Live-action Film Research Articles

Narrative and Visual Cinematic Strategies in Communication Design

In an audiovisual kinematic narrative there is always a viewer's constraint as he experiences emotions, thoughts and even realities that are not of his daily life. Being fictional narratives, these are, nevertheless, experienced as if they were realities. This immersive experience of a fictional narrative in the first person is planned and intentional, in significant and communicational terms. Since that during this time the viewer excludes its own reality, he forgets it because every one of us, at any time, can only exist in single reality, at each given time. The cinematic storytelling can be so immersive in its simulation of environments, characters and situations told to the viewer, that he forgets his “reality” to live in the fictional one, as if were his own. These Cinematic Storytelling Communication Projects are based on devices of scripting, production and lighting design, directing, iconic and subliminal meanings approach, photography and painting compositions or their language of representation, perceptual and cognitive issues, editing, ensemble together in a cinematic narrative Syntax, be a live action film - fiction or documentary, or an 2D or 3D animation - drawn or digital. All these visual storytelling induce in the viewer percepts like of spaces, environments, emotions, thoughts, feelings, expectations, dreams, ideals, passions, fears, exaltations, events - a jigsaw that creates a flow of information, emotion and a story point of view. Whatever the adopted communicational approaches are, these are always understood within anthropometric, ergonomic and physical beacons, as they are biological, perceptual, psychological, emotional, cultural, experiential, based, in learned cognition experiences and memories, and in individual and collective imaginary of the viewer and his society. To induce in the viewer these illusions and immersion as realities, visual cinematic narratives references all the time to what characterizes Human Being and His experience, to meet Man in his Ergonomic, Psychological and Existential Dimension.

Assembling Movement: Scientific Motion Analysis and Studio Animation Practice

[F]or animators-those microscopists of the cinema-the of images contains the very fabric of their art, just as, for biologists, the behavior of cells contains the secrets of living organisms.-Alexandre Alexeieff, 1970In employing an organic analogy in this account of his work, animator Alexandre Alexeieff echoes a long tradition of linking animation to the study of life. Animation, as one frequently reads in popular criticism, is an art form that plays with the boundaries of life: constructing an illusion of a living world or creating an alternate fantasy life, imbuing inert objects with a vital spirit, or composing abstract forms that dance about like intentional beings.1 However, Alexeieff's definition goes beyond these familiar tropes and suggests something much more concrete about the relationship between animation and biology. Just as a biologist dissects organic bodies to understand the inner workings of life, an animator probes into the essence of cinema by dissecting moving Or, in a more provocative formulation, animators are not just filmmakers; they are also scientists of film. This claim isn't a self-aggrandizing gesture (at least, it isn't only that) but instead is a statement about the particular skills required to animate an image. Animation challenges the filmmaker to synthesize movement where there is none, frame by frame, by orchestrating a substitution of images. Or, as Alexeieff notes in another passage, whereas photographic live-action cinema begins by breaking down and stilling real movement, |a|nimaled movement is not reconstituted by projection: it is created on the screen for the first time.2 As such, animation requires a certain level of close, methodical inquiry into the fundamental rules of motion, whether that means studying the trajectories of moving bodies or more intangible dynamic processes, such as emotions or musical rhythms.The emphasis on understanding the workings of movement explains why Alexeieff's analogy does not just point to science in general but also turns to the life sciences in particular. After all, by the twentieth century, the study of organic life also became inseparable from the close study of movement, from the concrete behaviors of discrete organic particles to the more abstract forces (reproduction, synthesis, evolution) that propel biological events. Since many of these dynamic processes cannot be optically seen or captured in a single still image, modern life sciences also took interest in the moving image as a device for capturing and analyzing movement.3Alexeieff's poetic description of the animator as a biologist of cinema is thus indicative of a much wider historical and conceptual relationship between animation and scientific inquiry. Broadly, I would characterize this relationship as a shared interest in studying and visually rendering movement with the aid of moving-image technology. For early animators and for modern life scientists, the cinematograph was an instrument of motion analysis in advance of (and often in preparation for) serving as an instrument of movement documentation. While early twentiethcentury biologists and industrial researchers of motion relied on the cinematograph to disassemble organic and mechanical processes into discrete instances or manageable cells, early animators, working in reverse, used the cinematograph to reassemble movement from discrete poses or images (building toward the celluloid cels in classic drawn animation).This shared interest fostered a relationship of mutual influence in how the different fields approached their study and visual rendering of movement. The life sciences, as a number of scholars note in this journal issue, have frequently relied on animated figures and images in order to model complex biochemical interactions and communicate the invisible structure of organic processes.4 However, early animators, as I propose below, also drew influence (directly or indirectly) from techniques developed by the life sciences in order to visually compose and communicate movement. …

