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Animation: an interdisciplinary journal

Journal Description

animation: an interdisciplinary journal

animation: an interdisciplinary journal provides the first cohesive international peer-reviewed publishing platform for animation that unites contributions from a wide range of research agendas and creative practice.

The journal’s scope is very comprehensive, yet its focus is clear and simple. The journal addresses all animation made using all known (and yet to be developed) techniques – from 16th century optical devices to contemporary digital media – revealing its implications on other forms of time-based media expression past, present and future.

animation: an interdisciplinary journal is essential and stimulating reading for academics, researchers, students, curators and practitioners in animation, film and media studies, cultural studies, critical theory, architecture, art & design, computer sciences, games studies and visual culture.

“animation: an interdisciplinary journal promises not only an interdisciplinary and international scope, but also – and most significant at this historical moment – to re-mediate and inter-mediate a range of moving image platforms and to re-think the premises that have thus far found it proper to separate the ‘mashed potatoes’ of film theory from the ‘peas’ of animation theory and the ‘carrots’ of digital media theory. Indeed, animation: an interdisciplinary journal promises to provide us an exceedingly full and intellectually satisfying plate.” Vivian Sobchack, Professor of Film, Television and Digital Media, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Electronic Access

Animation is available electronically on SAGE Journals at http://journals.sagepub.com/home/anm.

Journal Feed

  • From Ancient Zhiguai Tales to Contemporary Animation: A Study of Visual Rhetoric in ‘Yao-Chinese Folktales’ (2023)
    by Wang Aiqing
    Animation, Volume 19, Issue 1, Page 58-75, March 2024. This study delves into the use of visual rhetorical strategies in 中国奇谭 Zhongguo Qitan ‘Yao-Chinese Folktales’ (2023), particularly focusing on 鹅鹅鹅 E E E ‘Goose Mountain’ (henceforth ‘Goose’) directed by Hu Rui. We assert that ‘Goose’ transcodes and reinterprets the ancient Chinese zhiguai novella 阳羡书生 Yangxian Shusheng ‘The Scholar from Yangxian’ (henceforth ‘Scholar’) for a contemporary audience through the use of visual rhetoric, leading to a compelling contemporary rendition of this tale. As a silent animation, ‘Goose’ does so by adeptly incorporating visual depictions, especially animal-related imagery and ink painting aesthetics, […]
  • Disney’s Wagner Aesthetic: Music Drama in Pursuit of the Total Artwork
    by Jason Barker
    Animation, Volume 19, Issue 1, Page 43-57, March 2024. Aside from Walt Disney’s reputation for renegade avant-gardism, ‘sentimental modernism’ and subliterary Americana, the German composer Richard Wagner’s pursuit of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) provides a coherent framework for interpreting the ‘music drama’ of the Disney studio’s Depression-era shorts of the 1930s and its feature films of the Golden Age (1937–1942). In citing Wagner and Adorno’s critique of him, the author argues that Disney follows Wagner in three key respects: (1) in his disavowal of the ‘work’ of art and corresponding objectification of Nature; (2) his espousal of technology and its […]
  • Editorial
    by Suzanne Buchan
    Animation, Volume 19, Issue 1, Page 3-5, March 2024.
  • Posthumous Portraits in Motion: Experimental Animation, Metamorphosis and Reflections on Mortality
    by Michelle Stewart
    Animation, Volume 19, Issue 1, Page 6-26, March 2024. This article details an oil paint-on-glass animation depicting posthumous portraits of unclaimed deceased from a Johannesburg mortuary in South Africa. The creative project engages with Western traditions of posthumous, focusing on the iconography of the corpse. The author explores how these traditions are approached through the moving image, metamorphosis and experimental animation processes. The animation uses metamorphosis not just as a symbolic strategy to serve the idea of transformation – but also as a self-referential engagement with animation’s contradictory life-giving and destructive traits. The article and the creative project it illuminates […]
  • Narrating Fabrics: Nostalgia in Animated Puppets’ Skin
    by Vincenzo Maselli
    Animation, Volume 19, Issue 1, Page 27-42, March 2024. In recent years, many studies in the field of animation aesthetics have recognized that puppets’ materiality in stop-motion animation films is a powerful narrative tool. Starting from these premises, this article explores stop-motion films performed by fabric-skinned puppets and suggests that textile materials convey meta-narratives about loss and nostalgia. The analyses of the anthropological and expressive–sensorial dimensions of fabric indeed allow us to investigate the concepts of melancholy and nostalgia as intellectual and emotional experiences made possible thanks to the material characteristics of an artifact. To validate this hypothesis, three stop-motion […]
  • Corrigendum to Editorial
    Animation, Ahead of Print.