Cross-species Perception and Ecological Disposition in Animation

Abstract

Studies on environmental animations have explored the politics of world-making and the interdependence of humans and animals. Taking as a case study the short Hungarian animation A Légy (Ferenc Rófusz, 1980), this article explores ways that animation can foster an ecological disposition in the viewer by presenting the worldview of a housefly from a first-person perspective. A Légy focuses on altersubjectivity, a term that Vinciane Despret (‘Ethology between empathy, standpoint and perspectivism’, 2010) uses to describe Jakob von Uexküll’s practice of adopting the animals’ perspectives. Because each species is attuned to its particular dwelling-world, Von Uexküll (A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with a Theory of Meaning, 2010) suggests, we must study animals by examining the features available to them by erecting ‘a bubble’ around them. A Légy gestures toward this idea by facilitating a becoming-animal that highlights perceptual similarities and differences between the viewer and the animated insect. The animation machine enables a ‘cross-species perception’, a form of perception that extends the spectator’s perceptual awareness of the nonhuman worldview.