Animation recent issues

Editorial

Buchan, S. — 2008-06-24

From the `Cinematic' to the `Anime-ic': Issues of Movement in Anime

Ruddell, C. — 2008-06-24

This article explores the way that movement is formally depicted in anime. Drawing on Thomas Lamarre's concepts of the `cinematic' and the `anime-ic', the article interrogates further the differences in movement and action in anime from traditional filmic form. While often considered in terms of `flatness', anime offers spectacle, character development and, ironically, depth through the very form of movement put to use in such texts.The article questions whether the modes of address at work in anime are unique to this form of animation.Taking into account how the terms `cinematic' and `anime-ic' can be understood (and by extension the cinematic and animatic apparatus), the article also begins to explore how viewers might identify with such images.

Star-Spangled Ghibli: Star Voices in the American Versions of Hayao Miyazaki's Films

Denison, R. — 2008-06-24

This article offers an examination of the use of American stars in re-voicing a set of Japanese animated texts. The author argues that a new industrial, contextual and textual understanding of stardom is required to penetrate the dense network of meanings attached to star voices in animation. Furthermore, she utilizes a mixed textual and contextual approach to several of Studio Ghibli's American DVD releases to consider the markets for and meanings of anime in America. In so doing this article represents an intervention into a range of academic debates around the nature of contemporary stardom and the significance of anime in America.

Nervous Light Planes

Gfader, V. — 2008-06-24

Electronic streams appear to be most illuminating when they fail or break down. At these moments, they make apparent our desire of wanting to keep continuity, to experience things uninterruptedly. In the contemporary artistic environment marked by electronic pulses and lightscapes, the flickering screen, with its conflicting modes of engagement, provides the thinking of a limit and erasure. Philippe Parreno's analogue line animation What Do You Believe, Your Eyes or My Words? Speaking Drawing: . . . (2007) inhabits such a corruptive site of `no single continuing line' where the various time structures inherent to the work resist to create unity, both in terms of the work's spatiality and its relation to our sense of time. In Semiconductor's digital piece Inaudible Cities: Part One (2002) the flickering strips the image of the failed electronic stream, its supposedly essential element. The animated cityscape presents us with yet another kind of electronic light movement co-dependent on the sonic pressures of an electrical storm. What is expressed is the process of image-forming itself, the image's potential for self-variation which is linked to imagination and Brian Massumi's `vagueness of the virtual'. Referring to notions such as Gilles Deleuze's `point flicker' or Massumi's `imaginative and non-systemic', the article addresses the sensation of flickering as an experience of spacing and rupturing inherent to animation. Not only does this sensation propose animation as an often paradoxical work, but, proposing a particular site its image can occupy, it allows us to think of the animated image as an erasure itself, with its potential of becoming art.

The Many Faces of Internationalization in Japanese Anime

Lu, A. S. — 2008-06-24

This article explores the internationalization of Japanese anime (animation) in an effort to help explain the cultural politics behind this popular cultural product. The internationalization of anime includes the incorporation of de-Japanized elements into anime's background, context, character design, and narrative organization. A theoretical framework for understanding anime's internationalization is developed, proposing that there are at least three kinds of cultural politics working behind anime's international success: one, de-politicized internationalization, which primarily serves as a commercial tactic to attract international audiences; two, Occidentalized internationalization, which satiates a nationalistic sentiment; three, self-Orientalized internationalization, which reveals a cultural desire to establish Japan as an ersatz Western country in Asia.

Hallucinatory Vision and the Blurring of the Subject in Jeremy Blake's `Time-Based Paintings'

Hertz, B.-S. — 2008-06-24

From the turn of the 21st century until his death in 200 Jeremy Blake worked at the convergence of animation, digital technology and painting, synthesizing them through the use of cinematic strategies. This article discusses the debt Blake's early abstract works owe to the experimental animated films of the Visual Music artists and American post-war Color Field painters. During this period, Blake applied his exceptional facility with emerging animation software to sequential figure/ground abstractions based on literary narrative structures. Subsequently, Blake shifted from `time-based painting' to richly textured non-narrative biographical sketches created in collaboration with maverick protagonists in contemporary popular music. The visuality of Blake's hallucinatory moving images intensified emotionally as new digital software became available. The deep hybridity of his visual compositions, transmitted through constant fades and overlays of photo-based images and abstracted color patches, doodles and animation characters, create a richly textured bridge between subjective consciousness and the world of appearances.

