Over the past thirty years, the concept of agency has sparked engaging discussions across fields like Gender Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Philosophy, and Media Studies, offering unique insights for animation research. Agency challenges the boundaries between humans and non-human entities, questioning how actions and influences unfold. Who holds the power to act? How do individuals and institutions shape—or constrain—this power? What roles do technologies and non-human participants play in this complex interplay? With this guest-edited blog, we aim to systematically bring together the concept of agency and the field of animation research, something that has been surprisingly rarely done to date.[1]
Animated films inevitably expose their own artifice by means of their “madeness” or “craftedness” (see Backe et al. 2018, Ruddell/Ward 2019) and in many cases they explicitly address the process of artistic production or highlight it in various ways. This may be done ostentatiously, as a self-reflexive gesture that is consciously inscribed into the work by the artist, like the comedic interplay of creature and creator in early animations by Émile Cohl or Winsor McCay, or less explicitly, by allowing the production process to be discernible from the work without any specific artistic intention, as in the arbitrary motion of textures in stop-motion or the boiling of lines in hand-drawn animation. While many such cases seem to primarily indicate an animator’s agency—a human being who is acting upon a given material, doing ‘something to it’—others hint at a more complex distribution of powers: Material conditions and institutional requirements may be working against the animators’ intentions while budget, technology, or policy may limit their choices. There is, of course, a continuous spectrum between deliberate self-reflexive gestures and hazarded or accidental signs of artifice and it has been argued that some animation techniques may even “have benefited from their inherent limitations.” (OReilly, n.d.) But, in any case, agency is negotiated in these traces of the production process—both in the sense of human agency, i.e. deliberate artistic practice, and in the sense of material agency, i.e. the contribution of institutions, instruments, objects, and materials in the course of the creation of an animated film. Applying both to the field of analogue animation (i.e., the agency of clay, paper, pencil, ink, cels, etc.) as well as to the digital domain (i.e., software, hardware, interfaces, controllers, processes of automation and algorithmicizing etc.) the question arises: To what extent do these non-human entities collaborate and interfere in the act of creative expression? Or, to put it another way: Who or what actually animates whom or what?
The notion of agency not only refers to the ‘action of things/subjects’ on a technological or instrumental level; it also implies a political dimension regarding individual and structural (im)possibilities, (in)capabilities, (in)abilities and forms of power(lessness). This is especially true in the field of documentary animation and with regard to the ability of animated images to visualize phenomena that escape or overwhelm the eye. The power to make visible what cannot be shown otherwise or the choice to not show (in a photographical sense) what should not be shown (e.g. when it comes to questions of anonymity, ethics, or censorship) is an important aesthetical power of animation that is directly linked to questions of agency. Another example would be the use of animation in the context of information, education, and social engagement, and thus the idea of empowerment by and through animation (Reinerth 2021): NGO campaigns like UNICEF’s Meena Communication Initiative employ animated edutainment films to support important social issues like women’s rights in South Asian regions (Alam 2021). Participatory animation projects like Refugees—Kinder auf der Flucht (Refugee—I Want to Tell You My Story, 2016) or post factum documentaries like Miro Bernat’s Motýli tady nežijí (Butterflies Do Not Live Here, 1958)animate laymen’s artworks to tell stories of the voiceless—in these cases unaccompanied minors seeking refuge, and children murdered in the gas chambers of Theresienstadt (Rogoff 2019). And artistic solidarity actions like #AnimatorsAgainstWar in reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 or artistic empowerment through projects like Haneen Koraz’ animation workshops in Gaza oscillate between urging audiences to look where human lives have become war material and affirming one’s own political agency as artists in times of overwhelming global crises.
The coming blogposts, eight in total, are arranged in four thematic sections. The first section addresses the fragmentation and plurality but also the merging of actors within creative processes. Alisi Telengut understands working with natural materials and their idiosyncrasies as a collective endeavor, allowing a critique of a human-centered view of production processes and of an anthropocentric worldview per se. Collective and “democratic” forms of education and creative practice challenge Benjamin Hall to reflect on control, contingency and vulnerability. The second section asks about specific forms of interaction between human and material or virtual entities. Bodies—whether bodies of work or (un)playable avatar bodies—are examined in detail in this section: Carla McKinnon reflects on the capacities, limitations, and transience of materials in an archival context, while Maria Pagès looks at how idle animations negotiate, more or less successfully, between narrative content and active gameplay. In the third section, specific examples are discussed in more detail. While Virág Vécsey examines the emancipatory potential in Chicken Run (UK 2000), Sanny Schulte highlights counter-hegemonic forms of narrative and world-building in Lesbian Space Princess (AU 2025). The fourth and final section focuses on a more discursive classification of agency: Julia Eckel deals with the ‘agentic powers’ of Artificial Intelligence in animation production in relation to questions of amateurism. And Vera Schamal’s contribution takes a look at the conceptual and ontological connections between animation and agency, thereby providing—together with the editorial—a theoretical framing for the guest-curated theme.
The compilation of all these contributions and the thematic connections, tensions, and synergies that were intended to arise—but also spontaneously emerged between them—reflect a fact that resonates, so to speak, on a meta-level: the various agencies that have been involved in curating the theme. These agencies include not only the individual authors, editors and us as guest-editors, but also the technological, discursive, and institutional frameworks that shape the very process of editing an animationstudies 2.0 blog theme.
References
Alam, Naima (2021). Narrative Strategies for Animated Development Communication: Examples From BRAC in Bangladesh. In: Giuliana Sorce (ed.) Global Perspectives on NGO Communication for Social Change. London: Routledge, pp. 90–105.
