In 1923 Lotte Reiniger began production on her animated feature film The Adventures of Prince Achmed, which was finally released in 1926. It has often been noted that her friend and collaborator Walter Ruttman is said to have been upset…
Children's Animation
Early Years Animation as Ambient Experience
by Joe Darlington • October 2, 2015 • 0 Comments
You can imagine the scene – perhaps you’re living it now – with the infant sat captivated by the shifting shapes moving on the screen and the parent behind them, busy with another task, not concentrating on the screen but…
Children's Animation
RIP Saturday Morning: The Changing Face of Children’s Broadcasting
by Amy Ratelle • September 22, 2015 • 3 Comments
Like many other people of a certain (Gen X) age, tuning into the Saturday morning time slot was directly responsible for igniting my love for all things animated. It was with great dismay, then, that I read the news last…
Children's Animation
Planes, trains and automobiles; anthropomorphized vehicles in children’s animation (but mum it’s educational!)
by Nichola Dobson • September 4, 2015 • 3 Comments
This is a big topic to put into a short blog post and I have no intention on covering the complexities of the creepiness of the CG Thomas the Tank Engine with his juvenile voice versus the original stop motion…
Adaptation
From The Lego Movie to Emoji: Adapting the Unadaptable
by Sam Summers • August 25, 2015 • 1 Comment
Late last month it was announced that Sony Pictures Animation spent nearly a million dollars on the rights to a movie pitch revolving around Emoji, those colourful little icons inserted into text messages when mere words are not enough to…
Adaptation
Motion comics: Appropriating and adapting comic book artwork
by Craig Smith • August 13, 2015 • 5 Comments
While certain comic book narratives have already been adapted into various film franchises, televised cartoons, webcomics and interactive experiences, the emergence of the motion comic has further transformed the relationship between the comic book medium and moving image culture. It…
Adaptation
Adapting Superman and the idea of medium specificity
by Malcolm Cook • August 3, 2015 • 2 Comments
When my co-author, Max Sexton, and I started researching and writing our recently published book Adapting Science Fiction To Television: Small Screen, Expanded Universe (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015) we kept returning to a central concept: medium specificity. The…
Animating Industry
Sounding out the industry: the animated return of the Multiple Language Version (MLV)
by Christopher Holliday • July 7, 2015 • 9 Comments
Official stories of European film history evaluate multiple-language versions (MLVs) as a failed experiment within the emergent period of early sound cinema. As a counterpoint to intertitles that otherwise afforded readily flexible language transfer across nations, multilingual film production was…
Animation Archives
At the Archive: Access, Preservation and Discoveries
by Cindy Keefer • June 30, 2015 • 2 Comments
The Center for Visual Music (CVM), a nonprofit archive based in Los Angeles dedicated to visual music and experimental animation, has extensive mixed media animation collections. Its largest collections are the films of Oskar Fischinger and Jordan Belson, plus Fischinger’s…
Animation Archives
Animation Archives: Process and Materiality
by Mette Peters • June 22, 2015 • 0 Comments
The animation process often combines film and fine arts practices, whether for experimental or commercial production. Animation filmmakers make use of commercially available artist supplies (paints, inks, brushes, pencils) and specific equipment (pegbars or drawing tables), but also more unconventional…