When attention is paid to the ways characters perform and are performed in anime narratives, it becomes apparent that there are certain regularly utilized approaches to the character acting widespread in anime’s animation. Two of the most prominent modes of performance have been called embodied acting and figurative acting. Each uses distinct techniques to act out a specific character’s personality and, in the process, imply different notions of selfhood. This chapter examines the specific utilization of embodied and figurative acting in Yūri!!! on Ice and how these interrelated modes of performance dovetail with the narrative. Through its balancing of embodied and figurative modes of performance, the anime moves between an individualized self whose interior is expressed externally and an open acknowledgment of the interrelation of external others in the performance of self and gender.

This chapter presents an academic re-assessment of Gnomeo & Juliet, acknowledging its status as a Shakespearean adaptation for young children whilst also moving beyond this superficial evaluation. Whilst Asbury has his version of Shakespeare’s ‘star-cross’d lovers’ survive and unite their rival factions – a choice which clearly makes the story more palatable for children – the film earns this happy ending. It does so both through its echoes of and engagement with Shakespearean comedy (particularly A Midsummer Night’s Dream), and through its intertextuality with cinematic history, British culture and heritage and the Shakespearean canon. Asbury astutely makes his film appeal equally to three distinct audiences: young children, adults and Shakespeare aficionados – emulating the critically and commercially successful approach of Pixar Animation Studios in creating animated cinema which simultaneously connects authentically with multiple discrete demographics.

This chapter explores the aesthetic, narrative and ideological stakes of the balcony scene in Candy Candy. Oscillating between an eminently traditional representation and a questioning of social and aesthetic conventions, the scene punctuates the narrative progression and is the object of a double repetition: whilst several episodes show the actors’ auditions and then their preparation before the premiere, the characters of Terry and Candy ceaselessly replay the balcony scene, which constitutes a structuring motif of the anime. It also becomes the locus where gender identities are shaped and troubled, but also where theatre and life unfold in a game of mirrors. Candy and Terry’s love story actually never goes beyond the phase of the balcony scene, a sequence that they keep repeating in endless variations that call for decoding.

“Gulliver has been a regular inspiration for film-makers since the earliest days of cinema. This chapter considers the various reasons for his popularity on screen and the challenges inherent in adapting Swift’s text. Among the latter are its lack of narrative unity and the discrepancies between what people think they know of the book and how it actually conducts itself. From silent French films to groundbreaking animations and Hollywood blockbusters, such concerns have always informed the kinds of Gulliver presented to the world. At the same time, each adapter of Gulliver’s Travels explicitly or implicitly considers its relevance for cinema as form and spectacle. Swift’s capacity to disorientate, both in the shifting physical proportions of his characters and in the questionable literary dignity of his text, helps to align him with the experience of cinematic audiences and innovators worldwide. When we assess not only the changing figure of Gulliver but also the different varieties of otherness encountered through his screen afterlives, we can better appreciate the adaptation process as one in which our ideas of history and literature are themselves subject to interrogation.”

Comics inherently encompass multiple modalities and are published across numerous platforms, whether in print or digital form. In its distinct combinations of words and images, the multimodal medium of comics has encompassed numerous formats throughout its long history – typically appearing in numerous forms simultaneously in any given era. Comics exist in single-panel and multi-panel strips within newspapers and magazines, in single-issue comic books and longer graphic novel formats and in new digital forms such as webcomics and motion comics. Comics have also been adapted to cinema and television, in both live-action and animated incarnations – often drawing on the original words and imagery of their source material in direct ways. This essay traces the history of comics as a multimodal experience from the 1800s through the twenty-first century; it also examines how other media have translated them onto various types of screens while still drawing on the specific formal qualities used by comics to tell stories. Regardless of the particular format through which readers engage with the medium, comics offer amalgamations of two separate modes of content which allow for unique meanings via the unification of words and images.

Chapter 4 explores the foundation of extended business activities and tie-ins in the 1920s and 1930s that developed around Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse. The term ‘animated properties’ acknowledges that these popular fictional representations were attributed subjecthood and, as such, came alive outside the celluloid frame. Felix and Mickey were pre-packaged as family-friendly viewing. Doll effigies and other merchandise literally took the characters into the heart of the home. The chapter discusses the ambivalent role of intellectual property registration in stabilising the character merchandising trade, exploring what was particularly distinctive about the Disney Corporation’s industrial system of production and distribution. This successful strategy was an organisational one with cultural ambitions, engaging franchise managers and licensees in educating children and the trade about the protocols of consumption attached to play. The Disney brand came to signify child-friendly cultural content of all kinds, with trust in the name secured by the deployment of a new legal creation, the phenomenon of ‘world rights’ exploited by a new managerial class, Disney Enterprises’ agents.

Responding to obviously persisting concerns regarding the venerability of icons in the post-Iconoclastic era, some of the empire’s leading theologians made the novel claim that it is not human artistry, but divine inspiration that ultimately ensures the icon’s authenticity – its resemblance to its prototype. Just as with Christian literature, the divine inspiration of material images guarantees their faithfulness, and it is divine inspiration that also releases the work of art from the realm of ‘dead’ matter, enlivening it with the divine pneuma.

