The Peer-reviewed Open Access Online Journal for Animation History and Theory – ISSN 1930-1928
The real…erases itself in favour of the more real than the real: the hyperreal—Jean Baudrillard[1] He who has no shadow is merely the shadow of himself—Jean Baudrillard[2] Part I. Introduction This essay is theoretical, speculative, highly so. Theory, from Greek theoria, is speculating. And for many, if not all, of you, this essay may seem very […]
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 […]
Kingdom of Shadows1 The night of the 4th of July 1896 was a special night for cinema. It was the night that Maxim Gorky attended the screening of the Lumière brothers projections at the Nizhny-Novgorod fair in Russia and wrote the first significant review of cinema, a review that for me as for Tom Gunning […]
The Animated Dialogues 2007 conference was first conceptualised as an event that would bring together scholars working in the field of animation studies in the Australasian region. This first Animated Dialogues conference focused on the areas of texts, industries and audiences as a way of bringing people together who frequently work in quite disparate geographical […]
A Reply to the Cognitivists This essay has two projects. The first is intrinsic to the very question of what constitutes legitimate scholarly inquiry in the study of film and of animation, marking out something ostensibly especially contentious in and for the study of the latter: theory. Proceeding from two related queries-Why theory? And why […]
Kawamoto’s House of Flame and Švankmajer’s The Fall of the House of Usher Judy clubs Punch with a mallet. Jack the Pumpkin King decides to take Santa’s place one Christmas. Gumby foils the Blockheads’ plans, yet again. In each of these cases, we as the audience focus our attention on the moving figures, finding pleasure […]
Or: Why the commissar shouldn’t vanish “Truth is strange, stranger than fiction.” William Makepeace Thackeray, The tremendous adventures of Major Gahagan (Thackeray 1921, 1) In spring 2008, a vociferous discussion erupted on the Society for Animation Studies’ mailing list on the subject of an extensive definition of animation. More technically-oriented explanations clashed with highly theoretical […]
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, […]