The academic year just gone, a student in my tutor group was making work that involved taking images, objects, text and other stuff, and making it strange. He’d put it through some mysterious process, different every time. Sometimes he took the material apart to reconstitute it in unexpected ways, or he would copy-paste repeat the material until it became meaningless. Sometimes it was just about editing — making a photograph of an object look airbrushed and flat, or printing it out larger than it really was. Sometimes it was making something natural/organic look like it was made of plastic.

The outcomes all had the same palpable feeling: like reconstituted meat, uncanny, artificial and strange. In the privacy of my own mind, and sometimes in our conversations, I gave it a shorthand name: CARTOON LOGIC. I’m sure my student had no idea what I was on about because, to be completely honest, I didn’t know what I was on about. I knew it internally, pre-language, but every time I tried to explain it, it turned into mush. I want to figure out what I mean.

When I was little, me and my sister would stay over at my grandparents’ house every Friday night. At home we weren’t allowed to watch much telly and we only had the terrestrial channels. My Grandparents had SKY, which my uncle paid for, so he could watch the football when he came over. And my Dada had a VCR. He’d record our favourite cartoons throughout the week, so we’d never miss anything. Our favourite was LOONEY TUNES. We loved: Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Marvin the Martian, Gossamer, Porky Pig, Sylvester and Tweety, Yosemite Sam and Foghorn Leghorn. I thought my sister was the Tasmanian Devil. But my hands down favourite was Wile E Coyote and his endless, Sisyphean pursuit of Road Runner.

I couldn’t rip my eyes away from the screen. In my pre-critic state of being, I had no idea why. But now I think I liked that Wile E Coyote’s attempts were elaborate, using props and ploys and tricks. I liked that he failed, and that his failures were spectacular. I liked that he never spoke, only sometimes turning to look out towards me in despair. It was slapstick, exaggerated and grotesque. Bizarre and uncivilised.

Not all cartoons are like Looney Tunes — but when I think of cartoons, I think of Looney Tunes. So when I talk about the logic of cartoons, this is the reference point I return to. A logic of flattening and exaggeration, at the same time and on the same scale. Of amplification, pushing something to an extremity and seeing what happens. Of the physical or farcical. A cartoon logic is a state of suspension, or constant motion, an endless dynamic of back and forth without resolution. It is a state where matter is not always what it looks like, it shifts through forms, plastic and malleable. This logic works towards an end goal: to make things strange.

At first, I’d have been tempted to say: the cartoon world is the irrational shadow to the rational real world! Real life is limited by what is possible, cartoons are free from that constraint. Cartoons exist in an anarchic dimension where anything is possible! — but that actually isn’t true. The cartoon world is governed by a set of laws, they are just different.

In 1956, Disney released a short film called the Plausible Impossible, presented by Walt Disney himself. He explains: what is factually impossible in real life is acceptable in the world of cartoons, as long as it is generally plausible. Eg: in real life, pulling a cow’s tail doesn’t ring the cowbell on a cow’s neck. But the cow’s neck is connected to the cow’s tail via the cow’s spinal column. So in a cartoon, when you pull on the cow’s tail and it rings the bell on her neck, it feels plausible — which makes it acceptable, despite the fact we know it is impossible.

Plausibility is a process of internal discernment more informed by feeling than scientific probability. Walt Disney continues: this plausibility is about correctness of sensation. In real life, when we go up in an elevator, we feel a force pressing down on us as we go up. But we don’t actually compress down into a squashed shape of ourselves. When Mickey Mouse goes up in an elevator, he does squash down. It feels correct.

In the real world, feelings are not visible and they have no bearing on something as mathematical and rational as probability. In the cartoon world, feeling is factored into the logic of what is possible. So, when Mickey Mouse goes up in an elevator and squashes downwards, it feels like something correct is finally being made visible. What starts as a feeling in the real world gets amplified, exaggerated, until we can see it in the cartoon world where we start to identify it as correct.

These thoughts are new to me, but not new in general. In June 1980, Esquire Magazine published an article titled O’Donnell’s Laws of Cartoon Motion:

“1: Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation. Eg: Daffy Duck steps off a cliff expecting further pastureland. He loiters in middair, soliloquising flippantly until he chances to look down. At this point the familiar principle of 32 feet per second takes over.

(A later amendment to law 1:) Gravity acts in slow moving waves. First the feet fall, causing the legs to stretch, then the torso, causing the neck to stretch, as the head begins to fall, tension is released and the cartoon body resumes regular proportions until it strikes the ground.

6: As speed increases, objects can be in several places at once. Particularly true of tooth-and-claw fights, where a character’s head may be glimpsed emerging from the cloud of altercation at several places simultaneously.

