ABSTRACT

This new addition to the AFI Film Readers series brings together original scholarship on animation in contemporary moving image culture, from classic experimental and independent shorts to digital animation and installation. The collection - that is also a philosophy of animation - foregrounds new critical perspectives on animation, connects them to historical and contemporary philosophical and theoretical contexts and production practice, and expands the existing canon. Throughout, contributors offer an interdisciplinary roadmap of new directions in film and animation studies, discussing animation in relationship to aesthetics, ideology, philosophy, historiography, visualization, genealogies, spectatorship, representation, technologies, and material culture.

chapter 1|47 pages

Mechanics and Magic

chapter 1|27 pages

Expanded Animation

A Short Genealogy in Words and Images

chapter 2|18 pages

The Transforming Image

The Roots of Animation in Metamorphosis and Motion

chapter 2|44 pages

Material Culture

chapter 3|79 pages

Life and Non-Life

chapter 5|26 pages

Coming to Life

Cartoon Animals and Natural Philosophy

chapter 6|29 pages

A Cinema of Apprehension

A Third Entelechy of the Vitalist Machine

chapter 7|22 pages

The East Asian Post-Human Prometheus

Animated Mechanical ‘Others'

chapter 4|77 pages

History, Documentary and Truth

chapter 8|27 pages

Socialimagestics and cinemasymbiosis

The materiality of a-realism

chapter 9|24 pages

Reanimator

Embodied History, and the Post-Cinema Trace in Ken Jacobs' ‘Temporal Composites'

chapter 10|24 pages

Animated Documentaries

Aesthetics, Politics and Viewer Engagement

chapter 5|65 pages

Display, Process and Practice

chapter 11|17 pages

Take the B Train

Reconstructing the Proto-Cinematic Apparatus

chapter 12|25 pages

Spaces of Wonder

Animation and Museology