HAFF celebrates the start of the famous Tour de France 1-5 July 2015 in Utrecht with films and a lecture about sports and animation in collaboration with Paul Wells of the Animation Academy Loughborough University (UK), on the occasion of his recent book, Animation, Sport and Culture.
Ever since the very beginning of animation history, starting with Arthur Melbourne Cooper’s Animated Matches Playing Volleyball (1899) and Animated Matches Playing Cricket (1899), animation has been closely associated with sport. This is rarely mentioned, but a cursory glance at pre-cinematic optical toys; the early experiments of Marey and Muybridge; Disney’s Goofy shorts of the 1940s; the films of Russian Boris Dezhkin; features like Space Jam and Surfs Up; McLaren’s recent Tooned series, featuring Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button; and even devices like Hawkeye, demonstrate the symbiotic bond between sporting practice and animated film. In many senses, though, there is a logical and inevitable connection. Both share a complex and highly specific preparatory and developmental process - this in the service of the visual creation of a particular sequence of pre-choreographed movement. Both are an engagement with the relationship between functional execution and aesthetics, speaking to debates about art and cultural form. Both have a relationship with technology that effects definitions of performance, emotional affect, and meaning. Both share a condition that prompts enquiry about philosophy, representation, and social value. Both dramatize motion. The following programme of films, drawn from analysis in my recent book, Animation, Sport and Culture, reveal the relationship between sport and animation is a good match.
Paul Wells

This program screened as part of Haff 2015