A character’s body in animation is believed to be a fluid form (Wells 1996) due to its ability to take on any intended form. Characters can manipulate their bodies to assume new identities, hiding, or losing their sense of self in the process (Clarke 2022), whether intentionally or not. However, when discussing identity in animation through the technique of metamorphosis, the body tends to be overlooked despite being mostly affected in these acts of transformation, as audiences are more focused on anticipating the outcome of metamorphosis (Torre 2010) rather than the transition between the two bodies and the reasons behind the way the body transitions.
Read MoreFor nearly 100 years, the name Walt Disney has been synonymous with top class, polished, and popular animation. Teams of animators churn out major films every couple of years, often to great financial success, and usually with a very particular ‘Disney-esque’ style. Timothy White purports that this style is, at least partly, typified by an attempted realism and continuity editing, typically associated with “Hollywood” cinema (1992: 3-16), meanwhile Paul Wells similarly ascribes a “mimetic” quality to Disney’s style, describing it as “orthodox” (2003: 220).
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