When Charles Solomon's coffee-table book The History of Animation: Enchanted Drawings debuted in 1989, it quickly became a fetish item in my library. I immediately wanted a wall-size banner of the five-image sequence from A Hare Grows in Manhattan of Bugs Bunny caught in some explosive gesture, the middle frame stretched insanely in a curveball-fat distortion. Growing up as I had with only recycled Looney Toons, Silly Symphonies and Saturday-morning limited-animation effluent, I felt a slight buzz coming on as I relished images of Ub Iwerks' Pincushion Man, saw Glen Keane's charcoal roughs of the bear fight from The Fox and the Hound, and watched David Daniels wield a machete to cut clay for Pee-Wee's Playhouse.

Time to revisit Duck Amuck, I thought, but more importantly, time to reconnoiter my local library for Private Snafu and the Fleischer Superman shorts. I was beginning to know something about just how much animation I didn't know anything about.

If you did likewise, you're going to do it all over again when you score a copy of Animation Art, edited by Jerry Beck and with contributions from 22 other animation writers. (Full disclosure: AWN managing editor Rick DeMott is one of those contributors.) Ten years after the last edition of Enchanted Drawings, Beck, et al, have put together an addicting book of ready-reference covering hundreds of topics ranging across the whole history of the artform, from Humorous Phases of Funny Faces to Shrek 2, with a plethora of scenic overlooks along the way.

In 12 chapters, Animation Art covers the history of the artform in chronological order, dividing it roughly into five-year intervals through the 1960s and then decade-by-decade through 2004. This is a universal history, and the book's coverage girdles the globe, with each chapter dealing in turn with animation production in North America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe and Asia. (Only after making this list have I realized that Africa and South America are never mentioned. Sure, no powerhouse studios have sprung out of Cape Town or Buenos Aires, but why not, I wonder? The reasons might be interesting.)

Each two-page spread covers a different topic in capsule form — this marks the biggest difference between Animation Art and Enchanted Drawings. Where Solomon's book compiled all of animation history into a single narrative, Animation Art breaks it down into packets of activity dominated by individuals or studios that, in the book and in history, may or may not have had anything to do with each other. There are introductory essays on all the ubiquitous stars, including Walt Disney, Walter Lantz, Max Fleischer, Chuck Jones and Tex Avery.

For the intermediate student, there are era-by-era views of studios with less American broadcast presence, including NFB, UPA, Zagreb Studio and Pannonia. And for true haystack-divers there are tantalizing peeks at areas of animation most of us never see, including Japanese propaganda cartoons of WWII, Shanghai Animation Studio product from before the Cultural Revolution, and the huge library of Original Animation Video amassed for the Japanese home video market in the 1980s.

The strength of the book comes from its diversity of sources. Not limiting itself to one author's field of study, the book brings more than a dozen different writers to the table, all writing in detail on their own areas of expertise. Animation Art originates with Flame Tree Publishing, a U.K. imprint, and it's written by an international cast of authors for an international audience, one that by definition has seen more of this product than is currently available on American home video. The weakness of the book is part and parcel of its strength — depth has been sacrificed for breadth.