Surrealism and Animation
Transnational Connections, 1920-Present
Published on 12. June 2025
Book
Hardback
328 pages
978-1-350-47591-5 (ISBN)
Description
From Betty Boop to Donald Duck, Tex Avery to Walt Disney, collage animation to Japanese anime, and Claymation to 3D animation, Surrealism and Animation is the first book to identify correspondences between the art of animation and the International Surrealist Movement.
Sharing a deep commitment to a reanimation of everyday life, surrealist artists and animators sought a marvellous, living form of art. Cartoons and trick films by pioneers such as Georges Melies were influential for Salvador Dali and Andre Breton, among others; many other surrealists and their associates such as Max Ernst, Joseph Cornell, Hans Richter, Len Lye, Roland Topor, Jan Svankmajer, and Lawrence Jordan turned to animated cinema and theories of animacy to express their surrealist visions.
Surrealism and Animation is the first book devoted to surrealism's vivid engagement with the history, theory, and medium of animation on a transnational basis. Featuring seventeen essays by leading and emerging scholars, as well as interviews with contemporary artists Penny Slinger and Jacolby Satterwhite, this collection investigates a shimmering range of topics on animated surrealism, including black humour, queer subjectivities, ecofeminism, Black surrealisms, and more.
Sharing a deep commitment to a reanimation of everyday life, surrealist artists and animators sought a marvellous, living form of art. Cartoons and trick films by pioneers such as Georges Melies were influential for Salvador Dali and Andre Breton, among others; many other surrealists and their associates such as Max Ernst, Joseph Cornell, Hans Richter, Len Lye, Roland Topor, Jan Svankmajer, and Lawrence Jordan turned to animated cinema and theories of animacy to express their surrealist visions.
Surrealism and Animation is the first book devoted to surrealism's vivid engagement with the history, theory, and medium of animation on a transnational basis. Featuring seventeen essays by leading and emerging scholars, as well as interviews with contemporary artists Penny Slinger and Jacolby Satterwhite, this collection investigates a shimmering range of topics on animated surrealism, including black humour, queer subjectivities, ecofeminism, Black surrealisms, and more.
Reviews / Votes
For the 100th anniversary of surrealism, Susik has assembled an extraordinary collection that reinforces the cross-cultural longevity of the movement. Ranging across film studies and the plastic arts, it gathers fresh insights into canonical figures while bringing a range of exciting new voices into the conversation. This is solid historical scholarship that greatly expands on contemporary theoretical debates around the nature and uses of animation writ large. * Andrew V. Uroskie, author of Between the Black and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema in Postwar Art (2014) * Susik's groundbreaking collection proudly situates animation as the heart of surrealist cinema. It pencils in a fascinating web of links between artistic traditions going far beyond the graphic arts. Unfettered by parochial conceptions of history, these essays embrace a shared pool of inspirations drawn upon by the pioneers of truly fantastic cinema. * Daniel Bird, Friends of Walerian Borowczyk, Paris, France * Surrealism and Animation is a major contribution that boldly expands our understanding of moving image media's centrality to the ongoing, transnational surrealist enterprise. But across each section it also vitally demonstrates how much surrealism and its interdisciplinary study still have to teach us about the moving image, the diversity of its forms, and its essential role in art practices that affirm life and human liberation as both a political and an aesthetic value. * Jennifer J. Wild, Associate Professor, Cinema and Media Studies, The University of Southern California, USA * Surrealism and Animation offers a dynamic exploration of a 'living art form' that has rarely seen the full critical attention that it deserves. Unearthing analogue and digital treasures, the essays in this collection show the myriad ways in which surrealism, craft, philosophy and technology can intersect. * Felicity Gee, Associate Professor of Modernist Literatures and Avant-Garde Studies, University of Exeter, UK * An outstanding collection on the rich relationship between surrealism and animation that truly does justice to the subject's transnational breadth, the manifold nature of animation, and the various histories and applications of surrealism. * Jonathan Owen, author of Avant-Garde to New Wave: Czechoslovak Cinema, Surrealism and the Sixties (2011) * Drawing up an international panorama (America, Europe, Japan...), these richly illustrated essays explore the formidable world of animated film and its fertile forays into the realm of surrealism, as well as the interest shown by the Surrealists in the phenomenon of the animated image. * Bertrand Schmitt, author of Jan Svankmajer Dimensions of Dialogue (2013) *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
With dust jacket
Illustrations
104 colour illus
Dimensions
Height: 246 mm
Width: 173 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
1016 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-350-47591-5 (9781350475915)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Abigail Susik is Associate Professor of Art History at Willamette University, USA, and joint editor of the Transnational Surrealism series. She has published several books on surrealism, including Surrealist Sabotage and The War on Work (2021).
