Animated Landscapes: History, Form and Function

Description

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. Cover Half-title Title Copyright Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction Part 1: History: Formal Traditions 1. Seeing in Dreams – The Shifting Landscapes of Drawn Animation 2. The Stop-Motion Landscape 3. Pixar, ‘The Road to Point Reyes’, and the Long History of Landscapes in New Visual Technologies Part 2: History: National Perspectives 4. Australian Animation – Landscape, Isolation and Connections 5. Environmentalism and the Animated Landscape in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and Princess Mononoke (1997) 6. Animating Shanshui: Chinese Landscapes in Animated Film, Art and Performance 7. Latvian Animation: Landscapes of Resistance Part 3: Form: Journeys through Animated Space 8. The Landscape in the Memory: Animated Travel Diaries 9. Off the Rails: Animating Train Journeys 10. Between Setting and Character: A Taxonomy of Sentient Spaces in Fantasy Part 4: Form: Peripheral Perspectives 11. The Metamorphosis of Place: Projection-Mapped Animation 12. Plasmatic Pitches, Temporal Tracks and Conceptual Courts: The Landscapes of Animated Sport 13. The Zombiefied Landscape: World War Z (2013), ParaNorman (2012) and the Politics of the Animated Corpse Part 5: Function: Interactivity 14. Evoking the Oracle: Visual Logic of Screen Worlds 15. Beyond the Animated Landscape: Videogame Glitches and the Sublime Contributors Bibliography Animation/Filmography/Other Media Index