Disney Cartoon Research Articles

Gender Dimension of Comparison in Between Anastasia, Pinocchio, and Tiana Characters in Cartoons

Gender dimension of Comparison in between Anastasia, Pinocchio, and Tiana characters in cartoons researches different dimension of multinational appropriation of Disney pedagogical instruments, in the classrooms. Contemporary Disney studies involve the importance of the socialisation of the Youth, emphasising the sociological perspective on the Youth delinquency complexity plethora, as a crucial in the Walt Disney imaginary: “Disney in the classroom, as critical literacy founds that popular texts should require active engagement” in the classroom (Sandlin, Garlin, 2016:17). Investigation on Gender dimension of comparison in between the Anastasia, Pinocchio, and Tiana characters in cartoons, involved the analyses of theme songs in cartoons, was conducted in group of BA students, of Sociology of Gender I, at Faculty of Political Sciences Sarajevo. Contemporary theory of education, globally, demands use of Disney Cartoons, and films, in Sociology classes.

AUDIOVISUAL TRANSLATION OF «DISNEY» CARTOONS’ TITLES INTO KAZAKH LANGUAGE

The provided article depicts peculiarities of the audiovisual translation in «Disney» company’s cartoons that were translated into Kazakh language. The relevance of the given topic is that currently audiovisual translation plays a significant role in spreading diverse cultures on a global scale, also most Disney cartoons are popular among children, teenagers and adults. Hence, there is a growing need for high-quality analysis and translation of audiovisual texts into different languages for their wide use in the world of mass-communication. The aim of the article is to identify main features of audiovisual translation as an essential type of translation activity as well as to find out what types of audiovisual translations were applied for translating Disney cartoons into Kazakh language. The scientific novelty of the given research is considering three types of audiovisual translation into Kazakh language based on Disney cartoons which have not been subjected to this kind of analysis. To sum up, the theory of audiovisual translation, as well as the methods of its teaching, have recently been in the focus of attention of native and foreign scholars. The globalization of the modern world, the development of intercultural communication of digital technologies and ways of exchanging information pose new challenges for researchers. One of these tasks is a deep study of different types of audiovisual translation. As a result, a great number of Disney cartoons were investigated in Kazakh language and findings are presented in this article. Keywords: audiovisual translation, cartoon, culture, Disney company, dubbing, English, Kazakh language, subtitles, voice-over.

Narrative of LGBTQ Representations in Disney Cartoons

Narrative of LGBTQ Representations in Disney Cartoons

Narrative of LGBTQ Representations in Disney Cartoons

Narrative of LGBTQ Representations in Disney Cartoons

Between the Sacred and the Profane: The Works and Days of Lee Breuer

Between the Sacred and the Profane: The Works and Days of Lee Breuer

Magic and the Dignity of Man: Pico della Mirandola and His Oration in Modern Memory by Brian P. Copenhaver