Adaptations of Time Travel Narratives in Japanese Multimedia: Nurturing Eudaimonia across Time and Space

To displace a character in time is to depict a character who becomes acutely conscious of his or her status as other, as she or he strives to comprehend and interact with a culture whose mentality is both familiar and different in obvious and subtle ways. Two main types of time travel pose a philosophical distinction between visiting the past with knowledge of the future and trying to inhabit the future with past cultural knowledge, but in either case the unpredictable impact a time traveller may have on another society is always a prominent theme. At the core of Japanese time travel narratives is a contrast between self-interested and eudaimonic life styles as these are reflected by the time traveller's activities. Eudaimonia is a ‘flourishing life’, a life focused on what is valuable for human beings and the grounding of that value in altruistic concern for others. In a study of multimodal narratives belonging to two sets – adaptations of Tsutsui Yasutaka's young adult novella The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Yamazaki Mari's manga series Thermae Romae – this article examines how time travel narratives in anime and live action film affirm that eudaimonic living is always a core value to be nurtured.

Alice in Cartoonland: Childhood, Gender, and Imaginary Space in Early Disney Animation

The ‘plasmatic’ world of Mickey Mouse famously enchanted everyone from small children to European filmmakers and philosophers in the late 1920s and 1930s, but Disney’s attempts to use media technology to envision the freedom of childhood imagination can be traced back to his first successful series, the Alice Comedies (1923–1927), which featured a live-action girl who navigated animated wonderlands in her dreams and her imagination. Like Lewis Carroll’s original character, Disney’s Alice acts as a conduit into an irrational and magical world – the opposite of rational life in modernity. For Disney, Alice provided a way to both tie his own cultural productions to a long tradition of beloved children’s literature, and present his own vision of an animated wonderland as coming from the innocent perspective of a little girl. At the series’ outset, Alice’s trips to Cartoonland were motivated by live-action framing stories that depicted children at play, inviting audiences young and old to escape to a world of childhood imagination. But Disney didn’t just depict an idealized childhood in live-action film; he also used animation to gesture toward the existence of a universal, unassailable imaginary space. This emphasis on the child’s perspective in rendering the relationship between real and animated space speaks to larger cultural concerns at the time surrounding early education, psychological development, and the importance of protecting childhood in an increasingly rationalized world. This article examines the way childhood play is figured in both live-action and animated space in the first series of Alice cartoons – as mimicry, as performance, and as transformation of ‘real’ space – in order to show that Disney’s early work owed much of its impact to the ability of media technology to represent an idealized version of children’s imaginative play, and to evoke childhood perception through the use of animation.

