Animation Studios Research Articles

Recreando el fotorrealismo: la consultoría visual del director de fotografía Roger Deakins en Wall-E

<p>El dominio creciente de las técnicas de animación 3D a comienzos de la década de 2000 ha provocado un interesante cambio dentro del canon artístico de los largometrajes comerciales de animación estadounidenses. Aunque la animación 2D hollywoodiense siempre ha coqueteado con el estilo fotorrealista, esta tendencia visual se ha estandarizado en la producción de animación gracias a las posibilidades del paradigma digital. El artículo considera el estreno de Wall•E (Andrew Stanton, 2008), una de las obras visualmente más impactantes en la filmografía Disney/Pixar, como un momento crucial dentro de este proceso estético, ya que marca la primera colaboración entre el director de fotografía Roger Deakins y un estudio de animación. El artículo analiza los primeros diez minutos del largometraje para establecer si la labor de asesoría visual de Deakins pueden considerarse un hito que abrió nuevos caminos a la dirección de fotografía digital de imagen real. </p>

HCA-2018 Winner Igor Oleynikov: Never Stop Asking Questions

HCA-2018 Winner Igor OleynikovNever Stop Asking Questions Ekaterina Eskina (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Igor Oleynikov is one of the most appreciated contemporary Russian illustrators. He has illustrated so many and such various books that it could be enough for several persons' professional careers. The worlds that he creates spellbind both children and grown-ups. His artistic vision is unique, his space is vast, and his characters are unusual. His illustrations are very dynamic—sometimes they look like cinema shots. Oleynikov's interpretation of classical and traditional pieces of literature is always surprising; it is never what you expect. Any new edition with his art is an important event for connoisseurs of illustrated books. The books illustrated by Igor Oleynikov vary in genres: from fairy-tales and myths to science fiction, from fantasy to the WWII memories, from the Bible to Soviet avant-garde poetry. Like a pioneer of the Age of Discovery, he is never afraid of exploring the new illustration grounds, eager to try his hand at difficult texts' interpretation and to challenge the most complicated topics. He admits to preferring the stories where the writer does not go too deeply into describing all the daily life details—so that he, the illustrator, is given space for his own imagination. For the same reason, he prefers illustrating writers from the past to contemporary ones, so no one would protest against the original plot's interpretation. In total, Igor Oleynikov has more than eighty books, with his illustrations published by various publishing houses in Russia and abroad—which makes him one of the most highly demanded contemporary Russian illustrators. As many prolific artists, Oleynikov has a versatile background. Not having any artistic degree, he spent [End Page 10] his early career years in Soyuzmultfilm, the main animation studios in Russia, and then nearly ten years in the Russian branch of BBC's Christmas Films Studio. At first, he was mostly a backgrounds artist, and then he gradually reached the position of an art director. The years in animation without a doubt have brought to his style the dynamic approach to narrative, the dramatic viewpoints, and a brilliant understanding of the right pace for each story he had to illustrate. Oleynikov's personages are incredibly vivid—also thanks to his animation background. He got used to paying particular attention to movement, unusual angles, expressive poses, and mimics. He is not interested in drawing an elegant portrait of a still standing person; he takes his audience to a film set, lets the readers take a sneak peak of the shooting process and see with their own eyes what miracle happens when "…and action!" is still tinkling in their ears. Igor Oleynikov's first book, I've Been in the Computer City, was published in 1984, but he fully dedicated himself to illustration from the second half of the 1990s, seeking more artistic freedom and independence in decision-making. In the early 1990s, Oleynikov, among many talented Russian artists, collaborated with the innovative Tramway magazine, the ultimate perestroika-spirited periodical for the kids of the new generation. Its ironic texts were full of charismatic, funny, unforgettable personages—a general who turned into an ant, a dad and a son who learned to fly but got quickly bored, and many others. The magazine format itself required developing the character with just one or two pictures, and this is how Oleynikov became a "sprinter" illustrator—able to describe his heroes in a particularly short "distance." The characters created at the beginning of his career as an illustrator are incredibly captivating—exactly the image one would expect of a fairy-tale animal, a beloved teddy-bear, or a mischievous boy next door—just as your childhood best friend was. After years of experiments with diverse illustration media, Oleynikov obtained this effect by his particular artistic techniques: first the oil paint and then gouache paint combined with the dry brush, worn rags, or old brooms. Such a technique permitted the artist to create numerous vivid, dynamic images in short periods of time and to be one of the most productive contemporary Russian illustrators. This sketchy style never really left him: even...

