Fantasy/Animation

Kirikou and the Sorceress (1998) (with Lewis C. Seifert)

Mon, 04 May 2026 14:27:41 +0000

For Episode 173, Chris and Alex introduce the films of Michel Ocelot with this close look at the filmmaker’s successful animated adventure film - loosely based on a West African folktale - Kirikou and the Sorceress (Michel Ocelot, 1998). The discussion into the film’s articulation of magical realism, power, and struggle features special guest Lewis C. Seifert, who is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Brown University. Lewis’ research interests encompass early Modern France, gender and sexuality studies, folk narratives, and the environmental humanities, and he is the author of Fairy Tales, Sexuality, and Gender in France, 1690-1715: Nostalgic Utopias (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Manning the Margins: Masculinity and Writing in Seventeenth-Century France (University of Michigan Press, 2009). Listen as the trio reflect on hyperrealism, Ocelot’s expressive and experimental pictorial styles, and the structural influence of fables upon the narrative; registers of innocence and intelligence in the depiction of Kirikou; tensions between the individual and the disassociation of community, alongside the function of empathy and superstition within the status of magic; and the possible risks of reading Kirikou and the Sorceress through a predominantly orientalist and essentialist lens.

**This episode was produced and edited by Menelik Thaim-Lee*

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

**As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

Footnote #78 - The Imagination

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 12:49:11 +0000

Footnote #78 of the podcast focuses on the imagination as Alex takes Chris through the world of generative cognition and the many philosophical reflections that discuss our mental forces, which in turn allow us to conjure ideas, thoughts, concepts, and images that do not exist in the material world. Topics include early film theory and the question of imagined depth; the ‘use’ of the imagination to imagine and the distinction between imagination as a way to escape or transcend the real vs. a productive way to interrogate the world; the force of the imagination as a tool of meaning making, and the power in daydreaming certain fanciful ideas; cinema as an imaginary medium and the longstanding coding of fantasy as a genre of the imagination; and the productive tension between indulging or curtailing imagination with regards to the assumed non-realist and non-rational logic of fantasy cinema.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

**As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

Helen Hill (with Karen Redrobe)

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 10:00:00 +0000

The Fantasy/Animation podcast welcomes as its special guest for Episode 172 Professor Karen Redrobe, who is Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor and Undergraduate Chair in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work traverses film theory, animation, and feminism, and she is the author of Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism (2003) and the new book Undead: (Inter)(in)animation, Feminisms, and the Art of War (2025), as well as editor of Animating Film Theory (2014) and Deep Mediations: Thinking Space in Cinema and Digital Cultures (2021, with Jeff Scheible). In this instalment, Karen introduces Chris and Alex to the life and career of the artist and filmmaker Helen Hill, who died in 2007 aged only 36, but whose ebullient imagination on display across her experimental shorts pushed at the boundaries of direct animation, stop-motion, and do-it-yourself methods of animated filmmaking. Listen as the trio discuss Hill's last short The Florestine Collection (2011) completed by her husband Paul Gailiunas, alongside earlier works Mouseholes (1999), and Madame Winger Makes A Film (2001), to reflect on mixed media film as a negotiation of trauma and mode of catharsis; unfinished animation and the political act of recovery; film-based activism, education, and the interpretive form of experimental animation; pantomime aesthetics and the role of paper, puppets, fabric and ‘stuff’ in crafting worlds that only animation can access; and the playfulness of Hill’s animated experiments and projects that expressed not just her delight in life but confronted what it means for a community to have filmmaking at its centre.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

**As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

Footnote #77 - Expanded Animation

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:01:17 +0000

What might it mean for animation to ‘expand’? Footnote 77 confronts the performances and technologies of expanded animation, a term that speaks to both the broadening out of animation and its many sites of production, exhibition, and consumption, as well as those intermedial or multimedia live works that involve different kinds of animated images. Topics include the expansion of cinema in the 1950s and 1960s that pushed film beyond ‘conventional’ single-screen narratives and engaged more sensory, interactive, and immersive environments; the value and appeal of animated projections and art installations that break the one-way relation between audience and screen, often using the artist’s live and living body on stage; shifting temporalities and the fleeting existence of site-specific animation with its new (even hesitating) exhibition practices; connections between expanded, pervasive, and useful animation; and how expanding animation allows us to think more readily about its identity as a fine art alongside its form and function in everything from architectural schools and education to retail spaces.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

