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…
Not long ago I happened upon an original Reynaud praxinoscope for sale in a shop in Paris. Unable to justify its asking price, I began to research more affordable alternatives to share with animation students with whom I have made…
I like to start my animation history class by telling the students that I am going to show them the very first animated film ever made. I then proceed by showing Pauvre Pierrot (1892, by Émile Reynaud) without further comments.…
Imagine an evening with everyone sitting together, the room darkening; the first picture appears on the hanging sheet and the narrator starts his or her story. The form and content of the tale are always a little different – it…
Review of Deborah Levitt. The Animatic Apparatus. Winchester: Zero Books, 2018. Animation is thought made flesh. It gives life, or at least the illusion of a life, to the world as we imagine it. It fabricates perceptions and, in…
Among the incunabula of animation cinema, perhaps no other work is as revered and well-known to scholars, students, and cartoon aficionados as Winsor McCay’s Gertie. Aside from the technical innovation, the astounding feat of producing thousands of nearly-identical handmade pen-and-ink…
In the final months of 1917, Helena Smith Dayton (1883–1960) released a one-reel production of Romeo and Juliet starring a cast of characters crafted entirely out of clay. Though identifiable now as a pioneering work of stop-motion animation, the film’s…
Animation is the medium that allows for a dramatization of a skirmish with nature. -Esther Leslie, “Animation and History” In Segundo de Chomón’s Création de la Serpentine (1908), a sorcerer transforms a billowing piece of fabric into a woman…
