Summer term started today and I'm doing animation with the ND Media (Moving Image) first years for the next few weeks. There are 26 of them, all there and excited to be back at college after 2 weeks away. I asked them to respond to the question What is animation? and wrote down their responses on the whiteboard:

giving life to things than are inanimate
making images move frame by frame
making magic happen
manipulating the world
a candle flickering in the wind
things that change - colour/size/shape/position
getting drawings to move
creating an illusion of movement
graphics + movement
(visual) media that moves
animation happens in the brain
it's like donuts/doughnuts - ring or jammy ones
animation is like a building - big ones, small ones, full of stuff or empty

At lunchtime over an egg mayonnaise baguette, Lord Lipson commented that animation is a building process because you rebuild a sequence of still images into a moving image sequence.

The ring donut is an interesting visual and oral metaphor: a Krispy Creme exterior shaped by an absence, the empty space between; the zero, the nothing, that is the heart of all animation - the missing bit in between the frames, or how all moving image works.