What We Talk About When We Talk About Animation

And how Guillermo del Toro can help us.

Guillermo del Toro knows how to tell a story. He also knows how to spread a slogan. For years, the Pinocchio (2022) director has made animation lovers giddy by taking all kinds of opportunities—interviews, acceptance speeches, tweets—to declare with feeling that “animation is a medium, not a genre.”

He’s right, of course: too many—including many who wield influence in the industry—still talk and act as if animation is limited to family films. He’s also famous. Very few filmmakers make it big in live action before moving to animation, bringing the aura that comes from their background in a more prestigious industry. Del Toro is one, and his interventions carry real weight.

So animation is not a genre; let’s agree on that. It encompasses all the genres you’d care to name: comedy, horror, social drama, western and so on. But as I applaud del Toro, I ask myself a follow-up question: then what is animation? If it is a medium, how do we define it? Who gets to say?

A watertight definition of animation is as elusive as the Road Runner. Attempts tend to start from the concept of imbuing inanimate things with life or movement. The word “illusion” is often used: probably the most famous how-to book on animation is called The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation (published in 1981, it was written by veteran Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston).

But wait: live action also conjures the illusion of movement from still images. When we watch Cate Blanchett onscreen, we aren’t seeing Cate herself but static photographic images of her, projected in rapid succession. This leads some to suggest that live action is a subset of animation, indeed a kind of cheap mechanical form of it, where the camera saves you the effort of crafting the images yourself. They aren’t just being provocative: in the early years of cinema, the term “animated film” was used for all films, live action included.¹

Many refine the definition by adding that animation is built up frame by frame, rather than recording movement that really happened. Whereas those who describe live action as a form of animation are thinking in terms of what is produced—in both cases, static images—we are now talking about the production process itself, and making a distinction there. Should animation be defined in terms of process or product? Who knows?

Looking at process, we find further complications. Animators don’t necessarily craft movement alone. Rotoscoping is a technique that lets them trace over live-action footage as a basis for their work. It has been used across more than a century, including in Disney features, which many regard as the apogee of animation. Its evolutions, motion capture and performance capture, have become widespread in Hollywood and beyond, Gollum being the most famous example. Animators still play a vast and vital role: they embellish and sometimes fully deviate from the underlying footage, and get understandably angry when their work is downplayed, as it often is. Yet the character’s movement is rooted in an actor’s recorded performance, and for some purists, this disqualifies it as real animation (head to Cartoon Brew’s comment sections to see this debate play out with full force).

Gollum alongside Andy Serkis, the actor responsible for the captured performance.

The line between animation and live action is blurred again in the fast-growing number of films that combine the two, including many blockbusters made today. Cloaked in the label “visual effects,” this kind of animation isn’t always meant to be noticed as animation, but rather seamlessly integrated with the live-action elements. Animation teams are most certainly at work here, but they aren’t creating the entire frame.

The idea that animators advance frame by frame is also increasingly obsolete. In CG productions, for instance, animators tend not to create each frame individually and separately from the others. We can similarly ask questions about the burgeoning field of AI animation—is the movement really invented if the inventor isn’t human? And how about the group of approaches known as real-time animation, whereby a digital character might be set up to move in certain ways, but whose actual movements are then dictated by someone interacting with it live? (See video below.)

The more we think of animation in terms of process, the more we’ll have to adjust our thinking when technology takes its next leap.

As with any definition of a complex thing, the edges are fuzzy but the core is solid: we are basically talking about movement. To think about the nature of animation is to think about what movement is, how it can be artificially made or manipulated, and how this makes us viewers feel. For me, the most enduring definitions capture this and go no further. Take the oft-quoted one from Norman McLaren:

Animation is not the art of drawings that move, but the art of movements that are drawn. What happens between each frame is much more important than what exists on each frame. Animation is therefore the art of manipulating the invisible interstices that lie between frames.²

But for its succinctness I prefer the label that Len Lye, another great experimental animation filmmaker, applied to himself: motion composer.³ This works for me, because frames in animation are much like notes in music—the units from which the whole is typically constructed. The analogy also allows for techniques like rotoscoping, as after all, musical performances too can incorporate sounds recorded from reality.

