Cecile Starr (1921-2014) dedicated her life to the recognition of film as a visual art. She worked, as a writer, educator, and curator, to raise awareness of experimental film in general and women film artists in particular. This book includes her contributions to Experimental Animation, originally published in 1976, as well as a collection of her other writing on the historical roots of avant-garde film. It is prefaced by the personal reflections of a number of artists and curators on her impact on their lives.

A collage composed from the energies, enthusiasms and ideas of a hearty band of film mavericks whose exploits are for the first time treated in book form. A number of motifs emerge from Russett's and Starr's collection, including the vibrant interface between film and the other arts (painting and music), the growing importance of evolving technologies and, most important, film's exciting potential as a mode of personal expression.

This book discusses developments and continuities in experimental animation that, since Robert Russet and Cecile Starr’s Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art (1976), has proliferated in the context of expanded cinema, performance and live ‘making’ and is today exhibited in galleries, public sites and online. With reference to historical, critical, phenomenological and inter-disciplinary approaches, international researchers offer new and diverse methodologies for thinking through these myriad animation practices. This volume addresses fundamental questions of form, such as drawing and the line, but also broadens out to encompass topics such as the inter-medial, post-humanism, the real, fakeness and fabrication, causation, new forms of synthetic space, ecology, critical re-workings of cartoons, and process as narrative. This book will appeal to cross and inter-disciplinary researchers, animation practitioners, scholars, teachers and students from Fine Art, Film and Media Studies, Philosophy and Aesthetics.

From the early abstract animation films created at the start of this century to the latest in technologically oriented films, here is a comprehensive anthology of cinematic animation. It brings together over 50 interviews and first-person accounts that describe the work of 38 innovative artist-filmmakers. Such pioneers as Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker, Hans Richter, Vicking Eggerling, and Oskkar Fishinger are alongside the recent avant-garde of Robert Breer, Harry Smith, Stan VanDer Beek, Peter Foldes, and Ed Emschweiller. With nearly 300 illustrations, a filmography, a glossary of technical terms, and a list of distributors, this is the first important sourcebook for an emerging art.

Animation—Art and Industry is an introductory reader covering a broad range of animation studies topics, focusing on both American and international contexts. It provides information about key individuals in the fields of both independent and experimental animation, and introduces a variety of topics relevant to the critical study of media—censorship, representations of gender and race, and the relationship between popular culture and fine art. Essays span the silent era to the present, include new media such as web animation and gaming, and address animation made using a variety of techniques.