Film and Media Studies: Animation

This course offers a survey of the varieties of animation across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as well as their critical reception. Animation is a ubiquitous form, present across media and in advertising. Many viewers take its components and effects for granted. But the archive of animation fundamentally complicates any easy assumptions about "realism" in the twentieth century; animation, moreover, challenges assumptions about bodies and their functions, exaggerating their features and functions, promoting alternatives to more mundane notions of life and liveliness, and relatedly, to ideas of time, contingency, and experience.