The progressive migration of the European avant-gardes to America in the late 1930s compelled an adjustment of modern art practice and theory to the new cultural environment and to the needs of the cultural institutions that supported them. This radical redefinition of modern art implied the construction of a modernist canon, one that became hegemonic after WWII with the institutionalization of a discourse of modernism strictly focused on the value of form and an adherence to medium specificity. Associated with cartoons, advertising, and with popular culture in general, animation was dismissed as kitsch.  Moreover, while modernist scholars widely acknowledged film as the modernist medium par excellence, they did not pay much attention to animation, which was relegated to the category of a minor, subsidiary cinematic genre.

Inherently and unabashedly multidisciplinary (it encompasses and creatively blends painting, drawing, sculpture, film and many other artistic media), animation obdurately defied and still challenges disciplinary regulation. Animation and animation theory, developed in the interstices between modernist fields of practice and theorization such as art history and film studies, offer a unique standpoint from where to analyze modernism in art, the historiography of this discourse, and modernist theory itself.