Introduction

Animation per se foregrounds its own artifice and offers, as the animators of the Zagreb School put it, not ... the copying but ... the transformation of reality' (Holloway 9). The animator can freely transform the diegesis and 'defy the laws of gravity, challenge our perceived view of space and time' (Wells 11). Such a form offers rich possibilities for science-fictional and fantastic narrative.In the US, speculative animation has long been relegated to the small screen, dominated by adaptation and imitation of comic book superheroes and pulp fiction tropes.While in the west, Japan's distinct form of animation - hereafter referred to by its usual name of anime - is still shifting from subculture to mainstream, in Japan it is a firmly established part of mainstream media culture. There, Japanese-produced animated films account for roughly half of all cinema sales (Napier Anime 7) and are embedded into television programming for a wide range of genres and demographics. In the last two decades, anime has also increasingly been the focus of critical attention and scholarship, both in Japan and globally.Thomas LaMarre has theorised that anime, as a specific mode of animation, has a formally distinct relationship with realism and filmic space. While live-action cinema is characterised by movement into depth, anime in particular, he argues, works with the physical properties of multiplanecel animation, in which 'depth' is a series of flat layers. One of animes charac- teristic movements in panoramic scenes is the non-realist shifting of these layers. Instead of imitating the live-action camera's movement into the frame and seeking to 'composite' or conceal the gaps between layers, as with Disney's use of the multiplane (Telotte 131-55), anime slides layers of representation aside like curtains to open up the layer beyond (LaMarre 39-40) so that onscreen space appears to open up before the spectator rather than the spectator having the impression of moving into onscreen space. This effect, 'animatic' rather than cinematic, preserves the spectator's awareness of a series of flatnesses separated by empty intervals. Thus, animes depiction of space and depth is already non-realist and only partly indexical. Its depictions of the fantastic and speculative call attention to themselves as such, inviting the spectator's contemplation as constructed and imagined spaces. Although anime genres often do not necessarily map neatly onto Western genres, the fantastic, science-fictional, speculative and apocalyptic proliferate within anime output.The origins of sf itself, John Rieder and others have pointed out, are entangled with colonialism in multiple ways. Imperialism was part of the conditions under which emerged the technocratic society that produced sf readers, spectators and authors. Likewise, both the colonial gaze' and anxieties about its return by the alien Other mark many of sf's foundational narratives (Rieder 27-33). Historical and political engagement in sf texts thus very often incorporates an engagement with these colonialist underpinnings, whether as apologia or critique.Baryon Tensor Posadas notes in this issue Japan's 'doubled position as both subject and object of the colonial gaze', and that Japanese sf, like sf elsewhere, first emerged as part of the imperialist project. All the articles in this special issue propose that sf anime offers a complex and specific contri- bution to modern sf's engagement with colonialism. This is enabled by the form and content of animation in its investigations of the cultural, historical and political problematics of the Japanese nation-state - and also by animes particular affinity for the transnational.While Japanese animation existed before the Second World War, largely in the form of children's entertainment and patriotic programming, anime as a distinct form emerged in the 1960s, after Japan's post-war occupation by the US. The form developed during subsequent rebuilding and transformation from an imperialist-militarist state to a demilitarised, late-capitalist state. …

애니메이션의 움직임과 근대 기계론 전통의 상관관계 연구

Animation which appeared with films in the late 19th century was a medium which came on obtaining nourishment from art historical style of modernism. However, the relation establishment between animation and modernism has been focused mainly on animation shapes, namely painted images. This sprang from explaining the relationship between animation and paintings, and for this reason, discussions of movements in animation were understood in tradition of chromophotograph of Muybridge and Jules Marey, or some characteristics owned by the live-action film. However, movements of animation were essentially different from the indexical sign of films or photogram, and objects of reproduction were different between them. Movements reproduced by animation are not ordinary movements, but expressions of or compressed movements and considerably systematic movements. As a result, these movements are far from reproduction of live-action film photogram. Rather, the logic of movements reproduced by animation comes near to controlling their motion scopes, time, distance etc. after dividing each part of the body. This is concluded in a standpoint of modern mechanism which is represented by Descartes and La Mettrie who tried to understand human body as a exchangeable machine. Design of modern mechanism ranging from modern society to industrial society and the age of modernism came to lead to analysis of physical motions of modern industrial society called composition of efficient movements understanding them as the law of nature rather than movements as nature. In the late 19th century, Taylor, F. W. and Gilbreth, Frank Bunker`s studies of workers` working hours and `motion study` were a way of constituting the frame of machine-human, which indicates that tradition of modern mechanism affected the entire modernism passing through industrial society. Further, we can see that motion studies conducted by them have almost similar characteristics to action analysis to study animation later in the name of `timing`.

Walt before Mickey: Disney's Early Years, 1919–1928.Timothy S.Susanin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011.

