Journal articles on the topic 'Animation (Cinematography) Cartoon characters'

Current global trends have proved the creative industry to be one of the important sources of economic growth among developed countries. Creativity and its importance for Malaysia have made it imperative for any business organization to use creativity in a range of ways including multimedia content and animation. Malaysian animation viewers are rapidly influenced by digital media entertainment. The rise of such entertainment tends to drive them away from understanding what lies behind it that affect their emotion and thoughts. Therefore, the focus of this paper is to look into the experiences of “pleasantness” in viewer’s emotions that stimulate the perception of pleasure when watching Malaysian animated cartoon characters. A descriptive and One-Way Anova will be implemented in this study to examine the design aesthetics and perception from the animation viewers that affects the psychological experiences in emotions that determines the pleasantness feeling. Overall, the results indicate that perceived pleasantness on Malaysian animated cartoon characters did not differ between age and gender. We believe this finding will benefit the creative content creators and help them to understand more about local animation viewers.

Many researchers think that the characters in animated cartoons and comics are designed according to the exaggeration or reduction of some features based on the human face. However, the feature distribution of the human face is relatively symmetrical and uniform. Thus, to ensure the characters look exaggerated, but without breaking the principle of symmetry, some questions remain: Which facial features should be exaggerated during the design process? How exaggerated are the faces of cartoon characters compared to real faces? To answer these questions, we selected 100 cartoon characters from American and Japanese animation, collected data from their facial features and the facial features of real people, and then described the features using angles, lengths, and areas. Finally, we compared cartoon characters’ facial features values with real facial features and determined the key parts and degree of facial exaggeration of animated characters. The research results show that American and Japanese cartoon characters both exaggerate the eyes, nose, ears, forehead, and chin. Compared with human faces, taking the eye area as an example, American animation characters are twice as large compared with human faces, whereas Japanese animation characters are 3.4 times larger than human faces. The study results can be used for reference by animation character designers and researchers.

In the animation and design of cartoon characters, animators have often turned to the study of biological theories and observation of human actors and animals to capture lifelike movements and emotions more successfully. Charles Darwin’s principle of antithesis, as one of the principles he considered to be responsible for the expression of emotions in animals, would seem to be of distinctive importance in the development of animation. By revisiting Darwin’s original idea in the context of the principles of animation formulated by Thomas and Johnston, we are able to assess its application and relevance in the expressions of emotions in cartoon animal characters. The article concentrates on the emotive function of animal social communication as outlined in zoosemiotics, while taking into account that the expressions of animal characters are directed at the viewer. The principle of antithesis, as a descriptive tool, aids us in considering the diversity of modalities used simultaneously in affective communication, and serves to explicate human interpretations of the anthropomorphic and zoomorphic projections onto the behaviour of cartoon animal characters. This paper offers insight into the potential expansion and re-evaluation of unattested principles in animation, which can be utilized by animators in the creation of more dynamic and expressive animated characters.

Animated learning media using cartoon characters is an appropriate means of supporting learning methods in Early Childhood Education in the Surakarta area, Central Java, Indonesia. This research method includes data collection, data analysis, and presentation of data analysis. This research method uses a qualitative descriptive approach through data sources that include learning materials, animated cartoon characters, literature study through the stages of analysis obtained from various sources of information in interactive references. The investigation stages from multiple sources of information, both literature reviews and interviews, were carried out using an interactive model, where each research component includes the steps of data collection, data reduction, presentation, and conclusion drawing. The use of cartoon characters in animation learning media is beneficial for students who are very interesting and able to receive material and participate in learning activities. Also, animated audiovisual media are needed by students and teachers by using cartoon characters in it.

The traditional design method of 3D animation modelings, by which can obtain attractive and precise 3D animation modelings, is to use three-dimensional modeling software such as Maya or 3D Max to draw directly. However, this method is faced with many problems, for instance, the lack of creativity, long design circle, high production costs, etc. For the problem of the lack of creativity, the reason is that animation designers are often subject to the limitation of the existing modelings and design concepts in the design process, therefore, they can not design creative modelings which are attractive and unforgettable enough. [For the problem of long design circle and high production costs, the reason is that although the 3D animation software are powerful, to skillfully master them not only requires users to have knowledge of computer technology and aesthetics at the same time, but also need a long learning process of modeling. Moreover, it takes the designers a lot of time and energy to design, draw and complete each modeling, and this will undoubtedly extend the design circle and increase the costs to some extent. Therefore, how to quickly and automatically generate creative 3D animation modelings has become a research focus of the present computer-aided creative design.

The purpose of this study is to explore the impacts of foreign cartoons programs on the social behavior and attitude of Pakistani Children. It is forecasting different cartoon programs 24/7; hence, children spend most of their leisure in front of the television. All these cartoon characters affect the social life and psyche of the children and induce positive and negative mannerism in their daily lifestyles. It has found that one of the most disturbing factor is that the ferocity in children today is increasing rapidly due to following their favorite violent cartoon characters which are even different from their culture and societal norms. The issue is violence is what they see in every cartoon program in one or the other way. Their Guardians are unaware that these cartoons they let their children watch are destroying their parenting as negative forces are attacking the innocent minds of this generation. The study gives the insight of why and what is happening with non-parametric statistics studied and used for thorough analysis. The behavioral outcome of the kids like, imitating their preferred animation character, utilizing various dialects, watching the TV as opposed to deciding on outdoor games and being difficult about getting precisely the same outfits and embellishments as their adored character. This contextual analysis features the disturbing circumstance that guardians are uninformed of. There is something other than mimicking the particular character. The only traits of watching these foreign cartoon characters is that it might damage their own customs and they wildly become to believe these characters as their role models. KEY WORDS: Animated TV Shows, Children, Attitude, Behavior, Cartoons, Violence, Role Model, Pediatric Mental Health

<p><em>This study elucidates the main communication issues that arise from audiences’ interaction with three-dimensional animation of different types in augmented reality, as well as identifies the major 3D animations’ varieties used by brands to create AR and MR promotional campaigns. </em></p><p><em>The results of the study are based, in particular, on the analysis of AR cases of 27 commercial and social brands that used 3D animation for promotional purposes in 2010–2019.</em></p><p><em>It is ascertained that in the promotional practice there is used 3D predefined animation of a cartoon type, as well as 3D predefined and procedural non-homomorphic photorealistic animation. At the same time, three-dimensional procedural animation of cartoon type, as well as photorealistic animation of people (either predefined or procedural), was not used by any of the studied brands for the purpose of promotion.</em></p><p><em>The research revealed that in the field of promotion three-dimensional photorealistic animation of people, primarily of procedural type, is not used because it creates the majority of communication problems in the interaction of the audience with it. Real people’s displeasure with the animated ones arises, first of all, because of the “uncanny valley effect”, which is caused, in particular, by the technical difficulties with 3D rendering of human emotions and body language in real-time (including proxemics in a virtual environment); visual tracking of human movements by animated character; the naturalness and synchronicity of the language (above all, the content of the cues) and the sound of the voice of three-dimensional persons (its timbre, rhythmics, emotionality).</em></p><p><em>In general, today from a technical point of view photorealistic non-homomorphic animation is the most advanced 3D animation type, which explains the popularity of its use in the practice of promotional communications. Its predefined variety is most commonly used by automotive brands to create AR-campaigns, whereas procedural one is used in creating MR-campaigns, mainly for cosmetic and interior brands.</em></p><p><em>The predefined 3D animation of cartoon type was used to promote those commercial brands, which final consumers were, above all, children. However, some companies have used this kind of animation to create AR-based adult promotional events held in conjunction with the holiday and symbolic dates. The popularity of the use of 3D animation of cartoon type in the field of promotion is explained, first of all, by the fact that people at a subconscious level have a positive attitude towards cartoon characters as such.</em></p><strong><em>Key words:</em></strong><em> augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), 3D animation, promotional communications.</em>

Despite the popularity of three-dimensional (3D) animation techniques, the style of 2D cel animation is seeing increased use in games and interactive applications. However, conventional 3D toon shading frequently requires manual editing to clean up undesired shadows or add stylistic details based on art direction. This editing is impractical for the frame-by-frame editing in cartoon feature film post-production. For interactive stylised media and games, post-production is unavailable due to real-time constraints, so art-direction must be preserved automatically. For these reasons, artists often resort to mesh and texture edits to mitigate undesired shadows typical of toon shaders. Such edits allow real-time rendering but are limited in resolution, animation quality and lack detail control for stylised shadow design. In our framework, artists build a “shading rig,” a collection of these edits, that allows artists to animate toon shading. Artists pre-animate the shading rig under changing lighting, to dynamically preserve artistic intent in a live application, without manual intervention. We show our method preserves continuous motion and shape interpolation, with fewer keyframes than previous work. Our shading shape interpolation is computationally cheaper than state-of-the-art image interpolation techniques. We achieve these improvements while preserving vector quality rendering, without resorting either to high texture resolution or mesh density.

The main premise of the study is the objective need to find new means for the development of children’s personality in the modern educational process. Scientific and technological progress, the active use of technology and gadgets by children, even young children, the expansion of the use of distance learning and communication, artificial intelligence, and social networks are the realities in which we already live. Therefore, high relevance is gained by the means that are based on information technologies on the one hand but have the potential for the development of children’s personality on the other. What can be considered as one such instrument is animation creativity of children that involves the process of children jointly composing, creating, and discussing a cartoon of their own making. The assumption of the potential effectiveness of animation creativity as a means of developing children’s giftedness is based on the fact that in the process of joint creation of a cartoon, children show and develop several abilities as they create the script, images of characters, their characters and appearances, as they are involved in filming, montage, editing, as well as the presentation and promotion of the finished animated film. Children interact with one another and with technical devices, learn to listen to and hear each other, substantiate their opinion, carry the responsibility for collective work, distribute responsibilities between each other, and bring the creative idea to fruition in the finished product. The goal of the study is to conduct an empirical study to determine the effect of the author’s children’s animation technique on the development of figurative thinking in older preschool-age children. Methods: observation, conversation, measurement, creative tasks, comparative analysis of experimental data.