7: Certain bodies can pass through solid walls painted to resemble tunnel entrances; others cannot. Whoever paints an entrance on the wall’s surface to trick an opponent will be unable to pursue him into this theoretical space. (This is ultimately a problem of art, not of science).

8: Any violent rearrangement of feline matter is impermanent. Cartoon cats […] can be decimated, spliced, splayed, accordion-pleated, spindled or disassembled, but they cannot be destroyed. After a few moments of blinking self pity, they reinflate, elongate, snap back or solidify.”

All of these laws are supplemented by a universal superlaw: cartoon characters are allowed to bend or break these laws for the purposes of comedy. In fact, comedy is the underlying principle of these laws. It has a logical supremacy. The laws of cartoon motion safeguard comedy, ensuring that in the cartoon world, the funniest outcome is also the most possible outcome.

Daffy Duck tries to shoot Elmer Fudd with his own gun, but the gun backfires, the bullet comes out backwards hitting Daffy Duck in the beak. His beak swings around his head, 360 revolutions until it slows to a halt, steaming.

Slapstick is the humour of physical escalation, it often involves violence (either intentional or through mishap and ineptitude). The violence never harms the recipient, they always come out relatively unscathed, violence is just the natural extremity of all movement. In terms of cultural geneology, it’s related to the physical comedy of clowning. (Cream pies being smashed into people’s faces, stepping on rakes so the wooden handle slams up and hits the stepper in the face).

All of that is very applicable and good for comedians, clowns and animators. But, if my students are reading this, contemporary artists are thinking about this too. For six years, from 2011-17, an artist called Andy Holden produced different iterations of a work: The Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape. There are versions of this work as a live performance, the artist speaking into a mic over a video backing track. There was an exhibition at the Perimeter (in 2024) with an immersive installation and sculptures. When I emailed Andy, he was kind enough to send a Vimeo link to a film where he appears in the work as a cartoon avatar, narrating video essay style over a collection of clips and images.

In the film, Holden talks through O’Donnell’s Laws from 1980, using them as a starting point to make other connections across the history of animation, the history of images and the history of capitalism. Holden asks: ‘history has come to an end, the world has come to resemble the cartoon landscape’, so, literally — what now?

The first law of cartoon physics: any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation. This leaks out into the real world, Holden says: ‘capitalism as a whole operates with nothing below it. Ungrounded it hovers, oblivious’, until 2008 when the housing bubble burst, triggering a full on collapse of the banking system, ‘it looked down and became self-conscious’, and so — it plummeted.

The film feels tonally the same as those conspiracy theory videos you stumble across on Youtube: oh my god, there’s a pyramid with an eye on US dollars, freemasons, illuminati, triangles, Nicolas Cage in National Treasure. Holden throws things on screen with a rapid relentless logic, making connections that are both loose and also weirdly robust. (He creates a kind of plausiblility).

‘The cartoon landscape is a space of volume, sonorous, scatalogical, sensual. Solid matter doesn’t conform to conventional expectations, it’s multimorphic, plasmatic and often a sentient active agent.’ According to Holden, the Cartoon Landscape was a byproduct of the process of modernisation, the newly industrialised and mechanised world and its division of labour on the factory floor. Alienation from labour led to alienation from objects, causing things to take on a life of their own. Holden narrates (I paraphrase): It predicted surrealism, the readymade, object-oriented-ontology. It calls back to pre-enlightenment philosophy, to Animism and the idea that plants and inanimate objects have souls, to ‘Aristotle’s idea of final causation, which attributes a kind of will to matter. A stone wants to move to earth, smoke wants to ascend to heaven.’

In the Cartoon Landscape, the codified binary separating people and things collapses. Matter has a life of its own, a sentience, it is able to transform. ‘Objects are transformed from what they are into what they seem to be,’ Holden narrates over a clip of a cartoon cowboy getting shot at. The cowboy takes shelter behind a wooden table, but the table startles at the gunfire, leaps up on 4 legs and jumps to take shelter behind the cowboy. ‘There’s no distinction between the animate and the inanimate, all matter is potentially alive.’

In this slippage between alienation, sentience and strangeness, that’s what I was trying to identify as Cartoon Logic in my student’s work. Reconstituting, repeating, regurgitating an object (or an image of an object) would make it feel uncanny, close but not quite. I would experience the alienation of looking at something I felt I should recognise, and finding it subtly but palpably unrecognisable. Things shifting, transforming, feeling identifiable and wrong at the same time, or worse — feeling like they’d leap up, alive.

