Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477231163421
Suzanne H. Buchan
This issue brings you a set of interdisciplinary articles in unanticipated dialogues with each other, often through a long view, of histories of art, natural science and (pre-) cinema. For this reader, there is also an undercurrent throughout of pioneering media (an)archaeologist Zielinski’s (2006) Deep Time of the Media, that should be required reading for all interested in animation – and cinema as a whole – before and after the invention of photochemical processes. Zielinski’s challenges are to ‘an anemic and evolutionary model [that] has come to dominate many studies in so-called media’ (p. vii) and to a dominant orthodox historiography (pp. vii–viii). He is clear that the field of media archaeology ‘faces numerous issues to evolve histories of technologies, apparatuses, effects, images, iconographies, and so forth, within a larger scheme of reintegration in order to expand a largely ignored aspect of conventional history’ (p. ix). As an academic journal, we also encourage authorship that engages with expanding our field, including in the ways Zielinski proposes. Some of the articles in this issue develop ontological, media-archaeological or philosophical approaches to our understanding of animation and move beyond the concept of the illusion of life often used to define the form. Others are seeking distinctions and new ways to approach specific sets of works or techniques, apparatuses and technologies. Most engage with the phenomena described by Colin Williamson of magic ‘hidden in plain sight’ that is the main title of his (2015) monograph, that ‘focuses on the “long” shared history of magic and the cinema’ (p. 18). The journal’s scope, since 2006, is to address all animation made using all known (and yet to be developed) techniques, from 16th-century optical devices to contemporary digital media. Considering the direction and expansion that Animation Studies has been taking in recent years, it is time to responsively expand our scope into a longer-reaching techno-scientific and historical past and, with paradigm-shifting, disruptive new technologies into the speculative future. In the late 18th century, as one of a number of movements following on from the European Enlightenment and challenging its rational restraint, the German Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) was known for its focus on subjectivity and emotions. A key figure in this music and literary movement was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; yet this polymath’s contribution far exceeded the arts, with wide-ranging – what we would now call interdisciplinary – investigations into everything from colour theory to the natural sciences. One of the latter is the focus of Zeke Saber’s ‘Animating Goethe’ in which he takes one of the main terms used to describe a defining feature of animation – metamorphosis – to unfold and complicate this through Goethe’s aesthetic, philosophical and scientific considerations of the botanical phenomenon of morphology. Saber’s aim is ambitious: to propose a the
{"title":"Editorial","authors":"Suzanne H. Buchan","doi":"10.1177/17468477231163421","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17468477231163421","url":null,"abstract":"This issue brings you a set of interdisciplinary articles in unanticipated dialogues with each other, often through a long view, of histories of art, natural science and (pre-) cinema. For this reader, there is also an undercurrent throughout of pioneering media (an)archaeologist Zielinski’s (2006) Deep Time of the Media, that should be required reading for all interested in animation – and cinema as a whole – before and after the invention of photochemical processes. Zielinski’s challenges are to ‘an anemic and evolutionary model [that] has come to dominate many studies in so-called media’ (p. vii) and to a dominant orthodox historiography (pp. vii–viii). He is clear that the field of media archaeology ‘faces numerous issues to evolve histories of technologies, apparatuses, effects, images, iconographies, and so forth, within a larger scheme of reintegration in order to expand a largely ignored aspect of conventional history’ (p. ix). As an academic journal, we also encourage authorship that engages with expanding our field, including in the ways Zielinski proposes. Some of the articles in this issue develop ontological, media-archaeological or philosophical approaches to our understanding of animation and move beyond the concept of the illusion of life often used to define the form. Others are seeking distinctions and new ways to approach specific sets of works or techniques, apparatuses and technologies. Most engage with the phenomena described by Colin Williamson of magic ‘hidden in plain sight’ that is the main title of his (2015) monograph, that ‘focuses on the “long” shared history of magic and the cinema’ (p. 18). The journal’s scope, since 2006, is to address all animation made using all known (and yet to be developed) techniques, from 16th-century optical devices to contemporary digital media. Considering the direction and expansion that Animation Studies has been taking in recent years, it is time to responsively expand our scope into a longer-reaching techno-scientific and historical past and, with paradigm-shifting, disruptive new technologies into the speculative future. In the late 18th century, as one of a number of movements following on from the European Enlightenment and challenging its rational restraint, the German Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) was known for its focus on subjectivity and emotions. A key figure in this music and literary movement was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; yet this polymath’s contribution far exceeded the arts, with wide-ranging – what we would now call interdisciplinary – investigations into everything from colour theory to the natural sciences. One of the latter is the focus of Zeke Saber’s ‘Animating Goethe’ in which he takes one of the main terms used to describe a defining feature of animation – metamorphosis – to unfold and complicate this through Goethe’s aesthetic, philosophical and scientific considerations of the botanical phenomenon of morphology. Saber’s aim is ambitious: to propose a the","PeriodicalId":43271,"journal":{"name":"Animation-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"18 1","pages":"3 - 6"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45082701","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 : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477231155541
N. Jones
VFX (visual effects) breakdowns are short ancillary videos that advertise the digital animation work undertaken by a VFX company for a particular film or television programme. Claiming to take viewers ‘behind the magic’ of VFX, breakdowns disassemble a wide variety of shots and sequences, and point to the extensive use of computer-generated imagery in contemporary blockbuster cinema. But, as much as breakdowns reveal some illusions, they conjure others. Breakdowns operate in a register of speed, fluidity and efficacy, showing neither the many people nor the extensive periods of time that it takes to painstakingly generate all these VFX. In this article, the author reveals how the omission of labour and duration in VFX breakdowns both reflects and contributes to a broader (mis)understanding of digital effects as immaterial, instantaneous and magical. His case study is Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019), a film that links VFX with magic, evokes the breakdown in some of its spectacular visuals, and even outright villainizes those effects artists who seek fair recognition for their work.
