Animation Theory

Tricky Spaces: Animation, Installation and Spatial Politics

by Suzanne Buchan

Buchan, Suzanne (2011) Tricky Spaces: Animation, Installation and Spatial Politics ," in: Tricky Women – Animationsfilmkunst von Frauen – Women in Animation. Schüren Verlag, Marburg. ISBN 978-3-89472-723-9

Theatrical Cartoon Comedy: From Animated Portmanteau to the risus purus

by Suzanne Buchan

Buchan, Suzanne, "Theatrical Cartoon Comedy: From Animated Portmanteau to the risus purus," in: Horton, Andrew and Joanna E Rapf (eds) A Companion to Film Comedy, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012 (forthcoming October), ISBN: 978-1-4443-3859-1

'Ghosts in the Machine: Experiencing Animation'

by Suzanne Buchan

Published in Greg Hilty (ed) : Watch Me Move. The Animation Show, pp 28-38, London: Merrell, 2011. ISBN 978 1 8589 4558 3

There are many stories, and histories, of animation film. Yet there are other ways of telling a story of animation... more There are many stories, and histories, of animation film. Yet there are other ways of telling a story of animation that peel back and go below the material, historical and factual surface of this cinematic technique. Because the seven thematic concepts of Watch Me Move have a specific thematic focus, it allows permeation between different animation techniques and historically and stylistically discrete canons. This essay concentrates on four of the themes that consider the viewer's experience of animation: apparitions, structures, fragments and visions. Many works in these themes share certain features, properties and experiential phenomena for viewers. They tend to:  undermine conventional narrative; lack dialogue and are sound and music driven; feature imaginative, impossible 'worlds' and non-anthropomorphic figures; offer philosophical/perceptual concepts that diverge from our everyday experience of 'reality', and they are often self-reflexive. Tex Avery, one of the most radical Hollywood cartoon directors, is purported to have said "You can do anything in an animated cartoon." Looking beyond the cartoon, this essay reveals the fabulous experimentation of some of the exhibition's works that fall outside the realm of commercial popular culture, foregrounding the viewers' experience of the creative imagination that the animated form presents.

Suzanne Buchan was a Curatorial Advisor for the exhibition.

Editorial Suzanne Buchan Animation: an Interdisciplinary Journal, Nov 2008; vol. 3 No 3

by Suzanne Buchan

Editorial for animation: an interdisciplinary journal (Sage Journals)

Editorial and description of issue contents. Editorial and description of issue contents.

Editorial Suzanne Buchan Animation: an Interdisciplinary Journal, Nov 2007; vol. 2 No 3

by Suzanne Buchan

Editorial for animation: an interdisciplinary journal, (Sage Journals)

Editorial and description of issue contents. Editorial and description of issue contents.

"Liberation of the Mistake: the Quay Brothers"

by Suzanne Buchan

Published in Proof Magazine, Vol. 3 #1, 2008

A glimpse into the Quay Brothers' research process and their influences that lie in the written (and unwritten)... more A glimpse into the Quay Brothers' research process and their influences that lie in the written (and unwritten) histories of art, music, architecture, cinema, performance, and literature.

Stephen and Timothy Quay, collectively known as the Quay Brothers, have a unique ability to tap into a vast range of inspirational sources in their filmmaking process. Much has been written about the ‘alchemy’ of their films, yet the process of how they achieve this alchemy has more in common with a respectful and deeply curious attitude to the commonplace, the forgotten, the arcane, the – on first glance – banal, than with a methodological or systemised searching for materials appropriate to any one film.

They regard themselves as ‘authentic trappers’, be that in the gentle rummaging at a marché aux puce in the boxes of detritus hidden beneath vendor’s tables; not finding a sought-for book in a library, then discovering on the same shelf another volume secreting a wealth of images, diagrams and ideas, or discovering a murmur of muted, scratchy foreign voices while exploring international shortwave radio senders. In countries they have travelled to around the world, the archive, the flea market, the used book seller, the antique shop, the archive, the library, each with their own idiosyncratic ordering and disordering, are the secretive and astonishing sources of ideas, materials, sounds, music and figures that find their way into the Quays’ over 30 films to date.

Editorial Suzanne Buchan Animation: an Interdisciplinary Journal, Jul 2008; vol. 3 No 2

by Suzanne Buchan

Editorial for animation: an interdisciplinary journal, (Sage Journals)

Editorial and description of issue contents. Editorial and description of issue contents.

