Kirsten Moana Thompson | Seattle University (original) (raw)

Books by Kirsten Moana Thompson

Animation and Advertising (eds), 2019

As a stylized lighting bolt created by Ashton Collins in 1926 to promote electricity, Reddy Kilow... more As a stylized lighting bolt created by Ashton Collins in 1926 to promote electricity, Reddy Kilowatt became a ubiquitous symbol in American popular culture, whose embodiment of reliability and speed offered the promise of 'Better Living Through Electricity,' while encouraging consumers to use new electrical appliances. This paper explores the ways in which Reddy Kilowatt exemplified the prolific fluidity with which sponsored animation moved intermedially between print, radio, comic book, film and television cartoons and commercials as well as into different sites of exhibition, from theaters to shop windows and trade fairs. It will also consider the ways in which Kilowatt, as an anthropomorphized avatar of labour and modernity, was a form of expanded animation transforming the workplace into animated extensions of the Kilowatt story.

Advertising and Animation, 2019

This book argues that throughout its history animation has been fundamentally shaped by its appli... more This book argues that throughout its history animation has been fundamentally shaped by its application to promotion and selling, and that animation has played a vital role in advertising history. Case study chapters in the collection address Pixar, Anime, Disney, MTV, Lotte Reiniger, George Pal, and cover American, Indian, Japanese, and European examples. This book revises the existing history of famous animation studios and artists and rediscovers ignored ones. It situates animated advertising within the context of a diverse intermedial and multi-platform media environment, influenced by print, radio and digital practices, and expanding beyond cinema and television screens. It uncovers the role animation has played in shaping our consumption of particular brands and commodities. It assesses the way animated advertising has both changed and been changed by the technologies and media that supported it, including digital production and distribution in the present day. This collection establishes a rich new field of research, opening new questions about particular animation and media histories and our methods for researching them.

Keywords: animation, advertising, animation theory, animation history, animation historiography

Through close readings of such films as Cape Fear, Candyman, Dolores Claiborne, Se7en, Signs, and... more Through close readings of such films as Cape Fear, Candyman, Dolores Claiborne, Se7en, Signs, and War of the Worlds, Thompson argues that a longstanding American apocalyptic tradition permeates our popular culture, spreading from science-fiction and disaster films into horror, crime, and melodrama. Drawing upon Kierkegaard's notion of dread--that is, a fundamental anxiety and ambivalence about existential choice and the future--Thompson suggests that the apocalyptic dread revealed in these films, and its guiding tropes of violence, retribution, and renewal, also reveal deep-seated anxieties about historical fragmentation and change, anxieties that are in turn displaced onto each film's particular "monster," whether human, demonic, or eschatological.

As German reunification has increased attention to German history and culture, scholarly output d... more As German reunification has increased attention to German history and culture, scholarly output devoted to all phases of the history of German film has escalated rapidly. In this, the first of the PERSPECTIVES volumes to treat national cinema, the editors have collected classic and newly commissioned essays and articles that address a wide range of historical issues, including the politics of gender and sexuality; the Holocaust; feminism; and Nazi propaganda films. These discusssions of dramas and documentaries, filmmakers, and aesthetic ideologies cover all aspects of German cinema, from its silent beginnings to the present day.

"Among the recent anthologies on German film, Ginsberg/Thompson's project is by far the most ambitious one, both in size and in scope. In addition to an introduction by the editors, this weighty tome contains forty-three articles/essays, thirty-six of which are reprints. Seven are original contributions. An index has been added: given the size of the anthology, this is an invaluable bonus for the reader...[T]he introduction conveys many valid insights into the present state of German film studies and manages to launch the book on a very promising note...Within these parameters, the individual contributions live up to the editors' promise and offer fresh, often quite original insights...All in all, this is a remarkable anthology: surprisingly cohesive in the face of its diversity of topics/methodologies/strategies and extremely persuasive in arguing the editors' case for a more socially aware, politically 'engaged' re-orientation in German film studies. As a first-class reference work and a showcase of film criticism at its finest, the book deserves a wide readership." -- Gerhard P. Knapp (University of Utah), special issue of SEMINAR on "Recent German Film"

Book Chapters, Journals and Papers by Kirsten Moana Thompson

"Disney, DuPont and Faber Birren: Hollywood and the Color Revolution" eds. Katherine Spring and Phillipa Gates, Resetting the Scene: Classical Hollywood Revisited. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2021: 118-130., 2021

Drawing upon my research into Disney’s paint and plastic formulas at the Du Pont, Faber Birren an... more Drawing upon my research into Disney’s paint and plastic formulas at the Du Pont, Faber Birren and Getty archives, I trace a wider intermedial history that examines the corporate connections as an expanded cultural and material history of synthetic color which contextualizes and reframes some of the distinctive aesthetic properties of Disney's rich and vibrant color palette of the thirties. I explore the professional cross-connections between Walt Disney Studios and Faber Birren, one of the most influential corporate American consultants in color design, marketing and aesthetics, and Du Pont, whose chemical research provided the color pigments, inks and nitrate cels used in Disney’s Technicolor films.