Walt before Mickey: Disney's Early Years, 1919-1928. Timothy S. Susanin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011.Mickey Mouse first appeared in the 1928 animated short Steamboat Willie, and that is where most stories of his creator, Walt Disney, begin. In Walt Before Mickey, Timothy Susanin focuses on the decade in Disney's life prior to his first major achievement, scrutinizing his early career and influences. He divides his tale into two parts: Book One: Kansas City, and Book Two: Los Angeles.Book One begins with young Disney, at eighteen, returning to Missouri after serving as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in France during World War I. Disney had two interests, acting and art, and opted for a career in art because he thought he could land a job. Following a tip from his older brother Roy, who worked at a clerk at a Kansas City bank, Disney applied to be an apprentice with Louis Pesmen and Bill Rubin, who operated an art shop for the Gray Advertising Company. This is where Disney got his start. Because most of the firm's work was for farm journals, Disney did a lot of pencil drawings of hens, cattle, farm equipment, and happy farmers, honing his drawing skills. While at Gray Advertising, Disney befriended another recent hire, Ubbe Iwwerks (later Ub Iwerks), who later became his business partner. He also made the acquaintance of a Gray client, Frank Newman, owner of several Kansas City theaters, who later screened Disney's first cartoon.Susanin traces Disney's career at Gray and at his and Iwwerks' first venture of their own, Iwwerks-Disney, which housed its first studio in an unused bathroom at the National Restaurant Association. These humble beginnings led to art positions at the Kansas City Slide Company and the Kansas City Film Ad Company, where Disney and Iwwerks discoveredand became enamored with-the new art of animation. They sold their first cartoons to Frank Newman, and the Laugh-O-Grams made a successful debut at Newman Theatre, encouraging Disney to open another studio of his own, Kaycee Studios (named after the abbreviation for Kansas City). Here he tried his hand at animating fairy tales, producing Little Red Riding Hood and The Four Musicians of Bremen. A year later, he developed a new venture, Laugh-O-Gram Films, dedicated to his growing interest: fairy-tale cartoons, including/itc& and the Beanstalk; Goldie Locks and the Three Bears; Cinderella; Puss in Boots; Jack, the Giant Killer; and Alice's Wonderland. The project was fraught with problems, and Disney lamented that he had entered the animation field-which was already six or seven years old-too late. With few options left in Kansas City, he took his brother Roy's advice to move to Los Angeles, where their Uncle Robert had a place he could stay. Disney felt his only hope was to get a job in live-action film. He wanted to be a director.Book Two commences with twenty-one year old Disney's arrival in Los Angeles, where his brother Roy, being treated for tuberculosis at the Veterans Hospital in nearby Sawtelle, met him at the train station. Susanin devotes the next one hundred pages to chronicling every nuance of Disney's early career, including his frustrations living with Uncle Robert and Aunt Charlotte and his attempt to make it on his own by establishing a new studio in Los Angeles. Susanin does a good job of putting Disney's efforts in the context of his time, noting his negotiations with New York distributor Margaret Winkler, who handled the 1920s sensation Felix the Cat, to provide a contract for his series of Alice Comedies. …

Archiving the animation film-making process. The earliest Dutch animation films

Animation film-makers working in the Netherlands in the first decade of the 20th century,made use of processes and skills from live-action film production and the world of the visualarts. And yet for the majority, making animation films was nothing more than an excursionduring their careers as film makers, quick-draw artists, shadow artists, visual artists, designers15 6 | Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis – 15 [1] 2012and artists. George Pal and George Debels were the only ones to specialize in making animationfilms over a longer period. Dutch film-makers were obviously not working in isolationfrom the international context, as their films are clearly influenced by international developments.The technical aspects of the production processes, as discussed in this article, are anindication of this, as are the content and designs. To study how animation films were madein The Netherlands, historians can refer to the sources and materials that are generally usedto research film history. However, the special processes involved in the making of animationfilms also requires studying specific materials and using methods of analysis that are uniqueto this genre of films, for example, studying original animation artwork. Not much productionmaterial has been conserved as it was often non-durable. Furthermore, the audiovisual archiveinstitutes had little knowledge of how to treat the materials, and there was inadequate policywith respect to animation heritage. There are examples abroad that demonstrate that animationartwork can be used in various ways for presentations in museums or on internet. Clearlythere is a task here for Dutch cultural preservation – to continue and to expand the work.

