The official art book for the animated movie Spies in Disguise.

Super spy Lance Sterling (Will Smith) and scientist Walter Beckett (Tom Holland) are almost exact opposites. Lance is smooth, suave and debonair. Walter is… not. But when events take an unexpected turn, this unlikely duo are forced to team up for the ultimate mission that will require an almost impossible disguise - transforming Lance into the brave, fierce, majestic… pigeon. Walter and Lance suddenly have to work as a team, or the whole world is in peril.

In this coffee table hardback, uncover the concept designs, character sketches, storyboards, and production art, alongside insight from the artists, filmmakers, and directors for this animated buddy comedy set in the high-octane globe-trotting world of international espionage.

Animation has a lot to do with acting. That is, character animation, not the standardized, mechanical process of animation. Acting and animation are highly creative processes. This book is divided into two parts: From film history we learn about the importance of actors and the variety of acting that goes into animation; then, we will turn to the actor's point of view to describe the various techniques involved. Through exhaustive research and interviews with people ranging from the late Ray Harryhausen, Jim Danforth, Joe Letteri, and Bruno Bozzetto, this book will be the primary source for animators and animation actors. Key Features Interviews with industry legends are found throughout this exhaustive work on animation From film history we learn about the importance of actors and the variety of acting that goes into animation, then turn to the actor's point of view to describe the various techniques involved Coverage of acting from Vaudeville to Rotoscoping to Performance Capture Case studies throughout bring the content to life while providing actionable tools and techniques that can be used immediately

Combining art and design principles with creative storytelling and professional savvy, this book covers everything a serious motion designer needs to make their artistic visions a reality and confidently produce compositions for clients. In this updated second edition of Design for Motion, author Austin Shaw explores the principles of motion design, teaching readers how to creatively harness the essential techniques of this diverse and innovative medium to create compelling style frames, design boards, and motion design products. Lessons are augmented by illustrious full-color imagery and practical exercises, allowing you to put the techniques covered into immediate practical context. Industry leaders, pioneers, and rising stars contribute their professional perspectives, share personal stories, and provide visual examples of their work. This second edition also includes updates on the following: Illustration techniques Typography Compositing Visual storytelling Incorporating 3D elements Social/mobile-first design Portfolio and concept development How to develop a distinct personal design style, and much more Plumb the depths of core motion design fundamentals and harness the essential techniques of this diverse and innovative medium. An accompanying Companion Website (www.routledge.com/cw/shaw) features video tutorials, a student showcase, and more.

Marco Pellitteri examines the growing influence of Japanese pop culture in European contexts in this comprehensive study of manga, anime, and video games. Looking at the period from 1975 to today, Pellitteri discusses Super Mario, Pokemon, kawaii, Sonic, robots and cyborgs, Astro Boy, and Gundam, among other examples of these popular forms. Pellitteri divides this period into two eras ("the dragon" and "the dazzle") to better understand this cultural phenomenon and means by which it achieved worldwide distribution."

The First World War was the first conflict in which film became a significant instrument of propaganda. For the United States, the war had two distinct phases: from August 1914 to April 1917, America was officially a neutral country; after April 1917 the United States was in the war, providing men, money and munitions for the Allies. These two phases are mirrored in the newsreels and documentary films shown in the United States. This volume starts by examining the background to the war for the movie industry - the coverage of previous conflicts and the growth of the newsreel. It examines the experiences of American cameramen who worked in the war zone: their efforts to gain access to the front, to overcome problems ranging from unreliable equipment to poor lighting conditions to evading censorship and how this shaped the coverage of the war.

In Good Girls and Wicked Witches, Amy M. Davis re-examines the notion that Disney heroines are rewarded for passivity. Davis proceeds from the assumption that, in their representations of femininity, Disney films both reflected and helped shape the attitudes of the wider society, both at the time of their first release and subsequently. Analyzing the construction of (mainly human) female characters in the animated films of the Walt Disney Studio between 1937 and 2001, she attempts to establish the extent to which these characterizations were shaped by wider popular stereotypes. Davis argues that it is within the most constructed of all moving images of the female form the heroine of the animated film that the most telling aspects of Woman as the subject of Hollywood iconography and cultural ideas of American womanhood are to be found."

