The Animation Studies Reader brings together both key writings within animation studies and new material in emerging areas of the field. The collection provides readers with seminal texts that ground animation studies within the contexts of theory and aesthetics, form and genre, and issues of representation. The first section collates key readings on animation theory, on how we might conceptualise animation, and on some of the fundamental qualities of animation. New material is also introduced in this section specifically addressing questions raised by the nature, style and materiality of animation. The second section outlines some of the main forms that animation takes, which includes discussions of genre. Although this section cannot be exhaustive, the material chosen is particularly useful as it provides samples of analysis that can illuminate some of the issues the first section of the book raises. The third section focuses on issues of representation and how the medium of animation might have an impact on how bodies, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity are represented. These representations can only be read through an understanding of the questions that the first two sections of the book raise; we can only decode these representations if we take into account form and genre, and theoretical conceptualisations such as visual pleasure, spectacle, the uncanny, realism etc.

Animating Film Theory provides an enriched understanding of the relationship between two of the most unwieldy and unstable organizing concepts in cinema and media studies: animation and film theory. For the most part, animation has been excluded from the purview of film theory. The contributors to this collection consider the reasons for this marginalization while also bringing attention to key historical contributions across a wide range of animation practices, geographic and linguistic terrains, and historical periods. They delve deep into questions of how animation might best be understood, as well as how it relates to concepts such as the still, the moving image, the frame, animism, and utopia. The contributors take on the kinds of theoretical questions that have remained underexplored because, as Karen Beckman argues, scholars of cinema and media studies have allowed themselves to be constrained by too narrow a sense of what cinema is. This collection reanimates and expands film studies by taking the concept of animation seriously. Contributors. Karen Beckman, Suzanne Buchan, Scott Bukatman, Alan Cholodenko, Yuriko Furuhata, Alexander R. Galloway, Oliver Gaycken, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Tom Gunning, Andrew R. Johnston, Herve Joubert-Laurencin, Gertrud Koch, Thomas LaMarre, Christopher P. Lehman, Esther Leslie, John MacKay, Mihaela Mihailova, Marc Steinberg, Tess Takahashi

Der Band greift einen vorherrschenden wissenschaftlichen Trend zur Prozessualisierung, Relationierung und Situierung von gegenwartigen Medien bzw. medialen Konstellationen auf und erprobt und exemplifiziert diesen an Videospielarrangements. Er vereint unter der Perspektivierung von digitalen Spielen als "Situationen und Prozesse" internationale Forscher*innen aus dem Bereich der Computerspielforschung und zeigt in diesem Zuge auch, dass eine derartige theoretische Pramisse interdisziplinare Herangehensweisen ermoeglicht bzw. zusammenfuhren lasst.

She Animates examines the work of twelve female animation directors in the Soviet Union and Russia, who have long been overlooked by film scholars and historians. Our approach examines these directors within history, culture, and industrial practice in animation. In addition to making a case for including these women and their work in the annals of film and animation history, this volume also makes an argument for why their work should be considered part of the tradition of women's cinema. We offer textual analysis that focuses on the changing attitudes towards both the woman question and feminism by examining the films in light of the emergence and evolution of a Soviet female subjectivity that still informs women's cinema in Russia today.

When most people are asked what the first animated movie is, they assume it's Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937. For three years (1923-1926), a young, female animation director, her husband, and four men crafted the oldest surviving animated film in a Potsdam garage attic one maddeningly frame at a time. Lotte Reiniger animated Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed, better known as The Adventures of Prince Achmed, equipped with nothing but scissors, cardboard, lead sheets, a camera, and a story inspired by One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. Lotte Reiniger was a animation and puppetry pioneer, who gifted the mediums with her silhouettes and imagination. Yet due to a number of factors: her gender, her German ethnicity, World War II, lack of funding, and many others, she became a footnote in animation and cinematic history. Yet her sixty plus filmography is evident of her passion, talent, and dedication to animated art. For the first time, Early Animation Pioneer Lotte Reiniger shares Lotte Reinger's story in a detailed account that reveals her contribution to animation, puppetry, Weimar cinema, and modern filmmaking as well as how her silhouettes continue to snip their way into fans' imaginations.

