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 […]

Pierre Floquet – What is (not) so French in Les Triplettes de Belleville

In an article on text theory, Roland Barthes wrote: “Every text is intertext; it holds other texts within, at various levels, in irregularly recognizable shapes: those of the preceding culture as well as those of the surrounding culture; every text is new with interwoven past quotations”1. A text, a film, or an animated film is […]