This essay traces the theorization of interwar animation through period analogies with painting and dance, paying special attention to the valorization of concepts such as dematerialization and embodiment, which metaphors of visual music and physical kinesthesis were used to promote. Beginning in 1919, and exemplified by her feature-length film Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (1926), Lotte Reiniger directed numerous silhouette films animated in an ornate style that embraced decorative materiality. This aesthetic set her in uneasy relation to the avant-garde, whose strenuous attempts to distance abstraction from ornament took the form of absolute film, and were screened together at the Absolute film Matinee of 1925. However, their claims for aesthetic integrity were staked on territory these artists largely had in common. By adopting a feminist approach that examines networks of collaboration, publication, and artistic production in Weimar Berlin, this essay reveals Reiniger as an early proponent of haptic cinema in interwar Europe and one of animation's earliest and most perceptive theorists.

Based in the city of Leeds in the north of England, Leeds Animation Workshop describes itself as a “not-for-profit, cooperative company, which produces and distributes animated films and films on social and educational issues.” The organization was formally established in 1978 following a collaboration by a group of women on the film Who Needs Nurseries? We Do! In this interview Terry Wragg, a member of the group since that founding period, talks with Yvonne Tasker about funding patterns, filmmaking, the women's movement, and the significance of the workshop movement in the United Kingdom.