TRAUMA — current posts — Fantasy/Animation

Building the Korean Fantasy Epic I Wished I Had Growing Up

As a young artist growing up in NYC in the 1990s and early 2000s, anime and sci-fi/fantasy were my life. Robotech/Macross, Rurouni Kenshin, Gundam, Star Wars, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. These adventures (and many more like them) spirited me away from reality. Yet at the same time, these stories also helped me understand reality too as they featured gripping characters who often carried the fate of the entire cosmos on their backs.

But it dawned on me pretty quickly as a Korean American that there was a gap in the types of stories I was consuming. The Chinese had their fantasy epics which blew my mind with their scale and heroism. The Japanese had incredible anime and samurai stories. And of course the Western world gave us space operas and superheroes. My own homeland Korea though? I couldn’t point to any large-scale epic adventure that had its origin in Korean culture.

CREATIVE REFLECTIONGene KimMay 15, 2026NATIONAL CINEMA, POLITICAL, TRAUMA, ALLEGORYComment

Visualizing Reproductive Fear: Linking Body Metaphors To Traumatic Emotions In The Experimental 2D Animation Born (2024)

Experimental animation often employs metamorphosis and incorporates visual metaphors as strategies to explore concepts such as the cycle of historical trauma, thereby contributing to the transmission of collective memories related to colonialism, apartheid, and war. (Stewart 2024, 7). These transformations not only signify external historical ruptures but also mirror internal emotional upheavals. In this context, the body emerges as a crucial site of expression, metaphorically becoming a space through which the intensity of emotion can be measured (Kövecses 2000, 24). This provides a solid theoretical basis for using the body to express abstract traumatic emotions in experimental animation.

CREATIVE REFLECTIONYixin SunJune 20, 2025TRAUMA, EXPERIMENTAL ANIMATION, BODY, REPRESENTATION, GENDERComment

Review: Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen, 2021)

Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen, 2021) is an animated documentary that explores the nature of memory and trauma by taking the viewer on an emotional journey. It uses animation to present the memories of Amin Nawabi, an Afghan refugee credited under a pseudonym. Encouraged by his anonymity, he tells director Jonas Poher Rasmussen his story (Grobar 2021).

FILM REVIEWMark ThistlewoodApril 8, 2022DOCUMENTARY, TRAUMA, GENDER, SEXUALITY, NATIONAL CINEMAComment

How We Learn to Say the Unsayable: Grief in Fantasy/Animation

In many ways, 2020 is a year marked by many different intertwined sources of grief: all the different kinds of loss associated with a global pandemic and its effect on daily lives; the political and economic situations that have forced a reckoning with an acknowledgement of a loss of idealism – that maybe we aren’t, and never have been, the enlightened society we (the Western European and North America, the Anglophone West in particular) have considered ourselves to be.

EDITORIALMichelle Anya AnjirbagJanuary 22, 2021PIXAR ANIMATION STUDIOS, GRIEF, TRAUMA, NETFLIX, DISNEY, REPRESENTATIONComment