The Animated Bestiary

Contents

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pp. v-

Acknowledgments

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pp. vii-

Introduction: The Kong Trick

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pp. 1-25

Early in my academic career, I enjoyed an incredible naivet� and ignorance, awesome in its limits and simplistic premises. When first investigating King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, USA, 1933), for example, I sought...

1: The Bear Who Wasn’t: Bestial Ambivalence

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pp. 26-59

In Chuck Jones’s adaptation of Frank Tashlin’s children’s book The Bear That Wasn’t (Chuck Jones, USA, 1967), a bear emerges out of hibernation into a Metropolis-style factory, where he is viewed as “a silly man, who needs a shave,...

2: Of Mice and Men: What Do Animals Mean?

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pp. 60-92

The animal story has a rich tradition in art and literature. Animated film has embraced this tradition in a number of ways, both adapting narrative elements and design idioms. The animal story has proved attractive to animators and..

3: “I Don’t Care What You Say, I’m Cold”: Anthropomorphism, Practice, Narrative

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pp. 93-134

I have suggested that it is vital to see how the animal discourse functions both from the point of view of those who make animated films and those who seek to off er particular models of criticism. As I have tried to demonstrate,..

4: Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?: Performance, Philosophy, Tradition

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pp. 135-174

In a tour-de-force examination of the role of the animal in philosophic enquiry, Akira Muzuta Lippit moves seamlessly from Descartes’s view of animals as unthinking machines to Leibniz’s conception of animal as a composition of immortal, soul-like....

5: Creature Comforted: Animal Politics, Animated Memory

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pp. 175-202

As I have developed my discussion, I have sought to establish the idea of bestial ambivalence as a model by which the flux of animal discourses can be discussed within an infrastructural model of the natural cultural, stressing...

Bibliography

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pp. 203-206

Filmography

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pp. 207-209

Index

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pp. 211-223

About the Author

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pp. 225-

PAUL WELLS is the director of the Animation Academy in the School of Art and Design, Loughborough University, United Kingdom. He has published widely in the field of Animation Studies,...