Jim Henson’s 1986 production Labyrinth holds a special place in the Henson canon (as well as in the hearts of many children of the 1980s). Its inception came after one of the first critical misfires of Henson’s film career, the…
After the end of World War II, in all the nations where television had a swift boom, puppets largely invaded the small screen to satisfy an increasingly younger audience eager for fantasy and adventure. While in the 1960s, live action…
Review of Masao Yokota and Tze-yue G. Hu (eds.). Japanese Animation: East Asian Perspectives. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. This book was put together by a prominent clinical psychologist with a long experience in the psychological dimensions of animation…
I must correct a mistake that I made and widespread. On the 1996 Spring issue of Animation Journal I published an essay entitled The Italians Who Invented the Drawn-On-Film Technique. The brothers Bruno and Arnaldo Ginanni Corradini, from Ravenna, had…
The origins and development of the animated voice of cartoons provide a compelling way to understand the conflation of animals with the animated language. The animal body and the human body become intertwined through anthropomorphic cartoon body. The body of…
Until now the research on race and ethnicity in animated films and cartoons has mainly taken one of two directions: critiquing racist and ethnocentric characters and stories, and calling for increased diversity, especially in children’s animated media. There have been…
Review of Meike Uhrig (ed.). Emotion in Animated Films. New York/London: Routledge, 2018. Emotion in Animated Films explores the rich territory of emotions and their representation within animated films, particularly with a view on emotions as represented within computer animation. Books…
The Warner Bros. production Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle (2018, by Andy Serkis) uses motion capture for animating the animals. After seeing this film, we were left with a strong, yet uncanny fascination. In order to look further into this,…
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…
