Frame by Frame A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons

by Hannah Frank (Author), Daniel Morgan (Editor), Tom Gunning (Foreword)
May 2019
First Edition
Paperback
$34.95, £27.00
Courses
Animation Film History Industry and Labor
Endowments
Ahmanson Murphy Imprint in Fine Arts
Title Details

Rights: Available worldwide
Pages: 256
ISBN: 9780520303621
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.65
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 47 b/w illus.

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About the Book From Our Blog About the Author Reviews Table of Contents Awards Related Books

About the Book

At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

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.

From Our Blog

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Since first launching in 2015, Luminos has served as one of UC Press’s flagship open access programs. Having published more than seventy-five full length scholarly monographs—fully open and available to the public for free— …

About the Author

Hannah Frank (1984–2017) was Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her work has been published in Critical Quarterly and Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and she contributed a chapter to A World Redrawn: Eisenstein and Brecht in Hollywood.

Daniel Morgan is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago and is author of Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema.

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

"Frank moves with a shocking assuredness of purpose through all possible configurations of a process she has sharpened and honed for purpose. . . . [a] wry, effortless, sublime work of prose . . . It is hard not to fantasize about future volumes of Frankian prose while reading Frame by Frame, so commanding and captivating a stylist and a critical imagination is she. Her hideously premature death highlights the book’s only retroactive flaw: that it is too short that it offers itself only as the first volume in a great, ongoing work spanning a lifetime. A great mind and writer, Frank could and should have continued to write, producing work as virtuosic as this particular volume but on an industrial scale to match her favorite animators."—Cineaste

"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

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