Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477221134726
Suzanne H. Buchan
In a previous Special Issue on New Perspectives on Animation Historiography (Volume 17, No 1), Co-Guest Editors Rada Bieberstein and Erwin Feyersinger wrote what they called an ‘open paper’ inviting scholars to consider joining the discussion around ways to approach histories and historiographies of animation. While none of the articles in the present issue explicitly respond to this, this issue of animation: an interdisciplinary journal has a thread of history running through it that loosely links the articles, yet in very different ways, from documentary history or a history of myth to national history, historiography or the development history of a single film. We hope you pick up some of the threads and that you enjoy this issue as much as we did working with the authors. One way that animation is employed is in the visualization of what is unseen or unwitnessed, yet known. It has featured in many films and broadcast programmes that work with historical subjects, using imaginative interpretations of texts, drawings, sound recordings or oral histories; these animation segments or sequences are often graphic or artistic designs and materials. One of the interesting developments after the digital shift has been the explosion of films that do not look like animation, and aspire to realism, but are made with animation techniques using animation we are not supposed to see. While this kind of animation tends to be used in feature films and fantasy fiction, it is also put to use in documentary and historical projects, and this is the subject of Jason Woodworth-Hou’s ‘Reanimating the Master Narrative: How They Shall Not Grow Old Curates the Perception of Common Truth through CGI Animation’. He unfolds the origin of director Peter Jackson’s personally motivated project, discusses the aesthetics of CGI and realism, the work with archives and war footage, and the digital frame-by-frame processes used to rework the footage. He then concentrates on a key question for our field: why does Jackson avoid using the term ‘animation’ in discussions of this film? Peppered with interviews and underpinned by references to Gilles Deleuze, Andrew Darley and Stephen Prince, in particular, as well as media reviews of the film, Woodworth-Hou constructs a convincing argument around animation techniques and aesthetics in Jackson’s ‘re-animating’ of his subjects, with an interesting observation about the sound created post-hoc for the film (the footage was silent). He emphasizes the importance of animation in the ‘reimagining’ of factual histories and raises wellformulated concerns as to why reanimated historical documentary film needs closer academic and audience scrutiny. Also a form of historical retelling, but this time of a myth that is embedded in historical political and social systems, is Chengcheng You’s ‘The Demon Child and His Modern Fate: Reconstructing the Nezha Myth in Animated Fabulation’. You concentrates on the three animated features that depict this myth,
{"title":"Editorial","authors":"Suzanne H. Buchan","doi":"10.1177/17468477221134726","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17468477221134726","url":null,"abstract":"In a previous Special Issue on New Perspectives on Animation Historiography (Volume 17, No 1), Co-Guest Editors Rada Bieberstein and Erwin Feyersinger wrote what they called an ‘open paper’ inviting scholars to consider joining the discussion around ways to approach histories and historiographies of animation. While none of the articles in the present issue explicitly respond to this, this issue of animation: an interdisciplinary journal has a thread of history running through it that loosely links the articles, yet in very different ways, from documentary history or a history of myth to national history, historiography or the development history of a single film. We hope you pick up some of the threads and that you enjoy this issue as much as we did working with the authors. One way that animation is employed is in the visualization of what is unseen or unwitnessed, yet known. It has featured in many films and broadcast programmes that work with historical subjects, using imaginative interpretations of texts, drawings, sound recordings or oral histories; these animation segments or sequences are often graphic or artistic designs and materials. One of the interesting developments after the digital shift has been the explosion of films that do not look like animation, and aspire to realism, but are made with animation techniques using animation we are not supposed to see. While this kind of animation tends to be used in feature films and fantasy fiction, it is also put to use in documentary and historical projects, and this is the subject of Jason Woodworth-Hou’s ‘Reanimating the Master Narrative: How They Shall Not Grow Old Curates the Perception of Common Truth through CGI Animation’. He unfolds the origin of director Peter Jackson’s personally motivated project, discusses the aesthetics of CGI and realism, the work with archives and war footage, and the digital frame-by-frame processes used to rework the footage. He then concentrates on a key question for our field: why does Jackson avoid using the term ‘animation’ in discussions of this film? Peppered with interviews and underpinned by references to Gilles Deleuze, Andrew Darley and Stephen Prince, in particular, as well as media reviews of the film, Woodworth-Hou constructs a convincing argument around animation techniques and aesthetics in Jackson’s ‘re-animating’ of his subjects, with an interesting observation about the sound created post-hoc for the film (the footage was silent). He emphasizes the importance of animation in the ‘reimagining’ of factual histories and raises wellformulated concerns as to why reanimated historical documentary film needs closer academic and audience scrutiny. Also a form of historical retelling, but this time of a myth that is embedded in historical political and social systems, is Chengcheng You’s ‘The Demon Child and His Modern Fate: Reconstructing the Nezha Myth in Animated Fabulation’. You concentrates on the three animated features that depict this myth,","PeriodicalId":43271,"journal":{"name":"Animation-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"17 1","pages":"267 - 270"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48250472","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 : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477221102499
