Each chapter explores a different animation technique: soft edges, walk cycles, camera movements, and rotoscoping.

A variety of well-known animators are surveyed, from Winsor McCay to the Disney studio. The book most closely analyzes work by experimental animators of the mid-twentieth century. These filmmakers, like Caroline Leaf and Norman McLaren, use animation techniques to change our perceptions.

By examining how we perceive these techniques, the book argues that animators perform serious philosophical work with their visual style. In the process, each chapter offers a philosophical investigation of a concept of organizational change: exposure, complexity, revolution, and love.

Praise for Figure and Force in Animation Aesthetics

What makes this book so special is the way it expands our idea of why we ought to care about animation and how we ought to care about it.

There is a clear and lovely thread running through [the] four chapters: the exposure of the self to penetration by the outside world, the acknowledgment of our interdependence, the power of any single one of us to change the world by the power of our own movements, and finally love. And this—the chance to look up from a work of animation and suddenly see everything differently—is what the book ultimately offers to readers (besides, of course, the immaculate scholarship and impeccable interpretation and analysis).

Dan Bashara, Discourse

As a resource for inquiry-based learning, Figure and Force in Animation Aesthetics is a highly rewarding text to work through with students (with the added stylistic benefit of never sounding like a literal textbook).

Pierson skillfully encircles his theoretical problems with successive questions, patiently guiding readers to see what makes these seemingly small films so remarkable and unexpected. Beyond their elegance, his descriptions of animation also function as serious attempts to generate better descriptive prose for articulating exactly what it is that we are seeing when we watch moving images.

Tien-Tien Jong, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies

Pierson’s book is an important contribution to the more general argument, especially relevant in the so-called “digital era,” that any fundamental distinction between animation and live-action must be discarded, or at the very least reconsidered. By thinking of animation as Pierson proposes, as “an art of coordinating sensory units into perceptible figures and forces,” as “experiments in the possibility of sensory organization,” he provides a powerful means for doing so.

Marc Furstenau, Canadian Journal of Film Studies

Videos

Watch video demonstrations for each chapter’s key analysis of an animation technique: