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From Mickey to Moana — Disney treasures at ACMI tell the story of animation’s evolution over almost a century

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From Mickey to Moana — Disney treasures at ACMI tell the story of animation’s evolution over almost a century
Review: Disney: The Magic of Animation at ACMI.

Disney is one of the longest running animation studios in the world. As a result, the studio’s nearly 100 year legacy also provides a substantial insight into the history of the animated film.

Disney: The Magic of Animation features 500 items — original sketches, drawings, paintings, concept art and models. They have been carefully curated from the 65 million artworks at the Walt Disney Animation Research Library in Los Angeles.

The first feature exhibition at Australia’s national museum of screen culture since its major redevelopment, it showcases Disney’s legacy, and the process and artistry at work.

Moving pictures

When you first enter the exhibition space you are greeted with an array of large scale zoetropes — spinning cylinders with flickering images inside. They display the animated characters of Mickey Mouse, Pluto and Donald Duck.

These pre-cinematic animation devices provide a neat summation of the animation process, in which a quick succession of individual drawings, each one slightly different than the previous, can create a moving image. The zoetropes remind us animation has existed for many decades (if not centuries) prior to the invention of cinema.

‘They worked in shifts, night and day, to create this unique experiment in entertainment.’

Also on display are artworks from some of the studio’s earliest and most iconic animated shorts, such as Mickey Mouse’s Steamboat Willie and Plane Crazy. Equally impressive are the extensive artefacts from more than 25 feature films, ranging from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to this year’s Raya and the Last Dragon.

Walt Disney and his Mickey creation.
AAP

Australia has also played a little known but substantive role in the Disney animation story. Between 1988 and 2006 Walt Disney Animation Australia operated in Sydney, and employed hundreds of extremely talented Australian animators, artists and technicians.

They worked on dozens of animated sequels to big name Disney features, including The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride, Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World, The Little Mermaid 2: Return to the Sea, Lady and the Tramp II: Scamp’s Adventure, and Peter Pan: Return to Neverland.


Artistry on display

Exhibition curators have chosen a remarkable selection of highly dynamic animation drawings for display. Even as still images, these pencil drawings express incredible life and movement.

There are also a number of concept drawings created by American artist Mary Blair, whose designs informed Disney’s Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. She was also known for her children’s book illustrations (I Can Fly) and murals (including Disneyland’s It’s a Small World attraction). Her drawings and paintings use just a few strokes and splashes of contrasting colour to convey brilliant vibrancy and expression.

Also remarkable to behold are the series of background paintings from 1959’s Sleeping Beauty. Created by artist Eyvind Earle, the works show angular shapes and exquisite detail. Eyvind Earle’s sister, Yvonne Perrin, was also an animation background painter, who spent much of her life in Australia, working at the Eric Porter Animation Studio in Sydney and later illustrative children’s books with bush themes.

Walt Disney was a fan of Mary Blair as an artist within the studio and beyond.

Mechanical to digital

It’s not just two-dimensional art on display. Model cars made of wood and metal from the production of 101 Dalmatians provide insight into the technical aspects of making the film.

Painted black and white, the cars were moved by hand and filmed in real time, using high-contrast film-stock. The resulting footage was then enlarged and transferred, frame-by-frame onto cels and incorporated into the rest of the animated scene.

The result was fluid motion on screen and accurately depicted vehicles which, despite appearing to careen around corners and collide with each other, maintained their precise dimensions. The approach, to some degree, anticipated the use of 3D digital models that would be incorporated into the studio’s later animated films.

Disney warrior Raya
Modern Disney warrior princesses are a tougher breed than their dainty predecessors.
Raya and the Last Dragon/IMDB

Because Disney’s more recent films like Frozen and Moana were created almost entirely in the digital realm, the displays devoted to them tend to highlight concept art, rather than production materials. But it is still fascinating to see the concept artwork which guided these films through their early development. We gain a greater understanding of how the artists conveyed atmosophere, adventure and enchantment to create fantasy worlds.

As technology has evolved, so have Disney’s characters and narratives. This is notable as the exhibition reacquaints visitors with classic and dainty Disney princesses through to today’s more contemporary warriors like Moana and Raya.