Reviewed by: Magic and the Dignity of Man: Pico della Mirandola and His Oration in Modern Memory by Brian P. Copenhaver Denis J.-J. Robichaud Brian P. Copenhaver. Magic and the Dignity of Man: Pico della Mirandola and His Oration in Modern Memory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2019. Pp. xv + 682. Cloth, $55.00. “Man is a great miracle” (459). Nowadays, a student who happens to have studied nothing more than a smattering of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s (1463–94) philosophical writings might only remember this one line from the introduction of Pico’s most famous Oration (often entitled Oration on the Dignity of Man), which Pico originally conceived as an introductory oration to a public disputation over his 900 Conclusions—that is, the 900 Conclusions primarily about philosophy, theology, and magic that he brazenly wished to debate in Rome in 1486, which earned him an excommunication. If pressed by an instructor during an exam to explain what Pico means by this great miracle, a student might quote from a passage shortly thereafter where Pico’s personification of a Demiurgic God proclaims to man, “For others, a definite nature is confined within laws that we have prescribed. With no strictures confining you, you will determine that nature by your own choice, which is the authority under which I have put you” (460–61). This student might then conclude that the miracle of man is that only humans stand outside of the laws of nature, since only [End Page 160] humans are capable of fashioning themselves according to their own rational choice. In other words, man’s miracle is his particular status or dignity in (or rather outside of) the laws of nature. And if this student happened to have studied a little more philosophy, he might interpolate that Pico is either an apologist for Catholic notions of human dignity, or a harbinger of Kantian notions of human freedom, or a Burckhardtian emblem of the Renaissance man (i.e. a self-reflective complex modern secular individual), or finally a herald of existentialism bearing the Sartrian standard, “l’existence précède l’essence” (Jean-Paul Sartre, L’existentialisme est un humanisme [Paris: Nagel, 1946, 29]). If this student happened to be in Brian Copenhaver’s classroom, one imagines that such answers would not earn him the highest marks. Copenhaver’s Magic and the Dignity of Man seeks to dispel any such misinterpretations of Pico’s Oration. The first misinterpretation is the Oration’s title. Copenhaver reminds us that it only first came to be known as the Oratio de hominis dignitate long after Pico’s death. Simply put, according to Copenhaver, the Oration is not about human dignity. Instead, he tells his readers early on that “Pico wants humans to become angels and then to be annihilated in God: the rest of the Oration tells them how” (28). Why, then, were generations of scholars so wrong about Pico’s Oration? Copenhaver devotes ten of the book’s thirteen chapters (chapters 1–10) to critiquing the history of misunderstandings. The misinterpretations began early when Giovanni Pico’s nephew Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola manipulated Pico’s memory by writing his uncle’s biography, a work that none other than Thomas More translated. One might call Copenhaver’s book a masterclass in the historiography of philosophy, but he describes it as “a philosophical history of philosophy as cultural history” (3). Copenhaver analyzes the philosophical categories through which Pico has been historically understood, for example, by examining Pico’s treatment at the hands of the likes of Johann Jakob Burcker and Voltaire. But at times Copenhaver also shapeshifts into a cultural historian, for instance when he discusses how snippets of Pico’s Oration were excerpted in what he labels as “Pico Boxes” in American textbooks on Western civilization after the Second World War, or how the Disney cartoon character known to English-speaking audiences as Professor Ludwig von Drake came to be known as Pico de Paperis in Italian. No proverbial stone is left unturned in this long book—or rather nearly no stone, since a few important Pico interpreters like Henri de Lubac, for example, are not discussed. Still, no one before Copenhaver...

