The Teachers' Animation Toolkit

Profi t:
When the money taken from audiences paying to see the fi lm 
exceeds the production cost.
Programme:
A piece of content on TV, online: drama, documentary, news etc. 
Animation could handle any of these.

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Glossary of Terms
Projector: 
The machine that a fi lm or DVD is screened from onto a screen.
Promotion:
Promotion is another word we might use to cover the same ideas 
as the term marketing. It is about putting a fi lm into the world and 
creating a set of specifi c associations with it. It also becomes 
an issue of branding. Think how we associate the name Disney 
with a certain kind of animated fi lm or the name Aardman. The 
promotion of a given fi lm is not only about promoting the fi lm in 
itself but also, to some degree, the studio and producers who 
have made the fi lm.
Propaganda:
This is the promotion of an ideological and political position. Film 
and propaganda have a longstanding relationship and animation 
has played a powerful part in this around the world. In America, 
Britain, Europe and Japan, among other nations, animation has 
been used to boost morale and promote messages and information.
Ratings:
This relates to classifi cation. Most animated fi lms that the majority 
of audiences will be familiar with will have a U or PG rating. This 
is not to say that an animated fi lm cannot be rated for older, 
more mature audiences. Examples of this are 
Alice
and 
Street of 
Crocodiles
. These two fi lms are not appropriate for younger pupils 
but may be deemed appropriate for 15- to 16-year-old students.
Realism:
Realism is the idea that the fi lm we are watching is showing us 
something truthful and accurate about life–it’s something that the 
audience recognizes based on their own experience of the world. 
Realism can be found in the way characters behave or speak and 
the kind of situations and subjects that you choose to make your 
fi lm about.
Realistic:
We say that a fi lm is realistic if it offers a view or recreation of 
the world that we recognize as somehow accurate not only in 

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Glossary of Terms
167
terms of visual information but the way in which a story plays 
out and how characters relate to one another. Interestingly, we 
could say that Bambi is unrealistic because the animals in it talk. 
However, they also move with a certain fi delity to realism and 
their environment appears very true to what we know a forest to 
look like.