What do we mean by the slippery term ‘animation’ when discussing moving image culture? Is it a technique? – A style? – An interdisciplinary artistic medium? An art form that enables us to see and experience a ‘world’ that has little relation to our own lived experience of the world around us? Animated ‘Worlds’ is an edited anthology of papers originally presented at the eponymous conference held in 2003 at Farnham Castle, England. The conference encouraged speculation about these and other questions that address animation’s increasing pervasiveness in contemporary culture. The authors’ often interdisciplinary approaches range from film spectatorship, close film analysis, phenomenology and cognitive theory to philosophy, performance, literary theory and digital aesthetics and reveal the astonishing variety of ‘worlds’ animation confronts us with.The authors are: Suzanne Buchan (Editor), Heather Crow, Miriam Harris, Rachel Kearney, Thomas Lamarre, Vivian Sobchack, David Surman, Paul Ward, Karin Wehn, Richard Weihe, Paul Wells and Suzanne Williams-Rautiola.