In the late 1980s and early 1990s, animation education in Czechoslovakia played a key role in the upskilling of workers within the state film studios. This article focuses on the under-researched work of the Cabinet of Animation at the Faculty of Film and Television (FAMU), The Academy of Performing Art (AMU), in Prague, which, through close cooperation with the state film studios and the involvement of leading figures in Czechoslovak animation, combined academic education with practice. The specific organization of the studio blurred the boundaries between the school system and the film market, with staff from the state studios often participating in the teaching process. This article shows that animation education was not just a pedagogical activity; rather, it was an integral part of the state film system, which had a major influence on the development of Czechoslovak animation.

This article interrogates the intersection of queer diasporic identity, collective Socio-Political Identity, and the ‘algorithmic gaze’ through a critical Practice-Based Research (PBR) methodology. Situated within the sociopolitical rupture of post-2019 Hong Kong, the authors examine how collective culture and the homogenizing forces of generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) enact a dual erasure of local queer narratives. To address this, the study proposes a ‘Queer Social Ecology’ framework, adapting Bronfenbrenner’s model to map the coercive pressures exerted on the queer subject. Through the coproduction of the animated documentary Rhythms of Identity , based on the oral history of a Hong Kong migrant (‘YC’), this research demonstrates how animation functions as a ‘conditional space’ for articulating inarticulable trauma. Furthermore, the project employs Critical Technical Practice (CTP) by operationalizing GenAI not to refine but to perform bias—generating visual ‘glitches’ that expose the heteronormative exclusions of machine learning. The article argues that participatory animation serves as a vital counter-archive, preserving the texture of lived experience against the sanitizing forces of state power and technological standardization.

While many scholars have challenged the place of animatronics – as a combination of animate and electronics – within traditional definitions of animation, this article engages the relevance of animatronic technology to the medium as a frame-by-frame technique of illusion. While the labour of animatronics might recall techniques of cel-, computer-, or stop-motion animation whereby characters are endowed with the ability to execute any conceivable action, animatronics as a form of digital puppetry introduces new elements rooted in the real-time interaction between animator and animated. To reflect on the compromise position or designation of animatronics between multiple forms of animation, this article stages a multidisciplinary exploration of storytelling, technology and philosophy in the 12-minute short film Song Sparrow (Farzaneh Omidvarnia, 2019). The film blends live-action and recorded ‘live’ puppetry with extensive animatronics in a narrative that portrays the plight of a group of refugees. Song Sparrow ’s application of animatronic technology ultimately prompts a profound reflection on the delicate balance between freedom and limitation, considered here through the philosophical implications of control that dramatize the concealed operations of animatronic mechanisms. By drawing on the principles of Stoic philosophy and the values that it places on the inherent constraints that individuals face in shaping their destinies, this article suggests that philosophical reflections on the limitations that define human existence are well-supported by both Song Sparrow ’s refugee narrative of mobility and the unique creative possibilities engendered by its animatronics as a particular illusion of the animate.

Studies on environmental animations have explored the politics of world-making and the interdependence of humans and animals. Taking as a case study the short Hungarian animation A Légy (Ferenc Rófusz, 1980), this article explores ways that animation can foster an ecological disposition in the viewer by presenting the worldview of a housefly from a first-person perspective. A Légy focuses on altersubjectivity, a term that Vinciane Despret (‘Ethology between empathy, standpoint and perspectivism’, 2010) uses to describe Jakob von Uexküll’s practice of adopting the animals’ perspectives. Because each species is attuned to its particular dwelling-world, Von Uexküll ( A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with a Theory of Meaning, 2010) suggests, we must study animals by examining the features available to them by erecting ‘a bubble’ around them. A Légy gestures toward this idea by facilitating a becoming-animal that highlights perceptual similarities and differences between the viewer and the animated insect. The animation machine enables a ‘cross-species perception’, a form of perception that extends the spectator’s perceptual awareness of the nonhuman worldview.

This article develops a comparative analysis of Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten, and Eva Szasz and Robert Verrall’s Cosmic Zoom, seen through the lenses of Bergsonian and Deleuzo-Guttarian philosophy. The author claims that, despite similarities with respect to their subject matter and modes of production, there are significant stylistic differences between these films that are suggestive of divergent ontological, epistemological and political commitments. Of particular importance is the foregrounding of objectivity in the case of Powers of Ten and subjectivity in the case of Cosmic Zoom – a distinction that is reflected in their respectively quasi-indexical and expressive modes of representation. This fundamental tension similarly conditions their differently inflected approaches to time, space and measure, drawing attention to the strange intertwining of representation, abstraction and affect that is characteristic of much animated film. Ultimately, it is proposed that, in the context of Powers of Ten and Cosmic Zoom, animation’s capacities for abstraction and expression are differently distributed, resulting in a cosmopolitical opposition which can be aligned with the Deleuzo–Guattarian distinctions between major and minor language, and royal and nomadic science.

This article examines the rising importance of ‘virtual production’ by focusing on one of its core components, the so-called ‘virtual camera’. Using the virtual camera as a focal point, the author highlights how a particular industrial model of film production has changed in response to the transformations brought about by digital technologies. More specifically, this article uses the notion of ‘virtualization’ introduced by Pierre Lévy in Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age (1998) to offer a unique point of view on films ‘shot’ with cameras that are ultimately all but virtual. Here, The Lion King (2019) serves as a prime example of virtual production, in general, and of the transformation undergone by the camera, in particular.