GREENBERG, SLAVA. Animated Film and Disability: Cripping Spectatorship. Indiana University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv3142v9x.\
Image description: The book cover is mostly white with a black, scribbled spiral dominating the center of the cover. A red-haired drawn figure, wearing brown slippers, a light-purple dress, and a green coat, seems to be falling backwards into the spiral, a still from one of the case studies discussed in the book (My Depression by Elizabeth Swados, 2014). In the upper right corner, the author’s name, Slava Greenberg, is written in green. The title, Animated Film and Disability, is centered at the bottom and written in the same green. The subtitle, Cripping Spectatorship, appears below in orange.
Slava Greenberg’s Animated Film and Disability: Cripping Spectatorship situates itself in the vast scholarly gap between disability studies and animation studies, focusing on production processes and spectatorship in disability animation. Greenberg adopts a phenomenological standpoint, applying Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of embodied subjectivity to the emerging field of animated disability representation. This approach elicits the radical potential of animation in crip cinema, opening new ways of seeing, which he terms cripping spectatorship. Readers familiar with disability studies will immediately recognize Greenberg’s use of terminology and concepts, though the text remains accessible to those less familiar with the field, exemplified by his commitment to unpack such terms as person-first or identity-first language with care and patience.
In the preface, “Call me Trans Crip,” Greenberg situates himself and his research, offering the first overview of the net he casts across film theory, ableist cinematic traditions, and animation. He draws inspiration from Alison Kafer’s Feminist Queer Crip, particularly her engagement with the toilet as a multimodal physical and political space. Kafer does not frame the toilet as a theoretical construct, but rather engages with it as a lived, contested space, where bodily needs, access, and politics converge. For Greenberg this is a starting point for his animated crip cinema theory: a singular space revealing the overlaps in the struggles against a patriarchal, white, ableist, heteronormative hierarchy of humanity, that does not deem all bodies worthy of the same care.
Greenberg situates his research within film theory, drawing on Vivian Sobchack and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to emphasize the cinematic experience as a bodily perception, which, according to Greenberg, animation uniquely translates. Greenberg uses Robert McRuer’s emphasis on the entanglement of crip and queer theory to bridge David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s critique of disability as spectacle with Jack Halberstam’s formulations of queer temporalities and spatial logics. Greenberg connects film and disability theory through the shared concern with how marginalized bodies are imagined and experienced on screen and uses the aforementioned concepts to expose how mainstream cinema assumes an able-bodied spectator, while crip animation disrupts this gaze. Greenberg pushes this further by examining how, through its phenomenological capacities, crip animation challenges ableist film tradition, enabling the disability community through the medium’s accessible means of production (cf. Nothing about us without us) and offering an alternative mode of spectatorship. According to Greenberg, crip animation accesses a space beyond mere representational practice, which often renders people with disabilities as an empty shell symbolic of something or someone else. Moreover, it establishes a phenomenological practice of an embodied spectatorship that challenges normative film spectatorship.
In his Introduction, drawing on Heidegger’s In-der-Welt-Sein, Greenberg posits crip animation as exploring “alternative bodily spectatorship in a developing cinematic expression” (4) and describes these “disabled subjectivities” as expanding cinema through the new modes of perception and experience. Crip Animation thus challenges not only the normative representation of people with disabilities but also the aspects of an ableist gaze, persistently assuming an abled spectator.
Greenberg demonstrates his fluency in film and animation theory throughout by referencing Sergej Eisenstein, Walter Benjamin, Gertrud Koch, Jack Halberstam, Alan Cholodenko, Paul Wells, and Rosemarie Garland-Thompson. Alongside these animation scholars, Greenberg ultimately aligns with a recurring observation that animation stays largely under-researched and is often approached as if it were live action – a tendency that overlooks animation’s abstract and radical potential to express lived experiences. Yet film production and scholarship remain dominated by an able-bodied and neurotypical production crew and assumed spectators, often leading to a “unified style” (8) of assimilation, where the bodies of people with disabilities often become objects of spectacle and are overwhelmingly pathologized.
