The Ever-Expanding Scope of Animation Historiography: A Discussion of Interdisciplinary Approaches and Methods

Abstract

Accounting for animation’s pervasiveness, heterogeneity and intermediality, this article reflects conceptions of animation historiography. It brings together contemporary perspectives and methods in the research of animation history/historiography, and considers tangible approaches outside animation studies. Particular attention is paid to materials and aspects that are overlooked and non-canonical. The authors conceptualize animation historiography in the shape of a rhizome, enabling a better understanding of the relations between canonical aspects and fringes, and enriching the dialogue between the various disciplines, actors and institutions writing the histories of animation. Following a look at the current state of debate about animation history/histories and historiography in animation studies, the article surveys pertinent debates in film studies, art history and media art history. It then discusses historical research in performance studies and in the history of science, both concerned with fields where animation is often marginalized, as well as animation-related research on motion graphics and useful cinema, themselves under-researched topics, for perspectives to reconceptualize animation history. Media archaeology, its approaches and methodology, will be addressed repeatedly from the perspectives of the different disciplines and areas. The article is conceived as an ‘open paper’, understood as an invitation to further discuss animation historiography on a metalevel.

Keywords

animation histories animation historiography art history canonicity history of science interdisciplinary methodology media archaeology motion graphics performance studies useful cinema

Introduction

To engage with the history of animation in the 21st century still means first and foremost to acknowledge that there is no one history of animation, but there are many histories of animation. With the progress of digitalization and with the more recent developments, for example, in screen technology, mobile computing, virtual reality and artificial intelligence, the notion of what animation is and where it can be encountered has changed significantly. Animation has become a ‘pervasive’ cultural practice as Suzanne Buchan (2013a: 1) termed it. Framing these developments in a historical perspective, Paul Wells and Johnny Hardstaff’s (2008: 16) description of the state of animation pictures well the implications the technological novelties had and have for the notion of animation and its artists:

Animation has always re-imagined itself and is merely in a new phase at the heart of new digital orthodoxies. The difference lies in the fact that this is now acknowledged; and that artists and animators wish to re-engage with established parameters and definitions to re-establish or de-establish the term and the discipline of animation in alternative ways.

The new ways in which ‘the term and the discipline of animation’ is explored by its artists and creators have called those engaged with the study of animation to also reconsider common understandings, concepts, approaches and methods of the subject, thereby extending established paths and/or exploring new ones to account for animation’s pervasiveness, heterogeneity and intermediality, in many areas also for its continuing marginalization. The proposed reconsideration of animation historiography brings together single methods in the contemporary research of animation history/histories, investigates methodological possibilities for historiography of aspects that are overlooked and non-canonical, and analyses approaches from other areas towards historiography to make the discussion of the history/histories and historiography of animation fruitful for the present-day conceptual and theoretical discourses of animation studies.

Starting from these premises, the following contribution is conceived as an ‘open paper’ understood as an invitation to further discuss animation historiography and its challenges on a metalevel, as single publications already pursue an understanding of animation historiography that we want to frame in more general terms. Two aspects we do not pursue in this contribution, though: one, the complex and long-lasting discussion of how to write history in general, a discussion that starts in antiquity and without doubt offers very useful approaches for animation (Boyd, 1999; Linsenmaier, 2008). Two, we do not engage in the question of how to write animation history in the sense of a comprehensive history of animation structured around periods, individual animators and studios, nations and techniques – all common approaches in animation historiography so far. Rather, we want to expand on the established histories of animation by writing complementary and revisionist animation histories that account for the ‘now acknowledged’ pervasiveness and heterogeneity of the subject. In particular, we want to investigate with which methods and approaches we can research what could be called the ‘fringes’ of animation (and animation research), yet are a central aspect of culture, for example, graphical user interfaces, scientific images or ephemeral art works.

Ultimately, we conceive animation historiography in the shape of a rhizome where canonical aspects and fringes as well as a variety of disciplines, agents and institutions work together to enrich our understanding and concept of the history of animation, and to reveal the ongoing dialogue and exchange among these players, especially beyond linear, progress-driven and teleological readings.

Following a look at the current state of debate about animation history/histories and historiography in animation studies, we turn to the pertinent discussions in film studies, art history and media art history, and finally to the historical research of selected fields where animation is often overlooked, for example, in performance studies and in the history of science, to reflect their findings for a debate on the historiography of animation. Media archaeology, its approaches and methodology, will be addressed repeatedly from the perspectives of the different disciplines and areas.

Discourses on historiography in animation studies

The investigation of the history/histories of animation in this contribution starts from the premise that engaging in historical research is always an engagement with the present. In this philosophical take on the subject, the conception of what has been and how we historicize it relates to the point of view we take on the subject in the present (Anzenbacher, 2010: 265–269). In other words: ‘History is about a past that can be constantly approached from countless angles with new ideas, insights and techniques’ (Kamp et al., 2018: 9). Then, what does this understanding of history and writing history mean for the history/histories of animation and what current debates and approaches are there in animation studies to history and historiography of animation?