Paul M Van Opdenbosch
Outside the realm of feature films, smaller creative collectives and individual animators are exploring the creative applications of motion capture data to develop compelling and unique abstract animated short films. However, despite an increasing number of examples, there has been little detailed documentation of this practice and the processes involved in this format of animation production. More specifically, there has been little analysis of the key considerations and issues that might confront practitioners when integrating motion capture movement data into their abstract animation practice. As such, a more developed understanding of approaches to incorporating motion capture technologies into the field of abstract animation is called for. This study emerges at the intersection of two key areas of knowledge: abstract animation and computational generative art. The outcomes of this study contribute to building a better understanding of abstract animation practice by exploring and documenting possible strategies and approaches for generating elements that compose abstract animated short films from captured dance movements. This article reveals a possible framework for this type of practice and outlines five key considerations: capture of human movement, retention of human form and movement, influence of the simulation, influence of the virtual environment and visual connection to practice, which should be taken into account by practitioners who use motion capture in the production of abstract animated short films.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477221102500
Nicholas A. Miller
Erwin Feyersinger’s Metalepsis in Animation investigates a term that has been traditionally associated with the literary arts, offering a fascinating and compelling account of its central role in animation history. In classical rhetoric, ‘metalepsis’ is a verbal trope that uses far-fetched, ‘House that Jack Built’-style chains of metonymic association to represent characters and other story elements. The opening lines of Euripides’ Medea, for example, establish Jason as the author of the heroine’s sorrows not by naming him directly but by lamenting the mountain (Pelion) that bore the trees (pine) that produced the implements (oars) that propelled a ship (the Argo) to Medea’s home (Colchis). Literary theorist Gérard Genette later adopted the term, drawing on the element of spatial distance implicit in metaleptic representation to describe and analyze the complex effects of narrational perspectives in literary fiction. Genette argued that, in any act of storytelling, different ‘levels’ of embedded narratives might exist depending on who ‘sees’ and ‘tells’ story events, representing their content, frequency, duration, and order from a particular point of view. In the context of narratological theory, metalepsis has come to refer to the variously focalized voices of authors, narrators, and characters, and the dynamic effects that emerge based on their relative proximity to the story events they narrate. Feyersinger’s exploration of metalepsis builds on Genette’s approach by mapping the latter’s taxonomy of narrative voice onto an expressive visual form that routinely flouts expectations for verisimilitude. Animation, of course, has been defined since its origins precisely by its freedom from mimetic styles of realism, and this includes the diegetic separations of voice and perspective those styles typically employ. Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908), for example, features an artist’s hand breaching a story space in which figural metamorphosis dissolves notions of stable character; Chuck Jones’s Duck Amuck (1953) presents its visual narrative as the work of an artist who is himself a cartoon; Robert Stevenson’s Mary Poppins (1964) places live-action and drawn figures in a shared world where they interact directly with one another. In such cases, narrative voices and perspectives are not discrete or fixed; they do not stay ‘home’, but instead traverse and transgress ontological demarcations to subvert viewers’ expectations of reality rather than endorse them. Metalepsis in Animation explores such ‘paradoxical transgressions of ontological levels’ as a defining feature of animated media, suggesting that metalepsis offers a way to understand both the mechanism and the appeal of animation’s persistent disruptions of verisimilitude. Sandwiched between a brief introduction and conclusion, Feyersinger’s inquiry proceeds in two halves, each heralded by a short, discursive chapter defining terms followed by three lengthier investigative chapters. This neat, symmetric
