Spaces of difference . Narration in animation / live-action hybrid films

The aim of this paper is to focus on the ways of using animation as well as its function in live-action/ animation hybrid films. The usage of animation in narratives of such type of movies can vary. However, what connects them is the way of telling the story, based on the juxtaposition of two different realities that interact in a number of ways. The ways of combining the two worlds can be very different: animation may symbolize what is fantastic, as in pioneer McCay’s ‘Gertie the Dinosaur’, but also what is imagined, felt, thought out, once lived, dreamed of, alternative. The article describes the differences between classic hybrids and contemporary films.

Cinem as of Diffe rent Veloc ities and is largely defined in opposition to what is associated with the technology of cinematography, reproducing the appearance of reality. It is realized at the aesthetic level. In the case of the latter hybrid films, an important practice, although not a necessity, is to highlight the difference between animation and live-action. Their hybridity comes to the fore and becomes a meaningful element of not only the aesthetic of an image, but most frequently also the manner of narrating.
Paweł Sitkiewicz reached a similar conclusion. When defining an animated film, he emphasised that frame-by-frame technique 'must be a visible and significant stylistic procedure, never a means to create an illusion of reality ' (2009, p. 20). Thus, Sitkiewicz moved the focus in defining an animated film from the medium to the issue of reception, focusing on the function that the animated image performs in relation to the viewers. So if we consider animation in this way, we will automatically eradicate the problem of mixing two spheres -depth and surface or ontology and aesthetics 1 , which in this case is like a genotype and a phenotype in biology. In this respect, the depth concerns technological and production issues, whereas the surface is the domain of image aesthetics.
If we agree that contemporary cinema is dominated by digital images, which quite willingly and commonly use their plasticity to realistically blur the boundary between what was shot live and computer animation, then animation/liveaction hybrid films are extremely old-fashioned, as they go against the trend of creating this type of illusion. The reason for their existence is the opposite practice: constant highlighting of the difference between animation and liveaction. These films even return to the sources of the history of cinema, when the categories of animation and live-action were conditioned by each other, because their definitions were founded on mutual oppositions 2 . 1 Vivian Sobchack used yet another way, but equally effective, to distinguish animation from liveaction. She was right to say that it was only in animated films that such an abstract, geometric phenomenon as a line exists. It does not exist in nature, so naturally, it cannot exist in the cinema based on the reproduction of reality: 'The line "belongs" to animation as it never could to photoreal cinema -this not only because, in traditional cel animation, the "(out)line" was a production necessity by which animators guided "inbetweeners" and painters to fill out and in the individual frames; but also because, like the point, the line is ontologically a conceptual and structural object, a formal abstraction that has no substantial existence outside its two-dimensional, planar, graphic representation ' (2008, p. 253). What is important from the point of view of the problem taken up in this text, this difference is problematised by the use of the animation/live-action hybrid film 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit', about which she writes that its deep structural joke is built precisely on this difference (2008, p. 252). 2 As Fabia Lin Ling-Yuan recalls, both filmic forms were formed at the initial stage of cinema's development in opposition to each other. She points out that even contemporary dictionaries define 'live-action' as the opposite of animation: 'The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines "live-action" as "of, relating to, or featuring cinematography that is not produced by animation". On this account it is by contrast with "animation" that the definition of "live-action" can be established as the nonexcercise of animation ' (2013, p. 269).
These first, classic examples point to a few extremely important issues that were essential to films combining animation with live-action throughout the whole history of cinematography and are so even today. Let us point to these using the example of the 'Gertie the Dinosaur' film. What comes to the fore is the fact that hybridization has a remarkably strong relationship with the way the narration is conducted, since the differences in the materials used structure the narrated story and impose rules for its conduct. In the McCay film, the acting part justifies the creation of animation, which is then shown by the creator to a group of friends during a shared dinner. Although the animated part is closely related to the acting frame, it is at the same time a separate whole and can also function as a short film within a film. The consequence of such a use of these two materials is to create visually diverse, separate spaces, which in these types of films are usually clearly isolated from each other, even if they are in one frame like Roger Rabbit and Eddie Valiant, played by Bob Hoskins, from Robert Zemeckis' film. In the case of McCay's film, animation represents the world of phantasmagoric prehistory, in which there were both brontosauruses and giant sea serpents. In contrast, the live-action belongs to the reality known from the experience of audiences of that time. Another element is also important for contemporary cinema. It is the form of interaction, or perhaps it should be written, the confrontation between these two visually diverse spaces. Without appear-Cinem as of Diffe rent Veloc ities ing in the frame, but marking his presence throughout the boards with spoken words, McCay enters into a dialogue with a cartoon character, who reacts to his commands. A fantastic world of animation and a realistic world of live-action meet and even interact, thanks to the magic of cinema.
The ways of combining the two worlds can be very different: animation may symbolize what is fantastic, as in McCay's, but also what is imagined, felt, thought out, once lived, dreamed of, alternative. Animation does not have to function as an unambiguous opposite of the 'more real' live-action -it can symbolize the unreality of the whole represented world or it can show the close relations between the two narrative layers. If one looks for the greatest change that has taken place between the pioneering 'Gertie the Dinosaur' and contemporary animation/live-action hybrid films, it is easiest to find it in this aspect.

