Victoria Grace Walden – Animation: Textural Difference and the Materiality of Holocaust Memory

The notion of “Holocaust animation” may seem paradoxical; how can a medium which, in the popular eye, is usually associated with comedy, play and fantasy be used to remember one of the 20th century’s most traumatic events? By examining the textural difference of animation to our lived world in texts such as Silence (Yadin and […]

Alison Loader – Re:Animating Moths

The Animatic, The Death Drive and The Forest Tent Caterpillar One mid-September morning, Virginia Woolf sat watching a hay-coloured moth flit back and forth across her window, trying to escape into the promise of the warm autumn day. Vibrant despite its meagre, limited existence, the moth struggled valiantly before weakening and finally succumbing to inevitable […]

Animating, Ani-Morphing and Un-ani-morphing of the Evolutionary Process in Carl Sagan’s Cosmos

Produced and hosted by astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan, the television documentary mini-series Cosmos (1980) aimed to renew scientific interest among the general public, in light of the growing popularity of pseudo-scientific ideas, such as astrology. Since its original broadcast, Cosmos has long been considered a milestone in the scientific documentary genre, due to its […]

Daisuke Akimoto – A Pig, the State, and War: Porco Rosso (Kurenai no Buta)

Introduction Historically, animated cartoons and movies have been used as ‘propaganda’ in war (Roffat 2011). Some animated films, however, contribute to conveying an anti-war pacifist point of view (Takai 2011). As such, the film Porco Rosso (1992) can be categorized as “anti-war propaganda” (Okuda 2003, p. 144). Although Miyazaki has been attracted by seaplanes designed […]

Steve Fore – Waliczky in Wonderland

The Adventures of Tom Tomiczky in the Realm of Machinic Vision and Bodily Engagement Over the course of a distinguished career in experimental animation and digital art installations, Hungarian artist and animator Tamas Waliczky has earned an international reputation for creating works that simultaneously are cognitively challenging, affectively intimate, and artfully playful. Cumulatively, his artistic […]

Chris Carter – Digital Beings: An Opportunity for Australian Visual Effects

Ongoing innovation in digital animation and visual effects technologies has provided new opportunities for stories to be visually rendered in ways never before possible. Films featuring animation and visual effects continue to perform well at the box office, proving to be highly profitable projects. The Avengers (Whedon, 2012) holds the current record for opening weekend […]

Kirsten Thompson – “Quick–Like a Bunny!” The Ink and Paint Machine, Female Labor and Color Production

From the 1920s through the 1960s, the animation industry was a labor force segregated by gender, in which women were almost entirely restricted to the Inking and Paint department. Indeed, despite notable exceptions like Mary Blair and LaVerne Harding, Disney correspondence and internal papers show how women were regularly rejected as applicants or referred to […]