Adam de Beer – Kinesic constructions: An aesthetic analysis of movement and performance in 3D animation

In animation the issue of movement is central to any discussion of its nature, irrespective of its form, style or process of creation. As an animator, Norman McLaren believed “the most important thing in film is motion, movement” (in Bendazzi, 1994:117), whilst Wells describes animated films as “the artificial creation of the illusion of movement […]

Sheuo Hui Gan – To Be or Not to Be – Anime: The Controversy in Japan over the “Anime” Label

Outside Japan, anime is mainly used as a term referring to animation made in Japan. Inside Japan though, the word “anime,” an abbreviated pronunciation of animation in Japanese has been used widely as an abbreviation for all animation. However, despite the escalating popularity and attention in the worldwide media, the meaning and usage of the […]

Max Bannah – Revolutionary cels: The Sydney waterfront, Harry Reade and Cuban animation

In 2008, the noted Cuban journalist and art critic, Pedro de la Hoz, contended that, “What’s most important is that with animation and other graphic media… we have an extraordinary weapon for the formation and transmission of revolutionary, patriotic and human values, and for cultivating the sensitivity, love and intelligence needed to help us conquer […]

Paul St. George – Using chronophotography to replace Persistence of Vision as a theory for explaining how animation and cinema produce the illusion of continuous motion

Chronophotography was developed, at the end of the nineteenth century by Marey, Demenÿ and later Gilbreth and used as a tool for investigating movement. At the beginning of the twentieth century chronophotography’s potential as a research tool was ignored as aspects of chronophotography were developed into cinema. Now, in what many call the post-cinematic era1, […]

Alan Cholodenko: Animation (Theory) as the Poematic

A Reply to the Cognitivists This essay has two projects. The first is intrinsic to the very question of what constitutes legitimate scholarly inquiry in the study of film and of animation, marking out something ostensibly especially contentious in and for the study of the latter: theory. Proceeding from two related queries-Why theory? And why […]