Some of Miyazaki’s mythic narratives, rendered within dreamlike figurations, are certainly not detached fantasy. The director portrays relatable human actions and a reasonable amount of setbacks during the (heroic) spectating process. Miyazaki’s animated realm infuses the audience with a bright outlook for the future. His narratives are often based upon graphical details and a calculated emplotment. The present study proposes reading Miyazaki’s animated tales by means of the audience’s internal projection onto the signs in the film frame. In this article, the narrative highlights that render Spirited Away (2001) an archetypal quest will be discussed. Finally, the article examines the narrative oscillation in Ponyo (2008). Alluding to Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenological perspective, the study aims to look into the textual aspects of the three cases, demonstrates how Miyazaki renders the film frame to exert persuasive impact upon the audience, and describes Hayao Miyazaki’s persuasive artistry.

In its history, production, plots and gestures, slapstick comedy was tied to the rise of modern labor in terms of both Taylorist theory and Fordist practice. Comic heroes ranging from live action comedians Chaplin or Keaton to animated animals Felix or Mickey worked against work through the playful excesses of their obediences and transgressions within an increasingly rationalized, industrial world. The digital animation studio Pixar summoned slapstick and its specifically Fordist resonances in its 2008 feature, WALL-E, yet offered a twist in humanizing a figure of perfected Fordism itself with its title character, a robot repetitively working in a post-apocalyptic earth devoid of human life. Explicitly modeled after Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, WALL-E contrasts with the film’s humans, who are entirely liberated from labor through automation in a satirical reflection of both post-Fordist accounts of the ‘end of work’ as well as broader critiques of a distracting digital culture. This article focuses on the film’s revitalization of slapstick traditions within the context of recent debates about post-Fordism, the future of automated labor and the transformation of working human bodies. Just as slapstick’s relationship to modern labor touched on the playful mode of its cinematic production as well as their form as indexical montage so too does Pixar’s corporate reputation as ‘Creativity, Inc’ suggest a complex relationship between its slapstick hero and the digital labor animating his movement. The same will be argued of Pixar’s vaunted techniques with both digital image-making and commodity generation, both of which suggest a nostalgic animation of slapstick’s antinomies as much as a disavowal of the post-Fordist production of which Pixar is vanguard.

This article examines animation education at the two Indian government design schools, the National Institute of Design (NID) and Industrial Design Centre (IDC), looking beyond the transfer of skills to the negotiation of social and professional identity. The accounts of faculty, students and graduates express symbolic values of local relevance and cultural continuity rooted in a tradition of ‘purposeful design’ as a tool for post-independence national development. Moreover such testimony not only reveals fraught discourses of national, regional, class, and gender identity, but also creative independence and entrepreneurship. By placing design instruction in a context of communities of practice, the author argues that this reflects an overt politicised effort on the part of educators and students to respond to the current industrial conditions of Indian animation, rejecting market-driven labour standardization in favour of ideologically-based professional networks of their own devising.

The US girl cartoon genre began in the 1980s with the Federal Communication Commission’s deregulation of television, allowing the programming of toy-based cartoons. The toy industry’s gender binary of girl toys vs boy toys was translated into the definitive split of girl cartoons and boy cartoons. This first wave of girl cartoons defined the gender normative parameters that would identifiably label a cartoon program as a girl cartoon: rainbow unicorns and star sparkles in friendship communities with motivational girl leaders that displayed confidence, determination and savvy while processing emotions and solving conflicts through communication. These characters were young girls, not teenagers or young adults with developed bodies. It is rarely addressed that these cartoon characters presented an empowered girl media product in popular culture a decade before the nomenclature ‘Girl Power’, and did so sans sexualization. In this article, the author discusses the second wave of girl cartoons that came about with US television’s cartoon renaissance in the 1990s. This research explores the ways that lead girl characters were newly portrayed and how they evolved from the girl cartoon representations in the first wave era. Along with the representation of empowered girl characters, this research identified a feminine triptych. In character settings with more than one girl lead, the feminine portrayals were represented in the triptych of the beauty, the brains and the brawns. This research also revealed a persistent glitch to the empowerment of girl cartoon protagonists in the form of secondary characters, identified as mean girls and misogyny boys or no-homo boys. Another shortcoming is identified as boobs and boyfriends, to demonstrate the compulsion to give characters above the age of 12 sexualized bodies and heteronormative relationships. Several cartoon episodes of The Powerpuff Girls, Maggie and the Ferocious Beast, Dora the Explorer, Ni Hao- Kai Lan, Franny’s Feet, Lilo and Stitch: The Series, Maya & Miguel, Word Girl and Mighty B! are textually analyzed to document both verbal and visual gender cues.

