Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Rayna Denison (ed.), Princess Mononoke: Understanding Studio Ghibli’s Monster PrincessNichola Dobson, Norman McLaren: Between the FramesRaz Greenberg, Hayao Miyazaki: Exploring the Early Work of Japan’s Greatest AnimatorSusan Smith, Noel Brown and Sam Summers (eds), Toy Story: How Pixar Reinvented the Animated Feature

2019; Oxford University Press; Volume: 60; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/screen/hjz013

1460-2474

Malcolm Cook,

Cinema and Media Studies

Animation scholarship commonly starts with the truism that this subject has been neglected and trivialized within film and media studies. Historically this was undoubtedly accurate, but animation studies has in recent years been recognized as one of the most vital and exciting areas of moving-image research and theorization. The launch of the ‘Animation: Key Films/Filmmakers’ series from Bloomsbury, edited by Chris Pallant (alongside a comparable forthcoming series from Palgrave Macmillan edited by Caroline Ruddell and Paul Ward) signals animation’s new prominence, but also raises important questions about the direction of future research. This review will consider the series as a whole, paying particular attention to Rayna Denison’s edited collection on the celebrated Studio Ghibli film Mononokehime/Princess Mononoke (1997), which exemplifies the strengths of the four volumes published so far. The historiography of animation studies is necessarily bound up with the history of animation and its varying fortunes. The mainstream animation industry was in flux and received little respect when film studies was emerging as an academic discipline in the 1960s and 1970s, looking to establish cinema as a credible subject for scholarly enquiry.1 The decline of the Hollywood studios ended the ‘golden age’ of short, theatrical, animated cartoons from Disney, Warner Bros., MGM and others.2 In their place, television became the primary source of animation, but this was increasingly seen a low-cost filler for children’s television and was associated with an exclusively juvenile audience rather than the diverse audiences that had enjoyed cartoons as part of earlier film programmes.3 Devotees of course knew of outstanding animation being produced in Eastern Europe, at the National Film Board of Canada and elsewhere, but film studies, with a small number of exceptions, was looking in another direction.