In 2007, Alan Cholodenko stated a number of points central to his theorization of animation. One point engaged with the encompassing nature of animation:

It is idea, concept, process, performance, medium and milieu; and it invests all arts, media and communications . . . It invests all sciences and technologies. It invests all disciplines, faculties, knowledges (including the history of philosophy, the history of ideas), fields, practices, discourses and institutions. 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 object, 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. (pp. 67–68)

Cholodenko’s description of the omnipresence and importance of animation complements discourses by other scholars that perceive and highlight animation as a pervasive cultural practice, such as Suzanne Buchan:

Animation has many formal, aesthetic and critical intersections with ‘experimental’ film and digitally rendered features, it is figuring in changing ‘high/low’ art economies and dominating information technology interfaces. Especially since the digital shift, animation is implemented in many ways in many disciplines and on multiple platforms . . . As screens become part of everyday life – phones, laptops, pads, and future technologies to come – animation will increasingly influence our understanding of how we see and experience the world visually. (Buchan, 2013a: 1)

This understanding of animation as pervasive necessitates research into animation history/histories to go beyond mainstream and auteur animation film to map the great variety of contexts in which animation is used. Recent works on animation history already account for this, for example, Maureen Furniss’s final chapter of Animation: The Global History (2017), which covers computer games, site-specific works, installations as well as performing arts. Various historiographical approaches to animation history/histories are discussed in publications such as Suzanne Buchan’s Pervasive Animation (2013b) and Karen Beckman’s Animating Film Theory (2014). The contributions of both edited collections explore animation in a broad sense, investigating various theoretical approaches as well as issues of historiography. The Animation Studies Reader (2019a), edited by Nichola Dobson, Annabelle Honess Roe, Amy Ratelle and Caroline Ruddell, aims at complementing a common historiographical focus on ‘the history of the animated form or the work of specific animation studios or animators . . . by addressing the concepts and ideas that underpin the study of animation’ (Dobson et al., 2019b: 2). The academic blog Animation Studies 2.0 (blog.animationstudies.org) could be considered a mirror of current interests and debates in animation studies where questions pertinent to the issue of animation history/histories and historiography are raised, for example, ‘new theoretical approaches’, ‘alternative/forgotten histories’, various anniversaries of individual animation artists and studios or the role of archives. Likewise, fully-fledged articles in the various journals and collections of animation studies typically shed light on one specific historical phenomenon, but in combination, these many voices, supporting and revising each other, cover many different parts of the vast field of animation, resulting in more extensively researched topics and many unresearched gaps. The heterogeneous and changing nature of animation and of the status of its academic research becomes also apparent in the frequent attempts at defining animation (for example, Deitch, 2001; Denslow, 1997; Greenberg, 2011; Martinez, 2015; Small and Levinson, 1989; Solomon, 1987; Wells, 2011).

Then, two approaches emerge from the current research on the history of animation in animation studies that highlight the investigation into animation historiography as highly contemporary, also touching deeply on the understanding of animation itself: one, the consideration of tangible approaches outside of animation studies to account for current developments in animation and to historicize them at some point, and two, the distinct interest in the histories of animation and the archive. Both strands work to continue forming the rhizome-like history of animation that incorporates untold histories, and reveals overlooked links to other developments in, for example, arts, science and technology. In our understanding, the latter can emerge only if the paths pursued in animation historiography are recognized, valued, and critically evaluated – including the comprehensive histories of animation that have been published so far, for example, the three volumes of Giannalberto Bendazzi’s Animation – A World History (2015) and Maureen Furniss’s Animation: The Global History (2017). As Bendazzi noted in the foreword to his seminal Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation (2006: xvii):

Pages filled with names, titles and dates may be boring to the reader, but are necessary because the often fragmentary, uncertain sources require classification, and information had to be definitively written so as to become available to other scholars.

Although a great number of valuable publications on various aspects of animation history have appeared in recent years, many geographical, social, ideological, technical, thematic, contextual and other aspects remain uncharted. For example, most research on studio animation has focused on male directors and producers in American studios leaving so much of history to be uncovered and discovered.

