Editorial

We are always a year older than our birth year on the day of our birth. Fifteen years ago, the inaugural issue of animation: an interdisciplinary journal was delivered to our long-serving copyeditor, Jane Price, at the Sage London offices in Old Street. It was transported in a carefully arranged set of folders using the technology of that time, a far cry from today’s instant uploads and file transfers: all materials were compiled on CDs accompanied by a stack of printouts in case the data was corrupted or unreadable – not unusual in the day. The issue’s content reflected our global and interdisciplinary aims, with articles examining chronophotography, animated architecture, multiplane cinema, South Korean Animation, speculation on animation as a hybrid form, and the application of psychoanalytic theory to Japanese anime. The Editorial team included Suzanne Buchan, Bob Rehak and Angela Ndalianis, who, along with the many supporters and the initial Editorial Board members, contributed significantly to the journal’s development and launch. Fifteen years on, the journal’s editorial aims remain largely the same:

Through its editorial aims, it addresses and includes all animation made using all known (and perhaps yet to be revealed) techniques since the late 18th century up to the digital shift and beyond, reveals its implications for other forms of time-based media expression past, present and future, and illuminates how these affect our lives. While continuing to support traditional animation studies, the journal will also challenge conventional divisions between animation and other forms of moving image culture, aspiring to become an essential forum for debate, innovation and developments in established and emerging animation communities. (Buchan, 2006: 6)

The scope and remit have of course expanded to reflect the changing nature of digital technologies, such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality.

In the meantime, scholarly research and writing on animation have exploded; the results of dozens of PhD projects have found their way into journal articles, monographs and book chapters. A useful illustration of this expansion is the Society for Cinema and Media Studies; in the early 2000s, a handful – usually considerably less than a dozen – of papers on animation were usually bundled into the animation panels, an indication of the lack of understanding that animation is a form of film, and the paper topics could easily have been allocated to other thematic, historical, or theoretical panels. The 2019 conference (Celebrating 60 Years) featured 10 panels with close to 30 papers, a seminar in Animation as a mode of critical inquiry, and at least 10 additional animation-related papers. In the back materials publisher pages, there are 10 books on animation and related subjects of games, VR and digital computer graphics.

We welcome and celebrate the establishment of other journals as platforms for this research, such as the Society for Animation Studies’ Animation Studies established in 2013 and Animation, Process, Practice & Production (Intellect, 2011–present). Indebted to a pioneer of animation scholarship, we said a fond farewell to Animation Journal (1992–2017), founded and tirelessly edited by Maureen Furniss; some of us are fortunate to have copies of the printed issue on our shelves. Besides these subject-specific publishing venues, animation is now a viable and respected area of study and research, and articles are finding their way into other film, media, cultural studies, visual effects, games and arts journals. Animation is now recognized as no longer a genre or a medium (a longstanding misunderstanding as it always shared analogue and digital technologies with other types of film), but as a rich and varied form of the moving image that will continue to impact and affect our understanding of the world around us, and perhaps more significantly, what is unseen, but imagined or felt.

Our current Editorial Team is a collective with enduring and dedicated engagement. Joon-Yang Kim (2012), Caroline Ruddell (2016), Lilly Husbands (2014) and recently joined by Christopher Holliday (2018). Caroline was also our longstanding Reviews Editor and handed over this role in 2017 to Aimee Mollaghan and Colin Williamson. We are grateful to the Associate Editors who have worked with us over the years, including Angela Ndalianis, Bob Rehak, Leon Gurevitch, and others.

This issue, the first in our 15th (16th) year, is as rich and varied as the first one. Ekin Pinar’s ‘Across the Traces: Lawrence Jordan’s Animated Documents’ engages with art history, Victorian memorabilia, archives, animated techniques and the indexicality of materiality to examine Jordan’s exquisite experimental cutout techniques. This journal has regularly published articles from practitioner researchers: In his ‘Phytograms: Rebuilding Human–Plant Affiliations’, artist and filmmaker Karel Doing shares his artistic and technical methods and approaches for how his works are created, placing his practice in a historical continuum of arts, technology, critical and film theory and science, and he has a special interest in the spectator’s perception of the organic and non-human plant world of his phytogram works. In ‘The Golden Age of Spanish Animation (1939–1951)’, Maria Pagès unfolds the riches of postwar Spanish animation history, its studios and techniques, from early shorts to features, underpinned by extensive archival research at the Filmoteca de Catalunya (Catalan Film Archive). In his ‘Animating Management: Nonlinear Simulation and Management Theory at Pixar’, Jordan Gowanlock also examines studios, but concentrates on digital filmmaking since the 1980s. With the example of Pixar Animation Studios, he draws interesting comparisons and contrasts with another giant, Disney, in particular around notions of labour and production, and management strategies.

This journal has published a number of articles on the Japanese director Satoshi Kon. In their ‘Making Sense of Complex Narration in Perfect Blue’, Antonio Loriguillo-López et al. undertake a narrative and, in their conclusion, a cultural–critical analysis of Kon’s Perfect Blue through a framework of cognitive film theory, focalization and the genre of the puzzle film. Super, and not so super, comic book heroes are a popular phenomenon of animation and digitally created feature films, not least because animated techniques allow the character to perform what is humanly impossible. The Batman franchise is one of these, with productions ranging from the 1940 series to the 1960s live action features, digital blockbusters and characters based on a popular children’s construction toy product. Daniel Martin’s ‘Reanimating the Dark Knight: Superheroes, Animation, and the Critical Reception of The Lego Batman Movie’ critically investigates the relationships between merchandising, promotion and fandom, particularly questioning its suitability for children.

We offer one review, for which the author of the book and of this Editorial offers a full declaration. The review was organized, managed and edited solely by the journal’s Review Editors. For this reason, the only comment here on Andrew Buchanan’s review of Pervasive Animation (2013) is that his observation that there were ‘areas where [he] found [himself] hungry for further contribution’ is welcome; hopefully contributors to this journal and elsewhere can still that hunger.

This issue is in memoriam of our long-serving Editorial Board member Thomas Elsaesser, who was one of the first film scholars to critically engage with the shift from analogue to digital (animated) media. His interest in animation was enduring; at a recent 2018 lecture at Yale University, “The Cinema: In-Between the Animated and the Automated”, Thomas revisited that ever-returning question of “what is cinema?.” In his many books, edited anthologies, and articles since the 1960s, on everything from international film, critical theory and media archaeology, to Haroun Farocki’s investigation of simulation and animation, Thomas made a monumental and brilliant contribution to our field of the moving image.