Disney: The Magic of Animation celebrates each frame and component behind some of audiences’ favourite films of the last century. In doing so, the exhibition not only provides an illuminating peek into the animation process — but also gives us the opportunity to admire the artistry and complexity of what went into making every second of these works of art.

snow white
Snow White, 1937, a tempera on celluloid from the collection of political cartoonist J. Arthur Wood Jr.
AP Photo/Library of Congress

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Stanley Kubrick redefined: recent research challenges myths to reveal the man behind the legend

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Stanley Kubrick redefined: recent research challenges myths to reveal the man behind the legend


Even 25 years after his death, Stanley Kubrick remains one of the most widely known directors of the 20th century. Many of the 13 films he made – including 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971) and The Shining (1980) – are still revered today and remembered as some of the best movies ever produced.

To coincide with the anniversary of his death on March 7 1999, I have co-authored the first full-length biography of Kubrick in more than two decades. Based on the latest research into Kubrick, access to his archive at the University of Arts London, other repositories around the world, family members, cast and creatives, we have delved into his life in detail that few others have achieved.

Shy but not reclusive

During his life Kubrick was famously shy with the media, and frequently interpreted as reclusive. He granted very few interviews, and only when he had a film to publicise. He learned early on that he was not good at promoting his films personally. In the few interviews with Kubrick that survive, he comes across as nervous and ill at ease.

Kubrick was so shy and protective of his private life that few people recognised him publicly. Though born and brought up in New York, he settled in England in the 1960s and remained there. He could wander into Rymans in St Albans and buy stationery (he loved paper, pens and the like) or get a new pair of spectacles and no one would recognise him. It helped that he often used his brother-in-law’s name when doing so.

In fact, Kubrick was such an unfamiliar figure that an imposter went around London’s clubs and bars in the early 1990s pretending to be him. The imposter was only found out when Kubrick started receiving strange phone calls from spurned lovers and bars with huge unpaid drinks tabs.

Kubrick archive

His archive only opened in 2007, but it provides an insight into this extremely private director’s world as never before. Kubrick was a hoarder and held on to the miscellany and detritus of his personal and professional worlds. This included high school yearbooks, photographs he took for Look magazine, receipts, bills, invoices, as well as the voluminous amount of material a film production (especially a Kubrick production) generated.

Kubrick in 1949, working as a photographer.
Phillip Harrington / Alamy

Through studying this archival material, combined with our new interviews, we learned about the human being behind the mythology. Kubrick was a film director but he was also a son, brother, husband, father and friend.

He liked to entertain, chat, make jokes and cook. He loved making American-style fast food and huge sandwiches, often using a microwave as he was a lover of gadgets, adopting new technology as soon as it became available. This was as true of his private life (where he used car phones, pagers and computers) as his working life where he was an early adopter of Steadicam cameras and the Avid editing system.

He had a fear of flying, but it was based on his own knowledge as a trained pilot and frequent monitoring of radio traffic control. It’s not true that he never went over 30mph in a car, as has been claimed. Rather, he loved cars – fast German ones in particular – but frequently crashed them.

Kubrick at work

We uncovered much about Kubrick’s working practices too. Kubrick was a master of the insurance claim. He never hesitated to file one following an accident or fire on set. Not only did this help him to recoup his budget but it also gave him precious time to regroup and think about his options.

We also discovered how Kubrick had to beg, borrow and virtually steal to get most of his projects greenlit. It wasn’t until he signed with Warner Brothers in the 1970s – from A Clockwork Orange onwards – that he had a permanent financial backer. But even then he wasn’t guaranteed funding if the project wasn’t right.

A black and white close up of Stanley Kubrick's face.
Kubrick was famously shy in public.
Mayimbú/Wikimedia

And those projects included the famously never made biopic of Napoleon as the time wasn’t right, or his never-to-be-made Holocaust film, Aryan Papers, which lacked a big star and came too close on the heels of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.




Read more:
2001: A Space Odyssey still leaves an indelible mark on our culture 55 years on


It is also tempting to wonder what would have happened had he made the film Burning Secret in 1956, with MGM studios, with whom he had signed a contract. Would he have become another studio stooge or been fired for being too much of a maverick? What would have been the implications for his career?

While we can only imagine how those projects would have turned out, what remains is an extraordinary body of work that includes thousands of photographs, three documentaries and 13 feature films. Stanley Kubrick may have shunned the limelight, but his films have had a profound influence on the movie and television industries, as well as a lasting impact on popular and political culture.



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How non-English language cinema is reshaping the Oscars landscape

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How non-English language cinema is reshaping the Oscars landscape


Over the past few years, the Oscars have taken a decidedly international turn.

This year, of the 10 films nominated for an Academy Award for best picture, three of them – “Anatomy of a Fall,” “Past Lives” and “The Zone of Interest” – are non-English language films.