Postmodernism and transcendence
The narrative dominant of animation/live-action hybrid films is the mutual confrontation -in different ways -of both realities: animated and acting. This practice suggests that the visually differentiated realities created on the screen function as separate, though often very close to each other, worlds in film stories. Quite unexpectedly, this reveals the similarity of these hybrid films to the method in which postmodern authors construct their stories 3 . Surprisingly, as I have already mentioned, the combination of live-action and animation is as old as the cartoon itself, and thus it was born and developed its narrative structure long before postmodernism was constituted. Brian McHale closely linked the category of 'the world' with works belonging to postmodernism, pointing out that the dominance of the postmodern novel is ontological, in contrast to the modernist novel, where epistemological issues were at the forefront. In Postmodernist fiction he wrote that postmodernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions like the ones Dick Higgins calls "postcognitive": "Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?". Other typical postmodernist questions bear either on the ontology of the literary text itself or on the ontology of the world which it projects, for instance: What is a world?; What kinds of world are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ?; What happens when different kinds of world are placed in confrontation, or when boundaries between worlds are violated?; What is the mode of existence of a text, and what is the mode of existence of Spac es of diffe rence . Narra tion in anim ation /live-actio n hybri d films Mich ał Piepi órka the world (or worlds) it projects?; How is a projected world structured? And so on (2004, p. 10).
From the point of view of the films considered in this text, the most important questions are: 'What kinds of world are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ?; What happens when different kinds of world are placed in confrontation, or when boundaries between worlds are violated?'. Hybrid films that interest me also seem to ask similar questions, constantly pointing to the artificiality and arbitrariness of worlds, which in various ways collide with each other.
Animation/live-action hybrid films are characterized by the tendency to separate worlds, which then interact with each other: such a use of material duality is closely related to the way the narration is constructed. But that is not all. The precursory films already mentioned indicated one more significant dependency that results from combining animated and acting elements. The primary world is usually linked to live-action, whereas animation is the domain of transcendent, that is, what comes from outside the real world, associated with reality reproduced by means of cinematographic camera. Animation, quite stereotypically but historically justified 4 , is usually correlated with what is fantastic, amazing and, indeed, of external origin 5 . After all, Gertie is not a 'real' dinosaur but hand-drawn. She does not 'really' move, but does so thanks to the technical possibilities of the medium. Moreover, she is a dinosaur, an animal that represents an extinct species, so she could not 'actually' appear. Her conventional, drawing aesthetics and material foundation reveal her unreality, which only thanks to the animator's skills was able to interact with the real world, and only by virtue of convention and only for the needs of the film plot.
Today, however, we observe a significant shift. Animation still symbolizes what is transcendent towards the world of live-action, but not necessarily what is fictional or fantastic: animated inner states of 'The Diary of a Teenage Girl' (2015) heroine or Potter's emotions in 'Miss Potter' (2006), expressed through the animated little characters from her books, are not less real than their living bodies, and as are the small, drawn illustrations depicting the real estate market functioning in 'The Big Short' (2015), which are not more fictional than the actual economic processes that they talk about.
Cinem as of Diffe rent Veloc ities Animation as a sign of what is different, what belongs to a distinct order, something external, but intervening in a known reality, perhaps in the best, most comprehensive way was presented in 'Monty Python and The Holy Grail ' (1975). In this work by British comedians, the animated insertions (characteristic of their entire work and eagerly used by them) that appear out of the blue are a symbol of what comes outside the represented world. They appear in three situations: they represent God, who turns directly to the characters, initiating the action of the film, as he orders them to make a journey in search of the title The Holy Grail -animation defines a transcendent instance in the face of the material reality of the represented world; animated insertions are a form of short interlude in the form of inscriptions stylized into notes from medieval books, which open the following chapters, so they are a clear indication of the existence of a narrative instance that structures the story being told; also animated is the dangerous dragon which the protagonists encounter during their adventures. The beast would inevitably devour them, but for the fact that the animator suddenly dies of a heart attack. The dragon is as much a fantastic creature, important from the story's point of view as a visible sign of the existence of an external instance -the animator whose work intervenes in the represented world, disturbing the classical principle of narrative transparency. Animation as God, Narrator and Animator in Monty Python has the function of destroying the illusion of objectivity and the 'fourth wall'.

Between the Worlds
The examples of 'Gertie the Dinosaur' and the Monty Python film clearly show, and this is also reflected in many new works, that animation/live-action hybrid films are built on a difference -and not only on the most obvious one, revealing itself in the use of different materials. Hybrid image is only a visible equivalent of the narrative construction of the represented world, whose dominant feature is duality 6 -but a duality of a special kind. It manifests itself, first and foremost, in the way of constructing a film space, but sometimes also in constructing time. David Bordwell in Narration in the Fiction Film writes that the narration in the film fiction 'is the process whereby the film syuzhet and style interact in the course of cueing and channelling the spectator's construction of the fabula' (1985, p. 53). In this process, an extremely important role is played by the viewer who, on the base of syuzhet, develops the fabula. This happens according to the three principles: narrative 'logic' (casuality), time and space (1985, p. 51).
What is important is that different films put emphasis on something else when constructing their narratives. The majority, especially those which use the classic narration, focus primarily on cause-and-effect relations, but this is not a rule, and a great example to support that are the hybrid films that interest me -both the ones from the past and the present. Their fictional dominant feature is to create, within the represented world, two realities that interact with each other on the basis of different principles. For a long time, the most popular way of constructing narration in animation/live-action film was based on spatial dependencies, which has changed in contemporary cinema. But one thing has remained the same: the principles which govern the interdependencies between the world associated with animation and reality represented by live-action, condition 'the course cueing and channel the spectator's construction of the fabula' (Bordwell, 1985, p. 53).
The collision of animated and acting worlds once again indicates the similarity of these films to postmodern fiction. McHale considers science fiction as a postmodern genre par excellence 7 . He refers to the definition of Darko Suvin, who claimed that this type of story is 'confronting the empirical givens of our world with something not given, something from outside or beyond it, "a strange newness, a novum" ' (2004, p. 59). Thus, these novels are governed by exactly the same logic as films combining animation and live-action, which can be observed once again using the example of 'Gertie the Dinosaur'. The acting part represents 'the empirical givens of our world', while the animation depicting a trained dinosaur is evidently 'a strange newness, a novum'.
Although among films that interest me there are many that could easily be included in the science fiction genre (both those made years ago like 'Space Jam' [1996] or 'TRON' [1982] and contemporary ones: 'The Congress' or 'Ready Player One' [2018]), it does not seem that this type of story was privileged in any special way. Hybrid films only took from it the way of constructing the narrative, based on the confrontation of two worlds, because neither 'Gertie the Dinosaur', nor 'Monty Python and The Holy Grail', nor the most famous animation/liveaction hybrid 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' can be counted as science fiction. It would be much easier to gather them under the common banner of fantasy film, Cinem as of Diffe rent Veloc ities understood in the broader sense 8 . Nowadays, however, animation is boldly entering other genres, such as political cinema ('The Big Short'), biography ('Miss Potter', 'Summer' [2018]) or drama ('The Diary of a Teenage Girl', 'Foxtrot' [2017]). Nevertheless, these films are built according to the sci-fi structuring principle mentioned by McHale 9 , which emphasises the ontology of the constructed and confronted worlds. This was also noticed by Jay P. Telotte, who focused on two -but not the most recent -hybrid films 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' and Ralph Bakshi's 'Cool World ' (1992). He showed that the narrative dominant feature of both films is to build the tension between two worlds, understood as spatially as possible, which are inhabited by toons and people in the work of Zemeckis and 'noids' (from 'humanoids') and doodles in Bakshi's (2010, p. 180-181).

