Preview: International Animation Festival, Various venues, Norwich

The festival, mainly at the Playhouse, features 190 short films, as well as seminars and symposia. "We'll be looking at artists who have crossed the lines, like Caroline Leaf, who has gone from animation to painting," Pugh adds. "And Suzanne Buchan will be talking about the relationship between dance and animation."

Other participants include Tim Macmillan who, while a student in Bath, pioneered the "time slice" technique, whereby an object is frozen in mid-air while the camera pans around it, used to such effect in The Matrix; and the Polish auteur Jerzy Kucia, who has blurred the distinction between art and animation to the extent of having work exhibited at Tate Modern and MoMA in New York.

A monograph programme will feature the work of the animation star Marv Newland. He is the Canadian whose seminal Bambi Meets Godzilla from 1969 critiqued the stranglehold that Disney then seemed to have on animation.

Also showing is a rare selection of propaganda films, and the festival favourite Morir de Amor, about two parrots talking while their owner has a siesta, which has won prizes around the world.

"The great thing about animation is that it doesn't have rules" says Pugh. "It doesn't have to conform with laws of gravity. It has a direct line into the imagination in the way that literature and painting do."

Fourth Norwich International Animation Festival (01603 756231; www.niaf.org.uk), 19 to 22 October