If you are interested in joining the working group, please send your response to secretary@asifa.net
Deadline to volunteer for the working group: 31 October
Following João’s suggestion, we would like to open a broader international discussion with scholars, academics, researchers, artists, filmmakers, producers, festivals, and animation professionalsaround a fundamental question: How should we define animation today?
Our initial research shows that many definitions have been proposed over time—different, yet often overlapping. We propose establishing a research and discussion framework to map and compare historical definitions, from McLaren, Sifianos, Solomon, Wells, and others, with contemporary practices including CGI, motion capture, procedural animation, simulation, real-time systems, and generative AI.
As a starting point for discussion, we propose:
Animation is the art of conceiving, organizing, and aesthetically shaping the transformation of visual forms over time, regardless of the technique or technological system through which these transformations are generated.
Or, more concisely:
The art of animation is the art of controlled visual change over time, shaped through human intention, selection, direction, and aesthetic organization.
The historical trajectory might be summarized as:
“moving drawings” → frame-by-frame production → created movement → differences between frames → temporal convention → organized transformation over time.
This evolution raises several fundamental questions:
What is animation when movement is no longer necessarily created frame by frame or entirely determined by the animator?
How much of the movement must be directly created by the animator for us still to call the result animation?
Does the animator’s role lie in producing every frame, or in exercising intention, selection, direction, and aesthetic control over the processes that generate temporal change?
The Working Group
We invite the international animation community to join this conversation through a volunteer working group bringing together scholars and theorists, artists and filmmakers, producers, festivals, and other animation professionals.
The working group will bring together perspectives from different cultural, artistic, academic, and professional contexts. We also plan to incorporate insights and community discussions emerging from the AI panel at CINANIMA into this broader dialogue.
The working group’s discussions and progress could also be shared through the ASIFA website, allowing the wider community to follow and contribute to the process.
If you are interested in joining the working group, please send your response to secretary@asifa.net.
Deadline to volunteer for the working group: 31 October
The Outcome
The goal of this process will be to develop either an ASIFA Definition of Animation or, if a single definition proves too restrictive, an ASIFA Framework for Defining Animation.
The results of the research and discussions could be published on the ASIFA website and developed into a dedicated edition or contribution to our magazine or an academic journal, creating a lasting resource for the international animation community.
We sincerely invite you to join the working group and share this open call with colleagues, institutions, festivals, universities, and animation communities around the world.
Let us begin this conversation together.
