INTRODUCTION: CLASS ISSUES

Imagine a classroom, say, in the old-school style of Hogwarts or Miss Jean Brodie’s, and huddled up in the tightly rowed desks are academic subjects and disciplines. at the front, secure in their superiority, are the Classics and the sciences; engineering, business and architecture take their places just behind. The arts, unsurprisingly, sit by the window gazing out on other lands, nudged by the humanities and design to pay more attention, while sport comes in late, pulling its socks up. Film and media studies constantly put their hands up, eager for more attention, while, ironically, at the same time looking back and down at the sullen figure of animation studies sitting in the corner. This morning, however, animation studies is smiling. Its homework has been returned, and the red ticks in the margin have accumulated into three ‘A's – ‘ani-doc’, ‘art’ and ‘archives’ – its place in the Academy is thus secure.

When I first addressed the idea of the ‘animated documentary’ in the early 1990s, the acceptance of animation per se within UK university curricula boiled down to a few groundbreaking courses in production (mainly in art schools and polytechnics) and some recognition that scholars (principally American) active in the Society of Animation Studies sought to advance the idea of animation as a significant art form worthy of sustained study and analysis. The latter was hard enough: ‘cartoons’ were surely the flotsam of cultural practice and unworthy of attention. So, to also sully ‘documentary’ by association was a bridge too far. Even a seemingly open-minded earlier text such as Alan Rosenthal's The New Documentary in Action, which presciently included discussion of Norman McLaren's Pas de Deux (1967), still contained critique of ‘a number of deficiencies’ in McLaren's work, such as: ‘the harshness of his colors’, the ‘too often repeated simplicity of his forms’, and his ‘lack of passion and fire’ (Rosenthal 1971: 268). Rosenthal's critique, therefore, though possibly valid at some levels, still does not foreground what animation has specifically added to the parameters of documentary, nor reflected McLaren's status within experimental animated film, in deliberately intervening in documentary modes by using the form. This lack of acknowledgement fails to recognise the progressive nature of McLaren's position as an animator.