In Cartoon Vision Dan Bashara examines American animation alongside the modern design boom of the postwar era. Focusing especially on United Productions of America (UPA), a studio whose graphic, abstract style defined the postwar period, Bashara considers animation akin to a laboratory, exploring new models of vision and space alongside theorists and practitioners in other fields. The links-theoretical, historical, and aesthetic-between animators, architects, designers, artists, and filmmakers reveal a specific midcentury modernism that rigorously reimagined the senses. Cartoon Vision invokes the American Bauhaus legacy of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Gyoergy Kepes and advocates for animation's pivotal role in a utopian design project of retraining the public's vision to better apprehend a rapidly changing modern world.

French Animation History is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of animation, illuminating the exceptional place France holds within that history. * Selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2011 * The first book dedicated exclusively to this history * Explores how French animators have forged their own visual styles, narrative modes, and technological innovations to construct a distinct national style, while avoiding the cliches and conventions of Hollywood s commercial cartoons * Includes more than 80 color and black and white images from the most influential films, from early silent animation to the recent internationally renowned Persepolis * Essential reading for anyone interested in the study of French film

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.

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Scanning historical and current trends in animation through different perspectives including art history, film, media and cultural studies is a prominent facet of today's theoretical and historical approaches in this rapidly evolving field. Global Animation Theory offers detailed and diverse insights into the methodologies of contemporary animation studies, as well as the topics relevant for today's study of animation. The contact between practical and theoretical approaches to animation at Animafest Scanner, is closely connected to host of this event, the World Festival of Animated Film Animafest Zagreb. It has given way to academic writing that is very open to practical aspects of animation, with several contributors being established not only as animation scholars, but also as artists. This anthology presents, alongside an introduction by the editors and a preface by well known animation scholar Giannalberto Bendazzi, 15 selected essays from the first three Animafest Scanner editions. They explore various significant aspects of animation studies, some of them still unknown to the English speaking communities.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995), Pixar's first feature-length production and Hollywood's first completely computer-generated animated film, is an international cultural phenomenon. This collection brings together a diverse range of scholars and practitioners who together explore the themes, compositional techniques, cultural significance and industry legacy of this landmark in contemporary cinema. Topics range from industrial concerns, such as the film's groundbreaking use of computer generated imagery and the establishment of Pixar as a major player in the animation world, to examinations of its music, aesthetics, and the role of toys in both the film and its fandom. The Toy Story franchise as a whole is also considered, with chapters looking at its cross-generational appeal and the experience of growing up alongside the series. As the first substantial work on this landmark film, this book will serve as an authoritative introduction for scholars, students and fans alike.

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2019 Mickey Mouse, Betty Boop, Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, Felix the Cat, and other beloved cartoon characters have entertained media audiences for almost a century, outliving the human stars who were once their contemporaries in studio-era Hollywood. In Animated Personalities, David McGowan asserts that iconic American theatrical short cartoon characters should be legitimately regarded as stars, equal to their live-action counterparts, not only because they have enjoyed long careers, but also because their star personas have been created and marketed in ways also used for cinematic celebrities. Drawing on detailed archival research, McGowan analyzes how Hollywood studios constructed and manipulated the star personas of the animated characters they owned. He shows how cartoon actors frequently kept pace with their human counterparts, granting "interviews," allowing "candid" photographs, endorsing products, and generally behaving as actual actors did-for example, Donald Duck served his country during World War II, and Mickey Mouse was even embroiled in scandal. Challenging the notion that studios needed actors with physical bodies and real off-screen lives to create stars, McGowan demonstrates that media texts have successfully articulated an off-screen existence for animated characters. Following cartoon stars from silent movies to contemporary film and television, this groundbreaking book broadens the scope of star studies to include animation, concluding with provocative questions about the nature of stardom in an age of digitally enhanced filmmaking technologies.