"The Colour Revolution: Disney, DuPont and Faber Birren" Cinéma&Cie International Film Studies Journal, ed Elena Gipponi and Joshua Yumibe, vol XIX, No. 32 (Spring 2019), 39-52. , 2019

eds. Paula Massood, Angel Daniel Matos, and Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Media Crossroads: Intersections of Space and Identity in Screen Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press: 250-261., 2021

While achieving commercial success and popular acclaim as the ‘first’ Disney film to feature a Po... more While achieving commercial success and popular acclaim as the ‘first’ Disney film to feature a Polynesian princess, Disney’s recent Moana (John Musker and Ron Clements, 2016), has also been critiqued for its appropriations of Pacific Island cultures, including its notorious marketing of a Maui “skinsuit” as a children’s costume, a marketing strategy which was widely decried as Buffalo Bill-like and which led to its hasty withdrawal by the Disney company (Andrews, 2016). Part of Disney’s contemporary shift in its representational practices from the dominant versions of white femininity with which it has long been associated, Moana joins a small group of Disney feature films with non-Western protagonists from Lilo and Stitch, to Aladdin, Mulan et al, each of which have also been heavily contested sites for representational debate. Both celebrated and critiqued in the Pacific region, Disney's Moana initiates a different form of contestation, a fictional witnessing of a precolonial moment about two thousand years ago, reimagining the end of “The Long Pause" as a stasis that is solved by the now codified conventions of the Disney formula: the bold feminist heroine breaking the conventions of her isolationist father and village, and venturing out beyond the reef to initiate the return of interisland voyaging.

The paper will situate Moana within a longer, yet largely unexamined aesthetic history of midcentury modernism and ‘tiki kitsch’, in which the Pacific (Te Moana in Hawaiian and Maori) has played an influential role in Disney architecture, theme park design and animated cartoons, from the Enchanted Tiki Room to Polynesian Villages at Disneyland. It then takes up three specific sites of contestation, with particular attention to the racial and gendered intersections they articulate, in the interplay between two dimensional and three dimensional space: first, Maui’s animated tattoos, which come to life as animated films within the film and that are distinctively embodied. Second, it then turns to the film’s treatment of the scintillating hard gold surface of Jermanine Clement's glam crab Tamatoa ("Shiny") and third, the constellations or bioluminescent figures of Moana’s ancestors, that tattoo the sky and sea. Through these case studies I will explore the ways in which illuminated, scintillating light and embodied surface design reimagines the Pacific as a cosmopolitan space of exchange, in which figures of mobility, metamorphosis and exchange are distinctively animated. In so doing, I will join Jean Epstein and Giuliana Bruno's notions of the architectonic notion of light to the Samoan notion of Va as a philosophical and spiritual concept that refers to the space between, not as emptiness, but as connectedness, as relationality, "the space that is context" (Wendt, 408).

Copyright under COVID-19. Special Teaching Media Dossier, coed. with Brendan Kredell, Journal for Cinema and Media Studies (JCMS), March 2021, 2021

A world wide pandemic and the abrupt shift to online teaching in March 2020 for many higher educa... more A world wide pandemic and the abrupt shift to online teaching in March 2020 for many higher education institutions have made visible wider legal and copyright issues that have been emerging with the accelerating expansion of digital subscription platforms like Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ and Peacock. Catalyzed by COVID-19, the increasingly digital-only sites for distributing media have prompted new questions and problems of access for many faculty and students:
What happens when faculty's libraries or institutions cannot license titles on Kanopy or Swank? What are the issues of equity and access raised when these titles are only available through commercial streamers like Amazon or Disney+ that require students to subscribe to multiple providers? And what happens when some films and television programs are only available in physical form on DVD?
COVID has forced us all to consider how we move a pedagogical practice built around in-person learning into the online arena. For film and media faculty in particular, this also raises important questions about the legal scaffolding that our teaching is built upon. Programs already rip short film clips for teaching purposes, a practice expressly protected in the United States under an exemption by the Library of Congress to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Now many of us are considering the fair use arguments articulated by Patricia Aufderheide and the Center for Media and Social Impact for making entire feature films available online. In the United States, how have faculty approached the legal issues of copyright and compliance with federal statutes including the DMCA and the TEACH Act? What has been the institutional approach across other national and legal contexts to these legal and risk management issues?
For Special Issue
Copyright under COVID-19. Special Teaching Media Dossier