In the first two decades of the Academy Awards, only three foreign films – all European – earned Oscar nominations: the 1938 French film “La Grande Illusion,” which was nominated for best picture, or outstanding production, as it was then known; the 1944 Swiss film “Marie Louise,” which was the first foreign film to win an Academy Award, for best screenplay; and the 1932 French film “À nous la liberté,” nominated for best production design.

As a scholar of film history, I see the recent recognition of non-English language films as the result of demographic changes in the industry and within the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences itself.

Hollywood’s dominance wanes

During World War II, Hollywood experienced record financial success, with one-third of its revenue coming from foreign markets – mainly the United Kingdom and Latin America. The industry leveraged the appeal of American movies to employ them as cultural ambassadors to promote democratic ideals. Notably, a popular film like “Casablanca” not only entertained audiences but also served as potent anti-fascist propaganda.

After the war, co-productions and distribution agreements with foreign studios opened new markets, boosting Hollywood’s economic influence and reinforcing English language cinema’s global dominance.

However, by the late 1940s, Hollywood experienced some challenges: Studios lost an anti-trust case that challenged their monopoly over producing, distributing and exhibiting films, while television threatened to siphon away theatergoers. With studios undergoing major budget and production cuts, a 1949 Fortune magazine article posed the question “Movies: The End of an Era?

During that same period, art film movements in nations such as Sweden, France, Italy and Japan arose to contest Hollywood’s dominance, breathing new life into the cinematic arts.

These works contrasted sharply with Hollywood films, many of which had become formulaic by the 1950s and were constrained by an outdated censorship code.

A category of their own

Between 1947 and 1956, foreign films received honorary Oscars, with France and Italy dominating the accolades. In 1956, the category of “best foreign language film” was officially established as an annual recognition, marking a pivotal moment in Oscars history.

However, any film nominated in that category is also eligible to be nominated in the broader best picture category. The only stipulation is that it needs to have had a theatrical run in a Los Angeles County commercial movie theater for at least seven consecutive days.

Italian director Federico Fellini’s ‘La Strada’ won the first Academy Award for best foreign language film in 1957.
Louis Goldman/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Until this year, only 10 foreign films have garnered this dual nomination.

In 2020, the South Korean film “Parasite” became the first non-English language film to win both best international feature film – formerly known as best foreign language film – and best picture. Director Bong Joon-Ho also won the award for best director that year. Accompanied by an interpreter, he gave his acceptance speech in Korean.

During the 2019 Oscars, Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón – introduced in Spanish by actor Javier Bardem – accepted the Academy Award for what was then still called best foreign language film for his film “Roma.” During his speech, he joked that he had grown up “watching foreign language films and learning so much from them. … Films like ‘Citizen Kane,’ ‘Jaws,’ ‘Rashomon,’ ‘The Godfather’ and ‘Breathless.’”

Breathing new life into film

Cuarón’s comments wryly question why English is considered the default language of a global industry. They also highlight how the categories of “Hollywood film” and “foreign film” aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.

As in the past, many of the filmmakers pushing the boundaries of the medium are from outside the U.S. This isn’t due to a lack of talent within the U.S.; instead, it’s largely due to a lack of institutional funding for independent productions.

On the other hand, in countries such as France, Germany, Canada, South Korea and Iran, there are state-sponsored programs to support filmmakers. These programs, which aim to promote national cultural expression, allow for more experimentation.

In recent decades, the cinematic landscape has been revitalized by movements from abroad, such as Denmark’s Dogma 95 collective, South Korea’s IMF noir genre and Greek Weird Wave films. Filmmakers associated with these movements often transition to making English language cinema.

Take Yorgos Lanthimos, director of the Best Picture nominee “Poor Things.” Lanthimos first gained recognition for his contributions to the Greek Weird Wave, a cinematic movement that uses absurdist humor to critique societal norms and power structures. It emerged during the country’s economic crisis in the 2010s.

Similarly, “Parasite” director Bong Joon-ho, known for his earlier Korean language films, is emblematic of the IMF noir movement, which explored the profound repercussions of the late 1990s financial crisis in South Korea that was caused by policies dictated by the International Monetary Fund.

Balding middle-aged man with beard and red jacket.
Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos.
Vivien Killilea/Getty Images

The nomination process

As Michael Schulman, author of “Oscar Wars,” argues, viewing the Academy Awards as a “pure barometer of artistic merit or worth” is a mistake.

Numerous factors, including the aggressiveness of Oscar campaign strategists and publicists working around the clock, as well as the composition of the awards committee, exert great influence over the outcome.

