Lisa Bode

Avatar, “e-motion capture”, and the shifting industry rhetoric around performance/animation hybrids

Abstract: Looking at the chatter surrounding James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) and Beowulf (Zemeckis, 2008) among other films, this paper examines how and why industry rhetoric framing hybrid screen characters has shifted from discussing the labour of animators and VFX technicians to emphasising the labour of actors, and the discursive reassertion of the index.

Biographical statement: Lisa Bode is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her research is primarily concerned with the shifting discursive and ontological relationships between animation and screen acting in CGI heavy cinema, and their impact on film meaning, affect and reception. She has published articles in Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and Cinema Journal (forthcoming).

Pierre Floquet

Actors in Sin City’s Animated Fantasy: Avatars, Aliens, or Cinematic Dead-ends ?

Abstract: With reference to selected animated features and shorts from the past sixty years, and focusing mainly on Frank Miller’s graphic novel related film, this paper is questioning the ever-growing impact of animation techniques on representation and story-telling. The emphasis is laid on the interaction between live actors, their personae, their fictional existence, their digital parts, and the animated environment they are immersed into. To some extent, Miller reinvents the cinema of the origin; or does he barely pay homage to it in some original yet doomed aesthetic option?


Biographical statement: Pierre FLOQUET teaches English, and is associate professor at IPB, Bordeaux University. He wrote his PhD thesis in 1996 on linguistics applied to cinema, focusing on Tex Avery's comic language. Since then, he has organized several Avery retrospectives and conferences, and been a juror at festivals. He has widened his interests to live-action cinema, participating in books and journals both in France and abroad. He edited CinémAnimationS (2007), and published Le Langage comique de Tex Avery in 2009. This paper continues research on characters in animation (two related publications so far), to be developed in a focus on Burton’s animated female characters.

Rebecca Miller Asherie

Heavenly Voices and Bestial Bodies: Issues of Performance and Representation in Celebrity Voice-Acting

Abstract: The popularization of celebrity voice-acting over the past two decades marks the intersection of two prominent figures in contemporary American culture, namely the celebrity and the animated animal. This paper reflects upon the performative and representational implications of celebrity voice-acting and explores how this phenomenon allows celebrities and their animated animal counterparts to engage in a symbiotic relationship which liberates the star from the constant scrutiny of extra-textual media representations of his or her body while simultaneously endowing the animated animal with an authoritative and politically-viable vocal endorsement.

Biographical statement: Rebecca Miller Asherie is a doctoral candidate in the Cinema Studies department at New York University. She holds an M.A. in Cinema Studies from NYU and a B.A. in Linguistics and Italian from McGill University in Montreal. She is currently conducting research for a dissertation on the cultural history of the figure of the animated animal in American cinema, including issues of aesthetics, performance and representation of animals since the inception of animated film.