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In TASCHEN's first volume of one of the most expansive illustrated publications on Disney animation, 1,500 images take us to the beating heart of the studio's "Golden Age of Animation." Derived from the XXL book, this new edition again includes behind-the-scenes photos, story sketches, and cel setups of famous film scenes. It spans each of the...
This book analyzes Walt Disney’s impact on entertainment, new media, and consumer culture in terms of a materialist, psychoanalytic approach to fantasy. The study opens with a taxonomy of narrative fantasy along with a discussion of fantasy as a key concept within psychoanalytic discourse. Zornado reads Disney’s full-length animated features of the “golden era” as symbolic responses to cultural and personal catastrophe, and presents Disneyland as a monument to Disney fantasy and one man’s singular, perverse desire. What follows after is a discussion of the “second golden age” of Disney and the rise of Pixar Animation as neoliberal nostalgia in crisis. The study ends with a reading of George Lucas as latter-day Disney and Star Wars as Disney fantasy. This study should appeal to film and media studies college undergraduates, graduates students and scholars interested in Disney.
One of the most expansive illustrated publications on Disney animation, finally available in a compact edition. The landmark volume includes behind-the-scenes photos, story sketches, and cel setups of famous film scenes. It covers each of the major animated features made during Walt's lifetime, as well as lesser-known short films and episodic...
Volume XXIX of Studies in Contemporary Jewry provides a nuanced account of the history and development of Jewish humor, while also making a case for the importance of humor in studying any culture.
This work demonstrates that not everything that Disney touched turned to gold. In its first 100 years, the company had major successes that transformed filmmaking and culture, but it also had its share of unfinished projects, unmet expectations, and box-office misses. Some works failed but nevertheless led to other more stunning and lucrative ones; others shed light on periods when the Disney Company was struggling to establish or re-establish its brand. In addition, many Disney properties, popular in their time but lost to modern audiences, emerge as forgotten gems. By exploring the studio's missteps, this book provides a more complex portrayal of the history of the company than one would gain from a simple recounting of its many hits. With essays by writers from across the globe, it also asserts that what endures or is forgotten varies from person to person, place to place, or generation to generation. What one dismisses, someone else recalls with deep fondness as a magical Disney memory.
From its beginnings, Disneyland was destined to be something entirely different from the standard mid-century amusement park. To sell his dream park to investors and the public, Walt Disney recruited Hollywood art directors and sketch artists to design the grounds around the mythic settings and high-minded ideals commonly expressed on the silver screen. This book focuses on the initial planning of Disneyland and its first year of operation, a time when Walt personally oversaw every detail of the park's development. Divided into chapters by park zone, it reveals how the five sectors were constructed using illusionistic tricks of stage design. Reaching beyond structure and design, chapters also explore how the sectors--Main Street, U.S.A., Frontierland, Tomorrowland, Adventureland and Fantasyland--represented themes found in Disney stories, familiar movie genres and American culture at large.
The essays in this volume examine the parameters shaping the audiovisual self in the Germanophone cultural context across a variety of practices and aesthetic modes, from contemporary artists including Hito Steyerl, Ming Wong, and kate hers to Rolf Dieter Brinkmann's multimedia experiments of the 1970s, and from Helke Misselwitz's challenges to the documentary tradition in the GDR to Peter Liechti's investigations of Swiss ambivalence toward the nation's iconic landscape. The volume thus takes up a number of historically and geographically specific iterations of autobiographical discourse that in each case remain contingent on the space and time in which they are uttered.
What do dogs mean in America? How do Americans make meaning through their dogs? The United States has long expressed its cultural unconscious through canine iconography. Through our dogs, we figure out what we're thinking and who we are, representing by proxy the things that we don't quite want to recognize in ourselves. Often, it's a specific breed or type of dog that serves as an informal cultural mascot, embodying an era's needs, fears, desires, longings, aspirations, repressions, and hopeless contradictions. Combining cultural studies with personal narrative, this book creates a playful, speculative reading of American culture through its canine self-representations. Looking at seven different breeds or types over the last seven decades, readers will go on an intellectual dog walk through some of the mazes of American cultural mythology.
Gender, Agency and Violence: European Perspectives from Early Modern Times to the Present Day centres on literary, cinematic and artistic male and female perpetrators of violence and their discourses. This volume takes an interdisciplinary and cross-European approach – covering French, German, English and Italian case-studies from the sixteenth to the twentieth century and allowing for the exploration of recurrent themes. The contributions also facilitate an insight into how the arts and media respond to historical turning points which, time and again, challenge the link between gender, agency and violence for individuals and society alike.
Among their many idiosyncrasies, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, remained serious cartoon aficionados throughout their lives. They adored animation and their influence on German animation after World War II continues to this day. This study explores Hitler and Goebbels' efforts to establish a German cartoon industry to rival Walt Disney's and their love-hate relationship with American producers, whose films they studied behind locked doors. Despite their ambitious dream, all that remains of their efforts are a few cartoon shorts--advertising and puppet films starring dogs, cats, birds, hedgehogs, insects, Teutonic dwarves, and other fairy-tale ensemble. While these pieces do not hold much propaganda value, they perfectly illustrate Hannah Arendt's controversial description of those who perpetrated the Holocaust: the banality of evil.