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Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477231155545
C. Holliday
This article examines the critical and cultural framing of the Walt Disney Studio’s cel- and computer-animated feature films according to an enduring art-historical narrative. It traces the critical evolution and historical periodization of Disney animation from the 1930s and 1940s to the post-millennial period, arguing that the studio has often been understood according to ‘early, middle and late’ phases of production that are typically held as both complementary and in tension with each other. Supported by the well-established art-history vernacular that has defined discrete Disney eras, this article then argues for post-2012 Disney Feature Animation as an example of the studio’s ‘late style’ – a later phase not of transgression or alienation, but one that adheres to a more positivist mode that signals pleasurable formal dissidence, confident deformation, and artistic creativity. This article subsequently advances the term ‘Disney Baroque’ to describe such playful transformations of digital aesthetics and effects present across the studio’s nine features released between Wreck-It Ralph (Rich Moore, 2012) and Encanto (Jared Bush and Byron Howard, 2021), its longest run of computer-animated films. By sharpening contemporary Disney’s connections to the ahistorical or atemporal logic of Baroque theatricality, this article identifies how contemporary Disney animation engineers spectacular moments of upheaval that rest on specific Neo-Baroque qualities (concealment, illusionism, representationalism, polycentricism, seriality, the labyrinthine) in ways that further contribute to an understanding of Disney’s own internal history and critical periodicity.
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Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477231155543
Paola Voci
Animateurs are characterized by liminality or, possibly more accurately, intersectionality, vis-à-vis the mainstream and the avant-garde. Their vernacular creative work points to hybrid genealogies that include analogue handmade cinema and performing arts, such as the magic lantern show, puppetry and shadow play. The author proposes that animateurs develop a distinctive practice and theory of animation that can be best understood as ‘para-animation’, i.e. a liminal, nearby, or off idea of animation that critically expands theories of the moving image and media archaeology. In para-animation, the moving image is non-medium specific, freed from both the index and the virtual, as reality is not there to be (re)presented or remade, but instead to be reconnected with. Para-animation’s uncontainable and overflowing multimedia materialities challenge film’s representational and photographic genealogy and actualize the moving image as a key location for an alternative, both embodied and enchanted, experience of the modern world. In so doing, para-animation also reveals multidirectional – across times and places – connections between animateurs and other enchanters (inventors, prestidigitators, performers, storytellers), similarly crossing and morphing boundaries between technology and magic, representation and imagination, science and art, knowledge and pleasure. Referring to a selection of animateurs’ works, this article focuses on the embodied gesture of ‘the hand on-screen’ as one of the key modalities through which para-animation re-centres the body and allows for a simultaneously technologized and de-technologized re-enchanted experience of reality.
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Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477221114367
Mercedes Alvarez San Román
Animation in Spain is currently experiencing a golden age. This study identifies 1985 as the starting point for this era and proposes a periodization of the more than three decades since, during which time 120 Spanish animated films have been released. The establishment of new regional institutions during Spain’s transition to democracy was the driving force behind this development, as the newly created governments saw in animation a means of transmitting the culture and language of their own region to new generations. Since the arrival of CGI and the incorporation of Spain into international trade networks, Spain has become the fifth largest producer of animation worldwide and the second largest in Europe. The model has evolved into a transnational cinema model based on private capital and globalized content that has achieved profitability, high export ratios and international recognition.
