Colin Williamson’s Drawn to Nature argues that “science animation” is not a niche offshoot bolted onto cartoon history, but a force that has long shaped mainstream American animation. Williamson’s central wager is persuasive: scientific ideas about nature did not merely…
Destructive yet corrective, social yet subjective, the contradictory nature of humour makes it difficult to define. This is perhaps never more apparent than when humour relies upon the seriousness of its given topic. Over and above philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s claim…
Humour has been a consistent thematic thread throughout my practice. My first short, animated film, Family Favourites—a wry exploration of how emotionally fraught and dysfunctional Christmas can be—was screened on Channel 4 in 1990. The film drew on the tension…
A cat removing pus from an infected toenail. A wallaby shaved by a ceiling fan. A monster licking a mysterious blue goo with its hairy tongue. In the 1990s, the American television channel Nickelodeon drew on the exaggerated animation and…
Paul Wells (1998) leaves out just one overlooked source of laughing in animated films in his otherwise brilliant chapter on “25 Ways to Start Laughing”. Namely that of a cartoon character laughing. Felix the Cat silently chortles his “Ha! Ha!”…
When an object in a film appears to be alive by virtue of its movements, this impression is most often produced through animation. Frame-by-frame animation is usually applied for this purpose—especially in live-action films. The animation of inanimate objects thus…
Arguably, artificial intelligence and its evolving capacities for (moving) image generation, consistently raise questions about agency and animation. While responses to these developments oscillate between fears of job loss and enthusiastic embraces of new possibilities, underneath lies the question: What…
Etymologically, the term ‘animation’ is derived from the Latin word animatio, from animare. Probably originating in the 16th century, ‘animation’ has two key meanings, one referring to movement and the other to bestowing life (Wells 2011). These meanings are central to how…
The animation film Lesbian Space Princess (2025, Hobbs & Varghese) is a radical counter-utopian experiment in animated worldbuilding. It utilizes animation’s capacity to re:imagine and re:configure without an indexical link[1] to construct a homonormative society while avoiding the trap of…
One of the characteristics of animation is that it offers the illusion of life, in which passive materials are transformed into living entities with agency of their own. A range of animated films from Bambi (Hand, 1942) to The Jungle…