Emotion in Animated Films,ed. Meike Uhrig.New York: Routledge University Press, 2018: 142-160., 2018

Giuliana Bruno has spoken of film, architecture and clothing as linked aesthetic surfaces in that... more Giuliana Bruno has spoken of film, architecture and clothing as linked aesthetic surfaces in that all three have the ability to "house the motion of emotion" or make mood (18). For Bruno, the motion of an emotion can be "drafted onto the surface, in the shape of a line or in the haptic thickness of pigment" (5). As a 3D animated film which also features some 2D sequences, Moana (John Musker and Ron Clements, 2016) demonstrates specific capacities to create magical worlds through computer generated imagery, and in particular, the spaces and surfaces of water, sky, and light that play a central role in the story. This paper attends to the relationship of material surface, e(motion) and color in Disney’s feature film Moana, which has received some popular attention as the ‘first’ Disney film to feature a Polynesian princess. It situates Moana within a longer, yet largely unexamined aesthetic history of midcentury modernism and ‘tiki kitsch’, in which the Pacific (Te Moana in Hawaiian and Maori) has played an influential role in Disney architecture, theme park design and animated cartoons. Second, it examines the film’s treatment of several specific animated surfaces, including Maui's tattoos and the scintillating hard gold surface of Jermanine Clement's glam crab Tamatoa. Following Giuliana Bruno’s claim (Chicago, 2014) that new forms of ‘connectivity and relationality’ are enabled by the contemporary moving image as an illuminated and permeable surface, I want to explore the ways in which Moana foregrounds material surfaces as the ‘universe of things,’ in which emotions are animated.

Since the early 1900’s Broadway has been called the ‘Great White Way’ because of the proliferatio... more Since the early 1900’s Broadway has been called the ‘Great White Way’ because of the proliferation of its light-studded movie marquees and advertising signs, but this was in fact a misnomer as the area was often in blazing color. From Oscar Gude’s Heinz Pickle Sign of 1891 to Douglas Leigh’s EPOK animation and monumental signs of the forties, this chapter discusses Times Square/Broadway’s colorful electrical signs, arguing for an expanded understanding of animation’s historical role in the turn to color in visual culture. It contends that electrical billboards or ‘spectaculars’ were intermedial forms of animation, marshalling sensual and affective experience that linked color, glass and light stimuli in mesmerizing immersive imagery.

he Color Fantastic: Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema,, 2018

Since the early 1900’s Broadway has been called the ‘Great White Way’ because of the proliferatio... more Since the early 1900’s Broadway has been called the ‘Great White Way’ because of the proliferation of its light-studded movie marquees and advertising signs, but this was in fact a misnomer as the area was often in blazing color. From Oscar Gude’s Heinz Pickle Sign of 1891 to Douglas Leigh’s EPOK animation and monumental signs of the forties, this chapter discusses Times Square/Broadway’s colorful electrical signs, arguing for an expanded understanding of animation’s historical role in the turn to color in visual culture. It contends that electrical billboards or ‘spectaculars’ were intermedial forms of animation, marshalling sensual and affective experience that linked color, glass and light stimuli in mesmerizing immersive imagery.

Tom Ford’s A Single Man (2009) suggests that falling in (to) color is a falling into embodiment, ... more Tom Ford’s A Single Man (2009) suggests that falling in (to) color is a falling into embodiment, sensuality and the pain of a lover’s loss. Unfolding on November 30, 1962, the day George Falconer (Colin Firth) plans to commit suicide, the film shows the last 24 hours of his life as a gradual reawakening or attunement to the surfaces of the world. The film’s fetishistic attention to texture, detail and color suggests that cinema’s capacity to isolate, focalize and reframe enables a phenomenal openness to the world that is not unlike the experience of falling in love, while its celebration of color aesthetics—its chromophilia—stages three different modalities in the history of color. First, its production design, technological capacities and selective color saturation and desaturation exemplify the contemporary era’s digital capacity to manipulate color, while simultaneously signaling a reflexive anxiety about the problem of color stability for analog film, with implications for the digital era. Second, the intermedial color design of the film’s period setting in the early sixties nostalgically mourns the passing of an earlier technological regime in which Technicolor was marked as fantastic, at the very historical moment when cinema and television shifted from black and white to Eastmancolor as normative register. Third, in its Pop Art-inflected attention to chromatic surface and its textual allusions to Aldous Huxley’s novels and to psychedelic vision, it explores new cultural concerns with perception and the expansion of consciousness. A Single Man aestheticizes a contemporary shift in the moving image from actuality to potentiality, as one in which color acts as a signifier of appearance and disappearance, reflexively foregrounding the materiality of surface. By extension, through its progressive saturation and desaturation (or color ‘blooming’), it draws attention to the fragile and fugitive nature of analog color processes, yet also promises through its digital capacities that all might be retroactively restored. For at this historical moment marked by the ‘death of cinema’ and the shift to digital production, distribution and exhibition, color not only digitally alters but also can figuratively renew.

