7 : : Animation, in Theory

Abstract

Most of us today are aware of the many ways that animation has infiltrated our visual culture.For scholars and the public, exposure and access to commercial and especially independent animation filmthrough broadcast television, online archives, artist and studio websites, and new media platforms-have dramatically increased.While animation studies has been active for more than fifty years, film studies is only beginning to deeply engage with a cinematic form that has more to do with sculpture, algorithms, or painting than with the genres of narrative cinema.As a film studies scholar who specializes in animation and experimental film and digital media, I have examined film theory texts over the years for gaps and queries that seemed to address animation-or not.These trawled fragments formed the origins of animation: an interdisciplinary journal, published since 2006.This chapter traces the intellectual genesis of the journal, locating it in a historical and theoretical framework that, with some exceptions, spans the 1970s to the mid-2000s.In doing so, I take the long view-without Plato there would be no Gilles Deleuze, without mile Cohl no Wall-E, and, in my view, without Jean Mitry, Heinrich von Kleist, Nol Carroll, and Stanley Cavell no animation theory.I reflect on past achievements but also write to appeal to future researchers and makers of animation to be sensitive to the historical continuum of authorship and creating in the (mainly digital) striving ahead.I will not address writing about commercial canons or digital animation (Disney, Aardman, Pixar, and others) and will focus on some theoretical writings.This doesn't mean that others are less important; the selection is based on queries and positions that are relevant to my premise of "animation, in theory" that entails a skeptical but proactive attitude to theorizing animation.