Animated Landscapes History, Form and Function

by Pallant, Chris

• ISBN13: 9781628923513
• ISBN10: 1628923512
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-08-27
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

Studying landscape in cinema isn't quite new; it'd be hard to imagine Woody Allen without New York, or the French New Wave without Paris. But the focus on live-action cinema leaves a significant gap in studying animated films. With the almost total pervasiveness of animation today, this collection provides the reader with a greater sense of how the animated landscapes of the present relate to those of the past. Including essays from international perspectives, Animated Landscapes introduces an idea that has seemed, literally, to be in the background of animation studies.

The collection provides a timely counterpoint to the dominance of character (be that either animated characters such as Mickey Mouse or real world personalities such as Walt Disney) that exists within animation scholarship (and film studies more generally). Chapters address a wide range of topics including history, case studies in national contexts (including Australia, Japan, China and Latvia), the traversal of animated landscape, the animation of fantastical landscapes, and the animation of interactive landscapes. Animated Landscapes promises to be an invaluable addition to the existing literature, for the most overlooked aspect of animation.

Author Biography

Chris Pallant is a Senior Lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. His research includes animation, filmmaking production practices and technologies, and videogames. He has published on a range of topics, including Disney feature animation, the 'cartoonism' of Quentin Tarantino, performance capture, and Rockstar Games.

Table of Contents

Introduction - Chris Pallant, Canterbury Christ Church University, UK

Section I: Histories

Chapter 1 - Stop Motion Landscapes, Chris Pallant

Chapter 2 - Hand Drawn Landscapes, Bryan Hawkins, Canterbury Christ Church University, UK

Chapter 3 - Computer Generated Landscapes, Malcolm Cook, Birkbeck, University of London, UK

Section II: National Contexts

Chapter 4 - Australian Animation - Landscape, Isolation and Connections, Steven Allen, Winchester University, UK

Chapter 5 - The Politics of Control and Place in Japanese Animation, Melanie Chan, York St John University, UK

Chapter 6 - Chinese Landscape in Animated Film and Art Now and Then, Kiu-wai Chu, University of Hong Kong

Chapter 7 - Latvian Animation: Landscapes of Resistance, Mihaela Mihailova, Yale University, USA

Section III: Journeys Through the Animated Landscape

Chapter 8 - The Landscape of Memory: Animated Travel Diaries, Maria Lorenzo Hernandez, Universitat Politecnica de Valencia

Chapter 9 - Off the Rails: Animating Train Journeys, Birgitta Hosea, University of the Arts, London, UK

Chapter 10 - Projection Mapping: Animating the Monumental, Dan Torre, RMIT, Australia

Chapter 11 - Plasmatic Pitches, Temporal Tracks and Conceptual Courts: The Landscape of Animated Sport, Paul Wells, Loughborough University, UK

Section IV: Animating Fantasy

Chapter 12 - Between Setting and Character: Sentient Spaces in Fantasy Film, Fran Pheasant-Kelly, University of Wolverhampton, UK

Chapter 13 - From the Ground Up: Dimension, Incoherency, and Expression in the Medium of Animation, Bill Schaffer, Independent Researcher

Chapter 14 - The Zombiefied Landscape, James Newton, University of Kent, UK

Section V: Interacting with the Animated Landscape

Chapter 15 - Visual Invention: The Landscape of Screen Worlds, Tom Klein, Loyola Marymount University, USA

Chapter 16 - Reanimating the videogame Landscape: Glitches and Player Remediation in Rockstar Games' Red Dead Redemption, L.A. Noire, and Grand Theft Auto IV, Alan Meades, Canterbury Christ Church University, UK

Index