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction Linda Mahood The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth (JHCY) explores the development of childhood and youth cultures and the experiences of young people across diverse times and places. We are keen to publish original articles that embrace novel historical methodologies as well as interdisciplinary scholarship that shares a historical focus on children and young people. Many issues also include an "object lesson" on the material culture of childhood, contemporary policy pieces, and reviews of books. This issue begins with Shurlee Swain's "An Imperial Mission? The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the International Dissemination of Ideas around Child Protection prior to World War I." Swain traces the transmission of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), dissemination of their ideas throughout the colonies, and the factors that led to the success, failure, or local adaptation of the NSPCC's child-saving mission. She shows that within ten years of its foundation, the NSPCC was reporting on kindred societies in India, South Africa, New Zealand, and several of the Australian colonies, although none was able to completely replicate the original model. The next three articles deal with political and missionary movements. In her article, "Better Off with 'Their Own People': Basque Refugee Children, Catholic Anti-Communism, and the Geopolitics of Compassion in FDR's America," Anita Casavantes Bradford details how, in 1937, at the height of the Spanish Civil War, the autonomous Basque government organized the evacuation of 25,000 endangered Basque children. At the same time, American anti-fascists launched a program to bring Basque refugee children to the United States. Opposed by a restrictionist State Department and powerful anti-communist Catholic leaders, they were ultimately unsuccessful. Bradford argues that close examination of the failed program reveals how foreign policy and domestic political interests have long interacted with changing notions of race and religion to determine which unaccompanied children were seen as deserving of asylum in the United States. Divya Kannan's article focuses on children in India and [End Page 185] how missionary literature for young British readers drew upon a hierarchy of colonial childhoods premised on racial differentiation. In "'Children's Work for Children': Caste, Childhood, and Missionary Philanthropy in Colonial India," Kannan states that in the colonial field, such literature colluded with existent dominant caste biases, perpetuated through violent means. Kannan shows how Othering of low-caste children destabilized missionary notions of sentimentalized childhood even as periodical literature represented them as objects of pity. These children were not "voiceless victims," but their lived realities impinged on missionary practices and literary representations. In "Celebrating Violence? Children, Youth, and War Education in Maoist China (1949–1976)," Orna Naftali looks at the role of children's education in the creation of Chinese war culture in the Mao era (1949–1976). Analyzing school textbooks as well as pedagogical and media publications, Naftali highlights the existence of competing visions of children's roles in military violence. The findings challenge the thesis that childhood in Maoist China was ultra-militarized and the assumption that during the Cold War era, countries on different sides of the divide held starkly contrasting notions of the young. The final two articles deal with children's relationship to the natural world. Chris Rasmussen looks at the Children's International Summer Villages (CISV). His article, "A Whole Network of Friends: Doris Twitchell Allen's Children's International Summer Villages and American Peacemaking in the Cold War," examines a post–World War II effort to harness applied psychological expertise for the cause of world peace. Psychologist Doris Twitchell Allen believed that the American summer camp had the potential to break down national barriers and unite eleven-year-olds in "friendships without frontiers." The ambitious vision to engineer a lasting peace was characteristic of postwar psychology, and the history of the early CISV demonstrates how the Cold War made it an impossible goal. Finally, Joe Goddard examines three mid-twentieth-century Walt Disney short cartoons. His article, entitled "Celluloid Cityscapes: Kids, Cars, and Cartoons in the United States, 1938–1965," argues that initially, Disney cartoons were aimed at a mixed adult and child audience, but over...

Celluloid Cityscapes: Kids, Cars, and Cartoons in the United States, 1938–1965

This article considers the cinematic portrayal of the city in mid-twentiethcentury Walt Disney short cartoons. Initially, Disney cartoons were aimed at a mixed adult/child audience, but over time, they were seen and marketed mostly to children. Examining three cartoons in depth and six more to provide perspective, this article reflects upon the images relayed to children and the place of children in the city. The article concludes that portrayals of urban locations in the cartoons were not favorable, deemed to have little space for children. Country landscapes, meanwhile, were painted more benignly.

Gender and Language in Movies

This paper is a report on the findings of a mini research study that the writer conducted in her course Gender and Language with the students in the English Language and Literature, cohort of 2017. The students, in groups, analyzed several Disney cartoons and reported the results in PPt. The findings revealed that the cartoons contain the gender stereotypes in line with the theories.
 Keywords: gender and language, stereotypes, Disney cartoons

