Abstract
New Graduate Essay Award: Collaboration between animation: an interdisciplinary journal and the SCMS Animated Media SIG
Submission to a scholarly journal may be a postgraduate student’s first attempt at peer-reviewed published dissemination of their research, either during a doctoral degree or shortly after gaining the qualification: a question often asked at the doctoral exam is what plans the candidate has for publishing. Journal articles have a different structure and organisation, readership and purpose than a thesis chapter, for instance, so it is advisable to discuss a journal submission with doctoral supervisors or others with journal publishing experience. Reading journal articles in one’s own areas of research can also offer ideas and methods for how to construct a discussion and methodology in a limited word count that journals usually require, and some academic journal publishers have guidance on how to get published. 1 This journal is very supportive of doctoral and early career researchers (ECRs), as navigating the requirements of a submission can be complex. As an author, it is an exciting moment and career milestone to acheive your first peer-reviewed article in print; one of the real pleasures as a Journal Editor is working on submissions from doctoral students or ECRs, seeing a manuscript through the submission process and successful peer review to production and publication.
In late 2024, the Editor was approached by Chris Taylor, one of the Co-Chairs of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Animated Media Scholarly Interest Group (SIG), who proposed a collaboration to support a graduate student writing award (full declaration: the SIG was founded in 2010 by the Editor of this journal). 2 Along with Co-Chair Jaqueline Ristola, who worked with us on refinements and organisation, and Grace Han, the Graduate Representative, we enthusiastically agreed on the idea of a graduate and post-graduate student award, and developed and refined the concepts and processes now in place. One aim of the award is provide the SIG’s graduate students with an opportunity to submit their research for peer review in the context of a scholarly journal, so guidance was based on the journal’s formats, working practices and submission guidelines. In agreement with Sage Journals, a single-blind peer review process was agreed upon; the Panel members were named at the final announcement, but they were not identified in connection to the anonymised essays they reviewed, and their peer review reports were also anonymised. The first Call for Submissions went out in 2025 and SIG members were invited to put themselves forward as peer reviewers: the Panel members included Chris Taylor, Patrick Sullivan (this journal’s Reviews Editor), Jordan Schonig, Ryan Pierson, Rayna Denison, and Suzanne Buchan. The Panel were also provided with peer-review feedback guidance and criteria aligned to the journal’s own procedures and ethics as a Sage journal.
The winner of the first annual Animated Media SIG Graduate Essay Award, supported by the SCMS SIG, animation: an interdisciplinary journal (Sage) and the journal’s Editor, Suzanne Buchan was announced at the SCMS conference in Chicago this year: Duo Wang (University of Toronto) for his article ‘Sketching Reality: Takahata Isao and the Paradox of Animated Worlds’. The Award Panel’s laudatio: The essay presents a mature and careful academic voice, one that weighs and balances as it encounters complex discourse in a well-structured approach. The use of primary sources is exemplary in support of a more rounded understanding of Takahata as a filmmaker, whose relationship to the question of realism is foundational to his animated filmmaking. The clarity of argument and analytical focus is impressive and at the same time easy to follow for non-experts in Japan studies.
Duo Wang will receive US$250 and his work will be published as an article in animation: an interdisciplinary journal, working with the Editor, subject to peer review and editorial feedback. The Panel also awarded an Honorary Mention to Markus Beeken (King’s College, London) for his essay ‘The Rhetoric of Abandonment: Hybridity and Brand Identity in Contemporary Hollywood Stop-Motion’. The organising team noted the competitiveness of the submissions, and each reviewer expressed pleasure in reading and evaluating all the essays. They each provided peer review reports for two of them, and all authors received detailed feedback. Along with this inaugural award, it was a good year for animation and for the journal: one of the award Panel members, Jordan Schonig, won the prestigious 2026 SCMS Katherine Singer Kovács Essay Award for his 2025 essay in animation: an interdisciplinary journal – ‘Laborious Aesthetics: Visible and Invisible Labor in the Spider-Verse franchise’ (vol. 20, no. 1). Congratulations all round!