Then, what conceptions are there of animation history presently? Within animation studies, there are very broad understandings of the history of animation. They span from positions such as that of Donald Crafton (1993), whose approach complements Bendazzi’s observation on a history made of ‘names, titles and dates’ as he points out:

It would be misleading to present the history of early animation solely as a chronicle of inventions, patents, titles, and anecdotes, although that approach has its place. It is also necessary to analyze it as an ongoing attempt to organize certain concerns and interests shared by animator and audience into an entertaining yet significant structure . . . For some of us, unraveling this extraordinary communication network in a seemingly simple art form is the most exciting aspect of viewing early animation. (p. 11)

‘Unraveling’ the history of animation, as Crafton calls it, requires the immersion into, for example, film and newspaper archives composing animation’s history like a jigsaw puzzle. Another approach to animation history comes from Esther Leslie (2014: 26), who considers it ‘truly ahistorical’. However, she explains:

Animation has a history, naturally. Everything has a history, but, unlike film, animation, with its multiple forms (stop frame, puppet, drawn, CGI), with its slow-tech and commercial practices, and with its multiple origins in zoetropes, zoopraxiscopes, shadow theater, flip-books, and the like, evokes a history that is as crowded and indistinct as a phantasmagoria . . . It models the possibility of possibility. (Leslie, 2014: 35)

Then, Leslie underlines the many histories of animation and trajectories in them. This understanding of animation’s history has commonalities with the one offered by Siegfried Zielinski, one of the founders of media archaeology. He looks at animation in ‘the broader context of the deep time relations of arts, sciences, and technologies’ (Zielinski, 2013: 26). Hence, Zielinski considers animation history an interdisciplinary project.

The continuation on the paths of these broad understandings of and approaches to animation history can account for the past and more recent histories of animation. Yet, publications on the history of animation rarely discuss the concepts and methods they use for their investigation or construction of animation history. To reflect the present-day developments and changes in animation understood as a pervasive cultural practice, we would also like to point out the constructedness and perspectivation of animation historiography. Therefore, in the following, we discuss approaches to historiography of selected fields that share history with animation.

The impact of film studies on rethinking animation historiography

In light of the ongoing debate on the death of cinema, film scholars have reconsidered approaches to cinema and media in the 21st century, shown, for example, in the breadth of contributions to Shane Denson and Julia Leyda’s collection Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (2016). Within this grand debate, Francesco Casetti (2012) discusses the necessity for a change in the conception of the history of cinema led by the continuation of the ‘cinematographic’ (p. 8) experience rather than cinema as a medium. Many of his understandings of history and the implications of its reconception resound with media archaeology: ‘Behind this conception of history there is a deep rethinking of some traditional notions such as genealogy, causality, origin, or repetition, that punctuates the 20th century’ (p. 26). Although Casetti’s reasons for a change in the conception of cinema history differ from the needs to reconsider animation history, his observations could offer animation studies a metaperspective on the conception of historiography of animation and its methodologies. First, it would mean looking back at the history of animation historiography, making its many genealogies and influences explicit and reassessing established methods in light of new developments and new conceptualizations. It also means looking at how we can draw from other disciplines and their methodologies to research the many contexts animation appears in. Furthermore, it would mean looking at animation history and its narrative/s where, for example, it intersects with those of other disciplines and where it is not only progress-driven, but, for example, led to failure and non-realizations. And it could lead to a more inclusive and diverse revision of these canonical narratives, especially also from an intersectional feminist perspective.

Given that animation has been often conceptualized as a type, genre or technique of film, animation history has been mainly researched in the context of film (and television) history and thus also with methods of film historiography, with influences from art history, literary studies and cultural studies. Animation has, for example, strongly profited from the methodological rigor developed by New Film History and its focus on archival work to recognize also the broader context of developments in film history (Strauven, 2013: 62–63). This is apparent in the work of scholars such as Donald Crafton and his ‘unraveling’ of early animation history based on meticulous reconstruction through archival research, for example, of the film and performance of Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) by Winsor McCay.

Another development in film and media studies connected to New Film History is also promising for rethinking the histories of animation: media archaeology. In his Film History as Media Archaeology (2016), Thomas Elsaesser gives an overview of the different approaches within media archaeology, its history entwined with the study of early cinema and how it can be applied to ‘tracking digital cinema’. While media archaeology can be used to reconstruct early animation, Elsaesser’s understanding of media archaeology can be considered a fruitful approach to the conception of writing the history of animation as such: ‘The activity of recovering this diversity and to account for such multiplicity, to trace these parallel histories and explore alternative trajectories, is what is meant by “film history as media archaeology”’ (Elsaesser, 2016: 25). Also, as Petra Löffler (2016: 1) points out, media archaeology ‘is mainly concerned with the changeful, fractured histories of materials, apparatuses and media ensembles, the manifold beginnings and loose ends of the history of media as well as their notorious resumptions’ (our translation). This is what in our mind makes media archaeology appealing as a contemporary approach to writing animation history. Animation’s cultural practice, its pervasiveness, its intermediality, its various techniques and materials, and the relationships between these aspects can thus be accounted for.

