The Animated Dialogues 2007 conference was first conceptualised as an event that would bring together scholars working in the field of animation studies in the Australasian region. This first Animated Dialogues conference focused on the areas of texts, industries and audiences as a way of bringing people together who frequently work in quite disparate geographical and intellectual contexts. The conference’s aims were twofold: firstly, to consolidate the sense of an intellectual community working in animation studies in the region and, secondly, to provide a space to begin the work of documenting the rich and diverse histories, practices and critiques of animation in Australasia. Implicit in the conference’s agenda was the desire to foreground issues pertaining to the future development of the discipline of animation studies locally. That is, the conference was envisaged as an opportunity to take stock of the work that is underway, as well as to identify existing gaps and potential areas of interrogation, with an eye to expanding the discipline in ways that build upon the backbone of rigorous research currently being undertaken.

The conference was a truly collaborative event, receiving funding from relevant schools and departments at Monash University (Victoria), Murdoch University (Western Australia), RMIT (Victoria), and Deakin University (Victoria). Two days of the conference were hosted at Monash University’s Berwick campus – an outer suburban Melbourne campus with a strong animation education profile – with the third day held at the Victorian College of the Arts in the inner city. The conference was attended by delegates from Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and Japan that hailed from a variety of academic, pedagogic, production and exhibition backgrounds, including full and part-time university researchers, a cohort of postgraduate and Honours students (notably, Andi Sparks’ Queensland contingent who made the trip en masse), artists such as Lisa Roberts and Michael Roseth, and professional animators such as Antoinette Starkiewicz. Their work addressed a wide array of topics, ranging from the deeply theoretical to the production-inspired. We hope to have reflected some of the diversity of this work in the articles presented within this collection.

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