one of those distinctively Qud consonances turns up in Calvino from 1986:
The world of drawing has always been closer to me than that of photography, and I find that the art of moving cartoon figures about on a static background is not so different from that of telling a story with words arranged in lines on a blank sheet of paper. The animated cartoon has a lot to teach the writer, above all how to define characters and objects with a few strokes. It is a metaphorical and metonymic art at one and the same time; it is the art of metamorphosis (the great theme of novels ever since Apuleius, and one that the cinema is so bad at) and of anthropomorphism (a pagan vision of the world, far less humanist than is often supposed).
from Cinema and the Novel: Problems of Narrative. see also Cybernetics and Ghosts from the same collection; a decent survey of combinatorial storytelling
anyway, I desire an elaboration on either of these themes