Pummell has recently completed FRANKENSTEIN’S DREAM: a single screen animated film for cinema and gallery. The film is now touring festivals. He is currently in development on THE CITY OF MEAT & MAGIC an animated feature film set in the same world.  WIth writing partner Margot Knijn he is writing a science fiction novel.

In his comprehensive survey, ANIMATION: A WORLD HISTORY,  Giannalberto Bendazzi gives Pummell a significant place in the development of UK animation and describes his work as “crossing the boundaries of traditional animation; making films that turn on the anxiety caused by having a physical body and the need to find one’s self in a world of new technologies.” 

Pummell initially made an international reputation as an animator with a series of films for United Kingdom’s Channel Four TV. In this period, he combined old-school analogue animation techniques with sophisticated digital and optical effects to create such films as:  SECRET JOY OF FALLING ANGELS that won the Grand Prix at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, and was nominated for the Cartoon d'Or European Animated Film of the Year and BUTCHERS HOOK that won British Animation Award for most creative use of new technologies.

His first feature film BODYSONG was a BAFTA and BIFA winning project that used found footage to depict an archetypal life story built out of hundreds of archival clips taken from across 100 years of cinema: the film was the first film scored by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead. 

Pummell’s second feature film SHOCK HEAD SOUL premiered in the Orizzonti Competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2011, seamlessly combined drama, documentary and elaborate animation to create a portrait of Daniel Paul Schreber, the celebrated 19th Century outsider artist.  

His most recent science fiction film IDENTICALS premiered in competition in Edinburgh International Film Festival 2015, and was selected for the “Best of the Festival” after-screenings.  This dramatisation of multiple identities and looping lives explored the boundaries of science fiction, and was subsequently launched in the USA by the Hollywood major Samuel Goldwyn films and Sony Home Entertainment.

In recent years, Pummell has continued to make animated films, showing them as moving image installations at major art museums including TENT Rotterdam, Boijmans Museum Rotterdam, M HKA Antwerp, KASK Gent, Carpenter Centre Harvard and The Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Major museums that have screened his work include: Tate Gallery, ICA London, EYE Film-Museum Amsterdam, Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

In 2017, Pummell’s film prints and complete working archive (the record of more than a dozen animated short films, three feature films and associated installation work) was acquired by the EYE Film Museum Amsterdam for permanent preservation.  

Pummell is currently an Associate Research Professor and the Director of the Lens-Based Media Programme at the Piet Zwart Institute for Graduate Research and Study, WdKA, Rotterdam University.  For two years (2007-2009) he was a visiting professor at Harvard University VES, where he was awarded a Harvard Film Study Center Fellowship, and nominated for the Harvard University Levenson Teaching Award. He has lectured and taught at other institutions including the UK National Film School, the Royal College of Art UK, and the Netherlands Film Academy.