The Peer-reviewed Open Access Online Journal for Animation History and Theory – ISSN 1930-1928
Anima: soul or vital force (feminine form) + Matrix: point from where something originates Factory Girls I started my professional life in a factory—an animation factory. Despite having completed a bachelor degree in the then brand new field of Media Design, which included video, photography, graphic design and animation, along with extensive studies in art […]
The continued evolution of film in the digital realm, and the increased reliance on CGI and VFX elements in Hollywood film, have made it imperative to analyse not just the effect of these on image production, but also on the narrative techniques within cinema. Contemporary films now contain a significant proportion of computer graphics; at […]
In 2000 the Mumbai-based commercial graphics firm Crest Communications acquired the struggling Hollywood studio Rich Animation. Five years later, the combined companies signed a three-picture deal with Lions Gate starting with the 2010 feature Alpha and Omega (Bell and Gluck 2010). This was an audacious move for the newly minted Crest Animation, a studio that […]
Through steps such as these we can understand how it is, that as soon as some melancholy thought passes through the brain, there occurs a just perceptible drawing down of the corners of the mouth, or a slight raising up of the inner ends of the eyebrows, or both movements combined, and immediately afterwards a […]
“A film is about feeling.” Jerzy Kucia A lifelong “emotional animated documentary” on the Polish landscape Polish animator Jerzy Kucia’s films are about journeys – ordinary men and women travel from one place to another by different means of transport, such as a train as in Return (Powrót, 1972), a bicycle as in The Barrier […]
WHITHER(ING) ANIMATION (STUDIES)?![1] 1. This paper is theoretical, speculative, highly so. Theory, from Greek theoria, is speculating. Like theory, life is a risky business, too, getting riskier, more speculative, by the minute, especially since I theorise what I live, and I live what I theorise. So this is ‘food for thought’, perhaps indigestible. I take […]
Abstraction, as an art movement, represents the largest modernisation of visual arts since the Renaissance, reconfiguring how we perceive information on a global scale (Frankel 2012). In shedding representational form and meaning, abstraction presents an evocative sensuality that transcends language and culture. This sensuality provides a strong foothold in commercial visual communications, which has persisted […]
In his work The Production of Space (La Production de l’Espace, 1974), the French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefèbvre highlighted that, historically, the word ‘space’ implied a “strictly geometrical meaning: the idea it evoked was simply that of an empty area” (Lefèbvre 2007, p. 1). While arguing for an understanding of space as a social […]
Revolution, Identity and Connection in Looney Tunes Voice actress June Foray once recalled how Chuck Jones was able to quote Mark Twain and, in the same breath, discuss Aeschylus (King, 2013). Yet culture and animation have often shared an uneasy relationship. As critic Steve Schneider claims, “in all the vivisections of popular culture, non-Disney animation […]
Part 1 MOONWALKING, OF SORTS Let me begin with a question, one parroting my question ‘Why Animation, Alan?’ entitling a piece by me in the Spring 2008 Society for Animation Studies Newsletter. My question today: ‘Why my focus on art for this Toronto 2014 Society for Animation Studies conference on The Animator, Alan?’. Answer: not […]