Animation director Shaun Magher, who created the video, recalls that “In 1991, I was keen to establish my own animation studio, after recently graduating from the National Film and Television school, and was represented by a new production company, headed up by Fiona Stylianou, called Popata. We were approached by MCA records to look at a new release from Holly Johnson, who had firmly established his solo career beyond the earlier success with Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Holly wanted to develop a fantasy sci-fi adventure for his latest track Across the Universe, where he and his sidekick, Funky his faithful pooch, would traverse the universe. Johnson wanted a mix of “Tintin styling in a Star Trek universe.”

This piece combines the analytical and contextual writing of Shaun Magher and James Clarke with a series of first-person accounts and recollections offered by Magher relating to a series of specific case studies that illustrate the article’s area of exploration.

Across the spectrum of popular music, there’s a fascinating seam that intersects with music, visual culture, and animation. That intersecting seam is the form of the animated music video. These short animations have a rich tradition, and the animated aesthetic can offer a version of a rock/pop star as a fantasy incarnation of themselves.

The Tricky Women International Animated Film Festival, screening works by female and genderqueer artists, aspires to the fantastical vision, “to imagine a world that is different from the one we currently live in.” Given its radical agenda, it is remarkable that host city Vienna has consistently supported this event for twenty-five successive years in some of its finest cinemas, attended by diverse audiences and sponsored by prestigious patrons (Fig. 1). The strategic positioning of the festival to coincide with International Women’s Day welds it into feminist history. The ambition for transformation is proposed at both the organisational level, the shared director role broadening strategies for inclusion, and the programming, with films characterised by fantastical themes of transgression, mobilised most persistently through the figure of the monstrous female body.

Since the release of the recent Dragonflight update, Blizzard has once again brought the relevance and interest of players to the profession system and added many game mechanics to strengthen it. These are items with characteristics, tools and a new mechanic - Crafting Orders. This system continued to develop in The War Within, so if you want to earn a lot of WoW gold, then you need to be on trend and master one of the most important professions for strengthening the character - Enchanting.

The Society for Animation Studies (SAS), one of the world’s most well-known and popular international organizations dedicated to the study of animation history, theory and practice, holds an annual conference at locations throughout the world each year, where members present their recent research. The 36th Annual Society for Animation Studies conference took place between 7th-10th July 2025, hosted in Elephant & Castle, London, by the Screen School, London College of Communication (LCC), University of the Arts London (UAL). This year’s conference title was ‘Sustaining Animation’, and was inspired by UAL’s key values of climate, social and racial justice, and equality, diversity, and inclusion.

In many fantasy stories, magic is drawn from ancient relics or arcane symbols, but what if it came from something as simple, intimate, and culturally rich as a cup of tea? In Tea Leaves Last, a 2D animatic pilot made by Asians in Animation, that’s the recipe. The story follows Mya, a young woman from a small farming nation as she ventures out to bring back forgotten Tea magic to the world. This society revolves around the plant – it is used in place of water for everything from bathing to drinking to waterfalls and lakes of tea. But the choice of this drink has deeper meaning. As the world’s most widely consumed drink, tea originates from a region between Burma (Myanmar) and China, with which showrunner Saira Umar shares ethnic roots. Tea’s journey to global presence has shaped empires and incited revolutions from the Boston Tea Party to the Opium Wars. It is a drink of ritual, rebellion, and colonial entanglement, serving as a perfect foundation of an entire magical ecosystem.

In the previous blog, I analyzed Stromae’s verse from the song Ma Meilleure Ennemie as a reflection of Ekko’s emotional struggle in the animated series Arcane. This part is about Pomme’s verse and how it can be interpreted as a representation of Jinx’s inner guilt. Pomme has a softer voice that contrasts with the chaotic atmosphere that Jinx is often associated with. I will explore how both the lyrics and the visuals of the music video reflect Jinx’s fractured sense of self, emotional paralysis and duality between desiring connection and fearing it at the same time.

This is the first of two blogs that focus on music as narrative in the animated series Arcane (Christian Linke & Alex Yee, 2021-) supported by an analysis of its animation and character development. The series is set within the League of Legends (2009-) universe, an online multiplayer videogame created by Riot Games. It takes place in various fictional lands populated by hundreds of different champions, some of whom are explored in Arcane.