Animation 

About: Animation is an academic journal published by SAGE Publishing. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Animation & Anime. It has an ISSN identifier of 1746-8477. Over the lifetime, 352 publications have been published receiving 1871 citations. The journal is also known as: cartoon & animated feature.

Rethinking Plasticity: The Politics and Production of the Animated Image

Abstract: Writings on animation have often noted the plastic quality of the image: objects stretch, squash and change forms. Such discussions of the plastic quality of animation tend to equate plasticity with the appearance of the image. This article proposes a rethinking of plasticity in animation, suggesting that it is not simply an attribute of the finished image, but an aspect of the material conditions of its production. Introducing the work of Imamura Taihei and Hanada Kiyoteru, two leftist Japanese intellectuals who wrote on Disney animation during the 1940s and 1950s, and contrasting their work with the writings of their European counterparts, this article will suggest that these Japanese thinkers focus our attention on the importance of Fordism in the production of Disney animation. The work of Imamura and Hanada enables us to critically approach plasticity in animation in terms of the material conditions of the image production within Fordism, thus enabling us to consider plasticity at the level of the medium as well as that of labor.

The Many Faces of Internationalization in Japanese Anime

Abstract: This article explores the internationalization of Japanese anime (animation) in an effort to help explain the cultural politics behind this popular cultural product. The inter- nationalization of anime includes the incorporation of de- Japanized elements into anime's background, context, character design, and narrative organization. A theoretical framework for understanding anime's internationalization is developed, proposing that there are at least three kinds of cultural politics working behind anime's international success: one, de-politicized internationalization, which primarily serves as a commercial tactic to attract international audiences; two, Occidentalized inter- nationalization, which satiates a nationalistic sentiment; three, self-Orientalized internationalization, which reveals a cultural desire to establish Japan as an ersatz Western country in Asia.

The Veiled Genealogies of Animation and Cinema

Abstract: This article challenges the widely held view that cinema is a subcategory of the larger entity, animation. Tracing the etymology of the word ‘animation’ reveals how it acquired two separate meanings: one to endow with life or to come alive, and the other, to move or be moved. In trade and professional discourses about cinema, ‘animation’ did not refer to single-frame cinematography or to the class of films using that technique until the early 1910s. The genealogical argument that animation was the ancestor of cinema exploits the semantic serendipity of these two meanings, but the approach distracts from a larger understanding of animation as a film form, genre and social practice. A negative result of this line of reasoning is that the distinctive features of the optical toys of so-called pre-cinema are valued only inasmuch as they resembled later cinema and may not be studied in their own right.

The Line and the Animorph or `Travel Is More than Just A to B'

Abstract: One of the elements that separates live-action, photoreal cinema from animation is the line, a conceptual meta-object that has no existence other than as an idea or a graphic representation. Lines are not essential to photoreal cinema. Using five animated television advertisements for Hilton Hotels made by German animator Raimund Krumme, the essay raises some of the paradoxes inherent in the single, two-dimensional, animated graphic line as both an abstract geometric construct and an eccentric visualization of energy and entropy. What Krumme's animations emphasize (even if in the service of an advertising campaign) is that, never a `thing', the line in motion intends and marks its own differance and is always more lived and contingent than its geometry would suggest.

Character Animation and the Embodied Mind—Brain

Abstract: This interdisciplinary investigation of aspects of 3D character animation synthesizes relevant research findings from diverse perspectives, including neuroscience, narratology, robotics, anthropolo...