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Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477221114596
I. Cross
Skazka Skazok/Tale of Tales (Yuri Norstein, 1979) has delighted and puzzled audiences and critics ever since its release. It presents a series of beautifully-animated episodes that seem to make narrative sense at the micro-level and that appear to fit together as a whole, but leaves the audience bemused as to why this should be so. The article discusses the history and context of the film, arguing that the ways in which sound and, particularly, music are deployed in relation to its visual elements provide powerful clues and cues as to the film’s over-arching narrative significances. Close analysis of the film’s music, sound and visuals reveals teleological underpinnings that are realized by means of alignment and re-alignment of music and image, leading to a new understanding of how the film and its success can be interpreted.
{"title":"Music, Memory and Narrative: The Art of Telling in Tale of Tales","authors":"I. Cross","doi":"10.1177/17468477221114596","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17468477221114596","url":null,"abstract":"Skazka Skazok/Tale of Tales (Yuri Norstein, 1979) has delighted and puzzled audiences and critics ever since its release. It presents a series of beautifully-animated episodes that seem to make narrative sense at the micro-level and that appear to fit together as a whole, but leaves the audience bemused as to why this should be so. The article discusses the history and context of the film, arguing that the ways in which sound and, particularly, music are deployed in relation to its visual elements provide powerful clues and cues as to the film’s over-arching narrative significances. Close analysis of the film’s music, sound and visuals reveals teleological underpinnings that are realized by means of alignment and re-alignment of music and image, leading to a new understanding of how the film and its success can be interpreted.","PeriodicalId":43271,"journal":{"name":"Animation-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"17 1","pages":"334 - 346"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49276878","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 : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477221114368
Eric Herhuth
Andrew R Johnston’s Pulses of Abstraction: Episodes from a History of Animation makes a much-needed intervention in the study of cinema and animation. Claims that cinema is a subset of animation or subsumed by animation in the digital era tend to overlook the vicissitudes and variations that make up the history of animation. The ‘episodes’ that Johnston examines correct such overgeneralizations. These episodes center around artists working in the US during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s and problematize conventional categorizations of their work: that it belongs to either the mechanical arts or the new media of information processing, or, likewise, that it belongs to either political modernism or formal experimentation. By locating this work in a history of animation, rather than experimental film, for instance, Johnston offers new descriptions of how artists register and shape changing understandings of time, information, and movement. The project effectively models a methodology that accounts for different media ecologies and technological and epistemological changes. While ‘abstraction’ is the through line for Johnston’s case studies, each chapter carefully maps the interrelatedness of the many aspects constituting a given assemblage. This includes phenomenological approaches to the aesthetics of technology and consideration of form as ideological in relation to modes of production. And it includes understanding media ecologies as dynamic, agential networks of humans and nonhumans. Importantly, Johnston’s approach does not homogenize distinct constellations, but brings into relief their similarities and differences. In his own words, ‘animation’s technical assemblages pulse in this fashion, changing with epistemological landscapes by acting both within and on them’ (p. 15). The book’s chapter titles, ‘Line’, ‘Color’, ‘Interval’, ‘Projection’, and ‘Code’, reflect this approach and support a related idea, namely, that instances of animation tend to revisit and re-open the basic components of cinema. Johnston’s first chapter establishes his method by examining the scratch films of Len Lye through their technicity, form, and social context. The chapter puts into dialogue an array of theorists, historians, and philosophers, including Sergei Eisenstein, Wilhelm Worringer, Clement Greenberg, Roland Barthes, Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss, Donald Crafton, Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Through this multi-faceted dialogue, Johnston describes how Lye’s work expresses a ‘vitalistic energy’ that relies on traces of the artist’s gestural 1114368 ANM0010.1177/17468477221114368animation: an interdisciplinary journalBook review book-review2022
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Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477221114366
Jifeng Huang
This article clarifies the definition of ‘Chinese School of Animation’ and chronologically traces this term’s origination and development. The rise of the term ‘Chinese School’ was inspired by the Zagreb School of Animation. Chinese scholars generally define the Chinese School as a set of internationally award-winning films based on the collectivist discourse, which canonizes Chinese meishu films. The connotation of the Chinese School has kept changing in different times of China’s history, and the prevalence and decline of this term in Chinese animation studies are closely related to China’s cultural policies, nationwide nationalist thoughts, economic systems and its animation industry.