Now the sheer extent of animation sweeps into view. For this kind of constructing of movement happens not only in cinema and TV, but also in advertising, video games, scientific visualisations, the metaverse, even that swirling logo you see when you turn on your phone. Some define animation in terms of art, even magic, but not all animation is made with art foremost in mind. (The same goes for music.) Effective in all kinds of more functional ways too, it saturates our increasingly digital society.

Does it even stop there? Many history books on animation begin before the cinema with objects like the zoetrope and the phenakistiscope, which generate the impression of movement from sequential images without recourse to the film reel. Non-cinematic approaches to motion composition have continued since the invention of film, in works like the hypnagogic moving sculptures of Gregory Barsamian, or Bill Brand’s ingenious Masstransitoscope (where it is not the images that move but the viewer, sitting on a New York subway train).⁴ Some trace the invention of animation right back to the sequential images of cave paintings: an early scene in The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie (1979) tells a version of this narrative. Meanwhile, director and Studio Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata drew an analogy with medieval Japanese scroll paintings.⁵

If we take these things to be animation too, and so accept that it transcends film (both digital and photochemical), we have to ask whether it is even a medium at all. We are no longer talking about either product or process but something broader: an idea, or a form. I wonder whether anyone will ever heckle del Toro with that riposte.

This whole head-scratch over definitions is perhaps most vividly relevant to academics. Sure enough, when I raised the subject with my colleagues at the Society for Animation Studies, a wonderfully wide-ranging discussion ensued over email, and I thank all those who contributed. While the debate enriched my thinking, I recognise that viewers can fully enjoy animation without giving a second thought to the meaning of the term.

And yet it matters. Definitions can carry real sway in the industry when used by influential gatekeeping institutions. When the Academy decreed that Richard Linklater’s Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood (2022), which is partly rotoscoped, wasn’t eligible for the Animated Feature Oscar, Linklater and others protested. The Academy later backtracked (but the film still wasn’t nominated, sadly).

Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood (2022)

More perniciously, companies can exploit the ignorance around the subject to promotional ends. With great guile, Disney has consistently positioned its 2019 remake of The Lion King as a live-action film, when by any working definition it is essentially animated (hint: those singing lions aren’t real). It has done so to game award categories and exaggerate the novelty of its technology, obscuring the input of scores of animation workers in the process. Swathes of the media have played along.

The confusion around the meaning of animation isn’t only due to the complexity of the subject. It also speaks of a deeper problem—the one I opened this post with: animation still doesn’t get the serious attention it deserves. Almost since the invention of cinema, it has played second fiddle to live action, underestimated as a vehicle for art and storytelling. Especially when used outside films and series, it still receives relatively little coverage, with few media covering its full range and joining the dots.

We don’t need to settle on a definition of animation. But by asking the question, we start to see how much is there, how fast it’s changing and how little we talk about it all. Del Toro has issued a clarion call; let the debate flow.

1. Here lies the opening to a philosophical rabbit hole: if, when watching cinema, we really do interpret what’s happening onscreen as movement, who’s to say the movement is illusory at all? The scholar Tom Gunning addresses this and other questions of perception and animation in a fascinating chapter, “The Play between Still and Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century ‘Philosophical Toys’ and Their Discourse”, in the book Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms (edited by Eivind Røssaak).

2. The scholar Georges Sifianos has published correspondence with McLaren which contains this famous definition as well as McLaren’s comments on it. The filmmaker expanded: “… briefly, I will say my first statement was meant metaphorically, or rhetorically, not literally. The critical decision which the animator has to make has to be made between the first drawing and the second drawing—just exactly how much movement he has to make. (Incidentally, I said “drawings” for a simple and rhetorical effect; static objects, puppets and human beings [can] all be animated without drawings, but I failed to include them).” For more, see “The Definition of Animation: A Letter from Norman McLaren” in Animation Journal 3, 2 (Spring 1995).

3. See Edwin Carels’s chapter “Animation = A Multiplication of Artforms?” in The animate! Book: Rethinking Animation (edited by Benjamin Cook and Gary Thomas).

4. The Masstransitoscope gets a lovely nod in the recent Netflix feature Nimona. One of my big regrets in life is that I lived near it for three months before I knew of its existence, and never saw it.

5. Takahata developed these ideas in a book, Jūni-seki no animēshon: kokuhō emakimono ni miru eigateki/animeteki naru mono (Twelfth-Century Animation: Cinematic and Anime-like Aspects in the Picture Scroll National Treasures). It isn’t available in English.