When I first began researching animated documentaries, over 10 years ago, I remember being asked at an art-related conference “but where do you find your case studies”? Indeed, at the time a challenging part of the research process was to…
In 1955, Walt Disney Productions released A World Is Born, a 16mm short animated educational science film that visualized the natural history of Earth from the origins of cellular life to the extinction of the dinosaurs (see Figure 1). The…
Animals with human traits have populated the fables of Aesop and the fairytales of the Brothers Grimm to entertain and educate children and adults for hundreds of years. Therefore, is no great surprise that this aspect of the genre of…
In 2014 I wrote a short piece for this blog on Syrian animation and the changes the form had undergone during a time of civil unrest and war. With this new piece, I would like to delve deeper into one…
Whilst researching how animals have been depicted by Walt Disney Animation Studios (WADAS)[1], I found that chickens were featured in nineteen WDAS films (34%) (Stanton, 2019). This makes chickens the most commonly depicted species of bird in WDAS films. This…
Throughout human history, the labor of civil rights has been done by the oppressed. In disability advocacy especially, disability representation and media have been amplified, and critiqued, by the Disability Visibility Project. It is also the assertion of this community…
Review of Donna Kornhaber, Dream Sanctuary: War and the Animated Film. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2020. When one thinks about wartime animated films, propaganda film comes to most people’s mind. Indeed, since the 1990s, studies in animated propaganda developed…
When no film was in production, Alosha was busy engraving, while Claire was busy with the minutiae of daily housekeeping. Both read a lot. He knew Russian, French, German, and English. She knew English and French and had learned Russian…
I met Alexandre Alexeïeff at the Abano Terme Animation Festival (Italy) in the spring of 1971. He was standing in front of the cinema hall, solemn and gracious at the same time. I introduced myself and he greeted me warmly.…
In the short documentary, Nobody’s Metaphor (2019), Chouette Films worked with Maslaha to capture the unfolding stories of a group of Muslim girls and young women of color who try out fencing and poetry workshops after school. These workshops, run…
