Kirsten Moana Thompson

Seattle University · Film and Media

In Apocalyptic Dread, Kirsten Moana Thompson examines how fears and anxieties about the future are reflected in recent American cinema. 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,...

This introductory essay outlines the key issues and findings of a special dossier of Teaching Media in JCMS focused on issues of copyright related to online teaching and the COVID-19 pandemic.

This introductory chapter argues that, throughout its history, animation has been fundamentally shaped by its use for advertising. It highlights key examples of this interaction in well-known animation histories but also points towards the large volume of animation production that has received little attention until now. Animation was not only shap...

As a stylized lighting bolt created by Ashton Collins in 1926 to promote electricity, Reddy Kilowatt became a ubiquitous symbol in American popular culture, embodying reliability and speed and offering the promise of ‘Better Living Through Electricity’, while encouraging consumers to use new electrical appliances. This paper explores the ways in wh...

Throughout its history, animation has been fundamentally shaped by its application to promotion and marketing, with animation playing a vital role in advertising history. In individual case study chapters this book addresses, among others, the role of promotion and advertising for anime, Disney, MTV, Lotte Reiniger, Pixar and George Pal, and highli...

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...

Sparked by a groundbreaking Amsterdam workshop titled "Disorderly Order: Colours in Silent Film," scholarly and archival interest in colour as a crucial aspect of film form, technology and aesthetics has enjoyed a resurgence in the past twenty years. In the spirit of the workshop, this anthology brings together international experts to explore a di...

Sparked by a groundbreaking Amsterdam workshop titled "Disorderly Order: Colours in Silent Film," scholarly and archival interest in colour as a crucial aspect of film form, technology and aesthetics has enjoyed a resurgence in the past twenty years. In the spirit of the workshop, this anthology brings together international experts to explore a di...

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 fea...

Gender and Sexuality Pacific Studies Queer Studies

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).

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. T...

http://blog.animationstudies.org/?p=1185

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...

This article examines the discursive circulation of stories in journalism and travel writing over the last fifty years that linked leading Western Samoan hotelier Aggie Grey to South Pacific’s iconic Tonkinese, Bloody Mary. Made famous by Juanita Hall in the Broadway musical (1949–1954), and subsequent cinematic adaptation (Joshua Logan, 1958), Blo...

This paper examines the unusual theatrical and exhibition dimensions of Disney’s World of Color, an outdoor night time entertainment spectacle which screens animated films on ephemeral materials: the water spray and light produced by fountains, water, mist and fire. It considers how this show innovates a new form of theatrical exhibition, combining...

This paper explores a key machine in animation’s production process: the Ink and Paint Department in the classical studio era. It examines the relationships between gender, labor and materiality in the creation and promotion of proprietary paints, pigments, and other materials in cel animation. Examining oral histories from UCLA’s archives of inker...

The word animation derives from anima, meaning “breath” or “soul,” and animare, “to give life to.” Animation creates the illusion of life, and it does this through movement. There are two distinguishing characteristics: First, the image is photographed on film frame by frame, and second, in consequence the illusion of motion is created cinematicall...

How have digital special effects transformed the aesthetics of the historical epic? I begin with an industrial survey (“the state of the business”) which shows how computer-generated imagery (CGI) has reshaped all genres in a Hollywood film industry in which (digital) special effects now play a dominant role and in which the special-effects industr...

Crime Films: Investigating the Scene analyzes the wide body of films that fall under the rubric of crime, from the gangster film to the film noir to classic whodunit television series like Law and Order and CSI. Ever since Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery in 1903, audiences have been fascinated by films about crime and the world as seen fr...

Cinema Journal 44.2 (2005) 146-154 SCMS Deadlines (see SCMS Web site for further information) • A special issue of Screening the Past will focus on the role of popular music in film texts and film culture. This issue will reflect the emergence of a field of investigation concerned with moving beyond the visualist bias of film studies. Topics could...

The two cinematic adaptations of Cape Fear (1962, 1991) are a dialogue with their different cultural and historical production contexts, with the second film as the monstrous return of the repressed desires, fears, and violence, whose threat was contained in the original. Through the central figure of the monster, Max Cady, these secrets and trauma...

This essay examines the commercial and critical success of New Zealand feature film Once Were Warriors (Lee Tamahori, 1994) and the national reception and dissemination across the New Zealand public sphere that garnered accolades for it like “the great New Zealand film for which we have been waiting.” (Foster, 1994). and “epic in scale” (Cook, 1994...

This essay examines Warner Brother's comedic animated character Pepe Le Pew (Chuck Jones creator) and the comedic discourse of romantic seduction of the animated cartoon series in which he starred. Pepé le Pew, a skunk with an infallible belief in his own desirability ( along with some fractured French), frequently chased a wretched cat, whose chan...

"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 t...

"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 t...