Animated Realism


Book Description

With the development and accessibility of animation tools and techniques, filmmakers are blurring the boundaries between documentary filmmaking and animation. The intimacy, imperfection and charm of the animated form is providing live-action and animation directors with unique ways to tell stories, humanize events and convey information not easily adapted for live-action media. "Animated Realism" presents animation techniques as they apply to the documentary genre with an inspirational behind-the-scenes look at award-winning animated documentaries. Animators and documentary filmmakers alike will learn how to develop a visual style with animation, translate a graphic novel into a documentary and use 3D animation as a storytelling tool, all in the context of creating animated documentaries. With insight and inspiration, "Animated Realism" includes interviews from industry luminaries like John Canemaker, Oscar Winning Director of "The Moon and the Son", Yoni Goodman, Animation Director of Oscar Nominated Waltz with Bashir and Chris Landreth, Oscan Winning creator of Ryan. Packed with beautiful, instructive illustrations and previously unpublished material (including storyboards, photos and hand-drawn sketches) and interspersed with interviews - this is an exceptional source of inspiration and knowledge for animators, students and fans alike. With a companion website featuring animated shorts from leading animated documentaries, animators, students and documentary filmmakers will be able to analyze and apply Oscar-winning animation techniques to their own films. Learn from the best...Judith Kriger interviews some of the most innovative and inspirational animators, including John Canemaker, Oscar Winning Director of "The Moon and the Son", Yoni Goodman, Animation Director of Oscar Nominated Waltz with Bashir and Chris Landreth, Oscan Winning Director of Ryan.




Animated Realism


Book Description

Unique insight into the techniques of Oscar winning Animated documentaries from the some of the world's leading animators.




Understanding Animation


Book Description

First Published in 1998. Understanding Animation is a comprehensive introduction to animated film, from cartoons to computer animation. Paul Wells' insightful account of a critically neglected but increasingly popular medium: * explains the defining characteristics of animation as a cinematic form * outlines different models and methods which can be used to interpret and evaluate animated films * traces the development of animated film around the world, from Betty Boop to Wallace and Gromit. Part history, part theory, and part celebration, Understanding Animation includes: * notes towards a theory of animation * an explanation of animation's narrative strategies * an analyis of how comic events are constructed * a discussion of representation, focusing on gender and race * primary research on animation and audiences. Paul Wells' argument is illustrated with case studies, including Daffy Duck in Chuck Jones' Duck Amuck, Jan Svankmajer's Jabberwocky, Tex Avery's Little Rural Riding Hood and King Size Canary ', and Nick Park's Creature Comforts. Understanding Animation demonstrates that the animated film has much to tell us about ourselves, the cultures we live in, and our view of art and society.




The Animation Studies Reader


Book Description

The Animation Studies Reader brings together both key writings within animation studies and new material in emerging areas of the field. The collection provides readers with seminal texts that ground animation studies within the contexts of theory and aesthetics, form and genre, and issues of representation. The first section collates key readings on animation theory, on how we might conceptualise animation, and on some of the fundamental qualities of animation. New material is also introduced in this section specifically addressing questions raised by the nature, style and materiality of animation. The second section outlines some of the main forms that animation takes, which includes discussions of genre. Although this section cannot be exhaustive, the material chosen is particularly useful as it provides samples of analysis that can illuminate some of the issues the first section of the book raises. The third section focuses on issues of representation and how the medium of animation might have an impact on how bodies, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity are represented. These representations can only be read through an understanding of the questions that the first two sections of the book raise; we can only decode these representations if we take into account form and genre, and theoretical conceptualisations such as visual pleasure, spectacle, the uncanny, realism etc.




Animating Film Theory


Book Description

Animating Film Theory provides an enriched understanding of the relationship between two of the most unwieldy and unstable organizing concepts in cinema and media studies: animation and film theory. For the most part, animation has been excluded from the purview of film theory. The contributors to this collection consider the reasons for this marginalization while also bringing attention to key historical contributions across a wide range of animation practices, geographic and linguistic terrains, and historical periods. They delve deep into questions of how animation might best be understood, as well as how it relates to concepts such as the still, the moving image, the frame, animism, and utopia. The contributors take on the kinds of theoretical questions that have remained underexplored because, as Karen Beckman argues, scholars of cinema and media studies have allowed themselves to be constrained by too narrow a sense of what cinema is. This collection reanimates and expands film studies by taking the concept of animation seriously. Contributors. Karen Beckman, Suzanne Buchan, Scott Bukatman, Alan Cholodenko, Yuriko Furuhata, Alexander R. Galloway, Oliver Gaycken, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Tom Gunning, Andrew R. Johnston, Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, Gertrud Koch, Thomas LaMarre, Christopher P. Lehman, Esther Leslie, John MacKay, Mihaela Mihailova, Marc Steinberg, Tess Takahashi




The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation


Book Description

David Whitley's compelling study complicates our understanding of the classic Disney canon by focusing on the way images of the natural world are mediated within popular art for children. He examines a range of Disney's feature animations, from Snow White to Finding Nemo, to show that, even as the films communicate the central ideologies of their times, they also express the ambiguities and tensions that underlie these dominant values.




Animated Landscapes


Book Description

The first comprehensive study of animated landscapes across media.




3D and Animated Lenticular Photography


Book Description

Scholars are increasingly investigating photography’s broad cultural role, expanding our understanding of the diversity of photographic practices. Kim Timby contributes to this new history of photography by examining the multifaceted story of images that animate with a flick of the wrist or appear vividly three-dimensional without the use of special devices—both made possible by the lenticular process. Using French case studies, this volume broadly weaves 3D and animated lenticular imagery into scientific and popular culture, from early cinema and color reproduction to the birth of modern advertising and the market for studio portraits, postcards, and religious imagery. The motivations behind the invention and reinvention of this pervasive form of imagery, from the turn of the twentieth century through the end of the pre-digital era, shed new light on our relationship to photographic realism and on the forceful interplay in photography between technological innovation and the desire to be entertained. 3D and Animated Lenticular Photography: Between Utopia and Entertainment is a profusely illustrated and engaging interdisciplinary study of a wide-ranging body of images that have fascinated viewers for generations.




Pervasive Animation


Book Description

This new addition to the AFI Film Readers series brings together original scholarship on animation in contemporary moving image culture, from classic experimental and independent shorts to digital animation and installation. The collection - that is also a philosophy of animation - foregrounds new critical perspectives on animation, connects them to historical and contemporary philosophical and theoretical contexts and production practice, and expands the existing canon. Throughout, contributors offer an interdisciplinary roadmap of new directions in film and animation studies, discussing animation in relationship to aesthetics, ideology, philosophy, historiography, visualization, genealogies, spectatorship, representation, technologies, and material culture.




The Classical Animated Documentary and Its Contemporary Evolution


Book Description

The Classical Animated Documentary and Its Contemporary Evolution is the first book to provide an historical insight into the animated documentary. Drawing on archival research and textual analysis, it shows how this form, usually believed to be strictly contemporaneous, instead took shape in the 1940s. Cristina Formenti integrates a theoretical and a historical approach in order to shed new light on the animated documentary as a form as well as on the work of renowned studios such as The Walt Disney Studios, Halas & Batchelor, National Film Board of Canada and never before addressed ones, such as Corona Cinematografica. She also highlights the differences and the similarities existing among the animated documentaries created between the 1940s and the mid-1980s and those produced today so as to demonstrate how the latter do not represent a complete otherness in respect to the former, but rather an evolution.