In the early 1920s, animation promised to annihilate painting, or to show it up for what it had become – static, ever same, trapped within the confines of a frame that had become a kind of prison, cut off from the world and from life, or from the lively principle that suffuses all life worth living. Animation promised – for the critic and filmmaker Hans Richter – twenty-four Mondrians a second, which is so much better than one. Animation pledged kaleidoscopic experience. It promised not only to exceed painting through mobility and rhythm but also to do what cinema should do and was failing to do, as it became a conventionalised form, a banal representation. 

           From: Interview with Esther Leslie: For A Marxist Poetics of Science