Long has the iconography of the “Hand of the Artist” been used as a storytelling motif in animation, emerging in the early 20th century from roots in vaudevillian ‘lightning sketches’ such as James Stuart Blackton’s The Enchanted Drawing (1900). A magical brush,…
State sponsorship of cinema was a precondition for the functioning of the Polish animation market before 1989. Between 1947 and 1989, Polish animation studios thrived on a steady flow of commissions and state-backed financial guarantees securing their productions. Taking into…
Little is known about Czech director Karel Zeman—his works are still largely unavailable in the West—yet his animation techniques combining stop motion, hand-drawn and cut-out animation with various optical special effects, dubbed ‘Mystimation’, are a stated influence by film directors…
In this post, I will consider how independently produced animations have contributed to the development of this medium today through films by Sandra Lahire (1950-2001) and Barbara Hammer (1939-2019). During the 1980s, both worked with animation in its widest sense,…
