Thinking outside the lines

T.S. Eliot said “human kind cannot bear very much reality.’’ The ghettoized history of animation suggests that it’s imagination we can’t bear very much of. Is there a more terrifying moment in Hollywood history than when John Huston tells Jack Nicholson in “Chinatown’’ how he’s come to realize that, under the right circumstances, “a man can do anything’’? A different kind of terror comes into play when we realize that, under almost any circumstances, an animator really can do anything.

If you think about it, wonder is a lot like terror - only with less adrenaline and a smaller dry-cleaning bill. Wonder is very much the order of the day in “Frame by Frame: Animated at Harvard,’’ which runs at the university’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts through Feb. 14 (so get there quick). Reproach runs wonder a close second. The range of artistic approaches that can be seen here - lyrical, abstract, comic, elegiac, and not forgetting the ever-popular uncategorizable - reminds us how unlimited can be this art form which has been put to such limited popular use.

Harvard has never been called the CalArts of the East. People associate it with investment bankers, lawyers, even comedy writers (“The Simpsons’’ again), but not animators. Yet Harvard started offering animation courses in 1963, with the legendary John and Faith Hubley as the first teachers. “Frame by Frame’’ pays tribute to animation at Harvard, putting on display some of its very impressive products.

The exhibit includes puppets, drawings, a vintage Moviola editing machine, an Oxberry animation table. They’re all rather enchanting (the Moviola is something out of a steampunk opium dream). But they’re secondary to the show’s main purpose, which is to showcase films by Harvard animators, faculty and students, past, present, and even future - works in progress. There are more than 35. Some are barely a minute long, while Suzan Pitt’s “Asparagus’’ runs an all but epic 20 minutes (its profusion of visual imagery is epic, too).