Academic

Experimental and Expanded Animation: New Perspectives Gets SAS Award for Best Scholarly Book In Animation

Experimental and Expanded Animation: New Perspectives Gets SAS Award for Best Scholarly Book In Animation
33 Frames per foot (2013), Vicky Smith, 16mm performance

The Society for Animation Studies awards (annually or biennially) the award for the Best Scholarly Book in animation, aptly mentioned Norman McLaren/Evelyn Lambart Award.

For the 2018-19 period, the award went to Experimental and Expanded Animation: New Perspectives by Vicky Smith and Nicky Hamlyn. 

This book discusses developments and continuities in experimental animation that, since Robert Russet and Cecile Starr’s Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art (1976), has proliferated in the context of expanded cinema, performance and live ‘making’ and is today exhibited in galleries, public sites and online. With reference to historical, critical, phenomenological and inter-disciplinary approaches, international researchers offer new and diverse methodologies for thinking through these myriad animation practices - Book description

 The judges, Dr. Andy Buchanan, Dr. Eliška Děcká, and Dr. Fatemeh Hosseini-Shakib, stated: 

Experimental and Expanded Animation tackles a much-neglected subject and brings together a range of artists and scholars in impressively coherent fashion. The quality of the work remains high throughout and the chapters offer a mixture of case studies and more expansive discussions of the form. In doing so, Experimental and Expanded Animation touches on a variety of contributors to the field, technologies of animation, theoretical debates, and a wide range of contemporary works. Truly international in perspective, this is sure to be a key point of reference for many years to come.

Check out the book contents:

Introduction /  Smith, Vicky (et al.),
Lines and Interruptions in Experimental Film and Video /  Payne, Simon,
Performing the Margins of the New / Bruyn, Dirk
Twenty-First Century Flicker: Jodie Mack, Benedict Drew and Sebastian Buerkner /  Dicker, Barnaby,
Experimental Time-Lapse Animation and the Manifestation of Change and Agency in Objects/  Smith, Vicky, 
Analogon: Of a World Already Animated / Cubitt, Sean
Emptiness Is Not ‘Nothing’: Space and Experimental 3D CGI Animation / Jukes, Alex
Inanimation: The Film Loop Performances of Bruce McClure / Hamlyn, Nicky
Re-splitting, De-synchronizing, Re-animating: (E)motion, Neo-spectacle and Innocence in the Film Works of John Stezake / Wells, Paul
 Cut to Cute: Fact, Form, and Feeling in Digital Animation / Gosse, Johanna
The Animated Female Body, Feminism(s) and ‘Mushi’ / Buchan, Suzanne
“Coming to Life” and Intermediality in the Tableaux Vivants in Magic Mirror (Pucill, 2013) and Confessions to the Mirror (Pucill, 2016) / Pucill, Sarah Siting Animation: The Affect of Place / Hosea, Birgitta

The runner-up was Malcolm Cook’s Early British Animation: From Page and Stage to Cinema Screens The judges said the following:

Cook has written a marvellous book that is well constructed and presented throughout. What may appear to be a niche topic is made relevant and engaging for any animation scholar through the quality of the scholarship. Early British Animation is a deep and original historical account presented in a systematic and multifaceted manner.

The following ten books comprised the final shortlist:

Vicky Smith and Nicky Hamlyn’s Experimental and Expanded Animation (WINNER)
Malcolm Cook’s Early British Animation: From Page and Stage to Cinema Screens (RUNNER-UP)
Rayna Denison’s Princess Mononoke: Understanding Studio Ghibli's Monster Princess
Nichola Dobson’s Norman McLaren: Between the Frames
Eric Herhuth’s Pixar and the Aesthetic Imagination
Christopher Holliday’s The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre
Hannes Rall’s Animation: From Concept to Production
Susan Smith, Noel Brown and Sam Summers’s Toy Story: How Pixar Reinvented the Animated Feature
Dan and Lienors Torre’s Australian Animation – An International History
Stefanie Van de Peer’s Animation in the Middle East

About Norman McLaren/Evelyn Lambart Award-Best Scholarly Book in Animation

Inaugurated in 1995, this award, administered by the Society for Animation Studies, seeks to celebrate exceptional scholarship, published in book form, in the field of animation studies. In recognition of the growing critical mass of animation scholarship, the judging process was expanded to include Runners-Up in 2009. The award was bestowed on an ad-hoc basis between 1995 and 2009, but with the re-launch of the SAS website in 2016 the Society took the decision to mark this occasion by retrospectively bestowing the award for those years, in the awarding sequence, where no judging had been administered. 

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