In the case of foreign films, the process is twofold. To secure an Oscar nomination as a country’s entry, a foreign film must first gain approval from a committee in its native country. It is then submitted to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and subjected to a vote by the academy. Only one entry is allowed per country.

The intricate dynamics of this process are illustrated by the case of the French film “Anatomy of a Fall,” which was nominated for a best picture Academy Award but not best international feature from France. This decision was influenced by France’s small national nominating committee, which, disconnected from the current climate of the U.S. academy, favored the nostalgic, culinary romance “The Taste of Things,” starring Juliette Binoche.

A more diverse academy

The role of the voting committee in determining which films even reach consideration cannot be overstated. Over the last few years, this is what has most radically changed in the academy. In 2012, its composition was 94% white, 77% male and had a median age of 62.

As highlighted by Schulman, the #Oscarssowhite controversy in 2015 spurred changes to the academy’s makeup, in the hopes of addressing the industry’s under-recognition of the achievements of people of color.

There was also a concerted effort to enhance geographical diversity and infuse the awards with a more global perspective. In 2016, the new invitees to the academy were more diverse: 46% were female, 41% were nonwhite, and they came from 59 different countries. This year, a groundbreaking 93 countries submitted nomination ballots, signifying unprecedented global participation in the Oscars.

Perhaps most significantly, beginning in 2024, the academy has required that, for a film to qualify for a Best Picture nomination, it must meet two out of four standards established by the academy.

The criteria include having at least one lead or significant supporting actor from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group, or centering the main storyline on an underrepresented group. They also require representation in creative leadership positions and crew roles, along with paid apprenticeships for underrepresented groups. Even senior marketing teams require representation. All of these requirements lend themselves to the inclusion of more international film nominees.

Streaming distribution has also democratized access to non-English language cinema, which was previously limited only to niche audiences in art house theaters in large cities.

The distribution company Neon, established in 2017, has been another crucial factor in reshaping the Oscars landscape. Led by Elissa Federoff, Neon is committed to breaking industry barriers, diversifying content, transcending language barriers and engaging with younger audiences through platforms like YouTube and TikTok. Neon distributed both “Parasite” and “Anatomy of a Fall.”

As the Oscars evolve into a more globally conscious platform, the future of film seems destined to be shaped by those who think beyond the limitations of what was once considered “foreign,” and remain advocates for the universal language of the cinema.



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The Russia-Ukraine War has caused a staggering amount of cultural destruction – both seen and unseen

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The Russia-Ukraine War has caused a staggering amount of cultural destruction – both seen and unseen


War doesn’t just destroy lives. It also tears at the fabric of culture.

And in the case of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, now about to enter its third year, the remarkable destruction of Ukrainian history and heritage since 2022 hasn’t been a matter of collateral damage. Rather, the Russian military has deliberately targeted museums, churches and libraries that are important to the Ukrainian people.

It’s impossible to document the full extent of the destruction, particularly in the active military zones in eastern and southern Ukraine. However, as archaeologists and filmmakers, we wanted to do what we could. This meant traveling to liberated villages, museums and churches in northern and eastern Ukraine adjacent to regions with ongoing fighting.

Working closely with Ukrainian colleagues, we ended up making two nine-day trips – one in March 2023 and another in October 2023.

Here is some of what we found:

Sifting through the ruins

In liberated parts of Ukraine, the bodies of the dead have long been carried away and, for the most part, buried in local cemeteries. But enter any formerly occupied city or town, and you’ll immediately notice that the scars from battles that took place from March 2022 to July 2022 remain starkly visible.

Driving around Chernihiv, a city in northern Ukraine, we witnessed hundreds of burned-out buildings, and many more that are riddled with bullet holes and damaged by shrapnel.

As we wound through small farming villages, we were struck by the ferocity and randomness of modern military firepower: One part of a village could be completely flattened, while a block down the road, the houses were untouched.

The Ukraine Hotel in Chernihiv, pictured in March 2023 after it had been bombed.
Ian Kuijt, CC BY-SA

During a wet day in the middle of October 2023, we drove through small tree-lined roads to see the remains of the Church of the Ascension in Lukashivka, a small village about 8 miles from Chernihiv.

Previously home to about 300 people, Lukashivka was occupied by the Russians in March 2022 and later recaptured by the Ukrainian military.

Built in 1913 with a two-tiered belfry that can be seen for miles, this large white-brick church is now a shell of what it once was: Its wood flooring has been scorched and its brick roof blown open. In a few sections of the wall, the original plaster and paintings are still preserved.

