ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the underlying assumptions that can serve as a springboard when stepping into the wider aesthetic domain. Experimental animation need not be understood as a ‘genre’ with its own set of iconographies, emotional effects or recurring themes like westerns, horrors or romantic comedies. There are two seminal books from the field of animation studies which offer their own definitions of experimental animation: Paul Wells’ Understanding Animation, and Maureen Furniss’ Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics. Like conventional narratives, independent animations normally feature discernible characters and involve a chain of events occurring in cause and effect relationship. In experimental animation, a film might defy straightforward description and not necessarily feature an explicit take-away moral or message. In commercial animations the function of the surface detail is always subordinated to the story that it serves, and won’t play as big a part of the experience once it has been integrated into the larger, more ‘meaningful’ form of an over-arching story.