Review: Animation Universe: The 19th Society for Animation Studies Conference, Portland State University, USA, 29 June to 1 July 2007

Dow, M. V. — 2008-06-24

Review: Tom Corby (ed.), Network Art: Practices and Positions (Innovations in Art & Design). London: Routledge, 2006. 206 pp., 83 halftone illus. ISBN 978--0415364799 (hbk)

Dieter, M. — 2008-06-24

Review: French Lunning (ed.) Mechademia, Volume 1: Emerging Worlds of Anime and Manga. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. 184 pp., 32 b/w and 13 col. illus. ISBN 0--8166--4945--6 $19.95

Thouny, C. — 2008-06-24

Editorial

2008-03-14

Explosive, Expulsive, Extraordinary: The Dimensional Excess of Animated Bodies

McCrea, C. — 2008-03-14

Animation's excursions into the impossible allow bodies to erupt and explode, fly and roar. While the histories of animation and special effects cinema are deeply linked in this regard, the sensation of viewing the physically impossible in animation has its own visual and cultural idiosyncrasies. The experience of watching bones splinter to thrash metal refuses psychology's primacy and transforms it into a kind of pure ornament. This article proposes a specific symbolic discourse of violence-animated texts, and more specifically anime via the European and Australasian releases of Manga Entertainment.

Character Animation and the Embodied Mind--Brain

Power, P. — 2008-03-14

This interdisciplinary investigation of aspects of 3D character animation synthesizes relevant research findings from diverse perspectives, including neuroscience, narratology, robotics, anthropology, cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind, and considers how they might be integrated as theory for animators and animation studies. The article focuses on the creative nature of character conception and creation in a 3D animated environment and on aspects of character — narrative and style, in particular. It examines how findings from interdisciplinary research on the embodied mind—brain, including neuroscientific research with regard to mentalizing and simulation theory, can inform the creative animation process and might be gainfully synthesized in an animation studies context to inform both pedagogy and creative practice.

Observations on the History and Uses of Animation Occasioned by the Exhibition Eyes, Lies and Illusions Selected from Works in the Werner Nekes Collection

Cubitt, S. — 2008-03-14

The exhibition Eyes, Lies and Illusions held at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne and the Hayward Gallery in London was a selection from the 20,000 optical toys, scientific instruments, antiquarian books and visual entertainments in the collection of Werner Nekes, the German experimental film maker. This article begins with a consideration of the historical trajectory of belief in the afterlife in relation to `animation', the imputation of a soul to anything that appeared to move itself. The second section suggests that animation techniques bear witness to the persistence of atavistic beliefs in modernity.The third addresses the proximity of technology and magic in animation, and proposes a more extended use of the term `animation'.

Learning from the Golden Age of Czechoslovak Animation: The Past as the Key to Unlocking Contemporary Issues

Joschko, L., Morgan, M. — 2008-03-14

Can Czech animators resurrect the Golden Age of Czech animation or will they succumb to the changes of an open market economy? The post-1989 privatization of animation studios and subsequent withdrawal of government funding are commonly considered as one of the most significant factors contributing to the current decline of Czech animated films. This article argues that a number of additional factors associated with the post-1989 change of political regime have impacted on Czech animation production. These factors include: (1) the change of themes due to the removal of the communist regime as the common antagonist; (2) the fragmentation of the Czech audience due to the importation of animated films from the west and new methods of distributing content; and (3) economic censorship pressuring artists and producers to ensure financial success. In examining the history of the Czech animation industry during and after the communist regime, the authors present an outline of the conditions of the Prague Spring in 1968, during which the Czech animated films further elevated their international reputation and experienced exponential growth. In contrast to these conditions, this article highlights the contemporary issues that are affecting Czech animation studios today.