A good story is always in demand. But today the fairy tale is not only told in the mode of verbal translation in the family circle, it becomes the subject of repeated media transformations form, printed illustrated text, comic, film, TV series, cartoon, video game, etc. With the spread and development of media researchers began to pay more attention to the structure of the narrative, “worlds of history”, are still in demand, the various media platforms (transmedial), which combine a popular medium with a popular archetypical history. This is especially true of cartoons, as they are one of the most popular genres among children. Evidence suggests that children tend to imitate not only their parents and inner family circle behavior, but also cartoon characters, including their gender-specific behavior. Since most modern cartoons continue to borrow stories from classic fairy tales, they inevitably reproduce the gender-stereotypical behavior of the main characters of ancient times. Or, in response to social requests, the plot and character are repaired. In the article we describe the main findings of the study, where we studied folk stories, as well as the plots of modern cartoons. For the study we used a database of folk tales by Stith Thompson, as well as narrative functions in the concept of Vladimir Propp, adapting them to the aspect of female gender. The aim of the study is to reveal how gender socialization is constructed and mediated by media in popular fairy tales. For this purpose, in the study we use critical discourse analysis of modern cartoons.

Background: Marketing, including the use of cartoon animations on packaging, has been shown to influence the food children choose to eat. This paper aims to determine the nutritional quality of UK food and drink products featuring child-friendly characters on pack. Methods: A comprehensive cross-sectional survey of food and drink with packaging appealing to children available in the UK. Products were classified high in fat, salt and/or sugar (HFSS) according to the UK nutrient profiling model and guidance for front of pack nutrition labelling. Logistic regression was used to determine whether there was a significant relationship between nutritional quality of products, and animation type. Results: Over half (51%) of 532 products with animations on packaging were classified as HFSS. Food products featuring unlicensed characters were significantly more likely to be deemed HFSS than those with licensed characters, according to both the nutrient profiling model (odds ratio (OR) 2.1, 95% CI: 1.3 to 3.4) and front of pack nutrition labelling system (OR 2.3, 95% confidence interval CI: 1.4 to 3.7). Conclusions: The use of cartoon characters on HFSS products is widespread. Policies to restrict the use of such marketing tactics should be considered to prevent children being targeted with unhealthy foods and drinks.

AbstractIn the three-dimensional character animation facial expression is very important that the messages displayed by the characters can be easily understood. The process of making facial expressions is known as facial rigging. This study aims to produce six basic facial expressions on the three-dimensional character of Den Basito by utilizing UV warp technique as a facial rigging method. In order to control the expression of a character's face with a UV warp it takes two object bones. Each bones function as an anchors and targets. Then the results of still rendering six kinds of basic facial expressions tested to the owner of the reference model Den Basito and some his closest friends. From the test results obtained the conclusion that the use of UV warp techniques can be used for the control of facial expressions of three-dimensional characters with cartoon style.

Multimedia teaching applications have been widely utilized in various subjects. The presentation of teaching materials with animations and games helps to stimulate the visual sense and enhance the learning motivation of learners. Successful learning, however, requires the stimulation of learning motivation that can inspire learners to achieve the desired learning objectives. This study combines the ARCS (Attention, Relevance, Confidence, Satisfaction) motivation model, and humor to design a set of multimedia applications that include teaching animations and games for sixth graders' natural science and technology course, called the Cat's Cradle Multimedia Learning System (CCMLS). The scenario stories of anthropomorphic characters introduce four units of natural science: levers, axles, pulleys and gears. Additionally, games are designed to impress learners even more. After the applications were prepared, tests for learning effectiveness, learning motivation and perceived fun associated with teaching materials were conducted with 106 students at the Qishan Elementary School in Kaohsiung. The experimental group used CCMLS, while the control group used videos of the textbook as the applications. A pre-test and post-test, ARCS Learning Motivation Questionnaire, Smileyometer and interviews were conducted with both groups. According to the statistical analysis, significance was detected in regard to learning effectiveness between the experimental group and the control group. Significance was also found in ARCS learning motivation and perceived fun of teaching materials. Moreover, there is a significant positive correlation between the perceived fun related to the teaching materials and learning motivation. The contribution of this study lies in the proposal of the digital game-based learning (DGBL) from the design perspective: to enhance students' learning motivation and use willingness regarding the teaching materials of the drama and the cartoon characters in humorous dialogues. The proper sound and light effects and examples that are close to daily life will also be taken into consideration in the design of the multimedia applications.

Subject area “Starting up a new company” and “development of technology-based venture”. Study level/applicability The target audiences for this study are advanced business or non-business undergraduate students and MBA students taking courses of entrepreneurship, management of innovation and organization theory and design. Case overview Yeayyy.com was a private limited company based in Bandar Baru Bangi, Selangor, a township located about 30 km south of Kuala Lumpur. It was founded by Mr Hazmin in early 2010 with a seed funding of RM150,000 (about US$50,000). By the end of 2014, its core businesses include developing mobile application (app), software and website, as well as conducting information technology (IT) training. The company had developed its own animation cartoon, Oolat Oolit, and had commercialized several mobile app inventions. These mobile apps include a Jawi (traditional Malay writing system) app, mobile games and Facebook apps which were compatible with most mobile operating systems. Since its inception, Yeayyy.com had aspired to follow the footsteps of the internationally acclaimed Malaysian home-grown animation production house, Les’ Copaque, which had produced the popular Upin Ipin series. Similar to Les’ Copaque, Yeayyy.com also planned to commercialize its in-house characters into TV series and to market related merchandises, along with its collaborative partner, CikuTree Studio. However, by the end of 2014, the company’s seed funding had depleted, thus forcing Mr Hazmin to strategize for the company’s future. Expected learning outcomes Understanding the process of entrepreneurship and technology-based venture development enables case analysts to apply the concepts in many situations involving business opportunities and company development. Subject code CSS:3 Entrepreneurship.

Walt Disney’s studio created second full-length film Pinocchio in 1940. Its plot and interpretation of the characters were significantly different from the Carlo Collodi’s novel. Disney wrote enthusiastic letter to playwright and director Yasha Frank, who staged Pinocchio as theatre extravaganza in 1937. This production has become a landmark of the Children’s Theatre Project in the framework of Federal Theatre Project, being visually picturesque, inventive and up-to-date according to its social message. It was a story about the complexity of the emergence of a new human, which was especially significant in the context of the ideas of revising the structure of society. There is a reason to see in the Pinocchio script an attempt to substitute theatre dramaturgy by circus language, so essential for the Soviet theater of 1910–20s. The plot was split into numbers performed by professional variety and circus performers, and was reassembled: gags were an organic part of this new plot. However, Frank may not have escaped the influence of animation as well. The article is based on Yasha Frank’s working script, photos and reviews. It examines circus and cinema elements that were used for the theatre’s Pinocchio by Yasha Frank, and its influence to famous Walt Disney’ studio cartoon.

With the invention of moving pictures, the creators sought to supplement them with sound. Even before the invention of cinemat, E. Reynaud in the optical theatre gave performances in which moving images were combined with sound. It was pre-cinema experience, which represented the theatre model of audiovisual show. The attempts to synchronize the dynamic images and sound were taken by T. Edison, S. Meshes, L. Gaumont, O. Kellum, E.Tigerstedt, J. Engel, G. Phocht and J. Massol. However, the systems suggested by these inventors were not perfect. An important step towards creation of a sound film was the appearance of the optical sound recording system Phonofilm designed by Lee de Forest. In 1923, he became acquainted with Brothers Fleischer, outstanding American animators. Together with H. Riesenfeld and E. Fadiman they organized Red Seal Pictures Corporation and began to shoot Ko-Ko Song Car-Tunes, which consisted of a series of animated shots Sing-alongs (featuring the famous bouncing ball). It was a kind of multimedia shots, as there was no plot, no character and no narrative structure. They were created basing on popular songs, but did not illustrate them. The Sing-alongs shots were produced for the audience to sing their favorite songs before the session, while reading the text of the songs from the screen. The animated ball bouncing on the syllables helped them to follow the rhythm of the melody. These films became the prototype of the modern karaoke and music animated shows. The series were released from May 1924 till September 1927. The Fleshers created more than 45 shots, more than 19 of which using the Phonofilm. The first sound animated shots where the images were synchronized with the sound and recorded on the same media, were released in 1925. The film Come to Travel on My Airship was the first where the speech was heard, and in the shot My Old House in Kentucky the Fleischers managed to synchronize the speech with the facial expressions of cartoon characters as they were speaking. When the animating and shooting technology changed, the film structure underwent changes too. Detailed animation parts with the story content appeared. The text animation became variable as well. Since the 1930s, the shots have included scenes with singers and jazz-bands. The animated film series Ko-Ko Song Car-Tunes shot by the Brothers Fleischer established the principle of movement and sound synchronism in the animation. They not only out paced the sound films by P. Terry and W. Disney, which were considered to be the first sound animation films for a long time, but also proved that the sound animation had been possible and the thirty-year era of the silent animation came to an end.

Learning hijaiyah letters is one alternative to understand Arabic. Basically it is used to read Al-Qur’an in the initial stages. The introduction of hijaiyah letters is an important element to educate the children in comprehending religious knowledge. Therefore, it needs an appropriate learning method or media and exact strategy to deliver it in early childhood stage so that it will contribute well in the learning process. The purpose of this study is to create a media to introduce and to learn hijaiyah letters with 2D animation on android-based to facilitate that knowledge especially for children. This application is equipped with cartoon characters image and quiz menu to practice children’s ability in recognizing hijaiyah letters. This application can produce sound pronunciation of hijaiyah letters and the children can learn to write the letters as well. This application is created using Android Studio, wavePad sound editor and CorelDRAW X7 for drawing and coloring. The method used is Luther-Sutopo, while the data collection applies literature search and interviews. This application can be installed on smartphones with the Android operating system for at least 4.2 (Jellybeand) version. The results of the questionnaire show that the responses from the users are in average value of 92.67% so that this application is worthy to be the appropriate hijaiyah letters learning

Wide variety of applications (from industrial to entertainment) has a need for reliable and accurate 3D information about motion of an object and its parts. Very often the process of movement is rather fast as in cases of vehicle movement, sport biomechanics, animation of cartoon characters. Motion capture systems based on different physical principles are used for these purposes. The great potential for obtaining high accuracy and high degree of automation has vision-based system due to progress in image processing and analysis. Scalable inexpensive motion capture system is developed as a convenient and flexible tool for solving various tasks requiring 3D motion analysis. It is based on photogrammetric techniques of 3D measurements and provides high speed image acquisition, high accuracy of 3D measurements and highly automated processing of captured data. Depending on the application the system can be easily modified for different working areas from 100 mm to 10 m. The developed motion capture system uses from 2 to 4 technical vision cameras for video sequences of object motion acquisition. All cameras work in synchronization mode at frame rate up to 100 frames per second under the control of personal computer providing the possibility for accurate calculation of 3D coordinates of interest points. The system was used for a set of different applications fields and demonstrated high accuracy and high level of automation.

