Digital Surrealism: Visualizing Walt Disney Animation Studios

There are a number of fruitful digital humanities approaches to cinema and media studies, but most of them only pursue traditional forms of scholarship by extracting a single variable from the audiovisual text that is already legible to scholars. Instead, cinema and media studies should pursue a mostly-ignored “digital-surrealism” that uses computer-based methods to transform film texts in radical ways not previously possible. This article describes one such method using the z-projection function of the scientific image analysis software ImageJ to sum film frames in order to create new composite images. Working with the fifty-four feature-length films from Walt Disney Animation Studios, I describe how this method allows for a unique understanding of a film corpus not otherwise available to cinema and media studies scholars. “Technique is the very being of all creation” — Roland Barthes “We dig up diamonds by the score, a thousand rubies, sometimes more, but we don't know what we dig them for” — The Seven Dwarfs There are quite a number of fruitful digital humanities approaches to cinema and media studies, which vary widely from aesthetic techniques of visualizing color and form in shots to data-driven metrics approaches analyzing editing patterns. Despite their methodological differences, what all these approaches have in common is the reduction of the complex film or television text—image, sound, editing, production history, reception, paratext—to a smaller set of manageable variables: color palette, scripted dialogue, average shot length, budgets, box office results, social media presence. While any digital humanities project requires the reduction of a complex set of textual elements to a smaller set of abstracted variables, cinema and media