Temporal Loitering: Psychological Ageing and Animated Flânerie
Temporal Loitering: Psychological Ageing and Animated Flânerie

Summary/Abstract: This article proposes reimagining the figure of the flâneur, traditionally associated with youth, disaffection, and urban modernity, from the perspective of psychological ageing and its affective spatialities. I argue that animation, due to its formal plasticity, metamorphosis, and temporal elasticity, constitutes a privileged laboratory for mapping non-linear psychic ages, where memory, trauma, and repetition configure modes of “temporal loitering.” Within a framework that articulates the contributions of cultural gerontology and urban theory (Woodward; Benjamin; Augé; Lefebvre), I analyze three cases: Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson, 2015), chapter three of The House (Paloma Baeza, 2022), and BoJack Horseman (Raphael Bob-Waksberg, 2014–2020). In Anomalisa, the hotel corridors and the homogenization of voices materialize the protagonist’s collapsed “cultural age”; in The House, the flooded home performs an ecological senescence that forces the negotiation of grief and detachment; in BoJack Horseman, the drift through Los Angeles and episodes such as “Fish Out of Water” externalize rhythms of relapse, silence, and self-questioning. Together, I demonstrate how animation transforms flânerie from the boulevard to architectures of interiority (non-places, dilapidated houses, mental scenarios) and how its techniques (stretch and squash, acting, loops) allow us to think of ageing as a spatial and rhythmic experience rather than a chronological one. The proposal initiates a dialogue between animation studies and cultural gerontology, suggesting a reading methodology, “temporal loitering”, applicable to other contemporary narratives in which subjects, objects, and environments age within networks.

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