**As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

Immersive Experiences and The Sphere Las Vegas (with Tim Jones)

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 19:10:14 +0000

The latest episode of the Fantasy/Animation podcast marvels at the era of technologically-powered immersive experiences and high-tech live concert performances through a case study of the Sphere Las Vegas, whose 16K resolution/160,000-square-foot wraparound screen was announced via a series of 40 virtual reality concerts held by U2 between September 2023 to March 2024. Joining Chris and Alex as they navigate these new forms of concert illusion is Dr Tim Jones, an Assistant Professor of Media Arts at Robert Morris University who specialises in animation, film history, media production, and Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) experience design. Topics include fantastic environments and the aesthetic principles of immersion; the promise of limitlessness when liveness and animation collide, and the resultant spectacle of domed displays; site specificity, aura, and the scale of collective experiences; distinctions between contemplation and distraction; and how the Las Vegas Sphere operates as an expensive party trick that helps us understand animation’s own sacred spaces and sensory overloads.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

**As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

Footnote #76 - Performativity

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 14:15:12 +0000

Performativity gets the Fantasy/Animation treatment in Footnote 76 of the podcast, with Alex taking Chris through the power and implication of language, utterances, meaning, and those writers who have thought about how we do things with words. Topics include how language is essential to the creation of meaning in the world and the emergence of ordinary language philosophy; performative registers, speech acts, and the work of Judith Butler on gendered forms of performativity; fictions, falsehoods, and the societal function of performing gender; and the meaningfulness of utterances that create meaning by doing rather than simply describing.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

**As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

SuperTed (1982-1986) (with Elain Price)

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 18:42:19 +0000

Special guest Dr. Elain Price (Senior Lecturer in Media Studies, Swansea University) joins Chris and Alex for this rundown of SuperTed (Mike Young, 1982-1986) where they reflect on the series’ contribution to - and place within - histories of animation, including its influence upon the development of Welsh animation production over the last 40 years. Focusing on the episodes “SuperTed and the Inca Treasure” (S1E1, 1982), “SuperTed and the Giant Kites” (S1E4, 1983) and “SuperTed on Planet Spot” (S1E12, 1983), topics for Episode 170 include Elain’s own work on Welsh-language television channel S4C (the first to be aimed at a Welsh-speaking audience) and the broadcast of SuperTed on the first night of the channel in 1982; industry, investment, and the marketing of Mike Young’s television adaptation of his own childen’s books; links between the anthropomorphic character of SuperTed and Sid Griffith’s silent-era Welsh cartoon series Jerry the Troublesome Tyke (1925-1927); regional fantasy and parochial Welsh representation; and what SuperTed can tell us about national identity and the transportable nature of children’s television more broadly.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

**As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

Footnote #75 - Identification

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:17:40 +0000

Chris and Alex reflect on the question of identification in this latest Footnote episode of the podcast, drawing out what it means to identify (or not) with characters as both fictional agents and a set of archetypes. Topics include recognition and the comprehension of emotion; cognitive film theory and the schema of identification rooted in physical proximity, emotional connection, and the sharing of moral values and worldview; the distinction between subjectivity, alignment, and allegiance often complicated through point-of-view shots; examples where spectators may share a character’s subjectivity, and be aligned with them, but not hold an allegiance; and how identification is more than just seeing the world through someone’s eyes but in the case of non-figurative animation and fantasy can be conceived haptically through bodily and sensorial affect.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

**As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

Leeds Animation Workshop (with Terry Wragg)

