The Society for Animation Studies Newsletter ISSN: 1930-191X

Volume 30, Issue 1 Spring 2017

In this Issue: Letter from the Editors SAS Announcements

1 ● President’s Report Nichola Dobson Dear SAS members, 2 ● Membership Report Robert Musburger The first half of 2017 has flown by, and with 3 ● Animation Studies Update Singapore 2016 still fresh in the memory, it is time Amy Ratelle th 4 ● 2017 Emru Townsend Awards to look ahead to the 29 SAS conference, this year Tom Klein to be held in Padova, Italy. While the next issue will 5 ● Working Group Report include a fuller report on this truly international Tony Tarantini event, in the meantime we can always count on the 6 ● Animation Studies 2.0 SAS team to provide us with our regular updates on Cristina Formenti the society’s progress, membership information, blog and journal reports that traditionally make up Events and Announcements the newsletter’s content. 7 ● Report: 30 Years of Pixar Animation Studios We also have a conference report from the recent Christopher Holliday 30 Years of Pixar Animation Studios event at King’s 8 ● Conference: …And Yet It College London, alongside information about the Moves!: 29th Annual Society for 201 Emru Townsend Awards, and news of two Animation Studies Conference exciting animation-themed events/publications that Upcoming Event will no doubt be of interest to all SAS members. The 9 ● CFP: The Crafty Animator: A Conference on Handmade and future has never looked so animated… Craft-based Animation Upcoming Event Safe travels to Padova! 10 ● CFP: Animating and Advertising Upcoming Publication Sincerely, Christopher Holliday and Lilly Husbands

Membership Information

● SAS Board and Contacts

The articles in the SAS Newsletter are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Contributions are copyrighted by authors and remaining information is ©2006 Society for Animation Studies. Society for Animation Studies © 2014 SAS Newsletter, v30n1, p.1

President’s Report

Nichola Dobson

Hello SAS members.

I have been looking back over the Autumn report to compare notes with our progress in the first half of 2017 with the last half of 2016. Though things have perhaps settled down a bit in terms of larger projects like the website rebuild, we have been plugging away behind the scenes. There is still some work to do on the site, to build on our fairly extensive history and legacy as a scholarly organization, which is now in its 30th year! We will be developing on this anniversary more over the coming year and next year at our 30th conference but I’m very pleased to be part of such a dynamic group and see it continue to evolve and grow. Watch out for more on this as the year goes on!

We are moving rapidly towards our annual conference, this year in Padova, Italy with our fantastically organized host Marco Bellano. My tickets are booked and I am really excited to visit his beautiful town and catch up with you all, and of course hear all the papers! I’m sure we will be in for a busy, exciting and thought provoking conference in an historic setting.

Our members continue to disseminate their research and practice around the world at a variety of events, not least the recent SCMS conference, in Chicago USA, and the BAFTSS conference in the UK. If you are attending large, interdisciplinary events and want to promote the SAS, please contact the board. It’s great to see animation studies gaining such prominence in the larger field of Screen Studies; it helps develop the discipline and gives members alternatives beyond our annual conference.

I hope to see you in Italy, and remember to check in with us online: animationstudies.org twitter: @anistudies Facebook: @SocietyForAnimationStudies

Best wishes

Nichola Dobson President, SAS

Membership Report

Robert Musburger

MEMBERSHIP NEWS IN BRIEF

A total of 176 members internationally.

SAVINGS (as of 8/4/17) Checking 5,489.52 Money market 25,535.72 Pay Pal 7,911.09 TOTAL $38,936.33

Animation Studies Update

Amy Ratelle

Hello, SAS!

I hope this note finds everyone well and making their preparations for Padova!

As promised, Volume 11 was our largest regular volume, with 14 excellent scholarly publications – a close second to our Animated Dialogues special issue: https://journal.animationstudies.org/category/volume-11/

We received many exciting submissions in January for Volume 12, and while I do admit to things being a little behind at the moment, there will be new papers published through May and June, in time to discuss them with your colleagues at the conference.

