In the spring of 1964, just before the opening of the Olympic Games in Tokyo, the French government made the exceptional decision to loan the Venus de Milo to Japan. Some 1,750,000 people were able to admire the famous statue in Tokyo and Kyoto, many of them only after waiting in line for hours. At the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, where it was displayed from May 21 until June 25, the average number of visitors reached 24,700 per day, a figure comparable to the daily number of admissions at the Louvre Museum. Only the Tutankhamun exhibition presented the following year, again in Tokyo and Kyoto, attracted larger crowds.1 What are we to make of the attraction that the Greco-Roman patrimony has exerted not only in Japan, but also, more recently, in Korea, China, and Singapore? From a European point of view, there is a great risk in seeing this interest as an homage to Western civilization, indeed as a recognition of its superiority. A kind of condescending self-satisfaction creeps in: “They admire us. That’s perfectly normal, of course. But don’t they see that they demean themselves by behaving in this manner? And all the more since they cannot understand.

So much patience for so little gain ... ” The embarrassment that is felt in the West at how much trouble other nations have gone to to appreciate the culture of antiquity is associated with a paradoxical sentiment, namely, that Greece is the place where the human mind achieved its fundamental liberty, but that this place belongs to “us.” The freedom that was first discovered in Greece points toward autonomy, but it is under copyright – as though the people of the West were to say, “Feel free to feel free, but don’t forget to pay the fees you owe us!”

This chapter focuses on the aesthetic appeal of inanimate nature, plants, and animals. Hegel’s ontological privileging of living beings, and especially of animal bodies, comes hand in hand with their aesthetic privileging, and so particular focus is given to the beauty of animateness, and especially to that of animal bodies. It is argued that, while most appearances of animal life serve to disclose their finitude, and so their ontological dependency, there are striking moments in which their remarkable animateness stands out as such. And given that Hegel gives us good reason to think of life, in its ontology, as an essentially infinite and autonomous movement, this conspicuousness of animation provides us with an ephemeral glimpse of a more profound beauty. As the various dimensions of animation and its ways of appearing are explored in some detail, the chapter comes to argue, somewhat counter to Hegel though for Hegelian reasons, that it is particularly in animal movement – as opposed to the more static shape of the animal body, which is largely Hegel’s focus – that the full splendor of animateness is revealed.

The chapter addresses: What Is a Motion Picture?; What Is an Instructional Video?; What Is the Role of Instructional Video in Education and Training?; Are Instructional Videos Effective? And How Can We Design Effective Instructional Videos?

The chapter addresses: 1. Overview of the Pretraining Principle. 2. Theoretical Rationale for the Pretraining Principle. 3. Empirical Rationale for the Pretraining Principle. 4. Boundary Conditions for the Pretraining Principle. 5. Applications of the Pretraining Principle

The chapter addresses: 1. What Is a Motion Picture? 2. What Is an Instructional Video? 3. What Is the Role of Instructional Video in Education and Training? 4. Are Instructional Videos Effective? 5. How Can We Design Effective Instructional Videos?

This chapter considers the impact of digital technologies on Australian poetry, in both its production and its circulation. It charts Australian endeavours in electronic poetry, pointing out its internationalisation of Australian poetry, exploration of tensions between the global and the local, and caution regarding the dangers of increased surveillance. The chapter then discusses the experimentation with hypertext, interactivity, animation and computer coding, including the creation of a new language by mez (Mary-Anne Breeze). It considers the digital manipulation of words and voice and the poetic use of computerised text generation. It traces developments occurring between literature and game, including the use of virtual reality and 3D environments. The chapter also outlines the impact of machine learning on text generation, including the destabilisation of distinctions between human and machine creativity. After discussing the prevalence of multimedia work, it considers Indigenous digitality before turning to digital publishing such as online journals, databases and ebook publications. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the paucity of attention given to digital works in funding and prize culture.

Chapter 7 is focused on videos and animations. These methods are particularly suitable to work with adolescents and are also cost effective. Participatory videography can be a powerful tool to amplify the voices of adolescents to enable significant change in their lives. Specific ethical considerations are included as video may expose adolescent identity.

When attention is paid to the ways characters perform and are performed in anime narratives, it becomes apparent that there are certain regularly utilized approaches to the character acting widespread in anime’s animation. Two of the most prominent modes of performance have been called embodied acting and figurative acting. Each uses distinct techniques to act out a specific character’s personality and, in the process, imply different notions of selfhood. This chapter examines the specific utilization of embodied and figurative acting in Yūri!!! on Ice and how these interrelated modes of performance dovetail with the narrative. Through its balancing of embodied and figurative modes of performance, the anime moves between an individualized self whose interior is expressed externally and an open acknowledgment of the interrelation of external others in the performance of self and gender.