Mickey Marx

Mickey Marx Devin Thomas O’Shea (bio) How to Read Donald Duck, Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart OR Books www.orbooks.com/catalog/donald-duck/ 208 Pages; Print, $22.00 The dictator Augusto Pinochet had this book burned in the streets of Chile after the 1973 September 11th coup d’ état — a coup that was funded, planned, and encouraged in secret by the United States. Since then, a copy has been hard to find. The English translation took a long while to make it state-side, and if you’re familiar with Disney’s attitude towards intellectual property, it’s a miracle that How to Read Donald Duck was able to print Disney comics in its pages. After years of scarcity, OR Books has brought this critique of American cartoons as propaganda to English readers. Even if this is your first foray into Marxist criticism, Dorfman and Mattelart’s critique is fun, concise, and sharp as a knife. How to Read Donald Duck is essentially a Marxist critique of children’s literature. Disney comics flooded Latin America alongside US influence throughout the twentieth century. During that time, Scrooge McDuck’s gold vault swimming pool was made to look like a modest savings compared to the exploitative practices of US companies aided by the US government. For Dorfman and Mattelart, the ideological groundwork for this imperialist exploitation is contained and represented within Donald Duck and the cast of Disney characters that compose Walt Disney’s comic book canon. How to Read Donald Duck is not addressing Disney movies overall, but the archetypes as they appeared in comic form. With beautiful flourishes of language, it is difficult to convey what a rare perspective it is to get two authors collaborating to make a convincing case that everything evil about US imperialism is reflected in a three-panel comic about Jiminy Cricket chased by vultures named Marx and Hegel. It might seem silly, or absurd, to make such serious claims about Disney cartoons, but the authors defend their study with a mix of self-deprecation and serious psychology. Doesn’t it make sense that ideological propaganda would show itself plainly in childhood media? Disney cartoons often count as the first morality tales a child learns, so shouldn’t we investigate what they’re saying? Shouldn’t [End Page 20] we be concerned if there an “iron fist beneath the Mouse’s glove?” One high-water mark of the book came when Donald’s nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, are revealed to be products of art in the age of mechanical reproduction; they are time-saving stamps. Each nephew is identical except for the colors of their caps. These colors change their being. Maybe that’s why Disney’s family tree is so full of twins and triplets, but according to Dorfman and Mattelart, this represents an affect that Disney wants us to receive; Disney wants us running on the treadmill. In the comics, everything needs to be in motion while having nothing ever really change. Fortunes won or lost, there is no class or social movement in Disney’s world. Each nephew is put in motion, but nothing really changes; technicolor printing allows one to become three like a Boy Scout duckling hydra. How to Read Donald Duck uncovers a deeply conservative, patriarchal, agenda in the center of Micky Mouse’s heart; the female characters are always the girlfriends and bystanders of the male protagonists. All the characters are related indirectly; there are no mothers and fathers, only uncles and nephews. Therefore, the parental voice is absent and everywhere; it’s in the composition of the comics that we hear what the God of Disney wants to say. I appreciated the take-down of Scrooge particularly. On the surface, Scrooge is a criticism of capitalism within Disney’s world. Scrooge never spends a dime; he lives a shallow life in service of inanimate wealth. He is just like the Dicken’s character of his namesake. But with How to Read Donald Duck, we come to see that Scrooge is a decoy; a prop meant to disarm the reader...

Deep cartoon colorizer: An automatic approach for colorization of vintage cartoons

Although there exist several approaches to the automatic colorization of the natural scene images and movies the problem of cartoon colorization has barely been considered. Therefore, this paper proposes a fully automatic pipeline to create a plausible colorization of vintage cartoons which is visually appealing to a human observer. Particularly, the Deep Cartoon Colorizer is proposed. The method incorporates an encoder–decoder convolutional neural network which is trained to map colors onto consecutive cartoon frames. The method was trained with 4944 images and tested on 34 vintage Disney cartoons including both the decolorized and the originally monochrome movies. In total 265388 cartoon frames were assessed including 246591 decolorized frames and 18797 originally monochrome ones. The resulting automatic colorizations were evaluated both quantitatively (by means of popular image perceptual quality measures) and qualitatively (by performing a human perception test). The resulting median values of the image quality measures range from 0.66 for Visual Information Fidelity and 0.85 for HaarPSI, through 0.94 for Structural Similarity Index, to 0.97 for Universal Image Quality Index which is a very good result. The subjective scores assigned by the human raters’ on a ten-degree scale are on average equal to 6.11 and 6.63 for decolorized and monochrome frames respectively. This result also confirms that the desired effect of plausible colorization was obtained by the introduced approach.

