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In this beautifully written and deeply researched study, Hannah Frank provides an original way to understand American animated cartoons from the Golden Age of animation (1920–1960). In the pre-digital age of the twentieth century, the making of cartoons was mechanized and standardized: thousands of drawings were inked and painted onto individual transparent celluloid sheets (called “cels”) and then photographed in succession, a labor-intensive process that was divided across scores of artists and technicians. In order to see the art, labor, and technology of cel animation, Frank slows cartoons down to look frame by frame, finding hitherto unseen aspects of the animated image. What emerges is both a methodology and a highly original account of an art formed on the assembly line.
Open Access
Frame by Frame A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons
About the Book
Reviews
"It's not every day that a posthumously published Ph.D. thesis nudges the world of cinema studies off its axis. All hail Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons."—Artforum
"After reading Frame by Frame, it's difficult to naively or passively watch a classic-era cartoon again, considering the erased labor that was alienated and mechanized, yet individuated—ultimately producing an artwork. Frank impressively ties together the imaginative pleasures of close analysis to rethink the trajectory of animation as more than a "history of drudgery."—Film Comment
"A thrilling read—one of the most exuberant, brilliant books I’ve come across in a very long time. I have lived with many of the cartoons Hannah Frank analyzes for pretty much my entire life and never suspected the hidden life or lives within their images, the inscription of histories (social, personal, technological, aesthetic) in which, it turns out, they abound."—Scott Bukatman, author of The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit
"Frame by Frame is an original and thought-provoking work that makes important and unexpected contributions to the quickly evolving cinema and media studies debates about animation. Hannah Frank’s work is deeply refreshing in its ability to think across and weave together different strands of the various debates about animation that have arisen to date. These are all big conversations in their own right, and Frank is impressive in her ability to think lucidly across them in such fluent and productive ways."—Karen Redrobe, author of Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Foreword: Hannah Frank’s Pause by Tom Gunning
Editor’s Introduction by Daniel Morgan
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Looking at Labor
1. Animation and Montage; or, Photographic Records of Documents
2. A View of the World: Toward a Photographic Theory of Cel Animation
3. Pars Pro Toto: Character Animation and the Work of the
Anonymous Artist
4. The Multiplication of Traces: Xerographic Reproduction and
One Hundred and One Dalmatians
Conclusion: The Labor of Looking
Notes
Bibliography
Index