Posthuman Ecologies in Twenty-First Century Short Animations

Abstract

Defining the animated film genre as a posthuman environment itself, this dissertation strategically employs six short animations, namely, Yousif Al-Khalifa s End of an Era (2011), Steve Cutts s Man (2012), James Lee s Tarboy (2009), Shaun Tan and Andrew Ruhemann s The Lost Thing (2010), Seth Boyden s An Object at Rest (2015), and David Prosser s Matter Fisher (2010), to illustrate the ecological orientations of posthumanism in its various aspects. By questioning the meaning of what it means to be human or nonhuman in the twenty-first century, and by calling into question such concepts as agency, intentionality, consciousness, sentience, and personhood, the study draws subtle divisions between three major components of posthumanism. In line with this division, it interprets posthumanism as the ecological critique of anthropocentricism, as the naturalcultural Robo sapiens, and as the agentic-storied matter. As such, in each chapter, the human-centred view is deconstructed through the blu