Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons

by Hannah Frank, Daniel Morgan (Editor), Tom Gunning (Foreword by)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520303621
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	05/07/2019
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	1,117,015
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

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.

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

Editorial Reviews

"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

"This work, Frame by Frame, as it is, is a masterwork of ingenuity that pulls together studies on technics, labor, and aesthetics. It should be read by anyone working in the history of animation, by scholars in film studies and for many outside those fields with their own critical eyestrain upon visual studies, sensation, and the role of the scholar in stating their position within activist research."

Radio and Television Historical Journal of Film

"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

"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