According to theater director Peter Brooks, a play becomes holy when it reveals the invisible, reflecting the elements of the world that escape our senses. (Brook 1968, 49) Unlike traditional narrative theater, the holy employs incantations, primal screams, and cyclopean…
Writing about the way elements move in animation proves to be a formidable challenge for any book on the medium, but Ryan Pierson’s Figure and Force in Animation Aesthetics (2019) manages to explore philosophical theories related to change while providing…
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…
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,…
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).…
Review of Stevie Suan. Anime’s Identity: Performativity and Form Beyond Japan. United States, University of Minnesota Press, 2021. Traditional scholarship on anime has left the identity of the media form as de facto Japanese, reducing a global industrial network into…
