This new addition to the AFI Film Readers series brings together original scholarship on animation in contemporary moving image culture, from classic experimental and independent shorts to digital animation and installation. The collection - that is also a philosophy of animation - foregrounds new critical perspectives on animation, connects them to historical and contemporary philosophical and theoretical contexts and production practice, and expands the existing canon. Throughout, contributors offer an interdisciplinary roadmap of new directions in film and animation studies, discussing animation in relationship to aesthetics, ideology, philosophy, historiography, visualization, genealogies, spectatorship, representation, technologies, and material culture.

Pervasive Animation. An Introduction Suzanne Buchan SECTION 1: Preludes and Innovations 1. Expanded Animation: A Small Genealogy of the Idea and Praxis that Breathe a Soul into Dead Things Siegfried Zielinski 2. The Transforming Image: The Roots of Animation in Metamorphosis and Motion Tom Gunning SECTION 2: Material Culture 3. Animation's Petrified Unrest Esther Leslie 4. Ecocritique and the Materialities of Animation Sean Cubitt SECTION 3: Life and Non-Life 5. Coming to Life: Cartoon Animals and Natural Philosophy Thomas Lamarre 6. A Cinema of Apprehension: A Third Entelechy of the Vitalist Machine Suzanne Buchan 7. The East Asian Post-human Prometheus: Animated Mechanical 'Others' Joon Yang Kim SECTION 4: History, Documentary and Truth 8. Socialimagestics and Cinemasymbiosis: The Materiality of A-Realism Mark Bartlett 9. ReAnimator: Embodied History, and the Post-Cinema Trace in Ken Jacobs' 'Temporal Composites' Jeffrey Skoller 10. Animated Documentaries: Aesthetics, Politics and Viewer Engagement Nea Ehrlich SECTION 5: Display, Process and Practice 11. Take the B Train: Reconstructing the Proto-cinematic Apparatus George Griffin 12. Spaces of Wonder: Animation and Museology Edwin Carels 13. Animation Studies as an Interdisciplinary Teaching Field Paul Ward