Empathizing with the Animated Bodies

Abstract:

In our everyday life, we meet the animated figures on the screen and feel touched by them in surprising ways. We cry for Mary when she drowns herself in alcohol because her best and only friend Max refuses to write letters to her by sending her the “M” of his typewriter. We get nervous when Jerry is caught by Tom and hope he could get away before Tom puts him on the stove. Why, and how, do we empathize with the animated beings even though we know they are not real beings but clay-puppets or images? What’s even more interesting is we even feel genuinely happy and relief when Wall-E and Eve successfully save the plant together even though they are artificial robots modeled with 3D software. In Carefully Constructed Yet Curiously Real, Malou van Rooij offers a possible reason for the overwhelming emotional response to the animated films made by the American animation studios like Pixar, Disney, and Dreamwork. She points out that the audiences respond and empathize with the animated characters because of a specific shared style of characterization, which paradoxically combines lifelikeness and abstraction (191). In this paper, by taking her idea further, I argue that empathizing with animated figures, specifically with animated AI characters, takes more than the visual potentiality of animation.

To explore how we empathize with animated AI characters, I adopt Amy Coplan’s definition of empathy, which requires affective match, other-oriented perspective taking, and self-other differentiation. I then address the necessary practice of identification to embody the animated AIs. The research of performance studies and cognitive theory provide the preconditions we need to identify the animated figures as conditional bodies. By analyzing an animated film, Eve’s Time (Yasuhiro Yoshiura, 2010), I unfold the process of how the identification not only provides the otherness for the other-oriented perspective taking but also prepares the emotions for the affective match in the process of empathy.

Works Cited:

Coplan, Amy, and Peter Goldie, Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Van Rooij, Malou, ‘Carefully Constructed Yet Curiously Real: How Major American Animation Studios Generate Empathy Through a Shared Style of Character Design’, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 14.3 (2019), 191–206.

* This paper was revised and presented at the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference, Albuquerque, NM, February 2021.