Episode zero of the YouTube series Taiwan Bar (2014 – 2015), “Taiwan for Sale?” (Hauer, 2014), opens with a cute cartoon Formosan black bear sitting on a shelf with various kinds of drink bottles, while a lively voice-over says: Hello…
The “immobile engine” behind each animated piece is the animator, which appropriates acting as an invisible force over its creation. In this sense, this process of interpretation can be understood as the manifestation of the animator’s internal intentions on an…
CFP: Animation & Movement, September Theme (Deadline Friday 26th August 2016) September’s theme looks at the links between animation and movement. While these might seem obvious to the readers of this post, movement in animation is both constructed, and perceived,…
Direct animation possesses certain inherent qualities, such as immediacy, accelerated kinesis, and improvisational flow that I would like to suggest can correspond isomorphically to the extemporised uptempo meters of particular forms of jazz music. Gestalt theorist Rudolf Arnheim describes the…
Better known today as the director of the Japanese media franchise Neon Genesis Evangelion, which began in the early 1990’s and still runs, Hideaki Anno initially gained acclaim as a highly talented animator of vehicles. For instance, his student-film At…
Animation is a time-based image-making practice that can change our ideas, experience, and view of the world. Both metamorphosis and metaphor are powerful means to realizing this capacity. In the broadest sense, metamorphosis can be characterized as a striking change…
Tackling the subject of anime superheroes, both the graduate thesis “Superman vs. Goku: Different Cultural Values Represented in Superhero Characters in American and Japanese Comics”[1] and the widely viewed YouTube video essay How HeroAca and One Punch Man Flip the…
With the debut of its fifth and final season in May 2020, Dreamworks Animation’s She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018-2020) made history as another children’s animated series with explicit queer representation. Led by queer creator Noelle Stevenson and a…
At the time this is published, Persona 5 Royal (Persona 5: The Royal in Japan), an updated version of the smash-hit Japanese Role-Playing Game (JRPG) phenomenon Persona 5 (2016), will have just released in Japan on the PlayStation 4. The…
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…
