Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal [1] is an international peer-reviewed academic journal published in print and online three times a year by SAGE Publications. Established in 2006, the editorial remit is to address animation and related moving image culture - photographic, digital or otherwise - created using the single frame technique and it implications for a wide variety of creative practice. The range of topics and technologies ranges from the flipbooks and chronophotography, traditional animation and cartoons to installation art, computer animation, curating, spectatorship and philosophical perceptual impacts on its viewers.
Vivian Sobchack has described the journal as "promis(ing) not only an interdisciplinary and international scope, but also - and most significant at this historical moment - to re-mediate and inter-mediate a range of moving image platforms and to re-think the premises that have thus far found it proper to separate the 'mashed potatoes' of film theory from the 'peas' of animation theory and the 'carrots' of digital media theory. Indeed, animation: an interdisciplinary journal promises to provide us an exceedingly full and intellectually satisfying plate." [2]
It also publishes essays on popular culture and technologies and art forms that address animation's interdisciplinarity including comic strips, special effects, live-action/animated film, scenic design and animated documentary. With the shift away from photochemical celluloid to CGI and the attendant crisis in film studies' loss of its object, the journal explores the burgeoning use of computer animation, virtual actors and swarm intelligence in feature films. The journal also publishes on architectural computer-aided design, computer simulation and computer graphics in science and technology, including virtual reality, nanotechnology and biomimetics.
Its contributors are academic scholars, curators, and practitioners.
The editorial board includes Scott Bukatman, Noël Carroll, Simon Critchley, Thomas Elsaesser, Lev Manovich, Vivian Sobchack, and Siegfried Zielinski.
For a review of the journal by Tim Maloney in Film-Philosophy (December 2007), see Review: Suzanne Buchan (ed.) (2006) Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal [3]