Pub Date : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477211049360
T. Mes, Francis M. Agnoli
With the eternally looming spectre of Miyazaki Hayao’s retirement, the death of Takahata Isao and the failure to establish a viable new artistic figurehead to follow in their footsteps, Studio Ghibli has been at a crucial crossroads for some time. Over the past few decades, the acclaimed Japanese animation studio has adopted three main strategies to cope with these changes: apprenticeship to foster new talent, co-productions both domestically and abroad, and shutting down their production facilities. Each approach has affected Ghibli’s evolving brand identity – and the meaning of the ‘Ghibli film’ – causing confusion in the international critical reception of the resulting movies. Academic approaches too have shown difficulties dealing with recent shifts. While conceptualizing the ‘Ghibli film’ as the product of a studio brand or as the work of auteurs Miyazaki and Takahata has proven useful, such frameworks have become inadequate for accommodating these changes. This article therefore proposes a new approach for understanding recent ‘Ghibli films’, arguing that, rather than being treated as a brand or genre, they have increasingly been fashioned along modular lines.
{"title":"A Modular Genre? Problems in the Reception of the Post-Miyazaki ‘Ghibli Film’","authors":"T. Mes, Francis M. Agnoli","doi":"10.1177/17468477211049360","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17468477211049360","url":null,"abstract":"With the eternally looming spectre of Miyazaki Hayao’s retirement, the death of Takahata Isao and the failure to establish a viable new artistic figurehead to follow in their footsteps, Studio Ghibli has been at a crucial crossroads for some time. Over the past few decades, the acclaimed Japanese animation studio has adopted three main strategies to cope with these changes: apprenticeship to foster new talent, co-productions both domestically and abroad, and shutting down their production facilities. Each approach has affected Ghibli’s evolving brand identity – and the meaning of the ‘Ghibli film’ – causing confusion in the international critical reception of the resulting movies. Academic approaches too have shown difficulties dealing with recent shifts. While conceptualizing the ‘Ghibli film’ as the product of a studio brand or as the work of auteurs Miyazaki and Takahata has proven useful, such frameworks have become inadequate for accommodating these changes. This article therefore proposes a new approach for understanding recent ‘Ghibli films’, arguing that, rather than being treated as a brand or genre, they have increasingly been fashioned along modular lines.","PeriodicalId":43271,"journal":{"name":"Animation-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41314124","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 : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477211052599
Jun Wu, Jiede Wu, Chien-Wen Cheng, Chang-Chieh Shih, P. Lin
How do animation directors and music composers integrate personal creativity and expression into their work, and how do audiences understand and appreciate it as being important and worthy of discussion? This study explores the influence of music on audiences’ cognition of animation by using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Scholars specializing in aesthetics and music have conducted much research on music aesthetics and music itself. In recent years, further studies on music and film have also been carried out. However, there is a lack of research regarding audiences’ cognition of music in animation. This study focuses on the popular form of sand animation and provides insights into audiences’ cognition differences and preferences in order to uncover the core factors. The findings are that: (1) the audience perceived more consistent and subtle differences in the use of musical instruments, rhythm cadence and video–audio fit; there were also obvious differences in the perceptions of vocal skills, performance skills and musical style as well as emotional transmission; (2) three aspects of the audiences’ evaluation of an animation were affected by music: creativity, cultural meaning and preferences. The seven elements that constitute animation music (use of orchestration, vocal skills, musical style, rhythm cadence, performance techniques, emotional transmission and video–audio fit) exerted varying degrees of influence on the audiences’ evaluation of the animation film. Amongst these, video–audio fit was found to be the most important element, as it simultaneously affected the audiences’ evaluation in terms of creativity, cultural meaning and preferences; (3) audiences of different ages and professional backgrounds showed significant differences in evaluating animation films in terms of creativity, culture and preference; and (4) differences in music had a significant impact on audiences’ perceptions and evaluations of 10 facets of animation films, including the story content, role identification and spiritual fit.
