Leslie Bishko – The Uses and Abuses of Cartoon Style in Animation

Introduction “Cartoon style” in animation broadly refers to animation design and movement that adheres to the 12 Principles of Animation, defined and developed at the Disney Studios. The Principles evolved through trial and error, by observing motion on-screen and noting what aspects of animated movement served the believability of the characters. To this day, the […]

Caroline Ruddell – Breaking Boundaries: The Representation of Split Identity in Anime

This article addresses the representation of unstable identity in examples of anime. Split identities in the cinema generally (live action and animation) are often indicative of specific cultural concerns or perhaps mediate contemporary attitudes towards issues of identity in society; the dichotomy that is often apparent in the animation discussed in this paper is that […]

Alan Cholodenko – (The) Death (of) the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix, Part II

A Difficulty in the Path of Animation Studies2 Before I set out on the work of this paper (Part II) I will briefly reprise Part I to orient the reader. Subtitled ‘Kingdom of Shadows’, Part I argues the singular importance of animation to cinema and to film, and the singular importance of death to animation, […]

Tom Klein – Animated Appeal: A Survey of Production Methods in Children’s Software

Introduction The graphical style of children’s software has often strongly resembled that of traditional cel animation, yet the requirements for implementing graphics into computer games necessitated changes in the working practices of animators. In some of the earliest videogames for the home market, the means of creating sequential moving images was far removed from traditional […]

Pierre Floquet – What is (not) so French in Les Triplettes de Belleville

In an article on text theory, Roland Barthes wrote: “Every text is intertext; it holds other texts within, at various levels, in irregularly recognizable shapes: those of the preceding culture as well as those of the surrounding culture; every text is new with interwoven past quotations”1. A text, a film, or an animated film is […]

Marina Estela Graça – Cinematic Motion by Hand

Within Cinema, animation has had an unclear relation with live-action recording since its very beginning. We learned – helped by ASIFA (International Animated Film Association) – that we should separate one from the other and we also realized that we (still) don’t have a general theory of cinema that embraces both. Yet, over the last […]