While film theory has been around for as long as cinema itself, animation theory is a relatively new field. The ascendance of digital production and CGI and the rethinking of the medium it has provoked has catalyzed a contemporary turn to animation within film and media studies. Animation theory is not a sub-discipline of media theory, however; it is an interdiscipline crossing a wide variety of fields and approaches. This class will survey the expanded field of animation theory. We will consider appearances of animation in early film theory, examine its role in theories of post-cinema, look at its uses in molecular biology labs as well as in data visualization and VR, and trace its relations to concepts of animism and animacies that link it to the cultural (geo)politics of racialization, ability, climate change, and indigenous ontologies. This wide-ranging approach to animation will provide a framework for thinking about the deep-structural connections between media technologies, life worlds, and social struggles. [Tracks M, S]