{"title":"A Study of the Influence of Music on Audiences’ Cognition of Animation","authors":"Jun Wu, Jiede Wu, Chien-Wen Cheng, Chang-Chieh Shih, P. Lin","doi":"10.1177/17468477211052599","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17468477211052599","url":null,"abstract":"How do animation directors and music composers integrate personal creativity and expression into their work, and how do audiences understand and appreciate it as being important and worthy of discussion? This study explores the influence of music on audiences’ cognition of animation by using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Scholars specializing in aesthetics and music have conducted much research on music aesthetics and music itself. In recent years, further studies on music and film have also been carried out. However, there is a lack of research regarding audiences’ cognition of music in animation. This study focuses on the popular form of sand animation and provides insights into audiences’ cognition differences and preferences in order to uncover the core factors. The findings are that: (1) the audience perceived more consistent and subtle differences in the use of musical instruments, rhythm cadence and video–audio fit; there were also obvious differences in the perceptions of vocal skills, performance skills and musical style as well as emotional transmission; (2) three aspects of the audiences’ evaluation of an animation were affected by music: creativity, cultural meaning and preferences. The seven elements that constitute animation music (use of orchestration, vocal skills, musical style, rhythm cadence, performance techniques, emotional transmission and video–audio fit) exerted varying degrees of influence on the audiences’ evaluation of the animation film. Amongst these, video–audio fit was found to be the most important element, as it simultaneously affected the audiences’ evaluation in terms of creativity, cultural meaning and preferences; (3) audiences of different ages and professional backgrounds showed significant differences in evaluating animation films in terms of creativity, culture and preference; and (4) differences in music had a significant impact on audiences’ perceptions and evaluations of 10 facets of animation films, including the story content, role identification and spiritual fit.","PeriodicalId":43271,"journal":{"name":"Animation-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45213852","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 : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477211049352
A. Dial
Disney films have a distinct way of always feeling in-time, a sensation the company understands and monetizes. A Goofy Movie (AGM) was released in 1995, and since its theatrical release, the film has continued to capture the hearts and minds of a cult audience of passionate fans. Among this array of fans is a core of Black millenials who hold the film in high regard due to its R&B soundtrack and relatable narrative. However, the moments of Black representation within the film are less interesting than how a Black reading becomes possible. What are the component parts of the film’s making when arranged in such a way that invokes an essential Black lifeworld? AGM affixes Blackness to its form not through any profound representation of race. Rather, considering its animators as technical performers, the dark history behind the American cartoon, and how Black music is used to not just make Blackness known but believable instantiate what Michael Gillespie terms, ‘film Blackness’ in Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (2016).
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Pub Date : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477211052598
J. Mortimer, Nick Pilcher, Kendall Richards
Scotland’s history of animation is a forgotten past accomplishment in the animation/VFX sector, with key influential animation professionals having had an impact both at home and abroad. Yet, to date, this history has not been meaningfully documented and such documentation can help inform policy initiatives to help nurture and develop the industry. These developments could help ensure that the importance and accomplishments of its achievements will not be forgotten or remain undeveloped. Indeed, it is argued here that Scotland suffers from historical amnesia with regard to the country’s past accomplishments and missed opportunities, but that public funding and further investment in talent development and retention can help establish the industry as a key player in society and economy. This article presents the results from an investigative literature collection and consultation with central figures in the Scottish animation industry, providing for the first time a clearer picture of the importance of animation in Scotland both for the country and for the industry worldwide. Discussing the initiatives and funding models of other European countries such as France, the article concludes by suggesting ways in which future policy initiatives could help assist Scotland’s animation industry grow and establish itself both for the future development of animation in Scotland and worldwide.
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Pub Date : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477211049353
Amy Skjerseth
There is a tendency in animation studies to discuss sound in the language of images, stressing sound’s alignment with visual cues (as in mickey mousing and leitmotifs). But sounds do not only mimic images: they add textures and emotions that change what we see. This article explores grain (texture) and timbre (tone color produced by specific instruments and techniques) as qualities shared by visual and sonic material. To do so, the author closely reads Sand or Peter and the Wolf (1969), where Caroline Leaf’s haptic sand animation is matched by Michael Riesman’s electroacoustic score. Leaf painstakingly molds animals by scraping away individual sand grains, and Riesman sculpts sonic textures with tiny adjustments to knobs and touch-sensitive pads on the Buchla modular synthesizer. Their collective improvisation with sands and sounds reveals new ways to think about artists’ material practices and the friction and interplay between images and sounds. They encourage spectators to perceive the animals as not merely plasmatic, or Sergei Eisenstein’s notion of contour-bending character animation. Instead, Leaf and Riesman deploy what the author calls ‘granular modulation’, expressing sand and animals with sensuous materiality. In Leaf’s and Riesman’s improvisations, grainy textures are the seeds of understanding how sound and vision become symbiotic – and encounter friction – in animation.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477211025660
Patrick Sullivan
Zaps, crashes, boinks, and bangs flooded TV’s airwaves with the rise of Hanna-Barbera Productions at the end of the 1950s, and these sound effects have been heard ever since. Hanna-Barbera Productions created and proliferated one of the most recognizable collections of sounds in television and animation history. This article traces the formation of Hanna-Barbera’s library of sound effects and how these sound effects operate within the studio’s cartoons. Motored by television’s demanding production schedule and restrictive budgets, Hanna-Barbera persistently recycled its sound effects across episodes, seasons, and series. These sound effects, heard over and over again, were paired to the studio’s brand of limited animation – a form of animation that is often seen as kinetically wanting – to enliven images through sonically invoking movement, what this article calls trajectory mimesis. This logic of trajectory mimesis facilitates the repetition of the studio’s sound effects. These conditions – television’s economic restraints and the studio’s limited animation aesthetics –provided the ideal conditions for the creation of Hanna-Barbera’s iconic library of sound effects.