Review: Yuri Norstein and Francesca Yarbusova, YUcypuu Hopshcymeuncy u {Phi}pancychcyeckcya Ypbcyycova: Ckcyazkcya Ckcyazokcy (Yuri Norstein and Francesca Yarbusova: Tale of Tales). Krasnaya Ploshjad' (Red Square), 2005. 227 pp. 314 illus. & photos ISBN 5--9007--4388--8

Gadassik, A. — 2008-03-14

Review: Benjamin Cook and Gary Thomas (eds) the animate! book: rethinking animation. LUX Publications & Arts Council England, 2006. 160 pp. 870 illus. ISBN 0--9548569--1--0 {pound}19.95

Bridge, S. — 2008-03-14

Review: Roland Kelts, Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the US. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 238 pp., 16 col. illus. ISBN 1--4039--7475--6

Mackintosh, J. D. — 2008-03-14

Review: Animated Dialogues 2007 Conference, Melbourne, Australia, 17--19 June 2007

Joschko, L. — 2008-03-14

Editorial

Buchan, S. — 2007-10-15

Vanishing Point: Spatial Composition and the Virtual Camera

Jones, M. — 2007-10-15

This article examines new aesthetic modes of cinematic space. Specifically, the author examines the `virtual camera' (in practical and technical terms derived from animation born of computer-generated 3D graphics, layer-based motion graphics and most distinctly from computer and video gaming) as a construct for spatial composition, scenic depiction and viewer immersion that possesses distinct and unique qualities of engagement. The article argues that under the influence of the virtual camera, both a hybridized and re-mediated means of moving-image acquisition, cinema aesthetics are shifting; from the duopoly of composition in the frame and the staging for the camera, to a new mode entailing a composition of space and a staging of the camera. This article also examines the virtual camera in the framework of three key, oppositional, cinematic animation and narrative concepts — diegetic positioning; mediated and unmediated engagement; and diegesis and mimesis in narrative and perspective condition. This examination also scrutinizes the impact of the virtual camera on the production process and conceptual assembly of cinematic media.

The Changing Space of Animation: Disney's Hybrid Films of the 1940s

Telotte, J.P. — 2007-10-15

In the early 1940s, Disney animation underwent a critical reassessment, one in which commentators who had previously praised Disney's efforts, particularly for the studio's realistic advances, began to emphasize how, in its efforts at realism, Disney had moved away from, even betrayed animation's avant-garde possibilities. That seeming `break' with animation's subversive spirit, however, was hardly as definitive or deliberate as many critics claimed. This article examines Disney's hybrid animation efforts of the 1940s, particularly films like The Three Caballeros (1945), Song of the South (1946), and Fun and Fancy Free (1947), in light of the tension between animation's realistic and subversive possibilities. In these films, the author suggests, we can see the Disney studio's interest in recouping something of the modernist attitude with which it had earlier been associated, or at least an effort at finding some accommodation between what Disney had been and what it was becoming as it came to dominate the American animation industry.

Concrete Animation

Griffin, G. — 2007-10-15

This article was originally delivered as an illustrated lecture at the 2007 `Pervasive Animation' symposium at Tate Modern, London, 2—4 March 2007. My goal was to describe a category of animation practice emerging today and to compare its various tendencies with my experience making films, books, and installations. I have attempted to balance my personal art history with an analysis of larger issues in animation. `Concrete animation' refers to work that focuses primarily on materiality and process. It has a precedence in contemporary art practice; it has one foot in the distant, pre-cinema past, and one foot on a path leading to a future of digital and manual animation.

review essay: The Cinema of Attractions: Wanda Strauven (ed.), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. 460 pp. ISBN 978 90 5356 944 3

Cubitt, S. — 2007-10-15

review essay: British Game Studies? An Extended Review of Two New Publications: Jon Dovey and Helen W. Kennedy, Game Cultures: Computer Games as New Media. Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2006. 171 pp. ISBN 0 355 21357 X Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska, Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders: Videogame Forms and Contexts. London: I.B. Taurus, 2006. 264 pp. ISBN 1 85043 814 5

Surman, D. — 2007-10-15

Review: Digital Aesthetic 2 conference and exhibition, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, 16 17 March 2007

Cremona, C. — 2007-10-15

Review: David MacFadyen, Yellow Crocodiles and Blue Oranges: Russian Animated Film Since World War Two. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005. 256 pp. ISBN: 0 7735 2871 7

