I, the Narrator; Study of Author Ego States in Animation

In terms of storytelling in the literature and cinema, “me, the narrator” and “first-person narrative” are familiar phrases used to describe certain categories of cinematic or fictional works. Another definition is also conceivable for the first-person narrative: the first-person narrative as anything arising from the author’s ego, regardless of the characteristic language of the work. In this sense, all works can be considered as a “first-person narrative”; the product of the author’s ego. In the familiar definition of the “narrator’s ego”, the word “ego” refers to a character of the story/work and in another definition, it refers to the author of the story/work. It can be said that the first definition is a subset of the latter definition. When an author chooses the first-person perspective storytelling, s/he is creating the narrator’s personality, just as all the characters in the story are being created by his/her mind. In other words, the story narrator’s personality has an “ego” in line with the “ego” of the creator, placed in second place compared to it. What is the precise meaning of the author’s ego? Does the ego have only one state? Or if there are different ego states, could we conclude that these ego states are at work at different stages of the work? Considering this, we refer to Eric Berne’s theory of “transactional analysis”, leading to questions such as: “What “ego states” are used in making an animation?” and “Which “ego states” are used by the author to shape different parts of an animation?” In continuation, a distinction is made between technical activities and creative ones. Another question raised is “Which “ego state” of the animation maker is possibly more active while creating different kinds of animations? It is then to be explained the different nature of mainstream narrative and more personal, individualized ways of storytelling. Referring to Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, a relationship is depicted between the characteristics of the child’s mind and language and creative aspect of the author of animation. In this part, the two types of speech are being considered, i.e. ego-centered speech and social speech. Applying these two terms, the language spectrum of the “me, the narrator” in animation is being studied, leading to a conclusion that each animation could be located somewhere on this spectrum, depending its utilization ratio of these two types of speech.