{"title":"Hanna-Barbera’s Cacophony: Sound Effects and the Production of Movement","authors":"Patrick Sullivan","doi":"10.1177/17468477211025660","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17468477211025660","url":null,"abstract":"Zaps, crashes, boinks, and bangs flooded TV’s airwaves with the rise of Hanna-Barbera Productions at the end of the 1950s, and these sound effects have been heard ever since. Hanna-Barbera Productions created and proliferated one of the most recognizable collections of sounds in television and animation history. This article traces the formation of Hanna-Barbera’s library of sound effects and how these sound effects operate within the studio’s cartoons. Motored by television’s demanding production schedule and restrictive budgets, Hanna-Barbera persistently recycled its sound effects across episodes, seasons, and series. These sound effects, heard over and over again, were paired to the studio’s brand of limited animation – a form of animation that is often seen as kinetically wanting – to enliven images through sonically invoking movement, what this article calls trajectory mimesis. This logic of trajectory mimesis facilitates the repetition of the studio’s sound effects. These conditions – television’s economic restraints and the studio’s limited animation aesthetics –provided the ideal conditions for the creation of Hanna-Barbera’s iconic library of sound effects.","PeriodicalId":43271,"journal":{"name":"Animation-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/17468477211025660","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42540993","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 : 2021-07-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477211025665
R. Greenberg
Produced throughout the 1980s using the company’s Adventure Game Interpreter engine, the digital adventure games created by American software publisher Sierra On-Line played an important and largely overlooked role in the development of animation as an integral part of the digital gaming experience. While the little historical and theoretical discussion of the company’s games of the era focuses on their genre, it ignores these games’ contribution to the relationship between the animated avatars and the gamers that control them – a relationship that, as argued in this article, in essence turns gamers into animators. If we consider Chris Pallant’s (2019) argument in ‘Video games and animation’ that animation is essential to the sense of immersion within a digital game, then the great freedom provided to the gamers in animating their avatars within Sierra On-Line’s adventure games paved the way to the same sense of immersion in digital. And, if we refer to Gonzalo Frasca’s (1999) divide of digital games to narrative-led or free-play (ludus versus paidea) in ‘Ludology meets narratology: Similitude and differences between (video) games and narrative’, then the company’s adventure games served as an important early example of balance between the two elements through the gamers’ ability to animate their avatars. Furthermore, Sierra On-Line’s adventure games have tapped into the traditional tension between the animator and the character it animated, as observed by Scott Bukatman in ‘The poetics of Slumberland: Animated spirits and the animated spirit (2012), when he challenged the traditional divide between animators, the characters they animate and the audience. All these contributions, as this articles aims to demonstrate, continue to influence the role of animation in digital games to this very day.