Collision and integration
Both examples represent the most classic example of the coexistence and confrontation of the worlds of animation and live-action. 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' places actions in alternative Hollywood, where people and toons, literally, live side by side. The latter even have their own separate land, called Toontown. The film's action is based on the constant intermingling of worlds of humans and animated characters, who are actors in cartoons. Most of the action takes place in the real space, only for a moment the protagonist played by Bob Hoskins ventures to the world with rules known from animated films. Therefore, a more frequent treatment is to integrate drawn characters into the space of live-action. What matters is that both worlds exist on similar principlesthey are equally real and together they construct one larger universe, in which there is a place for both people and toon. This is a significant difference to how the narrative in 'Gertie the Dinosaur' is conducted, where the two worlds are clearly separated from each other. This does not mean that this change occurred only with the premiere of Zemeckis' film. The integration of animation with live-action films had already taken place much earlier. Examples include such titles as 'The Three Caballeros ' (1944), 'Songs of the South' (1946), 'The Incredible Mr. Limpet ' (1964), 'Bedknobs andBroomsticks' (1971), or 'Pete's Dragon' (1977).
The fact that in Zemeckis' work both worlds overlap -the drawn characters enter the reality of live-action and the characters played by the actors venture into Toontown -does not mean that creators do not see anything extraordinary in the toons world. They are willing to apply the principle of retardation, shifting the viewers' attention from the action to visual values, that is, the magic of the simultaneous existence of drawn characters and actors on the screen. In such a way, they underline the uniqueness of the world represented and the procedure of hybridisation 10 .
Zemeckis' film largely problematizes the practice of combining animation and live-action, emphasizing mise en abyme and focusing on the perfection of technical operations as well as the incredibleness of the represented world. Both syuzhet and style are subordinated to the treatments, which in the first place do not push the action forward, but build film reality largely based on spacial dependencies occurring between the world of people and Toontown. The focus of the plot is, after all, the existence of the world of animated characters, which are put to death by judge Doom.
In the case of 'Cool World' the duality of the film world is similarly constructed. The narration is also based on the constant connection of both realities, which this time are separated from each other to a greater extent, and their connection proves tragic. When the balance between the worlds is disturbed and animations enter the real world, reality seems to be heading towards irreversible extinction.
To these two classic examples we can add newer ones, which also construct their narrations on spacial relations. For instance, not less famous 'Space Jam' or Disney's 'Enchanted ' (2007). The space of the world represented in the film about a cosmic basketball duel is divided into three spheres, two of which are inhabited by animated characters. One of them is located in the universe and is home to small monsters, while the other is located underground, where characters known from 'Looney Toons' live. The third space is the so-called '3D-Land', meaning the world inhabited by people, presented in the convention of live-action. These three neighbouring spaces seem to exist only to interact with each other: aliens fly to Earth to take control over the bodies of famous basketball players and Michael Jordan finds his way through a golf hole to the world Cinem as of Diffe rent Veloc ities of toons to help them defeat the cosmic invaders. Eventually, characters famous from cartoons also land on Earth, namely in the house of the most famous basketball player in history. 'Space Jam' owes a lot to 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' and in a similar manner plays with its hybridity, often constructing the action in such a way as to be able to most effectively highlight the combination of animation and live-action. The best case to provide is the final scene, in which Jordan uses the rules that govern the world of animation and unnaturally lengthens his arm/to gain a decisive point.
In Disney's 'Enchanted' the two spaces are also unambiguously separated from each other, although their relation to one another does not have a clear translation into the topography of the film universe. The authors of this film discuss in a slightly self-critical way the mythology of Disney animation, in which the most important place is always given to a beautiful princess and a handsome prince, who saves her at the last moment. In everything, of course, the evil queen must be involved. It is also the case this time, but only until the antagonist pushes the princess into the abyss of the well, which magically transfers the girl to contemporary New York. Subsequent animated characters turn into living actors and appear on one of the busy streets of the metropolis to eventually move the action completely to the real world.

