ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth- to twentieth-century transition from Europe to America the authors saw a shift in both the location of global political/economic strength and in the dominant form of cultural expression, from European play/ novel to American movies. If this is more than a spurious correlation then perhaps there is some causal association between global political and cultural dominance. One way to examine this hypothesis is to look for evidence of both the successor to North America in economic prowess and indicators of new forms of expression that might be twenty-first-century successors to the live action movie. One obvious possibility is the US, where computer generated special effects have been magnificently interwoven with live action. But this may not be the case, for there seems to be a necessary shift in the geo-economic foundation which undergirds the development of new forms of storytelling.
