Validating the Animated Film. toy stories, trade tattoos and taiwan tigers: Or what’s animation ever done for us?

Even at a time when animation is everywhere, from mobile phones to mainstream cinema to multi-media installations, there is still a prevailing sense that it is still something of a ‘lost thing’, a perennial outsider, accommodating a diversity of approaches, contexts, and achievements, but somehow still residing in Arts culture’s department of odds and ends. The scope of this article is to look again at this ‘lost thing’, and in a semi-polemical way, argue for the specificity, omnipresence and achievement of animation as the most enduring and significant moving image form in the contemporary era. This will take in account why animation has been marginalized, how its presence should be acknowledged in contemporary cinema, and how its specific language of expression informs highly particular works of moving image practice both in the mainstream and the independent sector.

• View at Publisher