DIGITAL — current posts — Fantasy/Animation

Empowering Inclusion through Animation: Pioneering Digital Resources for Cultural Competency at King’s College London

The story began with discussions with colleagues about cultural competence content to train staff and students. I appreciated the unique insights I had on these perspectives, both as an outsider (experiences I had as a non-native) and as an insider (working as an academic in the UK for the past 17 years). Driven by a desire to address this issue, I began exploring the less overt forms of bias, i.e., microaggressions. While explicit biases are widely acknowledged for their impact, implicit biases are subtler and vary significantly based on individual backgrounds, education, and conditioning.

Another Kind of Magic: Méliès, Mercury, and Machine Learning

The music video for Queen’s “Heaven for Everyone” from their then-final record Made in Heaven (1995) - and a song that originally appeared on Shove It (1991), an album by drummer Roger Taylor’s side project The Cross (and featuring Freddie Mercury as a guest vocalist) - includes somewhat surprisingly footage from Georges Méliès’ early ‘trick’ films A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904).

EDITORIALChristopher HollidayMarch 8, 2024TECHNOLOGY, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, VOICE, STARDOM, CELEBRITY, DIGITALComment

Hollywood’s Big Little Lie: why are digital VFX still cinema’s bad objects?

Judging from both the pre-release marketing materials and industry narratives that have surrounded both Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (Christopher McQuarrie, 2023) and Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023), one would be forgiven for thinking that Hollywood still retains something of an aversion to digital VFX.

EDITORIALChristopher HollidayJuly 21, 2023SPECIAL EFFECTS, DIGITAL, COMPUTER ANIMATION, HOLLYWOOD, FRANCHISEComment

Review: BAFTSS Animation SIG Posthumous & Posthuman Animation Online Seminar

Last week the BAFTSS Animation SIG presented another stellar online event. This time the SIG offered to explore the uncanny territories of posthumous and posthuman animation. Organized by Dr. Sam Summers (Middlesex University) and featuring works-in-progress by a doctoral student Alice Giuliani (University of West London) and Dr. Christopher Holliday (King’s College London), the Posthumous & Posthuman Animation seminar took place on Zoom on May 10th 2023.

EVENT REVIEWAnastasiia GushchinaMay 19, 2023POSTHUMANISM, DIGITAL, ANIMATION, HOLLYWOOD, POLITICALComment

On Tom Cruise's Animated Face

Mission: Impossible II (John Woo, 2000) - the second feature in the evergreen Hollywood blockbuster franchise - is a film fascinated by the creative possibilities of Tom Cruise’s face. The film’s extended opening sequence (comprising ostensibly of two action set-pieces, see left) is structured from the start by the drama and jeopardy engendered by the star’s recognisable physiognomy.

EDITORIALChristopher HollidayApril 28, 2023HOLLYWOOD, STARDOM, DIGITAL, FACE, COMPUTER ANIMATION, SPECIAL EFFECTS, DEEPFAKESComment

Fictional World-Building in Animation and/as Writing Pedagogy

During the 2020-21 academic year, I convened a module on writing that used the significance of representation in fictional worlds (a key element of both fantasy storytelling and animated media) to guide undergraduate students through the challenges of writing across disciplinary boundaries.

The 10 Things to Break into the Animation Industry as a Lighting Artist

My name is Michael Tanzillo, and I’ve worked for years in the animation industry at top studios like Blue Sky Studios, and on computer-animated feature films such as Ice Age (Chris Wedge, 2002), Rio (Carlos Saldanha, 2011), and Ferdinand (Carlos Saldanha, 2017).

EDITORIALMichael TanzilloJanuary 28, 2022COMPUTER ANIMATION, DIGITAL, HOLLYWOOD, LIGHTINGComment

Review: The Wheel of Time (Rafe Judkins, 2021-)

The Wheel of Time (Rafe Judkins, 2021) is a highly anticipated Amazon Prime TV series based on Robert Jordan’s book series under the same title. The first season comprises eight episodes and recounts the events from The Eye of the World (1990), the first volume of Jordan’s epic saga, introducing its main characters in a familiar Tolkienian fashion.

