Students, staff, faculty, alumni, and any members of the public are all invited to the Fall 2015-Spring 2016 series of Faculty Pub Night at LMU's William H. Hannon Library. Eight LMU professors (four per semester) are selected annually to discuss their latest publication or project in a comfortable setting and format that welcomes diverse perspectives for an inclusive conversation aimed to educate the entire community.

The second Faculty Pub Night of Spring 2017 features Tom Klein, Associate Professor of Animation at LMU's School of Film and Television. Professor Klein will present, "Evoking the Oracle: Visionary Screen Worlds," his contribution to the recently published anthology, Animated Landscapes: History, Form and Function.

About the Author's Work:

The abstraction of animated landscapes can serve as a parable from which viewers may choose to divine a meaning. This in some ways follows in the tradition of Greek Oracles, with answers framed as riddles. The storytelling tradition of animators, which today is exemplified and amplified by its integration into live-action cinema through visual effects, is making this a topic of growing relevance in screen media. When the logic of a story-world can so easily defy reality and in fact becomes like magic, an audience can be made to reflect on themes from outside a normative framework. This challenges them to decode a meaning from something that may feel like it offers a truth. As cinema and games continue to move in this direction, the notion of the ancient Oracle resonates with contemporary nuance, conjuring the mystery and awe of the human condition.

About the Author:

Tom Klein is an Associate Professor and the Chair of Animation. He is a contributing columnist to the popular website Cartoon Research. His work on the avant-garde mini-films of Shamus Culhane has been written about in The New York Times and is the subject of his curated exhibit at Laband Gallery. He has worked at Universal Cartoon Studios and Vivendi-Universal Games. He is the designer of the strategy game Pirate Ring for iOS. "Evoking the Oracle" appears within the new anthology Animated Landscapes, published by Bloomsbury.

For more information about professor Klein, please visit his faculty webpage or the collection of his Cartoon Research columns.

All Faculty Pub Nights are free and open to the public. Pub refreshments and snacks will be served courtesy of the William H. Hannon Library. For more information or ADA accommodations, please contact Ray Andrade, Programming Librarian, at (310) 258-4648 or randrade@lmu.edu.