Beyond the Space
The examples mentioned above are no longer the most recent and apart from 'Enchanted', it is difficult to include them in contemporary cinema. That is why Telotte's thesis on the spatial distribution of both worlds does not necessarily fit into the description of newer examples, which is well illustrated by 'The Congress' by Ari Folman which, at first glance, seems to be built in a similar way. Robin Wright (played by the real Robin Wright), a slightly fading cinema star, allows herself to be scanned, so that she can continue appearing on the screen, but only as a digital avatar. Years after signing an agreement releasing her image rights to the Miramount company the woman goes to the eponymous futurological congress, which takes place in Abrahama City, an animated town. She takes a substance from an anonymous ampoule and turns into a cartoon character. At this point, the narration, which is carried out quite classically, changes completely, as does the heroine's body. With time, the scenes cease to be closely related to cause-and-effect relations, space and time become fluid and insignificant. The action and its mechanics is reminiscent of a dreamy vision or narcotic hallucination, in which one moment can be stretched to infinity and decades pass in a second. This fluidity corresponds with the medium of animation, which from the first moments of its appearance on the screen turns out to be the domain of fantasy, unlimited imagination and total abstraction. The same principles apply to the narration. Finally, it emerges that spatial order plays a much less important role in the way the story is told. What becomes a dominant is the ontological status of the observed world. It appears that the space of animation is a kind of narcotic delusion, imposed on the world of live-action -grey, dirty, completely unattractive, but associated with what is real.
The example of 'The Congress' showed how the perception of space in animation/live-action films and the function of animation itself changes in contemporary cinema. With new innovations come other titles from past years because the rules enabling interaction between these two worlds are practically the same as those of hybrid films. McHale wrote that: 'science-fiction, by staging "close encounters" between different worlds, placing them in confrontation, foregrounds their respective structures and the disparities between them' (2004, p. 60), which would be a great feature of animation/live-action hybrids, if not for the fact that they are much more varied. They not only focus on disparities between the worlds, but also on their parallelism, similarities, the cause-and-effect relations connecting them and many other narrative strategies. While the first animation/liveaction hybrid films were constructed around the difference between animation and live-action, films imitating 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' aimed at collision and intermingling clearly separated worlds, contemporary films prefer to emphasise the parallelism of narrative paths expressed in animation and live-action, and even highlight the impossibility of decisively separating these two spaces.

The realism of emotions
This diversity of contemporary animation/live-action hybrid films can best be examined using concrete examples. We should start with two works that combine animation and live-action like no others film in the history of cinema -'Miss Potter' and, above all, 'The Diary of a Teenage Girl'. Though different in terms of narration and aesthetics, both films are to some extent linked by the way animation is functionalised. In both cases, moving drawings reflect the inner states of the characters. In Potter's biography, animation serves to subjectify the look, because the moving illustrations of books can only be seen by the author.
The animation always appears at specific moments -in a retrospective return to childhood or in moments of the heroine's reverie over her own feelings. Moving bunnies or ducks reveal the childish sensitivity of the adult heroine and reflect her moods, as in the case when the sad little heroes together with a woman seem to mourn the death of her fiancé.

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Marielle Heller's 'The Diary of a Teenage Girl' follows a more complex narration. It is conducted from the point of view of the title character, who records a diary on a tape. We learn about the girl's sexual initiation and maturation, associated with an affair with her mother's partner and the subsequent erotic conquests. The story is accompanied by numerous animations: the teenager is a keen cartoonist, who dreams of becoming a comic book author. Thanks to animated fragments, Heller uses the passion of her protagonist to enrich the film with visualizations of her inner states -thoughts, desires, imagination, lusts and feelings. If we are talking about any spatial separation of animation from liveaction, the place reserved for animation is the girl's sensitivity, consciousness and conscience, and not any physical space.
Interestingly, most of the film has a realistic form, which is dropped only in fragments in favour of exploring the protagonist's interior by using, for example, the imaginary walk of a teenage girl with her favorite, drawn comic book author. Some animated scenes grow into whole sequences, such as the story of 'making a harlot', which illustrates both certain events from the protagonist's life and her emotional relationship. The animation used in this way does not have much in common with what it was in 'Gertie the Dinosaur', i.e. pure phantasmagoria, in 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit', i.e. a collision of spatially separated worlds, or even in the much newer 'Enchanted', i.e. a symbol of fabulousness. What is drawn is neither less real nor transcendent: it is equally important, or maybe even more important and more real than what is represented by live-action. Heller's film, as the title suggests, is an attempt at telling a story about the inner dilemmas of a teenage heart. And these dilemmas are represented in the film by animation.

