Nigerian-born artist and illustrator Shofela Coker’s student films Oni Ise Owo (2007) and Iwa (2009) narrate tales of redemption at the intersection of divine will and the exercise of human agency. Iwa is a remake of the earlier animation completed as a Motion Graphics final project when Coker was an art student at the Memphis College of Art. This post reads a critical scene in both films to explore artistic creative agency at the intersection of traditional African art production and the digital provenance of animation. Drawing on African art history, and reading cult ..read more

From Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream to Disney’s Frozen (Jennifer Lee & Chris Buck, 2013), fantasy storytelling across multiple media has allowed authors to create grand tales of myths, magic, lore, love, and sacrifice. Since the codes and conventions of fantasy do not require the storyteller to be shackled to our world’s laws, sensitivities, cultures, or even physics, the fantastical worlds available to the genre blow us away by what can be possible if we just suspend possibilities, even for a while, so that dragons can fly in our midst and wizards can reveal to us our heroic dest ..read more

In the previous blog post, I introduced a couple of eccentric films that have since been celebrated as cult classics. Rumour has it that The Man Who Saves the World, mentioned in that post, has been selected as one of the ten worst films ever made and is taught at universities in the US as an example of how not to make a film.[1] Discussing these productions, I aimed to underline the do-it-yourself ethos of the era, the constraints of the industry, and the creative solutions filmmakers came up with to these limitations, even sometimes at the risk of making absurd films. In this second part, I ..read more

Fig.1 - Mmanwu by Uzo Ngwu and ZOMA Studios. Since its inception, the animation industry has been a storytelling engine: telling all types of stories from all types of people. However, according to the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, the animation industry still has a representation problem. Multidisciplinary artist, Uzo Ngwu, is trying to combat the lack of African representation in animation with her newly founded studio ZOMA Studios and their debut project Mmanwu. Mmanwu, directed by Ngwu, is a 2D-animated horror short set in modern day Nigeria (Fig. 1). The film follows Ogechi, a Nige ..read more

Professor David Bordwell. To mark the life of distinguished film theorist and historian David Bordwell (1947-2024), and to add to the many tributes from across the disciplines of film and media studies, Chris and Alex have begun to collect some of Professor Bordwell’s writings that connect to fantasy and animation both in print and on his website davidbordwell.net and accompanying blog Observations on Film Art. As Variety recently wrote upon Professor Bordwell’s passing, he was a “prolific researcher, dedicated teacher and passionate cinephile” and that for more than two decades “penned comme ..read more

As a student, a long time ago, at the University of Warwick, I took a seat in the library one day, the photocopiers nearby chugging and churning away, and opened the new issue (May-June 1992) of Film Comment. As a lifelong devotee (I was only 19) of Steven Spielberg’s movies you can perhaps imagine my astonishment when I turned a page to find an essay entitled “The Panning of Steven Spielberg (Part One),” written by Henry Sheehan. To this day, Sheehan’s piece remains a touchstone in writing about Spielberg’s filmmaking. Limited to the space of a magazine page, Sheehan’s eventual two-part essay ..read more

Queen’s “Heaven for Everyone” from their album Made in Heaven (1995). The music video for Queen’s “Heaven for Everyone” from their then-final record Made in Heaven (1995) - and a song that originally appeared on Shove It (1991), an album by drummer Roger Taylor’s side project The Cross (and featuring Freddie Mercury as a guest vocalist) - includes somewhat surprisingly footage from Georges Méliès’ early ‘trick’ films A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904). With Mercury himself having died in November 1991 from an AIDs-related illness, the video directed by David Mallet comp ..read more

Fig. 1 - Figure 1: Walt Disney Studios, The Vultures from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, c. 1937, gouache on two layers of celluloid over watercolor and gouache background Burchard, Wolf. 2021. Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts. New York, NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, fig. 3, 18. In January 1939, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced its acceptance of an animation cel set-up from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937) and “presented by the artist, Walt Disney” (Burroughs, 1939) (Fig. 1). The gift — an ink and gouache painting on transparent ..read more

In this week’s blog, Fantasy/Animation sat down with Mikkel Mainz of SKJALD Animation studio, a full-pipeline creative house and animation studio located in Denmark, to discuss its experience working on successful web series and feature films, the interpretation of music through animated style, and SKJALD’s future animated projects. Q1. Can you tell us a little about the origins of the SKJALD Animation studio, and the kinds of projects it works on? SKJALD is a full-pipeline creative house located in Denmark that I oversee as Director. I created this studio after leaving Sun Creature studi ..read more

Liyana (Aaron and Amanda Kopp, 2017). This blog post examines the 2017 film Liyana, directed by Aaron and Amanda Kopp, which describes itself as a “genre-defying documentary” that weaves together both animation and live-action scenes to tell the story of five orphaned children in the Kingdom of Eswatini. Yet its reflexive framing narrative focuses on the children’s creation of their own fictional tale featuring the fearless Liyana, who as part of the film’s story-within-a-story structure embarks on a treacherous quest to save her younger brothers. The film is part of a larger social project, i ..read more