Among the many recent commemorations of the centenary of First World War, its implications for animation history have received scant attention. In Britain the war stimulated considerable production of animated cartoons between 1914 and 1918, as explored in my recent…
When my co-author, Max Sexton, and I started researching and writing our recently published book Adapting Science Fiction To Television: Small Screen, Expanded Universe (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015) we kept returning to a central concept: medium specificity. The…
Animation, by any definition, begins with a performance. This is equally true of animation’s history as it is of any individual film’s production. Especially important was the lightning cartoon or sketch, which played a vital role in the early development…
If I’ve heard this question asked once of an animator, I’ve heard it asked a thousand times. Not “When…?”, “Where…?”, or “Why…?”, but “How…?”. Animation often seems to revolve around technology and technique (a consideration of the distinction and relationship…