As always, I am indebted to the efforts of the review board for their ongoing support and thorough feedback, and the managing editors in keeping everything up and running. The next call for papers will be in July, just following the conference. Send in your papers!

If anyone is interested in getting involved in the journal’s operations, we are always open to new reviewers and other volunteers – please contact me via the email listed below.

Best,

Amy

Dr. Amy Ratelle Editor, Animation Studies [email protected]

2017 EMRU TOWNSEND AWARDS

Tom Klein

Society for Animation Studies members may now apply for grant awards of 300€ for those presenting at this year's annual conference in Padova, Italy. All applicants should send an email that includes:

1) your short-version paper abstract that you submitted for the S.A.S. conference (priority will be given to presenters, though others may apply)

2) your particular need for monetary assistance (250 words or less, including budget)

3) your affiliation/status (student/faculty) with an academic institution or studio, if applicable. SAS supports submission from independent scholars.

The Emru Townsend Award is specifically intended to offset some of the expenses for attending the conference held this July at University of Padova, Italy. This year there will be 6 awards given in total, three reserved for students.

These grants are competitive for our members. Applicants must be currently registered members of the S.A.S. and must not have been awarded a travel grant from the S.A.S within the last 3 years. The monetary disbursement will occur at the conference. Any named recipient who does not attend will forfeit the award.

The deadline to apply is May 28, 2017. The award recipients will be announced in June, after review by a selection committee. Applicants must send their request by email,

adhering to the above guidelines (abstract/proposal, need, affiliation) to Tom Klein at [email protected]

Please write your short application either entirely as an email message or attach a Word doc with the above information. DO NOT attach a pdf/Acrobat file since personal identifying information will need to be edited/redacted during the blind review process. When you send the email, use the subject line "Emru Townsend Application".

The conference grant is named in the memory of our dear colleague, Emru Townsend, who remains an inspiration to all of us, for his many efforts promoting the study and appreciation of animation.

Working Group Report

Tony Tarantini

The working group is open to SAS members who are interested in industry related inquiry and research. The ‘SAS friendly industry list’ idea has shown some potential. An example of this is the introduction of industry professionals -willing to be interviewed- to graduate students conducting production research. There is a tentative meeting scheduled for the Conference in Padua. Time and place will be made available at the conference. Anyone who is interested in attending the meeting is encouraged to come and join the discussion.

Anyone interested in receiving correspondence from this group please contact [email protected]

Animation Studies 2.0

Cristina Formenti

Recently a few changes have occurred. Firstly, with Nichola returning from her maternity leave, Jacqueline Ristola, who has been co-editing the blog with me in her absence, has left. I wish to take this opportunity to thank her for all her work on the blog in the past months as well as for having so nicely taken care of the SAS social media pages.

Secondarily, there is a novelty: while the blog will continue to have each month a new CFP on a particular and always different topic, a permanent call for posts has also been introduced. More precisely, from now on, aside from posts addressing each month’s specific theme, we accept for consideration on a rolling basis throughout the year posts illustrating the genesis of a recently completed animated work as well as reviews of animation-related books, conferences and festivals. Furthermore, it is now also possible to serve as a guest blogger. The rationale behind this choice is, on the one hand, to offer further possibilities for animation scholars and animators to enter into dialogue. On the other hand, the intent is to increase the volume of submissions so as to be able to steadily have new and diversified content each week. Indeed, we believe that both a rich offer and a standing appointment are important for a more regularly returning readership to develop, and we hope that the new opportunities we are offering will enable us to keep up with the current trend of publishing every week at least one new post.

