Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Cartoons?both from the classic Hollywood era and from more contemporary feature films and television series?offer a rich field for detailed investigation and analysis. Contributors draw on theories and methodology from film, television, and media studies, art history and criticism, and feminism and gender studies.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction, by Jayne Pilling New technologies
• 1 What is animation and who needs to know? An essay on definitions
• 2 'Reality' effects in computer animation
• 3 Second-order realism and post-modern aesthetics in computer animation Andy Darley Text and context: Analyses of individual films
• 4 The Quay brothers' The Epic of Gilgamesh and the 'metaphysics of obscenity'
• 5 Narrative strategies for resistance and protest in Eastern European animation
• 6 Putting themselves in the pictures: Images of women in the work of Joanna Quinn
• 7 An analysis of Susan Pitt's Asparagus and Joanna Priestley's All My Relations
• 8 Clay animation comes out of the inkwell: The Fleischer brothers and clay animation
• 9 Bartosch's The Idea
• 10 Norman McLaren and Jules Engel: Post-modernists
• 11 Disney, Warner Bros. and Japanese animation
• 12 The thief of Buena Vista: Disney's Aladdin and Orientalism
• 13 Animatophilia, cultural production and corporate interests: The case of Ren & Stimpy
• 14 Francis Bacon and Walt Disney revisited
• 15 Body consciousness in the films of Jan Svankmajer
• 16 Eisenstein and Stokes on Disney: Film animation and omnipotence
• 17 Towards a post-modern animated discourse: Bakhtin, intertextuality and the cartoon carnival
• 18 Restoring the aesthetics of early abstract films
• 19 Resistance and subversion in animated films of the Nazi era: The case of Hans Fischerkoesen
• 20 European influences on early Disney feature films
• 21 Norm Ferguson and the Latin American films of Walt Disney

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Pilling compiled papers from 1990s Society for Animation Studies conferences that both advocate for animation studies as a scholarly discipline and reveal why there has been resistance to it. Contributors apply interdisciplinary theory and criticism to animation, with an emphasis on European productions. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

How animation, existing from the earliest days of cinema, eluded serious scholarship for so long is a mystery. Pilling provides clues, chief among them that animation suffers the "triple whammy" of being filmic, comedic, and for children only, areas marginalized in academia. Redressing this neglect, Pilling has collected 21 papers presented at Society for Animation Studies conferences in the 1990s, edited them methodically, and organized them into sections on new technologies, analyses of individual films, cultural studies and cartoons, theoretical underpinnings, and rewriting history. She explains her deliberate European bias in selecting papers as an attempt to avoid Disney overload; the six chapters that do deal with Disney have connections to non-US regions or individuals. Abundantly illustrated and lucidly written and edited, this is a splendid mix of profiles of animators and textual analyses of their works; included are Norman McLaren, Jules Engel, Berthold Bartosch, Mans Fischerkoesen, Jan Svankmajer, Joanna Quinn, Candy Guard, Alison de Vere, Susan Pitt, Joanna Priestley, and the brothers Quay and Fleischer. Many chapters benefit from historical research based on elusive primary materials; particularly strong are the five chapters by William Morits, who, like a few of the contributors, is an animator himself. Pilling's book is more than a starting place: it is a lingering place where scholars will hang out until Pilling produces a second volume--perhaps one that will encompass non-Western areas. Upper-division undergraduates and above. J. A. Lent; Temple University