Subject area International business or International marketing. Study level/applicability The case is recommended for undergraduate and graduate courses in the fields of international business and international marketing. The aim is to show students the problems that a family business in the animation industry faces while growing and internationalizing. Specifically, the case discusses the entry mode selection and market selection challenges faced by an emerging market company in the comic book and animation industry to operate overseas and compete with entertainment giants such as Disney and DC Comics. The case enables the instructor to discuss international market selection theories and evaluate entry modes. For graduate students, the international market selection can be further developed by using more robust concepts such as psychic and cultural distance. Case overview This case examines the trajectory of a pioneering company in the comic book and animation industries, and in the licensing of trademarks in Brazil. Mauricio de Sousa Productions was founded in 1959 and is considered to be one of the most successful cultural producers in the country. According to a leading Brazilian public opinion research agency, 97 per cent of Brazilian children and 96 per cent of their parents are familiar with the Monica and Friends characters. As one of the main players in the publishing market, with 86 per cent of market share, Mauricio de Sousa Productions has a product portfolio that goes beyond Monica and Friends comic strips: the company’s show on the Cartoon Network ranks third in audience viewing in the country and the company has produced animated movies, books, shows and games. However, despite its experience in publishing comic books in several countries, Mauricio de Sousa Productions (MSP)’s worldwide operations have not been as profitable and sustainable as expected. Aiming at expanding its global presence, MSP’s top management decided in 2014 to review the company’s internationalization strategy and operations to enhance the firm’s performance. Expected learning outcomes The case highlights the key factors facing firms when expanding from an emerging markets. Students are expected to discuss and evaluate options, thus developing their knowledge and decision processes related to family-owned business challenges and opportunities, international market selection theories and international market entry mode. Developing strategies to face challenges as those presented by competitors such as Disney should bring opportunities to students to think outside models and weigh risks. Finally, the case gives students opportunity to base their decision processes and evaluations on logistics problems as well as psychic and cultural distances. It also compels the students to appreciate the various challenges involved in exploiting international market with animation content and intellectual properties as a service. Supplementary materials Company presentation to use in the discussion introduction can be found in: www.monicaandfriends.com/content/video.php Subject code CSS 5: International business.

Research aim is to identify the phenomena of verbal vulgarization of children’s cartoon discourse, to determine their functional-semantic loads and registers of reduced emotional evaluation, as well as the main socio-cultural types of corporate vulgar behavior. Research Methods. The study of the vulgarization of children’s media content was carried out with the help of: a) theoretical methods, b) psycholinguistic empirical methods – discourse-analysis of vulgarized dialogical situations; questionnaire related to the testing of registers of dialogical situations in cinema texts among the audience of student’s youth (80 humanitarian students (specialty “Journalism”) of the National University “Odesa Law Academy” aged 17-20 years). Results. The didactic role of animated cinema texts in the formation of media culture is noted. It was proposed the practical analysis of the modern children’s cartoons language in the context of the systematization of markers of affective vulgarity, such as slangisms, jargonisms, elements of common language, obscenisms. On the basis of a survey and psycholinguistic experiment, a stylistic evaluation of the perception of the selected lexical-phraseological material as such that contains the connotation “vulgarity” was confirmed, the attitude of the young generation of viewers to vulgarized cinema text was revealed. Conclusions. Among the main conclusions we may note that as a result of language vulgarization of modern consciousness, in particular children, the so-called conceptual sphere of human activity is changing. The new generation of viewers is focused on low, coarse communication, on the weakening of the feeling of beautiful, on the positive perception of the appropriate aesthetics of everyday life. According to the results of the questionnaire, these cinema texts are perceived neutral by 55 students, positively – 21 students, negatively – 4 students. The language of cartoon characters, which represent certain social groups of real society, is seen as the norm for any situation, and grumpiness, disrespect, psycho-emotional imbalance are seen as their “organic” color. Therefore, the majority, or the vast majority of the respondents, correlated the lexical-phraseological units as jargon that is, acceptable in the youth environment. Modern foreign animation that is presented as translated cinema text, loses the important function of being a mediadidactive source, that is, the medium of producing patterns of individual and collective linguistic behavior.

<p align="left"><strong>Resumen</strong></p><p>El objetivo del presente artículo es examinar la representación de personajes femeninos y masculinos y su impacto en las tramas en las series de animación infantil: <em>Steven Universe, Star vs Forces of Evil</em> y <em>She-Ra and the Princesses of Power</em>. Para ello, se utilizan como herramientas metodológicas el análisis de contenido cualitativo y la interseccionalidad. Su apuesta por la diversidad en las presencias y por el diálogo y la empatía en sus narrativas las alejan de modelos hegemónicos de dibujos animados que apuestan por la normatividad y la otredad. Así, estas series constituyen una oportunidad para superar los estereotipos de género dentro (y fuera) del mundo de ficción.</p><p align="left"><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p>The aim of this article is to examine the representation of female and male characters and their impact on the plots in the children's animated series: <em>Steven Universe</em>, <em>Star vs Forces of Evil</em> and <em>She-Ra and the Princesses of Power</em>. For this purpose, qualitative content analysis and intersectionality are used as methodological tools. Their commitment to diversity in their presences and to dialogue and empathy in their narratives distance them from hegemonic cartoon models that focus on normativity and otherness. Thus, these series constitute an opportunity to overcome gender stereotypes within (and outside) the fictional world.</p>

Penelitian yang dilakukan ini dilatarbelakangi oleh pentingnya rancangan multimedia tari pada pembelajaran SBdP. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mendeskripsikan hasil dan bentuk rencana multimedia tari kreasi anak “oray-orayan” untuk pembelajaran SBdP di Sekolah Dasar. Dalam pembelajaran SBdP, media pembelajaran yang digunakan berupa video dari internet. Video tersebut masih sederhana didalamnya hanya berupa gerakan tari, tidak terdapat animasi gerak tari dengan menggunakan tokoh kartun, tidak ada langkah-langkah menari serta tidak terdapat gambar dan teks sebagai materi pendukung. Media pembelajaran ini termasuk hal penting dalam proses pembelajaran, karena sebagai alat perantara dalam proses pembelajaran yang digunakan untuk menyampaikan informasi dalam proses pembelajaran antara guru terhadap peserta didik dalam menyampaikan informasi. Diharapkan dapat menciptakan pembelajaran yang lebih bermakna dengan pengembangan yang dilakukan terhadap salah satu media pembelajaran. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode kualitatif dengan analisis data secara deskriptif dengan menggunakan data hasil FGD (Focus Group Discuss). berdasarkan data FGD yang di dapatkan, rancangan Multimedia Tari Kreasi Anak “Oray-orayan” mendapatkan kelayakan dan memenuhi kriteria yang diinginkan untuk dijadikan sebagai media pembelajaran yang dapat digunakan untuk pembelajaran SBDP di SD. ABSTRACT This Research is backed the importance of multimedia design dance on SBdP learning. This research aims to describe the results and form of multimedia plan of childern Dance Creations “Oray-orayan” for learning SBdP in elemntary school. In SBdP learning, the learning media used is video from the Internet. The Video is still simple in the form of dance movement, there is no animation of dance motion using cartoon characters, there are no dance steps and there are no pictures and texts as supporting material. This learning Media is important in the learning process, because as an intermediate tool in the learning process used to convey information in the learning process between teachers and students in conveying information. It is hoped that you can create more meaningful learning with the development done with one of the learning media. This research uses qualitative methods with descriptive data analysis using FGD (Focus Group Discuss)result data. Based on the FGD data obtained, the Multimedia design of the children's Dance creations "OrayOrayan" is qualified and fulfills criteria which is desirable to serve as a learning medium that can be used to study SBdP in SD.

Latar belakang dari penelitian ini adalah adanya berbagai kasus yang bertentangan dengan nilai-nilai moral seperti korupsi yang menunjukkan rendahnya karakter dalam masyarakat. Oleh karena itu, pendidikan karakter merupakan aspek yang sangat penting dalam memperbaiki nilai moral masyarakat Indonesia. Pendekatan kebudayaan khususnya falsafah Jawa akan dijadikan landasan pendidikan karakter pada anak usia dini. Hal ini karena dalam budaya Jawa sarat akan pendidikan nilai yang merupakan substansi utama dari pendidikan karakter. Dalam budaya Jawa terkandung tata nilai kehidupan Jawa, seperti norma, keyakinan, kebiasaan, konsepsi, dan simbol-simbol yang hidup dan berkembang dalam masyarakat Jawa.Pendidikan karakter yang digali dari substansi budaya Jawa dapat menjadi pilar pendidikan budi pekerti bangsa. Budaya Jawa memiliki pandangan hidup (yang sering disebut sebagai falsafah hidup) yang merupakan kesatuan pola pikir orang Jawa dalam menempuh kehidupan. Falsafah hidup Jawa adalah saripati perjalanan hidup orang Jawa menjadi “Jawa”. Di dalam falsafah ajaran hidup Jawa, terdapat ajaran keutamaan hidup yang diistilahkan dalam bahasa Jawa sebagai piwulang (wewarah)kautaman. Pendidikan karakter pada anak usia dini menjadi fondasi dasar dalam mengembangkan keterampilan sosial di masa yang akan datang. Pendidikan karakter yang kuat dan kokoh merupakan hal yang penting dan harus ditanamkan sejak dini agar anak bangsa menjadi pribadi yang unggul seperti yang diharapkan dalam tujuan pendidikan nasional dan dapat memperkokoh bangsa dari pengaruh negative seperti korupsi. Penelitian ini merupakan penelitian deskpritif kualitatif dengan rancangan penelitian studi kasus (case study). Lokasi penelitian adalah dua puluh Taman Kanak-Kanak terpilih di Purwokerto. Pengumpulan data menggunakan teknik in depth interview danfocus group discussion pada informan yang terpilih.Informan dipilih dengan metode purposive sample. Analisis data dilakukan dengan model analisis perbandingan dan interpretasi data. Keabsahan data akan diuji dengan triangulasi sumber dan triangulasi metode. Dalam penelitian ini, temuan yang ditargetkan adalah pembuatan model pendidikan karakter berlandaskan falsafah Jawa.Untuk membantu para guru Taman Kanak-Kanak dalam mengaplikasikan model pendidikan karakter berlandaskan falsafah Jawa, disusun modul pendidikan karakter yang berlandaskan falsafah Jawa yang berbentuk animasi kartun. The backgroud of this study are about cases which are againts moral values, such as, corruption that shows the lowness of character in the society. Because of that, character education is very important to improve Indonesian moral value. Thus, cultural approach especially Javanese philosophy is used as the foundation of character education for early childhood. This is because Javanese culture is rich on education values, so those make it become the main substance of character education. Moreover, Javanese culture contains the social order of society, for example, norms, believes, customs, ideas, and symbols which live and develop in Javanese society. Therefore, character education that is from Javanese culture can be a pillar of nation’s character building. Javanese culture that has philosophies can be the guidance of life. The philosophies are the essence of Javanese to do journey to be Javanese. Furthermore, in Javanese philosophies, there are main teaching which in Java it is called by piwulang (wewarah).The important of character education in the early childhood is the education which can be the foundation to develop social skills in the future. This makes a sturdy and strong character education be necessary to be given since the early childhood, so in the future our generation can be strong characters that are excellent as what it has been hoped in the purpose of national education; and it can make the nation stronger to avoid negative influences like corruption. This study is descriptive qualitative research with case study. The locations of the research are in twenty kindergarthens in Purwokerto that have been selected. Data collection technique is done through indepth interview and focus group discussionon selected informants. Those selected informants are chosen using purposive sample method. Data analysis is done using comparative analysis and data interpretation. Finally, the validity is examined with resource triangualtion and method triangulation. In this research, the result is a model on character education based on Javanese philosophy. To help kidergarthen teachers to apply the model, a modul in the form of animation cartoon is created.

