The Perils and Problems of Fantasy and Animation
The Perils and Problems of Fantasy and Animation

From Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream to Disney’s Frozen (Jennifer Lee & Chris Buck, 2013), fantasy storytelling across multiple media has allowed authors to create grand tales of myths, magic, lore, love, and sacrifice. Since the codes and conventions of fantasy do not require the storyteller to be shackled to our world’s laws, sensitivities, cultures, or even physics, the fantastical worlds available to the genre blow us away by what can be possible if we just suspend possibilities, even for a while, so that dragons can fly in our midst and wizards can reveal to us our heroic destinies!

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EDITORIALAshton WhiteTELEVISION, SPECIAL EFFECTS, SPECTATORSHIPComment
Fantastic Turkish Cinema: Re-make or Not Re-make, That’s the Question - Part 2
Fantastic Turkish Cinema: Re-make or Not Re-make, That’s the Question - Part 2

In the previous blog post, I introduced a couple of eccentric films that have since been celebrated as cult classics. Rumour has it that The Man Who Saves the World, mentioned in that post, has been selected as one of the ten worst films ever made and is taught at universities in the US as an example of how not to make a film.

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EDITORIALSedef HizlanNATIONAL CINEMA, ADAPTATION, TURKISH CINEMA, SUPERHERO, FANTASY, REMAKEComment
Fantastic Turkish Cinema: Re-make or Not Re-make, That’s the Question - Part I
Fantastic Turkish Cinema: Re-make or Not Re-make, That’s the Question - Part I

Believe it or not, Yeşilçam, the studio system of Turkey, which became dominant from the 1960s to the 1980s, essentially introduced classical cinema to Turks. It drew its production systems from Hollywood—big producers familiarized themselves with the studio structure in Los Angeles and brought the same system back home—but localized the content to reflect the specific experiences of Turkish society.

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EDITORIALSedef HizlanNATIONAL CINEMA, ADAPTATION, TURKISH CINEMA, SUPERHERO, FANTASY, REMAKEComment
ZOMA Studios' Mmanwu
ZOMA Studios' Mmanwu

Since its inception, the animation industry has been a storytelling engine: telling all types of stories from all types of people. However, according to the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, the animation industry still has a representation problem. Multidisciplinary artist, Uzo Ngwu, is trying to combat the lack of African representation in animation with her newly founded studio ZOMA Studios and their debut project Mmanwu.

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EDITORIALUzo NgwuREPRESENTATION, IDENTITY, MAGICAL REALISM, NATIONAL CINEMAComment
Fantasy/Animation: David Bordwell (1947-2024)
Fantasy/Animation: David Bordwell (1947-2024)

To mark the life of distinguished film theorist and historian David Bordwell (1947-2024), and to add to the many tributes from across the disciplines of film and media studies, Chris and Alex have begun to collect some of Professor Bordwell’s writings that connect to fantasy and animation both in print and on his website davidbordwell.net and accompanying blog Observations on Film Art.

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EDITORIALChristopher Holliday and Alexander SergeantHOLLYWOOD, FILM HISTORY, CRITICISM, INTERPRETATION Comments
Colour and Motion: Some Notes on Spielberg’s Fantasy and Science Fiction Films and the Visual Style of Vincente Minnelli
Colour and Motion: Some Notes on Spielberg’s Fantasy and Science Fiction Films and the Visual Style of Vincente Minnelli

As a student, a long time ago, at the University of Warwick, I took a seat in the library one day, the photocopiers nearby chugging and churning away, and opened the new issue (May-June 1992) of Film Comment. As a lifelong devotee (I was only 19) of Steven Spielberg’s movies you can perhaps imagine my astonishment when I turned a page to find an essay entitled “The Panning of Steven Spielberg (Part One),” written by Henry Sheehan. To this day, Sheehan’s piece remains a touchstone in writing about Spielberg’s filmmaking. Limited to the space of a magazine page, Sheehan’s eventual two-part essay made such sense, and it was the first time that I’d really read something about Spielberg’s films that looked so consistently at the film style being deployed across his body of work.

