ARCHIVES — current posts — Fantasy/Animation

The Bruno Edera Project: Archiving Adult Animation

It is easy to argue that pornographic animation is always transgressive, for it directly confronts hard-won stereotypes that animated films are somehow a children’s medium, or that it is a type of media watched solely for laughs that cannot be taken seriously. To consider the creative potentials of pornographic animation is to therefore theorize the plurality of what animation truly is as a medium. But the very existence of pornographic animation also threatens preconceived ideas that there would be such a thing as authentic pornography, that is a kind of pornography in which performers are actually enjoying themselves and not ‘lying,’ versus faking and over-performing.

EDITORIALAurélie PetitJuly 5, 2024ADULT, PORNOGRAPHY, HISTORY, ARCHIVESComment

“Two Cadaverous Vultures”: Disney’s Gift to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York

In January 1939, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced its acceptance of an animation cel set-up from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937) and “presented by the artist, Walt Disney” (Burroughs, 1939) (Fig. 1). The gift — an ink and gouache painting on transparent celluloid, laid over a hand-painted background — was duly hung with the museum’s other “recent accessions,” and immediately generated considerable coverage in the nation’s major newspapers, magazines, and wire services.

EDITORIALHeather HolianMarch 1, 2024ARCHIVES, HOLLYWOOD, CARTOON, DISNEY, CEL ANIMATION, ARTISTComment

Animation Archives

As academics we find it easy to converse about the complete, those films that have made their way onto the screen and given audiences pleasure and academics room for discourse and assessment. The ‘completed’ animation finds itself venerated the world over and as a medium, or art form, it appears capable of fitting almost any brief, defying the shackles of live-action and capable of producing, from a visual point at least, works of both realism and fantasy that are only limited by the imagination and skills of the creator.