The origins and development of the animated voice of cartoons provide a compelling way to understand the conflation of animals with the animated language. The animal body and the human body become intertwined through anthropomorphic cartoon body. The body of…
Animation and animals
Racialized Voice Acting and Transracial Voice Casting of Animated Animals
by Kara Lynn Andersen • May 27, 2019 • 7 Comments
Until now the research on race and ethnicity in animated films and cartoons has mainly taken one of two directions: critiquing racist and ethnocentric characters and stories, and calling for increased diversity, especially in children’s animated media. There have been…
Book Review
Being Moved by Moving Images
by Andrew Connor • May 20, 2019 • 0 Comments
Review of Meike Uhrig (ed.). Emotion in Animated Films. New York/London: Routledge, 2018. Emotion in Animated Films explores the rich territory of emotions and their representation within animated films, particularly with a view on emotions as represented within computer animation. Books…
Animation and animals
From Human Animals to Animal Humans: Animation Practices in Three Versions of The Jungle Book
by Tina Ohnmacht and Lukas von Berg • May 13, 2019 • 2 Comments
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,…
Animation and animals
Dark Horse: An Overview of Walt Disney Animation Studios’ Horses (1937-2016)
by Rebecca Rose Stanton • May 6, 2019 • 1 Comment
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,…
Animation and animals
Homo Ridens and Animate Viverra
by Terry Lindvall • April 29, 2019 • 0 Comments
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…
Book Review
Between Myths
by Joseph Darlington • April 22, 2019 • 0 Comments
Review of Kayla Rae Whitaker. The Animators. London: Random House Trade, 2017. Animation often draws on literature. Disney had his fairy tales and every good anime starts life as a manga. Inspiration travels in the other direction far less often.…
Early Animation
The Temporality of Seeing: Reconsidering the Origins of the Phenakistiscope
by Nicholas Miller • April 15, 2019 • 2 Comments
Media “archaeologies” often emphasize the technical similarities between nineteenth-century optical devices and the basic mechanism of film animation: both create the illusion of movement by deploying series images stroboscopically. The designation of such instruments as “pre-cinematic,” however, can be misleading.…
Standalone Posts
Animated Suspense: A Quantitative Analysis of “Ice Age 3”
by Adrian Weibel • April 8, 2019 • 0 Comments
A few years ago I began an analysis of suspense and other narrative strategies in Blue Sky Studios’ Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009, by Carlos Saldanha), as a follow-up study to my research on suspense in Alfred…
European Animation
10X10: A European Animation Project
by Jared Taylor • April 1, 2019 • 1 Comment
The purpose of this post is to describe 10X10, an ongoing project initiated at Edinburgh College of Art, that each year brings animators and composers from a range of European universities together in a virtualized collaborative process. Currently, this project…