This thesis proposes a study about the relation between animated cartoons and live-action cinema. We base it on the study of a hybrid cinematic form, presenting a mix or an encounter between graphic characters and real actors. This research tries to question, from early cinema to more contemporaneous experiments, the evolution of a form resting upon a technical frontier always moving at the whim of technological innovations and theoretical perspectives historically variables. While interesting ourselves as much in the films than in their reception and their production context, the objective is to reveal and understand the reasons why animation is seen, nowadays, equally as a form radically different from live-action, linked to an institution of its own, and equally as a form potentially assimilable to photographic cinema, particularly in the case of films based on special effects. We aim to dig in order to find the roots of this singular relation, of this scission-assimilation aswe chose to name it, that we can explain through historical, theoretical and aesthetical modalities, particularly lighten by the hybrid form. Our goal is to analyze, through the evolution of this form and its use revealed by the films, the emergence of a separation more aesthetical, discursive or institutional than really ontological between what several historical movements and theoretical enterprises have contributed to define, throughout the history of cinema, as two systems of representation as well separated than potentially assimilable
