I find that the annual conferences of the Society for Animation Studies (SAS) is one of those necessities of life that refreshes both the mind and the spirit. While they may often lack the scale and frenetic energy that one encounters at festivals (although their second conference was held in conjunction with Ottawa '90) or even at a conference of the 1200-member Society for Cinema Studies (SCS), that's not the point. SAS is still a fairly modest-sized organization, whose membership generally lurks under 150. However, if you want to know what's going on in animation history, theory and criticism, SAS is the place to go. But then I'm biased, since I started SAS back in 1987 and was its president for several years.

This year's event, which focused on "Japanese Animation and Global Media" and was held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, September 25-29, had a special meaning for me. Back in 1984, I had come to Madison to present my first conference paper at an SCS conference. Originally, I was to be part of a panel on animation, but it did not make and I and another panelist were placed elsewhere.

The idea that there were only two acceptable proposals seemed absurd, as I knew there were a lot more animation scholars out there. But somehow the Society for Cinema Studies, for all its power and prestige, was unable to draw them out of the woodwork. It was an incident that eventually led me, with the help of other like-minded people, to start SAS. (One of those like-minded people was Russell Merritt, who helped run the 1984 conference!) And sure enough, when the first SAS conference was held at UCLA in 1989, some 40 (academic and independent) scholars and filmmakers showed up from around the world to participate. (Total attendance at the three day event was over 100.)

Since then, schools in the US, Canada and England have played host to SAS each year, sometimes in conjunction with local film archives and festivals. As a result, other organizations, including SCS and the Asian Cinema Studies Society, have opened their arms wider to animation, as have mainstream academic journals.

The organizer for this year's event was Donald Crafton, whose pioneering history of silent animation, Before Mickey (1982), helped provide a solid academic footing to the field. While the conference was not the biggest in SAS history, Crafton did bring in a large number of mainstream cinema studies superstars, most of whom inevitably spoke with considerable passion on anime!

What It's All About
After a half day of screenings and a tour of Wisconsin Center for Film & Theater Research, the conference proper began on Thursday, September 26, with a panel on Animation Technology, featuring papers by Richard Leskosky and Carolyn Shaffer on the history of the Mutoscope and the technology of puppet animation respectively. Both presentations were embellished by a constant interchange in which the audience seemed to collaborate with the panelists in the process of their historical research. This, after all, is what academic conferences are really all about, as researchers test their findings and hunches with their colleagues before going public.

With the exception of Brian Camp (who spoke on "The Evolution of Street Fighter: From Video Game to Spiritual Quest"), the anime papers were mostly given by people who were not specialists in Japanese animation. However, many were expert in Japanese live-action films and helped put the development of anime in a different perspective. This was especially evident in David Bordwell's "Stylistic Transformations Between Live-Action and Animation in Japanese Cinema," as well as David Dresser's "Why Anime?," which dealt with anime's rise against the background of the decline of Japanese live-action cinema.