On Animation: The Director's Perspective is a collection of interviews with 23 animated feature-film directors. These extensive interviews were conducted over the past several years by filmmakers and educators (and peers to the directors interviews) Tom Sito and Bill Kroyer. Interviews cover in-depth discussion of each director's career -- focusing on their creative development, their films, lesson learned and advice. The interviews were edited and produced by Ron Diamond. Key Features Interviews with the greatest living legends in animation Offers profound insight into the creative process of these giants Grants advice and lessons for inspiring animators

On Animation: The Director's Perspective is a collection of interviews with 23 animated feature-film directors. These extensive interviews were conducted over the past several years by filmmakers and educators (and peers to the directors interviews) Tom Sito and Bill Kroyer. Interviews cover in-depth discussion of each director's career -- focusing on their creative development, their films, lesson learned and advice. The interviews were edited and produced by Ron Diamond. Key Features Interviews with the greatest living legends in animation Offers profound insight into the creative process of these giants Grants advice and lessons for inspiring animators

Through the analysis of the work of the main Japanese animators starting from the pioneers of 1917, the book will overview the whole history of Japanese animated film, including the latest tendencies and the experimental movies. In addition to some of the most acclaimed directors Miyazaki Hayao, Takahata Isao, Shinkai Makoto, Tezuka Osamu and Kon Satoshi, the works of masters of animation such as Kawamoto Kihachiro, Kuri Yoji, Ofuji Noburo and Yamamura Koji will be analysed in their cultural and historical context. Moreover, their themes and styles will be the linking thread to overview the Japanese producing system and the social and political events which have often influenced their works. Key Features Insight into both mainstream and independent cinema Scientific reliability Easy readability Social and cultural context

Animation has been a staple of the filmmaking process since the early days of cinema. Animated shorts had been produced for decades, but not until 1937 did a major studio venture into animated features when Walt Disney produced Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Of the hundreds of animated feature films made since, many have proven their importance over the years while also entertaining generations of audiences. There are also many recent animated movies that promise to become classics in the field. In 100 Greatest American British Animated Films, Thomas S, Hischak looks at the most innovative, influential, and entertaining features that have been produced since the late 1930s-from traditional hand-drawn works and stop-motion films to computer-generated wonders. These movies have been selected not simply because of their popularity or critical acceptance but for their importance. Entries in this volume contain *plot information *production history *critical reaction *commentary on the film's cinematic quality *a discussion of the film's influence *voice casts *production credits *songs *sequels, spin-offs, Broadway versions, and television adaptations *awards and nominations Each movie is also discussed in the context of its original release as well as the ways in which the film has lived on in the years since. Familiar favorites and lesser-known gems are included, making the book a fascinating journey for both the avid animation fan and the everyday moviegoer. With a sweeping look at more than eight decades of movies, 100 Greatest American and British Animated Films highlights some of the most treasured features of all time.

