Animation: Critical and Primary Sources is a major multi-volume work of reference that brings together seminal writings on animation studies. Gathering historical and contemporary texts from a wide-ranging number of sources, the volumes provide a key resource in understanding and studying the past and future directions of animation studies. The four volumes thematically traces animation studies from its many definitions, or a lack thereof, to the institutional nature of animation production, to establishing greater space within animation discourse for the consideration of broadcast and interactive animation, and finally, giving greater contextual understanding of the field of animation studies, by focusing on‘Authorship’, ‘Genre’, ‘Identity Politics’, and ‘Spectatorship’, thus enabling readers to engage more deeply with the ideas discussed in the final volume. Ordering the collection in this way avoids imposing an overly simplistic chronological framework, thereby allowing debates that have developed over years (and even decades) to stand side by side. Each volume is separately introduced and the essays structured into coherent sections on specific themes.

Volume One directly addresses the question ‘what is animation’? Volume Two brings together scholarly contributions that focus on the institutional nature of animation production. Volume Three seeks to expand the margins of traditional animation studies by including essays that consider animation that has, historically, been pushed to the margins in a scholarly and/or popular sense. Volume Four functions more as a conventional ‘reader’, bringing the series to a close with what could be considered a critical toolkit.