However, we cannot possibly enrich the blog’s offer and make its readership continue to grow without your contributions, so please keep sending us your posts and/or offering to guest curate a theme. Also, do not let the fact that you have already contributed to a past theme stop you from submitting a post in response to a new CFP. In these months I have noticed that an area we are low is returning authors. That is, recently we have received mostly submissions from authors that had never contributed before to the blog. This is extremely positive because it means that the interest in the blog is growing among the scholarly community. Yet, we would also be happy to have more returning authors and the newly introduced possibility to be a guest blogger goes in this direction.

If you have any comments, questions or topics to suggest please do not hesitate to contact Nichola and me.

Keep following the blog!

Cristina Formenti

Report: 30 Years of Pixar Animation Studios

Christopher Holliday

King’s College London Saturday 10th December 2017

On August 17th 1986, Pixar Animation Studios premiered its ground-breaking computer-animated film short Luxo Jr. to an enraptured audience gathered at the annual SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference in the Dallas Convention Center

Arena. Screened alongside two other test shorts – Flags and Waves and Beach Chair – Luxo Jr. pioneered the possibilities enabled by new digital technologies and announced Pixar’s proprietary computer software as a landmark filmmaking tool. Luxo Jr. rapidly became a signature success for the company, marrying technical achievements in the field of digital technology with effective storytelling and strong characterisation, and is widely credited among animation historians as being as significant to Pixar’s early animated history as Steamboat Willie had been for the Walt Disney Studio nearly sixty years previous.

To coincide with the 30th anniversary of Luxo Jr. and following the recent cinema release of their computer-animated feature-film Finding Dory, this one-day interdisciplinary symposium held at King’s College London was designed to interrogate the numerous qualities of the Pixar studio’s animated legacy, discuss the success, appeal and specificities of this critically-lauded animation studio, and explore the broader implications of animation’s digital shift. The impressive line-up of speakers at the event allowed for a focused understanding of Pixar’s brand identity and critical prowess, kicked off by a panel that took its cue from the cultural image of the studio that has supported its sustained reputation for quality animated productions. James Russell (De Montfort University) examined the key authorial figure of John Lasseter, who as paternal head of both Pixar and Disney fully embodies the currents of nostalgia that flow through both studios. Christian Uva (University of Rome) next examined Pixar through a focus on The Good Dinosaur, Pixar’s distant second cousin to Inside Out also released in 2015. Uva argued that the film was Pixar’s first true Western, not in line with the standards set by the studio and a film entirely about the rediscovery of origins (which Uva connected to director Peter Sohn’s own diasporic history with his family immigrants from Korea). Dietmar Meinel (University of Duisburg-Essen) continued the work he began in his recent book Pixar’s America, to discuss the national rhetoric that veins Pixar’s computer-animated film canon, and the ways in which these texts narrate elements of American culture. Richard McCulloch’s paper (University of Huddersfield) neatly summarized the theme of this morning session, unpacking the Pixar brand in order to discern what Pixar ‘means’ (and, crucially, how such an identity is always in flux). McCulloch argued that the Pixar brand is always guided by external agents, from other studios, filmmakers, companies, industries, marketplaces and broader cultural trends, culminating in the view that even Pixar does not have a monopoly on its own reputation.

The second panel illustrated the promotional contexts that continue to circulate around Pixar, with particular emphasis on two particular tools of advertising: the ‘legacy trailer’ and ‘unconventional communication’. Eve Benhamou (University of Bristol) discussed the promotion of the Pixar brand via strategies that harked back to the studio’s origins. Benhamou’s impressive 5-minute micro-talk gave examples from the Pixar legacy trailer that, like Joy’s memory balls in Inside Out, operate as windows on the past and identify the studio’s clear nostalgia for its own history. Benhamou connected such promotional strategies to discourses of friendship, noting how Pixar chooses to collapse, rather than separate, its features together under the studio’s brand label. David Selva Ruiz (University of Cadiz) presented work that qualified Pixar’s promotional tools as adapting to trends in both marketing and advertising. Ruiz argued that the Pixar brand as a

particular personality (dovetailing with both the idea it has a ‘brain’ via the Brain Trust, but also with Benhamou’s notion that Pixar has a ‘memory’), and that the promotional material for Wall-E, Toy Story 3 and Monsters University has the potential to inflect the respective narrative of the films. In Ruiz’s terms, this is content ‘about content.’

