Editorial

Abstract

Deep archival research is the basis for the first article in this issue, ‘From Songfilms to Telecomics: Vallée Video and the New Market for Postwar Animation’, that reveals the complex interworkings of labour, commerce, production and distribution in a key period for broadcast television. Shawn VanCour and Chloe Patton trace the shift of animation workers, freelance and from other studios, whom Rudy Vallée’s company employed, from theatrical film productions made for cinemas to television. They observe how this shift was also informed by others in visual aesthetics and in production styles. Their research pulls together a vast US West Coast archipelago of studios, artists and producers into a coherent interconnected whole that is revealed as a conceptual pipeline responding to changes in economics and platforms for these forms of popular culture. The generous and comprehensive references list is a lodestone for future research. Changes in technologies of moving image platforms that have developed since broadcast television also affect economics and production today and, in the next article, this effect is shown to be one of suppression, mainly of freelance animators, as a result of a digital conglomerate’s monetization strategy. In ‘Is the YouTube Animation Algorithm-Friendly? How YouTube’s Algorithm Influences the Evolution of Animation Production on the Internet’, Xavier Ribes Guàrdia undertakes a quantitative and qualitative data analysis of thousands of mostly independent animation films – from Minecraft and machinima to low-quality amateur content – published on a set of YouTube channels. With a clearly outlined data collection approach and provision of these data as open source for other researchers, the findings also inform an evaluation of YouTube’s visual interface and relation to its monetization strategy. It is an informative uncovering of the deep workings of the influence of streaming networks that Ribes Guàrdia likens to censorship, and of counterstrategies employed by animation ‘streampunks’. The urban staging of technology in a possible future is the subject of ‘Batman and the World of Tomorrow: Yesterday’s Technological Future in the Animated Film Batman: Mask of the Phantasm.’ With a distinct focus on early and mid-20th-century amusement spaces, parks and fairs, and a detailed analysis of analogous connections between the urban spaces of New York and its 1939 World’s Fair Futurama, and the fictional Gotham City and its World’s Fair Futureama, AnnaSophie Jürgens analyses modernist and utopian architectural elements in these exhibitions, proposing the technical and stylistic possibilities inherent in the animated form and how the animated spaces become dramatic agents. She also convincingly unfolds the relations and influences between the real-world stylized stagings of designer Norman Bel Geddes and the theatre designs of Edward Gordon Craig, aligning these to the emergent avant-garde animation of the 1920s and 30s, to conclude that the film is a vehicle for transmedia storytelling. An element of appeal in the Batman franchise is the hyper-realistic quality of the (digital) environments, to the extent that the viewer cannot discern what is ‘real’ and what is not. This is also a longstanding discussion around the indexicality or truth value of photography and film, and how it shares the same transport medium, analogue or digital, that includes animation. In ‘The Animated Document: Animation’s Dual Indexicality in Mixed Realities’, Nea Ehrlich locates this within the 976498 ANM0010.1177/1746847720976498AnimationEditorial editorial2020