Dietmar Meinel – “Space: The Final Fun‐tier” – Returning Home to the Frontier in Pixar’s WALL‐E

Earth: The Final Frontier Pixar’s 2008 film WALL-E is set in a post-apocalyptic twenty-ninth century, in which humanity has left an uninhabitable Earth because its waste and garbage production led to global environmental destruction. Robots were left behind in order to clean Earth until its environment would suit human life again, but the ordeal of […]

Brad Yarhouse – Animation in the street: The seductive silence of Blu

An examination of his film Muto The film fades up from black as the jarring sounds of a busy street play. The camera tilts and pans drunkenly but with the stilted rhythm of frames being shown step by step. We pan across a brick wall covered with graffiti tags and come to rest on a […]

Heather L. Holian – Art, Animation and the Collaborative Process

Imagine for a moment, the city of Rome in 1510. Here, the Renaissance painter Raphael is in the process of carrying out the most important commission of his career, and consequently, one of the most famous projects in the history of Western art—the fresco decoration of the Pope’s private apartments in the Vatican. If we […]

Jane Shadbolt – Parallel Synchronized Randomness: Stop-motion Animation in Live Action Feature Films

Twenty first-century mainstream cinema is obsessed with achieving the photoreal representation of the impossible. Blockbuster after blockbuster parades superheroes battling super villains, cataclysmic natural disasters or intergalactic beings rampaging through both imaginary and familiar worlds. It has been 30 years since Tron (Steven Lisberger, 1982) wowed audiences with a wire-frame representation of cyberspace in 1982, and […]