What does this change of conception and with it the breaking up of linearity as a rule of construction of history mean for animation? For the history and historiography of animation this means embarking on a journey between disciplines as diverse as art history, performance studies, history of science, STS (science and technology studies) and HCI (human–computer interaction). Although the interdisciplinary conceptual frame is a challenge, it can be approached through selected focal points and trajectories to contribute to the rhizome-like historiography of animation.

Lessons from art history: Horizontal histories, AST (Art, Science and Technology) and Bildwissenschaft

The fields of art history and media art history have developed approaches to account for changes in the arts and for the ubiquity of the visual in our contemporary culture from which animation studies can draw impulses for its own reflections. Art history has engaged with many theories, approaches and concepts over the last decades and debated their different positions to develop the discipline further (for example, the Art Seminar book series by Routledge, 2005–2008). The conception of the historiography of art beyond the Western white male artist and the challenges accompanying this process are central issues (Nanne Elkins, 2002: xi–xv) just as the envisioning of a world art history or global art history. Buurman et al. (2018) describe the multi-layered shifts implied in this development in the history of art towards a global art history:

In this endeavour, we are indebted to a number of theoretical, curatorial and artistic perspectives that are currently working towards decolonizing art historical knowledge and replacing binary epistemological models (such as art vs. craft, occident vs. orient, progressive historical time vs. timeless traditions, theory vs. practice) with more relational approaches focusing on contacts, flows and circulations, as well as global relations of production. (p. 12)

Looking at animation historiography as a history of ‘contacts, flows and circulations’ not only between individual artists or national contexts, but also between disciplines enriches the conception of animation historiography as a rhizome emerging out of an interdisciplinary and multi-methodological frame.

Further, the reconsideration of space as a structuring category for the history of art (Buurman et al., 2018: 12) has led to the proposition of, for example, a horizontal rather than a vertical approach to the development of historiographic narratives. Reflecting the historiography of modernism, Piotr Piotrowski calls ‘Toward a Horizontal History of the European Avant-Garde’ (2009) that dismantles the hierarchy of centre and periphery where the latter is to adopt the ‘canons, hierarchy of values, and stylistic norms’ (p. 51) of the former. Piotrowski underlines that it was not the artists but art historians who defined these hierarchies and categorizations, and therefore determined who was included in the history of art. Therefore:

A horizontal art history should begin with the deconstruction of vertical art history, that is, the history of Western art. A critical analysis should reveal the speaking subject: who speaks, on whose behalf, and for whom? This is not to cancel Western art history, but to call this type of narrative by its proper name, precisely as a ‘Western’ narrative. In other words, I aim to separate two concepts which have usually been merged: the concept of Western modern art and the concept of universal art. (p. 54)

Focused on a reconception of art history from the spatial point of view that conceives Western modern art as one possible historiographic narrative next to others and pointing to the concept of transnationality in this context, Piotrowski is well aware that a ‘horizontal’ approach that deconstructs established hierarchies and value systems of historiography must include a range of other aspects, such as ‘specific genders, ethnic groups, subcultures, etc.’ (p. 58). Indeed, for animation studies, a horizontal understanding of historiography applied to more aspects than geography would open up the mainstream narrative and canon of historiography to include, for example, virtuality as ‘space’, less researched animation techniques and marginalized forms of animation. More importantly, this understanding can contribute to scrutinizing systemic racism and other forms of discrimination in animation production, animated representations and animation studies, by shifting the focus to female, LGBTQ+ and/or BIPoC animation artists and to intersectional feminist readings of the histories of animation, echoing current discourses in animation studies on anti-racist syllabi (Mihailova, 2020). Also, this horizontal approach necessitates a clear description of the position taken towards the history that is to be presented by the animation historian.

Another area that can provide enriching impulses to the general debate about animation historiography and its conception is media art, as both, media art and animation, are characterized by heterogeneity and pervasiveness, and overlap in some areas. (New) media art comprises ‘every kind of art that is created with the help of a computer’ (Wahl, 2013: 25). Other labels for this art include ‘digital art’, ‘computer art’, ‘multimedia art’, ‘interactive art’, ‘net art’ or ‘installation art’ (Paul, 2008: 7; Wahl, 2013: 25). Julia Noordegraaf (2013: 13) summarized the complexity of media in art:

Understanding the role and function of media in art thus requires knowledge about the nature of time-based media (technical features, narrative, aesthetics, dispositifs, and specific sociocultural and economic contexts of production and distribution) and of the relationship between work and viewer (spectatorship, use, participation) as developed in media and cultural studies.

Noordegraaf’s description of aspects of media in art extends also to the history of media art and forms one set of useful parameters when thinking about conceptualizing animation historiography. Within the field of media art history, various approaches are pursued; what they have in common is the understanding that media art history is/has to be interdisciplinary and that a most fruitful approach is media archaeology (Cubitt and Thomas, 2013: 2, 10; Grau, 2010: 8; Strauven, 2013).