Linsenmaier, T. — 2007-10-15

Review: Pervasive Animation Symposium, Tate Modern, London, 2 4 March 2007

Ruddell, C. — 2007-10-15

Editorial

Buchan, S. — 2007-06-07

Romancing the Rotoscope: Self-Reflexivity and the Reality Effect in the Animations of Jeff Scher

Fore, S. — 2007-06-07

In this article, the author considers the experimental animations of Jeff Scher in relation to the current obsessive quest for a total `reality effect' in much contemporary commercial computer animation. While Scher does not use a computer to create his works, he does extensively use a rotoscope, a device with a long and complex connection with the construction of illusionistic effects in animation. The author discusses Scher's unusual appropriation of rotoscoping techniques, his links with certain historical tendencies in avant-garde cinema, his interest in the relationship between the individual frame and the creation of movement in animation, and his reflexive engagement with fundamental principles of cognitive and visual perception.

Video Anekdot: Auteurs and Voyeurs of Russian Flash Animation

Strukov, V. — 2007-06-07

In this article, the author addresses the issue of flash animation and humour in computer-mediated communication. He traces Russian national graphic traditions of humour and publicity and provides historical insight into the aesthetics of flash animation. He also suggests a notion of the video anekdot, a form of flash animation that relies on the tradition of oral humorous performances that proliferated in the USSR as an attempt to overcome state censorship. With the abolishing of censorship, the anekdot continues to exist on the internet in the form of short flash animation films. The author analyses new structures of the anekdot and its relation to the previous forms of humorous and satirical art (lubok, the Soviet poster and caricature). Reflecting on the dominating themes and narrative structures of the video anekdot, he concludes with general remarks on transformations in Russian culture in regard to its traditions of oral performance and visual representations.

The Disappearance of Disney Animated Propaganda: A Globalization Perspective

Raiti, G. C. — 2007-06-07

This article examines Disney animated propaganda of the 1940s from the perspective of globalization literature, media studies, sociology and communication studies. Using examples from September 11 and the War in Iraq, the author shows how changes in media corporations, technologies and politics have limited the use of animated propaganda since the Second World War. One of the factors influencing this change is the absence of a mass audience caused by the fragmentation and proliferation of media from cinema to television to the internet. In addition, electronic communication is facilitating a more democratic exchange of information, thus reducing the influence of nation-states over their citizens. Animated propaganda exists today in other forms such as simulations on news broadcasts and internet caricatures, and adopts a more grass-roots approach on mainstream websites and cable television channels.

Tarantino the Cartoonist

Pallant, C. — 2007-06-07

In cinema it is not uncommon to see the interrelation of animation and live action but, despite this, the ascription of characteristics of one medium onto the other has been largely one-dimensional: live action upon animation. The films of Quentin Tarantino, however, illustrate an attribution of a cartoon-like aesthetic in live-action sequences, which the author subsequently terms `cartoonism'. `Cartoonism' and its development have been highlighted in Tarantino's work, showing his continual desire to realize this aesthetic in his own work whilst, ironically, only fully achieving this aesthetic in another's film. The conclusions are illuminating with respect to Tarantino's filmic politics and provide a potential mode of inquiry within film theory.

The Impossibly Real: Green Belting the Imaginary

Hardstaff, J. — 2007-06-07

Before we have explored what CGI (computer generated imagery) technology can really do, it seems that CGI technology is exploring what we can do. Animation is being used within corporate advertising to render the visual obsolete as a medium for the conveyance of messages of emotional or intellectual value.

Review: Steven T. Brown (ed.), Cinema Anime: Critical Engagements with Japanese Animation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 248 pp. ISBN 1--4039--7060--2 (hbk)

Steinberg, M. — 2007-06-07

Review: Daniel Goldmark, Tunes for Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 243 pp. ISBN 0--520--23617--3

Langdon, C. — 2007-06-07

Review: Women in Games conference, University of Teesside, 10--11 July 2006: http://www.womeningames.com

Westecott, E. — 2007-06-07

Review: Suzanne Buchan (ed.), with David Surman and Paul Ward (associate eds), Animated `Worlds'. Bloomington/Eastleigh: Indiana University Press/John Libbey, 2006. 207 pp. ISBN 0--86196--661--9

Wood, A. — 2007-06-07