Between Live-Action and Animation Kyle Meikle

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Between Live-Action and Animation Kyle Meikle This paper focuses on the scandalously in-between genre of the live-action/animated film, which encompasses motion pictures like Mary Poppins and Pete’s Dragon that feature human actors alongside animated co-stars. While such films—and their successors like Cool World, Osmosis Jones, and Looney Tunes: Back in Action—are often viewed as curios, they arguably set the template for most contemporary blockbusters’ blend of live action and computer generated imagery; two of 2020’s top-grossing films, Sonic the Hedgehog and Doolittle, feature human leads paired with animated counterparts. Broadly tracing an arc from Mary Poppins to Mary Poppins Returns, or from Pete’s Dragon (1977) to Pete’s Dragon (2016), or from Disney to Disney+, this paper asks how the live-action/animated film troubles both formal and industrial distinctions between live-action and animation, as well as how and why the genre so frequently troubles critics and audiences. Such productions—many of them, not incidentally, adaptations—foreground questions of what live-action can do that animation can’t (and vice versa). To borrow Kamilla Elliott’s distinction, the live-action/animated film ultimately presents a less “hierarchical and diverse” and more “mutual and inherent” dynamic between its respective terms than critics and audiences might like. In describing that dynamic, this paper moves beyond the singular case of the live-action/animated film to consider other, equally scandalous affinities and mutualities between live-action and animation, including cartoon adaptations of live-action properties and live-action adaptations of cartoon properties (like Disney’s own recent—and much-denigrated—photorealistic remakes of its animated classics). AV required: Screen-sharing to show slides. Kyle Meikle is an Assistant Professor of Communication and English at the University of Baltimore. His work has appeared in Adaptation, the Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, and Literature/Film Quarterly. He is author of Adaptations in the Franchise Era: 2001-16 and coauthor of the Oxford Bibliographies guide to adaptation. .

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