Aardman Animations: Beyond Stop-motion

✍ Scribed by Annabelle Honess Roe

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 329
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Aardman is a Bristol-based animation company known for its quintessentially British aesthetic and tone. Yet it continues to thrive internationally, its recent feature Shaun the Sheep Movie made $19 million at the US box office, Flushed Away made $64 million and the latest Wallace and Gromit film Curse of the Were-Rabbit made $56 million stateside. To some extent inextricable from one of its key animators, Nick Park, it made its mark in stop-motion, Plasticine-modelled family films and has more recently begun to experiment with modern digital filmmaking effects that either emulate ‘Claymation’ methods or form a hybrid animation style.
This unique volume brings together leading scholars from film studies and animation studies and children’s media/animation professionals to explore the production practices behind Aardman's creativity, the key personalities who have formed its ethos, its representations of ‘British-ness’ on screen and the implications of traditional animation methods in a digital era.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover page
Halftitle page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
Series Editors’ Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction Wonder Woman and the Body in Popular Culture
Beginnings
William Moulton Marston, Harry G. Peter and the Comic Book Industry
After Marston
The Superhero Body and the Superheroine Narrative Trajectory
Ethnicity and Queer Bodies: Amazons
Career Woman/Trickster: Diana Prince
Writing about Wonder Woman: The Marston Effect
Somatic Theory
Plan of the Book
1 Beautiful White Bodies Gender, Ethnicity and the Showgirl Body in the Second World War
Gender and Ethnicity in Second World War Propaganda: Pure/Impure, Health/Disease
Women and the War Effort
Ethnicity, Beauty and the Showgirl Body
Race, Gender and Pollution in Wonder Woman
Love in Chains: Bondage, Discipline and Submission
Loving Domination and Submission in Institutions
Conclusions
2 ‘Here Be Monsters’ The Mutating, Splitting and Familial Body of the Cold War
Culture, Comics and the Cold War
The Impossible Family and the Menace of Multiple Man
Monstrous Bodies
Conclusions
3 The New Diana Prince! Makeovers, Movement and the Fab/ricated Body, 1968–72
The Fashionable Body and the Superhero
Counterculture, Fandom and the Comics Industry, 1968–74
Modernizing Diana Prince
Pop Aesthetics, Female Spies and Consumerism
Feminism, Costume and the Active Female Body
Makeovers, Space and Female Agency
The Uncontrolled Body and Uncontrolled Mind of Doctor Cyber
After Diana Prince: The Pre-Fab Feminist Body
4 The Goddess, the Iron Maiden and the Sacralization of Consumerism
Capitalism, Feminism and the Politics of Health
The Sacred, the Profane and the Mundane
Marketing the Sacred: The Goddess and the Iron Maiden
Consuming/Consumed by the Sacred
Myndi Mayer and Lucy Spear
Conclusions
5 Taming the Unruly Woman Surveillance, Truth and the Mass Media Post-9/11
Post 9/11: Comics, Politics and American Culture
The Fatale Gaze: The Banality of Images and Captivated Audiences
Manipulation, New Ways of Looking and the Judgemental Gaze
6 Whose Story Is It Anyway? Revisiting the Family in the DC Extended Universe
The DCEU
The New 52 Wonder Woman : Dysfunctional Families, Absent Fathers and Negligent Mothers
The Dying/Reviving God and the Messiah in The New 52 and Rebirth
7 The Once and Future Princess Nostalgia, Diversity and the Intersectional Heroine
Nostalgia as a Promotional Tool in the DCEU
The Future Princess
Ethnic, Racial and Gender Issues in Early Twenty-First Century America
Race and Ethnicity
Gender
Appendix: Main Story Arcs and Body Themes in Comics
Notes
Bibliography
Index