Coppola was right. Computer animation, merely one aspect of the “communications revolution” is now a mainstream cinema practice. In the hands of Pixar Animation, DreamWorks SKG, Blue Sky, and a myriad of other studios,
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it has evolved from a marginal, experimental approach to film production to become the core aspect of much contemporary moving image construction. Cinema has always been a highly synthetic medium, of course, but computer animation in all its guises has enabled a much greater degree of “constructedness” in the cinematic image, promp ting claims that animation is not so much a variant, or “second cousin” of film, but the essential condition of film itself.
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While such a perspective encourages a radical reinterpretation of film form in its own right, it is important in the first instance to establish how the computer became an intrinsic part of film production and to trace the ways in which computer animation has influenced the vocabulary of film from visual effects to feature‐length animated stories. Prompted by the extraordinarily prescient comments Francis Ford Coppola made at the 1979 Oscar ceremony, this discussion, therefore, seeks to advance an informal history of computer animation within the American context, a task that necessitates defining its place and presence in American film before commenting on its own conditions as a film form and a mode of production in the contemporary era.