The current issue’s articles
One of the rewards of writing about the almost endless time-based creative constellations of animation is that there are so many avenues and disciplines, techniques and technologies, methods and processes, authors and artists to approach it from and through. For those of us seeking scholarly writings on animation in the 20th century, up until the 1990s they were few and far between; publications and university library holdings were scarce and teaching on animation was often embedded in Humanities departments of English or Art History. As an analogue to the earlier development and later refinement of cinema studies, in Animation Studies novel sets of methods and approaches, terms and definitions had to be created by working through other disciplines; some of these eventually became foundational to Film (and Animation) Theory, and provided the backbone, so to speak, for the vigorous expansion and refinement of our discipline that was to follow and continues today.
With this in mind, it is refreshing to read an article that takes chances and offers ideas in a similar way to the early development of Animation Studies. In his article, ‘Barthes on Steinberg: Panorama, Play, Paradox’, that brings the influential theorist, cultural philosopher and critic Roland Barthes and critically acclaimed artist Saul Steinberg (who had known and communicated with each other) into close proximity and exchange on his own terms, Patrick Ellis observes that Barthes’ 1976 text All About You ‘might seem an unlikely source for scholars of animation’, and that Barthes had an explicit distaste for le dessin animé. He then names authors who have invoked Barthes’ own concepts to discuss and analyse animation; Steinberg’s influence on Modernist animation of his times (notably early the independent artist-led UPA) and on cinema as well is noted. The shared and distinct historical contexts of each of the personalities and their careers are mapped out, with quotes from Barthes on Steinberg’s relevance to him. Ellis distills four concepts from Barthes: autonomy, impertinence, metamorphosis, and paradox. There is a comparative merging of a sort, of Barthes’ critical thinking and his reading Steinberg’s art that adds up to a way of approaching animation. The article includes a number of longer quotations from Barthes (all in translations by Ellis) and an insightful selection of images of Steinberg’s work, inviting the reader, via Barthes, to consider Saul Steinberg’s work as ‘a paper optical toy’. Discussing a number of images of the latter’s works, Ellis ultimately proposes that Barthes’ text is ‘an animatic celebration of Steinberg’. It is also an invitation to a way of ‘reading’ animation though his own critical exploration of these written and visual texts.
Staying in the range of modernist critical and cultural theory, the next article works with a number of critical ideas from Theodor Adorno (1903–1969); Barthes’ text was published in the 1970s and it is less known how they may have influenced each other. For Lucy O’Meara (2013), while it was not clear how much they may have influenced each other, she sees a convergence in ‘their lifelong work on ideology critique [as proceeding] from similar bases, and they each accord preeminence to aesthetic reflection’; their insistence on subjective critical response ‘is both concerned with the condition of the individual in modernity and founded on a post-Nietzschean understanding of [Immanuel] Kant’ (p.182). Working with Adorno and other cultural philosophers, in Peng-Yi Tai’s ‘Pixar’s Inside Out as a Critique of Disney: Self-alienation and the Culture Industry’, the condition of the individual is approached through animated characters. Tai sets up her critique of Disney by first contextualising the aesthetic heritage of Pixar before its takeover by the conglomerate with the training and artistic qualities of Disney that influenced the former. This is a key point that underpins her discussion, as Pixar tried to retain its identity and pushed against the franchising and sequels of its later owner. Tai pursues her interest in the tensions between creative autonomy and being part of a large corporation. This is followed by a discussion of Disney’s ideology as it developed in the 1930s, with happiness as a goal, and it is here that Adorno and his critical concept of the culture industry is invoked. An extended examination of the film and its sequel includes considerations of the processes of character design and behaviour, and the central role of emotion to this in this film. Tai expands her critique to include elements of Disney theme parks that are part of the film’s dynamic and ideology (and of Riley’s world) through labour and protest. This is followed by a discourse on personality culture of the 1930s that links to Adorno and Horkheimer’s writings on the culture industry, the individual, and self-alienation, that is developed as a basis for examining elements of Disney’s exuberant style of the time. Having set this up, Tai returns to the theme park and aligns the park employees’ highly disciplined training with Disney animators’ performative, positive emotion-based training in terms of controlled labour and Adorno’s notions of self-alienation. She evaluates the film’s ‘happy’ ending through these critical theory concepts, how the film is a critique of the perpetuation of the ‘normalcy of happiness’, and how Pixar’s critical reception has changed in past years.
