“In creating new characters for our cartoon films, one of our main sources of inspiration has been the world of animals. And we’ve always been very much impressed with the cat family. This group of carnivora includes more than forty…
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…
Thursday 19th to Saturday 21st September, Texas Tech University The 2019 Animation and Public Engagement Symposium (APES) held at Texas Tech University in Lubbock – thanks, among others, to the support of the Society for Animation Studies – brought together…
Thanks to its legacy of animated fairy tale films, Disney will always have princesses. But will it always have the Disney Princess franchise? In an attempt to come to grips with her feelings about the astonishingly lucrative line of merchandise,…
Anyone who has ever responded to a call for papers has, at one point or another, experienced the perverse pleasure of stubbornly latching onto a topic that was not mentioned therein and running with it. It was in that contrarian…
Indexes, icons, and symbols. According to Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic theory (1974), we can identify three basic types of signs: indexes, icons, and symbols. Indexes, such as photos, videos, and films, have a factual connection with their objects since they…
When designing sound for animation, especially when you have some latitude in interpreting the visuals against your fully designed soundscape, there can be a tendency on trying to match up everything you see on screen with a direct sonic match.…
Animation always had close links with sound and music. Synchronism provides a means of rich formal experimentations. It is particularly striking in the field of the music video where the progression of the music itself often determines the progression, the…
Steamboat Willie, the first fully synchronized animated film that also introduced Mickey and Minnie Mouse, was first publicly presented on November 18, 1928, at Universal’s Colony Theater in New York City. Unlike all other iterations of Disneyland around the world,…
Most people think of each classic commercial American animation studios as having their own distinctive sonic style. Warner Brothers had the postmodern, action-driven sound developed by Carl Stalling. MGM had the classically trained Scott Bradley pumping out modern, occasionally atonal…
