EVENT REVIEW — current posts — Fantasy/Animation

Review: Animex Research and Innovation Conference 2024

Events like the Animex Research and Innovation Conference are important in drawing together a diverse range of researchers, practitioners, and educators from around the world to discuss and address some of the most critical aspects of animation and gaming. Such events, through the creation of an environment of collaboration, give opportunities to investigate the expanse of these fields: from traditional 2D and 3D animation, including stop motion, digital techniques, and CGI, to the innovative realms of gaming.

EVENT REVIEWAnahita FazaeliDecember 13, 2024VIDEO GAME, EDUCATION, FILM PRACTICE, CREATIVE PRACTICEComment

Review: International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film 2024

While the legal, economic and ethical impact of generative AI continues to ripple through the media industry at large, one might be forgiven to find at least a modicum of solace in the belief that independent animation continues to be, in some ways, a world apart. This is not to say, of course, that animators, even art-house animators, are somehow shielded from the disruptive potential of exploitative technological innovations, or immune from the material and ideological concerns that affect the rest of the image-making community.

EVENT REVIEWPM CicchettiDecember 6, 2024DOCUMENTARY, FESTIVAL, REPRESENTATIONComment

Review: Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF) 2024

For animation lovers, the past year might have felt quite bleak. The ongoing battle against confusing algorithms (constantly demanding more output for a lesser audience) for independent creators on social media, paired with the unfair labor conditions highlighted by both the Animation Workers Ignited collective and the press (Stedman 2024), stands in stark contrast to the historical box-office records set by animated films this year. As of October 2024, Inside Out 2 (Kelsey Mann, 2024) remains the highest-grossing animated feature film ever released, despite the "horrendous" working conditions reported by IGN (Stedman, 2024). Additionally, as Cartoon Brew pointed out, five out of the top ten films this week are animated — a first in history (Amidi 2024a).

EVENT REVIEWAurélie PetitOctober 18, 2024FESTIVAL, SHORTSComment

Review: LAIKA: Frame x Frame (BFI Southbank)

The joy of stop-motion films lies in noticing the little details, those intricate features crafted in miniature and tucked into the background of a scene, adding a richness of texture to the (usually) fantasy world onscreen. It is these little details that are celebrated by the British Film Institute’s new exhibition LAIKA: Frame x Frame, opening on August 12th and running until October 1st at the BFI Southbank, as part of their Stop-Motion season. With over 700 artefacts on display, walking through the exhibit evokes the very best stop-motion viewing experience, each glance revealing another miniscule, yet exquisitely modelled feature.

EVENT REVIEWMarkus BeekenAugust 9, 2024STOP-MOTION, CRAFT, LABOUR, HOLLYWOODComment

Review: Cartoon Saloon at 25 – The Short Films of Cartoon Saloon + Q&A

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

EVENT REVIEWEleonora SammartinoFebruary 2, 2024CARTOON SALOON, HISTORYComment

Review: Discover Animation: Art, Legacy, Memory and Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play

As 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.

EVENT REVIEWAlex Gushurst-Moore and Tyler ShoresJuly 7, 2023Comment

Review: Rachel Gough - From Horror to Harbinger: The Evolution of Dinosaurs in Film

With 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.

EVENT REVIEWFern ParsonsJune 23, 2023FILM HISTORY, DINOSAURS, FICTIONAL WORLDS, FANTASY, POPULAR CINEMAComment

Review: BAFTSS Animation SIG Posthumous & Posthuman Animation Online Seminar

Last 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.

EVENT REVIEWAnastasiia GushchinaMay 19, 2023POSTHUMANISM, DIGITAL, ANIMATION, HOLLYWOOD, POLITICALComment

Review: The Factual Animation Film Festival (FAFF) 2022

The 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.

EVENT REVIEWAnastasiia GushchinaNovember 11, 2022REPRESENTATION, GENDER, DOCUMENTARY, FANTASY, IDENTITYComment

Review: BAFTSS Animation SIG Animated Horror Mini-Event

The 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.

EVENT REVIEWJuliana VarelaNovember 11, 2022HORROR, ANIMATION, DISNEY, HOLLYWOODComment

Review: The Evolution of Jim Henson's Puppetry - From Analog Craft to Digital Franchise

Was 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.