Wanda Strauven identifies the approaches to temporality emerging from media archaeology as a possible perspective to history: ‘it concerns four different, sometimes opposite approaches adopted by key figures of the field, which consist in seeking: 1) the old in the new; 2) the new in the old; 3) recurring topoi; or 4) ruptures and discontinuities’ (Strauven, 2013: 68). Also, she includes Wolfgang Ernst’s understanding of media archaeology which argues to forsake narrativization and to turn to alternatives such as ‘databases, collages, websites (such as Thomas Weynants’s Early Visual Media), or image libraries (such as Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne)’ (p. 73). Ultimately, she highlights the role of the artist in doing historiography, who ‘can freely . . . combin(e) in one and the same artwork, or body of artworks’ (p. 74) the various approaches operating in media archaeology, asking if it might not be the artist who has the possibilities to ‘dismantle the linear and narrative modes of media history’ (p. 73). Indeed, the inclusion of other agents and contexts in the creation of animation historiography such as animation artists and exhibitions are to our understanding important aspects in the debate of a conception of animation historiography. Also, the possibilities held in store by the digital humanities for the presentation of animation history/histories in other forms than (linear) text are still to be explored.

Approaching the interdisciplinarity of media art, Edward Shanken undertook to write a history of art, science and technology (AST). In ‘Historicizing Art and Technology’ (Shanken, 2010), he explains the challenges he faced, some of which are similar to those animation studies has to come to terms with when embarking on a historiography of animation that takes into account the interdependencies and mutual influences between animation, science and technology: they concern ‘canonicity, methodology, and historiography’ (p. 44). Shanken points out that because of a lack of methods ‘and a comprehensive history that would help clarify the interrelatedness of AST and compel revision, its exclusion or marginality will persist.’ (p. 44) For animation studies this might mean that without attempting to conceive histories of animation that account for animation’s pervasiveness, animation historiography and with it also theorization might run the risk of remaining at the margins of the academic discourses on present-day visual and image culture.

As one of the great challenges of a history of AST, Shanken stresses the lack of specific methods and raises several questions, such as: how should methods be designed to account for the history of AST and ‘what insights might emerge into the relationship between art, science, and technology, especially during periods when they seem relatively unrelated?’ (p. 53). Again, animation relies on technology and is faced with similar questions of methodology that ultimately also ‘relat[e] to other cultural forces (e.g., politics, economics, and so forth) that have shaped the unfolding of art’ (p. 54). However, Shanken sees for ‘the history of AST . . . the emergence of methodology and historical narrative as a mutual and reciprocal process’ (p. 59), ultimately stressing their interdependence.

Shanken closes his plea for a history of AST or a history of art that ‘addresses interactions between art, science and engineering’ (p. 65) with the point that the materials and tools employed by artists to create their art have changed and a non-revision of the history of art would leave out many artworks and artists. This observation is analogous for animation and its history where the change in technologies and the breadth of contexts of the use of animation call for a more comprehensive and inclusive representation of artists, artworks and animation productions, hence a debate on the conception of animation historiography.

Another vision of media art history is proposed by Oliver Grau in the introduction to MediaArtHistories (2010):

Image science, or Bildwissenschaft, now allows us to attempt to write the history of the evolution of the visual media, from peep show to . . . the virtual image spaces generated by computers. It is a history that also includes a host of typical aberrations, contradictions, and dead ends. (p. 11)

What makes Bildwissenschaft appealing to media art history, according to Grau, is that it ‘sets out to investigate the aesthetic reception and response to images in all areas’ (p. 12). Indeed, sketching the development of Bildwissenschaft from its beginnings during the 1920s with the work of art historians such as Aby Warburg and his image atlas to present-day developments into an ‘extended image science’ (p. 12), Grau suggests Bildwissenschaft and media archaeology as possible approaches to media art histories. To investigate media art history through image science to account for its broad contexts, chimes with the current pervasiveness of animation. The diverse approaches and methods in visual culture studies and Bildwissenschaft (Mitchell, 2008; Netzwerk Bildphilosophie, 2014) could be taken as a starting point to debate approaches and methods for a historiography of animation that resonates with Cholodenko’s (2007: 68) statement that ‘animation is more and other than a language.’ Also, it would touch on the very definition of animation, engaging with Buchan’s (2006: xii) suggestion to conceive animation as a ‘field of its own within visual moving image culture’.

