Animation

Costumes in feature films can be deliberately used for narrative purposes to reveal or conceal something related to the plot, functioning as a key element for cinematic storytelling. Costume design in animation is an integral part of character creation; however, relatively little is known about the design process. Previous research concentrates on either the history of hand-drawn animation, the principles of making animated films or character construction. This article presents several key components of the animators’ costume design process in Walt Disney’s animated feature films Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Cinderella (1950) and Sleeping Beauty (1959). The author demonstrates that the costume design in these films was a multi-layered process. For example, for Snow White, the costume silhouette of the final animation is visible in the early conceptual designs whereas, for Cinderella or Princess Aurora, the principal character animators designed the final costume. Additionally, the slow production time influenced the style of the costumes: small details on costumes and complex constructions were not used as it would have taken too long for them to be drawn. The article also reveals that animators used live-action filming and rotoscoping as tools for designing costumes. Furthermore, costumes that were used in pre-production filming for rotoscope were different in their construction from everyday garments. The work of a costume designer existed in the character design process, although not as a separate profession. This article aims to highlight the importance of characters’ costumes in Disney’s early hand-drawn animated films and the different ways costumes have been designed for animated characters.

From adults to children, from theaters to television, cartoons are one of the few major popular art forms that have been able to consistently redefine their audience as they experiment and change and, as such, have proved their importance in culture and society. This article discusses the social critique that originated with cartoons’ theatrical beginnings, which were met with substantial praise from the intellectual and art community of their time. An exploration into the massification of the medium reveals its role in the marginalization of women in the animation industry as underpaid and unrecognized labor. This article also explores the industry’s creation of a compulsory gender coding associated with the animated female form by investigating Disney’s and Warner Bros.’ competing portrayals of women as a ‘madonna–whore’ duality, and further looks into Disney’s feminine triptych perpetuating heteronormative gender coding in the form of the princess, the witch and the fairy godmother. The massification of the medium, as television programming shaped the industry into children’s programming, was led by Hanna-Barbera who did not consider girl cartoons a priority and continued to marginalize women in the workforce.

The puppet form has caught the imagination of many artists and writers. However, coming to terms with this riddling figuration is difficult. As a configuration characterized by tensions and conflicts, it eludes easy determination. This article focuses on the paradoxical nature of the puppet form: the tension in between the external bodily existence and the internal dramatic life of the puppet – two existential states that invest the puppet form with a perplexing double life. The paradox of renegotiating communicative flows between interior and exterior worlds is examined in relation to the phenomenon of intermediality. Amidst the intermedial concatenation of different modes of expression – puppetry, theatre, cinema and object animation – the puppet form acts as an intimate space. Concrete instances of medial interchanges carry metaphorically a long way towards the most intimate relation of knowing and feeling in resonance with the puppet form. Working with one of the finest examples of the use of puppetry in film, Jan Švankmajer’s Don Šajn (1970), these thoughts are developed through a series of readings ranging from the film critic Michael O’Pray’s view of the film, André Breton’s notion of communicating vessels, Deleuze’s concept of the baroque fold and Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology.

Theatrical-era short animation has often acquired a complex, even contradictory, textual identity: most cartoons were originally produced for a general audience, but were then marketed almost exclusively towards children as repeats on television. The rise of DVD has further complicated the status of these films. On the one hand, the format has facilitated the release of a lot of rare animated material, most notably within a series of multi-volume special editions entitled the Walt Disney Treasures, explicitly aimed at the previously marginalized adult viewer. However, Disney has also produced lower priced, ‘family friendly’ discs featuring many of the same cartoons. Unlike the Treasures volumes, the latter sets tend to censor problematic content and generally lack contextualizing bonus features. The choice to watch one of these collections over the other can thus have a significant impact upon one’s interpretation of the collected films. Thomas Elasasser argues that film culture – embodied most fervently by the devoted cinephile (and, for the purposes of this study, the equivalent figure of the animatophile) – has often failed to recognize itself as a product of generational memory. It is frequently implied by such groups that DVD special editions are the most ‘authentic’ because they privilege the original cinematic experience, without acknowledging the degree to which the format itself serves to remediate its contents. For instance, while the Treasures discs generally present the films uncut – sometimes ‘restoring’ footage unseen since the 1930s and 40s – these are often prefaced with mandatory disclaimers providing historical context for contentious elements such as racism. The sheer volume of material that these collections provide, including opportunities for binge-watching with ‘play all’ functions, similarly alters the portioned availability of these texts in the theatrical sphere. This article will suggest that both the special edition and ‘family friendly’ DVD options ultimately reflect a nostalgic struggle to appropriate and define the present and future reception of the films, rather than to truly reclaim the past.

This article explores how animation can manipulate a reflexive intertextual framework which relates to religious prohibitions on artistic mimesis that might replicate and threaten God’s creative act. Animated films are most intertextually reflexive, in these terms, when they narrativize the movement of diegetic objects from another medium which also transgresses God’s prohibition: sculpture. In the media of both sculpture and animation, the act of mimesis is transgressive in fundamentally ontological terms, staging the illusion of creation by either replicating the form of living creatures in three-dimensional sculpture, or by giving the impression of animating the inanimate in two-dimensional film. Both media can generate artworks that directly comment on these processes by using narratives about the creative act which not only produce the illusion of life, but which produce diegetically real life itself. Such artworks are intensely reflexive, and engage with one another in an intertextual manner. The article traces this process from the pre-historic and early historic religious, mythic and philosophical meditations which structure ideas about mimetic representations of life, via Classical and Early Modern sculpture, through a radical proto-feminist revision crystallizing around the monstrous consequences of the transgression in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and finally into film and more specifically animation. The article culminates with a relatively detailed account of these processes in the Toy Story franchise, which is a heightened example of how animation can stage a narrative in which ostensibly inanimate sculpted toys move of their own volition, and of how this double form of animation does this reflexively, by ontologically performing the toys’ animating act. The animated films analysed also engage with the transgressive and monstrous consequences of this double form of animation, which derive from the intertextual life of those narratives that challenge God’s prohibition on mimesis.