1,721,093 research outputs found
The lightning cartoon: animation from music hall to cinema
No full textThis article examines the history of the lightning cartoon/sketch act, which rose to prominence in British music halls in the 1880s, continued in popularity into the early twentieth century, and played a key role in the development of animation, the act having been performed by a number of important figures in its early history, including J. Stuart Blackton and Winsor McCay in the US, George Méliès in France, and Walter Booth in the UK. This paper considers the ways in which this act anticipated animation, featuring qualities such as transformation, the movement of line drawings, and the desire to bring drawings to life. It also examines the perceptual play that was central to the act’s aesthetic and which continued into early films of lightning cartoonists performing, as stage performers such as Tom Merry and Walter Booth transferred and played an important role in early British filmmaking
Revealing and concealing oil: the hidden screen industry of animated petroleum films
No full textThis article explores the use of animation with oil industries and considers the various ways this could be understood as a ‘Hidden Screen Industry’. This article begins by reviewing relevant literature in animation studies and environmental and energy humanities to understand why this industry and the films arising from it have been largely hidden from scholarly work at the intersection of the two fields of study. Following this, it examines the workings of the industry to understand its institutions and practices and its existence as an alternative screen industry running in parallel with, but often distinct from, the better-known entertainment industry dominated by Hollywood studios. Finally, it examines the aesthetic use of animation within oil industry films to understand the ways this form of filmmaking both conceals and reveals different aspects of oil extraction and exploitation, including their implications for the present-day climate crisis. While the observations raised are intended to have broad applicability, each section uses examples drawn from the animated films made for BP by British animation studios during the twentieth century, and especially the 1951 film We’ve Come a Long Way made by the Halas and Batchelor animation studio
Book review. Rayna Denison (ed.), Princess Mononoke: Understanding Studio Ghibli’s Monster Princess Nichola Dobson, Norman McLaren: Between the Frames Raz Greenberg, Hayao Miyazaki: Exploring the Early Work of Japan’s Greatest Animator Susan Smith, Noel Brown and Sam Summers (eds), Toy Story: How Pixar Reinvented the Animated Feature
No full textAnimation scholarship commonly starts with the truism that this subject has been neglected and trivialized within film and media studies. Historically this was undoubtedly accurate, but animation studies has in recent years been recognized as one of the most vital and exciting areas of moving-image research and theorization. The launch of the ‘Animation: Key Films/Filmmakers’ series from Bloomsbury, edited by Chris Pallant (alongside a comparable forthcoming series from Palgrave Macmillan edited by Caroline Ruddell and Paul Ward) signals animation’s new prominence, but also raises important questions about the direction of future research. This review will consider the series as a whole, paying particular attention to Rayna Denison’s edited collection on the celebrated Studio Ghibli film Mononokehime/Princess Mononoke (1997), which exemplifies the strengths of the four volumes published so far
Book review: "Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-Making in Animation" - Donald Crafton, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013; 411 pp.; ISBN 9780520261044
No full textReview of Donald Crafton, Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-Making in Animation, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013; 411 pp.; ISBN 978 0 520 26104 4£24.95 (pbk
Book Review: Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation
No full textFull circle: useful animation and the geography of petroleum extraction
No full textThis article examines animated films produced in Britain for oil companies in the mid-twentieth century and their representation of, and contribution to, the international and transnational geography of petroleum extraction. Within these films, the graphic basis of hand-drawn animation meant it was often used to display and propel into motion cartographic and diagrammatic representations derived from a range of disciplinary and intermedial contexts, which served to navigate and construct spatial and power relationships around oil industries. A case study of the film Full Circle, released in 1953 by British Petroleum, demonstrates these characteristics but also documents the specific postcolonial context of the nationalization of oil in Iran in this period. Production materials for Full Circle held at the BP Archive provide a unique insight into the way this animated film changed during these events and how it became a central tool for oil company and government deliberation on their relationship with Iran and other oil-rich states. As such, this article recognizes the importance of animation at the intersection of three fields of study: environmental and energy humanities; useful cinema; and animated documentary. It argues that studying the entwined history of the animation and oil industries can help us to understand the role of media in our dependence on fossil fuels, and the present-day climate crisis resulting from this dependence
Book review: Cinema beyond film: media epistemology in the modern era
No full textBook Review of: Cinema Beyond Film: Media Epistemology in the Modern Era, edited by François Albéra and Maria Tortajada, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 271pp.,€ 29,50 (paperback), ISBN: 9789089640833
Pixar, 'The Road to Point Reyes' and the long history of landscape in new visual technologies
No full textIn March 1983 the Lucasfilm Computer Division, soon to become known as Pixar, embarked on a project to demonstrate their new rendering algorithm. Having already created the groundbreaking ‘Genesis Effect’ sequence for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan they were experienced in creating computer generated landscapes and chose as their subject a view of the local vicinity, Marin’s Point Reyes, which also lent its name to their renderer: REYES (Renders Everything You Ever Saw). The subsequent landscape image “The Road to Point Reyes” marks a critical moment in digital imaging. While computer processing power limited the result to a single frame, it was nevertheless the division’s first film-resolution image. This ‘one-frame movie’ demonstrated, at least theoretically, the possibility of creating full length sequences, or even a feature film, composed of images which matched the quality of 35mm film. While technologically this image marked a further step towards digital cinema, away from the photochemical, its choice of landscape as a subject places it in a historical lineage in which landscapes have repeatedly been used as a proving ground for new visual technologies. In the 1820s and 30s the fixing of views of landscapes was central to the development of photography, with figures such as Niépce, Daguerre, and Fox Talbot all taking views from nature as a central purpose and test for their experiments. Similarly in the 1890s landscapes were among the most celebrated subjects of the earliest moving image presentations, such as Robert Paul and Birt Acres’ Rough Sea at Dover and the Lumière’s Barque sortant du port/Boat Leaving the Port. This chapter examines early computer generated landscapes through the framework of this long history of landscape in new visual technologies. Such a reading finds strong parallels between these historical moments, particularly a tension between the natural and the cultural, present both in the images themselves and in the technologies which created them, especially the newly emerging fractal mathematics. This not only provides fresh insight into the work of Pixar by placing it in a longer tradition of visual culture than normally applied, but also has implications for the study of computer generated imagery more generally
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