In his 1986 analysis of Foucault, philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1988) asks what the struggle for modern subjectivity might look like given that the subject must resist, on the one hand, the impulse to individualize themselves by exerting power over others…
Visual Metamorphosis in Animation
Metamorphosis in Pom Poko (1994)
by Idris Kellermann Williams • November 26, 2024 • 0 Comments
The main characters in Isao Takahata’s 1994 film Pom Poko are tanuki, an animal attributed with shapeshifting powers in Japanese folklore. Their powers form part of an ethos of constant metamorphosis pervading Pom Poko, enabling Takahata to address his socio-political…
Visual metamorphoses and environmental thought in contemporary animation
by Virág Vécsey • November 19, 2024 • 0 Comments
The universal but ever-changing relationship between humans and non-human nature is constantly interrogated through the language of animation. It is enabled precisely by animation’s distinct formal and aesthetic properties, such as plasmaticness, the illusion of life, anthropomorphosis and metamorphosis. These…
Corrupting the Cartoon: How Eisenstein’s Plasmatic Can Be Used For Evil
by Holland Kerr • November 13, 2024 • 0 Comments
Unfortunately, legitimately unsettling cartoon horrors seem to be rare. Semiotically abstracted from reality as they are, flat 2D images can in theory create an intellectual conceptualization of something scary. But they frequently cannot evoke the same immediate visceral experience that…
What if Gregor Samsa awakes in Bogotá? A collaborative work on an ever-transforming story
by Camilo Cogua and Ricardo Arce • November 5, 2024 • 0 Comments
As 25 animators awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, they found themselves animating in their beds a gigantic insect. In 2015, to celebrate the first century of Kafka´s Metamorphosis (1915), a group of Latin-American animators started creating an Exquisite Corpse,…