Explorations into performance studies and the history of science

Animation does not only form a ‘field of its own’, but, in a slightly different meaning of the word, appears in many shapes and functions as part of other fields as well. As with animation research in general, we thus conceive writing animation history as an interdisciplinary endeavour that needs to integrate historiographical research on a variety of fields of visual culture where animation plays an important role but is usually only mentioned in passing, such as various optical devices (Mannoni et al., 1995), music videos (Bódy and Weibel, 1987) or medical imaging and scientific visualization (Cartwright, 2006; Hentschel, 2014). Looking at animation from the perspective of other disciplines allows us to trace the trajectories of stylistic traditions, common rhetorical, persuasive or informative functions and similar production technologies across heterogeneous contexts. It furthermore helps in researching the education and careers of the unsung creators of animation at the fringes. Here, we will look at approaches from performance studies and the history of science as well as from studies of motion graphics and of useful cinema.

Tracy C Davis and Peter W Marx open their introduction to The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography (2020) with an account of William Kentridge’s performance piece The Head & the Load, attesting to the intricate connections between animation, performance and the stage. They continue with the following quote by Kentridge:

The test is really to find an approach that is not an analytic dissection of a historical moment, but which doesn’t avoid the questions of history. Can one find the truth in the fragmented and incomplete? Can one think about history as collage rather than narrative? (quoted in McCoy, 2019: 20; Davis and Marx, 2020: 1)

History is written in multiple ways, in academic books as much as in art works and performance pieces, in this case about Africa and World War I. Similar approaches of ‘history as collage’ can be found in animated films on history in general and in animated films that reflect the history of animation itself (Feyersinger, 2011), enabled by stylistic devices specific to the animated form such as condensation, exaggeration, juxtaposition and metamorphosis as well as animation’s flexibility in being integrated into multimodal contexts, as in Kentridge’s performance. Approaching ‘history as collage’ in contrast to teleological grand récits lends itself well to researching a field as heterogeneous as animation, which we also see in the myriad of voices writing its histories.

Davis and Marx’s (2020) critical media history focuses on theatre/performance media ecologies and looks at interdependencies of the following three dimensions that are relevant for animation as well:

Aesthesis refers to all acts of spectating, not as a natural, physiological process but as forms of reception developed in cultures. Under this rubric, questions of ‘belief’ or ‘taking something for real’ can be discussed. Apparatus/materiality refers to the historically specific formats for the apparatuses (means) and materialities (tangibles) of presentation that constitute media ecology as the product of cultural traditions and expressions, negotiations and innovations, in fixed or recombinative ways. Practices mediate between apparatus and aesthesis, as much as they are also enabled by the former and formed by the latter. The concept of practices includes artistic skills and elements that frame/shape the different media. (p. 4)

Considering the fringes of animation in terms of aesthesis, apparatus/materiality and practices also means to consider contexts where viewers/users are barely aware of engaging with animation, for example, when operating the interface of an ATM or where animation is only a small part of large institutional practices, for example, when a graphic designer semi-automatically animates the text for the lower thirds of television news. It, more importantly, means understanding the cultural, social, economic and political dimensions of this triad.

While Davis and Marx mention animation in the context of the theatre in the very beginning of their introduction, the term is almost inexistent elsewhere in their collection of essays. A more explicit, but still marginal account of animation in performance is offered by Steve Dixon and Barry Smith’s grand book Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation (2007). The term ‘animation’ is not included in their index but appears throughout the book together with techniques such as motion capture. Their undertaking is based on The Digital Performance Archive:

During the years 1999 and 2000, the Archive recorded all activity it could find within the field, and provided an extensive online database of individual works, with data fields including date, venue, credits, types of technologies employed, summaries of the works, photographs, artists’ statements, biographies, and website links (many artists’ websites were also cloned by the Archive to ensure their longevity). In parallel, Dixon video recorded twenty-five live performances in the United States and Europe (some with a single camera, others with a four camera crew). (Dixon and Smith, 2007: ix)

Archival research and the creation of specific animation archives is at the core of writing animation histories, as Steve Henderson (2016: 143) remarks: ‘Going forward a peer reviewed and evolving philosophy and the practice of cataloguing, organising, preserving and managing a collection of animation production materials alongside it will open up new opportunities in the field of animation research.’ In the case of digital performances, Dixon and Smith (2007) use the archive to trace genealogies and identify central themes, theories and key issues of performances, aspects such as liveness, bodies, space, time and interactivity. Dixon and Smith are, however, not very explicit with where their information comes from, and some of their facts are drawn from tertiary sources. For example, when they mention Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur performance (pp. 73–74), their sources are Bell (2000), who in turn refers to Waltz (1991), and Murray (1997), who in turn refers to a source that animation scholars are familiar with, namely Canemaker (1987).

