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Surrealism and Animation
Transnational Connections, 1920-Present
Edited by Abigail Susik
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Book Presentation:
From Betty Boop to Donald Duck, Tex Avery to Walt Disney, collage animation to Japanese anime, and Claymation to 3D animation, Surrealism and Animation is the first book to identify correspondences between the art of animation and the International Surrealist Movement.
Sharing a deep commitment to a reanimation of everyday life, surrealist artists and animators sought a marvellous, living form of art. Cartoons and trick films by pioneers such as Georges Méliès were influential for Salvador Dalí and André Breton, among others; many other surrealists and their associates such as Max Ernst, Joseph Cornell, Hans Richter, Len Lye, Roland Topor, Jan Švankmajer, and Lawrence Jordan turned to animated cinema and theories of animacy to express their surrealist visions.
Surrealism and Animation is the first book devoted to surrealism's vivid engagement with the history, theory, and medium of animation on a transnational basis. Featuring seventeen essays by leading and emerging scholars, as well as interviews with contemporary artists Penny Slinger and Jacolby Satterwhite, this collection investigates a shimmering range of topics on animated surrealism, including black humour, queer subjectivities, ecofeminism, Black surrealisms, and more.
About the Author:
Abigail Susik is Associate Professor of Art History at Willamette University, USA, and joint editor of the Transnational Surrealism series.She is the author of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (2021), editor of Resurgence! Jonathan Leake, Radical Surrealism, and the Resurgence Youth Movement, 1964-1967 (2023), and coeditor of the volumes Surrealism and Film after 1945: Absolutely Modern Mysteries (2021) and Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance (2022).Krzysztof Fijalkowski is Professor of Visual Culture at Norwich University of the Arts, UK. He has published in the history and theory of Surrealism, and is co-editor of Bloomsbury's Transnational Surrealism series.
Press Reviews:
"For the 100th anniversary of surrealism, Susik has assembled an extraordinary collection that reinforces the cross-cultural longevity of the movement. Ranging across film studies and the plastic arts, it gathers fresh insights into canonical figures while bringing a range of exciting new voices into the conversation. This is solid historical scholarship that greatly expands on contemporary theoretical debates around the nature and uses of animation writ large." ―Andrew V. Uroskie, author of Between the Black and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema in Postwar Art (2014)
"Susik's groundbreaking collection proudly situates animation as the heart of surrealist cinema. It pencils in a fascinating web of links between artistic traditions going far beyond the graphic arts. Unfettered by parochial conceptions of history, these essays embrace a shared pool of inspirations drawn upon by the pioneers of truly fantastic cinema." ―Daniel Bird, Friends of Walerian Borowczyk, Paris, France
"Surrealism and Animation is a major contribution that boldly expands our understanding of moving image media's centrality to the ongoing, transnational surrealist enterprise. But across each section it also vitally demonstrates how much surrealism and its interdisciplinary study still have to teach us about the moving image, the diversity of its forms, and its essential role in art practices that affirm life and human liberation as both a political and an aesthetic value." ―Jennifer J. Wild, Associate Professor, Cinema and Media Studies, The University of Southern California, USA
"Surrealism and Animation offers a dynamic exploration of a 'living art form' that has rarely seen the full critical attention that it deserves. Unearthing analogue and digital treasures, the essays in this collection show the myriad ways in which surrealism, craft, philosophy and technology can intersect." ―Felicity Gee, Associate Professor of Modernist Literatures and Avant-Garde Studies, University of Exeter, UK
"An outstanding collection on the rich relationship between surrealism and animation that truly does justice to the subject's transnational breadth, the manifold nature of animation, and the various histories and applications of surrealism." ―Jonathan Owen, author of Avant-Garde to New Wave: Czechoslovak Cinema, Surrealism and the Sixties (2011)
"Drawing up an international panorama (America, Europe, Japan...), these richly illustrated essays explore the formidable world of animated film and its fertile forays into the realm of surrealism, as well as the interest shown by the Surrealists in the phenomenon of the animated image." ―Bertrand Schmitt, author of Jan Švankmajer Dimensions of Dialogue (2013)
See the publisher website: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
> From the same author:
Surrealism and Film After 1945 (2021)
Absolutely Modern Mysteries
Dir. Kristoffer Noheden and Abigail Susik
Subject: Genre > Experimental
> On a related topic:
Rediscovered Classics of Japanese Animation (2025)
The Adaptation of Children's Novels into the World Masterpiece Theater Series
Contemporary Hollywood Animation (2023)
Style, Storytelling, Culture and Ideology Since the 1990s
by Noel Brown
The Life and Times of Betty Boop (2023)
The 100-Year History of an Animated Icon
Cultural Guide to Anime and Manga (2023)
by Pamela Gossin and Marc Hairston
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