{"title":"Book review: Metalepsis in Animation: Paradoxical Transgressions of Ontological Levels","authors":"Nicholas A. Miller","doi":"10.1177/17468477221102500","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17468477221102500","url":null,"abstract":"Erwin Feyersinger’s Metalepsis in Animation investigates a term that has been traditionally associated with the literary arts, offering a fascinating and compelling account of its central role in animation history. In classical rhetoric, ‘metalepsis’ is a verbal trope that uses far-fetched, ‘House that Jack Built’-style chains of metonymic association to represent characters and other story elements. The opening lines of Euripides’ Medea, for example, establish Jason as the author of the heroine’s sorrows not by naming him directly but by lamenting the mountain (Pelion) that bore the trees (pine) that produced the implements (oars) that propelled a ship (the Argo) to Medea’s home (Colchis). Literary theorist Gérard Genette later adopted the term, drawing on the element of spatial distance implicit in metaleptic representation to describe and analyze the complex effects of narrational perspectives in literary fiction. Genette argued that, in any act of storytelling, different ‘levels’ of embedded narratives might exist depending on who ‘sees’ and ‘tells’ story events, representing their content, frequency, duration, and order from a particular point of view. In the context of narratological theory, metalepsis has come to refer to the variously focalized voices of authors, narrators, and characters, and the dynamic effects that emerge based on their relative proximity to the story events they narrate. Feyersinger’s exploration of metalepsis builds on Genette’s approach by mapping the latter’s taxonomy of narrative voice onto an expressive visual form that routinely flouts expectations for verisimilitude. Animation, of course, has been defined since its origins precisely by its freedom from mimetic styles of realism, and this includes the diegetic separations of voice and perspective those styles typically employ. Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908), for example, features an artist’s hand breaching a story space in which figural metamorphosis dissolves notions of stable character; Chuck Jones’s Duck Amuck (1953) presents its visual narrative as the work of an artist who is himself a cartoon; Robert Stevenson’s Mary Poppins (1964) places live-action and drawn figures in a shared world where they interact directly with one another. In such cases, narrative voices and perspectives are not discrete or fixed; they do not stay ‘home’, but instead traverse and transgress ontological demarcations to subvert viewers’ expectations of reality rather than endorse them. Metalepsis in Animation explores such ‘paradoxical transgressions of ontological levels’ as a defining feature of animated media, suggesting that metalepsis offers a way to understand both the mechanism and the appeal of animation’s persistent disruptions of verisimilitude. Sandwiched between a brief introduction and conclusion, Feyersinger’s inquiry proceeds in two halves, each heralded by a short, discursive chapter defining terms followed by three lengthier investigative chapters. This neat, symmetric","PeriodicalId":43271,"journal":{"name":"Animation-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"17 1","pages":"262 - 264"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41572304","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 : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477221092344
Juergen Hagler, Remo Rauscher
This article discusses experimental forms of collaborative filmmaking in education and introduces the pedagogical concept of Chained Animation. Animation filmmaking usually involves teamwork; production pipelines are traditionally linear and hierarchically structured, separated into direction (or artistic direction) and production teams. By contrast, Chained Animations are non-linear and based on a large group of animators working together at various levels. This concept is particularly well suited to education as it integrates all participants equally, from the idea phase all the way through to its realization. In addition to teaching basic animation principles, this experimental form of education goes beyond established methods of practising those principles. The educational concepts for Chained Animations follow different strategies and range from professional workflows to playful, experimental forms that emphasize participatory and collaborative aspects within large groups. In this article, the authors first examine participatory art practices; then they discuss experimental forms of collaboration in animation and education, using examples from art, film and science. This article examines different experimental approaches, challenges and findings, which are based on three case studies undertaken at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Hagenberg Campus – Home (2016), Utopia Now (2017) and Draft One (2018) – ultimately presenting guidelines for Chained Animation in education.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477221102501
Paweł Sitkiewicz
When the doctrine of socialist realism was proclaimed in Polish cinema in November 1949, the production of animated films was only taking its first steps after World War Two. The industry lacked human resources, equipment, buildings, celluloid sheets, distribution system and success. Animators were forced to achieve new goals that were often both ambitious and contradictory. In this new reality, cartoons and puppet films had to be realistic and subordinated to the dominant political doctrine. Addressed to children exclusively, they presented educational and didactic features and were focused on several contemporary topics such as the construction of communism or official propaganda. At the same time, they were supposed to be artistic, technically perfect, addressed to the millions and compatible with Soviet animation practice from Soyuzmultfilm (which was the most important animation studio in the Soviet Union). This article identifies how Polish filmmakers strived to achieve these goals, and discusses the problems faced by young and inexperienced animators under Stalinist culture’s political pressure. The author examines the films produced in that period, verifies them against their assigned political tasks, and shows the absurdities of socialist realism in animation that wanted to reconcile contradictions such as entertainment and education, realism and fairy tales, artistic values and propaganda. Finally, the article explains the impact of these films on the future of Polish animation.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477221104172