The Parallel Worlds
'Miss Potter' and 'The Diary of a Teenage Girl', as I have mentioned, are unparalleled. A much more popular way of combining animation with live-action, and rarely seen before, is to juxtapose them on a parallel-like basis. One of the most interesting examples of this practice is J.A. Bayona's film adaptation of Patrick Ness' novel 'The Monster Calls' (2016). 'How does this story begin?' -these words are the starting point of the film, i.e. revealing the plane on which the narrative is developed. The narrator is the protagonist, a teenage boy, as it is he who says these words, but it may well be the eponymous monster, because it is he who answers the question asked at the beginning ('It begins like so many stories. With a boy. Too old to be a kid. Too young to be a man. And a nightmare'). The creators complicate narrative dependencies from the very beginning, as well as the relations between animation and live-action.
The action of storytelling is crucial for Bayona, because these are the stories told by a yew-tree turning into a monster that are presented by means of animation. The creators are not necessarily interested in whether the monster (also presented in an animated form, through CGI 11 ) and its stories are real in the same sense as the body, home, parents or school of the main character : it is rather clear that they belong to the boy's dream world, which he himself suggests, and which is confirmed by the late time of the beast's appearance (7 minutes after midnight). Much more meaningful is the other relation between animation and live-action. The monster tells the boy three stories, expressed in the film through animation: about a bad queen and no less bad prince, a herbalist and a pastor, and an invisible boy. Each of them is a fairy tale -definitely fictional and moving the action in distant times. It is precisely for this reason that the boy does not want to listen to them, as he has other problems on his mind -bullying by his schoolmates and, above all, his dying mother.
But it soon becomes clear that the stories are a commentary on his life situation. Between the stories and his life there is a relationship of parallelism, which combines animation and live-action: they explain to the boy the events that happen to him in his life. These relations are also emphasized in the editing and visual layer: when the protagonist enters the world of one of the stories (literally into animation) and, together with the monster, destroys the pastor's house, it turns out that at the same time he ruins his much-hated grandmother's room. The same happens in the scene when the boy takes revenge on his schoolmates who are bullying him. He is accompanied by a monster that only he sees.
Such a use of animation and live-action is not a completely new idea. An almost identical solution can be found in Disney's classic 'Song of the South'. The film has several narrative dimensions, but one narrator, Uncle Remus, an African-American who lives on a cotton plantation and is known in the area as a great story-teller. The main character is a boy to whom the raconteur tells the story of Brer Rabbit. Every time he begins his story, the action moves to the animated world of Zip-a-Dee-Do-Daa days, to the time when Brer Rabbit, the hero of his fairy tales, was alive. Just like in 'Monster Calls', the fairytale world of animation and the realistic world of live-action seem to be closely related on the basis of an evident parallel between two narrative spaces. The stories told by Uncle Remus about the rabbit are an equivalent, and at the same time, a commentary on what happens to the addressee of the story, that is, to the little hero.

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The two worlds that make up the universe of 'The Lego Movie' function on the basis of parallel as well. Most of the action takes place in a world inhabited by animated people made out of Lego bricks, but it is only at the end of the film that the story told is taken into an extremely important frame. Above the Lego world there is a more important space, which significantly influences what happens to the animated heroes. Viewers learn about it when Emmet, the main character, falls into the 'abyss', which turns out to lead to the real world, inhabited by people played by actors. It transpires that the whole universe of Lego bricks is a mock-up, consisting of various sets that a young boy plays with. The problem is that the bricks belong to his father, who does not like it when his son rearranges anything in this construction. His rhetoric is very similar to that of Lord Business, the main animated antagonist, who wants to immobilize the whole brick universe. The representative of his son in the Lego world is the main member of the Resistance, i.e. Emmet, who defies Business. The impression of parallelism between the world of animation and live-action is completed in the finale, when the creators, using parallel editing, juxtapose the dialogue of the son with his father and the Lord Business with Emmet. Both pairs of characters speak about exactly the same thing: the power of imagination and the right to unlimited creation. The artists even dared to make a visual parallel. In the final scene, the reconciled animated characters go to each other to fall into each other's arms. Exactly the same gesture, similarly depicted in the film, is made by the characters played by actors. The relation between the world of live-action and animation in this film is therefore even closer than in 'The Monster Calls', where the fates of the characters from the history of the beast and the little hero only coincide on the level of the similarity of experiences. In 'The Lego Movie', admittedly at the very end, it appears that the entire plot presented in the form of animation has its full reflection in what happens between the characters played by actors. The world of animation and live-action -stylistically completely different -appear to be analogous. The treatment used resembles that of 'The Congress', in which the final discovery of the hallucinatory nature of the world of animation, indicates the parallelism of the drawn space and the one populated by real characters. The same procedure is repeated in the continuation of 'Lego: The Movie' -'The Lego Movie 2 -The Second Part' (2019). This time, however, it is not the father who is the antagonist, but the sister who is represented in the world of animation by the queen Watevra Wa'Nabi.
To some extent, the two worlds from Samuel Maoz's 'Foxtrot' are also parallel to each other. Only a short fragment at the end of the film is animated, which illustrates graphic stories from one of the characters' notepads. The action of the film takes place on three narrative levels: on the first one parents receive informa-tion about the death of their son (as it turns out to be untrue), whose everyday life in the army we observe in the background, while the third one is a return to parents, who this time mourn the real death of their child. The animated sequence is an interlude between the history of the army and the return to the parents. It is an illustration of the father's history created by his son. It is not a realistic depiction of his fate, but rather a form of phantasmagoric family memory, which, as it turns out, has much in common with reality. Before leaving for the army, the father told his son a story from his childhood, about how he sold one of his grandmother's priceless souvenirs -a bible that had been in their family from generation to generation -for a pornographic magazine. The father never revealed how the family reacted to it, or how he felt about his act. This silence inspired his son to complete the story that his father called a 'fairy tale'. It is about the shame that has accompanied his father all his life and is symbolized by the black x on his face. The last sequence of the film explains that the father does live with a sense of shame, but the source is not the sale of the bible, but a mistake made during wartime. The fantasy about his father's trauma has turned out to be true, at least in part. Thus, the animation, despite its cartoon line, is closely linked to what is real and expressed in live-action.
It is worth mentioning the case of 'Mary Poppins Returns' (2018), which is the sequel to the Hollywood classic from 1964, and at the same time a kind of remake of the latter. The title heroine in one of the sequences takes her pupils to the centre of the picture that hides an animated land. There they ride on horses that have escaped from the carousel, sing with farm animals and even dance with penguins. An almost identical procedure was used in the newer version, but instead of the picture the protagonists jump into the painting on the vase where they have fantastic adventures, but also face a cunning rat who resembles one of the characters from outside the animated world -the owner of a bank who wants to take over the siblings' house. While in the 1960s version animation and live-action were not connected by any feature parallel, in the newer version this relation is very well exposed.

