Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film

Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film
Author: Donald Crafton
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 431
Release: 2014-07-14
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1400860717

This is the definitive biography of Emile Cohl (1857-1938), one of the most important pioneers of the art of the animated cartoon and an innovative contributor to popular graphic humor at a critical moment when it changed from traditional caricature to the modern comic strip. This profusely illustrated book provides not only a wealth of information on Cohl's life but also an analysis of his contribution to the development of the animation film in both France and the United States and an interpretation of how the new genre fit into the historical shift from a "primitive" to a "classical" cinema. "Beautiful in look and design, with stunning reproductions from films and newspapers, Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film offers a biography of a figure who virtually created the European art of animation... In its theory and history, the book is one of the most important contributions to [the field of animated film]. But [it] is central for film study per se, offering a fresh, exciting look at the complicated world of early cinema."--Dana Polan, Film Quarterly Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Machine-age Comedy

Machine-age Comedy
Author: Michael North
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2009
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 019538122X

In this latest addition to Oxford's Modernist Literature & Culture series, renowned modernist scholar Michael North poses fundamental questions about the relationship between modernity and comic form in film, animation, the visual arts, and literature. Machine-Age Comedy vividly constructs a cultural history that spans the entire twentieth century, showing how changes wrought by industrialization have forever altered the comic mode. With keen analyses, North examines the work of a wide range of artists--including Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, and David Foster Wallace--to show the creative and unconventional ways the routinization of industrial society has been explored in a broad array of cultural forms. Throughout, North argues that modern writers and artists found something inherently comic in new experiences of repetition associated with, enforced by, and made inevitable by the machine age. Ultimately, this rich, tightly focused study offers a new lens for understanding the devlopment of comedic structures during periods of massive social, political, and cultural change to reveal how the original promise of modern life can be extracted from its practical disappointment.

Animating Film Theory

Animating Film Theory
Author: Karen Redrobe
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2014-03-21
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0822376814

Animating Film Theory provides an enriched understanding of the relationship between two of the most unwieldy and unstable organizing concepts in cinema and media studies: animation and film theory. For the most part, animation has been excluded from the purview of film theory. The contributors to this collection consider the reasons for this marginalization while also bringing attention to key historical contributions across a wide range of animation practices, geographic and linguistic terrains, and historical periods. They delve deep into questions of how animation might best be understood, as well as how it relates to concepts such as the still, the moving image, the frame, animism, and utopia. The contributors take on the kinds of theoretical questions that have remained underexplored because, as Karen Beckman argues, scholars of cinema and media studies have allowed themselves to be constrained by too narrow a sense of what cinema is. This collection reanimates and expands film studies by taking the concept of animation seriously. Contributors. Karen Beckman, Suzanne Buchan, Scott Bukatman, Alan Cholodenko, Yuriko Furuhata, Alexander R. Galloway, Oliver Gaycken, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Tom Gunning, Andrew R. Johnston, Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, Gertrud Koch, Thomas LaMarre, Christopher P. Lehman, Esther Leslie, John MacKay, Mihaela Mihailova, Marc Steinberg, Tess Takahashi

Animation: The Whole Story

Animation: The Whole Story
Author: Howard Beckerman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2012-02-28
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1581159900

Professional animator Howard Beckerman has drawn them all: Popeye, Heckle & Jeckle, even Mickey Mouse. In Animation, he offers a road map to the complex art of making an animated feature. Vivid sketches, screen shots, and step-by-step illustrations show how to make a drawing come to life, create storyboards, use form and color, develop a soundtrack, edit, and more. This new edition is also thoroughly updated to reflect the latest trends surrounding digital technology. Animation provides artists and aspiring filmmakers with everything they need to carve their niche in today’s quickly evolving animation industry.

Animation

Animation
Author: Chris Pallant
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 457
Release: 2021-01-01
Genre: Animated films
ISBN: 1501305719

"Animation: Critical and Primary Sources is a major multi-volume work of reference that brings together seminal writings on animation studies. Gathering historical and contemporary texts from a wide-ranging number of sources, the volumes provide a key resource in understanding and studying the past and future directions of animation studies. The four volumes thematically trace animation studies from its many definitions, or a lack thereof, to the institutional nature of animation production, to establishing greater space within animation discourse for the consideration of broadcast and interactive animation, and finally, giving greater contextual understanding of the field of animation studies, by focusing on 'Authorship', 'Genre', 'Identity Politics', and 'Spectatorship', thus enabling readers to engage more deeply with the ideas discussed in the final volume. Ordering the collection in this way avoids imposing an overly simplistic chronological framework, thereby allowing debates that have developed over years (and even decades) to stand side by side. Each volume is separately introduced and the essays structured into coherent sections on specific themes"--