This chapter presents an academic re-assessment of Gnomeo & Juliet, acknowledging its status as a Shakespearean adaptation for young children whilst also moving beyond this superficial evaluation. Whilst Asbury has his version of Shakespeare’s ‘star-cross’d lovers’ survive and unite their rival factions – a choice which clearly makes the story more palatable for children – the film earns this happy ending. It does so both through its echoes of and engagement with Shakespearean comedy (particularly A Midsummer Night’s Dream), and through its intertextuality with cinematic history, British culture and heritage and the Shakespearean canon. Asbury astutely makes his film appeal equally to three distinct audiences: young children, adults and Shakespeare aficionados – emulating the critically and commercially successful approach of Pixar Animation Studios in creating animated cinema which simultaneously connects authentically with multiple discrete demographics.

This chapter explores the aesthetic, narrative and ideological stakes of the balcony scene in Candy Candy. Oscillating between an eminently traditional representation and a questioning of social and aesthetic conventions, the scene punctuates the narrative progression and is the object of a double repetition: whilst several episodes show the actors’ auditions and then their preparation before the premiere, the characters of Terry and Candy ceaselessly replay the balcony scene, which constitutes a structuring motif of the anime. It also becomes the locus where gender identities are shaped and troubled, but also where theatre and life unfold in a game of mirrors. Candy and Terry’s love story actually never goes beyond the phase of the balcony scene, a sequence that they keep repeating in endless variations that call for decoding.

“Gulliver has been a regular inspiration for film-makers since the earliest days of cinema. This chapter considers the various reasons for his popularity on screen and the challenges inherent in adapting Swift’s text. Among the latter are its lack of narrative unity and the discrepancies between what people think they know of the book and how it actually conducts itself. From silent French films to groundbreaking animations and Hollywood blockbusters, such concerns have always informed the kinds of Gulliver presented to the world. At the same time, each adapter of Gulliver’s Travels explicitly or implicitly considers its relevance for cinema as form and spectacle. Swift’s capacity to disorientate, both in the shifting physical proportions of his characters and in the questionable literary dignity of his text, helps to align him with the experience of cinematic audiences and innovators worldwide. When we assess not only the changing figure of Gulliver but also the different varieties of otherness encountered through his screen afterlives, we can better appreciate the adaptation process as one in which our ideas of history and literature are themselves subject to interrogation.”

Comics inherently encompass multiple modalities and are published across numerous platforms, whether in print or digital form. In its distinct combinations of words and images, the multimodal medium of comics has encompassed numerous formats throughout its long history – typically appearing in numerous forms simultaneously in any given era. Comics exist in single-panel and multi-panel strips within newspapers and magazines, in single-issue comic books and longer graphic novel formats and in new digital forms such as webcomics and motion comics. Comics have also been adapted to cinema and television, in both live-action and animated incarnations – often drawing on the original words and imagery of their source material in direct ways. This essay traces the history of comics as a multimodal experience from the 1800s through the twenty-first century; it also examines how other media have translated them onto various types of screens while still drawing on the specific formal qualities used by comics to tell stories. Regardless of the particular format through which readers engage with the medium, comics offer amalgamations of two separate modes of content which allow for unique meanings via the unification of words and images.

Chapter 4 explores the foundation of extended business activities and tie-ins in the 1920s and 1930s that developed around Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse. The term ‘animated properties’ acknowledges that these popular fictional representations were attributed subjecthood and, as such, came alive outside the celluloid frame. Felix and Mickey were pre-packaged as family-friendly viewing. Doll effigies and other merchandise literally took the characters into the heart of the home. The chapter discusses the ambivalent role of intellectual property registration in stabilising the character merchandising trade, exploring what was particularly distinctive about the Disney Corporation’s industrial system of production and distribution. This successful strategy was an organisational one with cultural ambitions, engaging franchise managers and licensees in educating children and the trade about the protocols of consumption attached to play. The Disney brand came to signify child-friendly cultural content of all kinds, with trust in the name secured by the deployment of a new legal creation, the phenomenon of ‘world rights’ exploited by a new managerial class, Disney Enterprises’ agents.

Responding to obviously persisting concerns regarding the venerability of icons in the post-Iconoclastic era, some of the empire’s leading theologians made the novel claim that it is not human artistry, but divine inspiration that ultimately ensures the icon’s authenticity – its resemblance to its prototype. Just as with Christian literature, the divine inspiration of material images guarantees their faithfulness, and it is divine inspiration that also releases the work of art from the realm of ‘dead’ matter, enlivening it with the divine pneuma.

The opening chapter sets out the terminological and conceptual ideas that provide a basis for the remainder of the book. Problematising the topic of musical subjectivity, it explicates the various meanings that have been given to this awkward notion and through increasing clarification proposes a range of potential meanings. Subjectivity here appears to refer to the experience of music as akin to a living being, an animate consciousness, but such that the experience may be of an apparent immediacy that shades it into a privileged first-person perspective. The second part of the chapter looks in turn to how subjectivity manifests itself both in music and in history, interrogating the notion of the musical subject through a series of questions that may be summarised as who, how and where, when and why? One of the properties of the idea of subjectivity identified here is that it is not a pre-given entity but a dynamic process that requires our own active participation for its interpretation. And thus while a number of conceptual questions still remain to be answered at the close of this chapter, it is given to the main body of the book to respond to these matters.