The Persistence of Animation

Parallel Synchronised Randomness — Stopmotion Animation in Live Action Feature Films

Abstract: In a film world obsessed with photoreal simulations of impossible worlds some filmmakers celebrate a different aesthetic that rejects the seamless integration of 3D realism for a consciously hand-made animated reality.

This paper examines the history of stopmotion effects in live action feature films with a specific analysis of Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep as an alternate model for both concepts of special effects.

Biographical Statement: Jane Shadbolt is a filmmaker and animator. She is currently in post-production for the 9-minute short animation, The Cartographer, a miniature epic featuring stopmotion characters in a digital world. She lectures in Visual Communications at the University of Newcastle, Australia.

Primitive Movers: Live Performance in Digital Animation

Abstract: This paper focuses on the developing contemporary genre of live animation performances, which include the body of the animator alongside projected images of his or her making. I examine these live performances within the context of the self-figurative animation tradition, but also within the context of current digital cinema debates and practices. As I argue in the paper, corporeal expression remains an important feature of traditional animation — one that insists on maintaining an embodied creative presence within moving image representations. Although the paper touches on the works of numerous contemporary artists, the paper focuses on the works of Kathy Rose and Pierre Hebert.

Biographical Statement: Alla Gadassik conducts research on hybrids of live-action and animation, early animation history, and digital cinema theory. She is particularly interested in animation as a form of embodied filmmaking — one that resonates with other filmmaking practices, but also suggests distinctive transformative possibilities within digital cinema. Alla holds an MA in Communication and Culture from York/Ryerson Universities (Toronto), and is currently pursuing her PhD in Screen Cultures at Northwestern University (Chicago). In addition to pursuing an academic career, Alla is a digital filmmaker/animator. She has taught digital media in the Radio and Television program at Ryerson University (Toronto), and hopes to combine theory and practice in her future teaching projects.

Animating shifts in consciousness: live action and animation in Jan Švankmajer’s Faust and Alice

Abstract: If it is animation’s frequent job to express the metaphysical, and to transform reality, it follows that where animation is combined with live action, it affects and transforms the reality of the live action. The proposed paper draws on psychoanalytic film theory to probe the interaction between the two media in the work of Jan Švankmajer. Focusing on two of his feature films, I will home in on points of transition between live action and animation, setting these against comparable shifts in more mainstream films.

Biographical Statement: Meg Rickards is a lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Cape Town, and a writer-director. She has published articles on anime directors Hayao Miyazaki and Satoshi Kon, and her PhD thesis investigates ways whereby filmmakers and animators can convey a character’s thoughts and emotions on the screen. Her co-written screenplay for an animated feature, Zinzi and the Boondogle, is in development, and in 2008 she was commissioned to write animation scripts for a UNICEF campaign in southern Africa. In 2007 she wrote and directed the mini-series and tele-feature Land of Thirst for the South African Broadcasting Corporation.

It’s a Bird. It’s a Plane. It’s Bob Parr? Narrative Discourse in The Incredibles

Abstract: As Pixarʼs first film concentrating on humans rather than anthropomorphized characters, The Incredibles questions the similarities — and differences — between live-action and computer- animated films. The Incredibles blurs the line between live-action and animation, but, complicates vocabulary in traditional animation and live-action contexts, creating a new vocabulary. A close analysis of The Incredibles’ mise-en-scene reveals the film questions semantic/syntactic uses of super-hero genre. Pixarʼs style of animation forgets the cartoonal, moving the image from spectacle to a suitable cultural text, reflecting reality. I propose that The Incredibles exemplifies the growing relationship between live-action and computer animation

Biographical Statement: Chris is a NYU Graduate Student in Cinema Studies. His collegiate career began at Clemson University, receiving a BA in Computer Science. His real degree should have been dabbling since he took courses across the spectrum of studies: Art, Programming, Animation, Creative Writing, and Theatre. Graduating, getting married, and moving to Brooklyn, May 2008 was a busy month for him. Since things have settled, Chris has noticed that many of the theories, histories, and readings fail to address, or justify, his love of Goofy shorts, Pixar, and Frank & Ollie. He is currently trying to find how his love for animation can fit into his academic pursuits. As part of his inquiry Chris is presenting a paper on The Incredibles at Yale in late January. As an undergraduate he used eye-tracking technology to see how edits affected spectatorship in Toy Story.

Simulational Animation and Re-mediated Observation: An ontological study of 3D animation and the stop-motion camera in some early animated shorts of the Aardman studio

Abstract: This paper proposes the concept of “re-mediated observation,” or how the stop-motion camera may provide intense experiences of observation and scrutiny in similar yet discrete ways by recourse to the specificities shared by traditional 3D animation and live-action. This is studied in a specific type of animation termed as “simulational” in some early clay-puppet films of the Aardman studio. It demonstrates that the stop-motion camera is capable of an “observational” function akin to the live-action camera. It is argued that in such modes of simulational animation, notions of reality, observation and the real as recorded, observed and “revealed” by the camera are simultaneously emphasised, interrogated, subverted and eventually re-visited and redeemed.

Biographical Statement: Fatemeh Hosseini-Shakib is a researcher and PhD candidate, completing the final stages of her PhD in animation studies. She is also a lecturer in animation theory at the University for the Creative Arts at Farnham, UK.

Fatemeh has a BA in Graphic Communication from University of Tehran (1993 — Faculty of Fine Arts) and an MA in animation from Tehran Art University (1995 — Faculty of Cinema and Theatre). She has also been engaged in the practice of visual arts (including animation filmmaking) as well as teaching animation history and theory to MA students, prior to her arrival in the UK to start her doctorate in animation theory.

Her current research interests include the question of representation and realism (and its hybrid nature) in the works of Aardman studio, traditional 3D/puppet animation, medium specificity thesis regarding the interpenetrating relationship of cinema and animation, as well as “Iranian Animation” and its emerging forms and institutions, and finally animation as a tangible element of modernity in the non-western worlds.

The current paper proposed for this conference relates to part of her doctorate research on the “Hybrid Nature of Realism in Some Early Animated Shorts of the Aardman Studio.”

Update: Unfortunately, Fatemeh will not be able to attend the conference due to problem in obtaining a U.S. visa.

“Softspace” and Hybrid Images: Animated World as Media Interface in Speed Racer

Abstract: This paper aims at theorizing the ways in which today’s software-generated feature filmmaking creates the space for reassembling a very rich set of heterogeneous media images, by examining Speed Racer, directed by the the Wachowski brothers in collaboration with John Gaeta, in terms of demonstrating how a software-driven representation plays an integral part in combining and structuring multiple ways of image making—2D photographic image, 3D computer graphic imagery, 2D motion graphics, lens-based video image, and simulated image. I would argue that the computer-generated frame for animating different media images needs to be articulated under a new spatial parameter for movement—what I would call “softspace.”

Biographical Statement: Ji-hoon Kim is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Cinema Studies at NYU, where he is currently working on a dissertation entitled “Intermedia Arts and the Moving Image: Photography, Film, Video, and the Digital.” His research interests include film/media theory, experimental film and video, expanded cinema, and digital moving images. His essays will be published in the 50th anniversary issue of Screen (Spring 2009) and two anthologies, Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories (eds., Rosalnd Galt and Karl Schoonover, Oxford University Press) and The Place of the Moving Image (eds. John David Rhodes and Elena Gorfinkel, University of Minnesota Press).