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Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477221131874
Jason Woodworth-Hou
In 2014, the British Imperial War Museum (IWM) contracted New Zealand-based filmmaker, Peter Jackson, to use their audio and video archives to create a media-based memorial to the men who served in World War 1. The documentary film, They Shall Not Grow Old (TSNGO), released in 2018, was the product of this collaboration. Jackson took on the project to better understand his own grandfather’s experience as a soldier at the Battle of the Somme. Weta Digital Studios, founded by Jackson, converted the standard WWI newsreel footage into a product that aligned to a modern audience’s perceptual sense of truth. Weta Digital redrew and colored each frame, a process that is strikingly similar to CGI animation. Curiously, Jackson, a filmmaker whose career has hinged on his ability to collaborate with CGI animators, does not describe his new historical film treatment as animation. This article first argues that TSNGO is following in the footsteps of previous CGI animated films, in particular those that have re-edited historical footage, but more importantly asks: why would Jackson prefer to keep the word ‘animation’ out of the discussion about his new historical documentary? The answer to this question leads us to a critical discussion about how animation has become both the preserver and ‘re-imaginer’ of existing historical archives.
2014年，大英帝国战争博物馆(IWM)与新西兰电影制作人彼得·杰克逊(Peter Jackson)签约，利用他们的音频和视频档案，为第一次世界大战中服役的人创建了一个基于媒体的纪念碑。2018年上映的纪录片《他们不会变老》就是这一合作的产物。杰克逊接受这个项目是为了更好地了解他自己的祖父在索姆河战役中作为一名士兵的经历。杰克逊创立的维塔数字工作室(Weta Digital Studios)将标准的第一次世界大战新闻片镜头转换成符合现代观众对真相的感性感知的产品。维塔数字公司重新绘制并为每一帧上色，这一过程与CGI动画惊人地相似。奇怪的是，作为一个电影制作人，杰克逊的职业生涯取决于他与CGI动画师合作的能力，他并没有把他的新历史电影描述为动画。这篇文章首先指出，TSNGO是在追随以前的CGI动画电影的脚步，特别是那些重新编辑了历史片段的电影，但更重要的是:为什么杰克逊宁愿把“动画”这个词排除在他的新历史纪录片的讨论之外?这个问题的答案将我们引向一个批判性的讨论，即动画是如何成为现有历史档案的保存者和“重新想象者”的。
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Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477221114365
Chengcheng You
Emerging from the 17th-century Chinese classic Fengshen yanyi (Creation of the Gods), a generic mixture of myth, folklore, history and legend, Nezha, a 7-year-old superboy who is decreed by fate to return his own flesh and bones to his parents and unyieldingly confront paternal authority in combat, has been popularized as an unconventional hero in animated adaptations since the 1970s. This article examines the cultural and historical significance of Nezha’s changing fate in the three Chinese animated feature films produced thus far: Nezha Conquers the Dragon King (Wang et al., 1979), Nezha (Jiaozi, 2019) and New Gods: Nezha Reborn (Zhao, 2021). The author argues that Nezha’s variations of personal individuation reflect China’s shifting historical contexts, changing intergenerational relations and reconfigured notions of selfhood by presenting an existential paradox of fate and freedom of action that ultimately preserves the social systems of patriarchy and filial piety, and puts forward a negotiated compromise between social collectivism and individualism. Combining theories of intertextual aesthetics with Gilles Deleuze’s conceptualization of fabulation, the study proposes a conceptual framework of ‘animated fabulation’ to account for the profound interaction between the literary and the cinematic, the social and the mythic, with a detailed analysis of the aesthetic and socio-political entanglements in the three animated adaptations.
{"title":"The Demon Child and His Modern Fate: Reconstructing the Nezha Myth in Animated Fabulation","authors":"Chengcheng You","doi":"10.1177/17468477221114365","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17468477221114365","url":null,"abstract":"Emerging from the 17th-century Chinese classic Fengshen yanyi (Creation of the Gods), a generic mixture of myth, folklore, history and legend, Nezha, a 7-year-old superboy who is decreed by fate to return his own flesh and bones to his parents and unyieldingly confront paternal authority in combat, has been popularized as an unconventional hero in animated adaptations since the 1970s. This article examines the cultural and historical significance of Nezha’s changing fate in the three Chinese animated feature films produced thus far: Nezha Conquers the Dragon King (Wang et al., 1979), Nezha (Jiaozi, 2019) and New Gods: Nezha Reborn (Zhao, 2021). The author argues that Nezha’s variations of personal individuation reflect China’s shifting historical contexts, changing intergenerational relations and reconfigured notions of selfhood by presenting an existential paradox of fate and freedom of action that ultimately preserves the social systems of patriarchy and filial piety, and puts forward a negotiated compromise between social collectivism and individualism. Combining theories of intertextual aesthetics with Gilles Deleuze’s conceptualization of fabulation, the study proposes a conceptual framework of ‘animated fabulation’ to account for the profound interaction between the literary and the cinematic, the social and the mythic, with a detailed analysis of the aesthetic and socio-political entanglements in the three animated adaptations.","PeriodicalId":43271,"journal":{"name":"Animation-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"17 1","pages":"286 - 301"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44210835","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}
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