He sank back into his black-and-white world, his immobile world of inanimate drawings that had been granted the secret of motion, his death-world with its hidden gift of life. But that life was a deeply ambiguous life, a conjurer's trick, a crafty illusion based on an accidental property of the retina, which retained an image for a fraction of a second after the image was no longer present. On this frail fact was erected the entire structure of the cinema, that colassal confidence game. The animated cartoon was a far more honest expression of the cinematic illusion because the cartoon reveled in its own illusory nature, exulted in the impossible--therein lay its exhileration and its secret melancholy. For this willful violation of the actual, while it was an intoxicating release from the constriction of things, was at the same time nothing but a delusion, an attempt to outwit mortality. As such it was doomed to failure. And yet it was desperately important to smash through the constriction of the actual, to unhinge the universe and let the impossible stream in, because otherwise--well, otherwise the world was nothing but an editorial cartoon.

-The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne
by Steven Millhauser