The Girl Who Named Pluto: The Story of Venetia Burney by Alice B. McGinty

Reviewed by: The Girl Who Named Pluto: The Story of Venetia Burney by Alice B. McGinty Elizabeth Bush Mcginty, Alice B. The Girl Who Named Pluto: The Story of Venetia Burney; illus. by Elizabeth Haidle. Schwartz & Wade, 2019 [40p] Library ed. ISBN 978-1-5247-6832-4 $20.99 Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-5247-6831-7 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-5247-6833-1 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys R 5-8 yrs If any children are still subjected to legends that the dwarf planet Pluto was named for Disney's cartoon hound, McGinty's respectful tribute to the actual naming by English schoolgirl Venetia Burney should put paid to it. And what a good story it is, starring a child who was challenged by a teacher to try to comprehend the immensity of the solar system, and whose grandfather, sharing her enthusiasm, actually tapped into a network of connections to send her suggestion to give the name of Pluto to the newly discovered Planet X in 1930 ("She knows that this planet, so far from the sun, must be frozen, dark, and lifeless. It would be like the underworld—the underworld ruled in Roman myths by Neptune's brother, Pluto"). Haidle's ink, graphic powder, and digital artwork is as precise and tidy as Burney's own science-oriented reasoning, and although dusty grays dominate the compositions, flashes of muted red and rusty orange highlight Burney and family members at critical moments in the narration. An author's note expands biographical detail, and a selected bibliography will guide adults to additional material. EB Copyright © 2019 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Детские художественные и научно-популярные произведения: опыт популяризации географических знаний

The importance of geographical knowledge in the modern world can hardly be overestimated: a modern individual uses electronic navigation systems, designs travel routes, and takes an interest in the natural and cultural environment of other countries. The article provides an overview of contemporary children’s fiction and non-fiction, which enables students to acquire geographical knowledge. The relevance of the article lies in the fact that the authors investigate the genres which have received little attention in other studies, and the sources which are not included in the school curriculum. The research covers children’s detective stories, radio broadcasts, and popular science periodicals, as well as “graphic literature”, or comics. Closest attention was devoted to the authors in whose works the geographic component is most pronounced. They are: the author of a children’s detective series Steve Stevenson, artists and screenwriters Karl Barks and Don Rosa, who created adventure comics featuring Disney cartoon characters, as well as Clement Kreps and Vladimir Mintz, the scriptwriters of the children’s radio program “Famous Captains Club”, who subjected the scripts of individual programs to literary processing. In addition, the article offers an overview of popular science magazines published in Russia. Among them are the domestic periodicals “Around the World”, “Global Pathfinder”, “Young Naturalist”, the annuals “Globe” and “Earth and People: Geographical Calendar”. In addition to Russian periodical sources, attention is also devoted to international periodicals published in Russian: “GEO”, “GEOlenok”, “National Geographic. Russia”, “National Geographic. Traveller”, and “National Geographic. Young Traveller”, “Discovery” and thematic collections of the Italian publishing house DeAgostini. The authors analyse how well geographical information is presented in these sources, and what age groups are targeted. The authors conclude that these publications contribute to the expansion of children’s outlook in general and of their geographical knowledge in particular, and they can be recommended as additional reading on geography.

Postmodern Picture Books as Multimodal Texts: Changing Trends in Children’s Literature

Literature for children has undergone significant changes over the past years. It has generated new attitudes towards childhood and changing practices around literature. The concept of literature for entertainment along with instruction, as proposed by Peter Hunt, has changed the traditional mode of reading methods and gave new dimensions in reading and experiencing children’s books. Nowadays, children’s books are available in various forms like printed books, audio/video recordings, animated movies, Disney cartoons etc. New developments in computational field and digital media have opened wider ways of exploring children’s stories. This has also led to the notion of cross-reading. Most of the stories for children are re-told or re-visioned adapting to different socio-cultural, linguistic domains. This adaptation is both a product and process as seen by Hutcheon (2012). The chief characteristics of postmodern picture books include usually a non-linear plot structure, using pictures or texts to position the reader and focalizing ideas through the point of view of a character, construction of meaning by the reader, intertextual references and above all, the varied design layout and styles of illustration as envisioned by Anstey (2002). All these developments appease the tastes of the modern child as well as the adult reader. This paper is an attempt to explore the evolving styles in contemporary children’s books where it is thought of more in terms of multimodal texts, with self-referential elements adding to it the notion of metafiction.