A Study on Animation Style of Full 3d Animated Feature Film for Full Animation and Limited

콘텐츠의 부가가치를 높이기 위해 고품질의 애니메이션을 제작하는 것은 애니메이션 제작자에게 매우 중요한 사업 목적이다. 극장용 full 3D animation 제작을 하는데 있어 자연스럽고 설득력 있는 고품질의 애니메이션을 만들기 위해 가장 보편적으로 알려진 방법은 Full animation 제작 방식이며, 그런 제작방식으로부터 표현되어져 나타난 주도적인 애니메이션 스타일은 Realistic animation과 Cartoon animation스타일이다. 극장용 full 3D애니메이션에서 Limited animation 스타일은 Sony Pictures Imageworks 에서 제작한 Cloudy by a Chance with Meatballs 에서 처음으로 시도 되어졌고 이후 SPI가 제작하는 극장용 애니메이션을 통해 지속적으로 stylized animation 스타일을 선보이며 Realistic animation과 Cartoon animation 스타일 이외의 주류적 스타일로서 흐름을 만들어 나가고 있다. 이 연구는 극장용 Full 3D 애니메이션 산업을 리드하고 있는 대표적인 북미지역 애니메이션 제작사의 대중적으로 흥행했던 작품들을 중심으로 full animation 제작방식으로부터 표현된 다양한 애니메이션스타일의 흐름이 어떤 배경으로 형성되고 변화 해왔는지 고찰할 것이고, 그런 고찰을 바탕으로 애니메이션스타일별로 적용될 수 있는 적절한 표준적인 상황들을 제언하여 다양한 관객들의 요구와 다변화 하는 시장 상황 속에서 차별화된 경쟁력을 가지기 위해 고심하는 애니메이션 제작자들에게 적절한 기준을 제언 한다.Producing high-quality animation to enhance the value added of content is a very important business goal for animation producers. In order to make successful hi-quality animation with natural feeling of movements and believable acting, animation producers need to work with Full animation process. There are three types of animation style based on Full animation process, which is Realistic and cartoon and Limited. Starting with “Cloudy by a Chance with meatball”, Limited style partially appeared in full 3D feature animated film and SPI continually released a number of feature animation with stylized animation. The aim of this paper is to present the appropriate standards through the analysis of trends in production process and analyses in the existing animation styles to help newly started animation studio to eager to gain competitive of their content from the high-quality animation market.

The Art of Walt Disney Animation Studios: Movement by Nature

Created in collaboration with the Walt Disney Animation Research Library, the “The Art of Walt Disney Animation Studios: Movement by Nature” exhibition held at the Paris Musee Art Ludique holds special appeal for students of popular culture. Some of that interest will, of course, stem from the 350 pieces on display, and some from the process by which the Disney corporation further “artifies” popular media, providing the studio’s products with an additional layer of cultural legitimacy and al...

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

There seems to be little argument that creativity is crucial to the success of any organization. Interestingly, despite years of academic research on the subject, there appears to be also little agreement as to what creativity really is or what the ideal process should be to develop creativity in organizations. Written based on Pixar’s experience, Creativity, Inc. Overcoming the Unseen Forces Stand in the Way of True Inspiration offers not only a concrete example of creativity but also provides an insight into what constitutes creativity and a creative organization. In this book, author Ed Catmull and co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios generously shares and reveals his personal experience not only in dealing with the creative process but also in building and sustaining one of the most successful organization in the world of animation.