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 18:36:36 +0000

Episode 169 marks the Fantasy/Animation podcast’s first engagement with the work of the Leeds Animation Workshop, a pioneering women’s animation collective formally established in 1978 to produce and distribute animated films on a variety of social, cultural, and educational issues. A not-for-profit, grassroots cooperative, the Workshop has been at the forefront in developing animation’s role as a tool for activism and action, not just organising screenings and providing workshops for adults and young people, but working “in consultation with organisations and individuals” to specialise "in making complex or sensitive issues more accessible to audiences, and at times offering an alternative point of view.” Chris and Alex are delighted to be joined in this episode by one of the Leeds Animation Workshop’s founding members, Terry Wragg, who recounts the often-tumultuous history of the Workshop and its desire to provoke discussion and debate through the study of three of its key works: Gives Us a Smile (1983), which depicts the daily harassment of women and includes quotes taken from real police cases and interviews; Bridging the Gap (2001), an examination of tensions between parents and their teenage children narrated by Michael Rosen; and They Call Us Maids (2015), a collaboration with Justice 4 Domestic Workers based on the real life stories of thousands of migrant women.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

**As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

Footnote #74 - Deconstructivism

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 17:39:55 +0000

Following the recent podcast episode on Space Ghost Coast to Coast (Mike Lazzo, 1994-2008), Alex takes the reins for Fantasy/Animation Footnote 74, taking Chris through Jacques Derrida and deconstructivism as a philosophical doctrine, which embraces a way of interpretive thinking that is loosely tasked with exposing the lack of meaning within meaning itself and pushing against the clear resolution of a thesis. Topics include the erasure of meaning as reliant on other sets or circuits of meaning; signifiers and chains of signification, and the role of the deconstructivist in reflecting on and exposing those chains; deconstructive animation as a generic deep structure of animation and the cartoon’s history and comedy of anti-illusionism; and how deconstructivist analysis as a reading strategy might work to unpack animation’s complex relationship to live-action and, ultimately, to itself.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

**As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

Space Ghost Coast to Coast (1994-2008) (with Jacqueline Ristola)

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 18:07:30 +0000

In Episode 168 of the podcast, Chris and Alex are delighted to be joined by Dr Jacqueline Ristola, Lecturer in the Department of Film and Television at the University of Bristol, to discuss the Cartoon Network’s adult live-action/animated talkshow parody Space Ghost Coast to Coast (Mike Lazzo, 1994-2008). With research areas including animation, anime studies, media industry studies, and queer representation, Jacqueline is the ideal guest to introduce listeners to the surrealist tone, irreverent comedy, and generic subversions of Space Ghost, with a focus in this instalment on the specific episodes “Sleeper” (S2E7) (1995), “Rehearsal” (S4E1) (1997), and “Fire Ant” (S6E6) (1999). Listen as they discuss Space Ghost’s carnival qualities and the role of fantasy-as-critique; media conglomeration, the U.S. talk show wars, and Adult Swim; the labour of cut-and-paste and limited animation as a stylistic advantage; and how the meta-commentary of Space Ghost represents an abrasive challenge to the flow and form of conventional television animation.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

**As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

Footnote #73 - Rotoscoping

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 18:02:55 +0000

Footnote 73 looks at animation’s historical relationship to the body and how physicality was transcribed via the rotoscoping process as part of the construction of the earliest animated characters. From the Fleischer Studios pioneering the technology for use in their Out of the Inkwell series of shorts (1918–1927) and later feature films Gulliver's Travels (David Fleischer, 1939), and Mr. Bug Goes to Town (Dave Fleischer, 1941), through to Bob Sabiston’s digital homage to rotoscoping when developing the Rotoshop tool during the 1990s, this episode has Chris take Alex through the mechanics of projecting performances onto glass to be traced by the animators to craft their animated performances. Topics include what the rotoscope contributed to animation’s hyper-realist aesthetic and the specific desire for naturalism at Disney; rotoscoping’s connection to both the Rotoshop and contemporary motion capture techniques; and how the rotoscope negotiates the uncanny, haunting presence of the human beneath the image.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