Panel three opened with Adele Fletcher (University of Hertfordshire), who drew inspiration from the often overlooked area of sound design and visual-centric Pixar criticism in her micro-talk, and using the ‘sonic humour’ of Finding Dory connected the film to theories of cinematic sound. James Walters (University of Birmingham) and Aylish Wood (University of Kent) presented intriguing papers on performance in Wall-E and the rendering of emotions in Inside Out respectively. While Walters questioned whether Wall-E meets what we would call ‘performance’ in the conventional (live-action) sense, Wood sought to champion the place of software and its contribution to digital materiality. Robert Geal (University of Wolverhampton) went right back to the mid- 1990s, and discussed the lineage of Toy Story’s sentient playthings, with recourse to religious imagery and the history of characters that are both moving and moved. Staying within the fields of performance and acting, Stuart Henderson (StudioCanal) offered a taxonomy of Pixar’s anthropomorphic tradition(s) and the ways in which they both continue and diverge from Disney predecessors. Henderson plotted the terrain of talking animals and non-human objects across Pixar’s cartoon canon according to three interlocking categories: the conscious animal, the fuzzy person, the animal person. This schema or sliding scale of personhood showcased how spectators are invited to ‘understand’ particular characters, and register their actions as a way of building spectatorial engagement.

The event’s final panel networked the idea of family across both its representation within Pixar’s computer-animated films, but also as a value that can be found ingrained across the studio’s production culture. Beatrice Frasl (University of Vienna/King’s College London) discussed Pixar’s first female-led feature (and first fairy-tale) Brave. For Frasl, Brave must be very much understood as a ‘Disney/Pixar’ character within the context of the two studios’ merger. As a film whose narrative is not interested in the ‘waiting, singing, longing’ trajectory, Brave suggests how Pixar are far for invested in the kinds of Disney fairy-tale so often attributed to the studio. With a focus on the portrayal of children, Michael Brodski (University of Mainz) framed his analysis of Inside Out and The Good Dinosaur within childhood studies to discuss childhood as a paradise lost. Pixar’s elaboration of childhood is thus one that enforces this early formative period as a stage of becoming rather than finality, and this sense of process partitions off adulthood as something to be outwardly achieved. The panel concluded with Caroline Ruddell (Brunel University London), whose conception of the familial was mapped onto studio discourse, particularly Pixar’s university-style campus in which productions occur (and happily so) ‘under one roof.’ Yet this image of forced fun and fraternity is, for Ruddell, strangely at odds with the lack of nuclear families articulated in the films themselves.

Closing with an extremely lively roundtable, chaired by SAS’s very own Vice President Chris Pallant, the final debates brought together the day’s fruitful discussions, whilst looking more directly at the stakes of the Disney/Pixar union (which in, 2016, was itself also 10 years-old). With a view that the Disney/Pixar anniversary in turn raises an

entirely different set of methodological questions than the sole Pixar label sidesteps, the roundtable was therefore the perfect place to digest the specific production practices and set of underlying critical and popular discourses that have enveloped the studio since Toy Story. As the day ended, speculation was rife as to whether such critical frameworks would continue to evolve by the time Pixar reaches its next milestone.

The Cosmos of Animation: 29th Annual Society for Animation Studies Conference

Upcoming Event

University of Padova, Italy Monday 3rd–Friday 7th July 2017 “… And yet it moves!”, was the response of Galileo Galilei, a former professor at the University of Padova, after he was forced to reject the idea of an Earth spinning around an unmoving Sun. In 2017, more than 380 years later, those words will come back to title the 29th Annual Conference of the SAS-Society for Animation Studies, held at the same institution where Galileo taught: one of the most ancient universities in Italy and in the whole world, founded in 1222.

