While the Lumière brothers’ film L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896) enshrined the image of trains in film history, trains may also have played an essential role in the history of psychology and the scientific study of…
Transport Vehicles
Memories in the Sky: Remembrance, History, and Aviation in Porco Rosso (1992)
by Joshua Fagan • November 21, 2023 • 0 Comments
In Hayao Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso (1992), the striking red plane flown by the main character, Porco, allows him to defeat pirates while soaring through the Adriatic skies, as well as allowing him to accomplish a more mysterious and restorative form…
Recollecting Ivor the Engine (1959)
by Cormac O'Kane • November 14, 2023 • 0 Comments
Growing up in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, the steam train was a throwback to the past. The little green steam engine, Ivor, who worked for The Merioneth and Llantisilly Railway Traction Company Limited that appeared on the tv screen…
The Material Ropeway in Wes Anderson’s Isles of Dogs (2018)
by Harry Gay • November 7, 2023 • 0 Comments
A material ropeway is an aerial device that is often used in coal mining operations to transport goods across long distances. Material ropeways differ from aerial ropeways and other transportation devices in that the contents they carry are not passengers…
Hideaki Anno’s Train Sets
by River Seager • October 31, 2023 • 0 Comments
Better known today as the director of the Japanese media franchise Neon Genesis Evangelion, which began in the early 1990’s and still runs, Hideaki Anno initially gained acclaim as a highly talented animator of vehicles. For instance, his student-film At…
Around Fuji: Panoramic Vision as a Postmodern Sensibility
by Colin Wheeler • October 24, 2023 • 0 Comments
Early cinema, in particular silent film, has often been linked to the train as a symbol of modernity in the early twentieth century. However, depictions of trains in animation open opportunities for the modern and the traditional to engage in…
Background Developments – Technology and the Process of Animating Vehicles
by Claire O'Brien • October 17, 2023 • 0 Comments
This text offers an analysis and discussion of the practical process of animating representational vehicles in traditional 2D-, Stop-Motion and CG animation by examining three case studies. It is argued that animating the locomotion of representational vehicles predominantly evolves in…