Postmodern Picture Books as Multimodal Texts: Changing Trends in Children's Literature

Literature for children has undergone significant changes over the past years. It has generated new attitudes towards childhood and changing practices around literature. The concept of literature for entertainment along with instruction, as proposed by Peter Hunt, has changed the traditional mode of reading methods and gave new dimensions in reading and experiencing children’s books. Nowadays, children’s books are available in various forms like printed books, audio/video recordings, animated movies, Disney cartoons etc. New developments in computational field and digital media have opened wider ways of exploring children’s stories. This has also led to the notion of cross-reading. Most of the stories for children are re-told or re-visioned adapting to different socio-cultural, linguistic domains. This adaptation is both a product and process as seen by Hutcheon (2012). The chief characteristics of postmodern picture books include usually a non-linear plot structure, using pictures or texts to position the reader and focalizing ideas through the point of view of a character, construction of meaning by the reader, intertextual references and above all, the varied design layout and styles of illustration as envisioned by Anstey (2002). All these developments appease the tastes of the modern child as well as the adult reader. This paper is an attempt to explore the evolving styles in contemporary children’s books where it is thought of more in terms of multimodal texts, with self-referential elements adding to it the notion of metafiction.

Assessing Three Audiovisual Translated Versions of Toy Story 1: A Functional Approach

Audiovisual translation (AVT) is a rather newly explored sub-discipline of translation studies. This paper compares the micro and macro translational strategies adopted in two types of AVT, namely dubbing and fansubbing. The corpus of study is a Disney cartoon, Toy Story1 dubbed from English into two Arabic varieties; Egyptian colloquial Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), as well as a fansubbed version translated from English into MSA. The functional approach is realized by employing the points of analysis suggested by Chaume’s (2004) model of analyzing audiovisual material and the problematic areas identified by Chiaro (2009), using the micro translational strategies pinpointed by Pedersen’s (2005) extralinguistic cultural-bound references (ECRs) analytical model. The results of the research indicate that the fansubbed version tends to adopt a foreignized macro strategy with the direct or literal translation strategy as the prime micro source language (SL) strategy. The Egyptian colloquial Arabic dubbed version tends to adopt a domesticated macro strategy with the substitution strategy as the prime micro target language (TL) strategy. Finally, the MSA dubbed version tends to adopt a foreignized macro strategy with the direct translation strategy as the adopted main micro SL strategy

On Sutak’s <em>Cinema Judaica: The War Years, 1939–1949</em>

On Sutak’s Cinema Judaica: The War Years, 1939–1949 Stephen J. Whitfield (bio) Cinema Judaica: The War Years, 1939–1949. By Ken Sutak. New York: Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion Museum/CCAR Press, 2012. 106pp., ISBN 978-1-884300-25-7 (ebook). US $9.99. Perhaps no decade in modern Jewish history—perhaps no decade since the destruction of the Second Temple—has been so packed with significance as the ten years that began in 1939. The horrifically unimaginable was followed by the thrillingly unpredicted. No catastrophe like the Holocaust can be said to have been redeemed. But the birth of a Jewish state, however much historians of the Yishuv can trace the achievement of sovereignty to forces independent of the shock of the Final Solution, cannot in retrospect be removed from the same cataclysmic decade as the torment of the refugee crisis, the plight of Diasporic Jewry beleaguered by anti-Semitism hardly limited to the distinctive terror of the Third Reich, the impact of totalitarianism, and the momentum of decolonization and nationalism. How did such extraordinary historical experiences register in the past century’s supreme medium of mass communication? One answer is reflected in movie poster exhibits that were mounted in the spring of 2007 and then again in the spring of 2008 at the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion Museum in New York City. This seductive, lovingly designed, and informative volume stems from those exhibits, which Ken Sutak very ably produced. Cinema [End Page 192] Judaica constitutes an impressive feat of archeology, of an era that begins with a feature film like Warner Bros.’ Confessions of a Nazi Spy (Anatole Litvak, USA, 1939), starring Edward G. Robinson, and ends with a quartet of obscure movies set during Israel’s fight for independence. The phrase that serves as the title of this book, Sutak writes, may have originated in Los Angeles, “to promote revival screenings of Jewish-themed films” (99), and to attract audiences to concerts where the film scores by Jewish composers were performed. The author gives no exact dates, however. Nor is his own definition of a “Jewish-themed” movie unduly rigid. The Stranger (Orson Welles, USA, 1946), for example, includes documentary footage of concentration camps. But none of the major characters (portrayed by Orson Welles, who also directed the film, Loretta Young, and the ubiquitous Edward G. Robinson) is Jewish; and the Nazis were not too finicky about whom they chose to imprison and torture in the camps. What makes The Stranger Jewish is therefore dubious. Cinema Judaica even includes a Disney cartoon, Education for Death (Clyde Geronimi, USA, 1943). Or take The House I Live In (Mervyn LeRoy, USA, 1945). Perhaps no nine-minute short in the history of Hollywood has enjoyed more acclaim. This movie won a special Academy Award for “Tolerance Short Subject,” as well as a Golden Globe Award for “Best Film for Promoting International Good Will.” These prizes, in the immediate aftermath of the Final Solution, signaled a shift in the zeitgeist. But the kid Frank Sinatra protects from young bigots in the film is bullied because of his different “religion”; it is not explicitly mentioned as Judaism. During a decade when prejudice was widely believed to be indivisible, as though anti-Semitism and racism were interchangeable, and when universalistic values were often considered the best refuge for an embattled people, it was prudent not to be too specific. The House I Live In was scripted by Albert Maltz, and Lewis Allan (the pseudonym used by Abel Meerepol) is co-credited with writing the title song. Two years after RKO’s short subject was released, Maltz would be subpoenaed to testify as a member of the Hollywood 10 before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Eight years after Sinatra introduced this musical plea for pluralism, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg would be electrocuted; and Meerepol would adopt their orphaned sons. Despite the marvelous evocation of the decade that the visual artifacts in Cinema Judaica achieve, it misses something crucial, which is the politics of many of the filmmakers themselves. The struggle against anti-Semitism was largely a leftist struggle, just as the New Deal had enhanced [End...

