Book Review: Omar Sayfo, Arab Animation: Images of Identity

Animation has been a ubiquitous part of popular and visual culture since at least the end of the 19th century and has evolved and transformed as a medium in tandem with cinema, television, and computer graphics. Its quintessential hybridity and dynamism as a visual form—essentially combining the age-old art of drawing with evolving techniques of moving images—allows for an abundance of creative freedom and translates into the dizzying array of aesthetics, styles, narrative structures, themes, techniques, functions, and audiences associated with contemporary animation. The study of animation—as texts, ideologies, industries, or audiences—has long been an established subfield of media and communication scholarship (see, e.g., Batkin, 2017; Wells, 2013), particularly concerning globally relevant and hegemonic animation industries like Japanese anime (Napier, 2001) and Disney animation (Pallant, 2011). The fact that there has been scarcely any scholarly attention to this field in the Arab world (see, Van de Peer, 2017, for another recent work), is a substantial lacuna that Omar Sayfo’s Arab Animation: Images of Identity aims to remedy.