This thesis examines the shifts within mainstream British television animation between 1997 and 2010 and it discusses how British animation’s close relationship with live-action television comedy reveals a map of contemporary attitudes and tastes. The British animated texts in this period reacted to their shifting industrial and broadcasting landscape. The historical moment of the late 1990s was determined by the successes of the American animated sitcom The Simpsons, which profoundly affected the way British practitioners conceived of the medium’s capabilities within a mainstream television environment.

This PhD explores Bergsonian notions of duration and the unrepresentable characteristics of creative emotion. Contemplating emotion through Bergson’s duration assists an understanding of the measure of emotion’s quantitative multiplicity, the complexity of its qualitative multiplicity and its creative potential. The application of these ideas to the Deleuzian cinematic concepts of the movement-image and time-image, allows the exploration of digital and analogue cinematic techniques alongside the characteristics of representable and unrepresentable emotion. The analysis of emotion traverses various historical and contemporary subjects that include areas such as philosophy, science, art and digital sound and moving-image technology. Three video pieces created for this thesis illustrate and elucidate the theoretical argument. The first work deals with movement, duration and change, the second with coexistent time, memory and perception and the third with intuition the élan vital and creative emotion. Each film is intended to allow the viewer/listener to enter their own creative emotion. Thus the research revaluates and elevates the further potentials of emotion, beyond its mere representation in order to discover how its very nature, suggests new approaches to the creation of art work that is itself, able to reveal the nature and process of creative emotion.