Het animatie maakproces in het archief: De vroegste Nederlandse animatiefilms

Animation film-makers working in the Netherlands in the first decade of the 20th century,made use of processes and skills from live-action film production and the world of the visualarts. And yet for the majority, making animation films was nothing more than an excursionduring their careers as film makers, quick-draw artists, shadow artists, visual artists, designers15 6 | Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis – 15 [1] 2012and artists. George Pal and George Debels were the only ones to specialize in making animationfilms over a longer period. Dutch film-makers were obviously not working in isolationfrom the international context, as their films are clearly influenced by international developments.The technical aspects of the production processes, as discussed in this article, are anindication of this, as are the content and designs. To study how animation films were madein The Netherlands, historians can refer to the sources and materials that are generally usedto research film history. However, the special processes involved in the making of animationfilms also requires studying specific materials and using methods of analysis that are uniqueto this genre of films, for example, studying original animation artwork. Not much productionmaterial has been conserved as it was often non-durable. Furthermore, the audiovisual archiveinstitutes had little knowledge of how to treat the materials, and there was inadequate policywith respect to animation heritage. There are examples abroad that demonstrate that animationartwork can be used in various ways for presentations in museums or on internet. Clearlythere is a task here for Dutch cultural preservation – to continue and to expand the work.

Kijken naar animatie. Tussen herkennen van werkelijkheid en toeschrijven van komedie

This article endeavours to give some insight into how the relationship between art, animationand live-action film, on the one hand, and reality on the other affects the meaningattributed by the viewer. A distinction is made between recognizing meaning and attributingit, whereby recognition is only possible when what is being shown contains elements of reality.Recognition acts as a catalyst for attribution. Psychological research has shown that peopleattribute an extremely wide range of meanings to the simplest of animation films (from genderto emotions to intentions). Attributing a genre to a film is fundamental for any viewer andwhen doing so people appear to rely on the gap between what they have seen and their ownreality. This is precisely where the difference between animation and live-action arises. Bothkinds of films allow the viewer to become immersed in the story, however, with live-actionviewers are steered from non-fiction to fiction whereas with animation they are steered fromfiction to non-fiction.

The Hands of the Animator: Rotoscopic Projection, Condensation, and Repetition Automatism in the Fleischer Apparatus

This article is concerned with the affective relationship among bodies and film technologies in the process of building and using filmmaking instruments, taking as its object the early Rotoscope, a device patented by the legendary American animator Max Fleischer that entailed the projection of live-action film for use as a template in the drawing of animated figures, to which the live-action trace was thought to impart life-like, normative patterns of movement. Drawing from media archaeology, psychoanalytic theories of repetition, projection, and condensation, and object relations theory, this article offers an interpretation of some of the kinds of psychic interactions offered in animated film through traces of the Rotoscope’s production history found in the device’s patent drawings, its patent embodiments, and its published family legend. It is proposed that the device was the locus of a collective fraternal performance, serving as a shared ground for an array of condensations and displacements and enactments of repetition compulsion among the multiple bodies engaged in the production of the device, as well as among the multiple animated and live-action film bodies that crossed its production screens and patent pages. One objective of this article is to shift the interpretive and analytic focus in film studies from the filmstrip and the projected screen image to the relationship between bodies and technologies in the experience of making films, and making the filmic apparatus. A secondary objective of this article is to suggest that the approach to bodily movement embedded in the design of the Rotoscope was hardly normative. The device offered a means to stretch and distort both norms and stereotypes of human expression through movement. The rotoscoped body sometimes performed in ways that pushed the limits of viewer expectations about how a given body will, or should, move, in space or across the screen.