Backe, Hans-Joachim; Eckel Julia; Feyersinger, Erwin; Sina, Véronique; Thon, Jan-Noel (eds., 2018). Ästhetik des Gemachten: Interdisziplinäre Beiträge zur Animations- und Comicforschung. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110538724.
Chicken Run (UK 2000; directors: Peter Lord, Nick Park).
Cholodenko, Alan (2011). Speculations on the Animatic Automaton. In: id. (ed.) The Illusion of Life II: More Essays on Animation. Sydney: Power Publications, pp. 486–528.
Frank, Hannah (2019). Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons. Oakland: University of California Press.
Gadassik, Alla (2010). Ghosts in the Machine. The Body in Digital Animation. In: “Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture“, edited by Esther Pereen and Maria Del Pilar Blanco. London: Continuum, pp. 225–238.
Gunning, Tom (2001). The Ghost in the Machine: Animated Pictures at the Haunted Hotel of Early Cinema. Living Pictures: The Journal of Popular and Projected Image Before 1914, no. 1(2001), pp. 3–17.
Herhuth, Eric (2016). The Politics of Animation and the Animation of Politics. Animation: an interdisciplinary journal, 11(1), pp. 4–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/1746847715624581.
Lesbian Space Princess (AU 2025; directors: Emma Hough Hobbs, Leela Varghese).
Johnson, Daniel (2017). Worlds in and of Motion: Agency and Animation at the Margins of Video Game Aesthetics. Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 9(3), pp. 225–241.
Leslie, Esther; McKim, Joel (2017). Life Remade: Critical Animation in the Digital Age. animation: an interdisciplinary journal 12(3), 207–213. https://doi.org/10.1177/1746847717740841.
Levitt, Deborah (2018): The Animatic Apparatus. Winchester/Washington: Zero Books.
OReilly, David (n.d.), “Basic Animation Aesthetics,” n.p. URL: https://www.media-arts-uts.com/aes1/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/BasicAnimationAesthetics.pdf.
Reinerth, Maike Sarah (2021). “Political Genres of Online Animation: Genre Theory, Animation Studies and Digital Media”, in: Ivo Ritzer (ed.): Media and Genre: Dialogues in Aesthetics and Cultural Analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, pp. 165–189.
Rogoff, Jana (2019). “Butterflies Do Not Live Here and On Shoes, Braid and Dummy: Production and Reception History of Two Czechoslovak Documentaries on the Holocaust”. Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 9. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2019.0009.180.
Ruddell, Caroline; Ward, Paul (eds., 2019). The Crafty Animator. Handmade, Craft-Based Animation and Cultural Value. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sobchack, Viviane (2009): “Animation and automation, or, the incredible effortfulness of being.” In: Screen 50:4 Winter 2009, pp. 375–391.
Wells, Paul (2014). Chairy Tales: Object and Materiality in Animation. alphaville. Journal of Film and Screen Media 8 (Winter 2014), pp. 1–18.
Footnotes:
[1] Relevant groundwork for this introduction include approaches toward animation for example in relation to materiality (e.g., Wells 2014; Frank 2019), movement, animism, and (a)liveness (e.g., Cholodenko 2011; Levitt 2018), automation and subjectivity (e.g., Gunning 2001; Sobchack 2009; Gadassik 2010), interactivity (e.g., Johnson 2017) as well as dimensions of critique and politics in animation (e.g., Herhuth 2016; Leslie/McKim 2017). For additional intersections of animation and agency see the full call for contributions here.
Jun. Prof. Dr. Julia Eckel is Junior Professor for Film Studies at the Department of Media Studies at Paderborn University. Her current research focuses on the relation between Animation, Documentation, and Demonstration and on Animation and AI; further interests include audiovisual anthropomorphism, synthespians, screencasting, tech-demos, and selfies. She is one of the speakers of AG Animation (a working group for animation scholars in german-speaking countries) and was a member of the DFG network “Animation and Contemporary Media Culture” from 2020 to 2024. In 2022, she guest-edited the animationstudies 2.0-Blog-Theme on Animation and AI together with Nea Ehrlich. More Info: www.juliaeckel.de
Dr. Maike Sarah Reinerth is a postdoctoral researcher at Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF. Her recent work focuses on political communication, sustainable production, and ecological storytelling in film and animation. From 2020–2024, she was PI of the scientific network “Animation and Contemporary Media Culture” (funded by DFG – German Research Foundation). Selected publications: “Political Genres of Online Animation: Genre Theory, Animation Studies, and Digital Media,” in Media and Genre: Dialogues in Aesthetics and Cultural Analysis (2021); Videography (bilingual blog, since 2023); “From Pragmatic Green Storytelling to Eco Media Literacy: Exploring Material Aesthetics in Sustainable Animation Production,” in Animation and Sustainability (forthcoming).
Dr. Vera Schamal is a postdoctoral research associate in the “Research Focus Aesthetics” at the Zurich University of the Arts. She studied film studies and completed her dissertation on animation titled Very Evidently in Motion. Eine Begriffserweiterung des Animationsfilms anhand der Erforschungsgeschichte bewegter Materie in 2022. From 2015 to 2022, she worked as a research assistant and lecturer at the Department of Film Studies at the University of Zurich. Between 2020 and 2024, she was a member of the DFG network “Animation and Contemporary Media Culture.” She is currently engaged in an interdisciplinary research project on material agency and artistic practice.