Pendragons at the Chopping Block: Elements of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the BBC’s Merlin

The BBC’s Merlin (2008) borrows elements of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in two of its early episodes, adjusting the thematic content of the poem to appeal to its audience of parents and children by placing the family rather than the court at the center of conflict. (EC)

DVD Chronicle

DVD Chronicle Jefferson Hunter (bio) Sabotage, directed by Alfred Hitchcock (Cobra Entertainment, 2011) Silly Symphonies, directed by Walt Disney and others (Walt Disney Video, 2001) Betty Boop: The Essential Collection, directed by Max and Dave Fleischer (Olive Films, 2013) Looney Tunes Golden Collection, vols. 1–6, directed by Chuck Jones and others (Warner Home Video, 2011) The Triplets of Belleville, directed by Sylvain Chomet (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2004) The Adventures of Prince Achmed, directed by Lotte Reiniger (Milestone, 2011) Princess Mononoke (Miramax, 2000),Spirited Away (Walt Disney Video, 2003), andHowl’s Moving Castle (Walt Disney Video, 2006), directed by Hayao Miyazaki Up, directed by Peter Docter (Disney Pixar, 2009) WALL-E, directed by Andrew Stanton (Disney Pixar, 2008). Sabotage is Hitchcock’s 1936 version of The Secret Agent, Conrad’s 1907 novel of international intrigue and terrorist attentat. Almost distressingly, the film foresees the world we live in now—a crowded London bus being blown up, a cornered fanatic grimly turning to press the button detonating his explosives-lined vest. These scenes are not in The Secret Agent, and they are far from Hitchcock’s only revisions of Conrad. The director (or the credited screenwriter, Charles Bennett) also changed the main setting from a shabby contraceptives-and-dirty-pictures shop to a cinema run by the Verlocs, husband and wife, and this change leads to the best and strangest scene in the film. Mrs. Verloc realizes that her husband’s plotting has led to the death of her young brother Stevie; she stumbles from their dining room into the cinema, full of stunned grief; but when she hears music on the soundtrack and catches sight of what’s on the screen, she smiles tentatively. Then, as revealed in one of the most heartbreaking close-ups Hitchcock ever photographed, she laughs. It’s a cartoon short she sees, Disney’s 1935 “Who Killed Cock Robin?”, with a Bing-Crosby-voiced Cock Robin crooning to a Mae-West-proportioned Jenny Wren. A second later an arrow pierces Cock Robin, and Mrs. Verloc grimaces, abruptly returned from melodious fantasy to the reality of violence. But we have had a few seconds of laughter, something to be set against, put in ironic juxtaposition with, a coded terrorist message glimpsed earlier in the film: “London Must Not Laugh on Saturday.” I think this moment illustrates two things: first, Hitchcock’s unmatched ability to capture emotions in extremis, especially pain oddly conjoined with comedy; and second, the power of animated images themselves—broadly [End Page 117] drawn figures cavorting or conniving on a screen, providing escapist fun or satirizing reality, compelling laughter. One reason to survey animated films, which is what I’ll do in this Chronicle, is that so many of us have been compelled by them, have like Mrs. Verloc, been seduced by cartoons. Stalin liked Disney; so did Sergei Eisenstein; so did E. M. Forster (see the 1934 essay “Mickey and Minnie” in Abinger Harvest). In Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels a would-be documentary filmmaker drops grandiose plans and discovers his humanity in the course of watching Disney’s cartoon “Playful Pluto,” which is screened in an African-American church for an audience of convicts. In David Lean’s Brief Encounter the two would-be lovers, enjoying a tryst, momentarily forget their English reserve and laugh out loud as they watch a Disney cartoon in the cinema. Alec says, “The stars can change in their courses, the universe go up in flames, and the world crash around us, but there will always be Donald Duck.” Personally, I am less an admirer of Donald Duck (or Mickey or Pluto) than of the various characters of Disney’s 1930s Silly Symphonies, the series to which “Who Killed Cock Robin?” belongs. These seventy-five seven-or eight-minute films earn both terms of their title, being both silly and symphonic, or at least inventive with music, as demonstrated by the very first of them, “The Skeleton Dance.” This is an intricately choreographed and comically ghoulish performance in a graveyard at midnight, with skeletal figures metamorphosing into fiddles, xylophones, and drums. At the start of what would be a lifelong career supplying scores...