Editor's note: there has been an issue with the book's companion site. Focal Press is fixing the issue. In the meanwhile, please visit http://www.routledge.com/cw/sullivan-978024081872/ for all the material promised in the book. From demo reel creation to festival shorts, students and professionals alike are creating animated shorts that are dynamic and eye catching but the time constraints of these shorts are challenging in their own right. The unique format of the animated short of two to five minutes in length presents a practical and aesthetic challenge that is rarely addressed in the classroom. Ideas for the Animated Short is a comprehensive and practical blueprint for creative and unique animated short creation with a focus on the strength of a compelling story. A comprehensive guide to the animated short, this title is an invaluable asset for aspiring animation professionals, students and independent filmmakers. Explore the process of developing a short from conception to final delivery and adapt the industry's best practices in your own workflow. Written by four leading animators, artists and professors, Ideas for the Animated Short is written from the unique perspective of a professional animator adapting creative stories into incredible animated shorts. Follow from start to finish the creation of an animated short from the pre-production thought process to story development and character design. Explore the best practices and avoid the common pitfalls of creating two to five minute shorts. Watch a specially created animated short, demonstrating the core techniques and principles at the companion website! Packed with illustrated examples of idea generation, character and story development, acting, dialogue and storyboarding practice this is your conceptual toolkit proven to meet the challenges of this unique art form. The companion website includes in-depth interviews with industry insiders, short animations (many with accompanying animatics, character designs and environment designs) and an acting workshop to get your animated short off to a flying start! With all NEW content on script writing, acting, sound design and visual storytelling that further enhance your animated shorts and apply the industry best practices to your own projects.

A Sight & Sound Book of the Year Jez Stewart charts the course of this extraordinarily fertile area of British film from early experiments with stop-motion and the flourishing of animated drawings during WWI. He reveals how the rockier interwar period set the shape of the industry in enduring ways, and how creatives like Len Lye and Lotte Reiniger brought art to advertising and sponsored films, building a foundation for such distinctive talents as Bob Godfrey, Alison De Vere and George Dunning to unleash their independent visions in the age of commercial TV. Stewart highlights the integral role of women in the industry, the crucial boost delivered by the arrival of Channel 4, the emergence of online animation and much more. The book features 'close-up' analyses of key animators such as Lancelot Speed and Richard Williams, as well as more thematic takes on art, politics and music. It builds a framework for better appreciating Britain's landmark contributions to the art of animation, including Halas and Batchelor's Animal Farm (1954), Dunning's Yellow Submarine (1968) and the creations of Aardman Animations.

Ivor the Engine, Noggin the Nog, Pingwings, Pogles Wood, The Clangers, and Bagpuss - the iconic animations produced by the Canterbury-based Smallfilms studio between 1958 and 1984 - constitute a significant thread of British cultural history. The lasting appeal of the imagined worlds created by Smallfilms is evident in the highly-successful BBC reboot of Clangers (2015-present), which has introduced a whole new audience to the pink moon mice. As well as the shows likely to be famiilar to readers, this history expands the Smallfilms story to include those less well-known animated shows that nonetheless played an important part in the studio's history. Through extensive studio access, interviews with many key Smallfilms collaborators, press and audience analysis, Chris Pallant provides a comprehensive and definitive historical record of the studio's work. Beyond Bagpuss is illustrated with 100 images from the Smallfilms archive, including those that have not previously been published.

The thought-provoking, aesthetically pleasing animated films of Hayao Miyazaki attract audiences well beyond the director's native Japan. "Princess Mononoke" and "Spirited Away" were critically acclaimed upon U.S. release, and the earlier "My Neighbor Totoro" and "Kiki's Delivery Service" have found popularity with Americans on DVD. This critical study of Miyazaki's work begins with an analysis of the visual conventions of manga, Japanese comic books, and anime; an overview of Japanese animated films; and a consideration of the techniques deployed by both traditional cell and computer animation. This section also details Miyazaki's early forays into comic books and animation, and his output prior to his founding of Studio Ghibli. Part Two concentrates on the Studio Ghibli era, outlining the company's development and analyzing the director's productions between 1984 and 2004, including "Castle in the Sky", "My Neighbor Totoro" and his newest film, "Howl's Moving Castle". The second section also discusses other productions involving Studio Ghibli, including "Grave of the Fireflies" and "The Cat Returns". Appendices supply additional information about Studio Ghibli's merchandise production, Miyazaki's global fan base, and the output of other Ghibli directors.