Barely a century has passed since anime (Japanese animation) was first screened to a Western audience. Over time the number of anime genres and generic hybrids have significantly grown. These have been influenced and inspired by various historical and cultural phenomena, one of which -Japanese native religion and spirituality - this book argues is an important and dominant. There have always been anime lovers in the West, but today that number is growing exponentially. This is intriguing as many Japanese anime directors and studios initially created works that were not aimed at a Western audience at all. The mutual imbrication of the profane and sacred worlds in anime, along with the profound reciprocal relationship between 'Eastern' (Japanese) and 'Western' (chiefly American) culture in the development of the anime artistic form, form the twin narrative arcs of the book. One of the most significant contributions of this book is the analysis of the employment of spiritual and religious motifs by directors. The reception of this content by fans is also examined.The appeal of anime to aficionados is, broadly speaking, the appeal of the spiritual in a post-religious world, in which personal identity and meaning in life may be crafted from popular cultural texts which offer an immersive and enchanting experience that, for many in the modern world, is more thrilling and authentic than 'real life'. In the past, religions posited that after human existence on earth had ceased, the individual soul would be reincarnated again, or perhaps reside in heaven. In the early twenty-first century, spiritual seekers still desire a life beyond that of everyday reality, and just as passionately believe in the existence of other worlds and the afterlife. However, the other worlds are the fantasy landscapes and outer space settings of anime (and other popular cultural forms), and the afterlife the digital circuitry and electronic impulses of the Internet. These important new understandings of religion and the spiritual underpin anime's status as a major site of new religious and spiritual inspiration in the West, and indeed, the world.

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 Sammelband widmet sich dem spezifischen Verhaltnis von Animation und verschiedenen Transformationsprozessen. In den geplanten Aufsatzen werden (Ver-)Wandlungen von Formen und Koerpern, von Zeit und Raum, aber auch der Wandel von wissenschaftlichen Definitionen oder (inter-)kulturellen Bezugen untersucht. Ziel ist es, die Wandlungsfahigkeiten der Animation in den Blick zu nehmen und ihre Umgestaltungs- und Umsetzungs- und UEbersetzungsleistungen als Phanomene genauer zu beschreiben.

Two filmmakers who've beaten the system give the real dope on what it takes to get your movie made.
Do you have to go to film school to get your movies made? No, say two young entrepreneurs who survived the grind. Here they offer 140 strategies for making movies no matter what. Amateurs as well as seasoned veterans can pick up this entertaining and incredibly useful guide in any place--at any point of crisis--and find tactics that work. Whether it's raising money or cutting your budget; dealing with angry landlords or angry cops; or jump-starting the production or stalling it while you finish the script, these strategies are delivered with funny, illustrative anecdotes from the authors' experiences and from veteran filmmakers eager to share their stories. Irreverent, invaluable, and a lot cheaper than a year's tuition, this friendly guide is the smartest investment any future filmmaker could make.
Strategies from the book include: Love your friends for criticizing your work--especially at the script stage; Shyness won't get you the donuts; Duct tape miracles; Don't fall in love with cast or crew (but if you do...).

"Through the worldview perspective, this book comes to grips with the incongruous moralities in Disney. It enables both parents and educators to gain a critical understanding of Disney content without being judgmental or promotional for the wrong reasons.... Mouse Morality is a pleasure to read and discuss in itself, but shows the pathway to media criticism of the first order."--from the Foreword

Kids around the world love Disney animated films, and many of their parents trust the Disney corporation to provide wholesome, moral entertainment for their children. Yet frequent protests and even boycotts of Disney products and practices reveal a widespread unease with the sometimes mixed and inconsistent moral values espoused in Disney films as the company attempts to appeal to the largest possible audience.

In this book, Annalee R. Ward uses a variety of analytical tools based in rhetorical criticism to examine the moral messages taught in five recent Disney animated films--The Lion King, Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, and Mulan. Taking the films on their own terms, she uncovers the many mixed messages they purvey: for example, females can be leaders--but male leadership ought to be the norm; stereotyping is wrong--but black means evil; historical truth is valued--but only tell what one can sell, etc. Adding these messages together, Ward raises important questions about the moral ambiguity of Disney's overall worldview and demonstrates the need for parents to be discerning in letting their children learn moral values and life lessons from Disney films.

