Animation to spare in Chris Landreth's and Ryan Larkin's short films

This essay explores the potential within animation film to reconfigure the regulative processes through which mental illness comes to be represented and understood in visual culture. Focusing on two short films - Ryan (2004) by Chris Landreth, and Spare Change (2008) by Ryan Larkin - it argues that particular components of the animation production process can inaugurate new relationships between visual culture and embodied motion. As a result, these films challenge the logic behind the social demand that one must control one's outward behaviour - one's 'animatedness' - through the disciplinary capacities of the mind and the social sphere. Landreth and Larkin do not satisfy a desire to police and ultimately prohibit appearances of mental illness. Rather, they highlight the capacity for animation to generate new connections between self and world through motion, connections that allow new forms of agency to be accessed, and ultimately enable a shift in the dominant understanding and treatment of mental illness. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]