Chapter 2 The Animated Spectator: Watching the Quay Brothers’ ‘Worlds’ Suzanne Buchan To say the poetic image is independent of causality is to make a rather serious statement. But the causes cited by psychologists and psychoanalysts can never really explain the wholly unexpected nature of the new image, any more than they can explain the attraction it holds for a mind that is foreign to the process of its creation. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1958 S ilent, sombre blackness fades up to an abstract composition of rough vertical and horizontal rectangular forms that frame thick and mottled glass panes. The camera pans up, to the left, back to the right and down again. The rhythmic sound of a tram passing in the distance suggests an open, off-screen space. Slightly visible in the lower left a movement commences: slowly, ponderously, a rotating form rises like a behemoth from its fixings, a thick, oily screw which doggedly emerges from its invisible existence below the visible surface. Eerie, restrained and cyclical music accompanies this unfamiliar and compelling vision; a squeaking violin implores the screw to strain higher, higher, revealing the spiralled ridges of its cylindrical form. Then, in the foreground, two smaller screws begin to twirl upwards to complete an industrial pas de trois, a visual fugue, Abstract: Using a framework of phenomenological concepts that reviews other authors’ approaches to animation spectatorship, the essay explores the viewer’s experience of the ‘worlds’ of animation film in screening, particularly investigating the relationship between the images on screen and their tangible, extant counterparts in the real world outside the diegesis. With a focus on puppet animation exemplified by the Quay Brothers Street of Crocodiles, the essay posits a number of propositions as to how animation as a form addresses and engages its audience. If aims to articulate the difference between a world, created with the animation technique, and the world, the phenomenal world we negotiate in our daily lives. 17