When the Disney studio shifted into digital animation by the early 1990s, it radically reduced it... more When 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.

From the 1920s through the 1960s, the animation industry was a labor force segregated by gender, ... more From the 1920s through the 1960s, the animation industry was a labor force segregated by gender, in which women were almost entirely restricted to the Inking and Paint department. One of the final steps in a Taylorized labor intensive industrial machine of specialized labor, the Ink and Paint Dept. usually consisted of several hundred female inkers or painters[2] in each animated studio, producing 8-10 cels an hour, enduring the lowest pay in the industry, while supervisors like Dot Smith would walk up and down the aisles at Disney urging them to work faster and faster with phrases like “Come on now, quick– like a bunny!” Incorporating 22 oral histories of inkers and painters who worked at Disney, MGM, Warner Bros. and elsewhere in the classical era and drawn from UCLA’s Oral History archives, this paper examines the relationship of color, labor and gender in the Ink and Paint machine with a particular focus on the material representation of paints, pigments, inks and other color materials in classical cel production.

This chapters surveys American cel animation, with a particular focus on the work of Walt Disney ... more This chapters surveys American cel animation, with a particular focus on the work of Walt Disney studio, its wartime propaganda production and its feature film Bambi (1942).

Animation and Advertising (eds), 2019

As a stylized lighting bolt created by Ashton Collins in 1926 to promote electricity, Reddy Kilow... more As a stylized lighting bolt created by Ashton Collins in 1926 to promote electricity, Reddy Kilowatt became a ubiquitous symbol in American popular culture, whose embodiment of reliability and speed offered the promise of 'Better Living Through Electricity,' while encouraging consumers to use new electrical appliances. This paper explores the ways in which Reddy Kilowatt exemplified the prolific fluidity with which sponsored animation moved intermedially between print, radio, comic book, film and television cartoons and commercials as well as into different sites of exhibition, from theaters to shop windows and trade fairs. It will also consider the ways in which Kilowatt, as an anthropomorphized avatar of labour and modernity, was a form of expanded animation transforming the workplace into animated extensions of the Kilowatt story.

Advertising and Animation, 2019

This book argues that throughout its history animation has been fundamentally shaped by its appli... more This book argues that throughout its history animation has been fundamentally shaped by its application to promotion and selling, and that animation has played a vital role in advertising history. Case study chapters in the collection address Pixar, Anime, Disney, MTV, Lotte Reiniger, George Pal, and cover American, Indian, Japanese, and European examples. This book revises the existing history of famous animation studios and artists and rediscovers ignored ones. It situates animated advertising within the context of a diverse intermedial and multi-platform media environment, influenced by print, radio and digital practices, and expanding beyond cinema and television screens. It uncovers the role animation has played in shaping our consumption of particular brands and commodities. It assesses the way animated advertising has both changed and been changed by the technologies and media that supported it, including digital production and distribution in the present day. This collection establishes a rich new field of research, opening new questions about particular animation and media histories and our methods for researching them.

Keywords: animation, advertising, animation theory, animation history, animation historiography

Through close readings of such films as Cape Fear, Candyman, Dolores Claiborne, Se7en, Signs, and... more Through close readings of such films as Cape Fear, Candyman, Dolores Claiborne, Se7en, Signs, and War of the Worlds, Thompson argues that a longstanding American apocalyptic tradition permeates our popular culture, spreading from science-fiction and disaster films into horror, crime, and melodrama. Drawing upon Kierkegaard's notion of dread--that is, a fundamental anxiety and ambivalence about existential choice and the future--Thompson suggests that the apocalyptic dread revealed in these films, and its guiding tropes of violence, retribution, and renewal, also reveal deep-seated anxieties about historical fragmentation and change, anxieties that are in turn displaced onto each film's particular "monster," whether human, demonic, or eschatological.

