This book combines insights from the humanities and modern neuroscience to explore the contribution of affect and embodiment on meaning-making in case studies from animation, video games, and virtual worlds. As we interact more and more with animated characters and avatars in everyday media consumption, it has become vital to investigate the ways that animated environments influence our perception of the liberal humanist subject. This book is the first to apply recent research on the application of the embodied mind thesis to our understanding of embodied engagement with nonhumans and cyborgs in animated media, analyzing works by Émile Cohl, Hayao Miyazaki, Tim Burton, Norman McLaren, the Quay Brothers, Pixar, and many others. Drawing on the breakthroughs of modern brain science to argue that animated media broadens the viewer’s perceptual reach, this title offers a welcome contribution to the growing literature at the intersection of cognitive studies and film studies, with a perspective on animation that is new and original. ‘Affect and Embodied Meaning in Animation’ will be essential reading for researchers of Animation Studies, Film and Media Theory, Posthumanism, Video Games, and Digital Culture, and will provide a key insight into animation for both undergraduate and graduate students. Because of the increasing importance of visual effect cinema and video games, the book will also be of keen interest within Film Studies and Media Studies, as well as to general readers interested in scholarship in animated media.

How animation can reconnect us with bodily experiences Film and media studies scholarship has often argued that digital cinema and CGI provoke a sense of disembodiment in viewers; they are seen as merely fantastic or unreal. In her in-depth exploration of the phenomenology of animation, Sandra Annett offers a new perspective: that animated films and digital media in fact evoke vivid embodied sensations in viewers and connect them with the lifeworld of experience. Starting with the emergence of digital technologies in filmmaking in the 1980s, Annett argues that contemporary digital media is indebted to the longer history of animation. She looks at a wide range of animation—from Disney films to anime, electro swing music videos to Vocaloids—to explore how animation, through its material forms and visual styles, can evoke bodily sensations of touch, weight, and orientation in space. Each chapter discusses well-known forms of animation from the United States, France, Japan, South Korea, and China, examining how they provoke different sensations in viewers, such as floating and falling in Howl’s Moving Castle and My Beautiful Girl Mari, and how the body is mediated in films that combine animation and live action, as seen in Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Song of the South. These films set the stage for an exploration of how animation and embodiment manifest in contemporary global media, from CGI and motion capture in Disney’s “live action remakes” to new media installations by artists like Lu Yang. Leveraging an array of case studies through a new approach to film phenomenology, The Flesh of Animation offers an enlightening discussion of why animation provides a sensational experience for viewers not replicable through other media forms.

The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Interface provides a ground-breaking investigation into media-specific spaces where Shakespeare is experienced. While such operations may be largely invisible to the average reader or viewer, the interface properties of books, screens, and stages profoundly mediate our cognitive engagement with Shakespeare. This volume considers contemporary debates and questions including how mobile devices mediate the experience of Shakespeare; the impact of rapidly evolving virtual reality technologies and the interface architectures which condition Shakespearean plays; and how design elements of hypertext, menus, and screen navigation operate within internet Shakespeare spaces. Charting new frontiers, this diverse collection delivers fresh insight into human–computer interaction and user-experience theory, cognitive ecology, and critical approaches such as historical phenomenology. This volume also highlights the application of media and interface design theory to questions related to the medium of the play and its crucial interface with the body and mind.

​This book examines the role of memory in animation, as well as the ways in which the medium of animation can function as a technology of remembering and forgetting. By doing so, it establishes a platform for the cross-fertilization between the burgeoning fields of animation studies and memory studies. By analyzing a wide range of different animation types, from stop motion to computer animation, and from cell animated cartoons to painted animation, this book explores the ways in which animation can function as a representational medium. The five parts of the book discuss the interrelation of animation and memory through the lens of materiality, corporeality, animation techniques, the city, and animated documentaries. These discussions raise a number of questions: how do animation films bring forth personal and collective pasts? What is the role of found footage, objects, and sound in the material and affective dimensions of animation? How does animation serve political ends? The essays in this volume offer answers to these questions through a wide variety of case studies and contexts. The book will appeal to both a broad academic and a more general readership with an interest in animation studies, memory studies, cultural studies, comparative visual arts, and media studies. Chapter “Introduction” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This second volume builds on the initial groundwork laid by Ecocinema Theory and Practice by examining the ways in which ecocritical cinema studies have matured and proliferated over the last decade, opening whole new areas of study and research. Featuring fourteen new essays organized into three sections around the themes of cinematic materialities, discourses, and communities, the volume explores a variety of topics within ecocinema studies from examining specific national and indigenous film contexts to discussing ecojustice, environmental production studies, film festivals, and political ecology. The breadth of the contributions exemplifies how ecocinema scholars worldwide have sought to overcome the historical legacy of binary thinking and intellectual norms and are working to champion new ecocritical, intersectional, decolonial, queer, feminist, Indigenous, vitalist, and other emergent theories and cinematic practices. The collection also demonstrates the unique ways that cinema studies scholarship is actively addressing environmental injustice and the climate crisis. This book is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of ecocritical film and media studies, production studies, cultural studies, and environmental studies.

Ethics of Cinematic Experience: Screens of Alterity deals with the relationship between cinema and ethics from a philosophical perspective, finding an intrinsic connection between film spectatorship and the possibility of being open to different modes of alterity. The book’s main thesis is that openness to otherness is already found in the basic structures of cinematic experience. Through a close examination of the ethical relevance of the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Stanley Cavell, Emmanuel Levinas and Gilles Deleuze to cinema studies, Ethics of Cinematic Experience: Screens of Alterity pursues the question of how film can open the viewer to what is not her, and so bring her to encounter otherness in a way that is unique to cinematic experience. The book sees ethics as not just the subject, content or story of a film but part of its aesthetic structure. Accompanied by readings of films mainly from mainstream cinema, each chapter focuses on a different aspect of the encounter with alterity through cinema. The book gives particular attention to how theoretical discussion of the cinematic close-up can lead to ethical insights into the status of both the human and the non-human in film, and thus lead to an understanding of the relationships the viewer makes with them. The book is a helpful resource for students and scholars interested in the relationship between philosophy, film and ethics, and is appropriate for students of philosophy and media and cultural studies.

This book explores the ways in which Hollywood film cycles from the 1930s to the 1960s were shaped by their surrounding industrial contexts and market environments, to build an inclusive conception of the form, operation, and function of film cycles. By foregrounding patterns of distribution, spaces of exhibition, and modes of consumption as key components of the form and mechanics of cycles, this book develops a methodology for defining cycles based on an analysis of the industry and trade discourse. Applying her unique framework to six case studies of different cycles, Zoe Wallin blends a wide range of historical sources to analyze the many cultural, social, political, aesthetic, and industrial contexts relevant to these films. This book makes an important contribution to the literature in the area of film historiography, and will be of interest to any scholars of film studies, history and media studies.