Browsing by Author "Thompson, Kirsten Moana"

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Open Access
Animating Ephemeral Surfaces: Transparency, Translucency and Disney’s World of Color
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2014) Thompson, Kirsten Moana
This paper examines the unusual theatrical and exhibition dimensions of Disney’s World of Color, an outdoor night time entertainment spectacle which screens animated films on ephemeral materials: the water spray and light produced by fountains, water, mist and fire. It considers how this show innovates a new form of theatrical exhibition, combining older art forms from fireworks to pyrodramas, with contemporary computer-controlled light and colour design and immersive effects. It will suggest structural and aesthetic connections between this animated attraction and recent technological innovations such as Google Glass™ in which mobile computer interfaces combine transparency and opacity as an essential part of their formal structure and tactile pleasure. Theorising that the relationship between animation and the ephemeral is also situated in these tensions between the transparent and opaque, I go on to suggest that Disney’s World of Color is a particular instantiation of the ways in which “animation” can be understood not only as a specific technical process, but also as a form of corporeal transformation in which movement, light and colour enlivens individual bodies and screen spaces.
Open Access
Classical Cel Animation, World War Two and Bambi, 1939-1945
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2014-09-16) Thompson, Kirsten Moana
Open Access
The construction of a myth: Bloody Mary, Aggie Grey and the optics of tourism
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2014) Thompson, Kirsten Moana
This article examines the discursive circulation of stories in journalism and travel writing over the last fifty years that linked leading Western Samoan hotelier Aggie Grey to South Pacific’s iconic Tonkinese, Bloody Mary. Made famous by Juanita Hall in the Broadway musical (1949-1954), and subsequent cinematic adaptation (Joshua Logan, 1958), Bloody Mary first appeared in James Michener’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Tales of the South Pacific (written 1944-1946, published 1947). The careful marketing and growth of the Aggie Grey brand both before and after her death in 1988, exemplifies the close economic relationship between the development of tourism in Samoa in the post-war years and the American film and celebrity industries, with the hotel in Apia providing accommodation, logistical and catering support to Hollywood productions and film stars from William Holden to Marlon Brando. My examination of an origin myth linking a charismatic historical figure with an iconic fictional character is undertaken not to ultimately suggest any one-to-one relationship between the two, but rather to demonstrate a remarkable persistence of a Pacific romanticism. In what I name as the optics of tourism I join with earlier scholars in suggesting that we must be more attuned to accounting for the affective power of visual media and the ways in which Hollywood plays a continuing complex role in cultural memory, tourism and popular culture.
Open Access
“Quick-Like a Bunny!”
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2014) Thompson, Kirsten Moana
From the 1920s through the 1960s, the animation industry was a labor force segregated by gender, in which women were almost entirely restricted to the Inking and Paint department. Indeed, despite notable exceptions like Mary Blair and LaVerne Harding, Disney correspondence and internal papers show how women were regularly rejected as applicants or referred to inking and painting as their only career options.[1] One of the final steps in a Taylorized labor intensive industrial machine of specialized labor, the Ink and Paint Dept. usually consisted of several hundred female workers[2] in each animated studio, wearing white gloves (with thumb and two fingers cut off) and pongee smocks (to keep cels free from dust). After cleaned up pencil drawings were received from animators, inkers used the finest Gillott 290 nibs to make precise small, medium or large black (and sometimes color) lines around those drawings. Painters would then flip the nitrate cels and color in the inked outlines, following numbered specifications from a model sheet created by the Color Key Artist who selected colors for characters and props (Furniss, p. 74). They worked on raked boards (as inkers) or flat boards (as painters) producing 8-10 cels an hour (Zohn 2010, p. 289), enduring the lowest pay in the industry, while supervisors like Dot Smith would walk up and down the aisles at Disney urging them to work faster and faster with phrases like “Come on now, quick- like a bunny!” (Baldwin, 1995, p. 4) This paper examines the relationship of color, labor and gender in the Ink and Paint machine with a particular focus on the material representation of paints, pigments, inks and other color materials in classical cel production.