Animation

From 1948–1952, Rudy Vallée, a successful performer whose career spanned radio, film, recorded music and stage entertainment, expanded his operations into the burgeoning US television market with the launch of his independent production company, Vallée Video. One of hundreds of forgotten companies that arose during this period to meet growing demand for programming content, Vallée Video offers an important case study for understanding animation workers’ role in postwar television production. Drawing on corporate records and films preserved in the Rudy Vallée Papers at California’s Thousand Oaks Library and the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the authors’ analysis documents Vallée’s use of freelance artists and external animation houses for work ranging from camera effects for illustrated musical shorts to animated commercials and original cartoon series. These productions demonstrate the fluid movement of animation labor from theatrical film to small screen markets and participated in larger aesthetic shifts toward minimalist drawing styles and limited character animation that would soon dominate mid-20th century US television.

YouTube has become a great showcase for audiovisual products and a source of income for a number of creators. Several pioneers of internet animation migrated to this platform to provide greater visibility and economic security for their productions. A group of YouTubers, so-called ‘Reply Girls’, achieved rapid economic benefits by publishing content without any value, neither artistic nor communicative, but that deceived YouTube’s remuneration system and prioritization algorithm. To fight this phenomenon, YouTube subsequently applied changes to its prioritization algorithm and monetization plans. In this article, the author examines more than 3,300 videos published by 25 animation channels between 2006 and 2018 with Digital Methods tools to analyse how the changes applied to the platform policies have influenced and shaped the evolution of animation production on the internet.

Examining facets of modernist visions of our technological future and of theatricalized city and stage spaces in the 1993 animated film Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, this article explores the cultural meaning of technology in graphic fiction. The confrontation scene between Batman and Joker in the grounds of Gotham’s World’s Fair, the author argues, echoes the 1939 New York World’s Fair with its modernist urban optimism and pop cultural fascination with new visionary technologies, as well as the modern history of moving pictures and multi-media spectacle. The article spotlights the power of the Batman story to participate in, and contribute towards, complex cultural inquiry and transmedial discourses around technology and popular entertainments. Through the exquisite medium of animation – which allows animated characters to be placed on an abstract architectural city stage – Mask of the Phantasm also embodies modernist visions of the ‘ideal’ stage character in a medium that creates non-realist art and more complex possibilities for movement, thus transporting modernist thinking into the 20th century.

Animation has become ubiquitous within digital visual culture and fundamental to knowledge production. As such, its status as potentially reliable imagery should be clarified. This article examines how animation’s indexicality (both as trace and deixis) changes in mixed realities where the physical and the virtual converge, and how this contributes to the research of animation as documentary and/or non-fiction imagery. In digital culture, animation is used widely to depict both physical and virtual events, and actions. As a result, animation is no longer an interpretive visual language. Instead, animation in virtual culture acts as real-time visualization of computer-mediated actions, their capture and documentation. Now that animation includes both captured and generated imagery, not only do its definitions change but its link to the realities depicted and the documentary value of animated representations requires rethinking. This article begins with definitions of animation and their relation to the perception of animation’s validity as documentary imagery; thereafter it examines indexicality and the strength of indexical visualizations, introducing a continuum of strong and weak indices to theorize the hybrid and complex forms of indexicality in animation, ranging from graphic user interfaces (GUI) to data visualization. The article concludes by examining four indexical connections in relation to physical and virtual reality, offering a theoretical framework with which to conceptualize animation’s indexing abilities in today’s mixed realities.

This article suggests a discussion on the reconfiguration of the 12 principles of animation and their necessary refinement for contemporary animation to address the growing complexity and expansion of the animation industry. The expansion of the 12 principles of animation into the various animation techniques requires a consideration of their development, which, in the 1930s and 1940s was sufficient for animation’s hand-drawn animation needs; since then, the principles have proven themselves accurate and incredibly helpful for subsequent decades. Nevertheless, this article indicates that a refinement of the principles is required to accommodate a broader range of animation techniques. The great advantage of the 12 principles of animation is their simplicity and logic; however, they do not apply in their entirety (as the full set of 12) to hand-drawn digital animation, stop-motion animation, experimental or digitally animated media. Therefore, this article explores the initial 12 principles with additions and variations suggested by artists and scholars over the last 30 years, and concludes with a reorganization and expansion of most of the principles’ content, a breakdown into sub points and an updated terminology to reconceptualize the 12 principles of animation for all animation techniques.