French Cinema

French Cinema
Author: R�mi Fournier Lanzoni
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 633
Release: 2015-10-22
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1501303074

"An all-encompassing history of French motion pictures and cinematographic trends chronologically from 1895 to the present"--

French Animation History

French Animation History
Author: Richard Neupert
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2014-03-03
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1118798767

French Animation History is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of animation, illuminating the exceptional place France holds within that history. Selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2011 The first book dedicated exclusively to this history Explores how French animators have forged their own visual styles, narrative modes, and technological innovations to construct a distinct national style, while avoiding the clichés and conventions of Hollywood’s commercial cartoons Includes more than 80 color and black and white images from the most influential films, from early silent animation to the recent internationally renowned Persepolis Essential reading for anyone interested in the study of French film

Before Mickey

Before Mickey
Author: Donald Crafton
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 435
Release: 2015-04-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 022623102X

This witty and fascinating study reminds us that there was animation before Disney: about thirty years of creativity and experimentation flourishing in such extraordinary work as Girdie the Dinosaur and Felix the Cat. Before Mickey, the first and only in-depth history of animation from 1898-1928, includes accounts of mechanical ingenuity, marketing and art. Crafton is equally adept at explaining techniques of sketching and camera work, evoking characteristic styles of such pioneering animators as Winsor McCay and Ladislas Starevitch, placing work in its social and economic context, and unraveling the aesthetic impact of specific cartoons. "Before Mickey's scholarship is quite lively and its descriptions are evocative and often funny. The history of animation coexisted with that of live-action film but has never been given as much attention."—Tim Hunter, New York Times

The Cine Goes to Town

The Cine Goes to Town
Author: Richard Abel
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 596
Release: 2023-09-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0520912918

Richard Abel's magisterial new book radically rewrites the history of French cinema between 1896 and 1914, particularly during the years when Pathé-Frères, the first major corporation in the new industry, led the world in film production and distribution. Based on extensive investigation of rare archival films and documents, and drawing on recent social and cultural histories of turn-of-the-century France and the United States, his book provides new insights into the earliest history of the cinema. Abel tells how early French film entertainment changed from a cinema of attractions to the narrative format that Hollywood would so successfully exploit. He describes the popular genres of the era—comic chases, trick films and féeries, historical and biblical stories, family melodramas and grand guignol tales, crime and detective films—and shows the shift from short subjects to feature-length films. Cinema venues evolved along with the films as live music, color effects, and other new exhibiting techniques and practices drew larger and larger audiences. Abel explores the ways these early films mapped significant differences in French social life, helping to produce thoroughly bourgeois citizens for Third Republic France. The Ciné Goes to Town recovers early French cinema's unique contribution to the development of the mass culture industry. As the one-hundredth anniversary of cinema approaches, this compelling demonstration of film's role in the formation of social and national identity will attract a wide audience of film scholars, social and cultural historians, and film enthusiasts.

Shadow of a Mouse

Shadow of a Mouse
Author: Donald Crafton
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2012-11-05
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0520261038

“Donald Crafton, our lively guide, shows us around a Tooniverse populated by performers, not just images, who engage us in all the ways their flesh-and-blood counterparts do, and then some. Taking classical animation as his terrain, Crafton nevertheless pushes ongoing discussions of performance, liveness, and corporeality in the directions in which they need to go if they are to help us describe and navigate our increasingly virtual worlds.” Philip Auslander, author of Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture "Every once in a while a book comes along that marks a transformational point in its discipline. Such a book is Donald Crafton's Shadow of a Mouse. Crafton skillfully draws together theoretical sources, animation history, technological development, and social analysis, deftly weaving together thinkers from Disney to Deleuze and Sito to Stanislavsky. The result is a substantial rethinking of animation that will reshape traditional approaches to the medium. Crafton's magisterial grasp of theory and history is livened by a true fan's passion for the subject and a keen sense of humor. Shadow of a Mouse is a must-read for anyone with an interest in performance, embodiment, popular culture, race, or reception." Mark Langer, Associate Professor of Film Studies, Carleton University