Moving from the subsidiary studio Pixar to its owner Disney, the next article addresses a set of aesthetics specific to humor and slapstick in two cinematic media forms. Working with comparative analyses of paired sets of films, in ‘Tones in the Aesthetic Transition from Disney 2D Animated Features to Their “Live-Action” Remakes: Humour vs. Seriousness’, Shuo Zhang first establishes a distinction between slapstick and seriousness, sets the corpus of works and establishes the aim to loosen a binary alignment of animated film to slapstick humour, invoking Sianne Ngai’s (2005) relational concept of ‘tone’. A longer section is devoted to an analysis of slapstick humour in animation and specific methods, props and actions that enable and determine it, such as visual gangs and cartoon physics. Zhang then turns to the notion of seriousness in its cultural and historical meanings as a framework (that includes Aristotle) to consider through nuances of tone, and to the live-action remakes, noting a change in target audience (families that include more mature audiences). A set of strategies are analysed in their effectiveness in expressing seriousness (style, narrative structure, character dynamics, emotional depth), and discussions of the films reveal a set of tragic scenes and elements of the horror genre across them; an interesting observation is that the live-action female characters have more agency than their earlier animated counterpart (while this may be an obvious correction by the studio to the earlier gender stereotypes). This establishes a basis for Zhang’s ensuing examination of how in the shift from short to feature-length productions, Disney animation also displays elements of seriousness. In the remaining sections, the modalities of tone are discussed through photorealism, situation comedy and comedic suspense, and the conclusion has a positive appreciation of how the studio negotiates its place and position in culture.
The journal has published a number of articles, as well as a Special Issue (vol. 17, no. 1, 2022), on animation history and historiography. The next article addresses the ‘how’ of historiography in that it applies the method of prosopography to three animation studios to undertake a systematic comparison of the contexts and conditions of a disparate set of creative individuals and their professions in two countries – the post-WW2 (former) Czechoslovakia and Poland. ‘Together at a Different Pace: Career Paths and Production Capacities in Czechoslovak and Polish Animation, 1945–1989’ is a collaboratively written article by authors based in the two countries under scrutiny (Pavel Skopal, Ewa Ciszewska, Michal Večeřa and Michał Pabiś-Orzeszyna) and it was also supported by research funding from the two countries. After the rationale for selecting the three studios that includes some of their specific features and types of works, that is the basis for what they term an asymmetrical comparison’, a brief, helpful overview of developments before the period under security is followed by a detailed discussion of post-war events up to 1960s, taking into account shared and distinct cultural, social, political and professional, and ideological parameters at play during the period. The authors provides details of the activities, education and career developments of a significant number of individuals and groups of artists working in various areas of animation production, with a particular interest in directors. The second period includes culture and, taking into account the political and institutional variances and impacts, they map out variations in how the two respective national industries developed in distinct temporalities and the reasons for differences in developments, with insights into how the artists worked in and through the studios. One of their aims is to find a position as to the uniqueness of the country-specific developments, demonstrating instead that these countries were not unique or insular in their developments but instead were also subjected to a wider range of influences, systems and cultural developments and upheavals. The advent of broadcast television was a major turning point for all involved (and not just in the former Eastern European countries), and the authors conclude with the invitation for further similar research that includes more countries.
