Until recently, the narrative of the American Thanksgiving meal has been about togetherness. Inspired perhaps by the Norman Rockwell painting Freedom from Want (1943), which depicts the archetypical American family sharing the archetypical American Thanksgiving feast. The traditional Thanksgiving meal is classic…
The Breadwinner is a 2D animated film about an Afghan Muslim girl’s desperate attempt to support her family. The film follows an 11-year-old girl, Parvana, who cuts her hair and dresses up as a boy to work for the family…
Mythology, as a reference to looping, serves as a new narrative origin, since it enables the narration of the story behind eternal punishments. These Greek heroes betray the trust of some god and are therefore punished with repetition. Duration is…
The animator is often seen as a God controlling all time and space in the animated film. Yet, in our shared world of human life, the animator is as helpless as everyone else, and must die. After a serious acute…
The giant journalist G. K. Chesterton observed that “as God made a pigmy-image of Himself and called it Man, so man made a pigmy-image of creation and called it art” (Chesterton, 264). J. R. R. Tolkien argued that all artists…
A discussion of theology, from the writings of St. Paul through the ironies of Soren Kierkegaard, delves into questions of God, of human nature, of theodicy and the problem of evil, and of incarnation, sacrifice, grace, and salvation. The heavy…
One of the gifts of most faith-based communities is that they are among the few places in society where people of multiple generations gather together for meaning-making purposes. The task of pastors, rabbis, imams, or other leaders is to offer…
In winter, 2021, I and my co-faculty, Laurie Meeker, assigned our students to produce Animated Intergenerational Interviews about individuals’ relationships with their environment. The interviews were to be 30 to 60 seconds long, include at least 30 seconds of animation…
The Anthropocene reveals the ways in which our day-to-day perception of what constitutes ‘normal’ misleads us, as we require time lapse footage to render the melting ice caps perceptible to our biologically limited temporality, for example (see Ehrlich 2021, 42).…
One of the main attractions of stop motion animation is to be found in how the animator plays with materials, since the medium’s specificity, compared to 2D or 3D animation, is to film objects in real space. If any filmic…