Lev Kuleshov on Animation: Montaging the Image

The Soviet film director Lev Kuleshov has not been historically associated with animation, and yet his legacy includes: an article on animation published in the Soviet central specialized newspaper Kino Gazeta; a film, a substantial part of which is animated; as well as a text of four lectures preserved in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI). In the lectures that he delivered to animators at the Soviet central animation studio Soiuzmul’tfil’m, he repurposes his theories of montage and acting for the needs of the medium of animation. Analyzing these materials, with the primary focus on the lectures, this article introduces Kuleshov’s contribution to animation theory and production, and suggests that Kuleshov’s legacy not only sheds light on the historically specific situation in animation production characteristic for the Soviet Union in the 1930s, but also facilitates a deeper understanding of the animated image as a phenomenon.

Katz, Maya Balakirsky Drawing The Iron Curtain: Jews and the Golden Age of Soviet Animation (review)

SEER, 95, 3, JULY 2017 548 is the description of Diagilev’s failed attempt to refocus the crazed Nizhinskii’s wandering mind by fetching him from the asylum to which he was confined to watch the performance of a ballet in which he had once starred? The Impresario’s faults are not ignored: his possessiveness, his dictatorial quirks and bullying tactics, his promiscuous, not to say predatory, homosexuality. As to the latter, any publication in Russia today must, by law, tread carefully round the question: so it is not surprising that we learn little of how this affected the man’s emotional and spiritual life; the subject is not evaded but neither is it examined. The resultant portrait is the familiar one of a dominant, Svengali figure: a moulder of men devoted to pioneering ever new forms of the Gesamtkunstwerk: from the sharply satirical to the nostalgic neo-romantic to the steamily primitive; from elegant neo-classicism to the grotesque, the constructivist, the futurist, culminating in the limpid simplicity of the parable of ‘The Prodigal Son’. Diagilev comes across as sophisticated yet superstitious, cosmopolitan yet homesick, dictatorial yet capable of suggesting to his artists some subtle insight able to supply the key to an entire performance. When he died, in Venice, leaving only a few thousand francs in his bank account, the Ballets Russes simply dissolved into thin air, an ephemeral rainbow bubble, the dream of a country lad from the extreme periphery of Europe — yet, for many, a dream come true. In his final chapter, Brezgin shows the surge of publications, memorial events and exhibitions in Europe and America which began to build immediately after Diagilev’s death, the initial deafening silence in the Soviet Union and the upsurge of interest in Russia, beginning from the 1980s, which, as this rich book bears witness, continues to this day. Department of Modern Languages Avril Pyman University of Durham Katz, Maya Balakirsky. Drawing The Iron Curtain: Jews and the Golden Age of Soviet Animation. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, and London, 2016. xi + 289 pp. Notes. Glossary. Filmography. Index. $34.95. Drawing the Iron Curtain is an important contribution to Jewish studies, animation studies and Russian studies. Maya Balakirsky Katz’s book investigates the history of one of the most prominent animation studios in Eastern Europe, Soiuzmul´tfil´m, and the significant number of Jewish artists that the studio employed. Katz argues that Soviet animation at Soiuzmul´tfil´m served as fertile ground to uncover ways in which Jewish culture influenced a popular form of Soviet culture, cartoons. Katz’s work revises the idea that Soviet animation is a Russian-centric product. While Jewish scholars have REVIEWS 549 documented the demise of Jewish culture during the time of the Soviet Union, Katz’s book aims at discovering an official avenue for its expression. While Soiuzmul´tfil´m operated as an official organ of the Soviet state, Jewish artists were allowed and even encouraged to work in animation. These artists not only legitimized animation but the animation field provided them with a space to showcase Jewish culture in an official manner. Many Jewish animators only talked about their Jewishness after retirement or after the collapse of Soiuzmul´tfil´m in the 1990s. Katz argues that Jewish animators during their careers adopted invisibility, some even stressing their Russianness, but that these animators would reject the terms invisibility or silence to describe their work. Jewish animators during the Soviet Union often modelled their characters after themselves and other Jewish animators. Katz concludes that on the screen, Jewishness was not invisible but it was not always identifiable to the average viewer. Soiuzmul´tfil´m became a meeting ground for both official and independent artistic communities, including a large Jewish community. While Katz sets out to tell the story of Jewish involvement in animation, she also reconstructs the confusing first years of animation in the Soviet Union with clarity. She documents the beginnings of Soviet animation by describing the work of independent artists, studios, clubs and the contributions that Jewish animators made in the years before Soiuzmul´tfil´m. From the early years Katz discusses the work of artists like Zinaida and Valentina Brumberg, who...

