Book review: Pervasive Animation

Abstract

Animation studies seems not to shy away from disciplinary identity inquiries, driven perhaps, at least peripherally, by the rapid developments in its technology, practices, industry and evolutions as a medium of expression throughout its history, and perhaps more centrally by its expansion as a discipline of academic inquiry in more recent history. Of note in this ongoing discussion is the question of categorizing animation (and animation studies) in relation to film (and film studies) evident in Alan Cholodenko’s ‘The Animation of Cinema’ (2008), Donald Crafton’s ‘Veiled Genealogies of Animation and Cinema’ (2011) and Karen Beckman’s Animating Film Theory (2014). Animation studies maintains somewhat similar relationships with media studies, visual arts, and newer fields, including the study of games and emerging interactive technologies. Unlike other artforms or creative media that may be defined by a discrete set of materials or practices, animation is defined by an exceptionally broad phenomenon – the ‘breathing into’ of life: the perception of mobility and motion. Questions about how to define and contextualize the study of animation as artefact, practice and cultural phenomenon are ongoing concerns. In Pervasive Animation, Suzanne Buchan notes the peculiar homonymic stance of ‘animation’, which exists both as technology and as artistic medium. The premise of this collection is to embrace the heterogeneity of animation, and present a corpus of positions that collectively contends that there is more to animation studies than intra-disciplinary concerns, that animation offers a fundamental access point into moving image culture at large. It both adopts theories and practices from other fields, and carries its conceptual concerns back into the world. The collection of chapters covers a range of topics and theoretical approaches. Alongside the expected considerations of animation craft, technology, materiality and history, there is a rich vein of animation philosophy. As is typical of edited collections of this quality, the heavy lifting of providing an overview of the chapters and the theoretical rivers that flow through them is amply provided in Buchan’s introduction that highlights the stated strategy of the AFI Film Readers collection: to embrace the plurality of approaches across related disciplines. The volume is organized into five sections: Mechanics and Magic; Material Culture; Life and Non-life; History, Documentary and Truth; and finally, Display, Process and Practice. There is something of a conundrum in segmenting the contributions within the theoretical proposition that animation is ‘pervasive’. 900456 ANM0010.1177/1746847719900456animation: an interdisciplinary journalBook review book-review2019