Posts in EVENT REVIEW
Review: Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF) 2024
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).

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EVENT REVIEWAurélie PetitFESTIVAL, SHORTSComment
Review: LAIKA: Frame x Frame (BFI Southbank)
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.

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EVENT REVIEWMarkus BeekenSTOP-MOTION, CRAFT, LABOUR, HOLLYWOODComment
Review: Cartoon Saloon at 25 – The Short Films of Cartoon Saloon + Q&A
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

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EVENT REVIEWEleonora SammartinoCARTOON SALOON, HISTORYComment
Review: Rachel Gough - From Horror to Harbinger: The Evolution of Dinosaurs in Film
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.

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EVENT REVIEWFern ParsonsFILM HISTORY, DINOSAURS, FICTIONAL WORLDS, FANTASY, POPULAR CINEMAComment
Review: BAFTSS Animation SIG Posthumous & Posthuman Animation Online Seminar
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.

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EVENT REVIEWAnastasiia GushchinaPOSTHUMANISM, DIGITAL, ANIMATION, HOLLYWOOD, POLITICALComment
Review: The Factual Animation Film Festival (FAFF) 2022
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.

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EVENT REVIEWAnastasiia GushchinaREPRESENTATION, GENDER, DOCUMENTARY, FANTASY, IDENTITYComment
Review: BAFTSS Animation SIG Animated Horror Mini-Event
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.

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EVENT REVIEWJuliana VarelaHORROR, ANIMATION, DISNEY, HOLLYWOODComment
Review: Two Decades of Shrek - An Academic Symposium
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.

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EVENT REVIEWChristopher HollidayHOLLYWOOD, ANIMATION, DREAMWORKS ANIMATION, STYLE, PARODY, MUSIC, POPULAR CINEMAComment
Review: Ray Harryhausen - Titan of Cinema
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.

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EVENT REVIEWToby JungiusCHARACTER, STOP-MOTION, ANIMATION, FANTASY, LABOUR, CREATIVE PRACTICE, MONSTERS, PUPPETRYComment
Review: Kotatsu Animation Festival - 10th Anniversary (2020)
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.

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EVENT REVIEWAnastasia Marika WilliamsANIME, JAPAN, CREATIVITY, CREATIVE PRACTICEComment
Review: Cartoon Animation - Satire and Subversion
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.

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EVENT REVIEWChristopher HollidayCARTOON, SATIRE, SUBVERSION, ANIMATION, BRITISHComment
Review: Animation and Public Engagement Symposium (APES) 2019
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.

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EVENT REVIEWJessica RutherfordEDUCATION, ENGAGEMENT, EXPANDED ANIMATIONComment
Review: Annecy International Animation Film Festival (2019)
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).

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EVENT REVIEWFrancis M. AgnoliFANTASY, ANIMATION, FESTIVAL, SHORTSComment
Review: Eyes Unclouded - The Films of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli
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.

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EVENT REVIEWChristopher HollidayJAPAN, STUDIO GHIBLI, ANIMATION, FANTASY, CHILDREN, CULTUREComment
Review: Emerald City Comic Con 2019
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.

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EVENT REVIEWChristopher Holliday and Alexander SergeantFANDOM, COMIC BOOK, SCIENCE-FICTION, ANIMATION, COSPLAYComment
Review: Experimental & Expanded Animation
Review: Experimental & Expanded Animation

43 years after the publication of the first edition of Robert Russett and Cecile Starr’s seminal text Experimental Animation: An Illustrated Anthology, experimental animation seems to be finally experiencing a very welcome surge of public interest and critical attention. Over the last few years there has been a rise in the number of screenings, performances and academic publications related to the multifarious art form, including the recent edited collection Experimental and Expanded Animation: New Perspectives and Practices (2018).

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EVENT REVIEWLILLY HUSBANDSEXPERIMENTAL ANIMATION, EXPANDED ANIMATION, PERFORMANCE ART, CREATIVE PRACTICE Comment
Review: Sci-Fi Ball 25
Review: Sci-Fi Ball 25

Since its launch back in 1994, the annual Sci-Fi Ball has become a highlight on the UK’s convention circuit, establishing itself as one of the south coast’s most high-profile and bustling events (see right). Now in its 25th year and still going strong, this annual non-for-profit celebration (all funds are donated to Teenage Cancer Trust) of science-fiction across film, television, gaming and beyond attracts a roster of industry dignitary from the genre’s past, present and final frontier.

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EVENT REVIEWChristopher Holliday and Alexander SergeantSCIENCE-FICTION, FANDOM, FAN STUDIES, COSPLAYComment