What counts as animation?
We've been talking a lot about what animation is in class--that it's all about movement and the movements between frames, but just because something moves doesn't make it animation. The definition of animation can be very loose because people interpret animation in many different ways. Zoetropes were the building blocks for animation, but is a spinning zoetrope animation? It's animated in that there is movement between the frames, creating one fluid motion how a flip book would. However, the caketrope film we watched wasn't animation in the sense of movement between frames, but rather the spinning cake being filmed was animated itself.
Since we watched all those movies last Tuesday I've been thinking about the definition of animation too! I loosely define it as the illusion of movement. But after watching the short film last week with the jelly beans I started to wonder if my definition could become even more general. Does a movie that references the art of animation as moving pictures count? Or a film that portrays human life as animation count? Something that's breathing and moving but doesn't fit a conventional box?
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