Anima Animata?

Dear reader,

Welcome to this little corner of, I hope, not-too-chaotic musings on the art of Animation. As a student of animation only beginning on the path of animated illumination, a whole new world opens itself to me. As I tread slowly but surely forward on this journey, I will sometimes stop between two shots or two animation sessions to ponder on certain words or matters that might be of interest to animators. This won't be a systematic study though. Mostly because it wouldn't really be fun to read for you and because I'm not trying to write some academically specialized blog, so I'll jump from one subject to another, trying to keep the curves between jumps as smooth as possible. Yes, this was indeed my first attempt at an animation "joke".... Bear with me.

For this, my first post, I wanted to brush on a subject that I think might be of "philosophical" interest to all involved in the art of animation and that might actually serve to answer this very basic question: "what is animation?". In all the definitions that I have read of what the art of animation is, I have never actually come across any that mentions the etymology of the word itself (for those who are a bit rusty, etymology means the "origin of a word"). This is quite surprising as it can shed some light on what it is exactly that we are trying to achieve with this art. So what is the etymology of animation then? I was thinking about it the other day and as I often do, tried to deduce what the Latin or Greek root of it might be. My knowledge of Latin is actually quite limited and my knowledge of Greek in the one of my personal origins, that is, Modern Greek.

Thinking about words that share similarities with animation, I thought of words such as "animism", "animal" (and even "animosity") that all share that *anim root. Coincidence? Not likely given that "anima" happens to be the Latin (and Italian) word for "soul" (or "spirit"). And what better way to define Animation but as the art of breathing life into an inanimate object (that is, an object without a soul). And here’s an interesting loop in the definition: the soul, the "anima", is often considered to be the breath of life but did you know that the Latin word itself, anima, comes from the Greek word ánemos (άνεμος) that means "wind" (root of anemometer, anemometry and other words related to the wind). And what is the wind: a movement of air. And what is breathing? The movement of air in and out of the lungs. There you go (as one character in the comedy "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" would say...).

Yeah, I like this kind of trivia stuff. So if you like it too, leave me your comments and I'll try to come up with more of this.

Cheers,

Charles