Description: Widely credited for the revival of feature-length animated filmmaking within contemporary Hollywood, computer-animated films are today produced within a variety of national contexts and traditions. Covering thirty years of computer-animated film history, and analysing over 200 different examples, The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre persuasively argues that this body of work constitutes a unique genre of mainstream cinema. Informed by wider technological discourses and the status of animation as an industrial art form, the book not only theorises computer-animated films through their formal properties, but connects elements of film style to animation practice and the computer-animated film's unique production contexts.
Brief description: Christopher Holliday is Senior Lecturer in Liberal Arts and Visual Cultures Education at King's College London, UK, specialising in Hollywood cinema, animation history, and contemporary digital media. His research is largely concerned with digital media technologies and forms of computer animation in contemporary visual culture. He is the co-author (with Sarah Thomas) of Smart Stardom: Advanced Digital Technologies and the Replication of Celebrity (2026) and author of The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre (2018). He is also the co-editor of the anthologies Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: New Perspectives on Production, Reception, Legacy (2021) and Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres (2018).
Review Quotes: The Computer-Animated Film is ambitious in its scope and comprehensive in its coverage, which alone would make a go-to text in the still-comparatively underserved field of contemporary animation. On top of this, its intelligent critique and potentially controversial genre-based approach make it an engaging read for experienced animation scholars.'--Sam Summers "animationstudies 2.0"