About - Move Madly
Animation production has ballooned in recent decades. Journalism hasn’t caught up. The field I’m active in, criticism, covers the art and history of live-action cinema well, but less so animation. David Lynch, Andrei Tarkovsky and Agnès Varda are familiar names even outside film circles; Regina Pessoa, Yuri Norstein and Naoko Yamada, not so much.
Move Madly was sparked by the sense that so much interesting animation isn’t receiving the attention it deserves. I’ll write about new releases that do something unusual or fun, as well as films that are considered classics within the animation community yet which ring few bells elsewhere. There will be reviews, essays, interviews with artists and filmmakers.
My focus is on short films, where the work that most excites me happens. But I’ll sometimes branch out to other places where animation is found: features, ads, games and—who knows?—maybe the odd phenakistiscope. I’ll write with newcomers to these subjects in mind, trying to avoid jargon. If there’s anything in particular you’d like me to cover, drop me a line: movemadly@substack.com
Thanks for reading!
My name is Alex Dudok de Wit, and I’ve been writing about animation for over a decade. I used to be Deputy Editor at Cartoon Brew, the leading animation news site, and my writing has also appeared in Sight & Sound, Little White Lies, Vulture, Short of the Week, Skwigly, Time Out and the BBC. I’m part of the selection committee for the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, focusing on animation.
My book BFI Film Classics: Grave of the Fireflies was published by Bloomsbury in 2021. My translation of Hayao Miyazaki’s graphic novel Shuna’s Journey (First Second, 2022) became a New York Times bestseller and won an Eisner Award in 2023.
I tweet here.
(Blog logo: Fantasmagorie (1908) by Émile Cohl. Profile image by Joanna Quinn.)
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