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.
Foreword (Chris Landreth) Part I: Introduction 1. AnimOtion: Animating Emotions in the Digital Age (Meike Uhrig) Part II: Emotion Theory & Animated Film 2. ‘Perfect Bridge Over the Crocodiles’: Tacit Contracts, Listen Thieves, and Emotional Labour in the Animated FAGO (Paul Wells) Part III: Genres 3. Audiovisual Metaphors and Metonymies of Emotions in Animated Moving Images (Kathrin Fahlenbrach & Maike Sarah Reinerth) 4. The Butterfly Lovers: Sex, Gender, and Emotion-Based Story Prototypes (Patrick Colm Hogan) 5. Animated Documentary: Viewer Engagement, Emotion, and Performativity (Paul Ward) Part IV: Diegesis & Formal Features 6. Aesthetics and Psychology of Animated Films (Torben Grodal) 7. Creating (Artificial) Emotion in Animation Through Sound and Story (Nichola Dobson) 8. Light, Color and (E)Motion: Animated Materiality and Surfaces in Moana (Kirsten Moana Thompson) 9. Shot Scale and Viewers’ Responses to Characters in Animated Films (Katalin E. Bálint & Brendan Rooney) Part V: Young Audiences 10. How Infants Perceive Animated Films(Sermin Ildirar Kirbas & Tim J. Smith) Part VI: Excurse 11. "Portraying emotions is fundamental to animated film": An Interview with Felix Gönnert (Meike Uhrig) Part VII: Annex
Biography
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).