As German reunification has increased attention to German history and culture, scholarly output d... more As German reunification has increased attention to German history and culture, scholarly output devoted to all phases of the history of German film has escalated rapidly. In this, the first of the PERSPECTIVES volumes to treat national cinema, the editors have collected classic and newly commissioned essays and articles that address a wide range of historical issues, including the politics of gender and sexuality; the Holocaust; feminism; and Nazi propaganda films. These discusssions of dramas and documentaries, filmmakers, and aesthetic ideologies cover all aspects of German cinema, from its silent beginnings to the present day.

"Among the recent anthologies on German film, Ginsberg/Thompson's project is by far the most ambitious one, both in size and in scope. In addition to an introduction by the editors, this weighty tome contains forty-three articles/essays, thirty-six of which are reprints. Seven are original contributions. An index has been added: given the size of the anthology, this is an invaluable bonus for the reader...[T]he introduction conveys many valid insights into the present state of German film studies and manages to launch the book on a very promising note...Within these parameters, the individual contributions live up to the editors' promise and offer fresh, often quite original insights...All in all, this is a remarkable anthology: surprisingly cohesive in the face of its diversity of topics/methodologies/strategies and extremely persuasive in arguing the editors' case for a more socially aware, politically 'engaged' re-orientation in German film studies. As a first-class reference work and a showcase of film criticism at its finest, the book deserves a wide readership." -- Gerhard P. Knapp (University of Utah), special issue of SEMINAR on "Recent German Film"

"Disney, DuPont and Faber Birren: Hollywood and the Color Revolution" eds. Katherine Spring and Phillipa Gates, Resetting the Scene: Classical Hollywood Revisited. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2021: 118-130., 2021

Drawing upon my research into Disney’s paint and plastic formulas at the Du Pont, Faber Birren an... more Drawing upon my research into Disney’s paint and plastic formulas at the Du Pont, Faber Birren and Getty archives, I trace a wider intermedial history that examines the corporate connections as an expanded cultural and material history of synthetic color which contextualizes and reframes some of the distinctive aesthetic properties of Disney's rich and vibrant color palette of the thirties. I explore the professional cross-connections between Walt Disney Studios and Faber Birren, one of the most influential corporate American consultants in color design, marketing and aesthetics, and Du Pont, whose chemical research provided the color pigments, inks and nitrate cels used in Disney’s Technicolor films.

"The Colour Revolution: Disney, DuPont and Faber Birren" Cinéma&Cie International Film Studies Journal, ed Elena Gipponi and Joshua Yumibe, vol XIX, No. 32 (Spring 2019), 39-52. , 2019

eds. Paula Massood, Angel Daniel Matos, and Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Media Crossroads: Intersections of Space and Identity in Screen Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press: 250-261., 2021

While achieving commercial success and popular acclaim as the ‘first’ Disney film to feature a Po... more While achieving commercial success and popular acclaim as the ‘first’ Disney film to feature a Polynesian princess, Disney’s recent Moana (John Musker and Ron Clements, 2016), has also been critiqued for its appropriations of Pacific Island cultures, including its notorious marketing of a Maui “skinsuit” as a children’s costume, a marketing strategy which was widely decried as Buffalo Bill-like and which led to its hasty withdrawal by the Disney company (Andrews, 2016). Part of Disney’s contemporary shift in its representational practices from the dominant versions of white femininity with which it has long been associated, Moana joins a small group of Disney feature films with non-Western protagonists from Lilo and Stitch, to Aladdin, Mulan et al, each of which have also been heavily contested sites for representational debate. Both celebrated and critiqued in the Pacific region, Disney's Moana initiates a different form of contestation, a fictional witnessing of a precolonial moment about two thousand years ago, reimagining the end of “The Long Pause" as a stasis that is solved by the now codified conventions of the Disney formula: the bold feminist heroine breaking the conventions of her isolationist father and village, and venturing out beyond the reef to initiate the return of interisland voyaging.

