Upon the release of OpenAI’s video-generation model Sora in February 2024, a wave of fear and awe swept public discourse on the future of filmmaking. The sleek photorealistic videos shared by the company elicited a flurry of hyperbolic statements regarding…
In memory of my friend Hannah Frank and her cat Ingeborg Two decades into the twenty-first century, animated fauna is thriving. A famous nonagenarian mouse with infinite spending power holds the American entertainment market ever more securely in its white-gloved…
Anyone who has ever responded to a call for papers has, at one point or another, experienced the perverse pleasure of stubbornly latching onto a topic that was not mentioned therein and running with it. It was in that contrarian…
In 2007, a committee assembled by Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe and chaired by Abe’s science adviser Kiyoshi Kurokawa drafted Innovation 25, a strategic proposal that promised to stimulate economic growth by 2025 by investing in various aspects of technological…
On May 12, 2015, the Academy Theater in New York City hosted “Anatomy of an Animation Studio: An Evening with Blue Sky,”[1] a presentation by the studio’s leading creative figures. Throughout the evening, director and co-founder Chris Wedge, director Carlos…
Inside Out (Pete Docter and Ronnie Del Carmen, 2015), Pixar’s film about the structure and inner workings of a preteen girl’s mind, represents the human brain as a cross between a factory and an amusement park. The feature’s mismatched protagonist…
There are certain buzz-worthy technological concepts that, having initially infiltrated animation discourse, continue to circulate just below the surface until a new development, event, or work of art re-energizes them AND brings them to the fore. The notion of digitally-enabled…
