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…
Review of Kayla Rae Whitaker. The Animators. London: Random House Trade, 2017. Animation often draws on literature. Disney had his fairy tales and every good anime starts life as a manga. Inspiration travels in the other direction far less often.…
Media “archaeologies” often emphasize the technical similarities between nineteenth-century optical devices and the basic mechanism of film animation: both create the illusion of movement by deploying series images stroboscopically. The designation of such instruments as “pre-cinematic,” however, can be misleading.…
A few years ago I began an analysis of suspense and other narrative strategies in Blue Sky Studios’ Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009, by Carlos Saldanha), as a follow-up study to my research on suspense in Alfred…
The purpose of this post is to describe 10X10, an ongoing project initiated at Edinburgh College of Art, that each year brings animators and composers from a range of European universities together in a virtualized collaborative process. Currently, this project…
Almost 24 years ago, in November 1995, audiences flocked to the movie theater to see a new kind of animated film: one not drawn by hand, but created entirely within a computer. While some may have gone due to the…
The practice of dubbing over European productions, as with all dubbed foreign language productions, risks a potential disconnect between the spoken language and opposing cultural references within the diegetic world, ranging from instances of untranslated writing to a specific international…
The notion of the Scottish Animated comedy of the title is as unclear as the first part of the title. Is there such a genre? Is there a national identity inherent in a body of work? If so, can it…
Let’s start with some numbers. 250 animated features were produced in Europe (36 countries) between 2010 and 2014, according to the European Audiovisual Observatory (the corresponding number during the 1989-1998 period: 46) [1]. 1 Cannes Jury Prize (for Marjane Satrapi’s…
