[ecrea] New book: Animated Landscapes History, Form and Function

*/Animated Landscapes: History, Form and Function /(Bloomsbury Academic,
2015)*
http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/animated-landscapes-9781628923490/

Below you will find a short description, the table of contents, and two
reviews.

*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.


*Contents*
As editor, I had the pleasure of overseeing the publication of these
contributions:

*I – History: Formal Traditions*
1. Seeing in Dreams - The Shifting Landscapes of Drawn Animation (/Bryan
Hawkins)/
2. The Stop Motion Landscape (/Chris Pallant)/
3. Pixar, 'The Road to Point Reyes', and the long history of landscapes
in new visual technologies /(Malcolm Cook)/
/
/*II – History: National Perspectives*
4. Australian Animation – Landscape, Isolation and Connections (/Steven
Allen)/
5. Environmentalism and The Animated Landscape in /Nausicaä of the
Valley of the Wind/ (1984) and /Princess Mononoke/ (1997)/
(Melanie Chan)/
6. Animating /Shanshui/: Chinese Landscapes in Animated Film, Art and
Performance (/Kiu-wai Chu)/
7. Latvian Animation: Landscapes of Resistance (/Mihaela Mihailova)/

*III – Form: Journeys Through Animated Space*
8. The Landscape in the Memory: Animated Travel Diaries (/María Lorenzo
Hernández)/
9. Off the Rails: Animating Train Journeys (/Birgitta Hosea)/
10. Between Setting and Character: A Taxonomy of Sentient Spaces in
Fantasy Film (/Fran Pheasant-Kelly)/

*IV – Form: Peripheral Perspectives*
11. The Metamorphosis of Place: Projection-Mapped Animation (/Dan Torre)/
12. Plasmatic Pitches, Temporal Tracks and Conceptual Courts: The
Landscapes of Animated Sport (/Paul Wells)/
13. The Zombiefied Landscape: /World War Z /(2013), /ParaNorman /(2012),
and the Politics of the Animated Corpse (/James Newton)/

*V – Function: Interactivity*
14. Evoking the Oracle: Visual Logic of Screen Worlds (/Tom Klein)/
15. Beyond the Animated Landscape: Videogame Glitches and the Sublime
(/Alan Meades)/
/
/
/
/
*Reviews*
/

“For so long animation studies literature has focused mainly on animated
characters-at last a book that examines the other part of the frame:
backgrounds and environments. Through historical analysis and
theoretical considerations, /Animated Landscapes /brings attention to a
significant but largely overlooked realm of animation aesthetics. The
broad scope of essays by leading scholars in the field reflect the
diversity of animation today.” – Maureen Furniss, Program Director of
the Program in Experimental Animation, California Institute of the Arts,
USA, and Founding Editor of Animation Journal

“Animated landscapes: they're not just 'backgrounds' anymore. This
collection by established and emerging scholars directs our attention to
an aspect of animation that has long been treated as secondary, if it
was considered at all. Far from being painting in motion, or even a
depiction of nature, landscaping can be mindscaping, and an active, if
not dominant element of the film, new media, or gaming experience. The
book is a welcome addition to the growing body of work in animation
studies.” – Donald Crafton, The Joseph and Elizabeth Robbie Professor of
Film, Television, and Theatre, University of Notre Dame, USA, and author
of Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-making in Animation


/
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Cheers,
Chris

*_P.S – Bloomsbury Academic currently has a 30% OFF sale._*

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