**As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

AI and Animation (with Mihaela Mihailova)

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 15:14:07 +0000

The creative - and highly controversial - relationship between animation and artificial intelligence provides the focus of Episode 167 of the Fantasy/Animation podcast, which features as its special guest Dr Mihaela Mihailova, an Assistant Professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. Mihaela is the editor of Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio LAIKA’s Stop-Motion Witchcraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), whose work has also appeared in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, The Velvet Light Trap, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Feminist Media Studies, animation: an interdisciplinary journal, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, and [in]Transition. She has contributed to Animating Film Theory (with John MacKay), The Oxford Handbook of the Disney Musical, Animated Landscapes: History, Form, and Function, The Animation Studies Reader, and Drawn from Life: Issues and Themes in Animated Documentary Cinema, and was editor of the recent “AI and the Moving Image” dossier published in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. She is currently co-editor of Animation Studies and serves as co-President of the Society for Animation Studies. Listen as Mihaela introduces Chris and Alex to the AI-generated short films Generation (2022), PLSTC (2022), Bruegel the Younger (2022), and Dissolution (2023) as a backdrop to thinking about the trajectory of machine learning in relation to animated imagery and creative practice; the aesthetics and implications for labour prompted by AI as both an assistive and generative tool; the discourses of technophilia and technophobia that surround contemporary synthetic media; and what impact the ‘open secret’ of AI might have within the animation industry beyond some of its current applications.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

**As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

Footnote #72 - The Hero's Journey

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 19:37:00 +0000

Building on their recent podcast episode on Kung Fu Panda (John Stevenson & Mark Osborne, 2008) with screenwriter John Yorke, Alex takes Chris through the mechanics and mysteries involved in the hero’s journey, Joseph Campbell’s famous structure and patterning of narrative, to discuss how such storytelling archetypes link to Jungian approaches towards the process of character individuation. Topics include the big-screen reworkings of the hero’s journey and its industry function as a screenwriting template; theorisations of form and formalist frameworks for understanding narrative organisation; Campbell’s interests in the traces of our unconscious mind as found in collective archetypes that surround culture; and the way that the formula for heroic action and its calls to adventure can and do work within the creative spaces of fantasy.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

**As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

Kung Fu Panda (2008) (with John Yorke)

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 16:34:34 +0000

Episode 166 of the Fantasy/Animation podcast high kicks its way into the world of DreamWorks’ successful Kung Fu Panda franchise (2008-) with this look at the series’ first big-screen instalment, Kung Fu Panda (John Stevenson & Mark Osborne, 2008), with very special guest John Yorke. John is a television producer, screenwriter, editor, and author, who was Head of Channel 4 Drama (2003–2005), controller of BBC drama production (2006–2012) where he founded the BBC Writers Academy, and more recently managing director of Company Pictures (2013–2015). He is now teaching screenwriting via his own company, John Yorke Story, and is the author of Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them (Penguin, 2014) and Trip to the Moon: Understanding the True Power of Story (Penguin, 2026). Topics include the tension between showing and telling that underpins the character development of Kung Fu Panda’s protagonist Po (Jack Black); story as central to the film’s effectiveness as a martial arts animated comedy and the spectacle of the animated body in physicalising certain narrative beats; storytelling within a commercial animation context and how the medium’s narrative strategies are enabled by animation as an industrial art form; and how Kung Fu Panda functions as a popular fantasy film merging Chinese with American cultural concerns yet remains indebted to longstanding folkloric structures of narrative.

This podcast is sponsored by the project “UK-China Animation: Co-Creating Research and Knowledge Exchange,” led by the University of Nottingham and funded by the British Council through an award from its Going Global Partnerships programme, which builds stronger, more inclusive, internationally connected higher education and Technical and Vocational Education and Training systems (TVET).

