If you’re a parent, or you know one with a toddler, you’ll know how challenging it can be to teach practical skills to a toddler, especially brushing teeth. In my case, dealing with my daughter running away and clamping her…
Many of us watched Bob Ross make beautiful landscapes with a technique he claimed anyone could replicate. I imagine those that picked up a canvas to follow along would find it harder than he made it seem. Countless folks pursue…
Figure 1. The Animated Tea-towel by St Paul’s Animation Club (2024) I once had a rather memorable conversation with a colleague at a wrap party for a production I had worked on. This took place some years ago now, though…
Animation education today often begins not with pencils or paper, but with software. Many students arrive expecting that animation should be produced seamlessly by machine, efficient, polished, and screen-ready from the start. Manuals like Richard Williams’ The Animator’s Survival Kit…
In 2001 Nickelodeon began airing a peculiar yet profoundly intriguing animated show that caught audiences off-guard: Invader Zim (2001) created by Jhonen Vasquez. This dark animated comedy pushed the limits of how horror can be visualized in children’s programming, all…
Daisy Yan Du, Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation, 1940s-1970s. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2019: 276 pp.: ISBN 978 0 8248 7210 6, $90.00 (hbk); $30.00 (pbk). In Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation, 1940s-1970s, Daisy Yan…
The sensation of pain is invisible (Munday et al., 2020). It is private, shifting, and impossible to pin down. So, how do we communicate something so visceral and elusive? The answer seems to lie in metaphor. According to Conceptual Metaphor…
Following the great success of the Latvian animated feature Flow (Zilbalodis, 2024), which brought home the Oscar statues for the first time in the nation’s and the Oscar’s history, this text explores the intuition that the success could relate to…
Flow (Zilbalodis, 2024)is striking for its lack of spoken dialogue; the filmmakers respected the lived reality of the nonhuman creatures by not imposing on them anthropocentric ideas of spoken narrative. Nonetheless, the story is communicated beautifully, evocatively, and intelligibly to…
This article examines the first installment in Nick Park’s Wallace & Gromit series A Grand Day Out (1989) through the lenses of the oneiric and the Dionysian. While scholarship on Aardman Animations tends to emphasize its stop-motion materiality and British eccentricity, less attention has…
