Millie and I first met at the 28th Annual Conference of the Society for Animation Studies held in Singapore in 2016. She was interested in my paper presentation about Buddhism and animation and asked relevant questions during the Q&A time.…
Whilst researching how animals have been depicted by Walt Disney Animation Studios (WADAS)[1], I found that chickens were featured in nineteen WDAS films (34%) (Stanton, 2019). This makes chickens the most commonly depicted species of bird in WDAS films. This…
According to a user poll on IMDB, Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, Scooby-Doo, and Donald Duck are five of the most recognizable animated characters of all time. As well as being recognizable, these animated characters all have one…
In memory of my friend Hannah Frank and her cat Ingeborg Two decades into the twenty-first century, animated fauna is thriving. A famous nonagenarian mouse with infinite spending power holds the American entertainment market ever more securely in its white-gloved…
Review of Daisy Yan Du. Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation 1940s-1970s. University of Hawai’i Press, 2019. Daisy Yan Du’s excellent Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation 1940s-1970s is essential reading for anyone interested in Chinese or Japanese…
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…