This is the definitive biography of Emile Cohl (1857-1938), one of the most important pioneers of the art of the animated cartoon and an innovative contributor to popular graphic humor at a critical moment when it changed from traditional caricature to the modern comic strip. This profusely illustrated book provides not only a wealth of information on Cohl's life but also an analysis of his contribution to the development of the animation film in both France and the United States and an interpretation of how the new genre fit into the historical shift from a "primitive" to a "classical" cinema. "Beautiful in look and design, with stunning reproductions from films and newspapers, Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film offers a biography of a figure who virtually created the European art of animation...In its theory and history, the book is one of the most important contributions to [the field of animated film]. But [it] is central for film study per se, offering a fresh, exciting look at the complicated world of early cinema."--Dana Polan, Film Quarterly Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Anime: A Critical Introduction maps the genres that have thrived within Japanese animation culture, and shows how a wide range of commentators have made sense of anime through discussions of its generic landscape. From the battling robots that define the mecha genre through to Studio Ghibli's dominant genre-brand of plucky shojo (young girl) characters, this book charts the rise of anime as a globally significant category of animation. It further thinks through the differences between anime's local and global genres: from the less-considered niches like nichijo-kei (everyday style anime) through to the global popularity of science fiction anime, this book tackles the tensions between the markets and audiences for anime texts. Anime is consequently understood in this book as a complex cultural phenomenon: not simply a "genre," but as an always shifting and changing set of texts. Its inherent changeability makes anime an ideal contender for global dissemination, as it can be easily re-edited, translated and then newly understood as it moves through the world's animation markets. As such, Anime: A Critical Introduction explores anime through a range of debates that have emerged around its key film texts, through discussions of animation and violence, through debates about the cyborg and through the differences between local and global understandings of anime products. Anime: A Critical Introduction uses these debates to frame a different kind of understanding of anime, one rooted in contexts, rather than just texts. In this way, Anime: A Critical Introduction works to create a space in which we can rethink the meanings of anime as it travels around the world.

It is hard to discuss the current film industry without acknowledging the impact of comic book adaptations, especially considering the blockbuster success of recent superhero movies. Yet transmedial adaptations are part of an evolution that can be traced to the turn of the last century, when comic strips such as "Little Nemo in Slumberland" and "Felix the Cat" were animated for the silver screen. Representing diverse academic fields, including technoculture, film studies, theater, feminist studies, popular culture, and queer studies, Comics and Pop Culture presents more than a dozen perspectives on this rich history and the effects of such adaptations. Examining current debates and the questions raised by comics adaptations, including those around authorship, style, and textual fidelity, the contributors consider the topic from an array of approaches that take into account representations of sexuality, gender, and race as well as concepts of world-building and cultural appropriation in comics from Modesty Blaise to Black Panther. The result is a fascinating re-imagination of the texts that continue to push the boundaries of panel, frame, and popular culture.

Robotech is a sweeping science-fiction anime epic in which humans use a vast arsenal of transforming robotic mecha to defend the Earth against alien domination. The franchise has captivated fans for over 35 years, and is widely credited with popularizing anime around the world. Robotech Visual Archive: The Southern Cross is the ultimate collection of artwork gathered from Robotech's second era - "The Masters Saga". Included in this epic tome are mecha designs, character illustrations, pre-production concepts, key art, location artwork, a full episode guide, and more!

Celebrate the first decade of James Cameron's Avatar and the beginnings of an epic cinematic journey. Delve into the majestic world of Pandora and discover the incredible wealth of creativity that led this story to become the highest-grossing film of all time and the winner of three Academy Awards. The World of Avatar celebrates, explores, and explains the spectacular world of Pandora-its extraordinary geology, flora and fauna, and the customs and beliefs of its people, the mysterious Na'vi. The book uniquely covers key content from all aspects of the burgeoning franchise. It combines original movie stills and artwork with stunning imagery from Cirque du Soleil's Avatar-inspired show Toruk: The First Flight; and Disney World's Pandora-The World of Avatar. With a foreword by Avatar star Zoe Saldana (Neytiri), and an introduction by producer Jon Landau, The World of Avatar concludes with a "sneak peek" of a new Avatar era, fuelling excitement for the long-awaited release of Avatar 2 in December 2022. (c) 2022 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.

"Animation: Genre and Authorship" is an overview of the distinctive language of animation, its production processes, and the particular questions about who makes it, under what conditions and with what purpose. Arguably, animation provides the greatest opportunity for distinctive models of "auteurism" and revises generic categories. This is the first study to look specifically at these issues, and to challenge the prominence of live action movie-making as the first form of contemporary cinema and visual culture. Including extensive analysis of individual animators and their operation within studios such as Disney and Dreamworks, the book investigates the use of animation in genres from horror and science fiction to documentary and propaganda.

