Gunnar Strøm – The Two Golden Ages of Animated Music Video

Music videos have been being made since the mid 1960s and had their breakthrough in the mid 1970s. Since then it has been the main marketing tool for breaking new pop and rock artists in the international market. When MTV opened on August 1st 1981 by showing the video Video Killed the Radio Star (Russel […]

Pamela Turner – Early Connections Between Film and Emerging Media as Evidenced in the Animated Worlds of Adam Beckett

Making a “film” today rarely involves a journey to the lab as images are more often recorded digitally and not on celluloid. Even video’s electromagnetic record is transformed to bits and bytes. There is no frame to splice. The visual material exists as a virtual reference only. As McLuhan points out, new media doesn’t replace […]

María Lorenzo Hernández – The Double Sense of Animated Images. A View on the Paradoxes of Animation as a Visual Language

“The cartoon is a playful art. […] A false devotion to the cinematic approach inexorably stifles the draftman’s imagination.” Lindvall & Melton (1997, p. 204) “Once upon a time, or maybe twice…” George Dunning, Yellow Submarine, 1968 Introduction Representation in the visual arts, such as cinematography – and in particular animation – contains a degree […]

Leslie Bishko – The Uses and Abuses of Cartoon Style in Animation

Introduction “Cartoon style” in animation broadly refers to animation design and movement that adheres to the 12 Principles of Animation, defined and developed at the Disney Studios. The Principles evolved through trial and error, by observing motion on-screen and noting what aspects of animated movement served the believability of the characters. To this day, the […]

Caroline Ruddell – Breaking Boundaries: The Representation of Split Identity in Anime

This article addresses the representation of unstable identity in examples of anime. Split identities in the cinema generally (live action and animation) are often indicative of specific cultural concerns or perhaps mediate contemporary attitudes towards issues of identity in society; the dichotomy that is often apparent in the animation discussed in this paper is that […]

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, […]

Tom Klein – Animated Appeal: A Survey of Production Methods in Children’s Software

Introduction The graphical style of children’s software has often strongly resembled that of traditional cel animation, yet the requirements for implementing graphics into computer games necessitated changes in the working practices of animators. In some of the earliest videogames for the home market, the means of creating sequential moving images was far removed from traditional […]