I like to start my animation history class by telling the students that I am going to show them the very first animated film ever made. I then proceed by showing Pauvre Pierrot (1892, by Émile Reynaud) without further comments.…
Imagine an evening with everyone sitting together, the room darkening; the first picture appears on the hanging sheet and the narrator starts his or her story. The form and content of the tale are always a little different – it…
Review of Deborah Levitt. The Animatic Apparatus. Winchester: Zero Books, 2018. Animation is thought made flesh. It gives life, or at least the illusion of a life, to the world as we imagine it. It fabricates perceptions and, in…
Among the incunabula of animation cinema, perhaps no other work is as revered and well-known to scholars, students, and cartoon aficionados as Winsor McCay’s Gertie. Aside from the technical innovation, the astounding feat of producing thousands of nearly-identical handmade pen-and-ink…
In the final months of 1917, Helena Smith Dayton (1883–1960) released a one-reel production of Romeo and Juliet starring a cast of characters crafted entirely out of clay. Though identifiable now as a pioneering work of stop-motion animation, the film’s…
Animation is the medium that allows for a dramatization of a skirmish with nature. -Esther Leslie, “Animation and History” In Segundo de Chomón’s Création de la Serpentine (1908), a sorcerer transforms a billowing piece of fabric into a woman…
Review of Christopher Holliday. The Computer-Animated Film. Industry, Style and Genre. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. The Computer-Animated Film is ambitious in its scope and comprehensive in its coverage, which alone would make a go-to text in the still-comparatively…
This post explores the use of the camera obscura as an Early Modern astronomical instrument and shows how that apparatus helped make sequential images of extraordinarily controversial cosmological significance centuries before chronophotography. What follows is the story of how, in…
I recently began a project that combines new media art with robotic design. It is a fascinating new direction for me and I was quite surprised to see the recurring mention of animation within the field I was venturing into.…
In her 2005 book Cyborg Cinema and Contemporary Subjectivity Sue Short argues that “science and technology become the equivalent of magical totems equipped with the ability to transform entire worlds without the need for struggle”[1]. The dystopia of Konaka Chiaki’s…
