Animation Studies: Three Fabulous Online Resources

Updated with a call for papers on November 15

Lignes verticales/Lines Vertical (Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart, 1960). Read Aimee Mollaghan's article on McLaren's Line Films here.

Pervasive Animation - Video of conference sessions.

The conference was held at the Tate Modern, London in 2007.

Animation has an unlimited potential to visually represent events, scenarios and forms that have little or no relation to our experience of the 'real' world. Implemented in many ways, in many disciplines, it is increasingly influencing our perception and experience of the world we live in. This timely and groundbreaking international conference unites speakers from a wide range of research agendas and creative practices. It facilitates much-needed dialogue centred on the ubiquitous and interdisciplinary nature of animation, its potentially radical future development, and its ethical responsibilities for spatial politics in moving image culture. The conference's contributors include Norman Klein, Michael Snow, Vivian Sobchack, Tom Gunning, Anthony McCall, George Griffin, Suzanne Buchan, Beatriz Colomina, Edwin Carels, Siegfried Zielinski, Lisa Cartwright, Johnny Hardstaff and Esther Leslie. Especially since the digital shift, the uses of animation are no longer exclusive to cinema, and animation's origins in pre-cinematic optical experiments through avant-garde experimental film continue to evolve in fascinating ways. Artists increasingly incorporate animation in installations and exhibitions, architects use computer animation software to create narratives of space in time, and scientists use it to interpret abstract concepts for a breadth of industries ranging from biomedicine to nanoworlds. Pervasive Animation provides a dynamic international forum to explore animation's myriad forms and applications across a wide band of creative and professional practice. Organised by Suzanne Buchan, Reader in Animation Studies and Director of the Animation Research Centre at the University College for the Creative Arts, and Stuart Comer, Curator of Film at Tate.

Film Studies For Free animatedly highlights three fabulous Animation Studies resources today. First up, through the second of the two videos embedded above, you can access the entire, recorded proceedings of a very high quality conference on animation held in 2007 at London's Tate Modern.

FSFF heard about those videos through the fantastic Experimental Animation website which houses, and links to, many more animation treasures, like Lignes verticales/Lines Vertical,  Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart's brilliant 1960 opus embedded at the top of this post.

Finally, the third amazing resource du jour are the below contents of the volumes of Animation Studies, the online, Open Access and peer-reviewed Journal of the Society for Animation Studies (also on Twitter as @anistudies). See also the Society's Call for Papers for an upcoming conference at the foot of this post.

"Th-th-th-that's all folks!"

Animation Studies - the Journal of the Society for Animation Studies

• Volume 6, 2011
  • Shannon Brownlee – Masculinity Between Animation and Live Action, or, SpongeBob v. Hasselhoff
  • Maria O’Brien – The Secret of Kells (2009), a film for a post Celtic Tiger Ireland?
  • Aimee Mollaghan – "An Experiment in Pure Design:" The Minimalist Aesthetic in the Line Films of Norman McLaren
  • Hannes Rall – Tradigital Mythmaking: New Asian Design Ideas for Animation
  • Colleen Montgomery – Woody's Roundup and Wall-E's Wunderkammer: Technophilia and Nostalgia in Pixar Animation
  • Pierre Floquet – Actors in Sin City’s Animated Fantasy: Avatars, Aliens, or Cinematic Dead-ends?

• Volume 5, 2010
  • Van Norris – Touching cloth...Considering Satire and the Clergy in Popular Contemporary British Animation
  • Alison Loader – We're Asian, More Expected of Us:Representation, The Model Minority & Whiteness on King of the Hill
  • Meg Rickards – Uncanny breaches, flimsy borders: Jan Švankmajer’s conscious and unconscious worlds
  • María Lorenzo Hernández – Through the Looking-Glass: The Self-Portrait of the Artist and the Re-Start of Animation
  • Michael S. Daubs – Subversive or Submissive? User-Produced Flash Cartoons and Television Animation

• Volume 4, 2009
  • Adam de Beer – Kinesic constructions: An aesthetic analysis of movement and performance in 3D animation
  • Sheuo Hui Gan – To Be or Not to Be – Anime: The Controversy in Japan over the “Anime” Label
  • Max Bannah – Revolutionary cels: The Sydney waterfront, Harry Reade and Cuban animation
  • Paul St. George – Using chronophotography to replace Persistence of Vision as a theory for explaining how animation and cinema produce the illusion of continuous motion
  • Alan Cholodenko – Animation (Theory) as the Poematic

• Volume 3, 2008
  • Van Norris – Taking an Appropriate Line
  • Laura Ivins-Hulley – The Ontology of Performance in Stop Animation
  • Alan Cholodenko – The Spectre in the Screen
  • Timo Linsenmaier – Why animation historiography?
  • María Lorenzo Hernández – Visions of a Future Past: Ulysses 31, a Televised Re-interpretation of Homer’s Classic Myth
  • Birgitta Hosea – TV 2.0: Animation Readership/Authorship on the Internet
  • Lynne Perras – "Steadier, happier, and quicker at the work"? Women in Canadian Animation
  • Sheuo Hui Gan – The Newly Developed Form of Ganime and its Relation to Selective Animation¹ for Adults in Japan
  • Amy Ratelle – Half-breed Dog, Half-breed Film: Balto as Animelodrama

