The Film Art of animation: A review

Paul Taberham’s impressive study of film animation was released earlier this month. The title brings to mind a major concern of David Bordwell in studying cinema, poetics as an aesthetic approach. Taberham has indeed been influenced by David’s writings and indeed mine, as he state in his introduction: Live-action cinema and television have received sustained critical attention within the field of poetics (see Bordwell 2007; Cavendish 2013; Mittell 2015; Çağlayan 2018), but animation has, by contrast, only been addressed peripherally. While animation and live-action filmmaking share a common formal language through shot composition, editing, colour, sound design and the like, important distinctions between the two remain underexplored. This book seeks to address that gap, positioning itself as an animation-focused counterpart to David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s Film Art: An Introduction (first published in 1979 and now in its fourteenth edition), a pedagogical distillation of…