STYLE — current posts — Fantasy/Animation

The 21 (Tod Polson, 2024)

In 2019, MORE Productions was contemplating its first animated film project. Having worked on live-action features like The Ticket (2016) with Dan Stevens and Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016), MORE’s co-producers Mark Rodgers and Mandi Hart knew the world of live-action filmmaking well. They also knew it was not the best creative choice for the story they were seeking to tell - the story of 21 men (twenty Coptic Egyptians, one Ghanaian) kidnapped, tortured and ultimately martyred by ISIS in an infamous video published on February 15, 2015.

EDITORIALMandi HartDecember 6, 2024REALISM, STYLE, POLITICALComment

Game Central Station: The Worlds of Wreck-It Ralph (Rich Moore, 2012)

Wreck-It Ralph (Rich Moore, 2012) follows the antagonist of a fictional arcade game known as Fix-It Felix. After escaping his 8-bit pixelated world and joining fellow outcast Vanellope von Schweetz in the brightly tinted world of Sugar Rush, the eponymous Ralph learns that their quest for redemption could lead to a massive shutdown of the arcade. Through its visual style and videogame narrative, Wreck-It Ralph felt as if it was calling me and my sector of young gamers, and the animation team at Disney managed to successfully bring in elements of popular gaming tropes and familiar characters to build the many worlds connecting through Game Central Station.

EDITORIALRudan DanielNovember 1, 2024DISNEY, COMPUTER-ANIMATED FILM, STYLE, FICTIONAL WORLDS, VIDEO GAMEComment

An Analysis of George Dunning’s Yellow Submarine

Based on the music of the British pop band The Beatles, Yellow Submarine (George Dunning, 1968) is a film that perhaps best resembles the tradition of the jukebox musical. It tells the story of Pepperland, a music-loving utopia falling under siege by the music-hating Blue Meanies. By command of the Mayor, Captain Fred boards the titular yellow submarine to seek help. He discovers The Beatles and urges their help given their musical talents and their resemblance to Pepperland’s favourite musical group: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Beatles join Old Fred (Fig. 1) on a journey back to Pepperland, and rally Pepperland’s citizens to rebel against the Blue Meanies. Harnessing the groovy power of psychedelic pop, they sing their way to freedom.

EDITORIALKirstin Stevens SchmidtJuly 19, 2024MUSICAL, SURREALISM, BRITISH ANIMATION, STYLE, AESTHETICS, COLOURComment

Colour and Motion: Some Notes on Spielberg’s Fantasy and Science Fiction Films and the Visual Style of Vincente Minnelli

As a student, a long time ago, at the University of Warwick, I took a seat in the library one day, the photocopiers nearby chugging and churning away, and opened the new issue (May-June 1992) of Film Comment. As a lifelong devotee (I was only 19) of Steven Spielberg’s movies you can perhaps imagine my astonishment when I turned a page to find an essay entitled “The Panning of Steven Spielberg (Part One),” written by Henry Sheehan. To this day, Sheehan’s piece remains a touchstone in writing about Spielberg’s filmmaking. Limited to the space of a magazine page, Sheehan’s eventual two-part essay made such sense, and it was the first time that I’d really read something about Spielberg’s films that looked so consistently at the film style being deployed across his body of work.

EDITORIALJames ClarkeMarch 15, 2024MUSICAL, STYLE, COLOUR, HOLLYWOODComment

Interview with Mikkel Mainz (SKJALD Animation)

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.

EDITORIALChristopher Holliday and Alexander SergeantFebruary 23, 2024AESTHETICS, STYLE, HORROR, MUSIC VIDEOComment

Analysis of (OO) (Seoro Oh, 2017)

(OO) is an animated short film directed by Seoro Oh in 2017 that illustrates the unpleasant experiences that someone encounters when they catch a cold. The unnamed protagonist’s journey begins with a sneeze but escalates into a cold. He is shown struggling with breathing through his nostrils and, as a result, finds himself constantly blowing his nose into a tissue. Everyone, at some point in their lives, experiences the feeling of not being able to properly breathe through their nostrils, whether it is because of a cold, being sick in general, or allergies.

