by Sarah Treadwell and Paul Veart

Hélène Cixous in her essay, 'Without End, no, State of Drawingness, no, rather: The Executioner's taking off' has an explicit and unusual account of drawing: 'The drawing is without a stop. I mean to say the true drawing, the living one - because there are dead ones, drawn-deads. Look and you shall see. Barely traced - the true drawing escapes. Rends the limit. Snorts. Like the world, which is only a perennial movement, the drawing goes along, befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness.'²

She raises the possibility that not only might human beings be rent with a shifting animal/human divide but that drawings too might slip across categorical boundaries that regularly shape knowledge of life and its effects. Drawings, already meshed and riven in terms of technique and content, might also be quickened with the active involvement of time and spatial sequence. Cixous in her depiction of drawing imagines drunken disruptive movement that is variably paced and unpredictable. Drawing that eludes finish and that seeks passing truth through encounters with error is what interests Cixous; drawings on the run with erratic speed.

For Cixous, Blythe and Sellers suggest, the 'practice of working on what moves, 'on what escapes', is something that 'can only be done poetically'³. Poetic work means allowing for a certain degree of freedom in interpretation - looking for potential for things (words, phrases, drawings) to mean more than their first appearance suggests. In this vein this paper sets a short animation, Beyond⁴ by Koji Morimoto, alongside the poetic practice of Cixous. Her words are arranged in terms of a perceived correspondence through proximity, as found in the alongside-ness of children's play (an implicit theme of the animation). The adjacency is imagined as a spatial and interpretative potential with animal connections - heightened senses and peripheral vision.

Beyond is one of a compilation of nine animated films titled The Animatrix, a joint Japanese-American production that is part of the Wachowski brothers' multi-media approach to the world of the Matrix. The protagonist of Beyond is a young woman called Yoko who lives alone with her cat, Yuki, in a small apartment in urban Kichijoji, Japan. Yoko seems to be a typical anime orphan; she searches for a lost cat that is her main source of emotional expression (and the only creature that seems aware of the Matrix). Following some children to an abandoned site with a haunted house she finds her cat, (and herself in bliss) through an instability in the world. She and the children are eventually evicted from the site which is then sealed and remade as a parking lot.

Not all animations constitute 'escaping texts' despite the literal, constructed movement in the drawing. Some animators draw cartoon contours as closures and never escape them. Cixous wants to draw, that which is invisible to the naked eye and impossible to draw, 'the quick of life'⁵. She sees traces of the quick of life in a rounded appearance that necessarily conceals the lack of pity and the brilliance of horror in drawing.

The animation Beyond operates sets up categories of life through conditions of drawing, categories that, however, leak and reverse. Certain things in the depicted city are drawn without contour and with attention to variations in surface condition creating a reassuringly stable background, Cixous' rounded appearance. But while the drawing of the city tends to the realistic surface, with its technical assurance and consistency, it also becomes mere backdrop when set against an animated condition.

Things in the (insecure) animal category are drawn with a linear contour and flat colouration and include Yoko a young girl/woman, Yuki the cat/girl, a raven, dove, and dog. If cartoon drawing is reserved for the animated as a category of the living, then it also spreads into categories that are close to or touch the living; the cat's feeding bowl and Yoko's bed are drawn with pronounced contour. Contour drawing extends the corporeal, even as it fashions it with a line that is removed from depictions of reality, a line that proclaims most clearly its constructed nature.

The film is structured by a line, a linear narrative, which, however, returns. The story starts with a city scene; depressed looking people march across an intersection. A curious melody plays, a refrain, signalling a marking of territory and imminent change. The sound is plaintive and reminiscent of childhood, haunting and repetitive.⁶ Another road intersection follows with the same song but this time it is empty. The refrain hangs as a faint echo in the air. A crow or raven flies into the intersection and in its blackness and with its melancholic cry intimates doubt or tragedy. The cat, Yuki, strolling into the intersection scares the bird away.

Cixous uses an image of something breathing under the pen that writes and draws; a beak/pen that sings, eats, pecks and is both a weapon and an instrument. A bird that can be scared away in the combat that is her image of drawing.⁷

Purposefully walking across the square the escaping cat, Yuki, wears a bell (suppression of feral hunting) and is well fed. It also has what could be the mark of a human footprint patterning its body (as a human might wear leopard fur so the cat's coat is decorated). Yuki, strolling along a wall, purrs until, behind the wall, it sees its own impossibly large shadow projected onto a building. The disconcerting suggestion of a gigantic cat is caused by familiar techniques of architectural drawing - manipulations of scale, skiagraphy and controlling projections.

Cats in the eighteenth century were positioned as moral monsters in that they, like children, represented the asocial. As James Steintrager points out, 'cats are the spectre of society's dissolution.'⁸ The curiosity of Yuki the cat leads Yoko to a place that is outside society and in which play rather than law is operative. The curious cat remains potentially the cruel hunter in that it scares the crow and later hunts the white dove associated with transformative pleasure and excess.