Held at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles on the evening of March 24, 2002, the 74th Academy Awards heralded an important moment in the visibility of Hollywood animation. On the one hand, the ceremony marked the inaugural appearance of…
In early January 2020, Variety reported that Walt Disney’s feature film Frozen II (Jennifer Lee & Chris Buck, 2019) was now “officially the highest-grossing animated movie in history” (Rubin, 2020). In what was emphatically described as a “box-office achievement fit…
Soon after the release of the 53-second teaser trailer for Pixar Animation Studios’ forthcoming Incredibles 2 (Brad Bird, 2018) – that premiered on November 18, 2017 and attracted 113 million views in its first 24 hours (becoming the most viewed…
2012 represented something of a bumper year for animated film production in Hollywood. A stream of commercially-successful computer-animated films – which included Walt Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph (Rich Moore, 2012), Illumination Entertainment’s Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax (Chris Renaud, 2012), and Blue…
The stability of animation as a viable economic industry was immeasurably supported and strengthened by the Walt Disney Studios’ aspirations to innovate. The desire of Disney (the man and the company) to harness the possibilities of technology during cinema’s first…
One of the most durable images that recurs throughout critical histories of Classical Hollywood is the studio system’s evocation of factory principles of corporate standardization. Writing in 1927, William A. Johnston argued that “from manufacturer to consumer it [cinema] functions…
Official stories of European film history evaluate multiple-language versions (MLVs) as a failed experiment within the emergent period of early sound cinema. As a counterpoint to intertitles that otherwise afforded readily flexible language transfer across nations, multilingual film production was…
Computer-animated films are emblematic of the intensification of what Thomas Schatz calls the “franchise mentality” in the conglomerate era of Millenial Hollywood.[i] Indeed, a computer-animated film rarely exists in isolation. Most have theatrically-released sequels and prequels (and in some instances…