Care for chronic disease requires patient adherence to treatment advice. Nonadherence worsens health outcomes and increases healthcare costs. When healthcare professionals are in short supply, a virtual physician could serve as a persuasive technology to promote adherence. However, acceptance of advice may be hampered by the uncanny valley effect—a feeling of eeriness elicited by human simulations. In a hypothetical virtual doctor consultation, 441 participants assumed the patient’s role. Variables from the stereotype content model and the heuristic–systematic model were used to predict adherence intention and behavior change. This 2 × 5 between-groups experiment manipulated the doctor’s bedside manner—either good or poor—and virtual depiction at five levels of realism. These independent variables were designed to manipulate the doctor’s level of warmth and eeriness. In hypothesis testing, depiction had a nonsignificant effect on adherence intention and diet and exercise change, even though the 3-D computer-animated versions of the doctor (i.e., animation, swapped, and bigeye) were perceived as eerier than the others (i.e., real and cartoon). The low-warmth, high-eeriness doctor prompted heuristic processing of information, while the high-warmth doctor prompted systematic processing. This pattern contradicts evidence reported in the persuasion literature. For the stereotype content model, a path analysis found that good bedside manner increased the doctor’s perceived warmth significantly, which indirectly increased physical activity. For the heuristic–systematic model, the doctor’s eeriness, measured in a pretest, had no significant effect on adherence intention and physical activity, while good bedside manner increased both significantly. Surprisingly, cognitive perspective-taking was a stronger predictor of change in physical activity than adherence intention. Although virtual characters can elicit the uncanny valley effect, their effect on adherence intention and physical activity was comparable to a video of a real person. This finding supports the development of virtual consultations.

This issue of M/C Journal is devoted to all things cute – Internet animals and stuffed toys, cartoon characters and branded bears. In what follows our nine contributors scrutinise a diverse range of media objects, discussing everything from the economics of Grumpy Cat and the aesthetics of Furbys to Reddit’s intellectual property dramas and the ethics of kitten memes. The articles range across diverse sites, from China to Canada, and equally diverse disciplines, including cultural studies, evolutionary economics, media anthropology, film studies and socio-legal studies. But they share a common aim of tracing out the connections between degraded media forms and wider questions of culture, identity, economy and power. Our contributors tell riveting stories about these connections, inviting us to see the most familiar visual culture in a new way. We are not the first to take cute media seriously as a site of cultural politics, and as an industry in its own right. Cultural theory has a long, antagonistic relationship with the kitsch and the disposable. From the Frankfurt School’s withering critique of cultural commodification to revisionist feminist accounts that emphasise the importance of the everyday, critics have been conducting sporadic incursions into this space for the better part of a century. The rise of cultural studies, a discipline committed to analysing “the scrap of ordinary or banal existence” (Morris and Frow xviii), has naturally provided a convincing intellectual rationale for such research, and has inspired an impressive array of studies on such things as Victorian-era postcards (Milne), Disney films (Forgacs), Hallmark cards (West, Jaffe) and stock photography (Frosh). A parallel strand of literary theory considers the diverse registers of aesthetic experience that characterize cute content (Brown, Harris). Sianne Ngai has written elegantly on this topic, noting that “while the avant-garde is conventionally imagined as sharp and pointy, as hard- or cutting-edge, cute objects have no edge to speak of, usually being soft, round, and deeply associated with the infantile and the feminine” (814). Other scholars trace the historical evolution of cute aesthetics and commodities. Cultural historians have documented the emergence of consumer markets for children and how these have shaped what we think of as cute (Cross). Others have considered the history of domestic animal imagery and its symptomatic relationship with social anxieties around Darwinism, animal rights, and pet keeping (Morse and Danahay, Ritvo). And of course, Japanese popular culture – with its distinctive mobilization of cute aesthetics – has attracted its own rich literature in anthropology and area studies (Allison, Kinsella). The current issue of M/C Journal extends these lines of research while also pushing the conversation in some new directions. Specifically, we are interested in the collision between cute aesthetics, understood as a persistent strand of mass culture, and contemporary digital media. What might the existing tradition of “cute theory” mean in an Internet economy where user-generated content sites and social media have massively expanded the semiotic space of “cute” – and the commercial possibilities this entails? As the heir to a specific mode of degraded populism, the Internet cat video may be to the present what the sitcom, the paperback novel, or the Madonna video was to an earlier moment of cultural analysis. Millions of people worldwide start their days with kittens on Roombas. Global animal brands, such as Maru and Grumpy Cat, are appearing, along with new talent agencies for celebrity pets. Online portal I Can Haz Cheezburger has received millions of dollars in venture capital funding, becoming a diversified media business (and then a dotcom bubble). YouTube channels, Twitter hashtags and blog rolls form an infrastructure across which a vast amount of cute-themed user-generated content, as well as an increasing amount of commercially produced and branded material, now circulates. All this reminds us of the oft-quoted truism that the Internet is “made of kittens”, and that it’s “kittens all the way down”. Digitization of cute culture leads to some unusual tweaks in the taste hierarchies explored in the aforementioned scholarship. Cute content now functions variously as an affective transaction, a form of fandom, and as a subcultural discourse. In some corners of the Internet it is also being re-imagined as something contemporary, self-reflexive and flecked with irony. The example of 4Chan and LOLcats, a jocular, masculinist remix of the feminized genre of pet photography, is particularly striking here. How might the topic of cute look if we moving away from the old dialectics of mass culture critique vs. defense and instead foreground some of these more counter-intuitive aspects, taking seriously the enormous scale and vibrancy of the various “cute” content production systems – from children’s television to greeting cards to CuteOverload.com – and their structural integration into current media, marketing and lifestyle industries? Several articles in this issue adopt this approach, investigating the undergirding economic and regulatory structures of cute culture. Jason Potts provides a novel economic explanation for why there are so many animals on the Internet, using a little-known economic theory (the Alchian-Allen theorem) to explain the abundance of cat videos on YouTube. James Meese explores the complex copyright politics of pet images on Reddit, showing how this online community – which is the original source of much of the Internet’s animal gifs, jpegs and videos – has developed its own procedures for regulating animal image “piracy”. These articles imaginatively connect the soft stuff of cute content with the hard stuff of intellectual property and supply-and-demand dynamics. Another line of questioning investigates the political and bio-political work involved in everyday investments in cute culture. Seen from this perspective, cute is an affect that connects ground-level consumer subjectivity with various economic and political projects. Carolyn Stevens’ essay offers an absorbing analysis of the Japanese cute character Rilakkuma (“Relaxed Bear”), a wildly popular cartoon bear that is typically depicted lying on the couch and eating sweets. She explores what this representation means in the context of a stagnant Japanese economy, when the idea of idleness is taking on a new shade of meaning due to rising under-employment and precarity. Sharalyn Sanders considers a fascinating recent case of cute-powered activism in Canada, when animal rights activists used a multimedia stunt – a cat, Tuxedo Stan, running for mayor of Halifax, Canada – to highlight the unfortunate situation of stray and feral felines in the municipality. Sanders offers a rich analysis of this unusual political campaign and the moral questions it provokes. Elaine Laforteza considers another fascinating collision of the cute and the political: the case of Lil’ Bub, an American cat with a rare genetic condition that results in a perpetually kitten-like facial expression. During 2011 Lil’ Bub became an online phenomenon of the first order. Laforteza uses this event, and the controversies that brewed around it, as an entry point for a fascinating discussion of the “cute-ification” of disability. These case studies remind us once more of the political stakes of representation and viral communication, topics taken up by other contributors in their articles. Radha O’Meara’s “Do Cats Know They Rule YouTube? How Cat Videos Disguise Surveillance as Unselfconscious Play” provides a wide-ranging textual analysis of pet videos, focusing on the subtle narrative structures and viewer positioning that are so central to the pleasures of this genre. O’Meara explains how the “cute” experience is linked to the frisson of surveillance, and escape from surveillance. She also explains the aesthetic differences that distinguish online dog videos from cat videos, showing how particular ideas about animals are hardwired into the apparently spontaneous form of amateur content production. Gabriele de Seta investigates the linguistics of cute in his nuanced examination of how a new word – meng – entered popular discourse amongst Mandarin Chinese Internet users. de Seta draws our attention to the specificities of cute as a concept, and how the very notion of cuteness undergoes a series of translations and reconfigurations as it travels across cultures and contexts. As the term meng supplants existing Mandarin terms for cute such as ke’ai, debates around how the new word should be used are common. De Seta shows us how deploying these specific linguistic terms for cuteness involve a range of linguistic and aesthetic judgments. In short, what exactly is cute and in what context? Other contributors offer much-needed cultural analyses of the relationship between cute aesthetics, celebrity and user-generated culture. Catherine Caudwell looks at the once-popular Furby toy brand its treatment in online fan fiction. She notes that these forms of online creative practice offer a range of “imaginative and speculative” critiques of cuteness. Caudwell – like de Seta – reminds us that “cuteness is an unstable aesthetic that is culturally contingent and very much tied to behaviour”, an affect that can encompass friendliness, helplessness, monstrosity and strangeness. Jonathon Hutchinson’s article explores “petworking”, the phenomenon of social media-enabled celebrity pets (and pet owners). Using the famous example of Boo, a “highly networked” celebrity Pomeranian, Hutchinson offers a careful account of how cute is constructed, with intermediaries (owners and, in some cases, agents) negotiating a series of careful interactions between pet fans and the pet itself. Hutchinson argues if we wish to understand the popularity of cute content, the “strategic efforts” of these intermediaries must be taken into account. Each of our contributors has a unique story to tell about the aesthetics of commodity culture. The objects they analyse may be cute and furry, but the critical arguments offered here have very sharp teeth. We hope you enjoy the issue.Acknowledgments Thanks to Axel Bruns at M/C Journal for his support, to our hard-working peer reviewers for their insightful and valuable comments, and to the Swinburne Institute for Social Research for the small grant that made this issue possible. ReferencesAllison, Anne. “Cuteness as Japan’s Millenial Product.” Pikachu’s Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon. Ed. Joseph Tobin. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. 34-48. Brown, Laura. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. Cross, Gary. The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children's Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Forgacs, David. "Disney Animation and the Business of Childhood." Screen 33.4 (1992): 361-374. Frosh, Paul. "Inside the Image Factory: Stock Photography and Cultural Production." Media, Culture & Society 23.5 (2001): 625-646. Harris, Daniel. Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Jaffe, Alexandra. "Packaged Sentiments: The Social Meanings of Greeting Cards." Journal of Material Culture 4.2 (1999): 115-141. Kinsella, Sharon. “Cuties in Japan” Women, Media and Consumption in Japan. Ed. Lise Skov and Brian Moeran. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995. 220 - 54. Frow, John, and Meaghan Morris, eds. Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Milne, Esther. Letters, Postcards, Email: Technologies of Presence. New York: Routledge, 2012. Morse, Deborah and Martin Danahay, eds. Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. 2007. Ngai, Sianne. "The Cuteness of the Avant‐Garde." Critical Inquiry 31.4 (2005): 811-847. Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. West, Emily. "When You Care Enough to Defend the Very Best: How the Greeting Card Industry Manages Cultural Criticism." Media, Culture & Society 29.2 (2007): 241-261.