At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In this beautifully written and deeply researched study, Hannah Frank provides an original way to understand American animated cartoons from the Golden Age of animation (1920-1960). In the pre-digital age of the twentieth century, the making of cartoons was mechanized and standardized: thousands of drawings were inked and painted onto individual transparent celluloid sheets (called "cels") and then photographed in succession, a labor-intensive process that was divided across scores of artists and technicians. In order to see the art, labor, and technology of cel animation, Frank slows cartoons down to look frame by frame, finding hitherto unseen aspects of the animated image. What emerges is both a methodology and a highly original account of an art formed on the assembly line.

The Art of Czech Animation is the first comprehensive English language account of Czech animation from the 1920s to the present, covering both 2D animation forms and CGI, with a focus upon the stop-motion films of Jiri Trnka, Hermina Tyrlova, Jan Svankmajer and Jiri Barta. Stop-motion is a highly embodied form of animation and The Art of Czech Animation develops a new materialist approach to studying these films. Instead of imposing top-down Film Theory onto its case studies, the book's analysis is built up from close readings of the films themselves, with particular attention given to their non-human objects. In a time of environmental crisis, the unique way Czech animated films use allegory to de-centre the human world and give a voice to non-human aspects of the natural world points us towards a means by which culture can increase ecological awareness in viewers. Such a refutation of a human-centred view of the world was contrary to communist orthodoxy and it remains so under late-stage consumer-capitalism. As such, these films do not only offer beautiful examples of allegory, but stand as models of political dissent. The Art of Czech Animation is a unique endeavour of film philosophy to provide a materialist appraisal of a heretofore neglected strand of Central-Eastern European cinema.

The internationally acclaimed films Persepolis and Waltz with Bashir only hinted at the vibrant animation culture that exists within the Middle East and North Africa. In spite of censorship, oppression and war, animation studios have thrived in recent years - in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Syria and Turkey - giving rise to a whole new generation of entrepreneurs and artists. The success of animation in the Middle East is in part a product of a changing cultural climate, which is increasingly calling for art that reflects politics. Equally, the professionalization and popularization of film festivals and the emergence of animation studios and private initiatives are the results of a growing consumer culture, in which family-friendly entertainment is big business. Animation in the Middle East uncovers the history and politics that have defined the practice and study of animation in the Middle East, and explores the innovative visions of contemporary animators in the region.

The Bristol-based animation company Aardman is best known for its most famous creations Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep. But despite the quintessentially British aesthetic and tone of its movies, this very British studio continues to enjoy international box office success with movies such as Shaun the Sheep Movie, Flushed Away and Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Aardman has always been closely linked with one of its key animators, Nick Park, and its stop motion, Plasticine-modelled family films, but it has more recently begun to experiment with modern digital filmmaking effects that either emulate 'Claymation' methods or form a hybrid animation style. This unique volume brings together leading film and animation scholars with children's media/animation professionals to explore the production practices behind Aardman's creativity, its history from its early shorts to contemporary hits, how its films fit within traditions of British animation, social realism and fantasy cinema, the key personalities who have formed its ethos, its representations of 'British-ness' on screen and the implications of traditional animation methods in a digital era.

Besides Walt Disney, no one seemed more key to the development of animation at the Disney Studios than Ward Kimball (1914-2002). Kimball was Disney's friend and confidant. In this engaging, cradle-to-grave biography, award-winning author Todd James Pierce explores the life of Ward Kimball, a lead Disney animator who worked on characters such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Jiminy Cricket, the Cheshire Cat, and the Mad Hatter. Through unpublished excerpts from Kimball's personal writing, material from unpublished interviews, and new information based on interviews conducted by the author, Pierce defines the life of perhaps the most influential animator of the twentieth century. As well as contributing to classics such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio, from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, Kimball established a highly graphic, idiosyncratic approach to animation alongside the studio's more recognizable storybook realism. In effect, Ward Kimball became the only animator to run his own in-studio production team largely outside of Walt Disney's direction. In the 1950s and 1960s, he emerged as a director and producer of his own animation, while remaining inside Disney's studio. Through Kimball, the studio developed a series of nonfiction animation programs in the 1950s that members of Congress pointed to as paving the way for NASA. The studio also allowed Kimball's work to abandon some ties to conventional animation, looking instead to high art and graphic design as a means of creating new animated forms, which resulted in films that received multiple Academy Award nominations and two awards. Throughout his life, Kimball was a maverick animator, an artist who helped define the field of American animation, and a visionary who sought to expand the influence of animated films.