In most time-based works – games, film, animation – there are two main technical formal parameters that address two faculties of the human sensory apparatus: sound (hearing) and image (sight) with a few variously received exceptions like the olfactory Smell-O-Vision. While the image communicates much that can be analysed, discussed and evaluated, considering its sensory impact and emotional quality, it is puzzling that sound continues to be underexplored in research and writing. Our final article is based on practice-led research that takes a different approach to sound; instead of the audiences’ aural experience, its experiential context is on people who are unable or less able to perceive sound – Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) learners and professionals. In ‘Exploring British Sign Language (BSL) Terminology in Animation and Games’ in this Scottish, UK based-study of British Sign Language (BSL) Jonathan Mortimer takes a very specific educational focus on the necessity of a shared disciplinary language that enables participation across studio practice, education and interpreter settings, working with a data-based methodology to identify and evaluate specialist animation and games-based terminologies used in BSL events. After a helpful review of histories of sign language and BSL in Scotland, the study’s locus of HEI animation and games teaching modules curriculum is explained. An excursion into past and current engagement with Deaf communities in film and animation provides additional context on Deaf communities, professionals and artists’ experience and representation (or not). A summary of relevant government and cultural policies and projects centring on BSL, as well as the collaborative development and expansion of disciplinary BSL glossaries in Scotland leads to a discussion of pedagogies and student experience of and support for Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) students. Then the methodology for an extended qualitative analysis is mapped out, and the project’s animated short is introduced. The research process and design parameters for the iterative making of the film and the visualisation of sound through signer performance is embedded in a theoretical and practice-led framework that is deeply community-based with multiple types of stakeholders considered. After summarising the findings and the results of the data analyses, Mortimer offers a number of future avenues of research and refers to specific examples of his findings that could be improved upon, both in educational, practice and professional environments and also for a wider community of DHH users and their individual and collective needs and lived experiences.
Reviews
By coincidence, as they were independently sent to our Reviews Editor and both finalised on time for this issue, we bring you two reviews of books edited (as sole Editor and Lead Editor) by one of the journal’s team, Associate Editor Daisy Yan Du. The first, published in 2022, was made available in English before its late Chinese publication and, as Du notes in her introduction, readers can find the original Chinese names, terms and film titles there. What the two books share is their genesis in conferences and their link to the Association of Chinese Animation Studies (ACAS), founded by Du. The start of this Editorial mentioned the initial emergence and consolidation of Animation Studies; Du’s engagement is bringing a similar bounty of research and writing on Chinese animation to English-speaking readers.
There are some interesting links between the article on Polish and Czechoslovakian animation studio development in this issue and the first book reviewed: both are the result of collaboration and a wide range of individuals involved, from scholars to film directors, and both are interested in a political period that supported, promoted and impacted animation film production. In her review of the collection Chinese Animation and Socialism: From Animators’ Perspectives (2022), Yuzhe Li extracts the book’s editorial premise and summarises how ‘socialist animation’ and related terms can be understood here. Li extracts key factors and issues at stake in the book’s conception and organisation, its methods and methodology as well as its historiographic value. The reader is made aware of the value and challenges of working with archival materials and interviews, praising the books as an essential source for a range of fields that relate to animated media and its socio-political contexts in China. The second publication, Chinese Animation: Multiplicities in Motion (2025) is reviewed by Lingjia Xu who starts with a question: ‘What, precisely, do we mean by “Chinese animation”?’ The review explains how the publication addresses this question on multiple levels and approaches applied in the five-part structure, including a final one of practice-based essays. Noting the scope for new possibilities of exploration in historical, geopolitical, and theoretical areas, Xu recommends the publication to educators and scholars with a closing comment to the latter referring back to the book’s title.
We hope you enjoy this issue as much as we had as a team in working on it with the authors.