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288• Marc Steinberg the nonrealistic quality of animation—one need only think of Sergei Eisenstein’s fragments on Disney, wherein the theorist-filmmaker finds the plasmaticness of animation of the greatest interest. 3 One site where theoretical, critical, and practical interest in realism in animation first comes together is around the work of Disney. Walt Disney famously pushed his animators toward a greater verisimilitude of movement and weight displacement in the drawing of their characters. Disney’s drive toward realism was also taken to new levels in his attempt to reproduce the filmic production of depth in the form of the multiplane camera, a camera with multiple levels of glass separated spatially, allowing animators to produce a cinematic illusion of depth (from differentiation between foreground, middle ground, and background to the simulation of racking focus and the creation of out-of-focus parts of the shot). Disney aimed for the production of what Paul Wells, borrowing a term from Umberto Eco, calls “hyper-realism.” 4 Hyperrealism is an appropriate term because it implicitly traces a lineage of animation from Disney to the three-dimensional computer-generated imagery (3-D CGI), a more recent development in animation wherein we encounter the problematic of realism. This heightened form of realism is often known as hyperrealism, or, in Andrew Darley’s coinage,“second order realism.” 5

What makes Darley’s term second-order realism so useful is that it clearly states what is sometimes ambiguous: that the referent for CGI’s realism is not “the real world” or the profilmic but rather cinematic conventions of realist representation: the …