The sensation of pain is invisible (Munday et al., 2020). It is private, shifting, and impossible to pin down. So, how do we communicate something so visceral and elusive? The answer seems to lie in metaphor. According to Conceptual Metaphor…
Flow (2024)
Video games strategies in the animation feature Flow (2024)
by Maria Pagès • July 22, 2025 • 0 Comments
Following the great success of the Latvian animated feature Flow (Zilbalodis, 2024), which brought home the Oscar statues for the first time in the nation’s and the Oscar’s history, this text explores the intuition that the success could relate to…
Flow (2024)
Anthropomorphism as a narrative mode in Flow (2024)
by Samantha Baugus • July 8, 2025 • 1 Comment
Flow (Zilbalodis, 2024)is striking for its lack of spoken dialogue; the filmmakers respected the lived reality of the nonhuman creatures by not imposing on them anthropocentric ideas of spoken narrative. Nonetheless, the story is communicated beautifully, evocatively, and intelligibly to…
Standalone Posts
To the Moon on a Whim in A Grand Day Out (1989)
by Christian Wilken • June 17, 2025 • 0 Comments
This article examines the first installment in Nick Park’s Wallace & Gromit series A Grand Day Out (1989) through the lenses of the oneiric and the Dionysian. While scholarship on Aardman Animations tends to emphasize its stop-motion materiality and British eccentricity, less attention has…
Animation and Surrealism
A Closer Look at “In the Shadow of the Cypress”
by Dawn Lam • June 3, 2025 • 0 Comments
“In the Shadow of the Cypress” is a 2023 Iranian animated short by Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani. It premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, making history by claiming…
Animation and Surrealism
Visualizing Trauma Memory Through Surreal Techniques
by Yixin Sun • May 20, 2025 • 1 Comment
Experimental animation, through its unconventional narratives, offers a compelling medium for expressing surreal feelings, personal philosophies, spiritual concerns, and abstract psychological trauma. Specifically, the unstable psychological state of the traumatized individual can be seen as placing their identity in a…
Animation and Surrealism
Is Priit Pärn a Surrealist?
by Akira Arimochi • May 6, 2025 • 0 Comments
This paper presents a preliminary study on the unique surrealist qualities of Estonian animation director Priit Pärn, distinguishing his approach from that of André Breton and Jan Švankmajer. Pärn began work on animated films in the 1970s during the Soviet…
Animation and Surrealism
Surrealism, Memory, and Resistance in Soviet Animation
by Jodi Kolpakov • April 22, 2025 • 0 Comments
Figure 1. A still from Norstein’s The Tale of Tales, where women dancing with their husbands all the sudden appear alone. Animation, a powerful storytelling medium, has been breaking down complex ideas in a visually engaging way for over a…
Book Review
Review of The Intersection of Animation, Video Games, and Music: Making Movement Sing
by María ilia Katsaridou • April 15, 2025 • 1 Comment
In The Intersection of Animation, Video Games, and Music: Making Movement Sing, editors Lisa Scoggin and Dana Plank gather fourteen chapters that examine how music operates across animated forms and interactive worlds. With a nod toward both classic and contemporary…
Animation and Surrealism
Dimensions of Dialogue: The Carnivorous Appetite of Surrealist Animation
by Srijita Banerjee • April 8, 2025 • 0 Comments
Dimensions of Dialogue (1983) begins with two faces shaped out of random accoutrements such as decaying fruits and vegetables, kitchen equipment and utensils etc. The two faces move towards each other and clash in a haphazard mishmash of objects—face shapes…