In Pulses of Abstraction: Episodes from a History of Animation, Andrew R. Johnston contends that animation has been ‘pulsing in fits and starts with the creation, distribution and experimentation of new technologies’ (Johnston: 2024, p. 3). He sets out to…
Despite a common belief, the industrialization of Spanish animation studios took place only a decade later than in the United States. However, the first experiences happened at the beginning of the 20th century. We can claim that Segundo de Chomón…
Puppet films are often described as the work of a single author. The focus on the puppet featured in the film helps reveal the puppet filmmaking’s collaborative nature. A study on the collective mode of puppet filmmaking will be presented…
Many animation productions are international efforts, though the creative control often comes from studios in the US or Europe, while the studios in Asia end up performing the actual animation work. I will explore how the creative control in animation…
While the trademark thumbprint pressed into Gromit’s snout is the archetypal giveaway of British animation studio Aardman’s distinct material style, I was always more preoccupied by a splodge of jam. In several scenes of The Wrong Trousers (Nick Park, 1993),…
I have been taking photos, screenshots from my computer, printing them, re-photographing them, cropping them on my phone and reprinting them, creating assemblages that follow connections and human neural networks. In this process I take the role of a generative…
The horizon line is a key visual principle of the Western world-view, binding together histories of navigation, spatial representation, and philosophical inquiry. Ancient mariners valued the horizon as an orienting boundary between the earthly and the celestial, scanning perpendicularly across…
Animation goes, in all its superficiality, deeply into the substance of being, the hidden realms, the crevices beneath usual exposure, the constructions and reconstructions. […] Film is the unknowing suspension of disbelief in stand-ins, doppelgangers, avatars, things that only pretend…
Writing about the way elements move in animation proves to be a formidable challenge for any book on the medium, but Ryan Pierson’s Figure and Force in Animation Aesthetics (2019) manages to explore philosophical theories related to change while providing…
I work within a tradition of documentary practice. Whilst a documentary can follow a narrative structure, this video complicates any notion of narrative to present a section of path in a wetland forest. This is an essential watershed area where…