One of the most beloved stories of all time--"The Hockey Sweater"--is celebrated in this heartfelt recollection. Reflecting on the original short story and mortifying real-life moment that started it all, the account relates how the resulting film is as much about childhood emotions and the desire to fit in as it is about hockey, the clash of cultures, and a harkening to bygone times. Canada's tireless devotion to the film is illustrated, emphasizing how it is also loved by many more around the world. Delving into the artist's notebooks, photographs, and memories, this record recreates the movie's entire development, journeying back to the people and places that inspired its original imagery. The director's additional films and illustrations are also explored, chronicling a 40-year career and providing rich insights into the creative process.

"An excellent reference work on the subject." Library Journal (starred review) For fans, culture watchers, and perplexed outsiders, this expanded edition offers an engaging tour of the anime megaverse, from older artistic traditions to the works of modern creators like Hayao Miyazaki, Katsuhiro Otomo, Satoshi Kon, and CLAMP. Examined are all of anime's major themes, styles, and conventions, plus the familiar tropes of giant robots, samurai, furry beasts, high school heroines, and gay/girl/fanboy love. Concluding are fifteen essays on favorite anime, including Evangelion, Escaflowne, Sailor Moon, Patlabor, and Fullmetal Alchemist. Patrick Drazen is an anime historian who lives in Bloomington Normal, Illinois.

Comic Books Incorporated tells the story of the US comic book business, reframing the history of the medium through an industrial and transmedial lens. Comic books wielded their influence from the margins and in-between spaces of the entertainment business for half a century before moving to the center of mainstream film and television production. This extraordinary history begins at the medium's origin in the 1930s, when comics were a reviled, disorganized, and lowbrow mass medium, and surveys critical moments along the way-market crashes, corporate takeovers, upheavals in distribution, and financial transformations. Shawna Kidman concludes this revisionist history in the early 2000s, when Hollywood had fully incorporated comic book properties and strategies into its business models and transformed the medium into the heavily exploited, exceedingly corporate, and yet highly esteemed niche art form we know so well today.

The early twenty-first century has seen an explosion of animation. Cartoon characters are everywhere-in cinema, television, and video games and as brand logos. There are new technological objects that seem to have lives of their own-from Facebook algorithms that suggest products for us to buy to robots that respond to human facial expressions. The ubiquity of animation is not a trivial side-effect of the development of digital technologies and the globalization of media markets. Rather, it points to a paradigm shift. In the last century, performance became a key term in academic and popular discourse: The idea that we construct identities through our gestures and speech proved extremely useful for thinking about many aspects of social life. The present volume proposes an anthropological concept of animation as a contrast and complement to performance: The idea that we construct social others by projecting parts of ourselves out into the world might prove useful for thinking about such topics as climate crisis, corporate branding, and social media. Like performance, animation can serve as a platform for comparisons of different cultures and historical eras. Teri Silvio presents an anthropology of animation through a detailed ethnographic account of how characters, objects, and abstract concepts are invested with lives, personalities, and powers-and how people interact with them-in contemporary Taiwan. The practices analyzed include the worship of wooden statues of Buddhist and Daoist deities and the recent craze for cute vinyl versions of these deities, as well as a wildly popular video fantasy series performed by puppets. She reveals that animation is, like performance, a concept that works differently in different contexts, and that animation practices are deeply informed by local traditions of thinking about the relationships between body and soul, spiritual power and the material world. The case of Taiwan, where Chinese traditions merge with Japanese and American popular culture, uncovers alternatives to seeing animation as either an expression of animism or as "playing God." Looking at the contemporary world through the lens of animation will help us rethink relationships between global and local, identity and otherness, human and non-human.

Drawn from Life, a multidisciplinary anthology, introduces readers to a diverse range of filmmakers past and present who use the animated image as a documentary tool. In doing so, it explores a range of questions that preoccupy twenty-first-century film artists and audiences alike: Why use animation to document? How do such images reflect and influence our understanding and experience of'reality'? From early cinema to present-day scientific research, military uses, digital art and gaming, Drawn from Life casts new light on the capacity of the moving image to act as a record of the world around us.

For many, the middle ages depicted in Walt Disney movies have come to figure as the middle ages, forming the earliest visions of the medieval past for much of the contemporary Western (and increasingly Eastern) imagination. The essayists of The Disney Middle Ages explore Disney's mediation and re-creation of a fairy-tale and fantasy past, not to lament its exploitation of the middle ages for corporate ends, but to examine how and why these medieval visions prove so readily adaptable to themed entertainments many centuries after their creation. What results is a scrupulous and comprehensive examination of the intersection between the products of the Disney Corporation and popular culture's fascination with the middle ages.

