This course aims to unsettle the privileging of the visual and of live action cinema in film and media studies. The founding impetus of the class is to counter the marginalization of two intertwined issues – animation and sound – in cinema studies. This course takes seriously the suggestion of various scholars that animation is central rather than peripheral to film history and the rise of digital media.

The course aims to give students a working knowledge of key concepts at the intersection of animation, sound, and music, while also surveying a range of historical, national, and transnational contexts. The class considers feature-length titles from Hollywood and Japan as major nodes in the global circulation of cartoons and anime; at the same time, it de-centers these major players by also exploring short, experimental, and independent animation work in a transnational vein. This eclecticism is paralleled by a variety of approaches to sound and animation covered in the class, from more theoretical, philosophical, or formalist discourses to perspectives that foreground history and ideology, and considerations grounded in the materiality of media, production contexts, or industrial circulation. Throughout, the class is attuned to the cultural and political work that animated sound films do in negotiating dynamics of race, gender and sexuality.