Two interlocking strands of critical enquiry have emerged within the last decade that have influenced recent studies into the cultural persistence of animation in the contemporary media ecology. The first of these is the academic challenge posed to the core/periphery model that has conventionally privileged Hollywood when defining animation's status as both art and industry. Maureen Furniss’ Animation: The Global History (2016) and Giannalberto Bendazzi's recent multi-volume Animation: A World History (2017) (a collection that updates his 1994 publication Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation) both explore familiar names and often-forgotten histories as a way of plotting the medium's vast international development since its origins in the late-1890s. A second strand of thought has adopted a similar act of recovery, undertaking the task of inserting animation back into film and media theory that, in its prioritizing of the photographic image, has otherwise occluded the animated medium's knotted relationship with the history of moving images. Suzanne Buchan's Pervasive Animation (2013) and Karen Redrobe Beckman's Animating Film Theory (2014) are just two recent examples of work that proclaims the need to reconsider the global contribution of animation by integrating it into dominant theoretical traditions of the twentieth century.
Based on three years’ worth of papers given at the annual Animafest Scanner festival in Zagreb, Croatia, Global Animation Theory: International Perspectives at Animafest Zagreb (2018) sits squarely and effectively between the above titles, combining extensive geographical scope with considered historical and critical overviews as a way of doing justice to animation's variety of forms, styles, genres, techniques, and approaches. As a book that doubly secures animation's substantial international presence at the same time as it identifies the medium's rightful place on a variety of scholarly agendas, Global Animation Theory offers readers a rigorous journey through both the well-known and the unknown. Its authors present highly accessible critical, historical, and theoretical positionings of a range of animated media through perspectives drawn from art and film history, philosophy, gender, and cultural studies. Yet the collection also includes chapters that directly situate animation among specific national filmmaking traditions to, as contributor Olga Bobrowska puts it, broadly identify the medium as an “anthropological record of historically and culturally determined momentum” (62). In this way, Global Animation Theory offers not a unified theory of global animation per se, but an impressively global take on animation as it plays out in a variety of competing historical, national, and industrial contexts.
The collection's cumulative intentions are certainly ambitious, namely to highlight “various significant aspects of international animation studies by introducing the newest developments from different cultural backgrounds” (xi), and in some cases to shine the spotlight on animators “still unknown to the English-speaking community” (xi). The anthology's editors, Franziska Bruckner, Nikica Gilic, Holger Lang, Daniel Suljic, and Hrvoje Turkovic, therefore work—and successfully so—to present animation foremost as an interdisciplinary art and craft, one whose creative complexity and elusiveness requires the very methodological approaches that go on to structure the anthology. Another positive feature of the collection is that it efficiently narrows the gap between theoretical and practical discourse, staying true to the spirit of the Animafest event by bringing established academics together with filmmakers, creative practitioners, and artists.
The pervasiveness and availability of animation across contemporary moving image culture is well-served by Global Animation Theory’s fourteen chapters, which are structured as two distinct halves. The first deals with historical and theoretical approaches drawn from what the editors term “international animation studies” (2), while the second focuses on “case studies around the world” (115). The question of whether a discrete “Animation Studies” exists as a separate area or subject has remained central to the ever-mutating shape of the discipline itself. The many voices contained in the collection certainly reflect how valuable contributions are being made to the study of animation that cross (rather than strengthen) disciplinary boundaries and, paradoxically perhaps, bring into question the very nature of Animation Studies as a closed discipline. Nonetheless, it is under these broad section headings that Global Animation Theory unfolds a series of chapters that map animation (both in terms of geographical scope, but also theoretically) across a multitude of terrain. Eastern Europe is given central prominence, though authors are also not afraid to venture elsewhere (Sweden, China, Australia) as the collection makes good on its introductory claim to move fluently between established filmmakers and those whose work is altogether more veiled.
As a consequence of the anthology's international expanse, however, it is a little unclear at times as to the rationale for the overall structure, with question marks over the division of topics into what can, at times, feel like disconnected parts of the whole. Chapters that might have been found in the book's latter stages, such as Paul Wells’ investigation into Hungarian painter György Kovásznai and South African artist William Kentridge, or Mareika Sera's study of “analogical reasoning” (31) in the work of Czech surrealist filmmaker Jan Švankmajer, instead appear early on when perhaps better suited to a second half that includes case studies on filmmaker Robert Breer, theorist Ranko Munitić, and Irena Paulus’ examination of the modernist “imagination and creativity” (180) of Croatian composer Tomislav Simović. By comparison, Dirk de Bruyn's closing chapter on Australian experimental animation that explores “local activity” that, as the author notes, can often “fly under the radar” of even the most comprehensive of scholarly accounts (234), could easily have appeared in the collection's first section given its emphasis on animation's increasingly international “habitats” (xii). Indeed, De Bruyn's work would have sat nicely alongside Holger Lang's history of Austrian animation that explores its “blossoming” in the early-1920s (87) through to its “growth and acceptance” (97) in the country today. Yet the two chapters appear as fourteen and six respectively.
This fuzziness between sections indicates that the book's final organization was, perhaps, one of many possible combinations that were available. On the one hand, this is undoubtedly a symptom of the clear strength of the individual contributions, if not the difficult juggling act that can be the editorial process. On the other, the arbitrary division of history/theory and case studies as section markers settled upon here plays things a little safe. When taken together, however, the chapters surface clear continuities and divergences that might have formed the basis for a more nuanced, interrelated structure. For example, Michał Bobrowski's consideration of Polish avant-garde filmmaker Julian Antonisz and the “Krakow animation scene” (220); Chunning Guo's chapter on the gendered imaginary of “digital art” as a way of confronting the marginalizing of women's animated labor (54); and Fatemeh Hosseini-Shakib's piece on the ontological specificity of stop-motion “puppet realism” (203) via the work of British animator Barry Purves collectively bring to the fore issues in performance and acting, studio vs. independent production, experimental vs. orthodox styles, and animation's relationship to technology. In this way, the anthology's introduction may have offered less on explicating the arguments of individual chapters, and more in teasing out these more intricate themes potentially traceable across the book's varied contributions. Yet in whatever alternate configurations they might have appeared, the collected chapters offer readers an impressive cross-section of micro-histories and theoretical interventions relating to a topic that is itself being continually redefined and reconstructed. Global Animation Theory might not quite be as successful as the sum of its parts, but it is in its parts that its significant contribution to the study of animation can be found.
