This book discusses developments and continuities in experimental animation that, since Robert Russet and Cecile Starr’s Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art (1976), has proliferated in the context of expanded cinema, performance and live ‘making’ and is today exhibited in galleries, public sites and online. With reference to historical, critical, phenomenological and inter-disciplinary approaches, international researchers offer new and diverse methodologies for thinking through these myriad animation practices. This volume addresses fundamental questions of form, such as drawing and the line, but also broadens out to encompass topics such as the inter-medial, post-humanism, the real, fakeness and fabrication, causation, new forms of synthetic space, ecology, critical re-workings of cartoons, and process as narrative. This book will appeal to cross and inter-disciplinary researchers, animation practitioners, scholars, teachers and students from Fine Art, Film and Media Studies, Philosophy and Aesthetics.

Experimental Animation: From Analogue to Digital, focuses on both experimental animation’s deep roots in the twentieth century, and its current position in the twenty-first century media landscape. Each chapter incorporates a variety of theoretical lenses, including historical, materialist, phenomenological and scientific perspectives. Acknowledging that process is a fundamental operation underlining experimental practice, the book includes not only chapters by international academics, but also interviews with well-known experimental animation practitioners such as William Kentridge, Jodie Mack, Larry Cuba, Martha Colburn and Max Hattler. These interviews document both their creative process and thoughts about experimental animation’s ontology to give readers insight into contemporary practice. Global in its scope, the book features and discusses lesser known practitioners and unique case studies, offering both undergraduate and graduate students a collection of valuable contributions to film and animation studies.

The symposium Expanded Animation was initiated in 2013 and offered a first approach to the expanded field of computer animation. In the meantime, it has become an established part of the Ars Electronica Animation Festival and the international competition Prix Ars Electronica Computer Animation. Every year under an overarching theme, the symposium has researched the field of technology and art, animation and aesthetics, investigated the collapsing boundaries in digital animation and explored positions and future trends. Much like the first conferences on computer animation at Ars Electronica in the 1980s, practice and theory are equally important. The richly illustrated publication Expanded Animation. The Anthology features contributions from speakers and artist positions from the past five years and presents an overview of the prize winners in Computer Animation.

Expanded cinema: avant-garde moving image works that claim new territory for the cinematic, beyond the bounds of familiar filmmaking practices and the traditional theatrical exhibition space. First emerging in the 1960s amidst seismic shifts in the arts, multi-screen films, live cinematic performance, light art, kinetic art, video, and computer-generated imagery - all placed under expanded cinema's umbrella - re-emerged at the dawn of the 2000s, opening a vast new horizon of possibility for the moving image, and perhaps even heralding the end of cinema as we know it. Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia offers a bold new account of its subject, breaking from previous studies and from larger trends in film and art scholarship. Author Jonathan Walley argues that expanded cinema's apparent departure from the traditions and forms of cinema as we know it actually radically asserts cinema's nature and artistic autonomy. Walley also resituates expanded cinema within the context of avant-garde film history, linking it to a mode of filmmaking that has historically investigated and challenged the nature and limits of cinematic form. As an outgrowth of this tradition, expanded cinema offered a means for filmmakers within the avant-garde, regardless of their differing styles, formal concerns, and politics, to stake out cinema's unique aesthetic terrain - its ontology, its independence, its identity. In addition to reconsidering the better-known expanded cinema works of the 1960s and 70s by artists like Andy Warhol, Robert Whitman, and Nam June Paik, Cinema Expanded also provides the first scholarly accounts of scores of lesser-known works across more than 50 years. Making new arguments about avant-garde cinema in general and its complex meditations on the nature of cinema, it urgently addresses current and crucial debates about the fate of the moving image amidst a digital age of near-constant technological change.

Packed with examples from classic and contemporary films, The Fundamentals of Animation presents each stage of the animation production process in an engaging visual style, whilst providing an historical and critical context for four core disciplines: drawn/cel; 2D/3D stop-motion; computer generated; and experimental animation. With insightful commentary from leading animators, Wells and Moore also introduce you to the many different career paths open to aspiring animators, from storyboard artist or character designer to VFX artist or writer and director. They also provide you with key tips on producing engaging portfolios and show reels. - Illustrated with over 300 images, including preliminary sketches, frame-by-frame analyses and shots of animators at work. - Now explores the animated documentary genre and the role of visual effects and gaming in contemporary animation. - Features more than 20 interviews with a range of international practitioners including Pete Docter, Director, Monsters, Inc. (2001), Up (2009) and Inside Out (2015). Featured Artists Sarah Cox, ArthurCox Lluis Danti, Media Molecule Pete Docter, Pixar Paul Driessen Eric Fogel Cathal Gaffney, Brown Bag Films Adam Goddard Philip Hunt, STUDIO AKA The Brothers McLeod Bill Plympton Ellen Poon, Industrial Light and Magic Barry Purves Joanna Quinn Chris Randall, Second Home Studios Maureen Selwood Koji Yamamura

From the early abstract animation films created at the start of this century to the latest in technologically oriented films, here is a comprehensive anthology of cinematic animation. It brings together over 50 interviews and first-person accounts that describe the work of 38 innovative artist-filmmakers. Such pioneers as Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker, Hans Richter, Vicking Eggerling, and Oskkar Fishinger are alongside the recent avant-garde of Robert Breer, Harry Smith, Stan VanDer Beek, Peter Foldes, and Ed Emschweiller. With nearly 300 illustrations, a filmography, a glossary of technical terms, and a list of distributors, this is the first important sourcebook for an emerging art.