The talk first discusses basic techniques of visual aesthetics, abstraction, exaggeration, and complexity reduction. It then uses these techniques to analyze facial expressions, gaze direction, and body language in animated films, their emotional effects and how these expressions are afforded by brain structures in somato-sensory cortex and the tempero-parietal junction. It discusses how and why animated films are ultra-social but also have elements pertinent to animal survival mechanisms of hiding, tracking, trapping, observing, fighting and fleeing. Finally it briefly mentions the role of violation of ontological categories and the role of metaphor in cartoons.
