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
Read MoreAs the forenote to The Third Act of Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play warns: Every story ends on a dark and raging river. And in the act of watching the play unfold, so too are we, the audience, cast into this strange new story, floating in a mass of visual and textual signifiers that are at once familiar and strange.
Read MoreWith the celebration this month of the 30th anniversary of Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993), the exploration of dinosaurs in popular culture takes centre stage, as this film and its franchise has achieved a vast global impact. But whilst dinosaurs appear at the forefront of popular culture (do they ever really leave?), we are currently considering the possibility of our own extinction event with the increasingly alarming climate news from North America.
Read MoreLast 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.
Read MoreThe Fall of 2022 marked the 9th year of running of The Factual Animation Film Festival (FAFF). Following the success of 2021, this time the festival maintained its hybrid format offering both in-person and online events. Those who found themselves in Berlin on September 24th, could attend a screening at local Z-inema moderated by Marina Belikova, one the festival’s producers.
Read MoreThe first event of the new BAFTSS Animated SIG was a very spooky one. Threading the often-unexplored relationship between animation and horror and organized by Dr. Sam Summers (Middlesex University), “Animated Horror: An Online Mini-Event” (Fig. 1) took place online on October 19, 2022. Even though it was a short one, the seminar offered a great deal of varied richness on issues of liminality, transformations, and the overlapping of horrific and seemingly innocent content, within animated horror.
Read MoreWas Jim Henson a puppet master or a Muppet pastor? This pun question, posed by writer and Muppet enthusiast Aimee Knight, has stayed with me since the two-day symposium on the legacy of Henson’s work was held at the University of Bristol – and online – on September 16th and 17th 2022.
Read MoreIt is a rare privilege to witness the origins of a globally popular artform like Japanese anime, and even rarer to experience it with live musical accompaniment and traditional Benshi narration.
Read MoreThe well-rehearsed statement that animation is nothing more than a medium ‘for children’ that is ‘not taken seriously’ enough is troubling on two counts. Firstly, it is clearly an assumption that is wide of the mark, as anyone working in the fields of film, media, or animation studies will tell you.
Read MoreWhen it comes to the subject of the relationship between fantasy and animation, few bodies of work are as pertinent to the conversation as the special effects of Ray Harryhausen. The Ray Harryhausen: Titan of Cinema exhibit was set to open in Edinburgh in the summer of 2020 at the National Galleries of Scotland.
Read MoreDuring October 24th-26th 2020, the Kotatsu Animation Festival held its 10th anniversary festival. Sponsored by Japan Foundation London and hailed as Wales’ premiere event for Japanese animation, this year’s event was held online due to the Coronavirus pandemic, with showings of the festival films live on the Kotatsu Japanese Animation Festival YouTube channel and several Zoom Q+A’s and workshops were held.
Read MoreThe University of the Creative Arts (UCA) in Farnham, UK, was the setting for a recent one-day interdisciplinary symposium that confronted the irreverence and subversive potential of caricature and cartoons, pitting together multiple forms of animation with alternate modes of printed and graphic communication to illuminate the power of political (and politicised) pictures.
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