Editorial

Most of the articles and reviews in our first issue of 2018 are focused on North American animation from large commercial studios. They examine a range of topics, from relations between labour, design and narrative, and feminist readings of animated shorts, to an emphasis on audiences, distribution and consumption or an intertextual debate between ‘the illusion of life’ and divine creative acts.

Maarit Kalmakurki’s ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty: The Components of Costume Design in Disney’s Early Hand-Drawn Animated Feature Films’ makes an important contribution to our understanding of the collaborative design process of costumes for animated figures. This included actors, illustrators and animators, and Kalmakurki observes the central role that rotoscoping played in achieving a quality of realism in the animated movement and appearance of fabrics and costumes designed for female figures. She makes very good use of the often extensive ‘extras’ included on DVDs of Disney’s feature films, describing in detail the research process of the teams involved and the transition from material-based costumes to the final aesthetic choices used in the three feature films. A key point she makes is that the costume design is intricately implicated in the design of characters: ‘a character is never drawn unclothed’ (p. 17). The emphasis on the female figure, albeit in a different framework, continues in Katia Perea’s ‘Gender and Cartoons from Theaters to Television: Feminist Critique on the Early Years of Cartoons’. Her corpus of animated shorts spans close to 100 years, from adult-oriented early theatrical shorts to contemporary television cartoons for children from Disney, Warner Bros. and Hanna-Barbera. She uses these to propose an enduring master narrative of gender and sexualization of female characters, and its stereotypical coding (with a few exceptions) that had and has an equivalent in discriminatory labour practices until only recently.

The next article takes us to Europe, specifically pre-EU Czechoslovakia, and its puppet theatre traditions. In ‘Jan Švankmajer’s Don Šajn (1970): Puppets as Intimate Objects’, Mareike Sera discusses a less-known film of the major artist based on the Don Juan narrative fantasy, one that mixes puppet animation with live-action filming of life-sized marionettes. Sera is interested in the affect of these puppets and what she calls a communicative flow of media and intermediality, as well as a certain material and ontological ambiguity of lifelessness and liveliness of filmed objects and puppets in which a live actor is encased. In her discussion, she describes and analyses key scenes and the experiential modes they offer to viewers, and the emotional range available to them. With references to aesthetic, perceptual and philosophical concepts from Michael O’Pray, André Breton, Gilles Deleuze and Paul Ricoeur, Sera develops a series of metaphors to deconstruct and reconstruct the meaning of the film and its combination of intermedial features and techniques.

We then return to USA-based studio productions. David McGowan’s reception-orientated ‘Walt Disney Treasures or Mickey Mouse DVDs? Animatophilia and the Competing Representations of Theatrical Cartoon Shorts on Home Video’ addresses non-cinematic modes of consumption of films that had originally been made for adult audiences. He questions whether, with the additional materials and contextualizing information on DVD editions, they can actually represent authentic theatrical viewing experiences of the past for animation cinephiles. McGowan frames his analysis and evaluation of DVD culture in film and television studies debates and discourses. Working mainly with the example of Disney, he explains how new subsets of home viewing audiences were targeted with differently marketed and designed collections of films, from standard to luxury editions, the latter being more aligned to generate and satisfy nostalgia in potential buyers. McGowan’s specific examples and detailed descriptions of variations of parafilmic materials and digital user menus that were included (or not) reveals the commercial strategies at work in the (re-)marketing of theatrical shorts, as well as a relation between varying degrees of information on problematic content (racism, stereotyping) and intended DVD audiences (adults of children); in an afterword, he concludes with some observations on the recent decline in DVD purchasing and the shift to online streaming, and that we may have seen the best, and possibly the last, of the animation studio archives treasures during the decade of the DVD format’s popularity.

In 1979, Donald Crafton proposed a metaphor for the power of the animator: that in animating drawings he or she becomes god-like (p. 415). The since oft-repeated and enduring meme or trope of animation as a technical usurpation of divinity and the ‘hand of God’ has recently been discussed by Colin Williamson (2015: 92–99) in terms of the turn of 20th-century time-lapse photography, science films and Disney’s anthropomorphization of the natural world. Also working with Crafton’s concept, the animated toys of Pixar’s animated features are the subject of Robert Geal’s ‘Animated Images and Animated Objects in the Toy Story Franchise: Reflexively and Intertextually Transgressive Mimesis’. However, rather than promoting animation as a technique or tool that imitates divinity, Geal’s argument is focused on an historical, medial and cultural intertextuality he observes in narratives about the creation of life. He engages first with a scoping of religious prohibitions of engaging in god-like mimetic activities, including sculpture, literature and creation of simulacra to then apply this to an examination of animation’s continuation of this creativity, and proposes a self-reflexivity of the Pixar figures’ own animation and de-animation as digital sculptures that continue with the usurpation of the divine creative act. Geal’s article makes an important contribution to the ongoing discussion initiated by Crafton close to 40 years ago.

The Reviews Editors are working through a backlog of book reviews that, until they joined the team, we had been somewhat remiss in securing. In this issue, we present three reviews on publications on Pixar, and one on the history and legacy of special effects. Steven Smith takes us through an illuminating theoretical and contextual chapter-by-chapter evaluation of Eric Herhuth’s Pixar and the Aesthetic Imagination: Animation, Storytelling, and Digital Culture (2017), pointing out the value of the author’s interdisciplinary approach to a set of aesthetic complexes located in the book’s corpus of films. Smith observes and commends the deep, sometimes brilliant aesthetic examinations that Herhuth undertakes, and goes into some detail with examples of thematic and conceptual terms the author works with to also analyse democratic society through the films. The next reviewer, Christopher Holliday, describes Dietmar Meinel’s Pixar’s America: The Re-Animation of American Myths and Symbols (2016) as a welcome addition to what he calls an ‘emergent field of “Pixar Studies”’ (p. 88). He locates Meinel’s book within this field, then comments on how it is structured and displays a discursive progression of a not necessarily chronological ordering of films discussed, one that is oriented to an overarching analysis of American cultural, political and historical events and traditions. Then, Helen Haswell’s review of Pixar with Lacan: The Hysteric’s Guide to Animation (2016) by Lilian Munk Rösing also begins with a brief review of Pixar studies to then explain how this book is located in a scholarly sub-group of thematic approaches to Pixar’s films: specifically, that of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Haswell effectively condenses and summarizes each of the chapters’ foci, with helpful examples of the effectiveness of psychoanalytic terms and concepts to a range of films and their figures, noting how one later chapter is a ‘turning point of the book’ (p. 92) and how Munk Rösling is effective in introducing and applying notably complex concepts to this popular studio’s output. Finally, and contextually related to the computer animation that most of Pixar’s films are created with, is Nick Jones’s review of Julie A Turnock’s Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics (2015). First observing a lack of scholarship on how 1970s special effects blockbusters influenced animated visual aesthetics, Jones names other recent publications on SFX that Turnock aligns to, then points out how her interest is also in changing practices, people and post-production technologies and how special effects were influenced by realism and avant-garde filmmaking. Jones then summarizes the key features of the three-part book before concluding that Turnock’s book fills a notable gap in our understanding of the histories and aesthetics of special effects.

For the Editorial Team