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- Volume 4, Issue 1, 2014
Animation Practice, Process & Production - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2014
Volume 4, Issue 1, 2014
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Freezing versus wrecking: Reworking the superhero genre in Disney’s Frozen (2013) and Wreck-It Ralph (2012)
By Eve BenhamouAbstractTropes of the superhero genre in Disney’s Frozen (Buck and Lee, 2013) and Wreck-It Ralph (Moore, 2012), and the way they impact on the films’ gender constructions will be the focus of this article. Whether it be in popular or critical accounts, Frozen has often been referred to as a fairy tale or a Disney ‘princess film’. However, with its marginalized protagonist endowed with extraordinary powers (Elsa), I argue that it also borrows from another very popular genre: the superhero film. How does Frozen rework this genre? To what extent does this reworking influence its portrayal of femininity? My reading of Frozen as a superhero narrative will consist of comparative textual analyses with Wreck-It Ralph, which also portrays an outcast with extraordinary abilities (Ralph). I will investigate the potential gendered particularities of the characters’ extraordinary abilities. Building on Shahriar Fouladi’s concept of superheroes’ ‘underlying monstrosity’, I will pay attention to themes of power, anger and control. Evident in male-centred superhero films such as The Incredible Hulk (Leterrier, 2008), I will explore the extent to which these become more problematic when associated with female characters such as Elsa. Focusing on gender through a specific genre-sensitive approach – the superhero genre – and relying on comparative textual analyses will allow me to investigate the extent to which Frozen actually presents challenging images of femininity, and aims at opening up new ways of considering this animated feature.
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Disney classics and ‘Poisonous Pedagogy’: The fairytale roots of Frozen (2013)
More LessAbstractDespite a very tenuous connection to Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen (1844), the creators of Disney’s Frozen (2013) seemed motivated to keep an affiliation with ‘traditional’ fairytales alive. Having said that, directors Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee also professed to ‘kind of taking a new approach’, while simultaneously wanting to ‘relaunch’ the spirit of the Disney ‘classics’. Although Frozen does avoid a heteronormative love story, I argue that it does indeed harken back to the fairytale-based Disney ‘classics’. This is not because the story actually recalls Andersen’s Snow Queen (1844), but because it operates on a fairytale model used by Disney’s other source for ‘classics’, the Grimm Brothers. In her recent monograph, Willful Subjects (2014), Sara Ahmed begins by quoting the Grimm Brothers’ story of ‘The Willful Child’. The wilful child is one who refuses to capitulate to authority and so is punished by God. This narrative model is part of what Ahmed, following Alice Miller, calls ‘poisonous pedagogy’, a genre of fairytale used to ‘straighten children out’ and ‘cure’ them of wilfulness. I suggest that in trying to retain some connection with the Disney ‘classics’, the creators of Frozen produced a story that leans heavily towards this tradition. Elsa, a child whose will is powerful and visible, is taught that it must be suppressed. When she wilfully abandons her duty, and flouts patriarchal authority, punishment ensues and it is only when she returns to the confines of normal society that life can go on happily. Ahmed’s arguments that this model has been formative in training western subjects to reject wilfulness are affirmed both by the film’s conclusion, and by fan reactions to Elsa’s ‘abandonment’ of Anna and Arendelle. Nevertheless, similar to the ways Ahmed develops a queer reading of ‘The Willful Child’, I suggest that a queer reading of Frozen (2013) may prove fruitful in disrupting the film’s function as ‘poisonous pedagogy’.
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Colourful material histories: The Disney paint formulae, the paint laboratory and the ink and paint department
More LessAbstractWhen the Disney studio shifted into digital animation by the early 1990s, it radically reduced its ink and paint department and discarded a number of production tools and documents that had once formed a part of the company’s earliest history. These included the paints and mustard grinders that Ub Iwerks had purchased for the Hyperion Studio’s ink and paint department in the late 1920s. Along with records of the paint formulae, and other production materials used in cel animation, these artefacts were subsequently acquired by several animation restorers and made available to the author. The discovery of these extant materials is a rare opportunity to better understand the colour production processes of a leading studio, which pioneered the introduction of three-strip (or Technicolor IV) colour into the motion picture industry in the early 1930s.
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Notes on a Luxo world
More LessAbstractThe impact of digital technologies upon contemporary film-making practice has given rise to a range of fictional film worlds to which the label ‘computer-animated’ might legitimately be applied. But the evident rejuvenation of cinema’s fictional worldhood at the hands of technological advancement are demands that can only be met by a fresh approach to understanding how the digital crafts its unique screen worlds. This article advances the term ‘Luxo’ as a useful descriptor that awards both shape and definition to the specific fictional worlds of the computer-animated feature film. Historically bound to the development of computeranimated film-making within a US context and the release of Pixar Animation Studios’ Luxo Jr. (Lasseter, 1986), this article negotiates the term as a way of examining the intrinsic cause and effect relationship between these worlds’ origins on a computer screen and their arresting, animated activity. By applying the affiliated concept of animatedness to divulge how the animators’ digital thumbprint enunciates the status of Luxo worlds as animation, this article allies the particular industrial considerations with specific textual features involved in the computer-animated film’s fictional world construction.
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