From Pixar's upcoming film Incredibles 2, this making-of book is a dive back into the beloved world of the Incredibles. The Art of Incredibles 2 explores Pixar's highly anticipated sequel through colorful artwork, energetic character sketches, intriguing storyboards, and spellbinding colorscripts. Featuring gorgeous production art and interesting details from the production team about the making of the film, The Art of Incredibles 2 overflows with insights into the artistic process behind Pixar's engaging creative vision. Copyright (c)2018 Disney Enterprises, Inc. and Pixar. All rights reserved.

Successful storyboards and poignant characters have the power to make elusive thoughts and emotions tangible for audiences. Packed with illustrations that illuminate and a text that entertains and informs, Prepare to Board, 3rd edition presents the methods and techniques of animation master, Nancy Beiman, with a focus on pre-production, story development and character design. As one of the only storyboard titles on the market that explores the intersection of creative character design and storyboard development, the third edition is an invaluable resource for both beginner and intermediate artists. Key Features Adapt key techniques, tips and tricks of experienced character designers and storyboard artists with 30 years of experience to your film, television and animation projects. Save time and money with workflow solutions and avoid common mistakes and problems with troubleshooting tips. Implement creative solutions for your own projects with this invaluable resource for beginner and intermediate artists with examples of what a good storyboard and character design should look like and example of poorly designed storyboards. and tricks. Further your artistic skill development with an interactive, companion website which will includes video tutorials, examples of animatics and good and bad pitching techniques.

The Art of Moana is the latest title in our exceptional series showcasing artwork from the creation of Walt Disney Animations' latest releases. Three thousand years ago, the greatest sailors in the world ventured across the Pacific, discovering the many islands of Oceania. But then, for a millennium, their voyages stopped-and no one today knows why. From Walt Disney Animation Studios, Moana is a CG-animated adventure about a spirited teenager who sails out on a daring mission to prove herself a master wayfinder and fulfill her ancestors' unfinished quest. During her journey, Moana meets the once-mighty demi-god Maui and together they traverse the open ocean on an action-packed adventure, encountering enormous fiery creatures and impossible odds. The stunning artwork in this behind-the-scenes book includes character designs, storyboards, colourscripts and much more. Copyright (c)2016 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Ivor the Engine, Noggin the Nog, Pingwings, Pogles Wood, 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.

A phenomenological investigation into new media artwork and its relationship to history What does it mean to live in an era of emerging digital technologies? Are computers really as antihistorical as they often seem? Drawing on phenomenology's investigation of time and history, Sensations of History uses encounters with new media art to inject more life into these questions, making profound contributions to our understanding of the digital age in the larger scope of history. Sensations of History combines close textual analysis of experimental new media artworks with in-depth discussions of key texts from the philosophical tradition of phenomenology. Through this inquiry, author James J. Hodge argues for the immense significance of new media art in examining just what historical experience means in a digital age. His beautiful, aphoristic style demystifies complex theories and ideas, making perplexing issues feel both graspable and intimate. Highlighting underappreciated, vibrant work in the fields of digital art and video, Sensations of History explores artists like Paul Chan, Phil Solomon, John F. Simon, and Barbara Lattanzi. Hodge's provocative interpretations, which bring these artists into dialogue with well-known works, are perfect for scholars of cinema, media studies, art history, and literary studies. Ultimately, Sensations of History presents the compelling case that we are not witnessing the end of history-we are instead seeing its rejuvenation in a surprising variety of new media art.

This is the definitive biography of Emile Cohl (1857-1938), one of the most important pioneers of the art of the animated cartoon and an innovative contributor to popular graphic humor at a critical moment when it changed from traditional caricature to the modern comic strip. This profusely illustrated book provides not only a wealth of information on Cohl's life but also an analysis of his contribution to the development of the animation film in both France and the United States and an interpretation of how the new genre fit into the historical shift from a "primitive" to a "classical" cinema. "Beautiful in look and design, with stunning reproductions from films and newspapers, Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film offers a biography of a figure who virtually created the European art of animation.. In its theory and history, the book is one of the most important contributions to the field of animated film]. But it] is central for film study per se, offering a fresh, exciting look at the complicated world of early cinema."--Dana Polan, Film Quarterly

Originally published in 1992.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.