Editorial Suzanne Buchan Animation: an Interdisciplinary Journal, Jul 2007; Vol. 2 No 2

by Suzanne Buchan

Published in animation: an interdisciplinary journal  (Sage Journals)

Editorial and description of issue contents. Editorial and description of issue contents.

Editorial Suzanne Buchan Animation: an Interdisciplinary Journal, Nov 2006; vol. 1 No 2

by Suzanne Buchan

Published in animation: an interdisciplinary journal

Editorial and issue description.

Editorial and issue description.

Editorial Suzanne Buchan, animation: an interdisciplinary journal, Jul 2006; Vol 1 No 1

by Suzanne Buchan

Published in animation: an interdisciplinary journal (Sage Journals)

Editorial and inaugural issue description. Editorial and inaugural issue description.

Editorial Suzanne Buchan, animation: an interdisciplinary journal, Jul 2006; Vol 1 No 1

by Suzanne Buchan

Published in animation: an interdisciplinary journal (Sage Journals)

Editorial and inaugural issue description. Editorial and inaugural issue description.

L'allégorie dans Metropolis, chez Lang et Rintaro

by Stephane Collignon

travail réalisé en 2005 dans le cadre du cours d'esthétique et philosophie du cinéma suivi pendant ma formation en Écritures et Analyses Cinématographiques à l'Université Libre de Bruxelles.

Études et comparaison des figures allégoriques (personnages, structure du récit, décors, etc) développées dans le... more Études et comparaison des figures allégoriques (personnages, structure du récit, décors, etc) développées dans le Metropolis de Fritz Lang et l'adaptation animée japonaise de Rintaro.

OSCILLATING AT THE 'HIGH/LOW'ART DIVIDE: CURATING AND EXHIBITING ANIMATION

by Suzanne Buchan

Published in : Rugg, Judith (Ed.) Issues in Curating, Contemporary Art and Performance, London: Intellect, 2008, ISBN 9781841501628, pp 131-145. URL: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/books/view-Book,id=4229/

First paragraphs (no abstract)

As a time-based moving image form, animation film is finding its way into... more First paragraphs (no abstract)

As a time-based moving image form, animation film is finding its way into what we can term 'serious' curatorial practice. The current proliferation of exhibitions featuring artists' use of animation that expands their oeuvre into time-based imagery attests to animation's increasing pervasiveness in other types of creative making. As one of the intentions of this publication is to explore curating as a space for critical reflection and argument, here I take a specific attitude, perhaps an arts-political stance, towards the curatorship of animation films. I have been defined elsewhere as 'an activist for imaginative imagination' and what I posit here is culled from my experience as an animation film festival director, a curator by experience, entering the practice obliquely (as distinct from one who has acquired curatorial skills and requisite methodologies via training) and as an academic. Some chapters in this book have dealt with curating the moving image, software art and video, and others have considered the material and virtual status of the work. With time-based art, there is often the reflection that these are emerging curatorial practices taking place in proper exhibition spaces as well as in what may be regarded as non-art venues. This chapter explores different approaches to curating and exhibiting animation as an extremely rich and artefact-based film form in a range of exhibition spaces, in terms of its interdisciplinary affinities with the arts.

Independent animation, that is, animation made without strong commercial backing or control, will be the focus of this chapter. The text's trajectory begins with various strategies of animation curatorship, from festival and cinema programming to gallery installations and museum exhibitions. It then poses some questions as to changing conceptions of animation as an art form, taking into account the diversity of fine arts, design and crafts media used in its production. These ideas are exemplified by a discussion of the Spacetricks animation exhibition, revealing the research-based nature of its conceptual development, selection methods, thematic refinement, adaptation and design of the exhibition architecture and publication. This should illuminate ways to mediate the relationships between pro-filmic artefacts as exhibition materials and the finished films for audiences. It will also address animation's technological shift from a fine arts base to a digital moving-image medium, and explores how, through curatorial and critical engagement, its singular status as both art (to which I hope to make clear why) and moving image can be retained.

Tarantino the Cartoonist

by Chris Pallant

Article: 'Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal'

Walt Disney’s Fantasia: The Cosmos and the Mind in Two Hours

by Bill Benzon

Working notes; c. 30,000 words, 100+ frame grabs.

The range of subjects in Disney’s Fantasia is encyclopedic, placing it in a class with such very different works a... more The range of subjects in Disney’s Fantasia is encyclopedic, placing it in a class with such very different works a Dante’s Divine Comedy, Goethe’s Faust, Melville’s Moby Dick, and Joyce’s Ulysses (cf. Mendelson on encyclopedic narrative and Moretti on the modern epic). The episodes are arranged such that they call on an increasing range of mental faculties with each succeeding episode. In discussions of individual episodes (all of them) I deal with ring-form, animated acting, Freudian undertones, the relationship between sound and imagery, and Jakobon’s poetic function.