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

**As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

Footnote #71 - Synthespians

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 17:18:36 +0000

Listen as the brand new Fantasy/Animation Footnote tackles the complexities and contradictions of digital performance and cyber stardom via this discussion of synthespians, a term very much anchored to early-2000s concerns around the future of acting, agency, and authenticity whose popularisation was largely prompted by the rise of motion capture and other forms of computerised intervention. In this latest instalment, Chris takes Alex through the origins of (and key discourses surrounding) the cyberstar and the broader entertainment industry’s increased turn towards the creative possibilities of the “synthetic thespian”; how scholars have grappled with the divergent forms of labour and performance styles engendered by CG avatars, proxies, and digital doppelgängers; the role of celebrities in mediating shifts between old and new media, including the stakes of newer star-centred forms of digital replication; and the growing anxieties surfacing in late-2025 regarding the arrival of synthespian ‘Tilly Norwood’ and what artificial intelligence and machine learning might now mean for the next phase in digital cyberstardom.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

**As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

Wicked: For Good (2025)

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 11:36:00 +0000

Just as it did to kick off 2025, the Fantasy/Animation podcast returns once again following the festive break to celebrate the New Year with another visit to Oz, with Chris and Alex reflecting on movie musical Wicked: For Good (John M. Chu, 2025) that as with the first instalment released in 2024 discussed a year ago adapts Stephen Schwartz’s successful 2003 theatre production. Topics for this first episode of 2026 include Wicked: For Good’s heightened reflexivity around performance, deception, and the power of illusions that take place in front of and behind the curtain; Elphaba’s political radicalism vs. the pragmatism of Glinda; necropolitical action and the film’s targeting of who gets to live and who must die; ‘wickedness’ and the emptiness (and reclaiming) of language; and where Wicked: For Good succeeds - and ultimately fails - as it seeks to find its own narrative in the intriguing ellipses of the Oz lore.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

The Polar Express (2004)

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 11:09:11 +0000

The Fantasy/Animation Christmas special pulls into the proverbial station with this look at The Polar Express (Robert Zemeckis, 2004), a computer-animated adaptation of the 1985 children’s book by Chris Van Allsburg and a film noted for its pioneering - if at times highly uncanny - application of motion capture technology as it portrays the magic of Christmas Eve through a young boy as he journeys to the North Pole. Topics for Chris and Alex in this episode include the state of computer graphics in the early-2000s and the emergence of the cyberstar; motion capture performance and the mechanics of virtual stardom; simulation, belief, time, and the digital long-take; strategies of narration and metaleptic transgressions between the world of the telling and the world of the told; fantasy and agency embodied through Tom Hanks as he inhabits multiple roles on- and off-screen; and how The Polar Express offers audiences a festive spectacular defined by the same shifting registers of fantasy that have shaped screen representations of Christmas and the magic of what it means to believe. Happy holidays!

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #70 - Pantomime

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 16:20:58 +0000

Sound, performance, and the body come together in this Footnote episode discussing pantomime as an entertainment spectacle, as Chris and Alex seek to map the possible connections between pantomime as a popular theatrical tradition emerging in the 17th century and both animation’s own technologies and representations and legacies of fantasy. Topics include classical antiquity, gesture, and choric dramas; European precursors like commedia dell’arte and féerie stories; the invested interest by early animation scholarship in the medium’s multiple genealogies and the role of pantomime in defining animated points of origin; and how the self-reflexive staging and gestures of pantomime came to influence the different visual and comedy stylings of cartoon storytelling.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Babes in Toyland (1934) (with Rob King)

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 16:12:25 +0000

Chris and Alex make their first foray into the world of Laurel and Hardy with this reflection on Babes in Toyland (Gus Meins and Charles Rogers, 1934), a film based loosely on the Mother Goose fairytale albeit with a few other nursery rhyme characters thrown in for good measure, all supported by the iconicity of Laurel and Hardy and the duo’s particular brand of slapstick comedy. Joining them to separate their Tom-Tom Piper from their Bo Peep is Rob King, Professor of Film at Columbia University and a film historian who has written wildly on American genre cinema, popular culture, and cultural history with a particular emphasis on silent-era stardom and comedy. Topics for Episode 163 include Laurel and Hardy’s starring role in smoothing out the transition from silent to sound cinema, and the early twentieth-century industrial importance of the slapstick genre; the sound of fantasy and the demise of the comedy short in Hollywood; the immersive worlds of childhood and the enchantment of drawings; toys, toyness, and child’s play; and what Babes in Toyland has to say about the emergence of consumer culture through its pointed citation of Mickey Mouse.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #69 - Transnational Cinemas

