What 'Ilmu' Means for Indonesia's Animation Academic Field

This morning, I had a sudden epiphany regarding my understanding of my field of study. Having around eight years of experience working as academic in Indonesia within the field of animation, I struggled to position my understanding of knowledge in the realm of scientific inquiry. Animation as a field of study has this hybridity in its nature. Some people might classify animation as part of design studies, art, or to some extent IT, and even media and communication.

This has led academics in my field (particularly in Indonesia) to have varied views and beliefs. I posit that this matter comes from the development of technology and industry in the field of animation, with new technology and rising economic opportunities from the industry, further exemplifying technical and procedural aspects in the discussion of animation as a field of study.

While this means that animation has a richness that can be shared across many different fields, it also creates confusion in examining animation as an academic discipline. My previous understanding as an animation lecturer in Indonesia back then may have been influenced by this, as I wrote various academic works following the formats of journals that differ in their ontological and epistemological frameworks. Ironically this has also affected the way I examined and supervised my students.

I perceived comments such as ‘How do you measure its success?’ or ‘How do you evaluate its effectiveness?’ as a way to push them to prove their research’s validity through epistemological assumptions that may not align with their approach. That said, what I believed to be appropriate at the time may have actually distanced the focus away from the essence of the research, which I only came to realise much later when I finally had the time and space to critically rethink my assumptions through the deep research process of doing a PhD.

In this writing, I want to emphasise that I am not an expert. I simply want to express what I feel and write this as a reflective piece during a quiet moment after my candidature presentation. Continuing from what I said earlier, I believe this misunderstanding may stem from how we understand the words ‘science’ and ‘knowledge’. In Indonesian language, both terms are commonly translated as ‘ilmu’, and this may reflect why, as academics in the field of animation, which actually operates more within the domain of ‘knowledge’ often find ourselves judged by the standards of ‘science’.

In my humble opinion, this may arise from Indonesian language limited vocabulary to distinguish between these concepts. Although this may seem like a simple linguistic matter, its impact is influential. The inability to grasp the different nature of these terms can definitely lead to situations where one is forced to conform to the framework of the other. In practice, this means that animation publications are often expected to follow standards of academic rigour rooted in entirely different disciplinary traditions.

To clarify what I mean, I actually thought about this because I remembered a moment when I attended Mass on last Good Friday. Now living in Australia, I attended the Mass in English, and during that service, I realised something important. The verse read was from John 19:30, at the last moment of His life on the cross, Jesus said, “It is accomplished.” The sudden realisation I had at that time was how much clearer it was to me that His death on the cross was a fulfilment of His promise.

This comes from the Greek word tetelestai (τετέλεσται), the original language of the verse, and it brought a profound moment. In my whole life, I read this verse in Indonesian translation as “sudah selesai”. While “sudah selesai” literally means “already finished,” in everyday Indonesian conversation it can be ambiguous, it can be positive, sometimes neutral or even negative. This made me reflect on how the same phrase can carry different emotional and conceptual weights depending on language and context which circle back to my earlier remark on how the word 'ilmu' affect our understanding and approach to ‘knowledge’.

This reflection leads to a question that is relevant within the Indonesian academic context: How can animation be approached as a distinct field of inquiry, rather than one that is expected to fit into the frameworks of other disciplines? In Indonesia, animation research is often required to conform to the methods and standards of fields like design, film studies, or computer science.

While this hybridity reflects animation’s richness, it can also shadow its unique ways of producing knowledge. If this tendency continues, we risk overlooking what animation can offer on its own terms. I wonder what it would mean to take animation studies into the spotlight, not only as a product of technical skill but as a way of thinking, a field of inquiry, and a mode of knowledge that deserves recognition in its own right. In other words, the old structure must first be dismantled to make way for a stronger, more complete one to emerge.