‘Don’t Box Me In’: Blurred Lines in Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly

This article seeks to evaluate the visual style of Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, predominantly through an analysis of the films’ aesthetics. The use of Rotoshop as an expressive means to illustrate character and theme, where identity becomes sketched and multi-faceted rather than fixed or stable is explored here. Yet this aesthetic play with borders has a greater resonance than simply a means by which to delineate thematic preoccupations with troubled identity. While such representations are indeed key to these two films, the darkly outlined contours of character borders, which move and slide incessantly, also comment on the blurred divide between live action and animation. Central to the argument is the use of the animated line in understanding these two films; the line provides impetus for exploring several issues raised by the films and the use of Rotoshop. This article explores the following key ideas: the animated line and aesthetic analysis; Rotoshop technology; the representation of fragmentary identity; and the relationship between photo-real cinema and animation, with a particular focus on narrative and spectacle. The author addresses Rotoshop within the context of technology and spectacle; taking industry practices into account allows for an appreciation of how a technological innovation such as Rotoshop can change the shape of live-action cinema.

Animated war

In this feature article two DIY (do-it-yourself) film projects are examined from perspectives of resemiosis (transformations in meaning-making) and the textual production practices of contemporary multimedia authorship. These practices are considered as evolving in a complex media ecology. The two films analysed are Gzim Rewind (Sweden, 2011) by Knutte Wester, and In-World War (USA, expected 2011) by DJ Bad Vegan. The films are currently in production and involve many collaborators. Both films have themes of war and include film scenes that are ‘machinima’ – real-time animation made in 3D graphic environments – within live action film scenes. Machinima harnesses the possibilities of reappropriating digital software, game engines, and other tools available in digital media. War-related stories are resemiotized in the machinima film scenes as meanings are transformed in the story’s shift from a war game context to a film context. Thus machinima exemplifies how DIY multimedia storytellers explore new ways to tell and to ‘animate’ stories. The article contains four parts: an introduction to machinima and the notions of resemiosis and authorial practice; a presentation of DIY filmmaking as a practice that intertwines with new networked economics; an analysis of the two DIY film projects; and a discussion of implications including issues relating to IP (intellectual property) and copyrights when reappropriating digital assets from commercial media platforms.

Dissecting <i>Bambi</i>: Multiplanar Photography, the Cel Technique, and the Flowering of Full Animation

Dissecting <i>Bambi</i>: Multiplanar Photography, the Cel Technique, and the Flowering of Full Animation

Absence, Excess and Epistemological Expansion: Towards a Framework for the Study of Animated Documentary

This article gives an overview of the history of animated documentary, both in regard to the form itself and how it has been studied. It then goes on to present a new way of thinking about animated documentary, in terms of the way the animation functions in the texts by asking what the animation does that the live-action alternative could not. Three functions are suggested: mimetic substitution, non-mimetic substitution and evocation. The author suggests that, by thinking about animated documentary in this way, we can see how animation has broadened and deepened documentary’s epistemological project by opening it up to subject matters that previously eluded live-action film.

