The flesh of animation: Bodily sensations in film and digital media By SandraAnnett. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 2024. pp. 288. $29.00 (pbk)

Turning toward disembodied hands and holographic performers, Sandra Annett's The Flesh of Animation contends with embodiment and its persistence in animated film. Arguing that the genre has thus far been overlooked, Annett's focus on animation's capacity to “express and incite embodied experience” diverges from previous scholarship's concentration on analog, indexical cinema (7). As part of the embodied turn, The Flesh of Animation follows in the footsteps of feminist scholarship, such as Laura U. Marks's The Skin of Film (2000) and Kate Ince's The Body and the Screen (2017), in countering discourses of digital disembodiment. Working within film phenomenology and Deleuzian theory, Annett makes a convincing case for the centrality of embodied experiences in an expansive range of medial and cultural texts. Annett makes three key interventions in the discussion of film and embodiment. First, her scope moves beyond traditional foci in film phenomenology by privileging the an-ontological medium of animation over live-action cinema (8). Covering non-mainstream and even non-cinematic instances of animation, she draws upon a broad range of primary sources from North America, Europe, and East Asia, including music videos and art installations. Finally, the book positions itself against an exclusive focus on indexical images, opting to include stylized representations of the body to discuss non-dominant experiences. In addressing the genre's development since the 1980s, the book maps out diverse strategies of proprioceptive aesthetics and haptic visuality in animation. Moving from material to virtual modes of animation, the individual chapters follow an illustrative progression through hand-drawn, digital, and holographic texts. The book opens with a section devoted to 2D cel animation (short for celluloid) in Japanese anime and hybrid films that operate along the lines of haptic visuality. In the first chapter, this is covered through sensory experience while the second chapter considers hybrid films that juxtapose animated and live performances and their opposing ontologies. The third chapter turns to contemporary live-action remakes that favor perceptual realism and nostalgia in shaping the audience's perception of bodies as assets. The discussion also highlights less visible labor practices that undergird the process of animation and motion capture through discourses of biopower. Diverging from narrative texts, the fourth chapter focuses on the phenomenon of electro swing music videos through the Deleuzian movement image and time image. This is also where the analysis takes a personal slant, as it reads music videos, the cultural scene of electro swing, and the author's physical access to the music scene alongside one another. In her final chapter, Annett moves toward virtual ideals and the posthuman through noteworthy multidimensional media experiences (such as the VOCALOIDS) and installations works by new media artist Lu Yang. In discussing 2.5D animation, chapter five challenges discourses of digital disembodiment most firmly, calling for a more corporeal or embodied form of posthumanism. In this shift to the virtual, Annett emphasizes new media's distinctive attention to the imbrication between the virtual and the living as key for the future of animation studies. Bridging the discursive gap between animation and embodiment, The Flesh of Animation provides a systematic overview on stylistic, technological, and medial variance in evoking the body. In terms of scope, this variance covers a breadth of ground that needs to strike a difficult balance between approaches to embodiment, the evolving mediascape of film, and the specific cultural contexts of each case study. Nevertheless, Annett offers a nuanced appraisal of entanglements between different styles of animation, as well as fertile ground for future research on virtual practices. For researchers interested in film and new media studies, Annett's book offers an elucidating introduction to the embodied turn, contemporary concerns in film phenomenology, and East Asian media culture.