‘I don’t like games. You’re robbing the precious time of children to be children.’ – Hayao Miyazaki In 2008, whilst studio founder Hayao Miyazaki was otherwise occupied screenwriting Arrietty (Hiromasa Yonebayashi), other members of staff from Studio Ghibli – despite…
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…
We love movies because they allow us to escape from our reality, to project ourselves into impossible worlds and parallel universes. We long for adventure, love, excitement and answers to personal quests. The magic of cinema, and especially of animation,…
‘Animation is not the art of drawings that move but the art of movements that are drawn.’ (Norman McLaren) This quote can be recited by heart by most people in the animation field, usually in the pursuit of the…
Several years ago, I wrote an article for Print Magazine’s online blog Imprint about a book written by artist/cartoonist Edwin George “E.G.” Lutz – a 1920 manual titled Animated Cartoons – How They Are Made Their Origin and Development. According…
‘With animation you can do everything’. This is what director Ari Folman says in the extras of his award-winning animated film Vals Im Bashir (Waltz with Bashir, 2008)[1]. And, indeed, it seems that there is nothing animated films are not capable…
Interestingly, today’s hyper-visual and screen-based “era of information” is also defined as a time of “post-truth” (Oxford Dictionary’s 2016 “word of the year”). The tension between knowing and not knowing, between being informed and being misinformed is therefore timelier than…
I want to compare the path of interpretation of stop-motion films, which takes into account invisible meanings conveyed by visible and indirectly tangible material features of puppets, with the set of tools theorized in the field of product design in…
In the last decade or so it has become not so unusual for mockumentary-style paratexts to be created for non-mockumentary animated features. For instance, to promote the home media release of Wreck-It Ralph (2012, by Rich Moore), the Walt Disney…
Last month, I wrapped up a PhD thesis looking at DreamWorks’ influence on the prevailing aesthetic trends in the American computer-animated features of the 21st century. I have spent many words examining how, with films like Antz (1998), Shrek (2001),…
