Animation is a moving image practice that extends across a spectrum of technologies, screen platforms and sociocultural relationships. In this contribution, I work with a notion of pervasive animation, and my concerns address the effects and affects of animation in contemporary culture on the humans who engage with it, and with informing relations and distinctions between a range of subjects, technologies and platforms on which it is experienced. The immediate question is not what is animation, but rather, what is it not? As digital technologies develop, the borders between, for example, virtual reality, augmented reality or new media art and animation are increasingly porous, as these often use animation. Implications of digital media on the animated form, and vice-versa, bring it in closer proximity to contemporary discourses on aesthetics, socio-politics and techno-cultural progression. As a digital mode, animation is impacting the digital humanities and influencing academic, artistic, political and cultural capital agendas that, in turn, affect people in their daily lives. After a discussion of ideologies and ontologies around pre-digital animation, I propose four subsets on a spectrum of pervasive animation: Impossibly real, disruptive, useful and peripheral. Working through 40 years of video and digital productions and processes I discuss films from artists with subversive or critical agendas who address these through the use of digital tools. I conclude to suggest that as a moving image form, animation holds the potential to close C. P. Snow’s famous two cultures divide in our information-based era by defining how the visual language of animation opens up new dialogue channels and shared interdisciplinary toolsets to express and visualise concerns from the political to the eco-critical.