Isao Takahata’s The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013) stands as the final masterpiece of one of Studio Ghibli’s founding fathers. Expanding upon the historic Japanese fairy tale Taketori Monogatari, it offers a poignant reflection on the impermanence of joy…
Accountability and responsibility must be thought of in terms of what matters and what is excluded from mattering. (Barad, 2007: 220) This is a ghost story about a poltergeist that haunted me through the winter of 2023-2024 on my Vimeo…
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…
Giannalberto Bendazzi was uniquely capable of being both entirely approachable and formidable at the same time. Speaking to colleagues as I prepared this text, the daunting email subject “why don’t you write a book on x,” was frequently mentioned. As…
A few years ago I began an analysis of suspense and other narrative strategies in Blue Sky Studios’ Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009, by Carlos Saldanha), as a follow-up study to my research on suspense in Alfred…
From its very beginning in 1975, Saturday Night Live has always been an outlet for independently produced short films, but animation was not something the show’s producers had much, if any, contact with. If there was, it was acquired as…
I’ve been producing animation for over 30 years in both the commercial and the broadcast realms. I’ve consciously stayed away from the long-form motion picture world because I like working with shorter length projects, and also because I prefer exploring…
