Animation and cinema are both storytelling mediums for sure. Animation expands cinema's possibilities with imagination, offering fantastical worlds beyond live-action limitations.

Yet, cinema traditionally refers to live-action films. Thus, animation is a part of cinema, bridging progression from static art to dynamic storytelling.

Cinema is often limited to live-action, but animation challenges that view, offering a unique realm of visual storytelling.

Animation can depict abstract concepts and inner thoughts visually, blurring lines between film, art, and imagination. Hence, animation extends the traditional scope of cinema.

Len Lye (1901 – 1980) was a New Zealand artist known primarily for his experimental films and kinetic sculptures.

In the A Colour Box (1935) Lye painted long, continuous patterns on the 35 mm film stock, without frame lines to separate individual film frames and with few splices used. He used combs or sticks to create linear patterns on the film stock.

Public Comments:

"Imagine how hard it'd be to synchronise something like this by hand in 1935"

"Wait, how?! Was it painted directly on the celluloid? How did they made copies?"

"just watched this on a "Secrets of British Animation" programme on BBC 4, and I learnt that if you pause on some of the frames you can see Lye's fingerprints where he applied the paint on the film"

The theme of "mixture of fiction and reality" is a keyword that symbolises Kon Satoshi's works, and he repeatedly depicts the relationship between "fiction and reality" with various approaches in each of his works.

"Satoshi Kon used the hand-drawn medium to explore social stigmas and the human psyche, casting a light on our complexities in ways that might have failed in live action. Much of it was gritty, intense and, at times, even nightmarish. Kon didn't shy away from mature subject matter or live-action sensibilities in his work, and his films will always occupy a fascinating middle ground between 'cartoons' and the world as we know it." -- Dean DeBlois

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1QqpbeSEtJ/?spm_id_from=333.337.search-card.all.click

The cinema is more of a documentary adaptation of real events, while the animation is more of a fantasy without much basis in reality.

Animation can be part of a movie, such as an animated film

Cinema ≠ Animation

Movies need to write scripts and choose roles.

Cinemas need to write scripts, select characters, shoot and edit, and animation can be done in the studio.

Think of it like this: "All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares." All animation is a type of filmmaking (cinema), but cinema also includes live-action.

Animation refers to a method of image creation based on frame-by-frame manipulation—whether drawn, digitally generated, or physically constructed. Its defining feature is that motion is artificially produced, not captured from real-time physical reality. The term therefore describes a technique or mode of production.

Cinema, by contrast, denotes the entire field of film: its artistic practices, industrial systems, technological infrastructures, narrative conventions, and cultural meanings. Cinema encompasses live-action film, animation, documentary, experimental film, and all other moving-image forms. It is both an art form and a cultural institution.