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…
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…
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…
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,…
To dance is to be free. To animate is to breath. The Latin root for animation, anima, is to breath in and bring to life[1]. The animator’s goal is to bring their imagined characters to life through the creation of…
In the darkness, a skeleton emerges on the screen and then jolts into a series of poses, lifting a leg, arms thrown out to one side, squatting, and popping off its head in both bony hands. The skeleton is dancing.…
I will consider pixilation as a form of dance in which the movements that are produced are wholly specific to animation, thereby making the study of this method fruitful for Animation Studies. In pixilation, single film frames are synchronised with…
The artist, animator, and educator Jules Engel is perhaps best known for his work as an Art Director at the beloved United Productions of America (UPA), or maybe later for his role as the first director of the Experimental Animation…
Dance sequences appear in a significant amount of Fleischer Studios cartoons throughout the 1920s and 1930s. These sequences presented the audience with an aesthetic sense of realism and an increased illusion of a third dimension, even though Fleischer’s cartoons were…
Isao Takahata’s The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013) stands as the final masterpiece of one of Studio Ghibli’s founding fathers. Expanding upon the historic Japanese fairy tale Taketori Monogatari, it offers a poignant reflection on the impermanence of joy…