The Impossible Worlds
'Mary Poppins Returns', like the 1964 film, is intriguing for another reason. In both cases, animation is not an element representing incredible opposition to the realistically depicted reality of live-action. Both sequences are only different elements that undermine the realistic status of the whole represented world, Cinem as of Diffe rent Veloc ities in which, as the protagonist says, 'everything is possible, even the impossible'. Both films are musicals (and are already devoid of realism for this reason), one of the neighbours has a ship on the roof, and the nannies fall from heaven and perform various miracles, not only those expressed in animation. Animation is only a complement to this convention, an additional emphasis on the artificiality of the world being presented -its perfectly integrated element.
After all, some films do not wish to emphasize the difference between animation and live-action, but to use the conventionality of animation to undermine the ontological status of the whole represented world. In such cases, the animated becomes a perfectly matched component of a larger whole, which also consists of live-action. In addition to the two films about Mary  The first of these tells the story of a young boy who comes to Paris to start working for a printing company. On the very first day, he meets a girl -a neighbour -with whom he falls in love. The boy is an artist: he not only paints, but also constructs incredible equipment, including a time machine that allows him to travel into the past and future, but only by one second, which also reveals an unrealistic ontology of the represented world. The protagonist's adventures with each subsequent scene become less and less realistic until it is finally not known whether what we see is a man's dream or reality. The narration unfolds in such a way that in the end the division into these two worlds is completely blurred and at the same time completely subjectivised. The protagonist's mother says that since the age of six he has had difficulty distinguishing between dreams and reality. This blurring is also supported by stop-motion animation, thanks to which the shaver can turn into an attacking spider boss, cellophane water flies from the tap, and the typewriter can grow hair and come alive.
In 'The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou' the aim is not to blur the world of dreams and reality, but to undermine -as in the Mary Poppins' films -the realism of the entire film world. The animation was used to show the world of underwater, fantastic creatures, which in the world represented here are not taken for something amazing. Stop-motion animated coral seahorses, sugar crabs or a jaguar shark function on an equal footing with the characters played by the actors, whose characterological characteristics also deprive them of realism. The animation turns out to be a complement to the over-aesthetic, quirky (MacDowell, 2012) form (famous Anderson symmetries, pastel colors and types of heroes), so significant for Wes Anderson's original style.Animation also complements the aesthetic layer in 'Scott Pilgrim vs. The World'. It was important for Wright to refer to the comic lineage of the story in the picture. Therefore, when the protagonist's band starts to play their instruments, not only sounds, but also graphically designed onomatopoeias, lightning and zigzags emerge. In the film there are also graphic elements known from computer games, which the protagonist particularly likes to play. While he pees, a pee bar similar to those that in fighting games indicate the amount of life left appears above his head. On the one hand, these visual ornaments reveal the comic origins of the story, and, on the other, point to the narrative structure of the story, referring to the mechanics of a computer game in which one has to fight other opponents. The character of Scott Pilgrim has to take on the former partners of his new girlfriend. Wright's animation has one more function, much more classic and clearly narrative -with the help of a drawing line several stories from the main girlfriend's past and also her old relationships are presented.

Inside and Outside
In 'Scott Pilgrim vs. The World' the stories of the title character's girlfriend expressed in animation have a narrative function that indicate the passage of time. But such a use of animation is not frequent 12 . Much more common, as I have mentioned in the classic examples of 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' and 'Cool World', is to build the narrative with the help of spatial relations. The creators of slightly newer films also eagerly reach for this dependence, yet develop it in a specific way by confronting the interior with the exterior. One such film is 'Osmosis Jones' (2001). Its title protagonist is a human-shaped white blood cell that fights against criminals, i.e. bacteria and viruses in the human body, more specifically, Frank's body, played by Bill Murray. The world represented in the film is divided into two spaces -the interior of the hero's organism, which inhabit the animated, humanoid beings that make up the organs of the human body, and the external world represented by the live-action. The main plot line, maintained in the style of cinema noir, takes place in the world of Frank's animated interior, but what he does in the real world has an impact on the fate of blood cells, viruses and other personalized entrails and body fluids. The logic of the narrative is based on cause-and-effect relations occurring between the inside and the outside, similar to those that are responsible for the physiology of the human body. When the animated Jones accidentally hits the nerve, Frank has Cinem as of Diffe rent Veloc ities a contraction, and when he eats a dirty egg, a deadly, human-shaped bacterium enters his body and becomes the main antagonist. The whole film and the main narrative idea, which depends on the confrontation of the two interdependent spaces, are based on these relations. Animation, admittedly, has a derealising function here, because our blood cells do not talk, but at the same time it has a close link to reality, but only by analogy. Two spaces, and thus the medium of animation and live-action, are clearly and spatially separated from one another, but they do not exist independently: they determine each other, which is presented both by the frequent use of parallel editing and by emphasizing the narrative logic based on the principles of cause-and-effect.
However, less disciplined in using the spatial relations between the interior and exterior were the authors of 'James and the Giant Peach' (1996), but in the end, it results in the fact that they also separate the animated from acting. The little James is raised by evil aunts, in front of whose house, thanks to magic, grows a huge peach. Inside it live animated worms, which James joins by getting inside through a hole bitten in the fruit. Again, what is on the outside of the peach is represented by live-action, while its centre is already animated -both the friendly worms and James himself. But the creators are not very consistent and, apparently, they do not care about it at all. Both worms and the boy can leave the inside of the huge fruit and still remain in their animated form. Because the domain of animation is not only the space of the interior, but also what is amazing, magical, fantastic and dreamlike, though the ontological foundations of what is real and what is invented are constantly undermined. The film begins with a scene in which an animated rhino, formed out of clouds, devours James' parents. At first, it seems that this event is presented from the boy's point of view, who visualised the death of his mother and father in this way. Still, over time it appears that none of the protagonists, including the adult ones, calls this information into question. The film has a significant narrative frame. The narrator turns out to be an animated soldier, who in a key scene gives the boy 'crocodile tongues', a visible equivalent of magic. The whole represented world has the traits of fairytale, so the rules that govern it are extremely flexible and far from realism -sleep can blend with reality, dreams with real deeds, and truth with fantasy, exactly the same as animation with live-action. There is no doubt, however, that the original gesture that sets up an animation on the screen, is the entrance to the interior of the peach. The finale of James' fate and his re-transformation into a boy made of flesh and blood is associated with the definite exit from the inside of the fruit. Although the two worlds can merge and interact, it is the logic of the interior and exterior that constructs history.
The same logic has its variations, because the interior and exterior, like entering and leaving, can be interpreted in different ways -for example, as 'entering' and 'leaving' a cinema screen (as in the case of 'Last Action Hero', in which the teenager gets inside the film where he meets, among other things, the character of the animated cat), submerging and emerging from the water (as in 'The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie ' [2004], where SpongeBob's underwater world is associated with the technique of hand-drawn animation, and what is happening above the waterline is the domain of live-action), jumping in and out of the painting (as in the aforementioned 'Mary Poppins' film).

