Francis M. Agnoli & Rayna Denison – Introducing Transnational Animation: A Special Issue of Animation Studies

Animation’s relationship to the transnational is a varied as animation itself. Though the scales of interaction may differ, an individual student animator or avant-garde animation artist can be just as implicated in the global systems underpinning animation production, distribution and reception as the biggest of Hollywood conglomerates. At the individualized end of the scale, each […]

Dean Bowman – Playing Around with Studio Ghibli: Understanding the Remediated Meaning of Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch through its Transcultural Marketing Paratexts

This article explores the reception of Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch (2013) in the West, particularly in terms of the involvement of renowned Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli. I argue that Studio Ghibli acts as a significant paratextual point of reference to the game for the game’s marketers and the critical community […]

Ian Friend – How does a Transnational Audience Factor in Character Design for Professional Broadcast Animation

During my animation career, I’ve found myself working in many areas of animation but most of my production experience lies in pre-school television. This can probably be attributed to the fact that most of the animation work produced in the UK is for a broadcast pre-school audience. I now teach full time in the University […]

James Mclean – Transmutation and Recolonization in Japanese Animation: Battle of the Planets and Anime’s Growth in the West

Japan has enjoyed a market for animation that extends far beyond its country’s borders since the beginnings of anime. While anime is usually produced predominantly for the country’s domestic market, international markets have developed a taste for Japanese anime over time, increasingly now in its subtitled, Japanese-language form (Pellitteri 2014; Ruh 2010; Daliot-Bul 2014). Prior […]

Helen McCarthy – Re-creating Anime History: The Development of British Anime Fandom and the Developing Comprehension of Anime History as a Transnational Phenomenon

Originally delivered at the University of East Anglia in Norwich as the keynote paper at the symposium “Media Journeys 2018: Animation in Transnational Contexts”, 24 May 2018. From its earliest beginnings, the appreciation and study of anime – both by its local fandom and in terms of the academic response – has been profoundly and […]

Anna Martonfi & Julia Havas – Bedrock Behind the Iron Curtain: Transcultural Shifts in the Hungarian Dubbed Version of The Flintstones (1960-66)

This article examines the transcultural travel of US animation to Hungarian television culture via the institutional practice of dubbing, focusing on how this practice affects the mediation of textual meanings and highlighting the role of historically contextualized notions of genre tradition, authorship, translation, and dubbing practices and the discursive importance of cultural hierarchies to account […]

Francis M. Agnoli – Building the Transcultural Fantasy World of Avatar

An examination of the processes of making contemporary US television animation reveals the transcultural nature of both the production and the final product. This phenomenon can be observed in the background designs of Nickelodeon’s Avatar franchise. The television series Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-08) and its sequel The Legend of Korra (2012-14) are set in […]

Ian Murphy & Saint John Walker – “Make it more invisible”: Hollywood VFX Training Crosstalk on the Transatlantic Fiber Optic

Many global media corporations aspire towards a 24-hour production line for animated content. As the US West Coast sleeps, media files can be sent to another low-cost territory in a preceding time zone to continue the work, maybe multiple times, chasing the sun. Technicolor-owned MPC (originally the Moving Picture Company) is one of the world’s […]