Putting Words in Their Mouths: Russian Byliny as Discursive Space

This article follows the Melnitsa Animation Studio into the imagined medieval space of their bogatyr films. With particular focus on Melnitsa’s use of the Il’ia Muromets corpus in Илья Муромец и Соловей Разбойник [Il’ia and the Robber], we consider the complex set of conflicts among characters and ideas that reflect concepts of identity and social issues in contemporary Russia.

Crowdfunding Japanese Commercial Animation: Collective Financing Experiences in Anime

ABSTRACTThe current article offers an exploration of the incipient development of crowdfunding anime projects for short and medium-length films. Japanese commercial animation is characterized by the support of a strong production industry that primarily targets local audiences through cross-media projects, developed in synergy with other cultural sectors (such as the publishing industry, record labels, or video game developers). The growing acceptance of anime in markets around the world has strengthened it as one of the most well-known forms of Japanese popular culture and has also resulted in changes to some of the dominant dynamics of its production to adapt to technological innovations. One of these changes has been the rise of crowdfunding, an increasingly popular form of financing involving the patronage of fans from all corners of the world who want to participate in these audiovisual projects. This article analyses the response to some of the more popular initiatives from a historiographical perspective on the production and reception of commercial animation and the main theories related to the relationship between the hyperactive nature of Japanese fandom and collective financing. The conclusions include the confirmation of the increasing receptiveness to anime crowdfunding among potential sponsors—especially among fans based outside Japan on platforms with a global reach, such as Kickstarter—and a consideration of the transformative potential of this phenomenon for a precarious industry and its usefulness as a tool for exploring the viability of the production and distribution of projects by animation studios.

El estudio de dibujos animados CIFESA y las películas de Rigalt-Reyes

<p>La edad de oro de la animación española (1939-1955) —en la que se realizaron cerca de un centenar de cortometrajes y cinco largometrajes— siempre ha resultado interesante por el difícil contexto de posguerra en el que se desarrolló. Pero aún resulta más sugestiva si nos centramos en sus inicios, muchas de las veces autodidactas, y nos alejamos del epicentro animado que era Barcelona. Esta es la historia de los primeros animadores valencianos de los que hay constancia, el prácticamente desconocido equipo formado por Carlos Rigalt y José Mª Reyes.<br />Pero además, en el presente artículo al heroísmo pionero se le suma lo enigmático. Pues del trabajo de la misteriosa pareja, auspiciado por el Estudio de Dibujos Animados CIFESA en la que sería su efímera incursión en la producción propia animada de la major española por definición, no queda ni rastro. Obras, autores e infraestructura que no trascendieron y a los que el tiempo sepultó bajo un manto de olvido, pero que quizá merezcan un recuerdo por su condición de adelantados en una técnica, en un país y en un tiempo difíciles.<br />Reparar su memoria es el objeto de este trabajo que se inicia en Valencia, y que tras pasar por Madrid y Barcelona terminará sorprendentemente en Guatemala, tras los pasos de un artista multidisciplinar y de talento que fue elemento principal de la historia a la vez que cómplice de su olvido.</p>

Gestão de pessoas na indústria criativa: o caso dos estúdios de animação brasileiros

Resumo Esta pesquisa visa entender a gestão de pessoas na indústria criativa a partir do estudo de um de seus segmentos, os estúdios de animação. Partindo da conceituação de Chaston (2008) de indústria criativa como o encontro entre negócio e cultura, observou-se o dilema entre a realização artística e os objetivos comerciais presente também nesse segmento da indústria. No estudo, pudemos aprofundar o entendimento sobre como esse dilema se reflete na operação da gestão de pessoas nesses estúdios brasileiros. Para entender essa questão foi conduzida uma pesquisa qualitativa através de estudos de casos em quatro produtoras nacionais nos quais foram entrevistados um funcionário e um sócio de cada empresa. Os dados encontrados apontam que ainda é incipiente a gestão de pessoas nesses ambientes, embora esteja presente a noção de que esses são os recursos principais que movem essas empresas. Foi observado ainda que a retenção dos colaboradores ocorre muito mais pela sua identificação com a atividade em si do que por outras retribuições, como salário ou garantias trabalhihstas.

