Pub Date : 2019-11-01DOI: 10.1177/1746847719875034
Kevin Cooley
After evaluating some of the limitations in the reception of Hayao Miyazaki’s films as advocacy for climate change reform, the author suggests the need for a new path in animation toward animating the nonhuman. He nominates the anime series Mushishi as the ideal trailblazer for a more ecologically sound and posthumanistically inclined future. Mushishi envisions a fairly realistic turn-of-the-20th-century Japan in which beings called ‘mushi’, simple organisms that are neither plant nor animal nor Miyazaki-esque fantastic spirit, exist alongside small agrarian communities. Using Mushishi and its barely animated titular beings as a test case, he argues that animation’s allusory–illusory nature and depiction of nature can combat the central tenets of anthropocentrism, generating a visually figurative ontology in which humans and nonhuman animals, subjects and objects, and characters and landscapes are democratically leveled down to symbolic totems, all rendered unreal through the filter of cartooning.
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Pub Date : 2019-11-01DOI: 10.1177/1746847719875071
Malou van Rooij
Contemporary computer-animated films by the major American animation studios Pixar, Disney and DreamWorks are often described as evoking (extremely) emotional responses from their ever-growing audiences. Following Murray Smith’s assertion that characters are central to comprehending audiences’ engagement with narratives in Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (1995), this article points to a specific style of characterization as a possible reason for the overwhelming emotional response to and great success of these films, exemplified in contemporary examples including Inside Out (Pete Docter and Ronnie del Carmen, 2015), Big Hero 6 (Don Hall and Chris Williams, 2014) and How to Train Your Dragon (Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, 2010). Drawing on a variety of scholarly work including Stephen Prince’s ‘perceptual realism’, Scott McCloud’s model of ‘amplification through simplification’ and Masahiro Mori’s Uncanny Valley theory, this article will argue how a shared style of character design – defined as a paradoxical combination of lifelikeness and abstraction – plays a significant role in the empathetic potential of these films. This will result in the proposition of a new and reverse phenomenon to Mori’s Uncanny Valley, dubbed the Pixar Peak, where, as opposed to a steep drop, audiences reach a climactic height in empathy levels when presented with this specific type of characterization.
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Pub Date : 2019-11-01DOI: 10.1177/1746847719881701
W. Brown, Terry Lindvall
The use of short animated films to address important social issues and societal needs has a rich tradition. These cartoons follow a stream of ecological propaganda in a variety of films that promote pro-environmental values and beliefs. After surveying films for both the cinema and television, the authors focus on exploring short animated films as pedagogical texts that teach pro-environmental beliefs and encourage ordinate behaviors in entertaining ways. They then discuss the application of the entertainment–education communication strategy through animated films as a means to advance environmental education. In particular, they view short animated films as pedagogical tools that function as exemplary or revelatory parables.
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Pub Date : 2019-11-01DOI: 10.1177/1746847719875072
María Lorenzo Hernández
Ari Folman’s The Congress (2013) borrows freely from Stanisław Lem’s dystopian view in his Sci-fi novel The Futurological Congress (1971) to propose the gradual dissolution of the human into an artificial form, which is animation. By moving the action of the novel from a hypothetical future to contemporary Hollywood, Ari Folman gives CGI animation the role of catalyst for changes not only in the production system, but for human thought and, therefore, for society. This way, the film ponders the changing role of performers at the time of their digitalization, as well as on the progressive dematerialization of the film industry, considering a dystopian future where simulation fatally displaces reality, which invites relating The Congress with Jean Baudrillard’s and Alan Cholodenko’s theses on how animating technologies have resulted in the culture of erasing. Moreover, this article highlights how Lem’s metaphor of the manipulation of information in the Soviet era is transformed in the second part of The Congress into a vision of cinema as a collective addiction, relating it to Alexander Dovzhenko’s and Edgar Morin’s speculative theories of total film – which come close to the potentialities of today’s Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. In addition, although The Congress is a disturbing view of film industry and animating technologies, its vision of film is nostalgically retro as it vindicates an entire tradition of Golden Age animation that transformed the star system into cartoons, suggesting the fictionalization of their lives and establishing a postmodern continuum between animation and film.
