
About the Journal
Semiotic Review is a multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal devoted to publishing original scholarship bearing upon symbolic behavior, meaning, and signification in all its forms. It is online and open-access.
Current Issue
Animation
Editor: Paul Manning

The animated drawing is the most direct manifestation of Animism. That which is known to be lifeless, a graphic drawing, is animated. Drawing as such outside an object of representation is brought to life. The very idea, if you will, of the animated cartoon is like a direct embodiment of the method of animism. What is animation? What does it mean to animate things in various media, to invest them with their own life and agency? And what is it like to live among such animated things? This special issue presents papers from any discipline that look at animation semiotically, not only as a specific medium or art form (viz. cel animation, stop motion, and so on) but also as a broader category of semiotic action, the projection of humanity into the nonhuman world. Inspired especially by Alan Cholodenko’s (1991, 2007, 2016, this issue) and Teri Silvio’s (2010, 2019) wide-ranging syntheses, we see the term animation as encompassing a series of related approaches, ranging from new reconceptualizations of what has been called “animism”, including the recognition of “other-than-human persons” (Hallowell 1960) and Sergei Eisenstein’s conception of the “plasmaticness” of animation as a kind of animism (1986), to the animated “life” of nonhuman characters in Japanese media and everyday life (Nozawa, this issue), to the agency of heterogeneous assemblages in the “Vital Materialism” of Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010). We invite papers that approach the proliferation of animated beings (resulting either from narrower or broader definitions of animation) populating our “more than human” world. In the spirit of the epigraph by Soviet film pioneer Eisenstein, we invite theorizations of animation in broad relation to animism and vitalism, bringing together cartoon characters and stop motion animated objects with ghosts, dolls, puppets, ancestors, gods, brands, automatons, robots, cyborgs, voice chips, vocaloids, avatars, virtual idols, and so on. Like all thematic issues, Animation will remain open to new essays and interventions, and there is no deadline for submission. For the Call for Papers click here.
To submit e-mail: semioticreview@gmail.com.
Published: 2025-01-18
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