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EDITORIALJames ClarkeMUSICAL, STYLE, COLOUR, HOLLYWOODComment
Another Kind of Magic: Méliès, Mercury, and Machine Learning
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).

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EDITORIALChristopher HollidayTECHNOLOGY, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, VOICE, STARDOM, CELEBRITY, DIGITALComment
“Two Cadaverous Vultures”: Disney’s Gift to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
“Two Cadaverous Vultures”: Disney’s Gift to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York

In January 1939, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced its acceptance of an animation cel set-up from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937) and “presented by the artist, Walt Disney” (Burroughs, 1939) (Fig. 1). The gift — an ink and gouache painting on transparent celluloid, laid over a hand-painted background — was duly hung with the museum’s other “recent accessions,” and immediately generated considerable coverage in the nation’s major newspapers, magazines, and wire services.

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EDITORIALHeather HolianARCHIVES, HOLLYWOOD, CARTOON, DISNEY, CEL ANIMATION, ARTISTComment
Interview with Mikkel Mainz (SKJALD Animation)
Interview with Mikkel Mainz (SKJALD Animation)

In this week’s blog, Fantasy/Animation sat down with Mikkel Mainz of SKJALD Animation studio, a full-pipeline creative house and animation studio located in Denmark, to discuss its experience working on successful web series and feature films, the interpretation of music through animated style, and SKJALD’s future animated projects.

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EDITORIALChristopher Holliday and Alexander SergeantAESTHETICS, STYLE, HORROR, MUSIC VIDEOComment
Representations of Femininity: International Perspectives - Liyana (Aaron and Amanda Kopp, 2017)
Representations of Femininity: International Perspectives - Liyana (Aaron and Amanda Kopp, 2017)

This blog post examines the 2017 film Liyana, directed by Aaron and Amanda Kopp, which describes itself as a “genre-defying documentary” that weaves together both animation and live-action scenes to tell the story of five orphaned children in the Kingdom of Eswatini. Yet its reflexive framing narrative focuses on the children’s creation of their own fictional tale featuring the fearless Liyana, who as part of the film’s story-within-a-story structure embarks on a treacherous quest to save her younger brothers.

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EDITORIALRosie ThomsonGENDER, IDENTITY, RACEComment
The Case for Progress: Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Neuralink
The Case for Progress: Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Neuralink

What if you could Google search in your mind? What if you could have a much better memory? Be effortlessly good at arithmetic, or able to suddenly display a talent for drawing or composing music ? What if you could communicate your thoughts and feelings in rich detail directly to another specific human being without speaking? What if you could become much smarter? What would you do?

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EDITORIALVictoria BaltagARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, ROBOTS, MACHINE, POSTHUMANISMComment
Review: Cartoon Saloon at 25 – The Short Films of Cartoon Saloon + Q&A
Review: Cartoon Saloon at 25 – The Short Films of Cartoon Saloon + Q&A

The month of January marked the celebration of a milestone anniversary at the BFI Southbank in London with “Cartoon Saloon at 25”, a season dedicated to the Kilkenny studio. The Short Films of Cartoon Saloon, also part of the London Short Film Festival 2024, showcased eight shorts by many of the key figures of the studio. The programme exhibited a great stylistic variety, while also displaying a coherence with the feature films and engagement with complex themes

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EVENT REVIEWEleonora SammartinoCARTOON SALOON, HISTORYComment
Review: Stella Hockenhull and Frances Pheasant-Kelly (eds.), Tim Burton’s Bodies: Gothic, Animated, Corporeal and Creaturely (2021)
Review: Stella Hockenhull and Frances Pheasant-Kelly (eds.), Tim Burton’s Bodies: Gothic, Animated, Corporeal and Creaturely (2021)

Tim Burton’s Bodies provides a distinctive body-centric approach to the analysis of Burton’s back-catalogue of animated and live-action films (see Fig. 1 for book cover). Tim Burton is an internationally celebrated filmmaker, animator and artist who has worked in the industry since the 1980s. His work is commercially and critically acclaimed and is mostly associated with the fantasy horror sub-genre, the macabre and spectral, animated corpses and grotesque outsider protagonists.

