Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 8(3) 215–233 © The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1746847713503280 anm.sagepub.com Animating the City: Street Art, Blu and the Poetics of Visual Encounter Vanessa Chang Stanford University, USA Abstract Street artist Blu creates remarkable wall-painted animations, in which he depicts cartoon figures cavorting along, around and through actual urban surfaces. Through this activity, his film Muto (2008) pictures a fraught relationship between urban space and its dwellers. In some way, the film seems to epitomize contemporary thinking about urban space. Emphasizing the primarily visual and spectacular character of the modern city, such thinking casts it as a space where a totalizing gaze elides the embodied experience of the individual. Yet, in Muto, Blu deploys this visual aspect to conceive of the metropolis as a complex ballet of individual choreographies. Envisioning the city as paradox, Muto casts urban space as both highly spectacular and embodied multiplicity. As a work of animation, Muto also encodes this contradiction formally; even as it depicts the city as a capitalistic sphere of exhaustion, it imbues its morphing bodies with the capacity to redefine place. Connecting the shapeshifting bodies of its beings, the bodies of its spectators and the body of the artist, Muto invests urban space with a sense of plurality. Incarnating urban movement as inscription, and urban inscription as movement, his artistic practice recognizes how bodies shape the spaces in which they dwell. Keywords animation, Blu, embodiment, encounter, graffiti, Muto, spectacle, street art, urban inscription, urban space In the past decade, Italian street artist Blu has been creating remarkable wall-painted animations, in which he depicts animated figures romping along, around and through actual urban surfaces. Labo- riously painted and photographed in urban space over existing graffiti, these large-scale murals are then knit together as animations onscreen. With his team, Blu uses house paint to create distinct images on urban walls, floors and ceilings, photographing each image to serve as a single frame of an animation. He then alters the static image, introducing the subtle visual shifts that will constitute Corresponding author: Vanessa Chang, Modern Thought & Literature, Stanford University, Margaret Jacks Hall, 450 Serra Mall, Building 460, Room 219, Stanford, CA 94305-2022, USA. Email: vxchang@stanford.edu 503280ANM 8 3 10.1177/1746847713503280animation: an interdisciplinary journalChang 2013 Article