The Snowman, produced by John Coates, turns forty this year. Remarkably, it has been a regular feature of Channel 4’s Christmas schedule since its first broadcast (an intriguing but important acquisition for the fledgling channel), taking its place within contemporary culture.
Read MoreAt the beginning of 2022, the film industry news reported that writer-director Robert Zemeckis was already preparing a follow up to his then-upcoming Pinocchio (2022) with another fantasy movie, albeit one that might be described as a little more ‘sombre’ in tone, being an adaptation of the graphic novel Here by Richard McGuire.
Read MoreNetflix has an extensive library containing an array of licensed movies and series alongside its ever-growing portfolio of original projects. Many titles, such as the thrilling South Korean Squid Game (Hwang Dong-hyuk, 2021-) or Netflix’s own Stranger Things (The Duffer Brothers, 2016-), have garnered worldwide popularity.
Read MoreEncanto (Byron Howard & Jared Bush, 2021), Disney’s 60th animated film inspired by Latin-American culture tells the story of a magical family, the family Madrigal. The narrative follows the dynamics of the Madrigal family tree across generations in the town of Encanto, ultimately spearheaded by 15-year-old Mirabel, the only member of the family without magical powers.
Read MoreFor a long time, the work of Pixar Animation Studios was routinely presented as something of a gold standard for animation. A critical darling and box office juggernaut, Pixar’s run of early films from Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995) to Toy Story 4 (Josh Cooley, 2019) were mostly unquestioned hits delivering nuanced meditations on everything from emotion to connection to self-actualisation.
Read MoreAnimation has, of course, never been only for children. To limit an understanding of the audience of animation to just children is to deny the medium’s potential as an art form to both reflect and reimagine reality in increasingly innovative ways.
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 MoreThe 1973 animated adaptation of Stefan Wul’s 1957 novel, Oms En Serie, recounts the enslavement and subjugation of the ‘Oms,’ (a term that is phonetically indistinguishable from the French word for men, hommes), by giant blue humanoid aliens, the ‘Draags.’
Read MoreAs someone who was schooled in the UK between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s, I don’t have extensive memories of the formal teaching of sex education, for such classes were embarrassingly few.
Read MoreI started researching the figure of Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman for specific reasons, which resulted in the book-length study, The Paths of Zatoichi (2021).
Read MoreThe Man of Carton (2021) is a music video project that uses forms of fantasy and animation to provide a metaphor for, and representation of, a specific type of human behaviour related to psychopathy, exploring the relationships between emotion, empathy, and behaviour. Psychopathy’s most significant and dominant characteristics are traditionally understood as the reification of humans, a perceived lack of emotion, a need to corrupt or cause harm or pain to others, and a complex relationship to modes of innocence.
Read MoreThe world that children occupy is full of secrets, and is a world not shared with adults. It is one concerned primarily with fantasy and imagination. Every child has a right to occupy that secret world; it’s part of childhood development and is an important locator of child identity as a ‘non-adult’. As Chris Jenks tells us, “the child is familiar to us and yet strange, he or she inhabits our world and yet seems to answer to another” (2020, 3). The child exists in its own distinct world and separation and agency are at the core of that world.
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 MoreThe climactic sequence of The Thief and the Cobbler/The Princess and the Cobbler/Arabian Knight (unfinished, 1993, 1995, Richard Williams) or the ‘War Machine sequence’ - as it is commonly found on YouTube - is a long and intricate piece of experimental animation.
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 MoreIn the first part of this blog post, I looked at how Petite Maman evokes the fantastic in its movement between what Tzvetan Todorov calls the uncanny and the marvellous, through the tale of a young girl (Nelly) meeting her own mother (Marion) at the same age. In this second part, I will look in further detail at the magical uncertainty, ambiguity and a wavering between different cinematic modes that Sciamma’s film presents.
Read MoreTo describe Céline Sciamma’s new film, Petite Maman (2021) (Fig. 1) as “Alain Resnais does Bridge to Terabithia” would surely be to do a disservice to all involved, and the director’s own references are – more appropriately – Alice Guy-Blaché, Germaine Dulac and Miyazaki Hayao (especially My Neighbor Totoro [1988] and Spirited Away [2002]).
Read MoreImagination is deeply intertwined with sensorial experience. One sensorial perception can prompt us to imagine a whole setting to go with it, and function as a catalyst for both simple and extremely complex cognitive processes (Berger, 2016). Sound can be a powerful tool to invite the audience to experience something that is not actually there, and because of this, it has been extensively used for world-building and character development within a range of animated and fantasy media.
Read MoreStarting in the very late 1980s and early 1990s, moviegoers and television watchers in the United States saw a wave of high-quality animation. These included movies like Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, 1988), The Little Mermaid (Ron Clements & John Musker, 1989), and Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise, 1991), as well as TV shows like The Simpsons (Matt Groening, 1990-), Rugrats (Arlene Klasky, Gábor Csupó, and Paul Germain, original run 1991-1994), The Tick (Ben Edlund, 1994-1997), and Batman: The Animated Series (Bruce Timm, Paul Dini & Mitch Brian, 1992-1995).
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.
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