The Peer-reviewed Open Access Online Journal for Animation History and Theory – ISSN 1930-1928
Introduction Singapore achieved independence in 1965. In 2015, the government of Singapore launched the SG50 initiative (2015, SG50 Celebration Ideas), calling upon Singaporeans from all walks of life to propose ideas for celebrating 50 years of independence. The top-down initiative focused on “things that make us uniquely Singaporean,” in hopes that residents would engage in […]
[1] The image to the left is from Chuck Jones’s Bully for Bugs and shows Bugs Bunny standing, looking worried, writing on a large piece of paper, the top of which has curled over to reveal the word “Will.” The word is oriented for the audience instead of appearing upside down and indicates that Bugs […]
1. Introduction As a general observation, since the appearance of moving images, audio-visual input has increased exponentially: From the static camera observing an action, for instance in Méliès’ pioneering works, escalated to faster and faster cuts as pioneered in Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, concurrently with Abel Gance’s approach to spread the images […]
Social robotics is a relatively new field of research that aims to integrate traditional robotics into human and public spaces. Social robots are designed to interact with humans as complementary agents to enhance human activity. Declining production costs means that sales for personal robots will increase over time, with robots having a greater reach into […]
The animated body, as opposed to the photographed body of traditional cinema, shunts aside notions of indexicality, and in doing so presents theoretical scholarship with a variety of corporeal problems. Its plasmatic need to mutate, stretching as back to the origins of animation, assures the animated body of a tether to the child’s realm of […]
Halfway through the short film David (Driessen, 1977), the audience faces an empty screen. For over two minutes of the total of nine, we are left to stare at an empty rectangle painted in faded yellow, while David, an invisible character, addresses the audience. Rather than doing what animators love the most (and are taught […]
1 Introduction Stories have always been an integral part of every society and culture. Storytelling is the most common means of sharing experiences. It majorly influences various aspects of our life and plays a vital role in defining our values, desires and dreams. Stories can be considered as universal since they bridge the gaps between […]
Author’s Note As a member of tranSTURM, I was personally involved in this project. The interaction between groups that comprise musicians, architects, animators, choreographers, dancers, and sculptors is difficult to constrain or contain within a single theoretical or methodological container. Bringing two creative collectives together is a meeting of multiple minds and influences. The diversity […]
Introduction Histories of cinema as an artform tend to start in the early nineteenth century and consider cinema as the convergence of two different practices that developed in parallel, only coming together at the end of the century. The first is the capture of still photoreal images in a chemical medium, known as photography. The […]
The aim of this paper is to examine and understand the uses of Arabic calligraphy as a visual language tool in animated films. The results of this exploration will enable Arab animators to use religious stories adapted from the Qur’an to make animated films for the domestic and international animation market. Most of the Islamic […]