Footnote #22 - Boiling

The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!

The second Fantasy/Animation footnote of the year sees Chris and Alex discuss boiling, an often-unintentional aesthetic effect involving the visibility of undulating animated lines that surfaces due to slight deviations within repeating drawn images. To unpack the pleasures of animated variation, they examine the modulations and discontinuities caused by images as they are ‘crafted’ imperfectly by hand; comparisons with the illusion of life generated by the industrial and standardised cel-animation process, and the staccato movements of stop-motion effects; and how in its many traces of artistry the animated images that ‘boil’ manifest the labour of difference and repetition, movement and stillness.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Suggested Readings

  • Frank, Hannah. 2019. Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons. California: University of California Press.

  • Ruddell, Caroline and Paul Ward, eds. 2019. The Crafty Animator: Handmade, Craft-based Animation and Cultural Value. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

  • Torre, Dan. 2015. “Boiling Lines and Lightning Sketches: Process and the Animated Drawing,” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 10, no. 2: 141-153, available here.

FOOTNOTE PODCASTChristopher Holliday and Alexander SergeantLABOUR, CEL ANIMATION, CRAFT, CREATIVITY, MOVEMENTComment