From Comics to Animation: The Enchanted Life Of The Moving Image

How does an image come to life? From story to page to screen, we will explore the development of the moving image in its most basic form. We will begin with early experiments in the visual depiction of movement and then explore developments in motion photography, early cinema and eventually animation. With stories ranging from Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio and Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy to Lotte Reiniger’s Adventures of Prince Achmed and Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie, we will chart fantasies of images that come to life. In the second half of our course, we will focus on contemporary case studies (Julie Maroh’s Blue is the Warmest Color and Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) to think critically about the nature of comics, film adaptation and the move between page and screen.

Our goal is to gain critical insight on the poetic possibilities enabled by translation across media as well as the entangled relationship between comics form and cinema. In addition to practicing methods of detailed visual analysis, each weekly assignment is geared to develop writing, drawing and presentation skills. The course aims to heighten sensitivity to visual and formal characteristics of texts and to develop skills for sustained textual analysis.

Attending to questions of translation, adaptation and visual form, each student will learn to engage visual culture in writing and response. The two larger assignments cultivate skills for research, argument and analysis of the sort expected at the advanced undergraduate level. And the weekly assignments are designed to help break down the analytic process into constituent parts: visual evidence, historical and formal claims, and argumentative structure. As is the case in all Comparative Literature classes, the readings span languages and national traditions (in this case, Italian, French, German and Japanese), and students are encouraged to read texts in the original when possible.

Satisfies General Education Requirements:

• Group-Satisfying: Arts and Letters
• Multicultural Courses: International Cultures (IC)