A major work destined to change how scholars and students look at television and animation With the release of author Thomas Lamarre's field-defining study The Anime Machine, critics established Lamarre as a leading voice in the field of Japanese animation. He now returns with The Anime Ecology, broadening his insights to give a complete account of anime's relationship to television while placing it within important historical and global frameworks. Lamarre takes advantage of the overlaps between television, anime, and new media-from console games and video to iOS games and streaming-to show how animation helps us think through television in the contemporary moment. He offers remarkable close readings of individual anime while demonstrating how infrastructures and platforms have transformed anime into emergent media (such as social media and transmedia) and launched it worldwide. Thoughtful, thorough illustrations plus exhaustive research and an impressive scope make The Anime Ecology at once an essential reference book, a valuable resource for scholars, and a foundational textbook for students.

Since Toy Story, its first feature in 1995, Pixar Animation Studios has produced a string of commercial and critical successes including Monsters, Inc.; WALL-E; Finding Nemo; The Incredibles; Cars; and Up. In nearly all of these films, male characters are prominently featured, usually as protagonists. Despite obvious surface differences, these figures often follow similar narratives toward domestic fulfillment and civic engagement. However, these characters are also hypermasculine types whose paths lead to postmodern social roles more revelatory of the current "crisis" that sociologists and others have noted in boy culture. In Pixar's Boy Stories: Masculinity in a Postmodern Age, Shannon R. Wooden and Ken Gillam examine how boys become men and how men measure up in films produced by the animation giant. Offering counterintuitive readings of boy culture, this book describes how the films quietly but forcefully reiterate traditional masculine norms in terms of what they praise and what they condemn. Whether toys or ants, monsters or cars, Pixar's males succeed or fail according to the "boy code," the relentlessly policed gender standards rampant in American boyhood. Structured thematically around major issues in contemporary boy culture, the book discusses conformity, hypermasculinity, social hierarchies, disability, bullying, and an implicit critique of postmodern parenting. Unprecedented in its focus on Pixar and boys in its films, this book offers a valuable perspective to current conversations about gender and cinema. Providing a critical discourse about masculine roles in animated features, Pixar's Boy Stories will be of interest to scholars of film, media, and gender studies and to parents.

The films from Pixar Animation Studios belong to the most popular family films today. From Monsters Inc to Toy Story and Wall-E, the animated characters take on human qualities that demand more than just cultural analysis. What animates the human subject according to Pixar? What are the ideological implications? Pixar with Lacan has the double aim of analyzing the Pixar films and exemplifying important psychoanalytic concepts (the voice, the gaze, partial object, the Other, the object a, the primal father, the name-of-the-father, symbolic castration, the imaginary/ the real/ the symbolic, desire and drive, the four discourses, masculine/feminine), examining the ideological implications of the images of human existence given in the films.

Celebrated as Pixar's "Chief Creative Officer," John Lasseter is a revolutionary figure in animation history and one of today's most important filmmakers. Lasseter films from Luxo Jr. to Toy Story and Cars 2 highlighted his gift for creating emotionally engaging characters. At the same time, they helped launch computer animation as a viable commercial medium and serve as blueprints for the genre's still-expanding commercial and artistic development. Richard Neupert explores Lasseter's signature aesthetic and storytelling strategies and details how he became the architect of Pixar's studio style. Neupert contends that Lasseter's accomplishments emerged from a unique blend of technical skill and artistic vision, as well as a passion for working with collaborators. In addition, Neupert traces the director's career arc from the time Lasseter joined Pixar in 1984. As Neupert shows, Lasseter's ability to keep a foot in both animation and CGI allowed him to thrive in an unconventional corporate culture that valued creative interaction between colleagues. The ideas that emerged built an animation studio that updated and refined classical Hollywood storytelling practices--and changed commercial animation forever.