Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons by Hannah Frank (review)

It is a rare thrill to be surprised by a work of criticism. In animation studies, we have many ways of conceptualizing the medium at its center. Animation is a branch of cinema, or, in the digital age, maybe cinema is a subset of animation. It is drawn cinema, or it is moving graphic design. It is an outgrowth of the trick film or perhaps of the comic strip or else of the optical toy. Or it is a sui generis art form that takes advantage of whatever technologies are around it at any given time. We are used to animation's porous boundaries and hybrid status, and we have a large body of scholarship grappling with what it is and how to talk about it. Hannah Frank's Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons is an intervention in this discussion, and it is worth being blunt: I have never seen animation talked about in this way before. It is field-defining, mind-expanding scholarship, and it is a joyous surprise.

Frank's book is more than a surprise, however; it is about surprise. The question that echoes throughout this book—"Did I just see that?"—carries the ultimate lesson of this impressive and meticulously researched study.¹ Frank examines animated films of the Golden Age (1920–1960) frame by frame, sometimes even poring over individual cels stacked atop one another to compose a frame. In so doing, she illuminates what hides unseen within the studio cartoons that unraveled in front of their audiences at twenty-four frames per second: smudges and creases, mistakes and jokes, traces of fatigue and artistic intervention. In treating the familiar seven-minute animated short as a collection of thousands of photographs of hand-painted art, Frank opens a space to consider the role of human fallibility, private whimsy, and unrecognized labor in the industrialized realm of Golden Age studio animation. Labor is the most important of these; one of the book's main goals is to recuperate the artistry of Hollywood's unnamed inkers, painters, and camera operators and to reveal the centrality of their labor to the medium. When viewing animation frame by frame, we find surprise traces of these artists, including sometimes their literal fingerprints; for Frank, these traces are "an index of their presence."²

There is a second kind of labor at issue in this way of thinking about animation: our own, as the audience. If this method of viewing animation is in part an ethical responsibility, bearing witness to the hourly or daily toil of faceless employees, it is also an aesthetic necessity. To fully understand cartoons, Frank argues, one must work, as fair recompense for the painstaking, finger-breaking work of the artists who created them. This reciprocity is evident in the book's introduction, "Looking at Labor," and conclusion, "The Labor of Looking." (Elsewhere, there is a section heading that reads simply "Eyestrain.") However, central to the book's premise is that this work is fun. As Frank notes, looking for the labor in animation "can mobilize an inquisitive gaze that plays with and within the image. Rather than worry that we cannot ever know what it is that we are looking at, we delight in the masquerade. Forensic investigation becomes a game."³ This spirit of play suffuses the book, balancing the towering demands of Frank's research—the time, the focus, and, yes, the eyestrain—with the thrill of discovery that such research offers.

This joining of work and play both celebrates the artistic labor of below-the-line cartoon workers and constitutes the book's most exciting paradox. Frank ruthlessly demystifies the animation apparatus. One description reads, "there is not a single mouse, nor is there a cat, a chair, a mirror, or a door. There is only a stationary camera of prescribed focal length, directed downward at a table...