Greenberg first establishes that the cinematic perception is necessarily a physical one and therefore adopts a phenomenological lens that positions film as an embodied experience. Utilizing this as his theoretical foundation, he argues that crip animation through its inherent abstractness and accessible production capacities can disrupt the normative mode of spectatorship that assumes an abled viewer as a default. In doing so, crip animation can also subvert the deeply rooted binaries, such as body/soul or object/subject, which have long constrained both disability and animation studies. As access, production, and spectatorship differ greatly, Greenberg differentiates between arthouse and mainstream cinema throughout his case studies, with examples ranging from independent animated feature films (Rocks in My Pockets, My Depression) to shorts (Creature Comforts, Orgesticulanismus), most of which circulated through international animation festivals. This distinction allows him to elicit and contrast, in congruence with crip cinema scholar Garland-Thompson, various constructed cinematic gazes (ableist, medical, voyeuristic) and to identify as well as illustrate recurring motifs in disability cinema. Among them, the ‘life-not-worth-living’ trope, where disabled characters would rather end their lives than keep on living with a disability – the idea that which is widely reinforced by actions of their diegetic communities, creating an impression that a disability is worse than death. Other tropes that Greenberg illustrates by concrete examples as well and theoretical contextualizations are the tropes of the objectified disabled body and default asexuality or hypersexuality of disabled characters. Through his extensive theoretical knowledge and historical situating, Greenberg exposes the perpetuated harm and discrimination created by these tropes as well as their ubiquity across cinema.
Using his case studies, he then highlights “rare examples of high-level involvement by people with disabilities” (80). Such pictures as Creature Comforts, My Depression, or Rocks in my Pockets, for example, resist the voyeuristic gaze and have a de-pathologizing effect through first-person narratives or addressing the viewer directly. Greenberg rightfully criticizes ways in which disabled bodies in ableist cinema are portrayed as empty shells, standing in as a metaphor for something or someone else. I suggest, however, that a consideration of how some films instrumentalize nonhuman animals – using them as empty canvases to showcase humanimal experiences of disability – could have expanded the discussion. This is particularly relevant to the notion of demarginalizing one voice at the cost of silencing another, which is also a significant aspect of disability theory. Greenberg dedicates the following two chapters to non-vision-centric films and reconfiguring auditory experience in cinema, supporting his discussion with close-readings of avant-garde short films and carefully constructed theoretical frameworks drawn from phenomenology, critical disability studies and sensory theory. In these chapters, he explores how the structural implementation of cinematography and sound design can challenge the “dominant sensual hierarchy of film spectatorship” (98). I suggest that other films, like Naoko Yamada’s A Silent Voice (2016), similarly align with Greenberg’s framework because of its sensory portrayal of social anxiety, depression, and deafness. Yet they might be absent from his discussion likely due to their seemingly able-bodied and neurotypical crew and Greenberg’s focus on avant-garde animation. In the final chapter Toward Accessible Spectatorship, Greenberg summarizes and ultimately deduces that “Crip animation avoids representing disabled bodies as spectacular and sensational by replaying the indexical body with abstract and metaphorical images” (159) and underscores again the nothing about us without us principle.
Overall, Animated Film and Disability’s carefully and tightly curated case studies open space for further research and dialogue, especially regarding animation enabling new modes of spectatorship. Greenberg shows his interdisciplinary fluency as congruent with current developments in animation scholarship, while drawing much-needed addition to both animation and disability media studies.
Sanny Schulte is a film studies researcher and PhD-candidate at the University of Tübingen. Their dissertation project, Animated Configurations of Otherness, explores animation’s potential to re:imagine and re:configure at the intersection of animation aesthetics and sociocultural transformation with a particular focus on marginality and the underexamined overlaps with FLINTA*-queer, disability, and ecological otherness. They received the State-Postgraduate-Fellowship for their dissertation, work at the open-access journal Colour Turn, and the Media Studies Institute. Sanny has worked in numerous German film productions as an AD and PA, holds an MA in Film Studies and a BA in Media Studies and Rhetoric.