André Martin and the “Idea of Animation”: On the 1955 “Birth” of Animation Cinema

Abstract

This article examines the French critic André Martin (1925-1994), who was active in the French animation scene from the 1950s onward, focusing on his conception of cinema as articulated through both his critical practice and his involvement in the organization of animation film festivals. It reconsiders the significance of the term cinéma d’animation, which Martin employed as a conceptual notion, and seeks to understand at the level of concrete critical practice what previous scholarship has described in abstract terms as Martin’s “idea of animation.” This idea was never systematized by Martin himself but appears fragmentarily throughout his writings as an open framework. Focusing on his critiques of state-studio productions around 1955, the article analyzes his writings in dialogue with film theory in order to reconstruct this idea theoretically and to clarify its theoretical potential.