Cinema Wars - Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-Cheney Era

The overall structure of Animation: History and Narration is chronological, with considerable attention given to the rise of American animation, including its rocky transition from a creative, disorganized cottage industry in the 1910s to a more rigid studio system by the 1930s, where individual studios including Disney, Paramount’s Fleischer, and Warner Brothers, launched their own house styles. The stability of classical American animation in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, however, was challenged during the 1960s when television permanently altered animation’s norms for production, distribution, and exhibition. The volume emphasizes innovative and transitional animators, such as Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, and Jay Ward, who helped rethink American animation but also struggled as the systems changed in the face of declining budgets and series formats.

Animation: History and Narration also addresses the aesthetic range of computer animation, including the non-representational work of John Whitney in the 1960s, and the experimentation of Disney’s Tron (1982), up to feature films today. Central to the study of recent animation is Pixar, whose approach to story, character movement, and hyper-realistic details has proven so dominant today, paralleling Disney’s role during the classical era. Pixar’s films, including Toy Story (1995) and Finding Nemo (2003), build upon slightly different classic traditions than their contemporaries such as Dreamworks’ Shrek (2001) and Blue Sky’s Ice Age (2002)
While this study is centered on American animation, the volume also investigates distinctive international animators and several important national cinemas for expanded understanding of viable options over the past 100 years, including Len Lye, Norman McLaren Caroline Leaf, and Robert Breer. Neupert considers those cartoons that forge lively alternatives to commercial American conventions, including Canada’s long history of prestigious output by Marv Newland and John Weldon, England’s Nick Park (Chicken Run, Wallace and Gromit), France’s renaissance (Triplets of Belleville, Kirikou...), and Hong Kong (My Life as McDull). The field of Japanese anime is investigated in its own crucial chapter, which outlines key moments and genres, including exemplary motion pictures, sexually transgressive and violent films, and the phenomenally successful work of auteur Hayao Miyazaki.

This book sheds new light on the cinema and modernity debate by confronting established theories on the role of the modern cinematic experience with new empirical work on the history of the social experience of cinema-going, film audiences and film exhibition.

The book provides a wide range of research methodologies and perspectives on these matters, including:

• the use of oral history methods
• questionnaires
• diaries
• audience letters
• as well as industrial, sociological and other accounts on historical film audiences.

The collection’s case studies thus provide a "how to" compendium of current methodologies for researchers and students working on film and media audiences, film and media experiences, and historical reception.

The volume is part of a ‘new cinema history’ effort within film and screen studies to look at film history not only as a history of production, textual relations or movies-as-artefacts, but rather to concentrate more on the receiving end, the social experience of cinema, and the engagement of film/cinema (history) ‘from below’. The contributions to the volume reflect upon the very different ways in which cinema has been accepted, rejected or disciplined as an agent of modernity in neighbouring parts of Europe, and how cinema-going has been promoted and regulated as a popular social practice at different times in twentieth-century European history.