While the Lumière brothers’ film L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896) enshrined the image of trains in film history, trains may also have played an essential role in the history of psychology and the scientific study of…
In Hayao Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso (1992), the striking red plane flown by the main character, Porco, allows him to defeat pirates while soaring through the Adriatic skies, as well as allowing him to accomplish a more mysterious and restorative form…
Growing up in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, the steam train was a throwback to the past. The little green steam engine, Ivor, who worked for The Merioneth and Llantisilly Railway Traction Company Limited that appeared on the tv screen…
A material ropeway is an aerial device that is often used in coal mining operations to transport goods across long distances. Material ropeways differ from aerial ropeways and other transportation devices in that the contents they carry are not passengers…
Better known today as the director of the Japanese media franchise Neon Genesis Evangelion, which began in the early 1990’s and still runs, Hideaki Anno initially gained acclaim as a highly talented animator of vehicles. For instance, his student-film At…
Early cinema, in particular silent film, has often been linked to the train as a symbol of modernity in the early twentieth century. However, depictions of trains in animation open opportunities for the modern and the traditional to engage in…
This text offers an analysis and discussion of the practical process of animating representational vehicles in traditional 2D-, Stop-Motion and CG animation by examining three case studies. It is argued that animating the locomotion of representational vehicles predominantly evolves in…
In the introduction of the recently published anthology Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio LAIKA’s Stop-Motion Witchcraft, editor Mihaela Mihailova writes, “Like witchcraft, puppet craft remains poorly understood and frequently branded as a relic of a bygone era — and…
Since 1958, when the game “Tennis For Two” was first exhibited, the question of animated representation entered the field of video game development. How could one represent a tennis match using external electronic inputs from pushing computer buttons? Developer William…
While all productions have some element of set design, Andre Bazin would distinguish directors focused on mise-en-scene from those who preferred naturalism and fluid editing: the former would meticulously construct shots to produce distinct, if occasionally artificial imagery (Konigsberg 1998,…
