Moving pictures: A history of American animation from Gertie to Pixar and beyond By DarlLarsen, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 2024. pp. 321. $40.00 (hbk)

Animation scholar Suzanne Buchan observes that animation has become a “pervasive” cultural practice. The timely book by Dr. Darl Larsen provides an engaging and well-researched historical account of “US animation, shorts, features produced for release in theaters (cinemas).” Compared with Betancourt's book on Motion Graphics Inc. (2013), Larsen's book offers the breadth and depth of this less researched area. The book is important not only because of the commercial potential of the global animation market size, expected to grow from USD 371.21 billion in 2023 to USD 580.82 billion by 2032, but also because there is increasing academic interest in this emerging area. Some worth mentioning trends can be found in Sage's pioneering interdisciplinary journal, Animation, and the establishment of an animation research center at the University for Creative Arts in the United Kingdom in 1988, as well as an academic program in animation and digital arts at the University of Southern California. Among animation scholars, the creation of the Animation Studies 2.0 blog helps build the community to disseminate the discussions on “current interests and debates in animation studies where questions pertinent to the issue of animation history/histories and historiography are raised” (Bieberstein and Feyersinger, 13). The book contains 11 well-crafted chapters with detailed yet fun facts and screenshots from representative animation shorts and features. Arranged in easy-to-follow chronological order, Dr. Larsen engages readers with a rare Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) in the beginning chapter of the book. The book concludes with an overview of the current development and major players in the animation industry that discuss the legacy studio, Disney, and new animation studios (such as DreamWorks, Blue Sky, NBC Universal, Illuminations, and Sony Animation, among others). As two animation historical scholars, Rada Bieberstein and Erwin Feyersinger (2022), proclaim in their article, “[t]he investigation of the history/histories of animation … starts from the premise that engaging in historical research is always an engagement with the present” (10). Larsen's book has provided readers with rich historical details to contextualize and facilitate such an engagement. The book ends with a bold claim, “Hollywood's future is an animated one” (260), which partially foresaw the rise of animation features as many recent box office hits (such as Ice Age, Frozen, Toy Story, and Super Mario Brothers). However, the book was written before 2022 and did not cover the latest technology developments in artificial intelligence and its role in animation. AI-driven animation has emerged as an important trend in the film and animation industries. These technical advancements can become a good addition to the future second edition of this book to record how technologies continue to revolutionize film and animation production in Hollywood. Additionally, the book has yet to research the role of livestreaming platforms (such as Amazon, Netflix, and Disney+) in distributing animation content to viewers. The consumption of animation content through the Internet and mobile phones (such as HIDIVE) is another interesting phenomenon. One of the most notable strengths of this book is its extensive research, evidenced by over 40 pages of meticulously prepared notes and bibliography. Scholars interested in the developments of American animation in general or in the context of Hollywood will benefit from Larsen's book, which advances and pioneers this subject. The book can benefit its readers, particularly students who are using the book as a textbook if the second edition of the book could include YouTube addresses associated with each animation example that the author has meticulously taken screenshots of. Larsen's book is uniquely designed to examine only the animation histories in the United States and Hollywood contexts. Readers will benefit from other edited books taking a more global perspective, such as Beckman's Animation Film Theory (2014) and Bendazzi's (2016) Animation: A World History. The author have nothing to report.