IntroductionThis paper argues that the industrial contexts of re-imagining, or transforming, literary icons deploy the promotional strategies that are associated with what are usually seen as lesser, or purely commercial, genres. Promotional paratexts (Genette Paratexts; Gray; Hills) reveal transformations of content that position audiences to receive them as creative innovations, superior in many senses to their literary precursors due to the distinctive expertise of creative professionals. This interpretation leverages Matt Hills’ argument that certain kinds of “quality” screened drama are discursively framed as possessing the cultural capital associated with auterist cinema, despite their participation in the marketing logics of media franchising (Johnson). Adaptation theorist Linda Hutcheon proposes that when audiences receive literary adaptations, their pleasure inheres in a mixture of “repetition and difference”, “familiarity and novelty” (114). The difference can take many forms, but may be framed as guaranteed by the “distinction”, or—in Bourdieu’s terms—the cultural capital, of talented individuals and companies. Gerard Genette (Palimpsests) argued that “proximations” or updatings of classic literature involve acknowledging historical shifts in ideological norms as well as aesthetic techniques and tastes. When literary brands are made over using different media, there are economic lures to participation in currently fashionable technologies, as well as current political values. Linda Hutcheon also underlines the pragmatic constraints on the re-imagining of literary brands. “Expensive collaborative art forms” (87) such as films and large stage productions look for safe bets, seeking properties that have the potential to increase the audience for their franchise. Thus the marketplace influences both production and the experience of audiences. While this paper does not attempt a thoroughgoing analysis of audience reception appropriate to a fan studies approach, it borrows concepts from Matt Hills’s theorisation of marketing communication associated with screen “makeovers”. It shows that literary fiction and cinematic texts associated with celebrated authors or auteurist producer-directors share branding discourses characteristic of contemporary consumer culture. Strategies include marketing “reveals” of transformed content (Hills 319). Transformed content is presented not only as demonstrating originality and novelty; these promotional paratexts also perform displays of cultural capital on the part of production teams or of auteurist creatives (321). Case Study 1: Steven Spielberg, The Adventures of Tintin (2011) The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn is itself an adaptation of a literary brand that reimagines earlier transmedia genres. According to Spielberg’s biographer, the Tintin series of bandes dessinée (comics or graphic novels) by Belgian artist Hergé (Georges Remi), has affinities with “boys’ adventure yarns” referencing and paying homage to the “silent filmmaking and the movie serials of the 1930s and ‘40s” (McBride 530). The three comics adapted by Spielberg belong to the more escapist and less “political” phase of Hergé’s career (531). As a fast-paced action movie, building to a dramatic and spectacular closure, the major plot lines of Spielberg’s film centre on Tintin’s search for clues to the secret of a model ship he buys at a street market. Teaming up with an alcoholic sea captain, Tintin solves the mystery while bullying Captain Haddock into regaining his sobriety, his family seat, and his eagerness to partner in further heroic adventures. Spielberg’s industry stature allowed him the autonomy to combine the commercial motivations of contemporary “tentpole” cinema adaptations with aspirations towards personal reputation as an auteurist director. Many of the promotional paratexts associated with the film stress the aesthetic distinction of the director’s practice alongside the blockbuster spectacle of an action film. Reinventing the Literary Brand as FranchiseComic books constitute the “mother lode of franchises” (Balio 26) in a industry that has become increasingly global and risk-adverse (see also Burke). The fan base for comic book movies is substantial and studios pre-promote their investments at events such as the four-day Comic-Con festival held annually in San Diego (Balio 26). Described as “tentpole” films, these adaptations—often of superhero genres—are considered conservative investments by the Hollywood studios because they “constitute media events; […] lend themselves to promotional tie-ins”; are “easy sells in world markets and […] have the ability to spin off sequels to create a franchise” (Balio 26). However, Spielberg chose to adapt a brand little known in the primary market (the US), thus lacking the huge fan-based to which pre-release promotional paratexts might normally be targeted. While this might seem a risky undertaking, it does reflect “changed industry realities” that seek to leverage important international markets (McBride 531). As a producer Spielberg pursued his own strategies to minimise economic risk while allowing him creative choices. This facilitated the pursuit of professional reputation alongside commercial success. The dual release of both War Horse and Tintin exemplify the director-producer’s career practice of bracketing an “entertainment” film with a “more serious work” (McBride 530). The Adventures of Tintin was promoted largely as technical tour de force and spectacle. Conversely War Horse—also adapted from a children’s text—was conceived as a heritage/nostalgia film, marked with the attention to period detail and lyric cinematography of what Matt Hills describes as “aestheticized fiction”. Nevertheless, promotional paratexts stress the discourse of auteurist transformation even in the case of the designedly more commercial Tintin film, as I discuss further below. These pre-release promotions emphasise Spielberg’s “painterly” directorial hand, as well as the professional partnership with Peter Jackson that enabled cutting edge innovation in animation. As McBride explains, the “dual release of the two films in the US was an unusual marketing move” seemingly designed to “showcase Spielberg’s artistic versatility” (McBride 530).Promotional Paratexts and Pre-Recruitment of FansAs Jonathan Gray and Jason Mittell have explained, marketing paratexts predate screen adaptations (Gray; Mittell). As part of the commercial logic of franchise development, selective release of information about a literary brand’s transformation are designed to bring fans of the “original,” or of genre communities such as fantasy or comics audiences, on board with the adaptation. Analysing Steven Moffat’s revelations about the process of adapting and creating a modern TV series from Conan Doyle’s canon (Sherlock), Matt Hills draws attention to the focus on the literary, rather than the many screen reinventions. Moffat’s focus on his childhood passion for the Holmes stories thus grounds the team’s adaptation in a period prior to any “knowledge of rival adaptations […] and any detailed awareness of canon” (326). Spielberg (unlike Jackson) denied any such childhood affective investment, claiming to have been unaware of the similarities between Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and the Tintin series until alerted by a French reviewer of Raiders (McBride 530). In discussing the paradoxical fidelity of his and Jackson’s reimagining of Tintin, Spielberg performed homage to the literary brand while emphasising the aesthetic limitations within the canon of prior adaptations:‘We want Tintin’s adventures to have the reality of a live-action film’, Spielberg explained during preproduction, ‘and yet Peter and I felt that shooting them in a traditional live-action format would simply not honor the distinctive look of the characters and world that Hergé created. Hergé’s characters have been reborn as living beings, expressing emotion and a soul that goes far beyond anything we’ve been able to create with computer-animated characters.’ (McBride 531)In these “reveals”, the discourse positions Spielberg and Jackson as both fans and auteurs, demonstrating affective investment in Hergé’s concepts and world-building while displaying the ingenuity of the partners as cinematic innovators.The Branded Reveal of Transformed ContentAccording to Hills, “quality TV drama” no less than “makeover TV,” is subject to branding practices such as the “reveal” of innovations attributed to creative professionals. Marketing paratexts discursively frame the “professional and creative distinction” of the teams that share and expand the narrative universe of the show’s screen or literary precursors (319–20). Distinction here refers to the cultural capital of the creative teams, as well as to the essential differences between what adaptation theorists refer to as the “hypotext” (source/original) and “hypertext” (adaptation) (Genette Paratexts; Hutcheon). The adaptation’s individualism is fore-grounded, as are the rights of creative teams to inherit, transform, and add richness to the textual universe of the precursor texts. Spielberg denied the “anxiety of influence” (Bloom) linking Tintin and Raiders, though he is reported to have enthusiastically acknowledged the similarities once alerted to them. Nevertheless, Spielberg first optioned Hergé’s series only two years later (1983). Paratexts “reveal” Hergé’s passing of the mantle from author to director, quoting his: “ ‘Yes, I think this guy can make this film. Of course it will not be my Tintin, but it can be a great Tintin’” (McBride 531).Promotional reveals in preproduction show both Spielberg and Jackson performing mutually admiring displays of distinction. Much of this is focused on the choice of motion capture animation, involving attachment of motion sensors to an actor’s body during performance, permitting mapping of realistic motion onto the animated figure. While Spielberg paid tribute to Jackson’s industry pre-eminence in this technical field, the discourse also underlines Spielberg’s own status as auteur. He claimed that Tintin allowed him to feel more like a painter than any prior film. Jackson also underlines the theme of direct imaginative control:The process of operating the small motion-capture virtual camera […] enabled Spielberg to return to the simplicity and fluidity of his 8mm amateur films […] [The small motion-capture camera] enabled Spielberg to put himself literally in the spaces occupied by the actors […] He could walk around with them […] and improvise movements for a film Jackson said they decided should have a handheld feel as much as possible […] All the production was from the imagination right to the computer. (McBride 532)Along with cinematic innovation, pre-release promotions thus rehearse the imaginative pre-eminence of Spielberg’s vision, alongside Jackson and his WETA company’s fantasy credentials, their reputation for meticulous detail, and their innovation in the use of performance capture in live-action features. This rehearsal of professional capital showcases the difference and superiority of The Adventures of Tintin to previous animated adaptations.Case Study 2: Andrew Motion: Silver, Return to Treasure Island (2012)At first glance, literary fiction would seem to be a far-cry from the commercial logics of tentpole cinema. The first work of pure fiction by a former Poet Laureate of Great Britain, updating a children’s classic, Silver: Return to Treasure Island signals itself as an exemplar of quality fiction. Yet the commercial logics of the publishing industry, no less than other media franchises, routinise practices such as author interviews at bookshop visits and