The Winter F&DM/HAVC Colloquium Series begins with a talk by Jack Halberstam,
Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity and Gender Studies at USC.
Flying the Coop: Stop Motion Animation and The Cinema of Escape
In the opening sequence in the now classic claymation feature Chicken Run, Mr. Tweedy, a bumbling farmer informs his much more efficient wife that the chickens are “organized.” Mrs. Tweedy dismisses her husband’s outrageous notion and tells him to focus more on profits, explaining to him that they are not getting enough out of their chickens and need to move on from egg harvesting to the chicken pot-pie industry. As Mrs. Tweedy ponders new modes of production, Mr. Tweedy keeps an eye on the chicken coop, scanning for signs of activity and escape. The scene is now set for a battle between production and labor, human and animal, management and employees, containment and escape. As Chicken Run humorously shows, the animated feature film draws much of its dramatic intensity from the struggle between human and non-human creatures. What are we to make of this Marxist allegory in the form of a children’s film, this animal farm narrative of resistance, revolt and utopia pitted against new waves of industrialization and featuring claymation birds in the role of the revolutionary subject? How do neo-anarchist narrative forms find their way into children’s entertainment and what do adult viewers make of them? More importantly, what does animation have to do with revolution? And finally, how do revolutionary themes in animated film connect to queer notions of self? This paper examines stop motion animation in Chicken Run, Coraline, The Fantastic Mr Fox and Wallace and Gromit for insights into the relations between suspense, transformation, surprise and other temporal modes of becoming.
Jack Halberstam is Professor of English, Gender Studies and American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. Halberstam is the author of three books including Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998) and In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005) and has another book in press with Duke UP titled The Queer Art of Failure. Today's talk comes from this last book. Halberstam works broadly in the areas of queer studies, gender studies, cultural studies and visual studies and contributes to a blog at Bullybloggers.com. Halberstam is working on two future projects: one on the Kindertransport and post-Holocaust memory and the other on "The End of Heterosexuality."
Sponsored by the Arts Research Institute