Forthcoming

‘Animation is the first, last and enduring attraction of cinema’ – Alan Cholodenko

Animating Theory, Theorising Animation is the long-awaited two volume publication of film theorist ‘become’ animation theorist Alan Cholodenko’s groundbreaking essays theorising animation in furtherance of his project of pioneering the animation of a new discipline, that of Animation Studies. Having shaped a generation of minds by elucidating the complexities of French poststructuralist and postmodernist thought, Cholodenko brought French theory, in particular that of Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard, to the theorizing of animation. In 1991, in The Illusion of Life, Cholodenko claimed that not only is animation a form of film, but ‘all film is a form of animation’, turning Film Studies thereby into a form of Animation Studies.

In these volumes, Cholodenko formulates a sophisticated, complex theory of animation, a theory worthy of animation’s complications and contradictions masked inside its simple definition: the endowing with life and motion. For Cholodenko, animation extends far beyond film. It is idea, concept, process, performance, medium and milieu; and it invests all arts, media and communications. (In other words, all arts, media and communications are forms of animation). It invests all sciences and technologies. It invests all disciplines, knowledges, fields, practices (including the history of ideas, the history of philosophy). It invests all relationships (of whatever kind: personal, social, national, sexual, etc.). It invests all life and movement, as it invests all thought. It invests not only the subject, it invests the world, the universe itself. That’s why it is more than only a human practice. It is a process, performance, medium and milieu of world, of universe. What might be called the at once ‘squash and stretch’, elastic, plastic, animated – indeed animatic – nature of ‘all’. Cholodenko maintains it is ‘not only the human that is at stake in animation, it is the world, the universe – everything which is the case, what could be called reality “as such”’.