The Liminal Space and the Cut
As if the creators did not sufficiently emphasize the spatial order that governs their films, the two separate spheres are often additionally connected by a third one, which can be called 'the place of passage' or 'the liminal space' 13 . It is located 'somewhere between' the world of animation and the world of live-action, but usually it does not belong to any of them, it is a kind of portal (sometimes without its visual concreteness) or a threshold whose function is to unambiguously separate the two spaces. It was presented in the clearest way 'James and the Giant Peach', where James, during his passage through the tunnel in the peach, in front of our eyes turns from a living boy into an animated puppet. But similarly separated spaces are also evident in 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' (a dark tunnel connecting the streets of Toontown with the road in that part of Hollywood inhabited by people), 'Space Jam' (an underground tunnel leading from a golf hole to the land of 'Looney Toons'), 'Cool World' (a mysterious funnel created by an animated professor) or 'Enchanted' (the abyss of a waterfall and other water objects such as a drink or soup, all of which have the power of a portal that allows communication between the two spaces).
It is no coincidence that the examples cited come from ten ('Enchanted'), twenty ('Space Jam', 'James and the Giant Peach'), twenty-five ('Cool World'), and even thirty years ago ('Who Framed Roger Rabbit'). The separation of 'liminal space', as well as the use of animation to narrativize space, is the most characteristic of films from a dozen or even several dozen years ago. Although it has to be admitted that among the new works there will also be those which use this function of animation and separate the 'liminal space', such as 'The Lego Movie', in which the abyss turns out to be a magical portal connecting the land of Lego with live-action and which is presented once as an animated, Cinem as of Diffe rent Veloc ities mysterious hole and once as an ordinary, cardboard paper roll, decorated with sequins.
In the latest films, the transition between animation and live-action is more direct, not connected by any separate space. The link is a hard editing cut, which juxtaposes the animation sequence with a portrait of the protagonist with a remarkable facial expression, betraying in a way the function of animation. In 'Foxtrot', the animated sequence is followed by the father's face, on which tears of emotion flow; in 'Miss Potter', the retrospective, in which the animation is used, ends with a thoughtful expression on the heroine's face, likewise in some scenes of 'The Diary of Teenage Girl', while in 'The Science of Sleep', after the first sequences, in which the animation appears, the protagonist wakes up, just like one of the pupils of the title heroine in 'Mary Poppins Returns'. When we count 'Summer' in, where sung, musical scenes, accompanied by animated inserts that add punk aesthetics to the video clip form, appear unexpectedly, without any announcement, it turns out that contemporary artists are interested in the integration of animation and live-action rather than in their unambiguous and decisive separation.

Rotoscopy or Beyond the Duality
In the article, I have focused on a kind of hybridization of animation and live-action, in which these two visual conventions are next to each other. Winsor McCay can give orders to Gertie, Roger Rabbit and the character played by Bob Hoskins can shake hands, and the teenage girl can take a walk with her favourite, drawn comic book author, but both characters and spaces always remain clearly separated. This way of on-screen co-existence of animation and live-action is the most interesting from the point of view of reflections on film narration, therefore it definitely dominates this article. However, it is not the only way to hybridise these two types of film. It is worth mentioning that an equally old and visually impressive cinematographic practice is the superimposition of animation on live-action. This technique, called rotoscoping, was used for the first time by The Fleischer Brothers, thus bringing the character Koko the Clown from the series 'Out of the Inkwell' (1918)(1919)(1920)(1921)(1922)(1923)(1924)(1925)(1926)(1927)(1928)(1929) to life in film. This technique gained recognition and has been used many times. The best known examples come from Disney's studio films, including 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' (1937), but the technique has also gained popularity in quite different areas of animated film production. It was also admired by Ralph Bakshi, who used it for 'Lord of the Rings' (1978).
It seems that it is difficult to speak of a specific, clearly defined narrative function in the case of using rotoscoping. However, the two newer examples slightly contradict this idea, as the visual union of animation and live-action again translates into a mixture of the two worlds in their plot. This technique turns out to be derived to some extent from the output of the previously discussed films. We are talking about the works of Richard Linklater: 'Waking Life ' (2001) and 'A Scanner Darkly ' (2006). The first one is a philosophical treatise on free will, dreaming, awakening and many other aspects of human life and the functioning of modern societies, but its plot is dominated by the motive of dreaming and constant awakening, which proves to be just another layer of dreaming. Linklater builds the film narration and space of the represented world in such a way that we are not sure whether the main character is dreaming or finally awakens. The viewers are suggested to stay in a state in between, which turns out to be only a delusion. This uncertainty of the ontological foundation of the observed world was to be emphasized by the animation superimposed on live-action. It was best described by Paul Ward, who commented on Linklater's film and wrote that 'the state of dreaming and the state of animation are inextricably linked, and linked in their ability to show a different "state of reality" ' (2005, p. 166). This also corresponds to what Mark Langer, the author of the most famous definition of this phenomenon, wrote about rotoscoping (2004, p. 12). According to him 'rotoscoping is detectable in the "simultaneous presence of the drawn and the photo-indexical" image produced by the technique' (Cornea, 2010, p. 156).
In a similar state of suspension between the two realities is the protagonist of the second of these films, 'A Scanner Darkly'. The equivalent of a dream, which curves the image of reality in this case are the drug hallucinations experienced by the main character, who is both a policeman and a junkie, addicted to the substance D. The storytelling device in this film is that the man is following himself. This is made possible by a special suit that masks his true identity. Overlapping layers of personalities, visual representations and ways of perception are presented in the film thanks to the visual equivalent of superimposing animation on the actors' movement. Ward's words about 'Waking Life' could also be used to describe the function of animation here, if only the dreams were changed into hallucinations. In both cases, the superimposition of animation on the live-action was intended to highlight the unclear status of the narrative perspective taken in the film, which additionally casts doubt on the ontology of the world represented. The worlds of dreams and hallucinations are superimposed on reality like animation on the image of live actors.