EDITORIALJessica ShenOctober 13, 2023METAPHOR, REPRESENTATION, IDENTITY, STYLEComment

Review: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers & Justin K. Thompson, 2023)

True to the promise of its title, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K. Thompson, 2023) is an exhilarating and emotional journey that continues to blaze the narrative and visual trail started by its predecessor. Made by Sony Pictures Animation in association with Marvel, the film does not open with the previous film’s Spider-Man, Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) as one might expect. Instead, it shifts the focus to Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld), also known as Spider-Woman, as she finds herself embroiled in the multiversal machinations of the taciturn, pragmatic Spider-Man 2099, Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac), and his spider society.

Exploitation or Empowerment: Sexual Violence in Belladonna of Sadness (1973)

Notable for its erotic tone and psychedelic imagery, Eiichi Yamamoto’s adult art film Belladonna of Sadness (1973) interrogates the depiction of sexual violence against its female protagonist. The film, set against the backdrop of feudal France, follows newlywed villager Jeanne after being raped by the town’s baron on her wedding night.

EDITORIALSerena RamseyJune 2, 2023AESTHETICS, STYLE, ADULT, SEXUALITYComment

Review: Noel Brown, Contemporary Hollywood Animation: Style, Storytelling, Culture and Ideology Since the 1990s (2020)

Noel Brown provides an engaging and well-researched account of contemporary Hollywood feature animation, here defined as from the 1990s onwards. Noting the recent significance of animation to both the Hollywood studios, their parent conglomerates, and popular culture more broadly, he aims to outline the “form and poetics of the mainstream animated feature” (Brown 2020, 2), with chapters devoted to their narrative and thematic focus on family and friendship, aesthetic shifts, and changes around their representations of identity.

BOOK REVIEWJason ScottOctober 7, 2022HOLLYWOOD, ANIMATION, STYLE, GENRE, POPULAR CINEMA, COMPUTER-ANIMATED FILMComment

Fictional World-Building in Animation and/as Writing Pedagogy

During 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.

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.

EVENT REVIEWChristopher HollidayNovember 26, 2021HOLLYWOOD, ANIMATION, DREAMWORKS ANIMATION, STYLE, PARODY, MUSIC, POPULAR CINEMAComment

The fantasy of the Japanese family in Hosoda Mamoru’s Mirai (2018)

In a world of globalised animation, anime’s influence is ever expanding, ranging from adult Netflix animations like Castlevania (Warren Ellis, 2017-) to a wide variety of western children’s TV shows from Teen Titans (Glen Murakami and Sam Register, 2003-2006) to She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (Noelle Stevenson, 2018-2020).

EDITORIALIssy MacleodJuly 24, 2020JAPAN, MODERNITY, FAMILY, STYLE Comments

Poetic Fantasies of Time and Space: From the Eyes of an Old Dog

In Sylvain Chomet’s first animated feature film, The Triplets of Belleville (2003) there is a key scene in which the main event simply concerns the barking of a dog out of the window at a passing train. This scene, which is going to be explored here in this sequence analysis, connects the childhood of Champion, the film’s main character, to the present time (of the film’s narrative, which takes place around 1950s), when we meet him as a young cycling athlete training for Tour du France, accompanied by his ever present, loving and supportive grandmother Madame Souza.

SEQUENCE ANALYSISFatemeh Hosseini-ShakibMarch 13, 2020STYLE, FRANCE, AESTHETICS, ANIMALS, MUSICAL, MUSICComment

One of the Gods or a Mere Mortal: Fantasy, Fiction and Documentary Filmmakers

In this article I will explore the conceptual position a director occupies in the world they create or represent as a method for clarifying a film’s status as either fiction or documentary. As an animated documentary practitioner I am particularly interested in finding a balance between the seemingly limitless fantastic potential of animation and the duty of a documentary filmmaker to create authentic and ethical representations of people and the world.

CREATIVE REFLECTIONAlex WiddowsonOctober 4, 2019DOCUMENTARY, ADAPTATION, FICTIONAL WORLDS, STYLE, MEMORYComment

Super-Psych: Into the Discourse Verse

Released in 2018, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman, 2018) explored the visual storytelling possibilities of animation. A computer-animated superhero feature film that retells the story of Miles Morales, a boy bitten by a radio-active spider giving him similar powers to those of Spider-Man, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse bucks many of the traditional techniques of animation, and the production team used novel techniques to depict motion, depth of field, and emotion. Particularly notable is the combination of comic book elements within an animated feature. How do these novel techniques, alongside the combination of comic book mythology and animated storytelling, impact viewers’ comprehension of and experience of the story?

EDITORIALHeather NessJuly 26, 2019AESTHETICS, STYLE, CGI, COMPUTER ANIMATION, ADAPTATIONComment