K. Ray
In this article, the author proposes that both substance and process philosophy inadequately address the ‘plasmatic’ and metamorphic movement (PMM) of early animation since it subverts the logic of the ‘cinematographic illusion’. Cognition, which is apparently dependent on identity formation, is predicated on substance, which conforms to representational thought. PMM, which is predicated on the ‘fluid’ linkage of images, destabilizes substance, consequently problematizing representation by introducing conflict between speculative substance predicated on form and perceived materiality from movement. A different problem appears with process philosophy privileging continuing flux that cannot logically be based on identity formation as it resists predication. Yet, cognition is possible as process is speculative and substance is manifest. PMM, as a manifest process that dematerializes substance, ungrounds the basis of both philosophies, simultaneously highlighting their complementarity. By problematizing both, PMM is able to highlight the relational and dependently originated nature of thought.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477221092357
J. Law
The animated films of Hayao Miyazaki are populated by women, children and men at work. This article argues that the rendering of physical labour has the capacity to (re)connect the body to its broader social collective experience. The late philosopher, Bernard Stiegler, identifies the loss of savoir-faire (know-how) and savoir-vivre (life skills) as a critical deficit to how we live and work today. Miyazaki’s animated films provide a platform for potentially regaining savoir-faire and savoir-vivre in their reflexive portrayals of human labour. Every story told by Miyazaki involves scenes where bodies work with tools, with each other, and with machines to perform tasks. The rhythms of the working body speak to the ideals of labour as craft – not as exceptionally skilled expertise, but as an everyday practice – that presents ‘an opportunity to “think otherwise”’ as proposed by Glenn Adamson in The Crafter Reader (2010: 136). This article examines the performance of manual tasks in three contexts: the physical act of labour, labouring with machines and the animator’s labour. The author concludes by making the case that the animator’s labour extends to the craft of storytelling and, specifically, that Miyazaki’s animations are what Walter Benjamin called Kraftwerk – a ‘power work’ that re-models the ‘folkloric relations of space’ (see Esther Leslie’s, ‘Walter Benjamin, Traces of Craft’, 1998: 47) that keeps the human spirit alive.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477221102498
Philippe Bédard
This article examines the rising importance of ‘virtual production’ by focusing on one of its core components, the so-called ‘virtual camera’. Using the virtual camera as a focal point, the author highlights how a particular industrial model of film production has changed in response to the transformations brought about by digital technologies. More specifically, this article uses the notion of ‘virtualization’ introduced by Pierre Lévy in Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age (1998) to offer a unique point of view on films ‘shot’ with cameras that are ultimately all but virtual. Here, The Lion King (2019) serves as a prime example of virtual production, in general, and of the transformation undergone by the camera, in particular.
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Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477221085412
Christine Veras
This article aims to reanimate and expand on the often-neglected details of the zoetrope’s history, offering new insightful evidence from archival sources about this 19th-century optical toy’s genealogy. From its theorizing by William G. Horner in 1834 to its commercialization in 1867, this new study of the zoetrope’s original patents and archival materials suggests that all the three patents, filed in the same year, months apart from one another, in England, the United States, and France, are connected to the Milton Bradley Company. The historical investigation extends to the forgotten characteristics of the zoetrope, bringing them to light in combination with a hands-on approach through the lens of experimental media archaeology. This includes experiments with ‘zoetropic editing’, allowing for a recontextualization of its imaginative potential and playability through the combination of two different strips. From this animation practitioner and researcher’s point of view, the contributions shared in this article can expand and challenge the way we play with, teach about, and produce animations for the zoetrope today.
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Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477221080113
Felix Hasebrink
Contrary to popular belief, ‘making-of’ documentaries are not a phenomenon of contemporary home cinema culture, but have a long pre-DVD history. This article engages with a special subcategory: ‘making-of’ documentaries on the production of animation. With a focus on French and American examples, the author retraces the transition of production imagery from metaleptic cartoons to emergent documentary genres of the 1930s, arguing that this historical shift reformulated the question of how the creation of animated films can be captured cinematically. Providing decidedly nonfiction (but not necessarily ‘objective’) images of the making of animation, the films challenged established concepts to address the realm of cinematic production. The article seeks to examine this theoretical potential, using the notion of a cinematic hors-cadre as a key example.
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