In the first part of this two-part blog post, the chronological and the spirit timelines of Grave of the Fireflies were located and defined, with the aim of showcasing how Plantinga’s concept of the spillover effect is found and works…
A graveyard: autumn fireflies, two or three Gensho, 1742 In this two-part blog post, I will use the story structure of Hotaru no Haka (Grave of the Fireflies, Isao Takahata, 1988) to highlight how in the two identifiable story timelines…
In this post, I illustrate how the early Chinese ink painting animation showed oriental aesthetics, conveying implicit and meaningful emotions. It was closely related to the traditional Chinese ink painting and reflected the unique philosophical concept of the Chinese ancients:…
Review of Daisy Yan Du. Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation 1940s-1970s. University of Hawai’i Press, 2019. Daisy Yan Du’s excellent Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation 1940s-1970s is essential reading for anyone interested in Chinese or Japanese…
Review of Masao Yokota and Tze-yue G. Hu (eds.). Japanese Animation: East Asian Perspectives. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. This book was put together by a prominent clinical psychologist with a long experience in the psychological dimensions of animation…
Review of Raz Greenberg. Hayao Miyazaki: Exploring the Early Work of Japan’s Greatest Animator, New York/London: Bloomsbury, 2018. There are those who advocate history-less animation, curricula that focus on the teaching of techniques and technology. In his book, Hayao Miyazaki:…
My knowledge of the late Japanese animation director’s work dates to 1996, when his critically acclaimed animated film Grave of the Fireflies (1988) was first screened publicly in Singapore at the first Singapore Animation Fiesta, of which I was the…
Episode zero of the YouTube series Taiwan Bar (2014 – 2015), “Taiwan for Sale?” (Hauer, 2014), opens with a cute cartoon Formosan black bear sitting on a shelf with various kinds of drink bottles, while a lively voice-over says: Hello…
Pinoy animation has been around for almost four decades now. Yet, to-date the industry has been able to produce only four original feature-length animated films. The first has been Ibong Adarna (Adarna: The Mythical Bird), created by Geirry Garcia along with…
Created during the height of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Tiě shàn gōngzhǔ (Princess Iron Fan, 1941, by Wan Guchan and Wan Laiming) was the first full-length animated feature film made in China, as well as the first in Asia. Princess Iron…