这款由美国软件发行商Sierra online开发的数字冒险游戏是在20世纪80年代使用公司的Adventure Game Interpreter引擎制作的，它在动画的发展过程中扮演了一个重要的角色，但在很大程度上被忽视了，它是数字游戏体验的一个组成部分。虽然关于该公司游戏的少量历史和理论讨论主要集中在游戏类型上，但却忽略了这些游戏对动画角色和控制它们的玩家之间关系的贡献——正如本文所述，这种关系本质上是将玩家转变为动画师。如果我们考虑Chris Pallant(2019)在“电子游戏和动画”中的观点，即动画对于数字游戏中的沉浸感至关重要，那么在Sierra online的冒险游戏中为玩家提供动画角色的巨大自由为同样的数字沉浸感铺平了道路。如果我们参照Gonzalo Frasca(1999)在“游戏学与叙事学:(电子)游戏与叙事的异同”一文中将数字游戏划分为叙事主导或自由游戏(ludus vs paidea)，那么该公司的冒险游戏便是通过玩家赋予角色动画的能力来平衡这两种元素的重要早期例子。此外，Sierra online的冒险游戏利用了动画师和角色之间的传统紧张关系，正如Scott Bukatman在《the poetics of Slumberland: animated spirits and the animated spirit》(2012)中所观察到的那样，他挑战了动画师、动画角色和观众之间的传统分歧。正如本文所阐述的那样，所有这些贡献直到今天仍在继续影响着动画在数字游戏中的角色。
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Pub Date : 2021-07-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477211025666
Linn Lönroth
This article explores the place of minor characters in Disney’s animated features. More specifically, it proposes that Disney’s minor characters mark an aesthetic rupture by breaking with the mode of hyperrealism that has come to be associated with the studio’s feature-length films. Drawing on character theory within literary studies and on research into animated film performance, the article suggests that the inherent ‘flatness’ of Disney’s minor characters and the ‘figurativeness’ of their performance styles contrasts with the characterizations and aesthetic style of the leading figures. The tendency of Disney’s minor characters to stretch and squash in an exaggerated fashion is also reminiscent of the flexible, plasmatic style of the studio’s early cartoons. In addition to exploring the aesthetic peculiarity of minor characters, this article also suggests that these figures play an important role in fleshing out the depicted fictional worlds of Disney’s movies. By drawing attention to alternative viewpoints and storylines, as well as to the broader narrative universe, minor characters add detail, nuance and complexity to the animated films in which they appear. Ultimately, this article proposes that these characters make the fairy-tale-like worlds of Disney animation more expansive and believable as fictional spaces.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477211025661
Madison Schmalzer
This article examines the ways videogames become animated by looking at gaming practices that subvert traditional notions of play: specifically tool-assisted speedruns (TAS). A TAS is a playthrough of a videogame that is preprogrammed by a human so that the inputs can be automatically played back in full without a human operator. This practice requires an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of gaming systems, often to the point of productively breaking the games through glitches and exploits. These extreme practices give a unique insight into the ways animation occurs within videogames and reveals games to be animated in a variety of ways that are often not primarily directed towards the visual nor humans. This article outlines four of these modes of animation separating them into multi-tiered ‘layers of animation’: sensory output, game states, code, material, and operator. TASs help to demonstrate these layers are actually discrete forms of animation that do not necessarily impact one another from becoming individually animated.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-01DOI: 10.1177/17468477211025667
Ahmad Zamzuri Mohamad Ali
Famously, Walt Disney once said, ‘I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing – that it was all started by a mouse’ (Lucas, 2019: 12). Implicit in these words is the idea that Disney’s success began with the character of a mouse, namely Mickey, and that its success continues to be one of the world’s greatest icons in the history of animation. The history of Malaysian animation is indebted in a similar way to the character of the mouse deer, which featured in the first animated short film in Malaysia and has since become a local icon (Harun and Abd Rahim, 2010). Early Malaysian animation was heavily influenced by Malaysian folk tales, with tales of the Mouse Deer being the most notable among them. The first Mouse Deer short, Hikayat Sang Kancil (The Story of the Mouse Deer), made its debut appearance on television screens in 1983. This was followed by Sang Kancil dan Monyet (The Mouse Deer and the Monkey) in 1984 and Sang Kancil dan Buaya (The Mouse Deer and the Crocodiles) in 1987. These stories were incredibly successful not only because of their entertainment value but also because of their role in instilling moral and ethical values in children. Hassan Abdul Muthalib’s From Mouse Deer to Mouse (2016) is a 12-chapter book that details the history of how Malaysian animation has evolved over the last 70 years, starting with a traditional approach, such as drawn on paper, celluloid or on glass, drawn directly on film or on scratchboard, or simply cut out of paper, and gradually moving towards computer-generated animation. This transition from traditional to digital methods is implied in the pun in the title: the ‘Mouse’ refers not to Disney’s Mickey but to a computer mouse, which serves as a symbol of the technological age. Although a clear definition of animation still remains elusive (Linares Martinez, 2015; Wells, 2011), it seems Hassan applied the broadest definition when identifying the first animation made in Malaysia, i.e. to move or change an object on the screen display over a perceptible period of time. Specifically, Chapter 1 summarizes the animation concepts, techniques and technology that have been used in the industry both past and present. Overall, Hassan adopts a first-person narrative approach in writing the book, as he was involved in the local animation industry for 45 out of its 70 years and therefore has first-hand experience of it. Hassan begins the chronological history of Malaysian animation with the establishment of the Malayan Film Unit (MFU), a documentary film studio set up by the British in Kuala Lumpur, Malaya, in June 1946. Gillie Potter, the British filmmaker, was the first person appointed to assist in the establishment of the MFU and to train emerging local talents. With Potter’s guidance and supervision, the Art Department was formed, which went on to produce numerous title 1025667 ANM0010.1177/17468477211025667AnimationBook reviews research-article2021
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