The astoni shing increase in academic work on animation of the last twenty years, and its intensification in recent years, has also made it a much more heterogeneous area of research. It is by no means a problem in itself that this area has begun to develop an overarching dynamic towards using animation, and es pecially anime, as a boundless playground for ideas. However, the scholarly energy this tendency is obviously generating should be paired with a degree of reflection on what recent research on animation has achieved, and where its current productive potential lies.