In this week’s blog, Fantasy/Animation sat down with Mikkel Mainz of SKJALD Animation studio, a full-pipeline creative house and animation studio located in Denmark, to discuss its experience working on successful web series and feature films, the interpretation of music through animated style, and SKJALD’s future animated projects.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreSystematic genre criticism has gone out of fashion and Sotiris Petridis’s Anatomy of the Slasher Film: A Theoretical Analysis (2019) is an attempt to respond to this pressing need in genre studies. Anatomy of the Slasher Film (Fig. 1) consists of an introduction, four chapters, a conclusion, two appendices (“Films Referenced” and “Semantic Elements”), endnotes, a filmography, a bibliography, and an index.
Read MoreWe live in haunted times. Haunted by the memories of a pre-pandemic existence, we continue to persevere through variant viral outbreaks. Haunted by the two-dimensional digital avatars cast on our devices (at least for those of us fortunate enough to have this luxury), we are increasingly alienated from our three-dimensional biological selves.
Read MoreGothic Film: An Edinburgh Companion provides a wide variety of perspectives based on differing examples of the Gothic within the film with analyses categorised by genre, time-period, and theoretical approach
Read MoreUnder the sea, monsters lurk. Despite The Little Mermaid (Ron Clements & John Musker, 1989)’s Sebastian singing about under the sea being better, audiences have long held a fear of the ocean and what lies beneath. It is an understandable fear, linked to the fear of the unknown; after all, it is estimated that 80% of our oceans remain unexplored.
Read MoreEver since Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897, his vision of the vampire has dominated the popular imagination as the representation of absolute horror. Vampire lore had existed for millennia across numerous cultures, but Stoker’s iteration of the monster as an almost undefeatable entity that represents a cultural other and threatens to subvert modern societal norms has resonated throughout the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries, particularly on film.
Read MoreAllowing for the unanticipated to occur and offering “a particular field for rethinking the relation of the virtual as not opposed to the real, but as wholly real in itself” (Thain 2016, 5), the medium of animation is able to go beyond reality, and (in so doing) allows new artistic expressions at the intersection of body and movement, the renegotiation of the human being and its relationship to machines, and experimentation with the cultural meaning of science and technology.
Read MoreReformation-era German engraver, painter and printmaker Hans Holbein and quirky contemporary Polish animator Kajetan Obarski are two artists separated by several centuries that, in their similarities, attest to historical parallels and ramifications of the fantastic. As this post identifies, both artists illustrate the grotesque through a Carnivalesque trope in their work of the Danse Macabre. Both also prophetically remind their viewers of the stark facts of mortality, of people who are “like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall” (Peter 1:24-25).
Read MoreI wouldn’t say I am scared of clowns, but I definitely don’t like them. If you Google search ‘fear of clowns’ there are over ten million results, so it seems I am not alone in my dislike towards these peculiar figures. Taking its cue from something of this ongoing cultural fear around such make-upped entertainers, horror sequel IT Chapter Two (Andrés Muschietti, 2019) offers an often engaging - but always disturbing - and certainly uncanny piece of cinema about an iconic killer clown returning to terrorise his victims once more.
Read MoreThe House with a Clock in Its Walls (Eli Roth, 2018) marks director Eli Roth’s first foray into family-friendly fantasy, following a career established largely within horror cinema thanks to his directorial debut Cabin Fever (Eli Roth, 2002) and the Hostel films (Eli Roth, 2005-2007), which consolidated the much-maligned and highly graphic “torture porn” subgenre as a strong current of post-millenial Hollywood (see Jones 2013; Kerner 2015).
Read MoreFantasy and animation, especially when combined, are often associated within popular discourse with children’s media. Referring predominantly to stop-motion animation, this post offers some thoughts on what the intrinsic association between children, fantasy and animation might mean in the context of another genre that has a more problematic relationship with child audiences: horror. Although horror is rarely considered a children’s genre, horror films addressed to children do exist, and across various forms of animation and live-action: the stop-motion animated Frankenweenie (Tim Burton, 2012), CG-animated Monster House (Gil Kenan, 2006), or the live-action Hocus Pocus (Kenny Ortega, 1993).
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