In Birth of an Industry, Nicholas Sammond describes how popular early American cartoon characters were derived from blackface minstrelsy. He charts the industrialization of animation in the early twentieth century, its representation in the cartoons themselves, and how important blackface minstrels were to that performance, standing in for the frustrations of animation workers. Cherished cartoon characters, such as Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat, were conceived and developed using blackface minstrelsy's visual and performative conventions: these characters are not like minstrels; they are minstrels. They play out the social, cultural, political, and racial anxieties and desires that link race to the laboring body, just as live minstrel show performers did. Carefully examining how early animation helped to naturalize virulent racial formations, Sammond explores how cartoons used laughter and sentimentality to make those stereotypes seem not only less cruel, but actually pleasurable. Although the visible links between cartoon characters and the minstrel stage faded long ago, Sammond shows how important those links are to thinking about animation then and now, and about how cartoons continue to help to illuminate the central place of race in American cultural and social life.

The Anime Boom in the United States provides a comprehensive and empirically-grounded study of the various stages of anime marketing and commercial expansion into the United States. It also examines the supporting organizational and cultural processes, thereby describing a transnational, embedded system for globalizing and localizing commodified culture. Focusing primarily on television anime series but also significant theatrical releases, the book draws on several sources, including in-depth interviews with Japanese and American professionals in the animation industry, field research, and a wide-scale market survey. The authors investigate the ways in which anime has been exported to the United States since the 1960s, and explore the transnational networks of anime production and marketing. They also investigate the many cultural and artistic processes anime inspired. The analysis of the rise and fall of the U.S. anime boom is the starting point for a wider investigation of the multidirectional globalization of contemporary culture and the way in which global creative industries operate in an age of media digitalization and convergence. This story carries broad significance for those interested in understanding the dynamics of power structures in cultural and media globalization.

In the American imagination, the Soviet Union was a drab cultural wasteland, a place where playful creative work and individualism was heavily regulated and censored. Yet despite state control, some cultural industries flourished in the Soviet era, including animation. Drawing the Iron Curtain tells the story of the golden age of Soviet animation and the Jewish artists who enabled it to thrive. Art historian Maya Balakirsky Katz reveals how the state-run animation studio Soyuzmultfilm brought together Jewish creative personnel from every corner of the Soviet Union and served as an unlikely haven for dissidents who were banned from working in other industries. Surveying a wide range of Soviet animation produced between 1919 and 1989, from cutting-edge art films like Tale of Tales to cartoons featuring ""Soviet Mickey Mouse"" Cheburashka, she finds that these works played a key role in articulating a cosmopolitan sensibility and a multicultural vision for the Soviet Union. Furthermore, she considers how Jewish filmmakers used animation to depict distinctive elements of their heritage and ethnic identity, whether producing films about the Holocaust or using fellow Jews as models for character drawings. Providing a copiously illustrated introduction to many of Soyuzmultfilm's key artistic achievements, while revealing the tumultuous social and political conditions in which these films were produced, Drawing the Iron Curtain has something to offer animation fans and students of Cold War history alike.

If you love animation then you're in for a treat!
Olivier Cotte has gone behind-the-scenes of 13 of the greatest short animations ever made, interviewing the directors and close collaborators who made each one, to offer us a unique guide to classic techniques from the masters of their crafts. Packed with beautiful, instructive illustrations and previously unpublished material (including story-boards, photos and hand-drawn sketches) and interspersed with interviews - this is an exceptional source of inspiration and knowledge for animators, students and fans alike.
Covering 13 winners of the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film:
Neighbours (Norman McLaren, Oscar 1952)
Frank Film (Frank Mouris, Oscar 1973)
Le Chateau de sable (Co Hoedman, Oscar 1977)
The Fly (Ferenc Rofusz, Oscar 1980)
Anna & Bella (Borge Ring, Oscar 1985)
L'homme qui plantait des arbres (Frederic Back, Oscar 1987)
Balance (Christoph and Wolfgang Lauenstein, Oscar 1989)
Manipulation (Daniel Greaves, Oscar 1991)
Mona Lisa descending a staircase (Joan C. Gratz, Oscar 1992)
Quest (Tyron Montgomery, Oscar 1996)
The Old Man of the Sea (Alexandre Petrov, Oscar 1999)
Father and Daughter (Michael Dudok de Wit, Oscar 2000)
Harvie Krumpet (Adam Elliot, Oscar 2003)
* Learn from the best... Olivier Cotte interviews some of the most innovative and inspirational animators of the last 50 years, including Frank Mouris, Borge Ring, Frederic Back, Alexandre Petrov and Michael Dudok de Wit
* See how it's done... with never before published color storyboards, preliminary sketches, stills from the films and behind-the-scenes photographs
* Be inspired... the detailed explorationof how these unique films were made will make you want to get out there and do it yourself!