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 08:36:25 +0000

Chris and Alex take on transnational cinemas in this brand new Footnote episode of the podcast, thinking through the mobility of - and interactions between - films and filmmakers across national borders and what it means for cinema to ‘travel.’ Topics include the national/transnational relation, and how new kinds of interconnectedness between nation-states are powered by globalisation; how we might understand the cross-cultural production and distribution of films as transcending national boundaries; the role of personal histories in how films represent diasporic experiences through images of migration; and how scholars have grappled with cinemas and individual filmmakers that appear to hold two national identities at once.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Lotus Lantern (1999) (with Muyang Zhuang)

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 20:17:15 +0000

Chris and Alex are delighted to be joined for Episode 162 of the podcast by Muyang Zhuang (Assistant Professor at Tongji University), who is a specialist in Chinese cinema, media, and visual culture in East Asia, with a special focus on animation and cartoons. In this instalment, the trio discuss Shanghai Animation Film Studio’s Lotus Lantern (Chang Guangxi, 1999), a film based on Chinese folklore whose animated adaptation in the late-1990s comes in a long line of reworkings of this most famous of tales. Topics include the context of state-owned animated production in socialist and post-socialist China; the (trans)national style and aesthetic choices of Chang Guangxi’s film and the politics of its Westernisation; European vs. Chinese folklore, the figure of the trickster, and links between the film’s musical sequences and character; the complex market forces that have helped position Disney animation as China’s monstrous other; and why Lotus Lantern is considered a landmark in contemporary Chinese animation.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #68 - Historiography

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 16:51:08 +0000

The next Footnote episode of the podcast maps the stakes of telling history and what it means to construct historical narratives through cinema as a form of historical writing. Listen as Fantasy/Animation’s resident lapsed historian Alex takes Chris through the history and theory of making history and doing historical work; verbal and visual discourses of narrativisation in relation to Hayden White’s notions of historiography and historiophoty; distinctions between the fluctuating ‘truths’, poetics, and politics of history; facts and events as non-narrative and empirical; and how the modes and meanings of telling history contribute to the writerly and highly subjective craft of the historian.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Tee Collins (with Robby Gilbert)

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 10:53:40 +0000

Episode 161 of the podcast features an examination of the animated career of Tee Collins, a pioneer of the medium whose place within received histories has tended to sideline, rather than celebrate, his contribution to the industry and aesthetics of the animated craft. Joining Chris and Alex to situate Collins within the trajectory of U.S. animation is animator, artist, and historian of animation and moving images Robby Gilbert. Robby has worked as an animator for several studios and has illustrated numerous works for children, including The Adventures of Ranger Rick for the National Wildlife Federation. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Animation at Rowan University and is the author of the recently released City in Motion: Animation in New York 1966-1999 (Palgrave, 2025). Topics for this episode include the emergence of Harlem’s early Black animators against the backdrop of institutional and representational racism; Collins’ early work on Sesame Street (Jim Henson, 1969-) with the Wanda the Witch and Nancy the Nanny Goat shorts as well as his later animated feature The Songhai Princess (Tee Collins, 1990); his signature Afro-Cubist style and links to the adult animation of Ralph Bakshi; ‘fast’ animation, movement, motion studies, and basketball (!); and what Collins’ forgotten place within global animation history tells us about the necessity of historical recovery.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #67 - Pepper's Ghost

