Approaching animation and animation studies

Animation encompasses an extraordinarily wide-ranging set of techniques and practices and thus constitutes an equally diverse field of study. Because of this diversity, animation presents particular challenges in terms of agreeing on a single definition, and similarly it defies a unified theoretical approach to studying it. This chapter seeks to explore these issues and to outline exactly why animation is difficult to define, and why interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to studying it are necessary. The chapter will outline some of the main ways that we might think about animation, in terms of how (or even whether) it can be defined and what some of its unique features and expressive capacities are. In doing so, this chapter offers an introduction to some of the key theoretical building blocks of animation studies.