Editorial

The main aim for the founding 10 years ago of animation: an interdisciplinary journal was, and continues to be, to enable authors to engage in academic dialogues that reflect on the interdisciplinary nature of animation. Founded at a time when there was an enormous gap between animation production and its critical academic counterpart, this gap, an opportunity, is now narrowing for a number of reasons: the three issues we publish each year, the marked increase in animation scholarship and publishing, and animation-based PhD projects. animation: an interdisciplinary journal is now a thriving publishing platform for diverse texts that in the past were a diaspora of publications in single-discipline journals. Our Editorial Team shares responsibility for developing the journal’s editorial direction, soliciting manuscripts and working with contributors, often providing extensive pre-peer review editorial feedback. Guest editors, including members of the Editorial Team, have played an important role in shaping and expanding our interdisciplinary reach, not least as they have often worked with authors working outside the nominal field of ‘animation’ who may not have contributed a manuscript to the open call. We will continue to encourage our authors, and our readers, to engage with all known techniques and those yet to be developed, revealing animation’s implications for other forms of time-based media past, present and future, and the impact of this on animation’s audiences.

The journal’s score of 0.213 and ranking of 42/383 journals in the 2013 SJR (SCImago Journal Rank) in Art and Humanities, Visual and Performing Arts, confirms and celebrates the quality and rigour of our authors’ contributions to the field. The SJR indicator ‘measures the scientific influence of the average article in a journal, it expresses how central to the global scientific discussion an average article of the journal is’ (SCImago, 2007). The journal is now on a healthy number of international abstracting and indexing services, from Art Abstracts, Arts & Humanities Citation Index and Communication & Mass Media Complete to European Network for Cinema and Media Studies, FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals, Inist-Cnrs, MLA International Bibliography and Scopus.

The current issue demonstrates the wide range of our authors’ subject matter, all joined by the overarching notion of ‘animation’ as an intertextual art form, a performative medium, and an internationally popular screen culture. In ‘Cartoon Vision: UPA, Precisionism, and American Modernism’, Dan Bashara unfolds a fresh understanding of UPA’s ‘high period’ artistic style by comparing it to the semi-abstract Precisionist school of modernist American painting. Interweaving details about each of these schools, their key figures, seminal works and theories, and cultural politics, he suggests that a new mid-century communicative animation style developed, removed from the dominant mimetic style to one that is more abstract and symbolic, while introducing a psychological realism. Bashara also takes away the taint of ‘limited animation’ often ascribed to UPA, suggesting instead the flatness and graphics are more of an intended understatement, a visual simplicity.

Malcolm Cook (2013) suggests that ‘animation, by any definition, begins with a performance’. With figures, forms and characters that originate from drawing or painting, the understanding of performance in animation is complex, an element that Don Crafton has brilliantly demystified in his Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief and World-Making in Animation (2012). The next two articles in this issue take on performance in animation of the animated movements of figures and humans, rather than cartoon characters. Fauzi Naeim Mohamed and Nurul Lina Mohd Nor’s ‘Puppet Animation Films and Gesture Aesthetics’ examines qualities of gesture in three puppet animation films. First defining their understanding of gesture – as non-verbal communication, as a semiotic phenomenon, as a kinetic language – they go on to develop a set of aesthetic and perceptual principles and properties that they subsequently test on the works discussed. Some points they make include that gesture is accretive in narrative, that the character’s environment affects gesture, and that cultural signification helps our understanding of gesture. They conclude by offering possible categories of gesture in puppet animation, from the spectator’s perspective and the animator’s perspective, that could be explored in future research. Also interested in gesture, but moving from wood, cloth and fabric to the human body, and from animated short to music video, Lisa Perrott’s ‘Music Video’s Performing Bodies: Floria Sigismondi as Gestural Animator and Puppeteer’ investigates gesture as a means of transgression. Her three case studies feature David Bowie, The Cure and Lawrence Rothman, with director Sigismondi as ‘puppeteer’. Working with a framework of the uncanny, and with the films of the Quay Brothers and Jan Švankmajer, Perrott explores a redefinition, or expansion, of animated agency through gestural performativity, exemplified through music video performers and their bodies. She is also interested in the beauty, aesthetic qualities unnatural of Sigismondi’s art as gestural performativity, and she raises questions about control, embodied subjects, gender and power structures. Perrott’s article is also important when we consider the role MTV played in the 1980s and later in introducing contemporary, innovative and experimental animation to a global network audience in their idents, ‘Free your Mind’ shorts, and the many music videos that featured animation.

Whether featured in drawings, puppets or people, stillness and movement are inherent in the animation process. Two processes used in drawn animation – animated sketching and boiling – are the subject of Dan Torre’s ‘Boiling Lines and Lightning Sketches: Process and the Animated Drawing’. His interest is in an emphasis on drawing as transformation, process and practice through the context of process philosophy. Torre makes a distinction between what might be termed full animation – sequentially replaced complete drawings – and animated sketching, which consists of sequential modifications of a drawing with origins in pre-cinematic lighting sketches. Working diachronically over a century, Torre describes the change in image construction that occurred with the introduction of cinematic technique and production; an example of this is a section on erasure that links JS Blackton, William Kentridge and Jules Engel. The repetitive aesthetic of ‘boiling’, a practice and technique that ensures the stillness of a drawing is not experienced by the viewer, is discussed as simultaneously immobile and mobile. Again working diachronically, from Winsor McCay to Joanna Priestley, and with a brief reference to Deleuze, Torre examines the material essence of this kind of image as a being-state of drawing, as what we might call time-based difference and repetition.

The journal has published a number of investigations into audiences and reception using empirical and social science methods. Alvaro David Hernandez Hernandez and Taiki Hirai work with surveys and a logistic regression analysis model in their article ‘The Reception of Japanese Animation and Its Determinants in Taiwan, South Korea and China’. The authors evaluate Japanese animation consumption in these countries by taking into account age, years of schooling, community types, working hours and other categories. Examining the influence of Japanese animation through legal, political, cultural and economic conditions and developments, the main conclusions they make are to suggest a change in the concept of ‘Japan’ in East Asian cultural consumption, and in what they call ‘cultural flows between countries’. Providing a wealth of statistics and information resources, many in Asian languages and reviewed and interpreted possibly for the first time in English, their contribution to understanding cultural consumption of animation in East Asia sits comfortably alongside those of Mark Steinberg, Susan Napier and Ian Condry.