Animating the archive: A role for creative practice in the animation archive

This article describes an emerging function for the archive within animation production and scholarship as the institution responds to new demands by incorporating creative practice. The key tension in the history of archives is between preservation and access. The first mandate is to maintain the collection. The second is to make materials available to the community the archive serves. But what is that community and how is it best served? This article demonstrates how two archives have addressed these questions, the ASIFA Hollywood Animation Archive and the National Film Archive of India, the first an activist archive not of animation but for animators, and the second a repository not only of artefacts but of an unbroken tradition of practice. To serve animation communities, the archive must be an available resource. This may be achieved by it becoming a place where practitioners can discover shared methods, narratives and traditions. While this means the archive cannot be an exclusively academic domain, it is an opportunity for researchers to engage in dialogue with other practitioners on the same terms to productively negotiate a common animation community.