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This chapter examines Oshii Mamoru's animated Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004). It analyzes the connections between the ‘cult’ elements of the film and the science fiction (sf)-esque issues that Oshii explores throughout his oeuvre. It argues that for Oshii, the film is a kind of performed philosophical speculation, and many of the same elements that allow us to define his work as ‘cult’ also function to highlight and enact his theories regarding technobiopolitics — theories typically linked to sf. To define Innocence as ‘cult’ here is not a secondary designation; rather, ‘cult’ is a fundamental element in producing the meanings of this sf film.

This chapter discusses and assesses the changes that contemporary cinema is seeing as the techniques and technology demonstrated in the animated films of Pixar increasingly migrate to and affect the world of live-action cinema. The lines between the two become increasingly blurred, and the very term animation seems to be taking on a whole new meaning. It looks at works that suggest the range of animation hybridity today, such as Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003).

This chapter discusses animated films that follow what Norman Klein terms the death of the conventional seven-minute cartoon, as its cinematic incarnation gave way to television and its early emphasis on restricted animation. It examines two feature films that self-consciously explore the dynamics of animation as they look both backward and forward in terms of animating space and the sort of characters who inhabit the cartoon world. Focus is mostly on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a work that brings together Warner Bros.' and Disney's approaches to animation.

This chapter explores the development of animation and cinema in Japan after World War II, with emphasis on the period of the Allied Forces Occupation between 1945 and 1952. It analyzes two animated films that were made immediately following the war: Sakura (1946), directed by Masaoka Kenzō; and Mahō no pen (1946), directed by Kumakawa Masao. The chapter also looks at the issues that surrounded Japan’s path to modernization, and considers how the nation and the animation artists responded to a new political era while working via a mass medium.

This chapter examines how Japanese film culture engaged parallel forms of media to create imperial subjects by focusing on manga or comic books, popular music, and film magazines. It first considers the ways in which images of Asia represented in manga, illustrated novels, and animated films were used to transform young, predominately male audiences into obedient imperial subjects. It then turns to stories about heroes in exotic outposts of the Japanese empire that were published in response to a sense of inner duty and market demand. It also explores the use of popular music in animated films and the growth of film publications. The chapter shows how film magazines, popular music in films, and comic strips all interacted dynamically, both expanding the audience base for film while inviting the viewers' and readers' vicarious participation in the imperial project through their consumption.

Before interest in Carl Stalling's music surged in the late 1980s, most of the critical writing on music and cartoons focused on Scott Bradley. During his almost twenty-five years of composing cartoons for MGM (1934–1957), Bradley not only made a name for himself as a composer but also developed a unique composing style that became highly influential in his own time and afterward. Though the stories of the MGM cartoons are often quite generic, they have a unique signature: violent action sequences combined with Bradley's illustrative approach to musical scoring. The penchant for extreme cartoon violence appears to have originated at the MGM studio during a time that America was involved in an unprecedented global conflict. Bradley took great pride in composing music for animated films, expressing high hopes for the future of cartoon music and of animation in general, and, as the sole composer for one of the major Hollywood animation studios, believed he could bring about change in his small corner of the industry.

Japanese animation first emerged in 1917 when Shimokawa Oten (1892–1973), Kitayama Seitaro (1888–1945), and Kouchi Junichi (1886–1970), working independently of each other, sought to make the first animation in Japan. The three of them are considered to be the first generation of pioneers in Japanese animation, whereas the second generation included Yamamoto Sanae (1898–1981), Ofuji Noburo (1908–1961), and Murata Yasuji (1896–1966). To the third generation belonged Oishi Ikuo (1901–1944), Masaoka Kenzo (1898–1988), and Seo Mitsuyo (1911–2010). This chapter examines Masaoka’s contributions to the technical developments in Japanese animation. It first provides a background on the life of Masaoka before turning to a discussion of his animation career, including the works he did during the Pacific War as well as his animated films. The chapter concludes with a look at Masaoka’s animation career after the Pacific War, citing some of his works such as Sakura (Cherry Blossoms) and Suteneko torachan (Tora-chan the Abandoned Kitten).

