Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Ryan Pierson (bio) Animation no longer sits at the margins of moving image practice. For most of the history of moving images, frame-by-frame manipulation had been relegated to slivers of play within a largely photographic arena: segments of instructionals, special sequences in fantasy or science fiction films, advertisements, and, of course, split-reel cartoons. Now animation is so pervasive as to be practically impossible to separate from recorded motion.1 Animation's characteristic techniques of manipulating motion frame by frame and manipulating space layer by layer are essential components of cinema, television, video games, smartphone apps, and internet videos. In the United States alone, there are more than two hundred postsecondary animation programs, not to mention additional programs that include animation instruction, such as graphic design and game design.2 Major animation festivals are held in Annecy, Ottawa, Zagreb, and Hiroshima, with scores of smaller-scale festivals worldwide. Disney, the studio that has long served as the synecdoche for animation, took in almost a third of all box office revenue in 2019, more than twice as much as any other studio.3 What had once sat on the periphery of media culture has moved to the center. A move from the margins to the center has also characterized animation's place in the study of moving images. As digital imagery and computer-generated graphics became more pervasive throughout the 1990s and into the early twenty-first century, it became easier for scholars to define the moving image itself by its plasticity rather than by its attachment [End Page 142] to reality.4 In addition, the theatrical feature-film experience began to lose its importance during this time, in comparison to the broader media ecology of sound and image.5 Animation's very dependence on "minor" forms was a boon here. Whereas cinema exists in a theater, animation exists wherever motion can be technologically rendered. The growth of animation scholarship was thus representative of the shift from cinema studies to cinema and media studies. This shift is not surprising, as critical interest in animation has often followed developments in animation practice. Early trick films such as Le garde-meubles automatique (Automatic Moving Company, Romeo Bosetti, 1912) inspired poet Vachel Lindsay to postulate "The Motion Picture of Fairy Splendor" in 1915.6 After cartoon production became industrialized in the mid-1910s, Viktor Shklovsky and Élie Faure posited a future for cinema in the refinement of cartoon techniques.7 And in the 1930s, Disney's elastic creatures and inventive use of sync sound were celebrated by Sergei Eisenstein, Lewis Jacobs, and many others.8 The mid-century saw a change in the way single-frame filmmaking was conceived; taking after art cinema and visual education, the notion of "animation" emerged as an alternative to the cartoon, which inspired further study of the art form. This notion was boosted within postwar film culture by periodicals, film societies, and festivals.9 By 1960, there was an international organization specifically devoted to the promotion of animation, the Association internationale du film d'animation (ASIFA). Our current era of theorization of animation is largely a product of three [End Page 143] scholarly developments in the late 1980s: the release of the English translation of Eisenstein's notes on Disney, the Illusion of Life conference in Sydney (the proceedings of which were later published as an edited collection), and the founding of the Society for Animation Studies.10 Save for the Eisenstein publication, these developments were responses to the encroachment of animation into visual culture that was already taking place and would become unavoidable by the twenty-first century. This dossier has two purposes. The first is to expose nonspecialists to a sample of the range of developments currently happening in animation scholarship. The second is to bring marginal phenomena to the center again—this time, phenomena within animation studies itself. Since becoming a subfield, animation studies has been able to pursue a number of topics, including non-Western industries (especially Japanese), animation and race, animated documentary, and commissioned (or "useful") animation.11 Despite this variety, however, animation studies has still had a difficult time expanding beyond the American studio cartoon. Those qualities that were...