual people there and what happened regardless of it still technically being an animation, while the less depiction in the first animation shows more of the actual event and the hardships the citizens of Hiroshima faced as a whole instead of the individuals there. The attempt by the animator to invoke emotion using viewer identification. “This combination allows readers to mask themselves in a character and safely enter a sensually stimulating world” (McCloud, 43). They wanted the audience to identify with the characters literally getting killed in order to get the point across that it was a humanitarian lapse in judgment and a tragedy.

“Pictures are received information. We need no formal education to ‘get the message.’ The message is instantaneous” (McCloud, 49). These videos we were able to capture the essence of what happened without needing words and perceived notions or the decoding of what happen, everything plays out in front of the viewer.