로버트 저메키스와 제임스 카메론의 캐릭터 애니메이션 이용

얼마 전 세상은 제임스 카메론의 최근작인 <아바타>에서 디지털 액터의 성공적인 출현을 목격하였다. 이런 디지털 애니메이션 캐릭터의 탄생은 영상 표현 기술의 발전에 의해 갑자기 만들어진 것이 아니다. 과거 애니메이션 영상과 실사영상의 결합을 시도했던 수많은 노력들이 테크놀로지의 발전과 맞물려 영상산업계의 커다란 변화를 가져올만한 성과를 이루어낸 것이다. 이런 시도들의 선봉에 선 사람들 중, 지속적으로 주목할 만한 성과를 낸 대표적인 감독이 두 명 있다. 제임스 카메론 감독과 로버트 저메키스 감독이다. 영상 테크놀로지에 대한 지속적인 캐릭터 표현 연구와 노력이 작품을 통해 상당히 오랜 기간 동안 나타났다. 영상 테크놀로지의 역할에 대한 이해에 있어서 두 감독은 서로 다른 시각을 가지고 있었던 것으로 보인다. 실제로 테크놀로지를 대하는 자세의 차이가 결국 두 감독의 최근 작품에서 매우 다른 결과를 가져 온 것으로 생각된다. 본문에서는 영상 테크놀로지 이용을 중심으로 두 감독의 작품들을 비교, 분석해보고자 한다. 두 감독이 시도했던 애니메이션과 실사영상의 결합에 대한 진보적인 성과들, 또 영화 제작에 있어서 테크놀로지의 역할을 인식하는 자세의 차이를 알아보는 것은 향후 끊임없이 계속될 새로운 영상 기술의 출현을 맞이해야 하는 우리 영상산업계의 기술수용과 대응에 있어서도 그 의미를 찾을 수 있다고 본다. James Cameron's Avatar was a stunning success for digital characters. Digital animation character creation was not suddenly enabled by visual technology, rather it was a result of numerous attempts of combining animation and live action film with the help of technology advancement. Two pioneers in this field are James Cameron and Robert Zemeckis. Although continuous interest and research in visual technology existed, the two directors differed in how they viewed the use of technology. The difference is demonstrated in their two recent movies which will be covered in details. How these two directors differed in their approach remains a topic of study for us who continuously are exposed on advance visual technology and our reaction to the changing nature of the industry.

Back to the Drawing Board

Animation has long occupied the sidelines of cinema. As its essence resides not in the ability to capture the world as it really is but in an artistic representation of reality, conventional animation has often been discarded as an outdated by-product of cinema’s early technological development. However, with advances in digital animation, live-action film is becoming increasingly reliant on computer-generated images as a tool to manipulate the on-screen image, whether to subtly tweak aesthetics or to create entire scenes. The relationship between animation and live-action cinema is therefore changing. Some fear that, as a result, cinema will lose its credibility as an authoritative medium; that the hand of the digital animator will detract from cinema’s ability to effectively showcase the ‘real’. With reference to films containing varying degrees of digital manipulation, this paper will look at the effect that this hybridisation has on both animation and live-action cinema, and will show that, although it may detract from cinema’s authoritative nature, it also frees filmmakers from the constraints of conventional cinematic apparatus, allowing for the creation of new and exciting styles.

Speciesism, Part III: Neoteny and the Politics of Life

Speciesism, Part III:Neoteny and the Politics of Life Thomas Lamarre (bio) In part one of this series, drawing on Sergei Eisenstein and Ōtsuka Eiji, I called attention to the "plasmaticity" of animation, which becomes pronounced in animated characters. Implicit in my emphasis on plasmaticity was a move away from representation theory and the politics of representation.1 If we look at wartime animation only in terms of what it represents, we quickly reach an impasse. We might say, for instance, that pigs in Norakuro represent the Chinese, or the jungle critters in Momotarō: Umi no shinpei (1945, Momotarō's divine navy) represent inhabitants of the islands of (what the Japanese at the time referred to as) the Southern Seas. Yet even the context of Norakuro and Momotarō, where the references appear more stable than in Tezuka's Chōjin taikei (1971-75, Birdman anthology) or Janguru taitei (1951-54, Jungle emperor), the power of these animations does not come primarily from representation. The materiality of the medium or media is integral to the actual experience and impact of speciesism, that is, of the transformation of "peoples" into nonhuman animal species. Among the examples of speciesism explored thus far, it is clear that different media present a distinctive set of material orientations. There is, of course, overlap between different media in terms of their material [End Page 110] orientations, which allows for translation across media, not only at the level of narrative devices or generic conventions. Nonetheless, if we are to grasp something of the specificity of manga and animation, materially and experientially, we need to consider some basic differences. Numa Shōzō's Kachikujin Yapū (The domesticated people Yapoo; also translated as "Yapoo, the Human Cattle" on the book cover) novels foreground textual techniques and discursive strategies of instrumentalization: the encyclopedic and clinical presentation of cruel, painful techniques for reengineering Yapū bodies for various uses frequently overwhelms the events that compose the story. Pierre Boulle's novel La planète des singes (1963, Planet of the Apes) uses a venerable literary device: two space travelers find a message in a bottle in which a human recounts his journey to a planet on which monkeys (chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans), not humans, are the intelligent species; as it turns out, however, the two space travelers reading the story are chimpanzees and find the story shocking and incredible. In other words, the novel plays with the absence of images to encourage us to assume that the readers are human, which device is designed to shock our assumptions about the primacy and universality of the human species. Speciesism in film will draw on other kinds of material orientation. In the Planet of the Apes films and Star Trek series, for instance, makeup plays a crucial role, and sometimes animatronics or models are used for special effects. This is often the case with speciesism in live-action cinema, with digital effects and digital animation in recent years gradually supplanting and recoding earlier "species effects." Manga and manga films present yet another set of material orientations. The Life of Characters In the formation of a specific set of manga and animation orientations, the 1920s and 1930s are particularly important, and those orientations continue to affect animation and manga today. In Japan, as in other parts of the world, the emergence of mass culture in the 1920s brought with it a new sense of distinct markets and audiences. This era saw, for instance, the mass production of a set of cultural materials for women (women's journals and other female-directed commodities),2 as well as the mass production of a children's culture, with new journals and books intended for children, which would increasingly include manga.3 This process was not merely a matter of discovering and developing new markets or niche audiences but of actively isolating and shaping them, economically, legally, and politically. As early as the Film [End Page 111] Laws of 1917, for instance, the Japanese government displayed a concern for segregating audiences by gender (mandating separate seating for men and women), and, as film become associated in the popular imagination with juvenile delinquency, particularly in the course of the 1920s, children...