Disney’s Metaphorical Exploration of Racism and Stereotypes: A Review ofZootopiaZootopiadirected by Byron Howard, Rich Moore, and Jared Bush. Produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios, 2016. 108 minutes.

Disney’s Metaphorical Exploration of Racism and Stereotypes: A Review of<i>Zootopia</i><i>Zootopia</i>directed by Byron Howard, Rich Moore, and Jared Bush. Produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios, 2016. 108 minutes.

Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation

Nicholas Sammond's study provides a detailed, thoughtful, exhaustively researched examination of the process by which the early animation studios cast about for technical and semiotic models to inform their new art form and drew upon the complex and conflicted vocabulary of blackface minstrelsy to do so. Though Birth of an Industry's subtitle specifies blackface, the book's wider topic is the processes by which early animation studios moved from a “craft”-based to a production line–based approach. Sammond's best material provides sophisticated semiotic readings of the tension between the public image of the “artistic” animator; the factory-style animation house where production was systematized and depersonalized; and the resistance that he finds in neo-blackface push back by animators' characters. When Goofy the dog (Walt Disney), Gertie the Dinosaur (Winsor McCay), and Felix the Cat (Otto Messmer) defy expectations, even as the creator draws the character on the animated page, Sammond sees a pantomime of resistance in which the subaltern (the animation worker, expressed through the minstrel “mask” of the animated character) pushes back against the pressure for conformity, consistency, and efficiency.

New approach to camerawork skills education for 3D/S3D computer graphics animation

Many vocational schools and universities offer lectures on non-stereoscopic 3D computer graphics (3DCG) animation production, as well as practical 3DCG software operation, modeling, and animation production. However, relatively few of these educational institutions provide lectures on stereoscopic 3D (S3D). To address this gap, we developed two 15-week syllabuses with educational materials, which focused on both knowledge-based and skills-based education about 3DCG animation and S3D computer graphics (S3DCG) animation production, considering the potential employment of students in animation studios. Our investigation confirmed that the knowledge and skills of the subjects improved in this study, so we presented a report on the effectiveness of the educational materials for S3DCG animation production education at the Education Symposium of SIGGRAPH Asia 2015.By developing these educational materials, we reaffirmed the importance of camerawork skills education, which may be regarded as the cornerstone of 3DCG animation and S3DCG animation production. However, camerawork skills education in 3DCG animation classes remains limited in vocational schools and universities at present. We hypothesized that one of the reasons for the paucity of camerawork skills education is the lack of suitable educational materials for practical classes in the use of 3DCG software. Indeed, educational materials that allow teachers to begin camerawork skills education for 3DCG and S3DCG animation production without preparation are greatly lacking. Furthermore, modeling and character animation are regarded as essential before camerawork practice. Camerawork practice can be started immediately if sufficient educational materials are provided. The educational materials that we developed are suitable for S3DCG but also for 3DCG camerawork practice.In this study, we present the camerawork skills education and evaluation methods involved in the educational materials developed for the S3D lectures and for camerawork practical classes in S3DCG animation. We then discuss the experimental classes in which we used the educational materials and we report the results of S3D knowledge tests and camerawork practical tests, which were conducted in order to measure the learning/education outcomes for the participating subjects, as well as the results of a survey that focused on their subjective experiences. The experimental results clearly demonstrated improvements in both the knowledge and skills of subjects, thereby confirming the effectiveness of the camerawork educational materials. We suggest that if students with knowledge of S3D and 3DCG animation are well-practiced in the use of these educational materials, their skills in S3DCG camerawork would improve markedly.