Inside the place of worship, we traversed the detritus of war, hearing the crunch of spent cartridges, rocket cases, broken bottles and heaps of burned cans.

Woman rides a bike on a wet, cloudy day, past a damaged white church with gold dome.
The Church of the Ascension in Lukashivka, a small village near the city of Chernihiv, in October 2023.
Ian Kuijt, CC BY-SA

We’ll never really know how many soldiers and civilians died fighting over Lukashivka and the church.

We do know, however, that cultural heritage has few friends during war.

The partially preserved church at Lukashivka is one of hundreds of cultural and religious buildings that have been damaged or destroyed over the last two years. This includes the Cathedral of the Transfiguration in Odesa, the Mariupol Drama Theater and the Korolenko Kharkiv State Scientific Library, one of the largest libraries in Europe.

The authors explore the Church of the Ascension in Lukashivka, where intense fighting had taken place.

More than meets the eye

If traveling in Ukraine has taught us one important lesson, it’s that the digging of trenches can erase history.

While the destruction of churches, libraries and museums viscerally evokes a sense of loss, there’s an entire unseen world below the ground surface – filled with untold numbers of artifacts, bones and buried buildings – that are exposed when trenches are created.

In fact, it’s likely that this war has destroyed more history and archaeology buried below the ground than above it.

As armies did during World War I, the Ukrainian military built deep trenches and bunkers along rivers and high ground in the early months of the war. Two years later, these defensive trench systems are a central element of the ground war and demarcate the front lines.

In many cases, the trenches were dug into the remains of buried archaeology sites, most of which were previously unknown and untouched.

A man in military fatigues peers over the top of a muddy trench.
A Ukrainian officer steps out of a trench network near the city of Kupiansk in eastern Ukraine.
Scott Peterson/Getty Images

In March 2023, for example, we visited sites around Iripin and Bucha, two villages on the northern edge of Kyiv, to document how medieval and Bronze age sites buried below the surface had been destroyed by trenches or, in other cases, were now blanketed by minefields to stop Russian military units.

We also went to the 11th century archaeology site of Oster. Perched on a small hill southeast of Chernihiv, Oster was an important regional center in the medieval period. It had a brick-and-stone church and a large settlement nearby. As part of the siege of Chernihiv in March 2022, Ukrainian troops built deep trenches and bunkers around the edges of Oster, since the site overlooks rivers and crossing points.

When we visited Oster a year after the invasion, we noticed that the trench system around the church was dug into a large, 11th century settlement and burial ground. Laying exposed on the dirt piles along the trenches we found medieval human skeletal remains. The more we studied the system of trenches and bunkers, which encircles an area of about 650 feet (198 meters), the more human bones we saw.

A crew of archaeologists has returned to photograph the destruction of these burial grounds. But given the ongoing war, it isn’t possible to fully document the destruction, let alone fill in the trenches, which still may be needed by soldiers.

The previously unknown burial ground at Oster is one of hundreds, if not thousands, of similar sites that have been damaged or destroyed in central and northeastern Ukraine.

The authors explore a system of trenches that had been built at Oster, an important medieval archaeological site.

War and the fabric of culture

Even after the fighting ends, large areas of Ukraine will remain inaccessible for years, given the widespread use of mines and environmental contaminants.

Surviving collections and museum exhibits inside and outside of Ukraine have assumed greater importance: They may represent the sole evidence of ancient cultures originating from these damaged territories.

We can confidently say that Europe has not experienced destruction of this magnitude, let alone this quickly, since World War II.

The bombings of churches, libraries and residences have destroyed major areas of Ukraine. As with the Nazis’ pilfering of paintings, bronze sculptures and art in the last few years of World War II, in the first months after the invasion the Russian army looted museums, stole art and destroyed churches with missiles and tank shells.

Make no mistake: At its core, the Russian full-scale invasion is a military attempt to erase Ukraine’s history, culture and heritage.

Seemingly entrenched in a 1950s geopolitical framework, President Vladimir Putin and other representatives of the Russian state dispute that Ukraine is a sovereign nation. Ukraine’s churches, museums and libraries are a threat to Russia, for they are the material and symbolic fabric that holds together Ukrainian identity and resistance.

That’s why this war is as much about culture as it is about land.

A man looks through rubble near a destroyed pink building.
A children’s library destroyed by a missile attack in the city of Chernihiv.
Viacheslav Skorokhod, CC BY-SA



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