STORYTELLING — current posts — Fantasy/Animation

The Mermaid of Venice

Cristina Kovacs is a passionate creator of digital art with a focus on character design and visual development. Her dream is to make a difference by connecting and inspiring people of all walks of life through creativity and zeal in the field of animation. Her senior capstone, The Mermaid of Venice, is a visual development pitch deck for a proposed 5-7 animated short film. Its story begins in 17th century Venice, when masquerade balls are at the height of their historical popularity—and humans are not the only guests in attendance.

CREATIVE REFLECTIONCristina KovacsMay 29, 2026CREATIVE PRACTICE, ANIMATION, STORYTELLING, CHARACTERComment

From Page to Screen: How Fantasy Stories Evolve into Animated Worlds

A book sits quietly on a shelf. Then, years later, it breathes fire on a cinema screen. This transformation — from static words to vivid animation — is one of the most complex creative journeys in modern entertainment. It is not simply a copy-paste process. Everything changes: pace, tone, visual language, even the emotional core of the story itself. Fantasy, above all genres, demands the most from animators. Why? Because fantasy worlds exist only in the reader's imagination until someone decides to build them for real.

EDITORIALAlisha TorresMay 23, 2026ADAPTATION, FANTASY, STORYTELLING

Transformers: The Movie (1986) and the Refusal of the Call trope

Joseph Campbell identifies the refusal of the call in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces as a story trope where the main protagonist of the story is called to an adventure but refuses to go. The hero’s reluctance to act can come from a variety of reasons that are usually psychological in nature. Emotions such as guilt or fear try to keep the hero homebound so that he/she cannot soar and reach their full heroic potential. It is an age-old trend that is found in all mediums of mankind’s story form. Everything from epic poems, oral fairy tales, literary fiction, television shows and finally movies. It is a part of the storytelling tradition that Campbell famously calls “The Monomyth.”

SEQUENCE ANALYSISShakeem R. WinnOctober 31, 2025NARRATIVE, STORYTELLING, HOLLYWOOD, ADAPTATION Comments

Vonnworld: The Animated Series

On the evening of February 28th 2015 in an East Oakland neighborhood in northern California, Davon Malik Ellis was walking with a couple of his friends to the store from his football coach's home when he was stopped by a random stranger and shot to death. He was only 14 years old with a promising future in football. It was this random violent act that birthed the idea of the animated project Vonnworld: The Animated Series

EDITORIALBruce BowersJanuary 13, 2023TELEVISION, RACE, AMERICA, STORYTELLINGComment

Review: Karma Waltonen and Denise Du Vernay, The Simpsons’ Beloved Springfield (2019)

Since its first full-length episode, “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire” (1989) (Fig. 1), The Simpsons (1989-) has been nominated for a plethora of awards. It is the first animated series to win an esteemed Peabody Award (1997), which was created to honour powerful, enlightening, and invigorating stories in media, and it has won 34 Emmy Awards across all areas of its production, which is an impressive result for an animated TV series.

BOOK REVIEWAmy HarrisNovember 5, 2021TELEVISION, COMEDY, STORYTELLING, ANIMATION, THE SIMPSONSComment

Review: Joseph Michael Sommers & Kyle Eveleth (eds.), The Artistry of Neil Gaiman: Finding Light in the Shadows (2019)

Neil Gaiman should be a familiar name to aficionados of speculative fiction. His oeuvre is characterised by its variety of written forms and its tendency to draw on anything from whispered urban legends to ancient religious texts, and from Victorian high literature to 1980s pulp fantasy.

BOOK REVIEWRhian WallerJuly 9, 2021NARRATIVE, STORYTELLING, SPECULATIVE FICTIONComment