The Peer-reviewed Open Access Online Journal for Animation History and Theory – ISSN 1930-1928
In 2002, I stood in the street in Old Town Portland, my eyes trained on the second-story windows of the New Wah Mae building. We were running an alignment test for my first animated installation, Illumination No.1. When the windows lit up, I was caught off guard. My moving images, the drawings so repetitively familiar […]
What if you could peek into any building, office, home and follow stories? What if you could collaborate building these stories? Attempting to answer these questions through the creation of virtual worlds may help understand transmedia experiences. These worlds constitute interfaces that allow users to interact with audiovisual content in multiple media and platforms, serving […]
The Voice Persona of Animation When we think of persona and animation, one of the first things that come to mind is the voice-actor, particularly if they are a celebrity. The character Po in, Kung Fu Panda (Osborne & Stevenson, 2008) is unmistakably voiced by celebrity actor Jack Black and a great deal of Jack […]
Film theorization, particularly classical film theory, has been obsessed with the concept of indexi-cality, the idea that cinema can capture the real world. From this concept has emerged theories that position realism as the essence of cinema. Film scholar Noël Carroll sees these arguments as based around a “medium specificity thesis,” in that classic film […]
Historical context on physics, physicality and behaviour From an historical point of view, physics played a role in animation when defying the laws of physics and physicality since its inception. When Émile Cohl brought Fantasmagorie (1908) to the screen, the world witnessed a figure on a black screen transforming its shape and its physicality, floating […]
(Animation) began as something other than drama. It was not a story in three acts; it was a singular event, like an implausible trapeze act … (Norman Klein, 1993) “There is no interest in achieving the possible, but it is exceedingly interesting to perform the impossible.” “Astound me!” (Serge Diaghilev, 1909-1929; Director of The Ballets […]
Originating at the end of the nineteenth century, three-dimensional stop-motion animation has been an exclusively manual animation practice, in which the direct manipulation of handmade puppets and models allows a more tactile approach of the physical act of animating and a more sensuous perception of the tangible by the viewer, that is, the elicitation of […]
Is a digital image consisting of dots and lines and digital information, is it more real? Is a drawn image, talking with real sound, less true? Who can say? Who is to judge? (Ari Folman, 2008) We are practically drowning in the present; we are practically drowning in the past. (Nicholas Rombes 2009, p. 96) […]
All our senses have their own space area of reference, and normally when we perceive we combine them all, what we see, hear, touch and smell all into the one area of space where we live. (Lee, 1971 p. 17) This essay explores the animation practice of Australian filmmaker Michael Lee, whose career spans the […]
This paper considers the films of the Czech Surrealist Jan Švankmajer (b.1934) from the perspective of puppetry[1]. The majority of his films involve stop-motion animation[2], usually combined with live action. He often uses puppets, as both live action effects (e.g. actually pulling strings) and animated using stop motion techniques. This paper will explore his relationship […]