The Peer-reviewed Open Access Online Journal for Animation History and Theory – ISSN 1930-1928
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 […]
In 2008, the noted Cuban journalist and art critic, Pedro de la Hoz, contended that, “What’s most important is that with animation and other graphic media… we have an extraordinary weapon for the formation and transmission of revolutionary, patriotic and human values, and for cultivating the sensitivity, love and intelligence needed to help us conquer […]
Critical Significance of Historical Research Animation has been practised in Australia from a relatively early stage in the worldwide history of cinematic animation, as evidenced by quite mature examples of cutout animation by cartoonist Harry Julius beginning in 1912. It may therefore seem odd that there is comparatively little written of its history. In America […]
Kingdom of Shadows1 The night of the 4th of July 1896 was a special night for cinema. It was the night that Maxim Gorky attended the screening of the Lumière brothers projections at the Nizhny-Novgorod fair in Russia and wrote the first significant review of cinema, a review that for me as for Tom Gunning […]
A Reflection on Animation Studies There are at least three problems that arise when any topic of interest (heterogeneous and globally dispersed as it must necessarily be at the outset) transforms itself, in an (equally necessary) institutional/territorial gesture, into a defined field of study – and I have seen all these problems materialise at least […]
Stepping Out of the Graveyard I will be forever grateful to be asked to deliver the keynote address at the ‘Animated Dialogues’ Conference in Melbourne in June 2007. My survey of the field of Animation Studies in the current period – ‘Battlefields for the Undead : Re-assessing Animation Studies and other Romantic Interludes’ – inevitably […]
The Animated Dialogues 2007 conference was first conceptualised as an event that would bring together scholars working in the field of animation studies in the Australasian region. This first Animated Dialogues conference focused on the areas of texts, industries and audiences as a way of bringing people together who frequently work in quite disparate geographical […]