The Department of Cultural Heritage of the University of Padova is one of the very few academic centers in Italy where History of Animation is taught. In 2014, it hosted the first Italian academic conference on animation, “Il cinema d’animazione e l’Italia” (Italy and the Animated Film), endorsed by the SAS. A mere 40 km (25 miles) from Venice, the Department of Cultural Heritage is a place where the Italian traditions of the arts and humanities meet the newest researches and expressive forms. Animation is primarily engaged in this interchange, which benefits also from the collaboration with institutions like the International School of Comics.

CFP: The Crafty Animator: A Conference on Handmade and Craft- based Animation

Upcoming Event

Rich Mix Cinema (Shoreditch), London Thursday 7th September 2017

Proposals are invited for an interdisciplinary one-day conference at Rich Mix Cinema, Shoreditch, London, on Thursday 7th September 2017

Animation is famously diverse, incorporating as it does a range of production methods, techniques and practices. This one-day conference focuses on any technique that could be considered to be handmade or craft-based, from cut outs to models and puppets, from sand-on-glass to ink-on-glass, and beyond. The role of the animator is key to such techniques where we can often see her/his imprints or finger marks etc. or even hands in the animation; the ‘presence of the artist’ is often highly visible in such craft-based practices and is a presence this conference seeks to explore from numerous perspectives. The conference aims to consider: the kinds of animation techniques that might fall into the category of the handmade; the ways that handmade and craft-based animation might be framed as gendered practices, or not; the kinds of cultural value that handmade and craft-based might animation carry. A range of disciplinary approaches is encouraged and the conference aims to include papers from practitioners, practitioner/scholars and scholars.

I am delighted to confirm Dr Birgitta Hosea, Head of Animation at the RCA, as our Keynote Speaker.

Possible approaches include but are not limited to:

 Historical examples of handmade animation  Contemporary practices  Gender politics and production practices  Audience engagement  Spectacle and visual effects  Space and place  Production cultures  Narrative and storytelling  Children’s television animation  Digitising the handmade  The cultural value of craft-based/handmade animation  Craft-based practices and the community  The ‘presence of the artist’  Craft-based/handmade animation and advertising

The conference will be held at the Rich Mix Cinema in Shoreditch, London on Thursday 7 September 2017. Please send abstracts of 300 words plus 100-word bio by Friday 23 June 2017 to:

Dr Caroline Ruddell ([email protected])

CFP: Animating and Advertising

Upcoming Publication

Proposals are invited for chapters in a new edited collection on the topic of ‘Animation and Advertising’.

Animation and advertising have a shared history and affinity, and they have a common social and historical context in modernity. Animators and studios have relied upon regular income from the advertising industry and seized the creative and technical challenges of this form of filmmaking. Corporations and advertising agencies have embraced animation as a way to distinctively embody products, brands, and values, and engage consumers in factual or affective ways. Animated advertising has expanded beyond the cinema screen, ranging from early illuminated billboards to new media ubiquity.

Despite this, cinema studies have until recently attached little value to animated advertising. Commercials have been an important part of the work of famous animation studios (Aardman, Disney, Fleischer, Ghibli, Pixar) and celebrated artists (Lye, Plympton, Quinn, Reiniger, Ruttmann) yet this is either ignored or marginalised by simple art/commerce binaries. Large volumes of animated advertisements have been produced and seen, yet these are accorded no place in histories of cinema and are often marginalised in archival practices.

Sharing in the growing interest in and theorisation of ‘films that work’ (Hediger and Vonderau, 2009), or indeed ‘films that sell’ (Florin, De Klerk and Vonderau, 2016), this book will address this nexus between advertising and animation to better understand how each has been fundamental to the other’s development.

