Several years ago, I wrote an article for Print Magazine’s online blog Imprint about a book written by artist/cartoonist Edwin George “E.G.” Lutz – a 1920 manual titled Animated Cartoons – How They Are Made Their Origin and Development. According…
‘With animation you can do everything’. This is what director Ari Folman says in the extras of his award-winning animated film Vals Im Bashir (Waltz with Bashir, 2008)[1]. And, indeed, it seems that there is nothing animated films are not capable…
Interestingly, today’s hyper-visual and screen-based “era of information” is also defined as a time of “post-truth” (Oxford Dictionary’s 2016 “word of the year”). The tension between knowing and not knowing, between being informed and being misinformed is therefore timelier than…
I want to compare the path of interpretation of stop-motion films, which takes into account invisible meanings conveyed by visible and indirectly tangible material features of puppets, with the set of tools theorized in the field of product design in…
In the last decade or so it has become not so unusual for mockumentary-style paratexts to be created for non-mockumentary animated features. For instance, to promote the home media release of Wreck-It Ralph (2012, by Rich Moore), the Walt Disney…
Last month, I wrapped up a PhD thesis looking at DreamWorks’ influence on the prevailing aesthetic trends in the American computer-animated features of the 21st century. I have spent many words examining how, with films like Antz (1998), Shrek (2001),…
2012 represented something of a bumper year for animated film production in Hollywood. A stream of commercially-successful computer-animated films – which included Walt Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph (Rich Moore, 2012), Illumination Entertainment’s Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax (Chris Renaud, 2012), and Blue…
The stability of animation as a viable economic industry was immeasurably supported and strengthened by the Walt Disney Studios’ aspirations to innovate. The desire of Disney (the man and the company) to harness the possibilities of technology during cinema’s first…
In 1932 Walt Disney tapped Herman “Kay” Kamen to be his first licensing representative in the character division of Walt Disney Productions. In Kamen’s days – and for a few decades after – Disney did not market their products specifically…
If it is difficult to imagine today the impact that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937, by David Hand) had in the United States at the end of the 1930s, it is even more difficult to consider the effects it had…