The official art book for the animated movie The Addams Family. Based on the famous New Yorker creations of Charles Addams, this animated action-comedy will follow the Addams family - parents Gomez and Morticia, children Wednesday and Pugsley, Uncle Fester, Grandma, Cousin It, faithful butler Lurch and helping hand Thing - whose lives begin to unravel when they face-off against a crafty reality-TV host while also preparing for their extended family to arrive for a major celebration, Addams-style. This companion book is full of concept designs, storyboards and production art, alongside insight from the artists, filmmakers and directors.

DreamWorks is one of the biggest names in modern computer-animation: a studio whose commercial success and impact on the medium rivals that of Pixar, and yet has received far less critical attention.The book will historicise DreamWorks' contribution to feature animation, while presenting a critical history of the form in the new millennium. It will look beyond the films' visual aesthetics to assess DreamWorks' influence on the narrative and tonal qualities which have come to define contemporary animated features, including their use of comedy, genre, music, stars, and intertextuality. It makes original interventions in the fields of film and animation studies by discussing each of these techniques in a uniquely animated context, with case studies from Shrek, Antz, Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar, Shark Tale, Bee Movie, Trolls and many others. It also looks at the unusual online afterlife of these films, and the ways in which they have been reappropriated and remixed by subversive online communities.

Be a fly on the wall as industry leaders Bill Kroyer and Tom Sito take us through insightful face-to-face interviews, revealing, in these two volumes, the journeys of 23 world-class directors as they candidly share their experiences and personal views on the process of making feature animated films. The interviews were produced and edited by Ron Diamond. Your job is not to be the one with the answers. You should be the one that gets the answers. That's your job. You need to make friends and get to know your crew. These folks are your talent, your bag of tricks. And that's where you're going to find answers to the big problems - Andrew Stanton It's hard. Yet the pain you go through to get what you need for your film enriches you, and it enriches the film. - Brenda Chapman Frank and Ollie always used to say that great character animation contains movement that is generated by the character's thought process. It can't be plain movement. - John Lasseter The beauty of clay is that it doesn't have to be too polished, or too smooth and sophisticated. You don't want it to be mechanical and lifeless. - Nick Park The good thing about animation is that tape is very cheap. Let the actor try things. This is where animation gets to play with spontaneity. You want to capture that line as it has never been said before. And, most likely, if you asked the actor to do it again, he or she just can't repeat that exact performance. But you got it. - Ron Clements

Uncanny computer-generated animations of splashing waves, billowing smoke clouds, and characters' flowing hair have become a ubiquitous presence on screens of all types since the 1980s. This Open Access book charts the history of these digital moving images and the software tools that make them. Unpredictable Visual Effects uncovers an institutional and industrial history that saw media industries conducting more private R&D as Cold War federal funding began to wane in the late 1980s. In this context studios and media software companies took concepts used for studying and managing unpredictable systems like markets, weather, and fluids and turned them into tools for animation. Unpredictable Visual Effects theorizes how these animations are part of a paradigm of control evident across society, while at the same time exploring what they can teach us about the relationship between making and knowing.