Content
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Beyond Disorientation': Surrealism, Animation, and the Hidden World, Abigail Susik (Willamette University, USA)
Part One: Activating Still Life and Materializing Dreams: Surrealism and Animation from the 1920s to Midcentury
Introduction to Part One, Abigail Susik
1. It's a Bird: Animation, Objective Humour, and the Heart of the Black Star, Krzysztof Fijalkowski (Norwich University of the Arts, UK)
2. Len Lye: Animation, Automatism, and Surrealism, Raymond Spiteri, (Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)
3. Boop-Oop-a-Doop: Betty Boop's Adventures in Surrealism, Michael Richardson (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)
4. Animation and Animacy in Salvador Dali's 1930s Multimedia Projects, Alex Zivkovic (Columbia University, USA)
5. Max Ernst's Cartoon Modernism: Brentano, Disney and Dream and Revolution, David Hopkins (University of Glasgow, UK)
6. Woe to the sperm whale that fought against a louse! On the Surrealist Reception of Tex Avery in the 1950s, Gavin Parkinson (The Courtauld Institute of Art, UK)
Part Two: Animacy Transforming the World: Postwar Transnational Surrealism and Animation
Introduction to Part Two, Abigail Susik
7. Parker Tyler's 'Film as the problem of space control', Ann Reynolds (University of Texas, USA)
8. Harry Smith and Lawrence Jordan in San Francisco, 1946-64, Jorgelina Orfila and Francisco Ortega (Texas Tech University, USA)
9. Magical Dreams: The Surrealist Animations of Dusan Tomas Marek in Czechoslovakia and Australia, Cheri Donaldson (University of South Australia, Australia)
10. Animating Death and Deadening Life in 1964: Angels' Games by Walerian Borowczyk and Les Temps morts by Rene Laloux and Roland Topor, Abigail Susik (Willamette University, USA)
11. Everyday Dreamlife: Surrealism and Animation in Japan, Catherine Hansen (The University of Tokyo, Japan)
12. The Secret Life of the World: Jan Svankmajer's Documentary Animation, Kristoffer Noheden (Stockholm University, Sweden)
Part Three: A Living Art for Critical Re-enchantment: Contemporary Surrealism and Animation
Introduction to Part Three, Abigail Susik
13. Animating the surreal side of structural film in the 1970s, Ken Eisenstein (Bucknell University, USA)
14. Ubu Animated: Jan Lenica, Geoff Dunbar, and William Kentridge, Ian Walker (Independent Scholar, UK)
15. Surrealism, Animation, and Ecological Consciousness in Cecilia Vicuna's Paracas (1983), Paulina Caro Troncoso (Independent Scholar, Chile and Italy)
16. A Feminist-Surrealist Metamorphosis: The Charged Objects of Kim L. Pace, Catriona McAra (University of Aberdeen, UK)
17. Sweet Horror Claymation: Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg's Neo-neo-surrealism, Marie Arleth Skov (Independent scholar, Germany)
Interviews
18. 'We Are All Surrealists': Abigail Susik and Jacolby Satterwhite in conversation, Jacolby Satterwhite (New York-based artist, USA)
19. An Exorcism and Liberation: Penny Slinger and Judith Noble in conversation, Judith Noble (Plymouth College of Art, UK), Penny Slinger (Los Angeles-based artist, USA)
Notes
Index
Introduction: Beyond Disorientation': Surrealism, Animation, and the Hidden World, Abigail Susik (Willamette University, USA)
Part One: Activating Still Life and Materializing Dreams: Surrealism and Animation from the 1920s to Midcentury
Introduction to Part One, Abigail Susik
1. It's a Bird: Animation, Objective Humour, and the Heart of the Black Star, Krzysztof Fijalkowski (Norwich University of the Arts, UK)
2. Len Lye: Animation, Automatism, and Surrealism, Raymond Spiteri, (Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)
3. Boop-Oop-a-Doop: Betty Boop's Adventures in Surrealism, Michael Richardson (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)
4. Animation and Animacy in Salvador Dali's 1930s Multimedia Projects, Alex Zivkovic (Columbia University, USA)
5. Max Ernst's Cartoon Modernism: Brentano, Disney and Dream and Revolution, David Hopkins (University of Glasgow, UK)
6. Woe to the sperm whale that fought against a louse! On the Surrealist Reception of Tex Avery in the 1950s, Gavin Parkinson (The Courtauld Institute of Art, UK)
Part Two: Animacy Transforming the World: Postwar Transnational Surrealism and Animation
Introduction to Part Two, Abigail Susik
7. Parker Tyler's 'Film as the problem of space control', Ann Reynolds (University of Texas, USA)
8. Harry Smith and Lawrence Jordan in San Francisco, 1946-64, Jorgelina Orfila and Francisco Ortega (Texas Tech University, USA)
9. Magical Dreams: The Surrealist Animations of Dusan Tomas Marek in Czechoslovakia and Australia, Cheri Donaldson (University of South Australia, Australia)
10. Animating Death and Deadening Life in 1964: Angels' Games by Walerian Borowczyk and Les Temps morts by Rene Laloux and Roland Topor, Abigail Susik (Willamette University, USA)
11. Everyday Dreamlife: Surrealism and Animation in Japan, Catherine Hansen (The University of Tokyo, Japan)
12. The Secret Life of the World: Jan Svankmajer's Documentary Animation, Kristoffer Noheden (Stockholm University, Sweden)
Part Three: A Living Art for Critical Re-enchantment: Contemporary Surrealism and Animation
Introduction to Part Three, Abigail Susik
13. Animating the surreal side of structural film in the 1970s, Ken Eisenstein (Bucknell University, USA)
14. Ubu Animated: Jan Lenica, Geoff Dunbar, and William Kentridge, Ian Walker (Independent Scholar, UK)
15. Surrealism, Animation, and Ecological Consciousness in Cecilia Vicuna's Paracas (1983), Paulina Caro Troncoso (Independent Scholar, Chile and Italy)
16. A Feminist-Surrealist Metamorphosis: The Charged Objects of Kim L. Pace, Catriona McAra (University of Aberdeen, UK)
17. Sweet Horror Claymation: Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg's Neo-neo-surrealism, Marie Arleth Skov (Independent scholar, Germany)
Interviews
18. 'We Are All Surrealists': Abigail Susik and Jacolby Satterwhite in conversation, Jacolby Satterwhite (New York-based artist, USA)
19. An Exorcism and Liberation: Penny Slinger and Judith Noble in conversation, Judith Noble (Plymouth College of Art, UK), Penny Slinger (Los Angeles-based artist, USA)
Notes
Index