Understanding the Research Article
After gathering the group together we had a brief read through a lot of articles from Animation: an Interdisciplinary Journal and ended up deciding on the article titled – ”The Afterlife as Emotional Utopia in Coco” by George Crosthwait. Initially this research article looked pretty daunting, it had a lot of complex vocabulary that on its own I understood but combined like it was in the article it made my head spin. It took a while but I went through it and highlighted key points that stood out to me as well as any relevant references and quotations. I then went ahead and looked more in-depth, looking outside the article for some examples to better understand some of Crosthwait’s points and find some more examples of what he talks about. For this I had my work written on paper but for clarity I went and translated these onto a word document. I realised I largely focussed on the first two sections of the article so I was hoping to present one of these for the prestation itself. I thought there was some interesting points that Crosthwait made but largely the article felt a bit uncertain of what it was explaining.
When it came to referencing I largely followed along with this guide as I’m still getting used to Harvard referencing style: https://library-guides.ucl.ac.uk/harvard/journal-article .
Research References:
Bolton CA (2002) From wooden cyborgs to celluloid souls: Mechanical bodies in anime and Japanese puppet theater. Positions 10(3), 1 August: pp. 729–771
Brown. K. (2019) ‘Utopias and Dystopias: The Potential of Human Nature’, Ball State University, 4 April. Available at: https://blogs.bsu.edu/dlr/2019/04/04/utopias-and-dystopias-the-potential-of-human-nature/ (Accessed 9 February).
Coco (2017). [Online] Directed by Lee Unkrich. United States. Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar Animated Studios. Available from Disney+. (Viewed 3 February 2024).
Cowen A.S. (2020) ‘What music makes us feel: At least 13 dimensions organize subjective experiences associated with music across different cultures’ PNAS 117(4), pp. 1924-1934
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1910704117
Crosthwait, G. (2020). ‘The Afterlife as Emotional Utopia in Coco’ Animation: an Interdisciplinary Journal 15(2), pp. 179–192
DB Damage (2023). ‘Emotions From Music: The Connection Between Sound and Feelings’ Sounds of Life 28 March. Available at: https://www.soundoflife.com/blogs/experiences/emotions-from-music (Accessed 9 February 2024)
Dyer R (2002[1992]) Only Entertainment. London: Routledge.
Filmtheory.org (2015). ‘New Sincerity’. Available at: https://www.filmtheory.org/new-sincerity/ (Accessed 7 February 2024).
Glocker, M.L. et al. (2009) Baby schema in infant faces induces cuteness perception and motivation for caretaking in adults, Ethology : formerly Zeitschrift fur Tierpsychologie. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3260535/#:~:text=He%20described%20the%20baby%20schema,elicits%20caretaking%20behavior%20from%20other (Accessed: 3 February 2024).
McCulloch, J. (2021). ‘Utopias: Do We Need ‘Em’?’, Medium, 18 May. Available at: https://jrmcculloch.medium.com/utopias-do-we-need-em-81562a5515e (Accessed 9 February 2024).
‘New Sincerity’ Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_sincerity (Accessed 7 February 2024).
‘San Junipero’ (2016), Black Mirror, Series 3, Episode 4. Directed by: Owen Harris, Written by: Charlie Brooker. Netflix. 21 October.
The Good Place. (2016) Netflix, 21 September.
Uhrig M (2019a) AnimOtion: Animating emotions in the digital age. In: Uhrig M (ed.) Emotion in Animated Films. Abingdon: Routledge, 3–12.
Wallace DF (1993) E unibus pluram: Television and U.S. fiction. Review of Contemporary Fiction 13(2), Summer: pp. 151–194.
Zong, M. (2020) ‘Research on Character Expression Shaping in Animation Movies’ Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research 416 Atlantis Press doi:10.2991/assehr.k.200316.035
Developing the Presentation
I knew that for our presentation we needed to have something visually appealing, so I went online to https://slidesgo.com and looked for something that fit the topic of our research article, and then I sent this over to my group to confirm the style of it, they all seemed to enjoy. Then I went and set up the design of how our slides should look, and I trusted my group members to follow along with this.
We briefly discussed in class how we would split up the article to present it, and I just asked which section each of my group members liked and we worked from there. I think that I should have pushed a group member to take on the animation section, as we ended up having to cut this out and two members picked largely similar sections, without doing outside research. I decided to choose the first section of the article, which discussed the purpose of utopian media as it was the most interesting and where I learnt the most information. I then went and cut out any of the research that I wouldn’t be referencing during the presentation. Trying to fit all of my knowledge in about 3 minutes was really hard, but I think I was able to pick out the key points.
I also arranged a call for us to practice the presentation, making sure that we said was hitting under our 10-minute time limit and to make sure that what we said was making sense, reflecting our understanding of the article. Unfortunately, only Sean joined this call so we were able to make sure out parts read well and practice together, I also placed his reference onto the research slide and aske if he had any other points of reflection that we could discuss, but he said I captured his own thoughts with what I had already. I wish my group had a bit more communication and discussion of the article as I felt that I took on a majority of the work by myself, but I understand that people have work and can’t always be available.
These were the slides that I created for our group presentation:
When it came to presenting I thought it went relatively well, I found myself very nervous and stumbled over some words but was able to speak without assistance from flashcards and we fell around the 10-minute time limit. I think public speaking is getting a bit easier the more I do it! I hope I was able to communicate my comprehension of the article, and provide some insightful reflection while backing up my criticisms.
Overall, this assignment was very stressful and I feel my group didn’t communicate the best, and was largely unorganised. I think the presentation could have benefitted from more in-depth research but I still managed to learn a lot despite not agreeing with the article, and was largely able to summarise what I wanted into our given time limit, condensing information is not my strong suit but I believe I’m improving on my analysis and understanding of academic papers and writings from last year.