TELEVISION REVIEWAga J. DrendaJanuary 14, 2022FANTASY, AMAZON, DIGITAL, SPECIAL EFFECTS, ADAPTATIONComment

Looking at Pixar’s Soul

Pixar’s much-delayed computer-animated fantasy film, Soul (Pete Docter, 2020), was originally scheduled for theatrical release in the U.S. on June 19, 2020, yet was finally released on the Disney+ platform almost a year ago in December 2020. The story follows the life of a middle school music teacher named Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) who falls down a manhole on the streets of New York City into another world, a world in which his soul is separated from his body.

Pixar’s Loop (Erica Milsom, 2020) – Celebrating Difference

Pixar’s Loop (Erica Milsom, 2020) is an animated short film from Pixar Animation Studios, and part of the “SparkShorts” program that was designed to discover new storytellers and artists by producing short films on a smaller time frame and budget, giving directors freedom to explore new stories, techniques and workflows.

EDITORIALJessica GibsonJuly 2, 2021PIXAR ANIMATION STUDIOS, DISABILITY, GENDER, COMPUTER ANIMATION, DIGITALComment

Reconsidering Arlo: The Good Dinosaur, Cuteness, and Subverting Meanings of the Dinosaur

Since its release in 2015, Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur (directed by Peter Sohn) has accrued a less-than-spectacular reputation. At the time of writing this blog, aggregated scores on sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic place the film towards the bottom of Pixar’s oeuvre.

Board of being lost: Robin Williams and the fantasy film Jumanji

The idea of the film star is bound up in the idea of ‘pure entertainment’ in two ways: a sense of an ideal world in which dilemmas and conflicts are harmoniously resolved, and in terms of the ways in which film stars offer audiences an idealised and intensified set of behaviours. With that in mind, one of the ways the 1995 fantasy film Jumanji (Joe Johnston, 1995) holds our interest is how it is the ‘authored’ work of a film star: in this case, Robin Williams.

EDITORIALJames ClarkeDecember 4, 2020FANTASY, CHILDREN, STARDOM, DIGITALComment

"The biggest star in the world": re-animating the king in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)

Michael Dougherty’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) was the thirty-fifth feature to star the giant kaiju (the Japanese word generally used to refer to giant movie monsters). Although it was the latest in a series of films spanning 65 years, it was only the fourth time that “the Big G” had appeared as a fully digitally animated creature, discounting the anime series on Netflix (2017/8).

EDITORIALSteven RawleApril 10, 2020MONSTERS, SPECIAL EFFECTS, DIGITAL, CGI, REMAKE, REBOOTComment

Review: Sonic the Hedgehog (Jeff Fowler, 2020)

On 23rd June 1991, the first Sonic the Hedgehog game was released. For almost 29 years since this first appearance on the Sega Genesis, Sonic has been loved all around the world for being the fastest, coolest hedgehog the world has ever seen, and for being an enduring and iconic figure within the gaming industry.

FILM REVIEWAndrew James ProudFebruary 21, 2020DIGITAL, ADAPTATION, VIDEO GAME, HOLLYWOOD, SPECIAL EFFECTS Comment

Review: Cats (Tom Hooper, 2019)

2019 was a bad year for cats: deaths of notable cats and cat owners, political defeat, and finally, worst of all, Cats (Tom Hooper, 2019) (Fig. 1). When the first Cats trailer was released last summer, it was soon subject to hyperbolic displays of disgust across social media. Reviews of the eventual film were no better. And all the criticisms are true.

FILM REVIEWMartha ShearerJanuary 10, 2020DIGITAL, ANIMALS, MUSICAL, HOLLYWOODComment