Digital technology has paved the way for the development of advanced techniques in Japanese animation production. In addition to widening the variety of production methodology in animation, digitalization has also made it possible for people with little experience, such as students, to be involved in the production of animated films for theatrical release. This chapter discusses the use of 3D computer graphics in the making of two Japanese animated films—Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004) and Doraemon (2004)—both of which were produced by IKIF+, a company founded by animators Ishida Sonoko and Kifune Tokumitsu. It also describes a Doraemon project called “Renewal,” when the voice actors of the television series were changed and a new production system was used. The focus is on the animated opening title sequences that enabled artists to challenge visual experiments.

Explores recent animated films that embrace the idea that belonging to a community does not require conformity to social expectations, but rather builds on the protagonist’s individuality and seeming queerness. In box office hits like Ratatouille (Bird, 2007), Kung Fu Panda (Osborn and Stevenson, 2008), and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Lord and Miller, 2009), and in the lesser known Bee Movie (Hickner and Smith. 2007), The Tale of Desperaux (Fell and Stevenhagen, 2008), character development connects closely with food, which becomes the instrument of the heroes’ redemption even when it would initially appear to be the very cause of their social isolation. This raises the question: What models of acceptable adulthood – in terms of gender, class, ethnicity, and body image - does the interaction with food present to viewers, in particular children, who are arguably among the main marketing targets of these productions? Although cooking is still often culturally framed as an element of the domestic and feminine sphere, in these films food is not domestic or related to care work, and as such appears as more culturally acceptable for males.

This chapter examines the disappearance of earlier stereotypes about China in American films of the new millennium, even as fears of China persist in the American imagination. Through an analysis of two highly successful animated films set in China, Mulan (1998) and Kung Fu Panda (2008), the chapter shows how economic, cultural, and social factors have conspired to foster radically changed representations of China in American cinema, but have not banished the impulses—in particular the ethnocentrism that gave rise to a binary view of the world—that engendered the old Chinese stereotypes. Both Mulan and Kung Fu Panda, it argues, have created an image of China that is more unreal and imaginary than ever before. In so doing, not only do they firmly erase the real China, but they also point to the creation of what might be seen as a new—and distinctly postmodern—form of Orientalism.

Les Temps qui changent (2004) is Téchiné's sixteenth and latest film, which is a useful point of departure for examining the collaborative nature of his work. It shows the extent to which an approach excessively centred on the director as auteur risks missing wider creative processes. The film explores the relationship between past and present while recapitulating the motifs and scenes from previous Téchiné films. It restages Téchiné's simultaneous attentiveness to socio-historical determinants and strata, and also to desires, dreams, aspirations, a virtual realm completely distinct from the antiseptic computer-generated animated film that advertises the new media complex. Despite the film's typical pluralism, it is the reunion of Deneuve and Depardieu that is at its centre, along with the central love story and love quest. Téchiné always writes his own screenplays, but always in collaboration with at least one other. Aside from that with Deneuve, his other long-term collaboration has been with Martinen Giordano, who worked as the editor on La Matiouette.

The first animated film in Japan was produced in 1917, but it was only in the 1960s that Japanese animation actually took off. Over this ninety-year period, several different epochs, marked by two distinct opposing forces, can be identified. The cross-pollination between these opposing forces has contributed to the development of Japanese animation. In order to gain an understanding of the history of Japanese animation, this chapter discusses these two opposing forces. It begins by looking at the 1910s–1920s, when cartoonists and entrepreneurs clashed over the production of Japanese animation. The chapter then considers how animators during the 1930s–1940s attempted to achieve artistic expression through individual rather than collective production, as well as the competition between animated feature films and TV serials in the 1950s–1970s. In particular, it examines the technique of TV animation created by Tezuka Osamu. Finally, the chapter describes the polarization of two kinds of works in Japanese animation in the 1980s–1990s: those produced for mass markets; and those that targeted a limited fan base only—the so-called “mania.”

This chapter explores the music of Walt Disney's animated feature Saludos Amigos (1942). It first surveys the principal trends in music and Pan Americanism during the Good Neighbor period. It then analyzes the music, folkloric and otherwise, and relates it to the film's visual and narrative elements, connecting it to broader themes in Pan Americanist discourse. In addition, it reflects on authenticity in terms of Pan Americanism, that is, a yearning for a “genuine culture of the Americas.” It is argued that, whatever authenticity Saludos Amigos proffered through its music, the film as a whole served mainly as a tool of strictly one-sided propaganda in favor of the United States and the war effort. Authenticity, always an elastic term, becomes even more so when paired with the tools of propaganda, especially as fashioned by Hollywood.

