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The Future of Thinking: Notes on Animation and the Essay Film

image of The Future of Thinking: Notes on Animation and the Essay Film
  • By Richard Wright1
  • 1 Royal Holloway University of London
  • Source: Essay Film and Narrative Techniques , pp 39-56
  • Publication Date: October 2025
  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/9781835951477_5
  • Language: English
  • Accessibility Summary:  EPUB 3 and pdf file included; compatible with devices and software which can read these formats. Adjustable font size, spacing, contrast, text justification, number of columns (ePUB only). Alternative text for images. Tagged with a logical reading order to assist screen readers. Navigation between in-text citations and reference list, and endnotes and endnote markers.

Despite its inclusion in the earliest essay films, animation was subsequently dropped in favour of the recording of personal testimony, eyewitness events and the use of archive footage. The result is, even today, a sparse number of animated essay films.

We compare examples of the more common montage based essay films with animated works, with a particular emphasis on how they materially instantiate different models of thinking - dialectical, disjunctive, computational. We compare visual logics such as montage and transformation, new relationships between media facilitated using rotoscoping and the recent use of AI. We argue that it is its broad range of artistic techniques and connections to other disciplines that now make animated media best placed to indicate the future of thinking as an audio-visual practice. In return, animation will have to confront issues of its own status as an artform, a form of media practice and as a science.

Keywords: AI ; animation ; computer animation ; Essay film ; filmic thought ; metamorphosis ; montage ; photography

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