How to Watch Television EthanThompson and JasonMittell, Editors. New York: New York University Press, 2013.

How to Watch Television Ethan Thompson and Jason Mitteil, Editors. New York: New York University Press, 2013.Imagine you've just purchased a new TV. You haul it home, open the box, set it up. You may or may not glance at the instruction manual. But once you've got the power on, chances are you never think about how to watch TV again. It just happens. Yet the way in which one watches matters deeply, both to individual viewers and to our collective culture. In their 2013 book, How to Watch Television, editors Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell offer a new kind of guide, one that explores different ways of watching, methods for looking at or making sense of television (1). This book, unlike the manual that comes with your TV set, is utterly readable, highly engaging, and worth referring back to, long after you've switched on your favorite channel.Where other collections have considered emerging genres (Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture [2004]), the global functions of (Global Television Formats: Understanding Television Across Borders [2011]) and the changing nature of the medium in the digital era (Television After TV: Essays On a Mednetwork ium in Transition [2004]), Thompson and Mittell's collection attends to specific shows, old and new. Each of the volume's forty chapters begins with a brief summary, introducing the author, program, and a particular analytical framework. Throughout, the reader is presented with a diverse group of narrativesfrom the Disney cartoon Phineas and Ferb, to telenovelas and Monday Night Football, to contemporary dramas such as House and 24. Essays are organized into five thematic sections, which discuss form, representation, politics, industry, and practice, although many chapters skillfully weave these strands together in ways that transcend categorization.A number of the collection's contributors position the narrative and stylistic nuances of programs within a historical context. For instance, in his essay on The Wonder Years (ABC, 1988-1993), Daniel Marcus writes that the bildungsroman served as an expression of nostalgia for the countercultural 1960s during the Reagan era. Similarly, Noel Murray links MMWs (CBS, 1972-1983) depiction of the Korean War to social commentary on war writ large in the 1970s, as public dissatisfaction with US involvement in Vietnam intensified. Evelyn Alsultany's critique of the more recent 24 (FOX, 2001-2010) unpacks the show's depiction of terrorism in a post-9/ 11 landscape. …