A recurring motif in Japanese animation and contemporary climate fiction animation is the misuse of technology by fictional scientific and militaristic authorities, which in the fictional narratives leads to severe disaster, often with ecological and environmental consequences. In this context, “living weapons” – powerful beings created by science whose impact and abilities are reminiscent of weapons of mass destruction – are particularly potent. Living weapons are “fantasy characters who exist in alternative worlds and become embroiled in implausible plot lines” (Swale 2020, 1999). As archetypes, they prompt reflection on the depiction of cultural notions of catastrophe, particularly environmental catastrophe, and are often explored as symptomatic of deep-rooted and durable cultural anxieties about disastrous scientific incidents.

Animation is inherently queer. The very process of destabilising the rigid boundaries of the human body and abstracting it into shapes and colours that we can project ourselves onto is essentially a process of queering. In their article “Why Are Cartoons So Queer?” for Sunstroke Magazine, Kellie Toyama remarks that “the flexible nature of animation gives stories the added potential to introduce fluid concepts of gender and sexuality with ease,” making animation the perfect medium to visualise the queer experience. As Paul Wells states, “the animated film has the capacity to redefine orthodoxies of live-action narrative and images,” an analysis that Kodi Maier elaborates on by linking his discussion directly to queer theory: “animation’s elasticity opens a realm where ideas of normalcy are disrupted and hidden potentials are revealed much in the same way that queer theory disrupts common understandings of gender and sexuality to explore other options in regards to embodiment and expression.” Why is it, then, that mainstream animation has for so long been afraid of queerness?

Tokusatsu is a Japanese media genre that translates roughly to “special effects,” hallmarked by its use of suits and over-the-top action scenes in a live action production. Think Godzilla and Ultraman, or Power Rangers for readers around my age. The reason I find myself interested in tokusatsu is that over-the-top spectacle. There’s not a lot that hits for me much better than a guy in a well-designed suit performing a flashy kick into a gross rubber monster suit accompanied by a huge explosion.

One of the concepts in a story involving characters is the character arc. In addition to being used to build the story structure, the arc also creates the conditions by which the audience might feel sympathy for the main character. When the main character begins at a certain emotional point, but by the end of the story experiences a change to a different point, that is the character arc (Myers 2022, 19). In his book Beyond the Hero's Journey, Anthony Mullins defines characters into two types: change and constant, and three types of arcs: optimistic, pessimistic, and ambivalent.

You’ve probably binge-watched animated shows or scrolled through endless GIFs, but have you ever wondered how animation actually began? Let’s rewind to 1832—before Netflix, before Disney, even before flipbooks—to meet the Phenakistoscope, the great-great-grandparent of all moving pictures. This device used cardboard, mirrors, and optical magic to make static images dance. Let’s dive into how this forgotten gadget sparked a revolution—and why it’s making a comeback today.

In 2020, the American streaming giant Netflix acquired global streaming rights (excluding the United States and Japan) for the films of Studio Ghibli. Audiences have since been enjoying a collection of the world-famous Ghibli animation films from My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988), Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2002), and Ponyo (Hayao Miyazaki, 2008) for nearly 5 years. But there was one exception. The 1988 film Grave of the Fireflies, directed by the co-founder of Studio Ghibli Isao Takahata was on the waiting list for 4 years, before finally arriving onto the platform on September 16, 2024.

Stories typically follow a structure of beginning, middle, and end, where characters move from their known world into a challenge, and then either overcome or fail it, leading to change. Joseph Campbell’s monomyth (2008) highlights this structure's universality, but exploring alternatives to traditional narrative patterns can lead to unique storytelling approaches. The narrative of mystery, according to Knobloch-Westerwick et al shows that the balance between suspense and resolution enhances audience satisfaction. The Interpretive Character Unravelling Framework (ICUF) builds on these ideas by applying the mystery genre’s principles and concepts of surrealism to character development, engaging the audience in unravelling characters themselves through interpretation rather than direct exposition.

Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs was one of the earliest animated American films to place a Black woman as the main character. Directed by Bob Clampett at Warner Brothers in 1942, the character of So White set a precedent for three further Black female lead characters in future Warner Brothers animated projects. However, introduced as a “happy washerwoman made for a jazzier version of the mammy stereotype” (Lehman 2007, 78), So White contributes to a larger structure of racism within American animation, hindering the progression of positive representation for future Black women as animated characters. The question that this blog investigates is whether the representation of Black women in Warner Brothers animation has truly improved since the introduction of So White, or do So White’s successors continue to perpetrate harmful stereotypes about African American women?