Motion Capture or Towards unification
The contemporary form of rotoscoping is considered to be the technique which is currently the most popular way of combining animation with acting, i.e. motion capture -this consists in intercepting the actor's movement and turning it into a way of moving a computer-generated character, an avatar. Just like the technology developed by the Fleischer Brothers, it is not associated with a specific manner of building the represented world or conducting the narration. It is also difficult to point to films that would use this technique in a particularly characteristic way, as Richard Linklater's films do in the case of rotoscoping. What is more, motion capture is governed by the logic opposite to that which accompanies the use of rotoscoping or animation/live-action hybrid films. Although it is also a form of hybridization of animation and film with actors (its links with the actor's movement are perhaps even closer than with the film successors of 'Gertie the Dinosaur' 14 ) -it has a completely different goal. Its task is to create the illusion of a seamless connection between digital and material -it is employed to blur the differences between used materials and to realistically blend what is animated with live-action. While the worlds represented in animation/live-action hybrid films are characterized by duality, eagerly emphasized by spatial relations, in the case of motion capture the reality of film fiction is homogeneous. The goal of the illusion produced by technology is to create a world that is not built on difference but similarity and coherence of both digitally generated elements and those recorded using cinematographic technology. Gollum is an integral part of Middle-earth, just like Smaug, and Caesar, although at the level of fiction it is characterized by its supernaturality, belongs to the real world even before the Earth turns into the Planet of the Apes. We could look for examples that would contradict this thesis and we would not even have to look far. James Cameron's 'Avatar' (2009) tells the story of the confrontation of two worldsman and the Na'vi people -and King Kong that devastates New York is, after all, a transcendent element in the face of the urban tissue. These examples show that it is hard to see a principle that, when using motion capture technology, would influence both the way the represented world is built and the way it is narrated.
However, the undeniable fact is that this technology is most often employed to create the illusion of reality, which is generally avoided by animation/liveaction hybrid films, and to realistically blend computer-generated elements into the photorealistic world. Films with motion capture tend to create homogeneous worlds where animated elements are to be a reliable element of the whole. With digital animation and motion capture, though, there is such a problem that they are much better suited to creating fantastic creatures than to creating avatars for people. The failure of the program aimed at making an ideal synthespian, i.e. a virtual human being, indistinguishable from the human actor and created by means of digital animation, contributed to the awareness of this fact. This isn the case of 'artificial actors' who worked the mechanism 'uncanny valley', described by the Japanese robotics engineer Masahiro Mori. He stated that robots which only conventionally resemble humans, such as Wall-E or C3PO, evoke positive emotions in humans, while examples of humanoid androids that are too similar to humans, but do not produce perfect illusions, are perceived as creepy.
This rule also applies to digital characters in films. Fantastic digital creatures, even if technically imperfect, can seduce the audience more easily than digital people, which was proved by the chilly reception of such films as 'Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within ' (2001) or 'Polar Express' (2004. That is why hybrid films that make use of motion capture still most often build their plot on fantastic elements that come in contact with what is realistic. But in order to mix su-Cinem as of Diffe rent Veloc ities pernatural with natural, they no longer need to produce two different worlds, which influence the way of narrating. Nonetheless, the example of Peter Cushing's digital 'resurrection' as Tarkin in 'Rogue One: A Star Wars Story' (2016) shows that we may be facing a revolution that will lead to a breakthrough in the use of digital acting. However, the foundation of a computer-generated human figure will not be a binary digital code, as was the case with synthespian, but, paradoxically, a living man whose movements will be captured by means of performance capture.

***
Therefore, combining animation with live-action takes different forms, but the most interesting of them in terms of influencing the way narration is conducted is the one in which the creators clearly point out the differences in the materials used. Their distinguishing feature is building the fabula around the confrontation of two worlds, often located as topographically as possible on the map of the film universe. Based on the difference -visual, spatial, material -they finally tell the story of the meeting, and sometimes even of connection and symbiosis. Animation and live-action, despite their uniqueness, turn out to merge, not only in the story, by pointing to parallels, analogies and similarities, but also visually and ontologically.