School animation: disputed territory between art and academia

School animation: disputed territory between art and academia

Most of the animated productions that appear in film, animation and audiovisual schools tend to have little diffusion beyond the classroom walls; which is reasonable since its purpose is not to take corporeity as a finished "work", but rather productions whose usefulness lies, mainly, in serving as a learning instrument. Notwithstanding this, some “school” animation films are made with a subsequent tour of festivals. We are interested in this work to dwell on those productions, which due to their technical and expressive characteristics manage to overcome the classrooms and manage to find their own screens. Student animations are usually very diverse in terms of theme and aesthetic resolution; and they can range from the independent and experimental to the more classic and trivial. In any case, we start from the assumption that animated films produced within the framework of educational institutions are a type of artistic object, which expresses the intentions of their animators/directors as actors in this cultural and social field.

We will consider for this work productions linked to the National University of Córdoba and the National University of Villa María, produced in the period 2010 - 2019 and that have had some type of dissemination and impact in the medium. Both institutions belong to the public educational system of Argentina and are located in the province of Córdoba. Another aspect that makes them similar is that they do not have a specific career in animation, but instead include the teaching of animation as a single subject in film and audiovisual arts curricula.

Finally, we risk that the mapping of this set of works will contribute to the construction of the Cordovan animated audiovisual as an object that is a crossroads between academic processes and artistic production.

Author: Alexander R. Gonzalez.

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