Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons

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

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 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.

256 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2019

Reviews

[Peter Baran · Rating 5 out of 5]

A terrific look at the work behind golden age Hollywood animation by considering the work of the hidden "non-artistic" contributors - the inkers, colourist and camerapeople. Frank watches these cartoons - hundreds of them - literally frame by frame to see find the mistakes, the fluffs, the gags. What she occasionally finds underlines the work involved, the choices made, when white paper isn't white paper and this throws back on the entire artistry of animation - films which have the most fluid of motion, but no actual motion at all. The section on the effect of Xerox machines on the animation of 101 Dalmatians is wonderfully clear, but Frank's style (and this was basically her PhD thesis) is playfully intellectual - bouncing around from reference to reference where she feels fit. Her unexpected death at 33 is a real tragedy to film scholarship

[Shawn Hall · Rating 3 out of 5]

Frank's method of examining animated films from the Golden Era of animation a frame at a time yields some fascinating results although many are covered in academic language that can sometimes be hard to get through.

Full review here: https://bit.ly/39gnQl2