Critique paper

2015

This essay has two projects. The first is intrinsic to the very question of what constitutes legitimate scholarly inquiry in the study of film and of animation, marking out something ostensibly especially contentious in and for the study of the latter: theory. Proceeding from two related queries – Why theory? And why animation theory? – the paper offers responses based in and on my own theory-driven and theory-focused work.1 The second project constitutes a reply to the cognitivists, or more particularly, those scholars who propound and promote a cognitive theory of film and especially of animation, notably, those who have wielded cognitivism as a weapon of total destruction against my work. Given the nature of the paper, this reply is of a general and in any case partial character. Let me pause to say: I ordinarily do not respond to criticism of my work. But given where these criticisms have been published and their purport, I felt I have had to make an exception to my rule. Theory...

2007

The night of the 4th of July 1896 was a special night for cinema. It was the night that Maxim Gorky attended the screening of the Lumiere brothers projections at the Nizhny-Novgorod fair in Russia and wrote the first significant review of cinema, a review that for me as for Tom Gunning offers us the first substantial account of the experience of cinema, a rich, indeed paradigmatic, guide to cinema and its abiding senses, sensations. For me, and it appears Gunning, Gorky’s extraordinary ‘first sight’ of cinema defines the very experience of cinema spectatorship (and also too cinema analysis, film theory). When I say Gunning and I, I reference his canonical article ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator’ (Gunning 1989) and my article ‘The Crypt, the Haunted House, of Cinema’ (Cholodenko 2004). My article extends, qualifies and recasts Gunning’s formulation in ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment’ of his notion of the cinema of attractions, also by rereading...

2014

To develop the CHILDSPLA App it has been necessary to produce animation that communicates clearly with our target audience. The character and animation for this project has been produced in collaboration with a group of sick and healthy children who guided the process with their observations at various stages. The frequent team meetings as well as the school visits generated a great deal of discussion about the requirements of the animation; which should be more important, that the animation should engage or be totally effective at the risk of being less engaging? What exactly is the best sequence of images to represent level 4 of inability to sleep? When the character is in pain, where should the pain be located in the body? The design solutions came through trial and error, a close adherence to the idea that less is more and walking a line between exaggerated cartoon animation and an empathetic, naturalistic performance from our drawn character. This innovative collaboration with ...

2015

Journal of Liberal Arts RMUTT, 2023

Animation movies have become increasingly popular among people of all ages, including children. Sometimes, the use of slang in character dialogues can confuse or mislead young viewers. This study aimed to investigate slang words used in the animation "How to Train Your Dragon" (2010) since the dialogues are enjoyable, and the characters are intriguing to a wide range of audiences, though slang words in the movie could be identified and used as guidance for young children. As a result, the slang words used in the movie were identified and explained in terms of definitions in the context of use, categorized into designated types, and calculated using descriptive statistics, including frequency and percentage. The data used in this study were the script in the form of a PDF file derived from Netflix and online dictionary websites.

Trends in Langauges and Literature, Ile Ife OAU Press , 2012

Film or cinematography, has become a viable visual medium which appeals to its audience in a multifaceted manner. This admirable role is necessitated by the fact that the thoughtful use of the expressive aspects of film generally enables the film maker to articulate subtleties of human experience and work against stereotypes. In spite of the above mentioned relevance of cinematography, animated feature film or cartoon as it is fondly referred to, has since been seen as a mere ‘child’s play’ which has no serious utilitarian value except to occupy children in their leisure periods. This paper however bares the fact that animated film or cartoon is not just a mere cinematographic innovation which entertains and communicates meanings to its audience, particularly the “immature minds”. Instead, it should be seen as a powerful visual literature which is greatly endowed with the ability to inform, persuade, teach morals, and eventually lead its audience towards positive insurrection and multifaceted change in society through its themes.

2015

This article is an intertextual reading of Nezha naohai (Nezha Conquers the Dragon King), the second cel-animated feature produced at the Shanghai Animation Film Studio, the major animation film studio in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from the 1950s until the 1980s. Released in 1979, the story of Nezha Conquers is an adaptation from three chapters of a popular Ming Dynasty 16th-century novel about a rebellious boy-god. The year Nezha Conquers the Dragon King is released, 1979, is a turning point for the hero in PRC cinema. Visual design for Nezha Conquers the Dragon King seems to be a combination of Osamu Tezuka’s Astroboy and Chinese Communist sports propaganda. Chief director and screenwriter Wang Shuchen considered the film to be a return to fantastic subject matter after the Cultural Revolution. Nezha Conquers the Dragon King signaled a return to mythological themes in PRC film and ends with an elliptical, open-ended finale, suggesting the propensity for future social and cultural contradictions.