There was an evening of programs about animation on BBC Four last night which I found fascinating. I have never really thought  about animation before now, but what struck me was the huge variation in  styles between the short films I watched. Each piece looked very different – far more different than live action films, even given the vast diversity of shooting styles there is  in live action. In animation, each  frame is drawn, created from scratch, so the  style of each piece really hits the viewer in the face; it also makes style much more salient to a piece’s meaning.   One piece in particular, Frankie’s Joke by Andrew Eu, Sheren Ali and Edwin Bulmar, mixed puppetry and animation  – 2d and 3d – in a way  I had never come across before but which  I found fascinating: here was a way of creating images which I found  new, novel and  captivating. It was still film, but it was using an entirely new visual vocabulary.  The film  itself was unquieting and slightly disturbing, about a character essentially in the throws of a mental breakdown, but I think the style and mise en scene was used to  enhance the feeling of discord,   as if the 2d and 3d components of the image were at odds with each other. By the end of the  evening I was fascinated and hungry for more; here is a new art form I can see myself getting into.