One of the more exciting books that we have had the opportunity to recently index at Southwest Humanities is Surrealism and Animation: Transnational Connections, 1920-Present, edited by Abigail Susik (Bloomsbury, 2025), which was published in May 2025. This edited collection is the first of its kind to thoroughly map the intersections between the surrealist movement and the world of animation, spanning diverse styles—from early trick films and Betty Boop to anime, Claymation, and 3D animation. Contributors examine how surrealist artists, including Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Joseph Cornell, Jan Švankmajer, and others drew upon the unique expressive capacities of animated media to give form to dreams, the absurd, and the uncanny. Striking at the heart of how animation has been harnessed as a medium of cultural, aesthetic, and political experimentation, this collection situates animation alongside surrealist traditions and demonstrates how moving images open creative portals to previously hidden, subconscious worlds through techniques like collage, transformation, and visual paradox. This book will be of interest to scholars and readers of Film and Media Studies, Art History (particularly the study of Surrealism), Cultural Studies, and Critical Theory. For more information about this excellent work, please see the publishers website here.
SOUTHWEST HUMANITIES 