'Animating with Facts: The Performative Process of Documentary Animation in "the ten mark" (2010)'

by Paul Ward

animation: an interdisciplinary journal, Volume 6 Issue 3 November 2011 pp. 231 - 244.

Abstract

This article examines how animated films re-present and re-interpret real world occurrences,... more Abstract

This article examines how animated films re-present and re-interpret real world occurrences, people and places, focusing on an area that has been overlooked to date: the process of performance and how this manifests itself in animated documentary films. Not simply a notion of ‘performance’ as we might understand it in an ‘acting’ sense (someone playing a role in a re-enactment), but that of the animator performing specific actions in order to interpret the factual material. The central questions addressed are: how does an understanding of ‘performance’ and the related term ‘performativity’ help us to frame animated/nonfictional acting? What ontological questions are raised by thinking about notions of acting in animation (and the performance instantiated in the very action of animating)? How do viewers relate to, interpret or ‘believe in’ animated films that are asserting real/factually-based stories? The article uses a recent film, the ten mark, as a case study to explore possible answers to these questions.

Keywords

animation, documentary, nonfiction, performance, performativity, puppets, alief.

“Dark Intervals, Mechanics and Magic: Animated Movement as the Illusion of Life”

by Paul Ward

This is a video recording of an invited lecture I gave at the University of Utrecht, 23 September 2011. I was invited by the University's Centre for Humanities and the Holland Animated Film Festival, and will be the first CfH/HAFF Fellow in Spring 2012. During the Fellowship, I will explore in more detail some of the themes mapped out in this lecture, to do with process, materiality and magic.

Curiously Downbeat Hybrid or Radical Retelling?: Neil Jordan's and Angela Carter's The Company of Wolves'

by Charlotte Crofts

Chapter in Cartmell, Huner, Kaye and Whelehan (eds) Sisterhoods Across the Media Divide, Pluto Press, 1998.

A feminist re-reading of Neil Jordan's film adaptation of Angela Carter's The Company of Wolve, cited by fairy tale... more A feminist re-reading of Neil Jordan's film adaptation of Angela Carter's The Company of Wolve, cited by fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes in The Enchanted Screen, The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films, Taylor and Francis, 2010:
http://www.isbnlib.com/preview/0415990629/The-Enchanted-Screen-The-Unknown-History-of-Fairy-Tale-Films
"As Charlotte Crofts points out in her astute essay, the film's foregrounding of storytelling serves a double function, first by contextualizing the violent ..."

Why Leap Over? Redefining the Banks of the Uncanny Valley

by Stephane Collignon

presented at the Swansea Animation Days 2008

With the advent of 3D CGI in the last couple of years, and their ability to push ever further the limits of realism in... more With the advent of 3D CGI in the last couple of years, and their ability to push ever further the limits of realism in animation, scholars have brought back the old robotics theory of the Uncanny Valley under their scrutiny. By doing so, they hope to shed new light on the quest almost as old as animation itself of perfect life like animation.

However some scholars tend to dismiss the theory all together by calling uncanny animation simply bad animation. The aim of this paper, is to study the roots of cartoon design, i.e. caricature, and how it influences audience relationship with the animated character.

By exploring history of art, facial recognition and social
releasing mechanisms the author shows that a simplified caricatural, or cartoony, design can actually trigger stronger emotional responses than even fully realistic animation could. In doing so the author redefines the very curve of the Uncanny Valley to propose a theory that elevates the left side (unrealistic design) of the curve higher than the right one (fully realistic design) to emphasise the actual strengths of unrealistic cartoon style animation while allowing for the existence of uncanny or realistic animation, but perhaps outside the field of animated film
per se.

From 19th Century Print Cartoon to 20th Century Animated Cartoon - How Caricaturists Shaped Early Animated Film

by Stephane Collignon

presented at the 23rd annual Society for Animation Conference in Athens, 18-20 March 2011

In this paper the author aims to show the specific historic and stylistic connections that existed between 19th... more In this paper the author aims to show the specific historic and stylistic connections that existed between 19th century caricature and early animated films. By doing so and by accepting caricature as the essence of animation, the author hopes to shed new light on some of the specificities of animation as an art form and especially its ability to create hyperreal figurines or even, supernatural figurines. That is, not only fantasy characters that look real, but “cartoony”
characters that have the ability to come out as more realistic than less distorted, thus truly more realistic, representations.