This dissertation shows how popular animation reproduces and revises discourses of race,gender, and the body through its unique mode of achieving the illusion of life. I study studio animation and its production artifacts of “inbetweens,” frames of animation that create the illusion of continuous movement and mark a process of becoming, to reimagine theories of race that employ metaphors of animation. My objects of study span a range of popular animated media, other forms of media that reflect and remediate concepts and grammars inherited from popular animation, and production ephemera and archival material that reflect an industry history. These include shorts, feature films, and TV episodes produced by Fleischer Studios, Disney Studios, and Nickelodeon; oral histories, pedagogical manuals, and production ephemera; and scripts and live-action films by Karen Tei Yamashita and the directorial duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (“the Daniels”). I focus on transpacific channels of consumption and production from the 1910s to the 2020s to study key trends in the development of popular global animation. Through interdisciplinary methods of analyzing animation’s genealogical developments as a new media technology and its approach to representational subjects, I theorize the animated character is a unique humanoid commodity, which inherits vocabularies of the objectified, racialized subject. In turn, I show studying popular animation production’s conversion of aesthetic labor into liveliness can help us reimagine metaphors of racialized being.