A French version of the CFP can be found at their website, here.
CALL FOR PAPERS – SYNOPTIQUE ISSUE 12.1 – “RETHINKING ANALOG EFFECTS AND ANIMATION PRACTICES”
This issue aims to restore much-needed scholarly attention to analog effects and other hands-on approaches to filmmaking in analog and contemporary digital cinema. Special effects have become a growing area in film studies with the rise of digital cinema since the turn of the century, sparking renewed interest across academic writing, popular culture, journalism, and fandom. Scholars such as Warren Buckland, Stephen Prince, Charlie Keil, Kristen Whissel, and Julie A. Turnock have primarily focused on the cinematic realism of CGI and its ubiquitous use in Hollywood mainstream cinema. Furthermore, as Dan North, Bob Rehak, and Michael S. Duffy point out, scholars such as Prince adopted the premise that “everything once we thought as ‘special effects’ can now be understood as digital phenomena, fully integrated with the storytelling apparatus of mainstream film-making” (2015, 21). This erasure of boundaries between digital and analog gives the impression that studying what is digital can account for all effect processes. However, monopolizing our attention over digital effects should not come at the expense of “historically grounded analysis of the multiple, complex and varied ways in which film fabricate and frame their representational terrain” (2015, 21). The digital turn does not completely erase analog effects: they continue to coexist with CG methods, generate new aesthetics and rhetorics, and gain new areas of use in filmmaking contexts beyond Hollywood. The academic fixation on digital effects also obscures the diversity of topics that could be studied within the wider field of animation studies. Lev Manovich’s (1996) definition of digital cinema, as a form of animation that uses photographic images as one of its graphic resources, opened at the time important reflections about the nature of cinema, animation, and CGI. The digital effects appeared then to be a very productive subject to study relations between animation and cinema. Animation is not, and never was, only one technique, but rather a wide set of practices. Studying only digital effects limits our vision to only one of the many crossroads between live-action and the diversity of animation, while each of these points of convergence is the key to another aspect of cinema as a whole.
Departing from the Hollywood-dominated prior literature, this issue seeks to shed light on the economical, aesthetic, and political implications of using analog effects and animation techniques in national and transnational frameworks. According to Turnock (2022), the effects industry leader ILM (Industrial Light and Magic) has engendered an aesthetic for effects realism powerful enough to draw companies within and beyond Hollywood to adhere to its stylistic standards. Diverging from these standards may align with ideas of political or economic resistance or asserting cultural or national specificity, thus creating diversity in the face of Hollywood’s homogenizing impact. Revisiting the analog approaches of the analog era also deepens our understanding of film history. Studies by Julie A. Turnock (2012), Laura Mulvey (2012), Vivian Sobchack (2014), and Ariel Rogers (2019) on the standardization of rear projection in the 1930s offer a renewed perspective on how this once-despised technique does more than clash with the transparent aesthetic of classical Hollywood cinema, as its “clumsy visibility” (Mulvey 214) can also produce a distinctive aesthetic impact that advances the narrative.
Scholars have debated whether the transition from analog to digital cinema (and thus from analog to digital effects) should be seen as a radical rupture or a historical continuum. In both cases, analog effects of pre- and post-digital cinema activate important questions that shouldn’t be overshadowed by the dominance of Hollywood’s effects realism in recent scholarly writings. As Dan North, Bob Rehak, and Michael S. Duffy write, “the narrative input of special effects to the overall impact and import of a film is never simply the direct transposition of events in a screenplay to images on a screen, but the technological mediation of those events” (2015, 27). Referring to King Kong, they argue that Kong would have evoked a different set of meanings if played by an actor in a gorilla suit. Similarly, the deliberate preference for analog effects produces narrative meanings distinct from those that could have been generated by CG-dominated imagery. The preference for ‘analog’ over ‘digital’ also foregrounds labour-related questions. The use of analog techniques, such as stop-motion animation, requires specific material—an articulate puppet, a miniature landscape, as in the case of Kong— long shooting periods for the animator to operate one frame at a time and often a large team of skilled practitioners. These factors, alongside the marketing discourses foregrounding the “handmade” and human status of analog approaches, may obscure or even legitimize exploitative labour practices.
We thus look for submissions that study the economic, aesthetic, and political implications of using analog effects, whether through a renewed focus on film history or contemporary counter- or beyond-Hollywood filmmaking practices.
Papers that are submitted to this issue of Synoptique may include, but are not limited to, the following topics:
– DIY filmmaking practices, craft practices
– Materiality of analog effects/animation
– Haptic visuality and analog techniques
– Analog effects in contemporary mainstream cinema
– Analog effects/animation in national/transnational cinemas
– Historical analysis, archival practices on analog effects and animation
– Special effects, animation, and experimental filmmaking practices
– Analog effects and questions of film authorship
– Analog effects as a convergence of live action and animation
– Circulation of animation skills and techniques in live action cinema through visual effects
– Analog effects, transmedial storytelling and object-based fan practices
– Analog animation and transnational labour in media production
Essays submitted for peer review should be approximately 5,500-7,500 words. Submissions for the non-reviewed section should be approximately 1,500-3,500 words. Reviews should be approximately 2,000 words. All submissions must conform to Chicago author-date style (18th ed.). All images must include photo credits and captions.
They also welcome reviews of relevant recent books, films, conferences, and film festivals.
Video essays submitted for peer review; interventions such as visual reconstitutions of film and animation production processes, or relevant archives are also accepted. These can be submitted in digital video, still images, or multimedia formats and will be hosted or embedded on the Synoptique website, and/or otherwise linked to in the PDF version of the journal.
Submissions may be written in either French or English.
You may also contact them with your submission ideas and other questions.
Please submit completed essays or works to the journal editors (editor@synoptique.ca) and copy the issue guest editors, Baptiste Mesot (baptiste.mesot@unil.ch) and Zeynep Aras (araszeynep.24@gmail.com) by July 7th, 2026. They will send notifications of acceptance by August 7th, 2026.