African animation scholars have discussed the role of formal art institutions in producing auteurs like Moustapha Alassane, Jean-Michel Kibushi, and Ebele Okoye (Callus 2018, Sawadogo 2019). In this piece, I propose that the African animation studio is a creative and…
In the opening minutes, Nayola narrates a dream: a man runs naked through tall grass, gunshots crack, he collapses in mud, and a mulemba tree grows from the place where he falls. In the final sequence, a masked figure crosses…
2026 marks the resurgence of animation’s most sophisticated anti-hero: Wile E. Coyote. While he has spent decades in a cycle of recursive trauma, he recently moved from the desert to the courtroom in the film Coyote v. Acme1. This cinematic…
In the years of 1953 through 1963 five hilariously funny Warners Brothers Looney Tunes were produced featuring the characters of Sam Sheepdog and his antagonist – coworker Ralph Wolf. The overarching theme of the series is the gag that Sam…
Colin Williamson’s Drawn to Nature argues that “science animation” is not a niche offshoot bolted onto cartoon history, but a force that has long shaped mainstream American animation. Williamson’s central wager is persuasive: scientific ideas about nature did not merely…
Destructive yet corrective, social yet subjective, the contradictory nature of humour makes it difficult to define. This is perhaps never more apparent than when humour relies upon the seriousness of its given topic. Over and above philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s claim…
Humour has been a consistent thematic thread throughout my practice. My first short, animated film, Family Favourites—a wry exploration of how emotionally fraught and dysfunctional Christmas can be—was screened on Channel 4 in 1990. The film drew on the tension…
A cat removing pus from an infected toenail. A wallaby shaved by a ceiling fan. A monster licking a mysterious blue goo with its hairy tongue. In the 1990s, the American television channel Nickelodeon drew on the exaggerated animation and…
Paul Wells (1998) leaves out just one overlooked source of laughing in animated films in his otherwise brilliant chapter on “25 Ways to Start Laughing”. Namely that of a cartoon character laughing. Felix the Cat silently chortles his “Ha! Ha!”…
When an object in a film appears to be alive by virtue of its movements, this impression is most often produced through animation. Frame-by-frame animation is usually applied for this purpose—especially in live-action films. The animation of inanimate objects thus…