Similar to Dixon and Smith, who established The Digital Performance Archive, the German historian of science Klaus Hentschel and his team collect information on scientific illustrators in the Database of Scientific Illustrations. This database does not feature animation, but it refers to optical devices of the 19th century. Similar to the fringe role of animation historiography in the performing arts, the role of animation in the history of science is also under-researched. Hentschel’s comparative approach to researching the history of scientific visual cultures provides a valuable blueprint for researching animation in science and animation in general. In his extensive study Visual Cultures in Science and Technology: A Comparative History (2014), Hentschel ‘aim[s] at an integrative view on recurrently noted general features’ (p. 1) and tries to identify ‘overriding patterns’ (p. 1) from a large number of case studies, an approach echoing with Warburg’s ideas behind the image atlas:

The following features characterize my comparative approach to the history of science and technology:

avoidance of the pitfalls of a local microstudy;

parallel analysis of many comparable cases;

no forced analysis, but category choices motivated by the sources (actor’s categories wherever available);

a bottom-up approach, starting out from the material;

intentional generalizability beyond the pool of selected cases; and

context-sensitive, cautious structural description of historical processes.

Following this methodology, history of science can produce results of relevance to neighbouring fields and not exhaust itself in internal dialogue within a narrow niche of specialists. (Hentschel, 2014: 4–5)

As mentioned earlier, animation history is written in larger volumes and, equally, in a multitude of smaller studies in the form of articles and blog posts. A larger pool of the latter can form the basis for a bottom-up generalization in Hentschel’s sense, especially, when also considering contexts where animation is essential but mentioned only in passing, as in performances and scientific images or, as we will discuss in the next section, in the case of motion graphics and useful cinema.

Non-canonical fields of animation history: Motion graphics and useful cinema

Michael Betancourt argues in The History of Motion Graphics: From Avant-Garde to Industry in the United States (2013) for an interdisciplinary approach, which seems equally feasible for animation:

The organization of this story is deeply mired in several distinct fields, each of which has a more-or-less established history, but whose combination when organized around the central locus of motion graphics changes their relationships to each other and to the larger histories of art, film, and design. (p. 10)

The fields Betancourt draws from have strong overlaps with animation history. While ‘animation’ is not a distinct entry in the book’s index, ‘absolute film’, ‘visual music’ and many animators and animated films are. He also refers extensively to important animation historians such as William Moritz, Robert Russett and Cecile Starr. Motion graphics themselves are a pervasive phenomenon often in the background or at the fringes, for example, as the animated stage of a product presentation or as a title sequence. However, similar to other under-researched types of moving images, motion graphics have received increased academic interest in the last decade.

When analysing studies such as Betancourt’s, it becomes apparent that animation is used in two senses in this context: on the one hand, motion graphics can be seen as a distinct genre or type of animation, but, on the other hand, animation is also seen as a parameter of motion graphics, i.e. as the movement aspect of graphics and letters. Being aware of the polysemic nature of the word ‘animation’ (Feyersinger and Bruckner, 2016) and its shifting contextual meanings and conceptualizations is in general helpful for avoiding confusions. It also means gaining a better understanding of the many functions animation can serve in visual culture.

Another large corpus of marginalized films that often are at least partly animated has become a recent object of study, being researched under overlapping terms such as ‘utility film’ (Bonah et al., 2018; Hediger and Vonderau, 2009a; Masson, 2012), ‘non-theatrical film’ (Slide, 1992; Streible et al., 2007), ‘ephemeral film’ (a term used by Rick Prelinger to refer to his archive from the mid-1980s onwards, see Wisniewski, 2008: 3) and ‘useful cinema’ (Acland and Wasson, 2011), which speaks of the vitality in writing the history of this material and how the formation of terminology is a process. Again, animation is fleetingly addressed in several of these studies as one of the many elements of the films, but it is very rarely the main focus of the research (some of the most notable exceptions are Curtis, 2018; Gaycken, 2014; Laukötter, 2013; Mihailova, 2019; Ostherr, 2018; Papenburg, 2018a, 2018b; Reichert, 2009). One of the most extensively researched genres of ephemeral films that relies on animation is advertising (Colpan and Nsiah, 2016; Cook, 2019; Cook and Thompson, 2019; Cowan, 2013; Forster, 2013).

The utilitarian, ephemeral, non-auteurist and commissioned nature of these films has often led to their marginalization when talking about the oeuvres of animation studios and animators, disregarding their importance as a source of income for the creators, their artistic qualities as well as their production and reception. In evaluating sources, animation historians need to consider not only how an artwork was produced and why production material and documents have been archived or not, but also for what purpose the artworks were produced, as Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau write in their introduction to Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (2009b: 12):

Far from constituting self-sufficient entities for aesthetic analysis, industrial and utility films have to be understood in terms of their specific, usually organizational, purpose, and in the very context of power and organizational practice in which they appear. As Thomas Elsaesser points out in his contribution (as well as in his other work on industrial films), all industrial films have an occasion, a purpose, and an addressee, or an Auftrag, Anlass, and Adressat, rather than an auteur. Furthermore, as the editors of this volume propose in their joint contribution, there are the ‘three Rs’ or areas of purpose that media in general and films in particular can serve in industrial organizations: record (institutional memory), rhetoric (governance) and rationalization (optimizing process).

