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…
“In the Shadow of the Cypress” is a 2023 Iranian animated short by Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani. It premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, making history by claiming…
Experimental animation, through its unconventional narratives, offers a compelling medium for expressing surreal feelings, personal philosophies, spiritual concerns, and abstract psychological trauma. Specifically, the unstable psychological state of the traumatized individual can be seen as placing their identity in a…
This paper presents a preliminary study on the unique surrealist qualities of Estonian animation director Priit Pärn, distinguishing his approach from that of André Breton and Jan Švankmajer. Pärn began work on animated films in the 1970s during the Soviet…
Figure 1. A still from Norstein’s The Tale of Tales, where women dancing with their husbands all the sudden appear alone. Animation, a powerful storytelling medium, has been breaking down complex ideas in a visually engaging way for over a…
In The Intersection of Animation, Video Games, and Music: Making Movement Sing, editors Lisa Scoggin and Dana Plank gather fourteen chapters that examine how music operates across animated forms and interactive worlds. With a nod toward both classic and contemporary…
Dimensions of Dialogue (1983) begins with two faces shaped out of random accoutrements such as decaying fruits and vegetables, kitchen equipment and utensils etc. The two faces move towards each other and clash in a haphazard mishmash of objects—face shapes…
