The Computer-Animated Film

'Holliday persuasively argues that contemporary computer animation feature films constitute a genre in their own right. Re-positioning genre through fresh configurations of how computer animated films relate to each other, he analyses their ideologically charged formal and technical characteristics, successfully revealing new systems of textual properties and affordances. Insisting that the very "animatedness" of computer animation invokes a revision of the traditional cartoon, conventional film tropes and digital moving images, Holliday properly traces the influence of animation in the re-invention of mainstream movies per se.'

Paul Wells, Animation Academy, Loughborough University



Widely credited for the revival of feature-length animated filmmaking within contemporary Hollywood, computer-animated films are today produced within a variety of national contexts and traditions. The Computer-Animated Film covers thirty years of computer-animated film history, and analyses over two hundred different examples, persuasively arguing that this body of work constitutes a unique genre of mainstream cinema.



Informed by wider technological discourses and the status of animation as an industrial art form, the book not only theorises computer-animated films through their formal properties, but also connects elements of film style to animation practice and the computer-animated film's unique production contexts.



Christopher Holliday teaches Film Studies and Liberal Arts at King's College London.





Cover image: computer models of Marlin and Dory, Finding Nemo, Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich, 2003 © Walt Disney Productions



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ISBN 978-1-4744-2788-3

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List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1: Falling with style? The Computer-Animated Film and Genre; 2: Towards a Journey Narrative syntax; 3: Notes on a Luxo world; 4: Computer-Animated Films and Anthropomorphic Subjectivity; 5: Object Transformation and the Spectacle of Scrap; 6: Pixar, Performance and Puppets; 7: Monsters, Synch: A Taxonomy of the Star Voice; 8: From Wile E. to Wall-E: Computer-Animated Film Comedy; 9. Dreamworks Animation, Metalepsis and Diegetic Deconstruction; 10: The Mannerist Game; Conclusion: Satisfying a Spirit of Adventure; Bibliography; Index