While many live-action films portray disability as a spectacle, "crip animation" (a genre of animated films that celebrates disabled people's lived experiences) uses a variety of techniques like clay animation, puppets, pixilation, and computer-generated animation to represent the inner worlds of people with disabilities. Crip animation has the potential to challenge the ableist gaze and immerse viewers in an alternative bodily experience. In Animated Film and Disability, Slava Greenberg analyzes over 30 animated works about disabilities, including Rocks in My Pockets, An Eyeful of Sound, and A Shift in Perception. He considers the ableism of live-action cinematography, the involvement of filmmakers with disabilities in the production process, and the evocation of the spectators' senses of sight and hearing, consequently subverting traditional spectatorship and listenership hierarchies. In addition, Greenberg explores physical and sensory accessibility in theaters and suggests new ways to accommodate cinematic screenings. Offering an introduction to disability studies and crip theory for film, media, and animation scholars, Animated Film and Disability demonstrates that crip animation has the power to breach the spectator's comfort, evoking awareness of their own bodies and, in certain cases, their social privileges.
"A tour de force that will enrich the way we experience and value our diverse embodiments both personally and socially, Animated Film and Disability: Cripping Spectatorship is an immensely important and much needed contribution not only to film and media studies but also to the humanities and social sciences. Taking some (but not all) of the 'dis' out of 'disability,' Greenberg approaches embodiment through the metamorphic plasmatics of animation. This strikingly original and expansive critical strategy and its highlighted films give shape and subjective voice to a variety of 'crip' ways of 'being in the world,' that may also 'crip' these films' spectators, who sense (if not re-cognize) the various onscreen possibilities and probabilities of their own embodied and ever-mutable animation."
Vivian Sobchack, author of Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image,
"In Animated Film and Disability, Slava Greenberg opens up a theory of 'crip animation' that grapples with the fullness of disability, queer, and trans experience. Applying a phenomenological approach, the book enables the radical basis of the animated film genre's alternative world-building objectives to surface. No longer child's play, animation operationalizes plastic universes to destabilize viewers' and normative film conventions that typically structure the visual, auditory, and cognitive processing fields. In doing so, Greenberg unveils the political possibilities of disability representation and its potential to upend the over-worn expectations of cinematic normalcy."
