The Society for Animation Studies has the pleasure to announce that Animated Documentary (Palgrave, 2013) by Annabelle Honess Roe has won the delayed 2015 SAS McLaren-Lambart Award for Best Book on Animation. Animated Documentary is a vital addition to both animation scholarship and film studies scholarship more broadly, expertly achieving the tricky challenge of synthesising these two scholarly traditions to provide a compelling and brilliantly coherent account of the animated documentary form. At the heart of Roe’s book is the conviction that animated documentary “has the capacity to represent temporally, geographically, and psychologically distal aspects of life beyond the reach of live action” (p. 22). As a representational strategy, Roe details how animated documentary can be seen to adopt techniques of “mimetic substitution, non-mimetic substitution and evocation” in response to the limitations of live action material (p. 26). Animated Documentary will without doubt become an essential resource for many years to come for anyone interested in the intersection of animation and documentary.
http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137017451
The Judging Committee, comprising Chris Pallant, Amy Ratelle and Laura Montero Plata, would also like to acknowledge the other fine examples of scholarship that we encountered throughout the judging process. The books shortlisted for the 2015 Award were:
America ‘Toons In: A History of Television Animation (McFarland, 2014) by David Perlmutter
[Winner] Animated Documentary (Palgrave, 2013) by Annabelle Honess Roe
[Runner-Up] Anime: A History (Palgrave: BFI, 2013) by Jonathan Clements
Japanese Animation: East Asian Perspectives (University of Mississippi Press, 2013) edited by Masao Yokota and Tze-yue G. Hu
Software, Animation and the Moving Image: What’s in the Box? (Palgrave, 2014) by Aylish Wood
The CG Story (Monacelli Press, 2013) by Christopher Finch
The judges agreed that it is was pleasing to read books in this shortlist that sought to make the complex accessible, and to establish a narrative for the often overlooked algorithmic bedrock of the computer generated animation that now dominates the production landscape. In this regard, both Aylish Wood’s and Christopher Finch’s books, which clearly start from very different methodological positions, work to achieve similar goals.
The judges would like to draw particular attention to the excellent steps being taken to truly internationalize the scope of animation scholarship, with the enormously ambitious Japanese Animation: East Asian Perspectives finally making a range of Japanese-language keystone texts available for the first time in English.
Lastly, David Perlmutter and this year’s Runner-Up Jonathan Clements both contribute valuable consolidated histories: of the American television animation tradition and Anime, respectively. Clements’ work stood out as the 2015 Runner-Up because of his fearless capacity to continually foreground the challenges of historical analysis, while putting this into practice to provide a much needed early history of Anime that is rich with balanced detail.
Juror short bios:
Dr Chris Pallant is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Canterbury Christ Church University. He is the author of Demystifying Disney: A History of Disney Feature Animation(2011), co-author of Storyboarding: A Critical History (2015) and editor of Animated Landscapes: History, Form and Function (2015). Chris has also published in book chapter and journal form on a range of topics, including Disney animation, the ‘cartoonism’ of Quentin Tarantino’s live-action films, performance capture technology, the animated landscape of New York City, and the work of Rockstar Games. Individuals interested in pursuing doctoral study in subject areas related to those listed above should contact Chris directly: chris.pallant@canterbury.ac.uk
In 2015, Chris organised the Society for Animation Studies annual conference in Canterbury, and currently serves as the Society’s Vice-President.
Twitter: @cjpallant.
Dr Laura Montego Plata has a Ph.D in History of Cinema by Autonomous University of Madrid, she graduated in Audio-visual Communication Studies by San Pablo-CEU University of Madrid. She is a member of the editorial staff of the film review magazine Fila Siete and A Cuarta Parede. She has published in journal like Secuencias, Con A de Animación or Cahiers du Cinéma España, she collaborates since 2010 in the Cines del Sur Film Festival of Granada and she is programmer and co-organizer for Semana de Cine Japonés Actual en la EOI. Her main research interests lie in the field of East Asian Cinemas, Anime and Contemporary Japanese Cinema. She wrote the book El mundo invisible de Hayao Miyazaki [The Invisible World of Hayao Miyazaki] (Dolmen, 2012); the publication has reached this year his fifth edition.
Dr Amy Ratelle is the author of Animality and Children’s Literature and Film (Palgrave Macmillan 2015). She received her PhD in Communication and Culture, a joint programme between Ryerson University and York University, and degrees in Film Studies from Ryerson University (BFA), and Carleton University (MA). Her research areas include children’s literature and culture, animality studies, animation studies, and critical media studies. She is currently a postdoctoral administrator for the Semaphore Research Cluster on Mobile and Pervasive Computing, at the University of Toronto.