The Peer-reviewed Open Access Online Journal for Animation History and Theory – ISSN 1930-1928
WHITHER(ING) ANIMATION (STUDIES)?![1] 1. This paper is theoretical, speculative, highly so. Theory, from Greek theoria, is speculating. Like theory, life is a risky business, too, getting riskier, more speculative, by the minute, especially since I theorise what I live, and I live what I theorise. So this is ‘food for thought’, perhaps indigestible. I take […]
Abstraction, as an art movement, represents the largest modernisation of visual arts since the Renaissance, reconfiguring how we perceive information on a global scale (Frankel 2012). In shedding representational form and meaning, abstraction presents an evocative sensuality that transcends language and culture. This sensuality provides a strong foothold in commercial visual communications, which has persisted […]
In his work The Production of Space (La Production de l’Espace, 1974), the French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefèbvre highlighted that, historically, the word ‘space’ implied a “strictly geometrical meaning: the idea it evoked was simply that of an empty area” (Lefèbvre 2007, p. 1). While arguing for an understanding of space as a social […]
Revolution, Identity and Connection in Looney Tunes Voice actress June Foray once recalled how Chuck Jones was able to quote Mark Twain and, in the same breath, discuss Aeschylus (King, 2013). Yet culture and animation have often shared an uneasy relationship. As critic Steve Schneider claims, “in all the vivisections of popular culture, non-Disney animation […]