Pixarticulation

Although academic study of animation has steadily increased over the course of the last decade, as Rebecca Coyle observes, 'animation literature tends to concentrate on visual aesthetics and style while marginalizing the form's reliance on dialogue and/or sound effects and sound design' (2010, p.8). By the same token, inasmuch as animation studies specifically, and media studies more generally, has long been dominated by image-based analyses, the study of film sound has generally privileged examinations of film music. In his foundational book, The Voice in Cinema, Michel Chion succinctly points out the irony of this critical bias, asking: 'by what incomprehensible thoughtlessness can we, in considering what is after all called the talking picture, forget the voice?' (1999, p.1). While the recent 'sonic turn' in media studies has yielded a wide, interdisciplinary range of valuable new sound studies research, the voice and vocal performance in film remain under-examined areas, particularly in comparison to the broad corpus of research on film music.Moreover, much of the extant work on the voice in cinema, including Chion's, approaches the subject from a psychoanalytic perspective (see also Doane, 1980; Dolar, 2006; Silverman, 1988; Sjogren, 2006). These studies are, no doubt, invaluable contributions to the fields of film and sound studies for, as Mladen Dolar argues, the voice is 'the intimate kernel of subjectivity' (2006, p.14). However, understanding how the voice functions not only as a formal property of the filmic text, but also within a broader system of texts surrounding a film, is equally important to parsing the relationship between voice and image in cinema. This study thus aims not only to address these critical lacunae in animation studies and sounds studies, but also to contribute to the growing body of sonically oriented media industries research, which has yielded several important studies of the music industry, film music, and recording technologies, but has been much less attentive to the voice (for example, see Forman, 2012; Goodman, 2010; Spring, 2013; Wikstrom, 2010; Wurtzler, 2008).Pixar Animation provides a germane case study for such an industry analysis of vocal performance in animation for two key reasons. First, from an historical perspective, in the mid-1990s Pixar became one of the first major contemporary animation studios to routinely cast star vocal performers in all of its feature films - a practice no doubt informed by its parent company, Disney, turning to star vocal casting in the early '90s (for films such as Beauty and the Beast [Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, 1991], Aladdin [Ron Clements and John Musker, 1992], and The Lion King [Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, 1994]). This voice casting strategy, as I argue, has not only significantly contributed to Pixar's sustained critical and commercial success but has since been widely adopted by most major animation studios such as DreamWorks SKG, Blue Sky Studios, and Illumination Entertainment. Pixar has thus played a significant role in reconfiguring the (increasingly important) role that vocal casting and vocal performance play in the production of animated features. Second, from an industry perspective, as a division of the largest, most synergised multinational media conglomerate, Pixar provides rich terrain for mapping how animated voices are constructed, marketed, and monetised within and across its range of media products. Pixar's vocal performances not only perform crucial narrative functions, but also figure centrally in both the studio's promotional paratexts and the synergistic, multimedia network of consumer products spawned by its films. A close analysis of Pixar's vocal performances allows us to parse both the narrative dimensions of the voice in animation as well as the broader meaning-making functions the voice serves in Pixar's range of texts and paratexts.This article's central objective is thus to consider, from a media industries perspective, the functions that the voice - and, particularly, star vocal performance - performs in constructing Pixar's texts and paratexts, and the ways in which it is operationalised in the studio's marketing practices. …

Collectivity in (Stop-)Motion: Lift Animation, Lantern Software, and the Making of Community

This article positions the work of the feminist animation studio Lift Animation as a corrective to the industrialized processes and gendered hierarchies of traditional commercial animation studios. It examines Lift's unique place in the world of contemporary animation as a studio concerned especially with questions of alterity, subjecthood, and community formation in its work. A self-described “socially conscious animation studio,” Lift is structured roughly along the lines of an artistic collective in which many animators freely contribute their skills and time in support of stop-motion animated films that explicitly consider questions of disability, gender, and political action. This article considers in particular the short films The Toll Collector (US, 2003), made by Lift founder Rachel Johnson, and Henrietta Bulkowski, currently in production at Lift. It argues that both films seek to establish empathy with characters ostracized from the boundaries of community by their physical disabilities and draws a connection between these efforts and the studio's recent animated public service announcement for Lantern Software, a program designed to circumvent government Internet censorship efforts around the world through the formation of peer-sharing networks. Each of these animated works speaks in turn to the power of community and collective action grounded in a willed identification with the distant other.