Ari Folman的《大会》（2013）自由地借用了Stanisław Lem在其科幻小说《未来主义大会》（1971）中的反乌托邦观点，提出将人类逐渐分解为一种人造形式，即动画。通过将小说的动作从一个假设的未来转移到当代好莱坞，Ari Folman赋予CGI动画催化剂的角色，不仅是制作系统的变革，也是人类思想的变革，因此也是社会的变革。通过这种方式，这部电影思考了表演者在数字化时代角色的变化，以及电影业的渐进非物质化，考虑到了一个反乌托邦的未来，在这个未来，模拟致命地取代了现实，邀请将《大会》与让·波德里亚和艾伦·乔洛登科关于动画技术如何导致擦除文化的论文联系起来。此外，这篇文章强调了Lem对苏联时代信息操纵的隐喻是如何在《大会》的第二部分中转变为一种将电影视为集体成瘾的愿景的，并将其与Alexander Dovzhenko和Edgar Morin关于整体电影的推测理论联系起来，这些理论接近当今虚拟现实和增强现实的潜力。此外，尽管《大会》对电影业和动画技术的看法令人不安，但它对电影的看法是怀旧的，因为它证明了黄金时代动画的整个传统，即将明星系统转变为卡通，暗示了他们生活的虚构，并在动画和电影之间建立了一个后现代的连续体。
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Pub Date : 2019-11-01DOI: 10.1177/1746847719881702
Zachary Sheldon
In her article ‘The soul factor: Deception in intimations of life in computer-generated characters’ (2009), Kathryn S Egan argues that digital characters in cinema have no soul and are incapable of being empathized with. For evidence, Egan assesses the character of Gollum from Peter Jackson’s adaptations of The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003, NZ, USA). This article finds, however, that there are many who have empathized with Gollum, in direct contradiction to Egan’s findings. The author argues that Egan produces academic scholarship rather than phenomenological research, and that there is an opening for empathizing with and relating to digital characters such as Gollum. He posits that further research is required in the area of mediated characters and relationships, and that more precise language is required around terms like ‘empathy’ to accurately communicate the nuance in relationships between real people and digital or artificial characters. In addition, he suggests a term, ‘directed empathy’, to evoke the kind of empathetic relationship that exists between digital characters and viewers.
凯瑟琳·S·伊根(Kathryn S Egan)在她的文章《灵魂因素:电脑生成的人物生活暗示中的欺骗》(2009)中认为，电影中的数字人物没有灵魂，无法被同情。为了证明这一点，伊根评估了彼得·杰克逊改编的《指环王》三部曲(2001-2003，新西兰，美国)中咕噜的角色。然而，这篇文章发现，有很多人同情咕噜，这与伊根的发现直接矛盾。作者认为，伊根产生的是学术研究，而不是现象学研究，对咕噜这样的数字角色产生共鸣和联系是有可能的。他认为，需要在角色和关系中介领域进行进一步研究，需要围绕“移情”等术语使用更精确的语言，以准确地传达真实人物与数字或人工角色之间关系的细微差别。此外，他还提出了一个术语“定向移情”，以唤起数字角色与观众之间的移情关系。
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Pub Date : 2019-11-01DOI: 10.1177/1746847719881703
William D. McCarthy
Barnouw E (1981) The Magician and the Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crafton D (1982) Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898–1928. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gunning T (1989) An aesthetic of astonishment: Early film and the (in)credulous spectator. Art and Text 34, Spring: 31–45. Holliday C (2018) The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lutz EG (1920) Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development. London: Chapman & Hall. Sexton M (2017) Secular Magic and the Moving Image: Mediated Forms and Modes of Reception. London: Bloomsbury. Solomon M (2010) Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Williamson C (2011) The blow book, performance magic, and early animation: Mediating the living dead. Animation 6(2): 111–126. DOI: 10.1177/1746847711405101.
{"title":"Book review: Toy Story: How Pixar Reinvented the Animated Feature","authors":"William D. McCarthy","doi":"10.1177/1746847719881703","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1746847719881703","url":null,"abstract":"Barnouw E (1981) The Magician and the Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crafton D (1982) Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898–1928. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gunning T (1989) An aesthetic of astonishment: Early film and the (in)credulous spectator. Art and Text 34, Spring: 31–45. Holliday C (2018) The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lutz EG (1920) Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development. London: Chapman & Hall. Sexton M (2017) Secular Magic and the Moving Image: Mediated Forms and Modes of Reception. London: Bloomsbury. Solomon M (2010) Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Williamson C (2011) The blow book, performance magic, and early animation: Mediating the living dead. Animation 6(2): 111–126. DOI: 10.1177/1746847711405101.","PeriodicalId":43271,"journal":{"name":"Animation-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"14 1","pages":"255 - 257"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1746847719881703","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44531848","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-11-01DOI: 10.1177/1746847719881704
M. Cook
Andrea Mariani is a Lecturer at University of Udine, Italy. He teaches Media Theory and European Screen Cultures. He is Head of Projects of the Digital Storytelling Lab at the University of Udine and directs the (Un) Dead Media Project. He edited the first Italian collection of the prominent international scholarship on media archaeology ‘Archeologia dei media’ (Meltemi, 2018: Limina Award 2019 for the Best Italian Translation). His articles have been published in Italian and international peer-reviewed journals such as Film History, Necsus and Bianco e Nero. He is author of Gli Anni del Cineguf: Il cinema sperimentale italiano dai cine-club al neorealismo (2017). He deals with media archaeology, amateur cinema in the interwar period, avant-garde and modernist cultures.
Andrea Mariani是意大利乌迪内大学的讲师。他教授媒体理论和欧洲屏幕文化。他是乌迪内大学数字故事讲述实验室的项目负责人，并指导（Un）Dead Media项目。他编辑了第一本意大利媒体考古学著名国际学术论文集《媒体考古》（Meltemi，2018：利米纳奖2019最佳意大利语翻译）。他的文章发表在意大利和国际同行评审期刊上，如《电影史》、《Necsus》和《Bianco e Nero》。他是《Gli Anni del Cineguf:Il cinema spermentale italiano dai cine club al neorealismo》（2017）的作者。他研究媒体考古学、两次世界大战期间的业余电影、先锋派和现代主义文化。
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