DOOZY DECONSTRUCTED at APAR symposium

Richard Squires’ paper DOOZY DECONSTRUCTED is part of the upcoming ANIMATION PRACTICE AS RESEARCH online symposium. It will also be published in the accompanying edition of the journal ANIMATION PRACTICE, PROCESS AND PRODUCTION (Intellect Books). Tickets for the symposium can be booked here.

Hosted by Manchester School of Art and Northumbria University, the symposium is a one-day-event which will be held online on 21st April 2021. The symposium will offer a space for academics, practitioners and students to investigate, define and extrapolate animation practice within the research context. It aims to provide possible frameworks, further understanding and exemplify case studies of practice as research, whilst strengthening and bringing together the animation practice as research community.

There will be a special edition of Animation: Practice, Process and Production (Intellect Press) that will publish all of the papers accepted into the symposium, including the keynote speakers (Robin Nelson and Paul Wells). The symposium has been organized by Dr Samantha Moore (Manchester School of Art) and Ellie Land (Northumbria University, Newcastle).

DOOZY DECONSTRUCTED: ABSTRACT

Doozy Deconstructed documents the research and animation production processes of artist-filmmaker Richard Squires’ debut feature Doozy. Part creative documentary, part essay film, the work utilises a number of distinct techniques to interrogate the voice casting of American actor Paul Lynde as a series of Hanna-Barbera villains in the late 1960s: an animated anti-hero Clovis – designed by Squires and animated by Elroy Simmons – who re-enacts alleged episodes in the life of the actor; a curious gameshow featuring specialist opinions from the worlds of animation, neurology, history and criminology; archival and documentary materials that reveal Lynde’s real-life circumstance. Doozy Deconstructed considers how sexuality is coded and performed by animated characters; Hollywood’s legacy of queer-coded villainy; the relationship between the actor’s real-life circumstance and his animated roles; Hanna Barbera’s motivations in casting the closeted actor; and the experimental strategies Doozy employs to disseminate this research.