The Peer-reviewed Open Access Online Journal for Animation History and Theory – ISSN 1930-1928
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
User-Produced Flash Cartoons and Television Animation Introduction A number of prominent media scholars including Peter Lunenfeld (2000, p. 71) and Lev Manovich (2002, p. 4) have shown that advances in the technical capabilities of personal computers, combined with the increasing ubiquity of Internet access, have allowed the computer to become a single site for the […]
The Self-Portrait of the Artist and the Re-Start of Animation Introduction Originally, the self-portrait was a pictorial subgenre of portrayal, in which the artists became the model for their own paintings. However, it is also present in mediums such as cinema, when directors appear in their films, from ephemeral manifestations, like the Hitchcockian cameo […]
Assessing the failings of mechanisms of power through comedy has remained a constant throughout animation. Within the specific arena of ‘the popular’, always a potent area for consideration, adult British network television animation in the early part of the 21st century has maintained a unique relationship with modes of Satire that has enabled writers and […]