This course aims to familiarize students with necessary tools to critically analyze and historically contextualize animated film. Beginning with the early instances of animation manifest in the pre-cinematic technologies, we will follow the chronological trajectory of animation through the 1910s into the digital age. At the same time, we will explore the definition and the scope of the term “animation” through a wide array of themes, concepts, and other media that concerns corporeality, performance, slapstick comedy, abstraction, experimentation, representational politics, television, comic books, mass culture, and technology. There will be precise attention paid to formal and stylistic techniques as well as to the narrative and non-narrative organizations of animated films while keeping an eye on the links of these formal, organizational, and technical features to historical, social, and cultural distinctions. There are no prerequisites. Requirements will include readings in film history and film analysis, an analytical essay, a final exam, and active participation.