The Evolving 'Temp Score' in Animation

'Temp music' has long been used to assist in the making of Hollywood motion pictures. Animated feature films, in particular, often spend years in production, going through a protracted process of development, storyboarding, animation, lighting, shading, editing and revisions. Unlike live-action film, today's computer-animated film is also edited as it is being developed, written and conceived. Hence, the 'temp score' changes, evolves and is 'conformed' as sequences are further edited and altered following reviews, screenings, rewrites, picture changes and new animation. Over several years, the temp score evolves along with the film. The evolution of the temp score, while being a hidden, unglorified part of the filmmaking process, is ideally situated to impact upon debates concerning authorship, originality, auteur theory, collaborative processes and intertextuality. Drawing on the author's notes and discussions with filmmakers, this article provides a glimpse into the internal process of temp scoring in c...

Imaginative Ownership: Nurturing the Peer Group Community in Film at Degree Level

How a regular group seminar and team projects can go beyond the limitations of the one to one tutorial, towards a richer experience of shared and simultaneous ‘voyages’ into film. Encouraging the students’ self-discipline over attendance, their time and generosity over giving advice and practical help, the tutor-practitioner here becomes the enabler for groups, around the table, on location and in front of the screen, to involve each other and teach themselves. It also makes more efficient use of actual tuition. Live Action film making seems a particularly suitable vehicle here, partly because it is so time taking, but also because it is instantly both practical and philosophical. However quite different disciplines can possibly relate to this approach where we make a virtue of numbers, promote cohesion and companionship. Debate and peer group contact over time then leads to a much deeper and increasingly more articulate individual grasp of the challenges and possibilities of the medium. Growing confidence in teams and groups in turn becomes a highly transferable skill for graduates, irrespective of whether they finally enter the media or not. A collaborative film project for mixed teams of Theater Design and Visual Communication BA students in their second year began in what was an otherwise highly individualistic environment. It has run ten years keeping continuity of teaching and structure. Many come to it quite new to film, thrown together for 8 weeks for the entire genesis and production of their short film, from initial group ideas through set design, acting, lighting, sound recording, shooting to fine cut. The key has been to engage the students’ own creative ‘engine’. Some competitiveness is positive too: 5 or 6 teams working to a set schedule create their own films keenly aware of other productions around them. Illustrated with short film extracts with a brief overview of the parameters, structure, logistics and philosophy. This has encouraged the sharing of individual Live Action projects in the third year through a sustained weekly seminar run by a film practitioner-tutor, where all carefully discuss each others work in progress, including the tutor’s.