Animation’s Spectral Charm Comes Alive at MoMA

There is something delightfully unsettling about the marriage of the macabre and the artistic, particularly when it unfolds within the carefully considered galleries of one of the world’s most distinguished museums. The Museum of Modern Art finds itself in precisely this territory this season, as it welcomes members to an evening suffused with the playful menace of the season, orchestrated around a skeletal vision brought to life through the medium of pumpkin carving.

The carved pumpkin, realised by Maniac Pumpkin Carvers, draws its inspiration from the exhibition ‘It’s Alive: A Century of Animation from the Collection’, a sweeping survey that traces the extraordinary visual language of animation across one hundred years. The imagery chosen for the pumpkin speaks directly to the exhibition’s thematic heart: the dancing skeletons from the original 1929 poster for ‘The Skeleton Dance’, a work that remains as effervescent and genuinely unsettling today as it was nearly a century ago.

‘The Skeleton Dance’ occupies a peculiar and vital position in animation’s genealogy. Those rattling, impossibly jointed figures performed a kind of skeletal choreography that suggested both menace and merriment, a duality that animators have returned to repeatedly across the decades. To encounter the original poster alongside the pumpkin carving is to witness a conversation across time: the flat, graphic forms of the printed image transformed into three dimensional relief, the imagery relocated from the archive into the season of spirits and spectres.

The exhibition itself offers far more than this single entry point. ‘It’s Alive’ presents a rich accumulation of work drawn from MoMA’s collection, each piece testament to animation’s capacity to conjure movement, personality and profound feeling from the simplest of gestures. The collection encompasses everything from the techniques that brought the earliest animated dreams to life through to contemporary explorations of the form.

For those who find themselves drawn to this intersection of contemporary festivity and artistic scholarship, membership offers an entrée not merely to this evening, but to an ongoing series of experiences designed for those who wish to deepen their relationship with art. Forthcoming game nights and gatherings promise similar instances of conviviality organised around cultural engagement, opportunities to encounter the art of our time in settings that prioritise connection alongside contemplation.

There remains something rather civilised about the notion of assembling to celebrate both the season and the enduring power of animated form. The pumpkin, however bone chilling its carved visage, serves as an invitation: a reminder that art, in whatever form it takes, possesses the capacity to enliven our experience of the world around us.

Imagery courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art (@themuseumofmodernart).