It is well-known that a major source of inspiration for Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee’s Frozen (2013) was Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Snow Queen (1844). Buck and Lee follow the Danish writer’s story by building the feature’s plot…
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…
While discussing the movie poster for Disney’s latest (live-action) rendition of Beauty and the Beast (2017, by Bill Condon) as an introduction to semiotics in a first-year university screen studies course, I was struck by the number of young adults…
In 1961 Disney released their classic animation One Hundred and One Dalmatians, a film so successful that it was re-released in cinemas four times over the coming decades. Due to the film’s overwhelming popularity, it has inspired many adaptations. These…
In late 2007, the autumn before Iron Man hit theaters—before audiences’ first foray into the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)—DC Comics released Superman: Doomsday, a direct-to-DVD, 78-minute animated feature inspired by the popular Death of Superman storyline. The film, starring Adam…
Late last month it was announced that Sony Pictures Animation spent nearly a million dollars on the rights to a movie pitch revolving around Emoji, those colourful little icons inserted into text messages when mere words are not enough to…
While certain comic book narratives have already been adapted into various film franchises, televised cartoons, webcomics and interactive experiences, the emergence of the motion comic has further transformed the relationship between the comic book medium and moving image culture. It…
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…