Re-imagining Horror in Children's Animated Film

Re-imagining Horror in Children's Animated Film

Traces of the World: Cel Animation and Photography

The animated cartoon has traditionally been excluded from photographic theories of cinema on the grounds that the animation camera is only incidental to the cartoon’s production, an assumption this article challenges. Taking as its basic premise that all works of celluloid animation were photographic in origin, this article demonstrates the ways in which the physical reality of our world, and particularly the world of the animation studio, leaves its mark on the cartoon image. Through the frame-by-frame analysis of cartoons by Warner Bros and other major American studios of the mid-20th century, the author catalogues the various visual imperfections that testify to cel animation’s photographic origins. These include improperly placed cels, reflections of the camera apparatus, dust and dirt particles, and even the fingerprints left by anonymous labourers. Although these mistakes may only appear on the screen for a fraction of a second, each has been preserved for posterity as a still photograph. In effect, an animated cartoon is a photographic record of its own production. A model for this method is the work of the artist Andrew Norman Wilson, whose ScanOps (2012) consists of a series of photographs culled from Google Books. Ultimately, this method of analysis serves as an inquiry into both the politics and the aesthetics of the labour process.

The Animated Esperanto: The Globalist Vision in the Films of Sándor Reisenbüchler

This article examines the work of the Hungarian collage animator Sándor Reisenbüchler, whose career lasted from the mid-1960s until his death in 2004. It poses theoretical questions concerning the concept of an animation Esperanto, pivoting off Béla Balázs’s early theories of an international film language. Through close studies of two of his films, the author claims that Reisenbüchler develops an animation Esperanto through his construction of landscapes, a significant break from an animation tradition that develops an Esperanto through the body. The article ties Reisenbüchler’s animated Esperanto to his globalist, transcendental politics and situates him within the context of Hungary’s socialist system. Finally, the article places Reisenbüchler’s work in the context of Pannonia, the major animation studio in Hungary, to which he was affiliated throughout his career. The films of Marcell Jankovics, Hungary’s most famous animator, suggest a more complicated reading of the interactions between the body and the landscape in the animated Esperanto. In conclusion, the author posits a possible dialectic between internationalism and globalism within the animated Esperanto, and applies this dialectic to Balázs’s initial conception of the international film language.

Slapstick after Fordism:WALL-E, Automatism and Pixar’s Fun Factory

In its history, production, plots and gestures, slapstick comedy was tied to the rise of modern labor in terms of both Taylorist theory and Fordist practice. Comic heroes ranging from live action comedians Chaplin or Keaton to animated animals Felix or Mickey worked against work through the playful excesses of their obediences and transgressions within an increasingly rationalized, industrial world. The digital animation studio Pixar summoned slapstick and its specifically Fordist resonances in its 2008 feature, WALL-E, yet offered a twist in humanizing a figure of perfected Fordism itself with its title character, a robot repetitively working in a post-apocalyptic earth devoid of human life. Explicitly modeled after Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, WALL-E contrasts with the film’s humans, who are entirely liberated from labor through automation in a satirical reflection of both post-Fordist accounts of the ‘end of work’ as well as broader critiques of a distracting digital culture. This article focuses on the film’s revitalization of slapstick traditions within the context of recent debates about post-Fordism, the future of automated labor and the transformation of working human bodies. Just as slapstick’s relationship to modern labor touched on the playful mode of its cinematic production as well as their form as indexical montage so too does Pixar’s corporate reputation as ‘Creativity, Inc’ suggest a complex relationship between its slapstick hero and the digital labor animating his movement. The same will be argued of Pixar’s vaunted techniques with both digital image-making and commodity generation, both of which suggest a nostalgic animation of slapstick’s antinomies as much as a disavowal of the post-Fordist production of which Pixar is vanguard.