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?

Trial of Osiris is a competitive player versus player (PVP) mode for the 2017 online video game Destiny 2. It is one of the most interesting and vibrant modes for battles, where you can demonstrate teamwork in a series of matches. To be more specific, squads of three players compete against each other in a series of rounds to determine the winner of the match. If you manage to achieve flawless status by winning 7 matches in a row, you can earn the best seasonal gear and weapons that will significantly strengthen your guardian.

In the earliest forms of animation, the so-called ‘Hand of the Artist’ was a visual tool to represent the moment before a drawing came to life on its own. Émile Cohl's Fantasmagorie (1908) is a famous example of this, where the hand and the pencil of the animator disappear once the drawings begin to seemingly move autonomously. Over the century since Fantasmagorie, animation has returned to this visual device as a form of satire or as a metatextual exploration of the medium, to disrupt our perception of the constructed reality of animation in a manner unique to a medium free from the constraints of live-action. Paul Wells argues that “animation’s inherently rhetorical condition means that its construction is always a critical intervention and interrogation of the representation of the material world” (Wells 2019, 15) which is what allows animation to be utilised as a reflexive storytelling device through the deconstruction of its own medium.

As a media form, animation has the unique ability to render immaterial realities and unfamiliar experiences visually in a manner inaccessible to live-action cinema. In this way, animation can represent the unrepresentable, creating a rare opportunity for either the disruption of hegemonic discourses, such as through the visualisation of silenced perspectives, or a repackaged reiteration of them. Animation can provide a vehicle for graphic political criticism, augmenting the way things are represented through artistic means: such as by exaggerating certain characteristic features of a political class or actor through cartoon aesthetics. A prime example of this can be found within the Who is a Refugee? animation featured on the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR) YouTube channel, which represents the journey of an unnamed family from an unspecified nation as they transition into refugee status.