The paper will situate Moana within a longer, yet largely unexamined aesthetic history of midcentury modernism and ‘tiki kitsch’, in which the Pacific (Te Moana in Hawaiian and Maori) has played an influential role in Disney architecture, theme park design and animated cartoons, from the Enchanted Tiki Room to Polynesian Villages at Disneyland. It then takes up three specific sites of contestation, with particular attention to the racial and gendered intersections they articulate, in the interplay between two dimensional and three dimensional space: first, Maui’s animated tattoos, which come to life as animated films within the film and that are distinctively embodied. Second, it then turns to the film’s treatment of the scintillating hard gold surface of Jermanine Clement's glam crab Tamatoa ("Shiny") and third, the constellations or bioluminescent figures of Moana’s ancestors, that tattoo the sky and sea. Through these case studies I will explore the ways in which illuminated, scintillating light and embodied surface design reimagines the Pacific as a cosmopolitan space of exchange, in which figures of mobility, metamorphosis and exchange are distinctively animated. In so doing, I will join Jean Epstein and Giuliana Bruno's notions of the architectonic notion of light to the Samoan notion of Va as a philosophical and spiritual concept that refers to the space between, not as emptiness, but as connectedness, as relationality, "the space that is context" (Wendt, 408).

Copyright under COVID-19. Special Teaching Media Dossier, coed. with Brendan Kredell, Journal for Cinema and Media Studies (JCMS), March 2021, 2021

A world wide pandemic and the abrupt shift to online teaching in March 2020 for many higher educa... more A world wide pandemic and the abrupt shift to online teaching in March 2020 for many higher education institutions have made visible wider legal and copyright issues that have been emerging with the accelerating expansion of digital subscription platforms like Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ and Peacock. Catalyzed by COVID-19, the increasingly digital-only sites for distributing media have prompted new questions and problems of access for many faculty and students:
What happens when faculty's libraries or institutions cannot license titles on Kanopy or Swank? What are the issues of equity and access raised when these titles are only available through commercial streamers like Amazon or Disney+ that require students to subscribe to multiple providers? And what happens when some films and television programs are only available in physical form on DVD?
COVID has forced us all to consider how we move a pedagogical practice built around in-person learning into the online arena. For film and media faculty in particular, this also raises important questions about the legal scaffolding that our teaching is built upon. Programs already rip short film clips for teaching purposes, a practice expressly protected in the United States under an exemption by the Library of Congress to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Now many of us are considering the fair use arguments articulated by Patricia Aufderheide and the Center for Media and Social Impact for making entire feature films available online. In the United States, how have faculty approached the legal issues of copyright and compliance with federal statutes including the DMCA and the TEACH Act? What has been the institutional approach across other national and legal contexts to these legal and risk management issues?
For Special Issue
Copyright under COVID-19. Special Teaching Media Dossier

Emotion in Animated Films,ed. Meike Uhrig.New York: Routledge University Press, 2018: 142-160., 2018

Giuliana Bruno has spoken of film, architecture and clothing as linked aesthetic surfaces in that... more Giuliana Bruno has spoken of film, architecture and clothing as linked aesthetic surfaces in that all three have the ability to "house the motion of emotion" or make mood (18). For Bruno, the motion of an emotion can be "drafted onto the surface, in the shape of a line or in the haptic thickness of pigment" (5). As a 3D animated film which also features some 2D sequences, Moana (John Musker and Ron Clements, 2016) demonstrates specific capacities to create magical worlds through computer generated imagery, and in particular, the spaces and surfaces of water, sky, and light that play a central role in the story. This paper attends to the relationship of material surface, e(motion) and color in Disney’s feature film Moana, which has received some popular attention as the ‘first’ Disney film to feature a Polynesian princess. It situates Moana within a longer, yet largely unexamined aesthetic history of midcentury modernism and ‘tiki kitsch’, in which the Pacific (Te Moana in Hawaiian and Maori) has played an influential role in Disney architecture, theme park design and animated cartoons. Second, it examines the film’s treatment of several specific animated surfaces, including Maui's tattoos and the scintillating hard gold surface of Jermanine Clement's glam crab Tamatoa. Following Giuliana Bruno’s claim (Chicago, 2014) that new forms of ‘connectivity and relationality’ are enabled by the contemporary moving image as an illuminated and permeable surface, I want to explore the ways in which Moana foregrounds material surfaces as the ‘universe of things,’ in which emotions are animated.

Since the early 1900’s Broadway has been called the ‘Great White Way’ because of the proliferatio... more Since the early 1900’s Broadway has been called the ‘Great White Way’ because of the proliferation of its light-studded movie marquees and advertising signs, but this was in fact a misnomer as the area was often in blazing color. From Oscar Gude’s Heinz Pickle Sign of 1891 to Douglas Leigh’s EPOK animation and monumental signs of the forties, this chapter discusses Times Square/Broadway’s colorful electrical signs, arguing for an expanded understanding of animation’s historical role in the turn to color in visual culture. It contends that electrical billboards or ‘spectaculars’ were intermedial forms of animation, marshalling sensual and affective experience that linked color, glass and light stimuli in mesmerizing immersive imagery.