When animation is used as an instrument, as a means to a larger whole, animation and its creators often become invisible, even to animation historians. Studying these types of films and production contexts helps us reconceptualize our notion of animators as well, shifting from the idea of animators as creative authorial geniuses towards understanding their multitude of roles in the production process – from designing projection mappings for an opera to rotoscoping actors’ blemishes in beauty work or cleaning up motion capture data in video game production – as well as issues related to the invisibility of labour, such as outsourcing and an exploitation of the workforce. Integrating overlooked animation into the history of animation can thus lead to questioning established trajectories, hierarchies and priorities, and ultimately asks us to ‘redistribute [history’s] internal weights, reformulate the relations between its various components, re-define its essential junctions’ (Casetti, 2012: 22).

Outlook: Expanding animation historiography as a rhizome

Our engagement with the history of animation is guided by animation’s pervasiveness and the exploration of approaches that can account for this development and is not limited to the ones discussed here. Essentially, the conceptual and theoretical possibilities for animation studies delineated above in the pursuit of the history of animation have raised more questions to reflect upon in the future, such as: What are historiographic methods that are specific to animation based on the materials, texts and discourses used in the creation and reception of animation? How can the fringes of animation be best related to the canon of animation history and how can this canon be revised? How does digitalization effect the conception of the history of animation and its re-writing?

With this ‘open paper’, we hope to engage in a broad and productive peer-based discussion on the historiography of animation and its conception that is also open for contributions from other disciplines. The invitation is to explore the conception of animation history, for example, as a rhizome or a ‘collage’, as Kentridge noted, and central elements related to this discourse on history such as methods, values, hierarchy and linearity. This understanding of animation history as a rhizome made of many histories is also based on the notion that many heterogeneous ‘writers’ work on the historiography of animation. Scholars, critics and animation artists shape it just as much as educators, curators and archivists. Publications as well as exhibitions, re-enactments, DVD or Blu-ray releases, video essays and documentaries about animation histories all construct animation history and so do animated films themselves. Institutions such as (animation) film festivals, art schools and the animation industry also write the history/histories of animation and a theoretical and methodological investigation into how these players contribute to animation historiography still needs to be conducted. Disciplines engaged with (moving) images have figured media archaeology as a viable approach for historiography; equally, a horizontal approach to history and non-narrative structures were considered useful. Out of question in this debate is that history made of ‘names, titles and dates’ (Bendazzi, 2006: xvii) has to be continued to include contemporary developments. Also, the disciplines and areas from which these facts are taken should spread into, for example, Bildwissenschaft and arts.

In addition to the ideas discussed in this article, we want to point out further historiographical approaches that have already been very valuable or seem highly promising for writing the histories of animation such as archival research and oral history; experimental history and experimental (media) archaeology (re-enactments, restaging, recreation of techniques etc.); production studies, media ethnography and industry studies as well as studying animation education, festivals and other distribution contexts; animation criticism and animation fandom; digital humanities approaches (distant reading, deep learning, computer vision and other computational approaches); and audiovisual historiography (documentaries, video essays, exhibitions, installations etc.). In that sense, paraphrasing Sean Cubitt and Paul Thomas (2013: 17) who noted that ‘the power of media art history is its project’, the power of engaging with the conception of animation history is the effects and chances it can have for animation studies as such.

Footnotes

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and publication of this article, and there is no conflict of interest.

Author biographies

Rada Bieberstein is an independent film and animation scholar. She was a lecturer in Media and Film Studies at the Universities of Tübingen and Mainz. In her doctoral thesis, she focused on representations of women in Italian film. Her current research interests in animation include aesthetics, history and methodology, and the relationship between animation and arts. She co-authored the documentary Lotte Reiniger – Tanz der Schatten/Lotte Reiniger – Dance of the Shadows (2012) and is the editor of the volume Beyond Prince Achmed: New Perspectives on Animation Pioneer Lotte Reiniger (Schüren Verlag, 2022).

Erwin Feyersinger is Co-Director of the Research Center for Animation and Emerging Media in the Institute of Media Studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany and one of the PIs of the university’s Center for Rhetorical Science Communication Research on Artificial Intelligence (RHET AI). He is the initiator and one of the coordinators of the academic interest group AG Animation (Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft) and a member of the DFG-funded network Animation and Contemporary Media Culture. He has published several books on animation, including the monograph Metalepsis in Animation: Paradoxical Transgressions of Ontological Levels (Universitätsverlag Winter, 2017).

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