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BOOK REVIEWAnna BlagroveTIM BURTON, STOP-MOTION, GENDER, FEMINISM, ANIMATIONComment
Divine Love in Animation: Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron (2023)
Divine Love in Animation: Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron (2023)

Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron (2023) is a beautiful bewilderment. It is the auteur’s innermost introspection on what it means to live, or exactly, how we live. Miyazaki is no stranger to isekai (異世界) world-building with his idiosyncratic imagination. His films combine a sense of the real-world situation with irreal events. The Boy and the Heron is no exception. However, as many reviews have already noted, this film is not an easy ride.

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EDITORIALBin Yee AngSTUDIO GHIBLI, FANTASY, JAPAN, ANIME, NATUREComment
Review: The Boy and the Heron (Hayao Miyazaki, 2023)
Review: The Boy and the Heron (Hayao Miyazaki, 2023)

Miyazaki Hayao’s newest film, The Boy and the Heron (Kimitachi wa dou ikiru ka『君たちはどう生きるか』lit. “How do you live?”) is a Studio Ghibli film about personal growth in a world you cannot control. It’s a tad amusing, too, if you are reading this review before watching the film. I cannot say whether knowing anything before viewing the film is better, as the studio intended, or if context (and warning) are warranted to level any preconceptions based on Ghibli’s and Miyazaki’s reputations or general hype. In either case, perhaps it is best to view the film free of expectations beyond the obvious: beautiful, hand-drawn Ghibli animation.

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FILM REVIEWRosaley GaiJAPAN, STUDIO GHIBLI, CHILDHOOD, FANTASYComment
Candyfloss Clouds and Vampires: Notes on Peter Pan (2003)
Candyfloss Clouds and Vampires: Notes on Peter Pan (2003)

Screen adaptations of the story about the boy who never grew up are plentiful, and there’s certainly a pleasure in plotting the variations and distinctions of each version. Contrary to the idea that a sequel, another retelling, or another iteration, suggests creative bankruptcy might it instead suggest new things of interest to find in each successive contribution to a particular franchise or filmography.

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EDITORIALJames ClarkePETER PAN, FANTASY, ADAPTATION, HOLLYWOODComment
Rethinking the Disney Renaissance
Rethinking the Disney Renaissance

The Disney Renaissance is one of those curious constructs that circulates among the Walt Disney Company and its fan communities, entering academic studies of Disney animation largely unchallenged. What, exactly, was the Disney Renaissance? One of the many pleasures and privileges of being an animation scholar is not only to think about Disney, but to think about how we think about Disney. And unsurprisingly, a lot of the critical discourse on Disney is shaped by Disney itself.

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EDITORIALPeter C. KunzeDISNEY, HISTORY, ANIMATION, CEL ANIMATION, HOLLYWOODComment
Radical Hybridity in Early Silent Film
Radical Hybridity in Early Silent Film

In seeking to describe the sensation of something irreducibly different about films made prior to the institutionalisation of cinema in 1915, film historian Andre Gaudreault refers to the “alien quality” of early cinema (2011, 36). In this blog post, I explore a technique found in the first decades of filmmaking which is certainly alien to commercial cinema today – the representation of an object, character or place in multiple styles within the same film e.g. live action, illustration, puppetry, stop motion.

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EDITORIALJudy HarrisSILENT CINEMA, EARLY FILM, FILM HISTORY, SPECIAL EFFECTS, HYBRIDITY Comment