The Peer-reviewed Open Access Online Journal for Animation History and Theory – ISSN 1930-1928
The Adventures of Tom Tomiczky in the Realm of Machinic Vision and Bodily Engagement Over the course of a distinguished career in experimental animation and digital art installations, Hungarian artist and animator Tamas Waliczky has earned an international reputation for creating works that simultaneously are cognitively challenging, affectively intimate, and artfully playful. Cumulatively, his artistic […]
Ongoing innovation in digital animation and visual effects technologies has provided new opportunities for stories to be visually rendered in ways never before possible. Films featuring animation and visual effects continue to perform well at the box office, proving to be highly profitable projects. The Avengers (Whedon, 2012) holds the current record for opening weekend […]
From the 1920s through the 1960s, the animation industry was a labor force segregated by gender, in which women were almost entirely restricted to the Inking and Paint department. Indeed, despite notable exceptions like Mary Blair and LaVerne Harding, Disney correspondence and internal papers show how women were regularly rejected as applicants or referred to […]
Earth: The Final Frontier Pixar’s 2008 film WALL-E is set in a post-apocalyptic twenty-ninth century, in which humanity has left an uninhabitable Earth because its waste and garbage production led to global environmental destruction. Robots were left behind in order to clean Earth until its environment would suit human life again, but the ordeal of […]
An examination of his film Muto The film fades up from black as the jarring sounds of a busy street play. The camera tilts and pans drunkenly but with the stilted rhythm of frames being shown step by step. We pan across a brick wall covered with graffiti tags and come to rest on a […]
Imagine for a moment, the city of Rome in 1510. Here, the Renaissance painter Raphael is in the process of carrying out the most important commission of his career, and consequently, one of the most famous projects in the history of Western art—the fresco decoration of the Pope’s private apartments in the Vatican. If we […]
Twenty first-century mainstream cinema is obsessed with achieving the photoreal representation of the impossible. Blockbuster after blockbuster parades superheroes battling super villains, cataclysmic natural disasters or intergalactic beings rampaging through both imaginary and familiar worlds. It has been 30 years since Tron (Steven Lisberger, 1982) wowed audiences with a wire-frame representation of cyberspace in 1982, and […]
This paper is indebted to the invaluable contribution of numerous animation artists, who shared with us via an open survey their experiences and opinions concerning the newly available technologies, and how they have influenced — or not — the evolution of their animation style: new resources and possibilities of digital production, advantages have they discovered, […]
Roughly one hundred years ago, Billboard announced a one-week run of “the latest novelty in motion pictures,” a collection of shorts entitled “Animated Sculpture,” debuting at New York’s Strand Theater on March 25, 1917.[1] On the day of the premiere, Detroit Free Press ran an anonymous review in commendation of these short comic films, explaining […]