festivals, generating paratexts that serve its promotional cycle. Motion’s choice of this classic for adaptation is a step further towards a popular readership than his poetry—or the memoirs, literary criticism, or creative non-fiction (“fabricated” or speculative biographies) (see Mars-Jones)—that constitute his earlier prose output. Treasure Island’s cultural status as boy’s adventure, its exotic setting, its dramatic characters long available in the public domain through earlier screen adaptations, make it a shrewd choice for appropriation in the niche market of literary fiction. Michael Cathcart’s introduction to his ABC Radio National interview with the author hones in on this:Treasure Island is one of those books that you feel as if you’ve read, event if you haven’t. Long John Silver, young Jim Hawkins, Blind Pew, Israel Hands […], these are people who stalk our collective unconscious, and they’re back. (Cathcart)Motion agrees with Cathcart that Treasure Island constitutes literary and common cultural heritage. In both interviews I analyse in the discussion here, Motion states that he “absorbed” the book, “almost by osmosis” as a child, yet returned to it with the mature, critical, evaluative appreciation of the young adult and budding poet (Darragh 27). Stevenson’s original is a “bloody good book”; the implication is that it would not otherwise have met the standards of a literary doyen, possessing a deep knowledge of, and affect for, the canon of English literature. Commercial Logic and Cultural UpdatingSilver is an unauthorised sequel—in Genette’s taxonomy, a “continuation”. However, in promotional interviews on the book and broadcast circuit, Motion claimed a kind of license from the practice of Stevenson, a fellow writer. Stevenson himself notes that a significant portion of the “bar silver” remained on the island, leaving room for a sequel to be generated. In Silver, Jim, the son of Stevenson’s Jim Hawkins, and Natty, daughter of Long John Silver and the “woman of colour”, take off to complete and confront the consequences of their parents’ adventures. In interviews, Motion identifies structural gaps in the precursor text that are discursively positioned to demand completion from, in effect, Stevenson’s literary heir: [Stevenson] was a person who was interested in sequels himself, indeed he wrote a sequel to Kidnapped [which is] proof he was interested in these things. (Cathcart)He does leave lots of doors and windows open at the end of Treasure Island […] perhaps most bewitchingly for me, as the Hispaniola sails away, they leave behind three maroons. So what happened to them? (Darragh)These promotional paratexts drop references to Great Expectations, Heart of Darkness, Lord of the Flies, Wild Sargasso Sea, the plays of Shakespeare and Tom Stoppard, the poetry of Auden and John Clare, and Stevenson’s own “self-conscious” sources: Defoe, Marryat. Discursively, they evidence “double coding” (Hills) as both homage for the canon and the literary “brand” of Stevenson’s popular original, while implicated in the commercial logic of the book industry’s marketing practices.Displays of DistinctionMotion’s interview with Sarah Darragh, for the National Association of Teachers of English, performs the role of man of letters; Motion “professes” and embodies the expertise to speak authoritatively on literature, its criticism, and its teaching. Literature in general, and Silver in particular, he claims, is not “just polemic”, that is “not how it works”, but it does has the ability to recruit readers to moral perspectives, to convey “ new ideas[s] of the self.” Silver’s distinction from Treasure Island lies in its ability to position “deep” readers to develop what is often labelled “theory of mind” (Wolf and Barzillai): “what good literature does, whether you know it or not, is to allow you to be someone else for a bit,” giving us “imaginative projection into another person’s experience” (Darragh 29). A discourse of difference and superiority is also associated with the transformed “brand.” Motion is emphatic that Silver is not a children’s book—“I wouldn’t know how to do that” (Darragh 28)—a “lesser” genre in canonical hierarchies. It is a writerly and morally purposeful fiction, “haunted” by greats of the canon and grounded in expertise in philosophical and literary heritage. In addition, he stresses the embedded seriousness of his reinvention: it is “about how to be a modern person and about greed and imperialism” (Darragh 27), as well as a deliberatively transformed artefact:The road to literary damnation is […] paved with bad sequels and prequels, and the reason that they fail […] is that they take the original on at its own game too precisely […] so I thought, casting my mind around those that work [such as] Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead […] or Jean Rhys’ wonderful novel Wide Sargasso Sea which is about the first Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre […] that if I took a big step away from the original book I would solve this problem of competing with something I was likely to lose in competition with and to create something that was a sort of homage […] towards it, but that stood at a significant distance from it […]. (Cathcart) Motion thus rehearses homage and humility, while implicitly defending the transformative imagination of his “sequel” against the practice of lesser, failed, clonings.Motion’s narrative expansion of Stevenson’s fictional universe is an example of “overwriting continuity” established by his predecessor, and thus allowing him to make “meaningful claims to creative and professional distinction” while demonstrating his own “creative viewpoint” (Hills 320). The novel boldly recapitulates incidental details, settings, and dramatic embedded character-narrations from Treasure Island. Distinctively, though, its opening sequence is a paean to romantic sensibility in the tradition of Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1799–1850).The Branded Reveal of Transformed ContentSilver’s paratexts discursively construct its transformation and, by implication, improvement, from Stevenson’s original. Motion reveals the sequel’s change of zeitgeist, its ideological complexity and proximity to contemporary environmental and postcolonial values. These are represented through the superior perspective of romanticism and the scientific lens on the natural world:Treasure Island is a pre-Enlightenment story, it is pre-French Revolution, it’s the bad old world […] where people have a different ideas of democracy […] Also […] Jim is beginning to be aware of nature in a new way […] [The romantic poet, John Clare] was publishing in the 1820s but a child in the early 1800s, I rather had him in mind for Jim as somebody who was seeing the world in the same sort of way […] paying attention to the little things in nature, and feeling a sort of kinship with the natural world that we of course want to put an environmental spin on these days, but [at] the beginning of the 1800s was a new and important thing, a romantic preoccupation. (Cathcart)Motion’s allusion to Wild Sargasso Sea discursively appropriates Rhys’s feminist and postcolonial reimagination of Rochester’s creole wife, to validate his portrayal of Long John Silver’s wife, the “woman of colour.” As Christian Moraru has shown, this rewriting of race is part of a book industry trend in contemporary American adaptations of nineteenth-century texts. Interviews position readers of Silver to receive the novel in terms of increased moral complexity, sharing its awareness of the evils of slavery and violence silenced in prior adaptations.Two streams of influence [come] out of Treasure Island […] one is Pirates of the Caribbean and all that jolly jape type stuff, pirates who are essentially comic [or pantomime] characters […] And the other stream, which is the other face of Long John Silver in the original is a real menace […] What we are talking about is Somalia. Piracy is essentially a profoundly serious and repellent thing […]. (Cathcart)Motion’s transformation of Treasure Island, thus, improves on Stevenson by taking some of the menace that is “latent in the original”, yet downplayed by the genre reinvented as “jolly jape” or “gorefest.” In contrast, Silver is “a book about serious things” (Cathcart), about “greed and imperialism” and “how to be a modern person,” ideologically reconstructed as “philosophical history” by a consummate man of letters (Darragh).ConclusionWhen iconic literary brands are reimagined across media, genres and modes, creative professionals frequently need to balance various affective and commercial investments in the precursor text or property. Updatings of classic texts require interpretation and the negotiation of subtle changes in values that have occurred since the creation of the “original.” Producers in risk-averse industries such as screen and publishing media practice a certain pragmatism to ensure that fans’ nostalgia for a popular brand is not too violently scandalised, while taking care to reproduce currently popular technologies and generic conventions in the interest of maximising audience. As my analysis shows, promotional circuits associated with “quality” fiction and cinema mirror the commercial logics associated with less valorised genres. Promotional paratexts reveal transformations of content that position audiences to receive them as creative innovations, superior in many senses to their literary precursors due to the distinctive expertise of creative professionals. Paying lip-service the sophisticated reading practices of contemporary fans of both cinema and literary fiction, their discourse shows the conflicting impulses to homage, critique, originality, and recruitment of audiences.ReferencesBalio, Tino. Hollywood in the New Millennium. London: Palgrave Macmillan/British Film Institute, 2013.Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987. Burke, Liam. The Comic Book Film Adaptation: Exploring Modern Hollywood's Leading Genre. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2015. Cathcart, Michael (Interviewer). Andrew Motion's Silver: Return to Treasure Island. 2013. Transcript of Radio Interview. Prod. Kate Evans. 26 Jan. 2013. 10 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/booksplus/silver/4293244#transcript›.Darragh, Sarah. "In Conversation with Andrew Motion." NATE Classroom 17 (2012): 27–30.Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1997. ———. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Gray, Jonathan. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. New York: New York UP, 2010.Hills, Matt. "Rebranding Dr Who and Reimagining Sherlock: 'Quality' Television as 'Makeover TV Drama'." International Journal of Cultural Studies 18.3 (2015): 317–31.Johnson, Derek. Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries. Postmillennial Pop. New York: New York UP, 2013.Mars-Jones, Adam. "A Thin Slice of Cake." The Guardian, 16 Feb. 2003. 5 Oct. 2015 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/16/andrewmotion.fiction›.McBride, Joseph. Steven Spielberg: A Biography. 3rd ed. London: Faber & Faber, 2012.Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York UP, 2015.Moraru, Christian. Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning. Herndon, VA: State U of New York P, 2001. Motion, Andrew. Silver: Return to Treasure Island. London: Jonathan Cape, 2012.Raiders of the Lost Ark. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Paramount/Columbia Pictures, 1981.Wolf, Maryanne, and Mirit Barzillai. "The Importance of Deep Reading." Educational Leadership. March (2009): 32–36.Wordsworth, William. The Prelude, or, Growth of a Poet's Mind: An Autobiographical Poem. London: Edward Moxon, 1850.

