“In creating new characters for our cartoon films, one of our main sources of inspiration has been the world of animals. And we’ve always been very much impressed with the cat family. This group of carnivora includes more than forty…
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…
The origins and development of the animated voice of cartoons provide a compelling way to understand the conflation of animals with the animated language. The animal body and the human body become intertwined through anthropomorphic cartoon body. The body of…
Until now the research on race and ethnicity in animated films and cartoons has mainly taken one of two directions: critiquing racist and ethnocentric characters and stories, and calling for increased diversity, especially in children’s animated media. There have been…
The Warner Bros. production Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle (2018, by Andy Serkis) uses motion capture for animating the animals. After seeing this film, we were left with a strong, yet uncanny fascination. In order to look further into this,…
Walt Disney Animation Studios (hereafter: WDAS) are both famous and infamous for their individualized anthropomorphic animal characters, such as Mickey Mouse, Simba, and Baloo. Unsurprisingly, dogs are depicted in more WDAS films than any other animal species. Yet, perhaps surprisingly,…
Felix the Cat silently chortled his “Ha Ha!” Mickey Mouse laughs (figure 1). Bugs Bunny snickers. Snoopy guffaws. In A Bug’s Life (1998, by John Lasseter), numerous insects laugh at their own jokes: “there’s a waiter in my soup.” When…
