In progress –
In 1831, the French caricaturist Charles Philipon faced trial for insulting the king of France. The accusation involved Philipon’s satirical depiction of the king as a pear, or poire in French, a slang term for a fool, or simpleton.
In court, and later in print, Philipon presents this argument: that the artist has the right to ‘follow the law of resemblances and the logic of associations’, from one image to the next. Philipon’s ironic defense amounts to a defense through animation; that given enough frames, anything can transform incrementally into anything else without any single moment in which the identity shifts… This sets the stage for the unique phenomenon of animated metamorphosis, the unique ability of animation to explicitly perform the double transformation of form and concept concurrently.