In the libraries of history and literature, there’s a recurring theme: it’s not enough to have knowledge, you have to be able to navigate it, accessing and linking relevant pieces of information that often seem disparate. The goal of the Library of Alexandria in Ancient Egypt was to amass all the knowledge in the world in one place, and the world’s first known index system, called the pinakes, was developed to organise the expanding collection as it became more and more unwieldy.
Read MoreThe story began with discussions with colleagues about cultural competence content to train staff and students. I appreciated the unique insights I had on these perspectives, both as an outsider (experiences I had as a non-native) and as an insider (working as an academic in the UK for the past 17 years). Driven by a desire to address this issue, I began exploring the less overt forms of bias, i.e., microaggressions. While explicit biases are widely acknowledged for their impact, implicit biases are subtler and vary significantly based on individual backgrounds, education, and conditioning.
Read MoreThe music video for Queen’s “Heaven for Everyone” from their then-final record Made in Heaven (1995) - and a song that originally appeared on Shove It (1991), an album by drummer Roger Taylor’s side project The Cross (and featuring Freddie Mercury as a guest vocalist) - includes somewhat surprisingly footage from Georges Méliès’ early ‘trick’ films A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904).
Read MoreJudging from both the pre-release marketing materials and industry narratives that have surrounded both Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (Christopher McQuarrie, 2023) and Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023), one would be forgiven for thinking that Hollywood still retains something of an aversion to digital VFX.
Read MoreLast 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.
Read MoreMission: Impossible II (John Woo, 2000) - the second feature in the evergreen Hollywood blockbuster franchise - is a film fascinated by the creative possibilities of Tom Cruise’s face. The film’s extended opening sequence (comprising ostensibly of two action set-pieces, see left) is structured from the start by the drama and jeopardy engendered by the star’s recognisable physiognomy.
Read MoreDuring the 2020-21 academic year, I convened a module on writing that used the significance of representation in fictional worlds (a key element of both fantasy storytelling and animated media) to guide undergraduate students through the challenges of writing across disciplinary boundaries.
Read MoreMy name is Michael Tanzillo, and I’ve worked for years in the animation industry at top studios like Blue Sky Studios, and on computer-animated feature films such as Ice Age (Chris Wedge, 2002), Rio (Carlos Saldanha, 2011), and Ferdinand (Carlos Saldanha, 2017).
Read MoreThe Wheel of Time (Rafe Judkins, 2021) is a highly anticipated Amazon Prime TV series based on Robert Jordan’s book series under the same title. The first season comprises eight episodes and recounts the events from The Eye of the World (1990), the first volume of Jordan’s epic saga, introducing its main characters in a familiar Tolkienian fashion.
Read MorePixar’s much-delayed computer-animated fantasy film, Soul (Pete Docter, 2020), was originally scheduled for theatrical release in the U.S. on June 19, 2020, yet was finally released on the Disney+ platform almost a year ago in December 2020. The story follows the life of a middle school music teacher named Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) who falls down a manhole on the streets of New York City into another world, a world in which his soul is separated from his body.
Read MorePixar’s Loop (Erica Milsom, 2020) is an animated short film from Pixar Animation Studios, and part of the “SparkShorts” program that was designed to discover new storytellers and artists by producing short films on a smaller time frame and budget, giving directors freedom to explore new stories, techniques and workflows.
Read MoreSince its release in 2015, Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur (directed by Peter Sohn) has accrued a less-than-spectacular reputation. At the time of writing this blog, aggregated scores on sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic place the film towards the bottom of Pixar’s oeuvre.
Read MoreThe idea of the film star is bound up in the idea of ‘pure entertainment’ in two ways: a sense of an ideal world in which dilemmas and conflicts are harmoniously resolved, and in terms of the ways in which film stars offer audiences an idealised and intensified set of behaviours. With that in mind, one of the ways the 1995 fantasy film Jumanji (Joe Johnston, 1995) holds our interest is how it is the ‘authored’ work of a film star: in this case, Robin Williams.
Read MoreMichael Dougherty’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) was the thirty-fifth feature to star the giant kaiju (the Japanese word generally used to refer to giant movie monsters). Although it was the latest in a series of films spanning 65 years, it was only the fourth time that “the Big G” had appeared as a fully digitally animated creature, discounting the anime series on Netflix (2017/8).
Read MoreOn 23rd June 1991, the first Sonic the Hedgehog game was released. For almost 29 years since this first appearance on the Sega Genesis, Sonic has been loved all around the world for being the fastest, coolest hedgehog the world has ever seen, and for being an enduring and iconic figure within the gaming industry.
Read More2019 was a bad year for cats: deaths of notable cats and cat owners, political defeat, and finally, worst of all, Cats (Tom Hooper, 2019) (Fig. 1). When the first Cats trailer was released last summer, it was soon subject to hyperbolic displays of disgust across social media. Reviews of the eventual film were no better. And all the criticisms are true.
Read MoreLife is Strange 2 (2018-) is a deeply emotive episodic videogame that revolves around a teenager and his young brother who are thrown into a series of adventures steeped with numerous struggles rooted in modern social and cultural realism. Towards the beginning of the game, the boy’s father dies at the hands of a police officer (who also is killed), and the siblings must go on the run out of fear they may be wrongly accused, arrested and separated.
Read MoreNow that the proverbial dust has settled on Avengers: Endgame (Anthony Russo & Joe Russo, 2019), the fallout from the almost-three hour epic can well and truly begin. To immediately follow a film that is, to date, the highest-grossing film of 2019 and now the second-highest of all time (behind, of course, Avatar [James Cameron, 2009]) was always a tricky, if not borderline impossible, act. Yet coming a mere three months after Endgame and just two years (and six films) after Spider-Man: Homecoming (Jon Watts, 2017), the next instalment Spider-Man: Far From Home (Jon Watts, 2019) does a more than admirable job of taking up the reins left slack in a post-Endgame world.
Read MoreSince Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995) hit cinema screens worldwide in November 1995, audiences have witnessed a series of dramatic changes within the animated medium, particularly in Hollywood. Having signed a contract with Pixar Animation Studios in 1991, Disney were initially hesitant to give the very first computer-animated film about a collection of toys the same commercial backing as their traditional cel-animated features. Until, that is, they saw the toys come to life.
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