In his 1986 analysis of Foucault, philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1988) asks what the struggle for modern subjectivity might look like given that the subject must resist, on the one hand, the impulse to individualize themselves by exerting power over others…
Visual Metamorphosis in Animation
Metamorphosis in Pom Poko (1994)
by Idris Kellermann Williams • November 26, 2024 • 0 Comments
The main characters in Isao Takahata’s 1994 film Pom Poko are tanuki, an animal attributed with shapeshifting powers in Japanese folklore. Their powers form part of an ethos of constant metamorphosis pervading Pom Poko, enabling Takahata to address his socio-political…
Visual Metamorphosis in Animation
Visual metamorphoses and environmental thought in contemporary animation
by Virág Vécsey • November 19, 2024 • 0 Comments
The universal but ever-changing relationship between humans and non-human nature is constantly interrogated through the language of animation. It is enabled precisely by animation’s distinct formal and aesthetic properties, such as plasmaticness, the illusion of life, anthropomorphosis and metamorphosis. These…
Visual Metamorphosis in Animation
Corrupting the Cartoon: How Eisenstein’s Plasmatic Can Be Used For Evil
by Holland Kerr • November 13, 2024 • 0 Comments
Unfortunately, legitimately unsettling cartoon horrors seem to be rare. Semiotically abstracted from reality as they are, flat 2D images can in theory create an intellectual conceptualization of something scary. But they frequently cannot evoke the same immediate visceral experience that…
Visual Metamorphosis in Animation
What if Gregor Samsa awakes in Bogotá? A collaborative work on an ever-transforming story
by Camilo Cogua and Ricardo Arce • November 5, 2024 • 0 Comments
As 25 animators awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, they found themselves animating in their beds a gigantic insect. In 2015, to celebrate the first century of Kafka´s Metamorphosis (1915), a group of Latin-American animators started creating an Exquisite Corpse,…
Dance and Animation
Animation Ceremony: Bringing the Dancing Body to Life
by Hong Huo • October 29, 2024 • 0 Comments
To dance is to be free. To animate is to breath. The Latin root for animation, anima, is to breath in and bring to life[1]. The animator’s goal is to bring their imagined characters to life through the creation of…
Dance and Animation
Shake Your Bones: The Shocking Image of Dancing Skeletons
by Joe Evans • October 22, 2024 • 0 Comments
In the darkness, a skeleton emerges on the screen and then jolts into a series of poses, lifting a leg, arms thrown out to one side, squatting, and popping off its head in both bony hands. The skeleton is dancing.…
Dance and Animation
The Dance Of Pixilation
by Vicky Smith • October 15, 2024 • 0 Comments
I will consider pixilation as a form of dance in which the movements that are produced are wholly specific to animation, thereby making the study of this method fruitful for Animation Studies. In pixilation, single film frames are synchronised with…
Dance and Animation
The Graphic Choreography of Jules Engel
by Tim Ridlen • October 9, 2024 • 0 Comments
The artist, animator, and educator Jules Engel is perhaps best known for his work as an Art Director at the beloved United Productions of America (UPA), or maybe later for his role as the first director of the Experimental Animation…
Dance and Animation
Fleischer’s use of Dance Sequences in Depicting Three Dimensions
by William J. Lorenzo • October 1, 2024 • 0 Comments
Dance sequences appear in a significant amount of Fleischer Studios cartoons throughout the 1920s and 1930s. These sequences presented the audience with an aesthetic sense of realism and an increased illusion of a third dimension, even though Fleischer’s cartoons were…