The opening chapter sets out the terminological and conceptual ideas that provide a basis for the remainder of the book. Problematising the topic of musical subjectivity, it explicates the various meanings that have been given to this awkward notion and through increasing clarification proposes a range of potential meanings. Subjectivity here appears to refer to the experience of music as akin to a living being, an animate consciousness, but such that the experience may be of an apparent immediacy that shades it into a privileged first-person perspective. The second part of the chapter looks in turn to how subjectivity manifests itself both in music and in history, interrogating the notion of the musical subject through a series of questions that may be summarised as who, how and where, when and why? One of the properties of the idea of subjectivity identified here is that it is not a pre-given entity but a dynamic process that requires our own active participation for its interpretation. And thus while a number of conceptual questions still remain to be answered at the close of this chapter, it is given to the main body of the book to respond to these matters.

Research has shown that animated graphics are not the educational magic bullet that many expected them to be. They are neither necessarily superior to static graphics nor intrinsically effective in their own right. The Animation Composition Principle characterizes learning from animation as a hierarchical relation-building process by which mental models of the depicted subject matter are progressively and cumulatively constructed from discrete information primitives. It helps explain the limited success of previous attempts to improve animation’s effectiveness that took no account of their fundamental design. By giving due consideration to both perceptual and cognitive aspects of animation processing, the Animation Processing Model that embodies this Principle opens the door to novel, more effective compositional design options. These compositional animations significantly improve learning outcomes.

There has been an explosion in the uses of multimedia and their various platforms. The proliferation of different types of technology inclusion in education has become even greater due to the increased need for remote platforms for education globally. My focus in this paper is on providing a definition of multimedia learning with simulations. There are many types of simulations and this chapter presents a framework for understanding this diversity. In particular, I discuss the multimedia principles that inform the design of simulations along with research evidence of how simulations support learning. Future directions for this research are discussed.

Over a span of a millennium or more, Maya scribes and sculptors in the Maya lowlands used a writing system notable for its formal complexity and close links to imagery. At times, in so-called full-figure writing, glyphic elaboration erupts into a welter of massed bodies, imparting a misleading impression of narrative pictures. Wit and fun seem to abound, along with hints of an exuberant, scribal personality behind certain inscriptions. The stress on physicality ‒ things with interiors, exteriors, and defining edges in between ‒ is thoroughgoing. Efficiencies of graphic presentation lead logically to a design choice, whether to show a full thing-in-the-world, or to abbreviate that display by exhibiting a recognizable feature. As a deliberate category error ‒ is it picture, is it text? ‒ full-figure signs heighten the pleasure of being puzzled. They build in part on the cognitive frissons of the Stroop Effect, in which one set of information collides with another. The pictorial interaction of such signs ranges along one of two extremes: sociable contact that is decorous, restrained, respectful, and an indecorous, emotive striving that might lead to uncertain outcomes. In the most extreme cases, Maya writing oscillates between controllability and a bare containment of feral will in the glyphs.

Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un chien andalou (1929) and L’âge d’or (1930) are often considered to be both the beginning and the end of surrealist cinema. But such hasty contentions obscure a rich tradition of surrealist filmmaking. This chapter discusses the defining characteristics of Buñuel and Dalí’s pioneering films, before proceeding to demonstrate that while the broader surrealist film tradition is notably indebted to these early experiments, it is also marked by an astounding heterogeneity. Surrealist filmmakers in France, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia have employed a range of formats, including documentary, feature film, and animation, from the 1930s up to the present. Providing an overview of surrealist film in a wider context, the chapter looks at how Michel Zimbacca’s documentary films interrogate notions of Western supremacy, Nelly Kaplan’s feature films depict anarchic revolts against patriarchy, and Jan Švankmajer’s films use animation to give life to inert matter in inventive ways.

This chapter is centered upon the section of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” that Kant calls the “key” to the critique of taste and in which he elaborates the judgment of taste in terms that are striking yet scant, familiar yet elusive: a “state of mind” of “free play” of the cognitive powers, in which they are in “harmony” or “attunement” and are mutually “animated,” and in which their “subjective relation” corresponds to a “subjective condition” of cognition. I propose that a key to Kant’s thought is to be found in the notion of “universal communicability,” which this section introduces. The sense of “communication” on which it depends is, I argue, to be understood robustly, as having to do with the imparting of something to someone. I then argue that the judgment of taste turns on an experience of wanting to render communicable, or explore and articulate, one’s encounter with the extra-factual aesthetic character of the object. My interpretation reorients the role and significance of pleasure, and of feeling more generally, in the judgment of taste. The pleasure of the judgment of taste is in the object and in one’s state of mind, which the object is felt to awaken.

This introductory chapter motivates and sketches the book’s approach. The chapter identifies the heart of the problem that the judgment of taste poses in terms of its apparent presumptuousness in demanding pleasure. Many scholars read Kant’s Critique of Judgment as adumbrating an account of the aesthetic that has little connection with our actual aesthetic experiences or with our ways of explaining and supporting aesthetic judgments. Among art historians, critics, and theorists, Kant is regarded as the source of a distorting notion of the aesthetic that chooses affect or pleasure over meaning. For example, Kantian aesthetics is widely taken to entail a specific approach to art criticism, viz. a narrow formalism. My interpretation aims to show that the judgment of taste is a contentful engagement with an object the terms of which are not specifiable in advance. To enter a judgment of taste is to expose one’s sense of what matters. This is why a risk of presumptuousness is characteristic of the judgment of taste. It is also why the judgment of taste is exemplary of judgment generally