Re your comments, the problem for us is that it’s plainly inadequate to call the profound time-slice (aka. bullet-time) technique an ‘animation fx’. Or to relegate Martin Arnold’s revelatory micro-editing process in Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy to ‘post-production’. In both cases the radical concepts are vastly bigger than the form, they preceded the making, and would never have been envisaged by an animator.

When Winsor McCay moved from creating his newspaper comic strips to Gertie the Dinosaur, he wasn’t an animator making a movie, he was extending his ‘chalk and talk’ live vaudeville act into a novelty two-hander. And I doubt the hardcore creative visionaries and art directors behind Sin City spent a lot of time with animators or post-production operators when they were developing the feature’s concept – they had a much bigger pre-production agenda to invent a complete, coherent space/world as the visual narrative bed of the film.

Right now, there’s modest funding around in the UK for conventional animation. Our challenge, Andrius, is that we want to support stuff other funders won’t touch, and we believe we state this very clearly. Each proposal we receive for an animate! commission has weeks invested in it by the artist so it really hurts when it’s totally traditional and hence off-target. We wish everybody who applied had your discernment and wisdom in understanding that there are many types of ‘animation’ including cartoon and, especially, real experiment.

We’re happy you agree that the conventional ‘frame-by-frame’ definition of animation is insufficient or irrelevant. And you’re right, it is about killing pre-judgement or, rather, stereotypical notions. Okay, death to the label ‘animation’ may be an extreme measure, but it just might be more successful than re-stating “animation it’s animation”...?!