Emotion in Animated Films

Description

Ranging from blockbuster movies to experimental shorts or documentaries to scientific research, computer animation shapes a great part of media communication processes today. Be it the portrayal of emotional characters in moving films or the creation of controllable emotional stimuli in scientific contexts, computer animation’s characteristic artificiality makes it ideal for various areas connected to the emotional: with the ability to move beyond the constraints of the empirical “real world,” animation allows for an immense freedom. This book looks at international film productions using animation techniques to display and/or to elicit emotions, with a special attention to the aesthetics, characters and stories of these films, and to the challenges and benefits of using computer techniques for these purposes.

Table of Contents

1. Foreword
2. Part I: Introduction 
   1. Animotion: Animating Emotions in the Digital Age
3. Part II: Emotion Theory & Animated Film 
   1. ‘Perfect Bridge Over the Crocodiles’: Tacit Contracts, Listen Thieves, and Emotional Labour in the Animated FAGO
4. Part III: Genres 
   1. Audiovisual Metaphors and Metonymies of Emotions in Animated Moving Images
   2. The Butterfly Lovers: Sex, Gender, and Emotion-Based Story Prototypes
   3. Animated Documentary: Viewer Engagement, Emotion, and Performativity
5. Part IV: Diegesis & Formal Features 
   1. Aesthetics and Psychology of Animated Films
   2. Creating (Artificial) Emotion in Animation Through Sound and Story
   3. Light, Color and (E)Motion: Animated Materiality and Surfaces in Moana
   4. Shot Scale and Viewers’ Responses to Characters in Animated Films
6. Part V: Young Audiences 
   1. How Infants Perceive Animated Films
7. Part VI: Excurse 
   1. “Portraying emotions is fundamental to animated film”: An Interview with Felix Gönnert
8. Part VII: Annex

Author Description

Meike Uhrig is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Media Studies at Tuebingen University, Germany. She worked as Visiting Researcher at the Department of Psychology at Stanford University, USA. In her dissertation project she studied the “Representation, reception and effects of emotions in film” (2014).