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.

Have you ever asked yourself what changed when you were "born again?" You look in the mirror and see the same reflection - your body hasn't changed. You find yourself acting the same and yielding to those same old temptations - that didn't seem to change either. So you wonder, Has anything really changed? The correct answer to that question is foundational for receiving from God. If you lack this basic understanding, you'll forever ask yourself doubt-filled questions like: "How could God love somebody like me?" and "How can I possibly expect to receive anything from the Lord? I don't deserve it, I'm not good enough!" Spirit, Soul, and Body will help you eliminate those and other doubt-filled questions that destroy your faith. If you have trouble receiving from God, this is a must-read!

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.

From Mouse to Mermaid, an interdisciplinary collection of original essays, is the first comprehensive, critical treatment of Disney cinema. Addressing children's classics as well as the Disney affiliates' more recent attempts to capture adult audiences, the contributors respond to the Disney film legacy from feminist, marxist, poststructuralist, and cultural studies perspectives. The volume contemplates Disney's duality as an American icon and as an industry of cultural production, created in and through fifty years of filmmaking. The contributors treat a range of topics at issue in contemporary cultural studies: the performance of gender, race, and class; the engendered images of science, nature, technology, family, and business. The compilation of voices in From Mouse to Mermaid creates a persuasive cultural critique of Disney's ideology. The contributors are Bryan Attebery, Elizabeth Bell, Claudia Card, Chris Cuomo, Ramona Fernandez, Henry A. Giroux, Robert Haas, Lynda Haas, Susan Jeffords, N. Soyini Madison, Susan Miller, Patrick Murphy, David Payne, Greg Rode, Laura Sells, and Jack Zipes.

David Whitley's compelling study complicates our understanding of the classic Disney canon by focusing on the way images of the natural world are mediated within popular art for children. He examines a range of Disney's feature animations, from Snow White to Finding Nemo, to show that, even as the films communicate the central ideologies of their times, they also express the ambiguities and tensions that underlie these dominant values.

What has Luce Irigaray’s statement that women need a God to do with her thoughts on the relation between body and mind, or the sensible and the intelligible? Using the theological notion ‘incarnation’ as a hermeneutical key, Anne-Claire Mulder brings together and illuminates the interrelations between these different themes in Luce Irigaray’s work. Seesawing between Luce Irigaray’s critique of philosophical discourse and her constructive philosophy, Mulder elucidates Irigaray’s thoughts on the relations between ‘becoming woman’ and ‘becoming divine’. She shows that Luce Irigaray’s restaging of the relation between the sensible and the intelligible, between flesh and Word, is key to her reinterpretation of the relation between woman and God. In and through her interpretation of Luce Irigaray’s thoughts on the flesh she argues that the relation between flesh and Word must be seen as a dialectical one, instead of as a dualistic relation. This means that ‘incarnation’ is no longer seen as a one-way process of Word becoming flesh, but as a continuing process of flesh becoming word and word becoming flesh. For all images and thoughts – including those of ‘God’ – are produced by the flesh, divine in its creativity inexhaustibility, in response to the touch of the other. And these images, thoughts, words in turn become embodied, by touching and moving the flesh of the subject.