Useful animation: iconography, infrastructure, and impact

Abstract

This article defines and explores the history of ‘useful animation’. Animation has found frequent application as a powerful practical and conceptual tool in professional fields requiring a versatile instrument for a variety of representational needs, from science and medicine to education and advertising. Today, forms of useful animation populate our television news, social media, and urban environments in ways that are no less consequential for their having become second nature. But how did we get here? This tradition is distinct from entertainment or art, and investigating this requires a revision of existing animation history, prompting new research questions and methodologies. This article presents such a framework for further work in this field. In doing so, it has three main aims. First, we establish the intellectual context and consider the historiographic implications of prior research in this area. Second, we ask three key theoretical research questions that can guide the investigation of the history of useful animation (How did useful animation build upon existing graphic traditions? What were the professional and institutional contexts for useful animation and how did these develop? What impact did animation have on professional fields and their understanding of the world?) Finally, we present three case studies from the first decades of film history that illustrate how these questions can be answered and suggest methods and research resources available to scholars of useful animation. These address Jean Comandon’s public health films in Post-WWI France, animated maps made by the Austro-German Institut für Kulturforschung in the inter-war period, and the animated film Unemployment and Money made in Britain illustrating Michael Polanyi’s economic theories in the 1930s. This article provides a basis for future research into this topic.

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