The typology proposed in this article comprehensively illuminates the formal characteristics of live action/animation hybrid films. By reference to six film analytical categories, the interplay of animation and live action film is explored within single images as well as on the level of montage, and is illustrated by means of examples from a wide variety of films. The flexible and adaptable set of parameters comprises all animation techniques and is applicable to whole films as well as to longer or shorter sequences. A further goal is to disintegrate the boundary that is often drawn between so-called mélange films and digital hybrid films. The only requirement is that the disparity between animation and live action film must be discernible to the viewers. Ideally, the application of the proposed typology will lead to a new historical positioning of hybrid tendencies within film history.

Using analytic tools developed by the literary critic, James Phelan, the author investigates frame narrative organization in three animated films. Zbig Rybczynski’s Tango uses addition and subtraction to frame mini-stories layered one over the other; Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis’s When the Day Breaks uses an A–B–A structure with repetitive events mirroring and revealing each other; and Yuri Norstein’s Tale of Tales uses character narrators that serve as observer/participants, allowing the film to cross narrative genres. This article also investigates the layered viewer response that frame narration requires. All three animations, while not digitally produced, demonstrate the ontological montage Lev Manovich ascribes to the aesthetic logic of digital compositing, which he maintains is layered and ‘first and foremost a conceptual [and] not only a technological operation’.

Viral aesthetics have become increasingly present in representations of health and illness. Since electron microscopy was first used to graphically isolate HIV, the ‘viral look’ has influenced academic and popular discussions about life and death. Commonly, the virus is associated with rapid and unseen transmission, hiding and genetic recoding that make identification and elimination difficult, and ‘sleeper cell’ behavior that delays detection and treatment. Visually isolating, eliminating and controlling molecular matter suggests that, in order to preserve life, foreign matter must be visually as well as biologically controlled. Recent attempts at imaging molecular space have shifted the practices of researchers. Using algorithms, models, and graphical interfaces, researchers now gain visual access to molecular space via simulation rather than photography, enrolling the public in the production of scientific research. Games such as Foldit use competitive play as a research method. Overcoming the problem of molecular scale using computer processing, and operationalizing the critique of ‘expert knowledge’ formulated by ACT UP in response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, some successes have already been reported. This article demonstrates how scalar travels, the practices of visualization that disclose them, and the participatory possibilities of research remind us of the power of cultural practices in creating scientific knowledge.

Czech surrealist filmmaker Jan Švankmajer is known to animate any sort of thing: leaves, the surface of a wall, socks, nails and raw flesh. But he does not limit himself to inanimate objects; he also stop animates live actors through a technique called pixilation. This article examines the performances of Švankmajer’s pixilated actors within the 1992 short, Food, which constructs a dialectic between the agency of the actor and that of the animator. The author argues that Švankmajer undermines embodied autonomy, positing limits to human agency and suggesting that the boundaries of our bodies are more permeable than we like to think.

The contingent instant that Walter Benjamin, among others, claims photography uniquely makes palpable has no place in film. Cinema relies on the impermanence of such elusive moments to generate continuity and presence. This article shows how Oskar Fischinger’s 1927 experimental short Walking from Munich to Berlin combines photography and film in a way that stages the incompatibility of these technologies, while also forging a new visual language – a radical form of animation – with which to overcome it. The article both examines Fischinger’s work as a singular contribution to animation and the avant-garde of the Weimar era and beyond, unraveling its philosophical implications for theories of collecting, film, photography, and animation.