Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo (1911), How a Mosquito Operates (1912), and Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) are regularly singled out as the most significant achievements in American animation of the early 1910s, often in comparison to the apparent deficiencies of other…
‘Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a band tying us to the eternal present […] Memory nourishes recollections that may be out of focus or telescopic, global or detached, particular or symbolic [… It] takes root in the concrete, in…
Over the past few weeks Animation Studies 2.0 has explored the theme of animation and philosophy through posts by Deborah Levitt, Scott Birdwise, Carol MacGillivray, Robby Gilbert, and Bella Honess Roe. I had the privilege of curating this theme and,…
Review of Rayna Denison (ed.). Princess Mononoke: Understanding Studio Ghibli’s Monster Princess, New York/London: Bloomsbury, 2018. In March 2000, during a visit to the cinema, I chanced upon a mysterious poster design featuring a golden medallion embossed with the image of…
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…
Leave the door open to the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, and where you will go. —Rebecca Solnit The mechanics of animation as illustrated by the zoetrope and film shutter…
Originally christened the Diasynchronoscope in a nod to a rich ancestry of mechanical devices of wonder, the D-Scope is a new tool for investigating the expressive power of embodied screen-less animation. It takes place in an architectural black-out where prepared…
Review of Nichola Dobson. Norman McLaren: Between the Frames, New York/London: Bloomsbury, 2018. McLaren’s film Neighbours (1952) changed the trajectory of my life. As a trainee art teacher on viewing the film with a group of schoolchildren (who were…
Tricksters or fakes, assistants or ‘toons, they are exemplars of the coming community. — Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community They are animations, disembodiments, pure spirits.— Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed With few exceptions, commentators on Giorgio Agamben’s notion…
1. For theorists of decoloniality, and of the “ontological turn” in anthropology, the concept of a “world of many worlds” has urgent political stakes. Walter Mignolo has long proposed the concept of the pluriverse as a way to think beyond…
