In The Intersection of Animation, Video Games, and Music: Making Movement Sing, editors Lisa Scoggin and Dana Plank gather fourteen chapters that examine how music operates across animated forms and interactive worlds. With a nod toward both classic and contemporary…
Figure 1. Render of Houdini scene featuring the Utah teapot which is available as an “off-the-shelf” object in most contemporary 3D software packages. 2024 Gina Moore. Found in various industries including film, advertising, games, and visualisation, computer graphics (CG) are…
Animation, edited by Scott Curtis, is a remarkable addition to the Behind the Silver Screen series of film books. This series promises to provide a history of filmmaking rather than merely a history of films, and Animation fulfills this promise…
I suggest anyone who is interested in anime, is involved in the ‘Animation, Comics and Games’ subculture within the East Asian context (ACG), has friends who are anime geeks, or identifies as an ‘nijigen/erciyuan’ to have a look at Anime’s…
The Flesh of Animation: Bodily Sensations in Film and Digital Media by Sandra Annett is an insightful exploration of the intertwining of the physical body and the ‘flesh’ of animation. The author plays with the concepts of body and flesh…
In Pulses of Abstraction: Episodes from a History of Animation, Andrew R. Johnston contends that animation has been ‘pulsing in fits and starts with the creation, distribution and experimentation of new technologies’ (Johnston: 2024, p. 3). He sets out to…
Writing about the way elements move in animation proves to be a formidable challenge for any book on the medium, but Ryan Pierson’s Figure and Force in Animation Aesthetics (2019) manages to explore philosophical theories related to change while providing…
French Animation History (2011) by Richard Neupert delivers an essential academic exploration of Francophone animated cinema, a topic of great interest according to Neupert, due to its artistic potential and worldwide influence since its origins. Across six chapters, the author…
In the introduction of the recently published anthology Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio LAIKA’s Stop-Motion Witchcraft, editor Mihaela Mihailova writes, “Like witchcraft, puppet craft remains poorly understood and frequently branded as a relic of a bygone era — and…
Review of Stevie Suan. Anime’s Identity: Performativity and Form Beyond Japan. United States, University of Minnesota Press, 2021. Traditional scholarship on anime has left the identity of the media form as de facto Japanese, reducing a global industrial network into…