he Color Fantastic: Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema,, 2018

Since the early 1900’s Broadway has been called the ‘Great White Way’ because of the proliferatio... more Since the early 1900’s Broadway has been called the ‘Great White Way’ because of the proliferation of its light-studded movie marquees and advertising signs, but this was in fact a misnomer as the area was often in blazing color. From Oscar Gude’s Heinz Pickle Sign of 1891 to Douglas Leigh’s EPOK animation and monumental signs of the forties, this chapter discusses Times Square/Broadway’s colorful electrical signs, arguing for an expanded understanding of animation’s historical role in the turn to color in visual culture. It contends that electrical billboards or ‘spectaculars’ were intermedial forms of animation, marshalling sensual and affective experience that linked color, glass and light stimuli in mesmerizing immersive imagery.

Tom Ford’s A Single Man (2009) suggests that falling in (to) color is a falling into embodiment, ... more Tom Ford’s A Single Man (2009) suggests that falling in (to) color is a falling into embodiment, sensuality and the pain of a lover’s loss. Unfolding on November 30, 1962, the day George Falconer (Colin Firth) plans to commit suicide, the film shows the last 24 hours of his life as a gradual reawakening or attunement to the surfaces of the world. The film’s fetishistic attention to texture, detail and color suggests that cinema’s capacity to isolate, focalize and reframe enables a phenomenal openness to the world that is not unlike the experience of falling in love, while its celebration of color aesthetics—its chromophilia—stages three different modalities in the history of color. First, its production design, technological capacities and selective color saturation and desaturation exemplify the contemporary era’s digital capacity to manipulate color, while simultaneously signaling a reflexive anxiety about the problem of color stability for analog film, with implications for the digital era. Second, the intermedial color design of the film’s period setting in the early sixties nostalgically mourns the passing of an earlier technological regime in which Technicolor was marked as fantastic, at the very historical moment when cinema and television shifted from black and white to Eastmancolor as normative register. Third, in its Pop Art-inflected attention to chromatic surface and its textual allusions to Aldous Huxley’s novels and to psychedelic vision, it explores new cultural concerns with perception and the expansion of consciousness. A Single Man aestheticizes a contemporary shift in the moving image from actuality to potentiality, as one in which color acts as a signifier of appearance and disappearance, reflexively foregrounding the materiality of surface. By extension, through its progressive saturation and desaturation (or color ‘blooming’), it draws attention to the fragile and fugitive nature of analog color processes, yet also promises through its digital capacities that all might be retroactively restored. For at this historical moment marked by the ‘death of cinema’ and the shift to digital production, distribution and exhibition, color not only digitally alters but also can figuratively renew.

When the Disney studio shifted into digital animation by the early 1990s, it radically reduced it... more When 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.

From the 1920s through the 1960s, the animation industry was a labor force segregated by gender, ... more From the 1920s through the 1960s, the animation industry was a labor force segregated by gender, in which women were almost entirely restricted to the Inking and Paint department. One of the final steps in a Taylorized labor intensive industrial machine of specialized labor, the Ink and Paint Dept. usually consisted of several hundred female inkers or painters[2] in each animated studio, producing 8-10 cels an hour, enduring the lowest pay in the industry, while supervisors like Dot Smith would walk up and down the aisles at Disney urging them to work faster and faster with phrases like “Come on now, quick– like a bunny!” Incorporating 22 oral histories of inkers and painters who worked at Disney, MGM, Warner Bros. and elsewhere in the classical era and drawn from UCLA’s Oral History archives, this paper examines the relationship of color, labor and gender in the Ink and Paint machine with a particular focus on the material representation of paints, pigments, inks and other color materials in classical cel production.

This chapters surveys American cel animation, with a particular focus on the work of Walt Disney ... more This chapters surveys American cel animation, with a particular focus on the work of Walt Disney studio, its wartime propaganda production and its feature film Bambi (1942).

With the archival turn in film and media studies and the increasingly diverse range of archives p... more With the archival turn in film and media studies and the increasingly diverse range of archives private, hybrid or institutional that exist both on and off line, animation scholars are confronted again with a longstanding problem. How do we find animation resources that are often dispersed across many different kinds of archives and within much larger collections like the Library of Congress or portals like the European film gateway ? http://blog.animationstudies.org/?p=1185

Film Quarterly, Jan 1, 2005

Cinema Journal, Jan 1, 2008

... Zombie Culture: Autopsies of the Living Dead. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008. • McKechnie,... more ... Zombie Culture: Autopsies of the Living Dead. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008. • McKechnie,Kara. Alan Bennett. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008. • McLean, Adrienne L. Dying Swans and Madmen: Ballet, the Body, and Narrative Cinema. ...