As Lewis Carroll’s Alice comes to the end of her journey through the looking glass world, she has also come to the end of her patience with its strange power games and arbitrations. At every stage of the adventure, she has encountered someone who wants to dictate rules and protocols, and a lesson on table manners from the Red Queen finally triggers rebellion. “I can’t stand this any more,” Alice cries, as she seizes the tablecloth and hurls the entire setting into chaos (279). Then, catching hold of the Red Queen, she gives her a good shaking, until the rigid contours of the imperious figure become fuzzy and soft. At this point, the hold of the dream dissolves and Alice, awakening on the other side of the mirror, realises she is shaking the kitten. Queens have long been associated with ideas of transformation. As Alice is duly advised when she first looks out across the chequered landscape of the looking glass world, the rules of chess decree that a pawn may become a queen if she makes it to the other side. The transformation of pawn to queen is in accord with the fairy tale convention of the unspoiled country girl who wins the heart of a prince and is crowned as his bride. This works in a dual register: on one level, it is a story of social elevation, from the lowest to the highest rank; on another, it is a magical transition, as some agent of fortune intervenes to alter the determinations of the social world. But fairy tales also present us with the antithesis and adversary of the fortune-blessed princess, in the figure of the tyrant queen who works magic to shape destiny to her own ends. The Queen and the mirror converge in the cultural imaginary, working transformations that disrupt the order of nature, invert socio-political hierarchies, and flout the laws of destiny. In “Snow White,” the powers of the wicked queen are mediated by the looking glass, which reflects and affirms her own image while also serving as a panopticon, keep the entire realm under surveillance, to pick up any signs of threat to her pre-eminence. All this turbulence in the order of things lets loose a chaotic phantasmagoria that is prime material for film and animation. Two major film versions of “Snow White” have been released in the past few years—Mirror Mirror (2012) and Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)—while Tim Burton’s animated 3D rendition of Alice in Wonderland was released in 2010. Alice through the Looking Glass (2016) and The Huntsman: Winter’s War, the 2016 prequel to Snow White and the Huntsman, continue the experiment with state-of-the-art-techniques in 3D animation and computer-generated imaging to push the visual boundaries of fantasy. Perhaps this escalating extravagance in the creation of fantasy worlds is another manifestation of the ancient lore and law of sorcery: that the magic of transformation always runs out of control, because it disrupts the all-encompassing design of an ordered world. This principle is expressed with poetic succinctness in Ursula Le Guin’s classic story A Wizard of Earthsea, when the Master Changer issues a warning to his most gifted student: But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. (48)In Le Guin’s story, transformation is only dangerous if it involves material change; illusions of all kinds are ultimately harmless because they are impermanent.Illusions mediated by the mirror, however, blur the distinction Le Guin is making, for the mirror image supposedly reflects a real world. And it holds the seductive power of a projected narcissism. Seeing what we wish for is an experience that can hold us captive in a way that changes human nature, and so leads to dangerous acts with material consequences. The queen in the mirror becomes the wicked queen because she converts the world into her image, and in traditions of animation going back to Disney’s original Snow White (1937) the mirror is itself an animate being, with a spirit whose own determinations become paramount. Though there are exceptions in the annals of fairy story, powers of transformation are typically dark powers, turbulent and radically elicit. When they are mediated through the agency of the mirror, they are also the powers of narcissism and autocracy. Through a Glass DarklyIn her classic cultural history of the mirror, Sabine Melchior-Bonnet tracks a duality in the traditions of symbolism associated with it. This duality is already evident in Biblical allusions to the mirror, with references to the Bible itself as “the unstained mirror” (Proverbs 7.27) counterpointed by images of the mortal condition as one of seeing “through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians 13.12).The first of these metaphoric conventions celebrates the crystalline purity of a reflecting surface that reveals the spiritual identity beneath the outward form of the human image. The church fathers drew on Plotinus to evoke “a whole metaphysics of light and reflection in which the visible world is the image of the invisible,” and taught that “humans become mirrors when they cleanse their souls (Melchior-Bonnet 109–10). Against such invocations of the mirror as an intermediary for the radiating presence of the divine in the mortal world, there arises an antithetical narrative, in which it is portrayed as distorting, stained, and clouded, and therefore an instrument of delusion. Narcissus becomes the prototype of the human subject led astray by the image itself, divorced from material reality. What was the mirror if not a trickster? Jean Delumeau poses this question in a preface to Melchior-Bonnet’s book (xi).Through the centuries, as Melchior-Bonnet’s study shows, these two strands are interwoven in the cultural imaginary, sometimes fused, and sometimes torn asunder. With Venetian advances in the techniques and technologies of mirror production in the late Renaissance, the mirror gained special status as a possession of pre-eminent beauty and craftsmanship, a means by which the rich and powerful could reflect back to themselves both the self-image they wanted to see, and the world in the background as a shimmering personal aura. This was an attempt to harness the numinous influence of the divinely radiant mirror in order to enhance the superiority of leading aristocrats. By the mid seventeenth century, the mirror had become an essential accessory to the royal presence. Queen Anne of Austria staged a Queen’s Ball in 1633, in a hall surrounded by mirrors and tapestries. The large, finely polished mirror panels required for this kind of display were made exclusively by craftsmen at Murano, in a process that, with its huge furnaces, its alternating phases of melting and solidifying, its mysterious applications of mercury and silver, seemed to belong to the transformational arts of alchemy. In 1664, Louis XIV began to steal unique craftsmen from Murano and bring them to France, to set up the Royal Glass and Mirror Company whose culminating achievement was the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.The looking glass world of the palace was an arena in which courtiers and visitors engaged in the high-stakes challenge of self-fashioning. Costume, attitude, and manners were the passport to advancement. To cut a figure at court was to create an identity with national and sometimes international currency. It was through the art of self-fashioning that the many princesses of Europe, and many more young women of title and hereditary distinction, competed for the very few positions as consort to the heir of a royal house. A man might be born to be king, but a woman had to become a queen.So the girl who would be queen looks in the mirror to assess her chances. If her face is her fortune, what might she be? A deep relationship with the mirror may serve to enhance her beauty and enable her to realise her wish, but like all magical agents, the mirror also betrays anyone with the hubris to believe they are in control of it. In the Grimm’s story of “Snow White,” the Queen practises the ancient art of scrying, looking into a reflective surface to conjure images of things distant in time and place. But although the mirror affords her the seer’s visionary capacity to tell what will be, it does not give her the power to control the patterns of destiny. Driven to attempt such control, she must find other magic in order to work the changes she desires, and so she experiments with spells of self-transformation. Here the doubleness of the mirror plays out across every plane of human perception: visual, ethical, metaphysical, psychological. A dynamic of inherent contradiction betrays the figure who tries to engage the mirror as a servant. Disney’s original 1937 cartoon shows the vain Queen brewing an alchemical potion that changes her into the very opposite of all she has sought to become: an ugly, ill-dressed, and impoverished old woman. This is the figure who can win and betray trust from the unspoiled princess to whom the arts of self-fashioning are unknown. In Tarsem Singh’s film Mirror Mirror, the Queen actually has two mirrors. One is a large crystal egg that reflects back a phantasmagoria of palace scenes; the other, installed in a primitive hut on an island across the lake, is a simple looking glass that shows her as she really is. Snow White and the Huntsman portrays the mirror as a golden apparition, cloaked and faceless, that materialises from within the frame to stand before her. This is not her reflection, but with every encounter, she takes on more of its dark energies, until, in another kind of reversal, she becomes its image and agent in the wider world. As Ursula Le Guin’s sage teaches the young magician, magic has its secret economies. You pay for what you get, and the changes wrought will come back at you in ways you would never have foreseen. The practice of scrying inevitably leads the would-be clairvoyant into deeper levels of obscurity, until the whole world turns against the seer in a sequence of manifestations entirely contrary to his or her framework of expectation. Ultimately, the lesson of the mirror is that living in obscurity is a defining aspect of the human condition. Jorge Luis Borges, the blind writer whose work exhibits a life-long obsession with mirrors, surveys a range of interpretations and speculations surrounding the phrase “through a glass darkly,” and quotes this statement from Leon Bloy: “There is no human being on earth capable of declaring with certitude who he is. No one knows what he has come into this world to do . . . or what his real name is, his enduring Name in the register of Light” (212).The mirror will never really tell you who you are. Indeed, its effects may be quite the contrary, as Alice discovers when, within a couple of moves on the looking glass chessboard, she finds herself entering the wood of no names. Throughout her adventures she is repeatedly interrogated about who or what she is, and can give no satisfactory answer. The looking glass has turned her into an estranged creature, as bizarre a species as any of those she encounters in its landscapes.Furies“The furies are at home in the mirror,” wrote R. S. Thomas in his poem “Reflections” (265). They are the human image gone haywire, the frightening other of what we hope to see in our reflection. As the mirror is joined by technologies of the moving image in twentieth-century evolutions of the myth, the furies have been given a new lease of life on the cinema screen. In Disney’s 1937 cartoon of Snow White, the mirror itself has the face of a fury, which emerges from a pool of blackness like a death’s head before bringing the Queen’s own face into focus. As its vision comes into conflict with hers, threatening the dissolution of the world over which she presides, the mirror’s face erupts into fire.Computer-generated imaging enables an expansive response to the challenges of visualisation associated with the original furies of classical mythology. The Erinyes are unstable forms, arising from liquid (blood) to become semi-materialised in human guise, always ready to disintegrate again. They are the original undead, hovering between mortal embodiment and cadaverous decay. Tearing across the landscape as a flock of birds, a swarm of insects, or a mass of storm clouds, they gather into themselves tremendous energies of speed and motion. The 2012 film Snow White and the Huntsman, directed by Rupert Sanders, gives us the strongest contemporary realisation of the archaic fury. Queen Ravenna, played by Charlize Theron, is a virtuoso of the macabre, costumed in a range of metallic exoskeletons and a cloak of raven’s feathers, with a raised collar that forms two great black wings either side of her head. Powers of dematerialisation and rematerialisation are central to her repertoire. She undergoes spectacular metamorphosis into a mass of shrieking birds; from the walls around her she conjures phantom soldiers that splinter into shards of black crystal when struck by enemy swords. As she dies at the foot of the steps leading up to the great golden disc of her mirror, her face rapidly takes on the great age she has disguised by vampiric practices.Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen in Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is a figure midway between Disney’s fairy tale spectre and the fully cinematic register of Theron’s Ravenna. Bonham Carter’s Queen, with her accentuated head and pantomime mask of a face, retains the boundaries of form. She also presides over a court whose visual structures express the rigidities of a tyrannical regime. Thus she is no shape-shifter, but energies of the fury are expressed in her voice, which rings out across the presence chamber of the palace and reverberates throughout the kingdom with its calls for blood. Alice through the Looking Glass, James Bobin’s 2016 sequel, puts her at the centre of a vast destructive force field. Alice passes through the mirror to encounter the Lord of Time, whose eternal rule must be broken in order to break the power of the murdering Queen; Alice then opens a door and tumbles in free-fall out into nothingness. The place where she lands is a world not of daydream but of nightmare, where everything will soon be on fire, as the two sides in the chess game advance towards each other for the last battle. This inflation of the Red Queen’s macabre aura and impact is quite contrary to what Lewis Carroll had in mind for his own sequel. In some notes about the stage adaptation of the Alice stories, he makes a painstaking distinction between the characters of the queen in his two stories.I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion—a blind and aimless Fury. The Red Queen I pictured as a Fury, but of another type; her passion must be cold and calm—she must be formal and strict, yet not unkindly; pedantic to the 10th degree, the concentrated essence of governesses. (86)Yet there is clearly a temptation to erase this distinction in dramatisations of Alice’s adventures. Perhaps the Red Queen as a ‘not unkindly’ governess is too restrained a persona for the psychodynamic mythos surrounding the queen in the mirror. The image itself demands more than Carroll wants to accord, and the original Tenniel illustrations give a distinctly sinister look to the stern chess queen. In their very first encounter, the Red Queen contradicts every observation Alice makes, confounds the child’s sensory orientation by inverting the rules of time and motion, and assigns her the role of pawn in the game. Kafka or Orwell would not have been at all relaxed about an authority figure who practises mind control, language management, and identity reassignment. But here Carroll offers a brilliant modernisation of the fairy story tradition. Under the governance of the autocratic queen, wonderland and the looking glass world are places in which the laws of science, logic, and language are overturned, to be replaced by the rules of the queen’s games: cards and croquet in the wonderland, and chess in the looking glass world. Alice, as a well-schooled Victorian child, knows something of these games. She has enough common sense to be aware of how the laws of gravity and time and motion are supposed to work, and if she boasts of being able to believe six impossible things before breakfast, this signifies that she has enough logic to understand the limits of possibility. She would also have been taught about species and varieties and encouraged to make her own collections of natural forms. But the anarchy of the queen’s world extends into the domain of biology: species of all kinds can talk, bodies dissolve or change size, and transmutations occur instantaneously. Thus the world-warping energies of the Erinyes are re-imagined in an absurdist’s challenge to the scientist’s universe and the logician’s mentality.Carroll’s instinct to tame the furies is in accord with the overall tone and milieu of his stories, which are works of quirky charm rather than tales of terror, but his two queens are threatening enough to enable him to build the narrative to a dramatic climax. For film-makers and animators, though, it is the queen who provides the dramatic energy and presence. There is an over-riding temptation to let loose the pandemonium of the original Erinyes, exploiting their visual terror and their classical association with metamorphosis. FashioningThere is some sociological background to the coupling of the queen and the mirror in fairy story. In reality, the mirror might assist an aspiring princess to become queen by enchanting the prince who was heir to the throne, but what was the role of the looking glass once she was crowned? Historically, the self-imaging of the queen has intense and nervous resonances, and these can be traced back to Elizabeth I, whose elaborate persona was fraught with newly interpreted symbolism. Her portraits were her mirrors, and they reflect a figure in whom the qualities of radiance associated with divinity were transferred to the human monarch. Elizabeth developed the art of dressing herself in wearable light. If she lacked for a halo, she made up for it with the extravagant radiata of her ruffs and the wreaths of pearls around her head. Pearls in mediaeval poetry carried the mystique of a luminous microcosm, but they were also mirrors in themselves, each one a miniature reflecting globe. The Ditchely portrait of 1592 shows her standing as a colossus between heaven and earth, with the changing planetary light cycle as background. This is a queen who rules the world through the mediation of her own created image. It is an inevitable step from here to a corresponding intervention in the arrangement of the world at large, which involves the armies and armadas that form the backdrop to her other great portraits. And on the home front, a regime of terror focused on regular public decapitations and other grisly executions completes the strategy to remaking the world according to her will. Renowned costume designer Eiko Ishioka created an aesthetic for Mirror Mirror that combines elements of court fashion from the Elizabethan era and the French ancien régime, with allusions to Versailles. Formality and mannerism are the keynotes for the palace scenes. Julia Roberts as the Queen wears a succession of vast dresses that are in defiance of human scale and proportion. Their width at the hem is twice her height, and 100,000 Svarovski crystals were used for their embellishment. For the masked ball scene, she makes her entry as a scarlet peacock with a high arching ruff of pure white feathers. She amuses herself by arranging her courtiers as pieces on a chess-board. So stiffly attired they can barely move more than a square at a time, and with hats surmounted by precariously balanced ships, they are a mock armada from which the Queen may sink individual vessels on a whim, by ordering a fatal move. Snow White and the Huntsman takes a very different approach to extreme fashioning. Designer Colleen Atwood suggests the shape-shifter in the Queen’s costumes, incorporating materials evoking a range of species: reptile scales, fluorescent beetle wings from Thailand, and miniature bird skulls. There is an obvious homage here to the great fashion designer Alexander McQueen, whose hallmark was a fascination with the organic costuming of creatures in feathers, fur, wool, scales, shells, and fronds. Birds were everywhere in McQueen’s work. His 2006 show Widows of Culloden featured a range of headdresses that made the models look as if they had just walked through a flock of birds in full flight. The creatures were perched on their heads with outstretched wings askance across the models’ faces, obscuring their field of vision. As avatars from the spirit realm, birds are emblems of otherness, and associated with metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls. These resonances give a potent mythological aura to Theron’s Queen of the dark arts.Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman accordingly present strikingly contrasted versions of self-fashioning. In Mirror Mirror we have an approach driven by traditions of aristocratic narcissism and courtly persona, in which form is both rigid and extreme. The Queen herself, far from being a shape-shifter, is a prisoner of the massive and rigid architecture that is her costume. Snow White and the Huntsman gives us a more profoundly magical interpretation, where form is radically unstable, infused with strange energies that may at any moment manifest themselves through violent transformation.Atwood was also costume designer for Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, where an invented framing story foregrounds the issue of fashioning as social control. Alice in this version is a young woman, being led by her mother to a garden party where a staged marriage proposal is to take place. Alice, as the social underling in the match, is simply expected to accept the honour. Instead, she escapes the scene and disappears down a rabbit hole to return to the wonderland of her childhood. In a nice comedic touch, her episodes of shrinking and growing involve an embarrassing separation from her clothes, so divesting her also of the demure image of the Victorian maiden. Atwood provides her with a range of fantasy party dresses that express the free spirit of a world that is her refuge from adult conformity.Alice gets to escape the straitjacket of social formation in Carroll’s original stories by overthrowing the queen’s game, and with it her micro-management of image and behaviour. There are other respects, though, in which Alice’s adventures are a form of social and moral fashioning. Her opening reprimand to the kitten includes some telling details about her own propensities. She once frightened a deaf old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, “Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyaena and you’re a bone!” (147). Playing kings and queens is one of little Alice’s favourite games, and there is more than a touch of the Red Queen in the way she bosses and manages the kitten. It is easy to laud her impertinence in the face of the tyrannical characters she meets in her fantasies, but does she risk becoming just like them?As a story of moral self-fashioning, Alice through the Looking Glass cuts both ways. It is at once a critique of the Victorian social straitjacket, and a child’s fable about self-improvement. To be accorded the status of queen and with it the freedom of the board is also to be invested with responsibilities. If the human girl is the queen of species, how will she measure up? The published version of the story excludes an episode known to editors as “The Wasp in a Wig,” an encounter that takes place as Alice reaches the last ditch before the square upon which she will be crowned. She is about to jump the stream when she hears a sigh from woods behind her. Someone here is very unhappy, and she reasons with herself about whether there is any point in stopping to help. Once she has made the leap, there will be no going back, but she is reluctant to delay the move, as she is “very anxious to be a Queen” (309). The sigh comes from an aged creature in the shape of a wasp, who is sitting in the cold wind, grumbling to himself. Her kind enquiries are greeted with a succession of waspish retorts, but she persists and does not leave until she has cheered him up. The few minutes devoted “to making the poor old creature comfortable,” she tells herself, have been well spent.Read in isolation, the episode is trite and interferes with the momentum of the story. Carroll abandoned it on the advice of his illustrator John Tenniel, who wrote to say it didn’t interest him in the least (297). There is interest of another kind in Carroll’s instinct to arrest Alice’s momentum at that critical stage, with what amounts to a small morality tale, but Tenniel’s instinct was surely right. The mirror as a social object is surrounded by traditions of self-fashioning that are governed by various modes of conformity: moral, aesthetic, political. Traditions of myth and fantasy allow wider imaginative scope for the role of the mirror, and by association, for inventive speculation about human transformation in a world prone to extraordinary upheavals. ReferencesBorges, Jorge Luis. “Mirrors of Enigma.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Eds. Donald A. Yates and James Irby. New York: New Directions, 2007. 209–12. Carroll, Lewis. Alice through the Looking Glass. In The Annotated Alice. Ed. Martin Gardner. London: Penguin, 2000.The King James Bible.Le Guin, Ursula. The Earthsea Quartet. London: Penguin, 2012.Melchior-Bonnet, Sabine. The Mirror: A History. Trans. Katherine H. Jewett. London: Routledge, 2014.Thomas, R.S. “Reflections.” No Truce with the Furies, Collected Later Poems 1988–2000. Hexham, Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2011.