The work of anime director Kunihiko Ikuhara is not only known for being deeply symbolic, but also for having outstanding representations of lesbians in anime. This is significant because LGBT visibility is quite low in Japan. Gay marriage, for instance,…
I’ve written here before about some of the children’s animation which my son consumes and, as he gets older (he’s almost 5), we all become exposed to more sophisticated shows aimed at older children. Thankfully, many of these shows are…
In fan studies, we often talk about fans being ‘poachers’ of texts (Jenkins 1992). Fans, we argue, lift bits and pieces from texts and create their own works: Sherlock becomes a detective in a high school; Edward and Bella become billionaire…
Witnessing the outpouring of grief in the queer community after the death of David Bowie made me realize just how much he had meant to a generation and beyond in regards to giving people permission to explore their gender identity,…
The early twentieth century bore witness not only to the emergence of the ‘standalone’ printed comic book, but also to the birth of the animated film. In many ways, comics have often been associated with their moving image counterparts, as…
In general, comic book to film adaptations may be defined as adaptations of drawn comic strips and comic book series for the medium of film (Marschall 2002: 103). As this definition implies, there are two basic aspects that seem to…
Lukas Schrank’s animated short, Nowhere Line: Voices from Manus Island (2015), uses recorded mobile phone conversations as both source and sound track, to tell the stories of two detainees in one of the Australian government’s notorious offshore refugee camps. This…
Undeniably, the most popular way of intersecting animation and documentary is that of using animation to recount a factual occurrence. Yet, this is not the only possible manner in which they can combine. Another way of crossing them over consists in…
Featured in this interview is Tara Knight’s animated, episodic, documentary series of short films, Mikumentary, about the singing, dancing, and collaboratively-created hologram Hatsune Miku. Through fragmented storytelling and animation that responds to Miku as a reconfigurable subject, Knight creates a modular…
To many “animated documentary” sounds like an oxymoron: the genre inherently refuses indexical understandings of “the real” as purported, and highly debated, within photographic documentary practices. Similarly, it is accepted that historical, archival, or found footage imagery may stand in…