This chapter describes a production approach that moves toward a faster, cheaper, and more accessible method of creating animated movies, and reduces the time it takes to illustrate a creative idea in the form of 3D animation. The material is approached from the perspective of machinima film creators and meeting their needs by developing new tools to support machinima as an artistic practice. It describes a workflow that changes the production process from a mostly linear progression, from initial idea to finished production, into an iterative approach in which decisions can be quickly evaluated and altered at any point in the process, thanks to an interconnected pipeline of shared assets.

This chapter explores the concept of Machinima, a 3-dimensional computer graphics rendering engine that was used mostly in the digital gaming sector and computer-animated films. The author shows how the unanticipated user interacts with the computer games by referring to the Machinima concept as the new visual media environment. The previous development and current scenario, along with the innovation, invention, modification, and commercial uses of this new concept, take the discussion further in the next parts of the chapter. In the final part of the chapter, the author focuses on the barriers, legal aspects, and copyright issues of Machinima, which affect the social and cultural changes in the gaming environment.

This chapter begins with a review of the principle of auteurship and how it applies to comics in general and Kelly’s work specifically. It then explores how Kelly’s engagement with the craft and industry of several different comic mediums such as animation, comic books, and political cartooning shaped his genre-defying comic strip. An analysis of critical business choices Kelly made at key points in his career then follows. Four facets of his career as a businessman are investigated here: his relationship with the Post-Hall syndicate, his various battles and compromises with touchy newspaper editors, his work as the president of the National Cartoonists Society, and his efforts to translate his comic strip into animated films. The chapter also presents an estimation of how the sum of his behind-the-scenes choices affected the quality and integrity of his work.

This chapter performs a detailed case study of several anime by director Miyazaki Hayao, showing the ways in which audience interpretations—including academic interpretations—of certain films as products deriving from directors' religious motivations or as media for imparting religious messages can be fruitfully juxtaposed with directors' reflexive statements about their own work. The specific aim is to provide a corrective for essentialist tendencies in foregoing scholarship, including the common assertion that Miyazaki's films somehow reveal a mystical understanding of religion (particularly Shintō). It proceeds on the presupposition that examining what a director and his audience s say about his oeuvre is more revealing than scouring the work for particular religious themes. Through commentary on fan sites, interviews with informants, academic literature, and citations of interviews with the director, the chapter examines how various interest groups interpret Miyazaki's films as religious while also showing how Miyazaki himself resists such descriptions.

In American animation, character takes precedence over space. In contrast, there is more balance between character and space in Japanese anime. One might wonder why Western mainstream animated films tend to place greater emphasis on character whereas anime can be more space oriented. This chapter suggests that the phenomenon is related to the more holistic visual culture of the East. It shows that people of the East are accustomed to a more associative, analogical, and spatial perception, from the pictographs and ideographs in Chinese characters and Japanese kanji to the multi-perspectival Chinese paintings. To illustrate this point, the chapter looks at several cultural artifacts from different disciplines of the arts that exemplify the location-based narrative with both the comprehensive space design of the story world and the meticulous arrangement of the camera. More specifically, it examines Japanese haiku poetry, Chinese handscroll painting, and some experimental animation films by Tezuka Osamu (1928–1989).

Kawamoto Kihachiro (1925–2010) is arguably the most famous artistic animation director in Japan. Known for his puppets, he changed his career in midlife, first by quitting as a successful animator at Shiba Productions to study puppet animation in Czechoslovakia. Kihachiro became an independent director and returned to Japan to direct Breaking of Branches Is Forbidden. His latest animation is The Book of the Dead, produced in 2005. This chapter examines Kawamoto’s creativity by focusing on his animations as well as the materials that he prepared for creating those animations. Before describing Kawamoto and his animated films, it outlines a basic frame of reference used in clinical psychology studies—the human life cycle—and then shows that Kawamoto’s films increasingly reflected on the theme of the human life cycle as he aged. The chapter then looks at Kawamoto’s first and last puppet animation films as well as his unpublished and unfinished projects. It also considers a group of animation directors in Japan, including Takahata Isao, Miyazaki Hayao, and Oshii Mamoru, whose animated works are reflective of their age advancement.