Cinema Journal, Jan 1, 2006

... Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. * Evans, Jessica, and David Hesmondhaig... more ... Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. * Evans, Jessica, and David Hesmondhaigh. ... Cambridge: Harvard Univer-sity Press, 2005. * Weaver, C. Kay and Cynthia Carter, eds. ... Baron, Naomi S. "Cybertalk at Work and Play." Visible Language 39, no. ...

Cinema Journal, Jan 1, 2007

Cinema Journal, Jan 1, 2007

Cinema Journal, Jan 1, 2005

Note to Contributors: Due to the lengthy production timeline of Cinema Journal, many announcement... more Note to Contributors: Due to the lengthy production timeline of Cinema Journal, many announcements and calls for papers cannot be included because of the time factor. Be sure to check Screensite at http://www.screensite.org/ for all current an- nouncements, conferences and CFPs, and ...

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2006

"Disney, DuPont and Faber Birren: Hollywood and the Color Revolution" eds. Katherine Spring and Phillipa Gates, Resetting the Scene: Classical Hollywood Revisited. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, , 2021

Color cinematography and the Ink and Paint department were key attractions in Disney films, while... more Color cinematography and the Ink and Paint department were key attractions in Disney films, while also playing a spectacular narrative role in features like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Hand 1937) and The Reluctant Dragon (Werker 1941). Celebrating its new color range in Technicolor, Disney's promotional rhetoric emphasized its material color production as novel, exotic, and luxurious. 1 The aesthetic quality of its color was emphasized in a 1930s Disney press release-"In seeking perfection in color reproduction Disney technicians have. .. developed paints which in beauty and reliability excel all watercolors of the past" 2-and celebrated on-screen in The Reluctant Dragon's "Rainbow Room, " in a montage sequence showcasing the Disney Ink and Paint department's transformation of prodiegetic pigments and paints into the final color image. From its first Silly Symphony in color, Flowers and Trees (Gillett 1932), color was a value that marked Disney's product as qualitatively different from earlier two-strip subtractive color processes in animation like Technicolor III, Multicolor, or the later Cinecolor. 3 With an exclusive contract for Technicolor IV between 1932 and 1934, Disney produced cartoons with a new color palette that no other cartoon studio could match. 4 With complementary (red and green) and triadic (red, blue, and yellow) color schemes in narratives where toys, candy, and Christmas were frequent devices for expressive display in its Silly Symphony series, like The Night Before Christmas (Jackson 1933) or The Cookie Car nival (Sharpsteen 1935), Disney also offered a more nuanced pastel palette in the feature film Snow White, with light browns, blues, and greens. 5 In its animated stories, the studio imagined color's material production process

eds. Katherine Spring and Phillipa Gates, Resetting the Scene: Classical Hollywood Revisited. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, , 2021

Color cinematography and the Ink and Paint department were key attractions in Disney films, while... more Color cinematography and the Ink and Paint department were key attractions in Disney films, while also playing a spectacular narrative role in features like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Hand 1937) and The Reluctant Dragon (Werker 1941). Celebrating its new color range in Technicolor, Disney's promotional rhetoric emphasized its material color production as novel, exotic, and luxurious. 1 The aesthetic quality of its color was emphasized in a 1930s Disney press release-"In seeking perfection in color reproduction Disney technicians have. .. developed paints which in beauty and reliability excel all watercolors of the past" 2-and celebrated on-screen in The Reluctant Dragon's "Rainbow Room, " in a montage sequence showcasing the Disney Ink and Paint department's transformation of prodiegetic pigments and paints into the final color image. From its first Silly Symphony in color, Flowers and Trees (Gillett 1932), color was a value that marked Disney's product as qualitatively different from earlier two-strip subtractive color processes in animation like Technicolor III, Multicolor, or the later Cinecolor. 3 With an exclusive contract for Technicolor IV between 1932 and 1934, Disney produced cartoons with a new color palette that no other cartoon studio could match. 4 With complementary (red and green) and triadic (red, blue, and yellow) color schemes in narratives where toys, candy, and Christmas were frequent devices for expressive display in its Silly Symphony series, like The Night Before Christmas (Jackson 1933) or The Cookie Car nival (Sharpsteen 1935), Disney also offered a more nuanced pastel palette in the feature film Snow White, with light browns, blues, and greens. 5 In its animated stories, the studio imagined color's material production process