Search

This essay puts artists, historians and theorists into conversation with each other in the context of an examination of stop-motion work process. Stop-motion film-makers frequently blur the boundaries between work and play as they practise their painstakingly labour-intensive craft, and this essay considers how the work of the animator's hands is evoked (in implicit and explicit ways) in two key examples of late-twentieth-century stop-motion film. Starting with Adam Smith's metaphor of the 'invisible hand' as a figure for self-regulating tendencies within capitalism, and extending into far more critical re-examinations of the figure by C. Wright Mills, I discuss the visual culture of workplace efficiency analysis and its relationship to the history of stopmotion film. I focus in the remainder of the essay on representations of work process in Henry Selick's Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas and Peter Lord and David Sproxton's Confessions of a Foyer Girl. I argue that these films' contrasting considerations of work are enmeshed within ambivalent considerations of the political economy of cinematic production and distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with film animator Rasmus A. Sivertsen is presented. Topics of the interview include the reason behind his preference to use stop motion animation in his films given the technical progress, the financial funding for original stories, and the investment systems in Norway wherein producers are given an incentive by the government when producing a children's film.