ABSTRACT
As both a creative medium and an industrial art form, animation accommodates a multitude of approaches, styles, practices, and techniques. This chapter maps animation's many creative and aesthetic connections to ‘storytelling,’ and reflects on how the qualities of animation can both enforce and confuse standards of narrative orientation. It argues that narrative remains a compelling subject for scholars of animation precisely because it necessitates an ongoing enquiry about what the medium's narrative distinctiveness might be, and why it remains so attractive to animators, artists, and storytellers. The emergence of narrative in animation in the first two decades of the twentieth century stands as a potted history of the medium itself, one typically shaped around the activities of numerous pioneers who collectively helped to usher in and hone the craft of the medium's storytelling capabilities. Personality-centred humour within early animation fully supported the medium's broader move towards its perhaps predictable status as a narrative cinema.
