Animation is an art that has become synonymous with the idea of giving cartoon characters the illusion of life. Appreciated primarily as a form of mass entertainment, animation's participation in the realization of new cultural configurations of life has never been given much thought. But as an art that is integral to computer-based dynamic modelling techniques, the time has come to address animation as a force of technological transformation that works its way free of the frame of illusion. Debate about what it is to be a living thing rages within art, biology, computer science, philosophy and philosophy of science, but scant attention has been paid to the fact that in pursuit of this question, scientists and artists alike have re-embraced animation, not to ensoul or breathe phantom motion into inanimate objects and materials, but as a method for modelling the complexity of life. Starting with a couple of brief definitions, the following paper considers animation along such lines. It proposes to do so by addressing the art in terms of animatics. I will begin by proposing that, as a term that refers to the 'machinery' of animation, the animatic applies equally to animation's manual, mechanical, cinematic, electronic or cybernetic machinery. I will then discuss the animatic in relation to the automaton and its centrality in the evolution of cinema. In the second section, automata such as bots, robots, digital avatars and artificial life experiments are differentiated from their electro-mechanical precursors. With the aid of a late nineteenth-century fictional female android, the final section focuses on a slippage between the use of animation for generating and visualising dynamic behaviour in animated artificial life, and its use as a method for artificially animating the living.