The Queerness of Animation: Barry JC Purves and the Supplementarity of Form.

This article examines the concept of the "queerness of animation," arguing that animation’s ontological and aesthetic features inherently subvert normative binaries of gender, sexuality, and embodiment. It foregrounds Barry JC Purves’s 1995 stop-motion film *Achilles*—an explicitly queer animated adaptation of the mythological tale of Achilles and Patroclus—as a key case study to explore how animation’s form and content intertwine to challenge essentialist and heteronormative frameworks. Through a queer close reading informed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s *Epistemology of the Closet*, the essay reveals how *Achilles* employs cross-dissolve editing, tactile puppet animation, and intertextual references to classical antiquity to destabilize binary oppositions such as lover/friend, active/passive, and male/female, while also engaging with historical and contemporary discourses on same-sex desire and identity. The analysis highlights how the film’s formal qualities—particularly its haptic visuality and the materiality of stop-motion puppetry—mirror and complicate its thematic exploration of queer desire, embodiment, and mortality, thereby proposing a framework for a queer theory of animation aesthetics that integrates both representational and ontological dimensions. [Extracted from the article]