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Filip Stojanovski
Contemporary Storytelling: Comics and Animation
Foreword
The goal of this paper is to provide information that
would contribute to the understanding of three related art forms, and
their resulting influence in society. The wide usage of these art forms
in communication mediums makes the receivers take them for granted:
their presence and effects often pass unnoticed. The art forms in
question are comics, animated cartoons and interactive applications.
They all share common historical roots, usage of storytelling
techniques, as well as conceptual similarities in the process of
production.
I have been interested in visual arts since
childhood, especially in drawing. While in primary school, I wanted to
be a comic book artist. At the time, I maintained a fairly large
collection of diverse comics, which were almost all in Serbian or
Croatian, the most widely used languages in former Yugoslavia. Although
foreign artists--from Italy, France, or the USA--made most of these
comics, there were several successful local artists who proved that you
could make a living from it without moving to the West. Ex-Yugoslavia
also had two, internationally acclaimed, "schools" of
animation: Zagreb and Skopje. Good domestic animations were shown on TV
side by side with cartoons from the USA and USSR. The country was
socialist, but non-aligned, not a part of either of the two sides in the
Cold War. There were cultural imports from both sides of the Iron
Curtain.
The break and the severe economic recession that
struck the Yugoslav federation in the nineties brought the publishing,
and especially the comics publishing, to a standstill. A whole new
generation of kids--potential readers--enclosed behind the new borders
and saturated with politics, grew up in an environment where the TV news
replaced cartoons, sleazy tabloids replaced comics, and low-quality
music replaced almost all other forms of entertainment. Naturally, I
wasn’t quite pleased with this development.
I was glad when I recognized some elements of comics
and animation returning with the advent of digital technology: computer
graphics, games and Internet. And I am hopeful that, if economic and
political situation improve, there will be a revival of storytelling in
these areas, storytelling based on imagination and humanness, not on
party propaganda and intolerance.
"Omnia mutatur, nihil interit" - everything
changes, but nothing is truly lost (Saiman & Muth, 1996, p.22). This
is where I come from, and here is the story…
Contents
| Foreword |
Glossary |
Works Cited
Comics: Bits of History |
Modern Age |
Great Adventurers |
Vocabulary
| Grammar: Closure
Animation: Origins |
An Early Animator |
Classical Animation |
Making an Animation
| Epilogue
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