Alan Cholodenko – (The) Death (of) the Animator, or: the Felicity of Felix, Part I

Kingdom of Shadows1 The night of the 4th of July 1896 was a special night for cinema. It was the night that Maxim Gorky attended the screening of the Lumière brothers projections at the Nizhny-Novgorod fair in Russia and wrote the first significant review of cinema, a review that for me as for Tom Gunning […]

Timo Linsenmaier – Why animation historiography?

Or: Why the commissar shouldn’t vanish “Truth is strange, stranger than fiction.” William Makepeace Thackeray, The tremendous adventures of Major Gahagan (Thackeray 1921, 1) In spring 2008, a vociferous discussion erupted on the Society for Animation Studies’ mailing list on the subject of an extensive definition of animation. More technically-oriented explanations clashed with highly theoretical […]

Alan Cholodenko – (The) Death (of) the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix, Part II

A Difficulty in the Path of Animation Studies2 Before I set out on the work of this paper (Part II) I will briefly reprise Part I to orient the reader. Subtitled ‘Kingdom of Shadows’, Part I argues the singular importance of animation to cinema and to film, and the singular importance of death to animation, […]