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ALMOND ANIMATION
Blog about animated feature films by art historian Tatiana Almond
Animation entered my life early, as it does for many of us, long before I had the vocabulary to explain why it mattered to me. My first encounters were on VHS: The Last Unicorn, 101 Dalmatians. Later came Miyazaki on DVD, and with him the unsettling realisation that animation could be my home & major research interest.
Much later, I had the extraordinary chance to meet Hayao Miyazaki in person — one of those rare moments when professional life briefly collides with childhood dream.
My practice is rooted in the study of art history, particularly photography, collage, and visual culture. I'm an alumna of the New York Film Academy and University of London.
Much later, I had the extraordinary chance to meet Hayao Miyazaki in person — one of those rare moments when professional life briefly collides with childhood dream.
My practice is rooted in the study of art history, particularly photography, collage, and visual culture. I'm an alumna of the New York Film Academy and University of London.
What brought me back to animation was not nostalgia, but curiosity: I wanted to understand how the world works when almost nothing is given in advance — when movement, space, time, texture, and even the laws of physics can be invented rather than recorded.
I began writing about animation in 2024. This blog is an extension of that practice: a place to look closely at animated films, their visuals and ideas, and the peculiar ways in which they make the invisible visible and touch us deeply.
Years of studying art have left me with the professional reflex of asking what an image can do. I'm trying, however, not to lose the less professional pleasure of simply being astonished by animated feature films.
I began writing about animation in 2024. This blog is an extension of that practice: a place to look closely at animated films, their visuals and ideas, and the peculiar ways in which they make the invisible visible and touch us deeply.
Years of studying art have left me with the professional reflex of asking what an image can do. I'm trying, however, not to lose the less professional pleasure of simply being astonished by animated feature films.
Einstein once said: “Imagination is more important than knowledge”. The phrase has become a cliché, but perhaps there is something useful in its very overuse. If even one of the great pillars of science kept returning to imagination as something fundamental, it is worth asking which art form gives that faculty the greatest freedom. My answer is animation.
Not because animation is superior to other arts, but because it is built according to a fundamentally different logic.
Bazin famously grounded the ontology of the photographic image in light: the camera records a trace of reality, and that trace is the source of the viewer’s trust in the cinematic image. That theory has, of course, been challenged many times. Vertov used montage to expose the constructed nature of the supposedly “objective” gaze; docufiction and mockumentary blurred the boundary between recording and staging. Yet the debate about cinema’s dependence on context and physical reality has never disappeared. Even when cinema exposes the camera’s instability, it still speaks the language of the trace.
Animation speaks another language from the beginning. There is no luminous imprint of an object, only a hand, a line, a movement invented frame by frame — let us leave rotoscoping aside for the moment. Animation cannot pretend to show “what really happened,” because there was never anything there to film in the first place. So perhaps it is more precise not to say that animation is “more honest” than cinema, but, following McLuhan and Manovich, that it is epistemologically structured differently: it has no referent prior to the act of creation, only the act itself.
The honesty I mean is not the rejection of illusion, but the open acceptance of authorship over that illusion. Even Disney realism does not claim to be a chronicle of reality. It creates a world rather than documenting one.
The comparison between animation and myth works not because they look metaphorically similar, but because they are structurally related—and this is why the comparison deserves some precision. For Malinowski, myth is not merely a space in which anxiety can be processed, but also a “social charter,” a tool that legitimises the structure of society. For Lévi-Strauss, myth is a mechanism for resolving structural contradictions in culture that cannot otherwise be solved logically. Myth is therefore a collective and largely anonymous machine for producing meaning.
Auteur animation inherits one of myth’s central functions: turning the inexplicable—fear, death, desire—into form, but it relocates that work onto the territory of the individual. Joseph Campbell called this “personal mythology”: where archaic myth spoke in the name of the community, the modern artist builds a private cosmology, with its own laws of gravity, its own geography of fear and love. The difference is not that one is more truthful than the other. The difference is that myth is unsigned, while animation is signed—and that signature is both its strength and its limitation.
Animation is not only an act of visual myth-making, nor merely a “space for experiencing emotion.” Winnicott described transitional space as a zone of play in which the subjective and the objective are not yet sharply separated, and where a child does not need to prove whether a teddy bear is “really” alive. Animation institutionalises this zone for adults: the viewer does not have to decide whether a drawn world is “true” in order to grieve or be afraid within it.