In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin explored and defined a theory of the Carnivalesque. The carnival acts as a kind of pocket dimension, a separate space where normal rules are momentarily suspended. Here, the real world’s codified boundaries are allowed (in fact, encouraged) to collapse into each other. Social barriers disintegrate as everyone comes together on equal footing. Class hierarchies are reversed: the king is the clown and the clown is the king, but everyone knows the king is a clown, so it goes over and over round and round). Sacred rules are mocked and their power is suspended, the carnival allows for blasphemy, obscenity, celebration of the bodily and the grotesque. As Andy Holden narrates: ‘people and things on equal footing, wrestling with each other in constant motion’. Collapsing the boundaries that separate these binaries allows the carnivalesque to represent a spirit of topsy-turvy lawlessness.

The strange world of the carnival is set apart, delineated as definitely NOT the real world. But if the cartoon landscape unleashes the power of the carnivalesque (collapsing codified binaries etc), the premise of Andy Holden’s film is that the real world has been colliding with the cartoon landscape since 2008. These neat delineations are not so neat anymore, they are swirling together in a weird vortex to the point of inseparability.

If the cartoon landscape is malleable, ‘elastic, protoplasmic’, then so is the real world. If the cartoon landscape is irrational or illogical, strung together only by ‘cruelty, torture and comedy’, then so is the real world. If the cartoon landscape is subject to a specific kind of derangement, the wrestling of people with objects, things, matter, all on an equal footing in constant motion — well, then so is the real world.

So, Cartoon Logic — flattened, exaggerated, amplified, shifting through forms and suspended in constant motion without resolution. I feel like end-goal of strangeness is too vague, raising more questions than it answers. (What does strangeness mean in that context and what happens as a result of it? Etc). I don’t understand what that end-goal bit means.

In Art as a Device, Victor Shklovsky wrote about a concept of estrangement or defamiliarisation — he wrote in Russian, so I guess it depends how you translate it. He wrote about it as a literary device, but I think it applies out to all art forms. Shklovsky would say: we grow habituated to the world as it exists, we grow complacent with our perception and take things for granted. Art is not about reproducing the world as it is, it must intervene and disarm our automatic processes, slow things down so we can feel the true texture of them. Art must make the familiar strange, so we might restore our perception. In strangeness, the world will feel more real, or clearer.

Shklovsky was writing in 1917, before the cartoon landscape collapsed binaries into each other, and before that then exploded into the real world. But his point makes it all sound like it was leaking to begin with. If art is a world of representation, the strangeness in this separate world creeps into our own by affecting our perception of things. Our perception forms the premise of what we feel to be plausible, Walt Disney’s Correctness of Sensation escalates that into something visible, something we can identify as correct. Bakhtin’s Carnivalesque sits in a separate pocket dimension, topsy-turvy and strange — a strangeness of transformation, resettling the order of things. Surely that leaks into the real world too, at the very least, according to our own perception. To be honest, if this is about the representation crashing into the real, maybe it is eggregious that I have not once mentioned Baudrillard and his 4 stages of the sign (I DON’T WANT TO READ BAUDRILLARD, I WANT TO WRAP THIS UP NEATLY AND SOON).

All of that only makes sense to me if I think about something Holden says about halfway through his film, when his cartoon self breaks and puts forth (what I think is) his main argument. ‘For a long time art history was a linear progression, until the cyclical motion of the post-modern era.’ An ouroboros, ‘a circular saw with shredding teeth, ripping into the fabric of history and creating a mound of shredded debris, an end point, a cartoon dump at the end of history.’ How is the artist, or anyone, supposed to operate under those conditions? Holden pulls up an image of Charlie Brown and the chunky black zigzag pattern on his orange t-shirt. He pulls up graphs with undulating curves, sine and cosine waves, parabolas, hyperbolas, integrals, derivatives (I don’t really know anything about maths to be honest, I’ve just googled things that sound mathematically complicated). ‘The zigzag is a way of being in the world’, both here and there at the same time. ‘Former binaries can no longer be separated’, we can only oscillate between, moving so fast it appears there’s no difference. ‘The best way to traverse a mountain is the switchback path, the zigzag, the shape of deep sleep brainwaves, the oldest human mark ever recorded, scratched into the surface of a shell’.

This rapid movement leads Holden on to O’Donnell’s 6th law:

6: As speed increases, objects can be in several places at once.

Holden talks about something called quantum superposition. A phenomena where an electron can be potentially anywhere, in a multitude of different positions. It is only recordable in one of those potential positions, so the position you get depends on the equipment, the method of recording, the situation. The electron can be here and there at the same time, zigzag way of being in the world, oscillating between and moving so fast there’s no discernable difference.

This is a bad way to end a text, because it offers no neat resolution. But I’m going to be completely honest. The rapid movement of being everywhere and anywhere, zigzag super position — if that is the only way of making sense of this tangle (the representation crashing into the real, the strange collapsing into the recognisable) then I still don’t know what it all means, what it does or what happens as a result. But if my students ever dare to ask, I think that’s Cartoon Logic.