The Peer-reviewed Open Access Online Journal for Animation History and Theory – ISSN 1930-1928
Introduction In the story of ‘Franken’, by Osamu Tezuka, humans flee in horror at the sight of a robot named Franken,1 unaware that he is actually on a search for his lost friend, as well as for mechanical pieces to repair himself. Directed by Kazuya Konaka, ‘Franken’ is an episode of the Japanese animation series […]
Renewal and Religion in anime “For at least some of the Superflat people […] there is a kind of traumatic solipsism, even an apocalyptic one, that underlies the contemporary art world as they see it.” Thomas Looser, 2006 “Perhaps one of the most striking features of anime is its fascination with the theme of apocalypse.” […]
The Films of Robert Breer “We must go back to the working actual body – not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement.” Merleau-Ponty (1964b: 162) “I used to take lessons in a biplane and do stunts and things.” […]
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 […]
A Reflection on Animation Studies There are at least three problems that arise when any topic of interest (heterogeneous and globally dispersed as it must necessarily be at the outset) transforms itself, in an (equally necessary) institutional/territorial gesture, into a defined field of study – and I have seen all these problems materialise at least […]
Stepping Out of the Graveyard I will be forever grateful to be asked to deliver the keynote address at the ‘Animated Dialogues’ Conference in Melbourne in June 2007. My survey of the field of Animation Studies in the current period – ‘Battlefields for the Undead : Re-assessing Animation Studies and other Romantic Interludes’ – inevitably […]
The Animated Dialogues 2007 conference was first conceptualised as an event that would bring together scholars working in the field of animation studies in the Australasian region. This first Animated Dialogues conference focused on the areas of texts, industries and audiences as a way of bringing people together who frequently work in quite disparate geographical […]
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 […]
Exploring Representations of Disability within British Mainstream Animation This article discusses how representations of disability operate within the mainstream animation narratives of the British Creature Discomfort series (2007-8). These images are constructed as a response to concerns about broader social perceptions of the physically disabled and once scrutinized it is apparent that they are […]
Kawamoto’s House of Flame and Švankmajer’s The Fall of the House of Usher Judy clubs Punch with a mallet. Jack the Pumpkin King decides to take Santa’s place one Christmas. Gumby foils the Blockheads’ plans, yet again. In each of these cases, we as the audience focus our attention on the moving figures, finding pleasure […]