This post is going to make a speculative claim and then ask a speculative question. The claim is that we can think about animation as a type of performance. The question is that if we do so, then what can…
According to a 2015 Los Angeles Times article, the majority of animation production students in the US are female, yet they comprise less than a fifth of the workforce in creative roles in the American animation industry. This situation is…
I’m currently pondering the idea of animated ‘interjections’ in otherwise live action documentaries. I first started thinking about animated interjections a long time ago, probably when I was doing my PhD research around 2008, but definitely when I was working…
When I taught my module on the History and Theory of Animation to my final year undergrads at the University of Surrey last semester I was really looking forward to the week on representation of gender. I’ve taught this class…
A couple of weeks ago, I responded to an excellent post by Caroline Ruddell in which she asks ‘what of animation theory?’ I suggested that animation studies hasn’t cohered around any central questions of enquiry in the way Film Studies…
Theorists of film and photography, from Barthes to Benjamin, have often drawn our attention to photographic media as a way of accessing history. However, animated documentaries such as Places Other People Have Lived (Yilmaz, 2011), Learned by Heart (Rimminen and…