• Animated Dialogues, 2007
  • Amanda Third and Dirk de Bruyn – An Animated Dialogue
  • Paul Wells – Battlefields for the Undead
  • Adrian Martin – In the Sand a Line is Drawn: A Reflection on Animation Studies
  • Alan Cholodenko – (The) Death (of) the Animator, or: the Felicity of Felix, Part I
  • Dirk de Bruyn – Performing a Traumatic Effect: The Films of Robert Breer
  • Michael Broderick – Superflat Eschatology: Renewal and Religion in anime
  • Katharine Buljan – The Uncanny and the Robot in the Astro Boy Episode “Franken”
  • Matthew Butler and Lucie Joschko – Final Fantasy or The Incredibles
  • Cordelia Brown – Flowerpot Men: The Haptic Image in Brian Cosgrove and Richard Hall’s Animations
  • Andrew Buchanan – Facial Expressions for Empathic Communication of Emotion in Animated Characters
  • Peter Moyes – Behind the Flash Exterior: Scratching the Surface of Online Animated Narratives
  • Cathryn Vasseleu – The Svankmajer Touch
  • Miriam Harris – How Michaela Pavlatova both incorporates and rebels against the Czech animation tradition
  • Zhi-Ming Su – Reaching Out to Touch: Animation and Aboriginal Children in Taiwan
  • Dan and Lienors Torre – Recording Australian Animation History

• Volume 2, 2007
  • Gunnar Strøm – The Two Golden Ages of Animated Music Video
  • Pamela Turner – Early Connections Between Film and Emerging Media as Evidenced in the Animated Worlds of Adam Beckett
  • Maria Lorenzo Hernandez – The Double Sense of Animated Images. A View on the Paradoxes of Animation as a Visual Language
  • Leslie Bishko – The Uses and Abuses of Cartoon Style in Animation
  • Caroline Ruddell – Breaking Boundaries: The Representation of Split Identity in Anime
  • Alan Cholodenko – (The) Death (of) the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix, Part II
  • Tom Klein – Animated Appeal: A Survey of Production Methods in Children’s Software

• Volume 1, 2006
  • Pierre Floquet – What is (not) so French in Les Triplettes de Belleville
  • Marina Estela Graça – Cinematic Motion by Hand
   

Call for Papers:
‘The Animation Machine’ - The 24th Society for Animation Studies Conference

Date: June 25-27, 2012

Hosted by: RMIT University
Location: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Keynote speakers include:

•         Thomas Lamarre (McGill University, Canada)

•         Tomotaka Takahashi (The University of Tokyo, Japan)

The Society for Animation Studies (SAS) invites submissions of proposals for individual papers and panels for its 24th Annual Conference, which will be held in Melbourne, Australia at RMIT University, 25-27 June 2012.

Animation production and consumption has continued to grow as animation itself has become ever more prevalent and visible in recent years. In parallel, the field of animation studies has expanded excitingly and dramatically, bringing together scholars from a variety of disciplines.

The theme of this year’s conference, ‘The Animation Machine’, reflects the wide range of processes, technologies, histories and structures in animation. As movement is an essential aspect of animation, whatever creates that movement may constitute an animation machine and one could conceive that animation is itself a machine. The animation machine can be considered from both the production process and the end product. Therefore, it refers to the machines of animation presentation, be these pre-20th century animation devices, movie or video screens, or even automata. The animation machine also relates to the multitude of animation production processes – from animating technologies (animation stands, cameras, computers), through to the animator’s individual creative practice. Ultimately, the animation machine can be described quite broadly and we welcome your own interpretations.

With the centenary of Australian animation approaching, the 2012 conference will also provide an opportunity to highlight some of Australia’s animation heritage. The conference will coincide with the Melbourne International Animation Festival (MIAF) and a number of crossover events are planned.

We invite proposals on a wide range of animation topics on all aspects of animation history, theory and criticism for 20-minute conference presentations. Proposals may include (but are not limited to) the following topics:


•         Australian Animation

•         Animation and the Asia-Pacific Region

•         Animation Histories

•         Future Forms of Animation

•         Industrial Methods and Changes

•         Materiality of Animation

•         Algorithmic Animation (including Games)

•         Philosophy and Animation

•         Motion Graphics

•         Scientific Visualisation

•         Contemporary Art and Animation

•         Architecture and Animation

•         Drawing and Animation

•         Web Animation

•         Narrative and Non-Narrative Animation

•         Obsolescence and Questions of Materiality

•         Augmented Reality and Vision

•         Automata (including Robotics)

•         Animation and Pedagogy

•         Documentary and Animation

•         Animation Fringes and Counter-Cultures

•         Sound and Animation

Please include with your individual submission the following:


•         Title and abstract of no more than 250 words (suitable for publication).

•         A brief biographical statement (suitable for publication).

•         Complete contact information, including name, institutional affiliation (if any), postal address, e-mail address and telephone number.

•         A head shot photo of yourself that will be suitable for publication (optional).

For panel proposals of 3-4 presenters, the chair of the panel should submit the following:


•         Overall panel title/theme, plus a 100-word description suitable for publication.

•         Name and contact information for the panel chair.

•         Titles and abstracts for each paper (as noted above).

•         Biography statement for each member (as noted above).

•         Name and contact information for each member (as noted above).

•         Photo of each presenter suitable for publication (optional).

Submit abstracts to: animation.conference@rmit.edu.au
Submission deadline: December 12, 2011
Conference website: http://www.rmit.edu.au/sas2012
Conference Chair: Dr Dan Torre, RMIT University