EVENT REVIEWJuliana VarelaOctober 14, 2022AMERICA, PUPPETRY, MUPPETS, LABOUR, CREATIVE PRACTICE Comment

Review: Early Japanese Animation (Barbican Theatre)

It 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.

EVENT REVIEWDevon DouiebJune 10, 2022JAPAN, ANIME, HISTORY, MUSIC, NATIONAL CINEMAComment

Review: Two Decades of Shrek - An Academic Symposium

The 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.

EVENT REVIEWChristopher HollidayNovember 26, 2021HOLLYWOOD, ANIMATION, DREAMWORKS ANIMATION, STYLE, PARODY, MUSIC, POPULAR CINEMAComment

Review: Ray Harryhausen - Titan of Cinema

When 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.

EVENT REVIEWToby JungiusJune 11, 2021CHARACTER, STOP-MOTION, ANIMATION, FANTASY, LABOUR, CREATIVE PRACTICE, MONSTERS, PUPPETRYComment

Review: Kotatsu Animation Festival - 10th Anniversary (2020)

During 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.

EVENT REVIEWAnastasia Marika WilliamsNovember 20, 2020ANIME, JAPAN, CREATIVITY, CREATIVE PRACTICEComment

Review: Cartoon Animation - Satire and Subversion

The 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.

EVENT REVIEWChristopher HollidayMarch 6, 2020CARTOON, SATIRE, SUBVERSION, ANIMATION, BRITISHComment

Review: Animation and Public Engagement Symposium (APES) 2019

Since emerging onto the Animation Studies scene five years ago, the Animation and Public Engagement Symposium (APES) has been held annually in different locations across the UK. But for the first time in 2019, APES went international, hosted by Jorgelina Orfila and Francisco Ortega at Texas Tech University, Lubbock between September 19th-21st.

EVENT REVIEWJessica RutherfordOctober 11, 2019EDUCATION, ENGAGEMENT, EXPANDED ANIMATIONComment

Review: Annecy International Animation Film Festival (2019)

Located in Annecy, France, the Annecy International Animation Film Festival was founded in 1960 and has been held annually since 1997. This year, the festival took place 10th-15th June, boasting its usual range of screenings and events: features, shorts, student films, television shows, commissioned works, and VR works (Fig. 1). The shorts in particular displayed a wide collection of animated techniques and materials. Highlights include the clay-on-glass musical retelling of America’s first circus elephant in The Elephant’s Song (Lynn Tomlinson, 2018), the self-reflexive Pinscreen exercise Jim Zipper (Alexandre Roy, 2018), and the impeccably smooth stop-motion porcelain animals of Winter in Rainforest (Anu-Laura Tuttelberg, 2019).

EVENT REVIEWFrancis M. AgnoliJune 21, 2019FANTASY, ANIMATION, FESTIVAL, SHORTSComment

Review: Eyes Unclouded - The Films of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli

An academic conference on the key creative figures and animated feature films of renowned Japanese production house Studio Ghibli seems an obvious - even borderline ideal - candidate for working through the interplay between fantasy and animation. Our earlier podcast on their third cel-animated feature My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988) - whose primary spirit character Totoro now functions as the company’s logo image (Fig.1) - suggested just how much there was to say not only about the adventures of the eponymous creature, but the studio’s origins and evolution, production practices, and their relationship to anime as a creative medium, if not Ghibli’s longstanding critical repute and ongoing commercial acclaim.

EVENT REVIEWChristopher HollidayMay 17, 2019JAPAN, STUDIO GHIBLI, ANIMATION, FANTASY, CHILDREN, CULTUREComment

Review: Emerald City Comic Con 2019

The Emerald City Comic Con attracts guests of upwards of 100,000 fans and 100s of celebrity guests from the worlds of fantasy, science-fiction, animation and gaming (Fig. 1). Now in its fifteenth year and still going strong, the three-day event held at the Washington State Convention Center, Seattle – of which we had the pleasure of attending just one day, Friday 15th March – is professional in every sense of the word, and worthy of every connotation it denotes. What the convention perhaps lacks in personality and quirk it makes up for in the sheer sophistication of its organisation.