When an object in a film appears to be alive by virtue of its movements, this impression is most often produced through animation. Frame-by-frame animation is usually applied for this purpose—especially in live-action films. The animation of inanimate objects thus…
Animation and Agency
AI Anymation and Agency
by Julia Eckel • December 15, 2025 • 0 Comments
Arguably, artificial intelligence and its evolving capacities for (moving) image generation, consistently raise questions about agency and animation. While responses to these developments oscillate between fears of job loss and enthusiastic embraces of new possibilities, underneath lies the question: What…
Animating Agency: Robots, Humans, and the Art of Unexpected Roles
by Nea Ehrlich • December 11, 2025 • 0 Comments
Etymologically, the term ‘animation’ is derived from the Latin word animatio, from animare. Probably originating in the 16th century, ‘animation’ has two key meanings, one referring to movement and the other to bestowing life (Wells 2011). These meanings are central to how…
Counter Hegemony in Lesbian Space Princess – Animation as a queer epistemic tool?
by Sanny Schulte • December 4, 2025 • 0 Comments
The animation film Lesbian Space Princess (2025, Hobbs & Varghese) is a radical counter-utopian experiment in animated worldbuilding. It utilizes animation’s capacity to re:imagine and re:configure without an indexical link[1] to construct a homonormative society while avoiding the trap of…
From meat machines to airplanes – posthuman approaches to agency in Chicken Run (2000)
by Virág Vécsey • December 1, 2025 • 0 Comments
One of the characteristics of animation is that it offers the illusion of life, in which passive materials are transformed into living entities with agency of their own. A range of animated films from Bambi (Hand, 1942) to The Jungle…
Levels of agency in idle animations: mapping (in)activity in video games
by Maria Pagès • November 25, 2025 • 0 Comments
In one of the most iconic idle animations, if the player does not interact with Sonic the Hedgehog (Sega, 1991), he will tap his foot and look annoyed at the player expecting to move (see Fig. 1). When the player releases…
Reflections on the uses of materials and technology in the Royal College of Art Animation archive
by Carla MacKinnon • November 21, 2025 • 0 Comments
This post looks at examples of work from the Royal College of Art’s (thereafter RCA) animation archive, to highlight ways in which distributed agency has been embraced in the production of experimental student films and suggest links between these approaches…
Picturing Security: exploring democracy and agency through drawing and animation
by Benjamin Hall • November 13, 2025 • 0 Comments
This text presents the 2023/24 research project Picturing Security, which was funded by the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) to explore experiences of security, risk and threat using collaborative arts practice as a tool for conversation. What follows are reflections…
The Song of the Sky and the Breath of Stones in Baigal Nuur – Lake Baikal (2023)
by Alisi Telengut • November 10, 2025 • 0 Comments
This short text is a continuation of the reflections developed in my doctoral research, which presents an artistic research inquiry into how animation under the camera (a form of stop-motion animation) not only acknowledges the materials of animation as co-creators…
Editorial: Animation and Agency
by Julia Eckel, Maike Sarah Reinerth, Vera Schamal • November 6, 2025 • 0 Comments
Over the past thirty years, the concept of agency as the ability and power to act has sparked engaging discussions across fields like Gender Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Philosophy, and Media Studies, offering unique insights for animation research. Agency…