Watch Me Move: The Animation Show at the Barbican Art Gallery

Entry: £10 adults / £7 concessions when booked online; £12 adults / £8 concessions on the door. Under 12s go free.

As a general rule I avoid exhibitions that I have to pay to see. I know I'll probably miss some good shows this way, but London has so many excellent free museums and galleries that it's hard for me to justify paying to see an exhibition when I don't have much in the way of disposable income.

I will make an exception if it's something I'm really interested in though. Unfortunately, this means that I go in with very high expectations – if it's a subject I'm interested in and I'm paying to see it then I expect to really be blown away – and going in with high expectations is a pretty good way to set myself up for disappointment.

Watch Me Move is on at the Barbican Art Gallery until 11^th September. In addition to the exhibition, the Art Gallery has set up a cinema in one of its rooms with a regular programme of feature-length animated films, and the Barbican Cinema is hosting both regular talks and films and the London International Animation Festival later in the summer. I can't fault the Barbican's commitment to their exhibitions; they really go all out to put together an amazing line-up of supporting events for each show.

However, I think the exhibition at the heart of this particular programme of events is too weak to carry it. If you read this blog regularly you may have gathered that I really like exhibitions that inform and educate me. I also dislike exhibitions that avoid chronological organisation in favour of thematic organisation. The latter often feels subjective and arbitrary, and it divorces the content from its context, making it feel like it exists in a vacuum. You can probably guess where this is going – yes, "Watch Me Move" is divided into six themed sections: Apparitions; Characters; Superhumans; Fables and Fragments; Structures; and Visions. The sections are very loosely chronological – Apparitions contains the earliest animations, while Visions contains some of the most recent, but Apparitions also contains footage from Jurassic Park (1993), while Visions contains a clip from the original Tron (1982).

Each section has numerous animations playing and there are places to sit and watch them, (except the first section for some reason). Each section has a little piece of introductory text and then each animation has a note giving its title, director and date, (again the first section is the exception and has slightly more written about the early techniques on show). There's not very much beyond that and with no clear historical progression and little information about the individual films it just feels like a huge jumble of moving images that all blur together quite quickly.

Ultimately, it offers a very shallow look at the history of animation and it cost me £20, (I paid for the ticket of the person who came with me). With hindsight, I should have looked at the film programme and timed my visit to coincide with something I wanted to see as that would have made me feel like I was getting better value for money, (Paprika [2006] was just starting as I was leaving, but I decided it was too late to sit down to feature film at that point). I left disappointed and I think I'll be sticking to my "only free exhibitions" policy for some time to come.