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

 The place of advertising in the histories of famous studios and animators.  The role of animation in the history of advertising.  Studies of advertising animation studios (e.g. Jam Handy, Nathan Love).  Animation theory and advertising: the role of animism, anthropomorphism, graphic design, and commodity fetishism in advertising.  The affective power and appeal of animated advertising.  ‘Many-sited’ and historically specific animated advertising: magic lantern slides and other optical toys, animated billboards, 2D and 3D analogue and digital displays, web animation, advertising in video games, music videos, television, mobile apps, interstitials and logos.  Animated advertising and paracinematic and protocinematic place (the cinema lobby, the public square, specific spaces like Times Square, the Akihabara district and many others), and/or as site of consumption (nibble nook/candy

counter, illustrated songs and lobby sheet music sales) and social or temporal practice (cinema intermission, 2D and 3D pop up advertising; TV/streaming web commercials and multitasking, etc).  Animation in the new global economy and the growth of transnational corporate marketing.  Nationally or regionally specific animated advertising.  Animated advertising broadly defined: product placement, sponsored, industrial, propaganda, documentary, and educational animation.  The impact of new primary materials/research documents on our understanding of animated advertising and the challenges of archival practices: digitised publications, corporate archives, online video repositories.  Animated advertising and its theorisation across disciplinary boundaries: Animation studies, Cinema and Media Studies, Marketing and Business Administration.  Animated stars in advertising and advertising characters who become stars (The Flintstones and Winston cigarettes, Bugs Bunny and Kool Aid, Wallace and Gromit and PG Tips tea).  Advertising and product placement/synergy/cross promotion across media.  Animation and specific advertising technologies, from mechanical devices to electricity to digital and virtual/augmented forms  Animation and commercial television.  Intermedial connections of animated advertising: print cartooning, graphic art, performance.  Advertising and the digital: augmented reality/virtual reality/360°.  Animated advertising and surveillance.

Proposals for chapters (7000-8000 words) in this edited collection should include a chapter title, a brief abstract (400 words), and academic biography (100 words). These should be sent to the editors Professor Kirsten Thompson ([email protected]) and Dr Malcolm Cook ([email protected]) before 15th May 2017.

Society for Animation Studies Board and Contact Information

Founded by Dr. Harvey Deneroff in 1987, SAS Membership the Society for Animation Studies (SAS) is Benefits to members include: an international organization dedicated to  Annual conferences. the study of animation history and theory.  Publication of peer-reviewed

SAS Board: conference proceedings in the Society's online journal, Animation Studies. Nichola Dobson, President University of Edinburgh, UK  Listing in the 'SAS Animation Experts' Chris Pallant, Vice-President directory (forthcoming). Canterbury Christ Church University, UK  The SAS Newsletter, an internal news Vacant, Secretary publication. Robert Musburger, Treasurer  Members-only discussion list. Musburger Media Services, USA Discounts to festivals and other events Pamela Turner, Chair with participating organizations. Virginia Commonwealth University, USA Regular Membership: Officers: USD 35.00 / 35.00 Euro Charles daCosta, Historian Student Membership Swinburne University of Technology, AUS USD 20.00 / 20.00 Euro Tom Klein, Institutional Membership Awards and Outreach Committee Chair USD 60.00 / 60.00 Euro Loyola Marymount University, USA Timo Linsenmaier, Webmaster Please visit the SAS website to learn how University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe, to become a member.

GER Tim Jones, Website Development University of East Anglia, UK SAS Newsletter Submissions, suggestions, corrections, Publications Editors: address changes and all other Newsletter- Amy Ratelle, Journal Editor related correspondence should be Ryerson University, CAN addressed to: Christopher Holliday, Newsletter Editor King’s College London, UK Christopher Holliday Lilly Husbands, Newsletter Editor E: [email protected] Royal College of Art, UK Lilly Husbands SAS Websites: E: [email protected] http://www.animationstudies.org http://www.sas-in-europe.com SAS Newsletter subscriptions are free with http://universe.animationstudies.org/ membership in the society. Twitter: @anistudies Temporary SAS discussion group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/animationst udies/