Narrative identity, in Dan McAdams’s sense—the idea that we are, to some extent, the stories we tell about ourselves—helps explain why the “right to author one’s own reality” is more than a beautiful metaphor. If identity is constituted through narrative, then an art form that literally shows a world being made out of nothing rehearses the same capacity through which we keep our own sense of self afloat.
And yet we have to resist the temptation of relativism: the slide from “everyone has their own truth” to “there is no truth at all.” Husserl’s concept of the lifeworld and Gadamer’s fusion of horizons offer a more precise vocabulary. Recognising the limits of one’s own perspective does not make understanding another person impossible; on the contrary, it becomes a condition for understanding. I can trust someone else’s world precisely because it does not pretend to be mine.
The subjective truth of animation is convincing not because it is sealed within itself, but because it openly reveals its boundaries. In doing so, it invites the viewer inside instead of keeping them outside, as supposedly neutral—but in fact authored—objectivity often does.
Animation gives us not only the freedom to invent a world of our own but, paradoxically, also teaches us how to be understood by others without ceasing to be ourselves.
After all, as we know, “imagination is more important than knowledge”.
Not because animation is superior to other arts, but because it is built according to a fundamentally different logic.
Bazin famously grounded the ontology of the photographic image in light: the camera records a trace of reality, and that trace is the source of the viewer’s trust in the cinematic image. That theory has, of course, been challenged many times. Vertov used montage to expose the constructed nature of the supposedly “objective” gaze; docufiction and mockumentary blurred the boundary between recording and staging. Yet the debate about cinema’s dependence on context and physical reality has never disappeared. Even when cinema exposes the camera’s instability, it still speaks the language of the trace.
Animation speaks another language from the beginning. There is no luminous imprint of an object, only a hand, a line, a movement invented frame by frame — let us leave rotoscoping aside for the moment. Animation cannot pretend to show “what really happened,” because there was never anything there to film in the first place. So perhaps it is more precise not to say that animation is “more honest” than cinema, but, following McLuhan and Manovich, that it is epistemologically structured differently: it has no referent prior to the act of creation, only the act itself.
The honesty I mean is not the rejection of illusion, but the open acceptance of authorship over that illusion. Even Disney realism does not claim to be a chronicle of reality. It creates a world rather than documenting one.
The comparison between animation and myth works not because they look metaphorically similar, but because they are structurally related—and this is why the comparison deserves some precision. For Malinowski, myth is not merely a space in which anxiety can be processed, but also a “social charter,” a tool that legitimises the structure of society. For Lévi-Strauss, myth is a mechanism for resolving structural contradictions in culture that cannot otherwise be solved logically. Myth is therefore a collective and largely anonymous machine for producing meaning.
Auteur animation inherits one of myth’s central functions: turning the inexplicable—fear, death, desire—into form, but it relocates that work onto the territory of the individual. Joseph Campbell called this “personal mythology”: where archaic myth spoke in the name of the community, the modern artist builds a private cosmology, with its own laws of gravity, its own geography of fear and love. The difference is not that one is more truthful than the other. The difference is that myth is unsigned, while animation is signed—and that signature is both its strength and its limitation.
Animation is not only an act of visual myth-making, nor merely a “space for experiencing emotion.” Winnicott described transitional space as a zone of play in which the subjective and the objective are not yet sharply separated, and where a child does not need to prove whether a teddy bear is “really” alive. Animation institutionalises this zone for adults: the viewer does not have to decide whether a drawn world is “true” in order to grieve or be afraid within it.
Narrative identity, in Dan McAdams’s sense—the idea that we are, to some extent, the stories we tell about ourselves—helps explain why the “right to author one’s own reality” is more than a beautiful metaphor. If identity is constituted through narrative, then an art form that literally shows a world being made out of nothing rehearses the same capacity through which we keep our own sense of self afloat.
And yet we have to resist the temptation of relativism: the slide from “everyone has their own truth” to “there is no truth at all.” Husserl’s concept of the lifeworld and Gadamer’s fusion of horizons offer a more precise vocabulary. Recognising the limits of one’s own perspective does not make understanding another person impossible; on the contrary, it becomes a condition for understanding. I can trust someone else’s world precisely because it does not pretend to be mine.
The subjective truth of animation is convincing not because it is sealed within itself, but because it openly reveals its boundaries. In doing so, it invites the viewer inside instead of keeping them outside, as supposedly neutral—but in fact authored—objectivity often does.
Animation gives us not only the freedom to invent a world of our own but, paradoxically, also teaches us how to be understood by others without ceasing to be ourselves.
After all, as we know, “imagination is more important than knowledge”.
Essays
Коллаж как самостоятельная художественная техника
Tatiana Almond
2026
2026