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 11:14:57 +0000

Inspired by the recent podcast episode on Casper (Brad Silberling, 1995) that featured a conversation with the film’s lead animator Mark Austin, Chris and Alex maintain the Halloween theme for this latest Footnote instalment that examines the spectacular imagery of “pepper’s ghost” - an illusion technique dating back to the earliest forms of stage magic that also found a home across multiple popular entertainment spaces and attractions. Topics include the origins of John Henry Pepper’s ghostly apparitions and the ‘trick’ mechanics of theatrical display; the techniques involved in the illusory creation of three-dimensional objects and the broader seduction of holographic effects; how and where the ‘live’ interactions between physical performers and transparent spectral figurations on stage moved into early silent cinema; and possible links between pepper’s ghost as a technique of illusion and contemporary digital holography (including ABBA Voyage [2022-]).

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Casper (1995) (with Mark Austin)

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 16:31:57 +0000

The Fantasy/Animation podcast presents its Halloween special with this deep dive into Casper (Brad Silberling, 1995) featuring a conversation with the film’s lead animator Mark Austin, who as part of the team at Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) worked on bringing the supernatural spectacle of Casper’s lonely ghost roaming the corridors of Whipstaff Manor to life. Since his involvement with the film, Mark has developed over 30 years experience in visual effects production (specifically within previsualization) across multiple features, games, commercial projects, and 3D attractions. After a decade at the visual effects studio Moving Picture Company (MPC), Mark recently joined Netflix Animation Studio in 2020 as a Sequence Designer and is now a freelance ‘Previs’ Supervisor. Listen as Mark discusses with Chris and Alex his own career and shift from cel-animated advertisements into the world of computer-generated imagery, and his role in crafting Casper’s many digital VFX sequences; the technologies involved in building virtual performances and the eponymous ghost’s status as cinema’s first fully CG film character; where Casper sits in relation to the 1990s’ boom in ‘live-action cartoons’ from Hocus Pocus (Kenny Ortega, 1993) to Flubber (Les Mayfield, 1997); and how Brad Silbering’s feature marked an often forgotten turning point in Hollywood’s ability to (inter)act digital with physical elements.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #66 - Enviro-Toons

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 12:05:44 +0000

The first Footnote podcast of the new season kicks off with this discussion of enviro-toons, a category - perhaps even sub-genre - of animation that speaks to the complex relationship that exists between the representations of (and labour processes behind) the animated medium and the environment. Topics include the questionable ‘greenness’ of animation and how specific cartoons might engage ecological concerns within their narratives; anthropomorphic subjectivity as a way to display images of urban sprawl; the environmental impact and sustainability of animation production, from the reuse of cels during Classical Hollywood to the repurposing of biodegradable stop-motion sets; and what the contemporary era of AI and machine learning means for how we understand animation’s growing cost to the environment.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

The Lion King (1994)

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 13:18:06 +0000

The Fantasy/Animation podcast returns for a brand new season with Chris and Alex marking the end of their summer hiatus with another trip into the magic of Disney’s animated features, this time to remember the pleasures of the pride lands and the circle of life held in delicate balance that propels forward the story of The Lion King (Roger Allers & Rob Minkoff, 1994) - the studio’s critical and commercial smash that has generated sequels, spin-offs, remakes, and a highly-successful theatre show. Topics for Episode 159 include the place of the film within Disney’s broader corporate and creative history, including important distinctions between ‘typical’ and Classic Disney; computer graphics, digital VFX, and registers of self-referentiality; anthropomorphic agency and the limits (and instincts) of animated animality in the film’s rendition of its non-human protagonists; Rafiki as the ‘Magical Negro’ archetype; the complications of the film’s well-documented Fascist imagery and the racial politics of its coded casting; and how The Lion King navigates wider ecocritical concerns around the relationships we can (and do) have to the environment.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Archive Episode - Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) (with Simran Hans)

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 15:16:32 +0000

For the final archive episode of 2025, Chris and Alex once again swing their way back into the superhero world of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman, 2018), revisiting their discussion of Sony Pictures Animation’s computer-animated film that featured special guest Simran Hans, film critic and culture writer whose work has appeared in The Observer, The Guardian, Buzzfeed, Dazed, The Fader and Sight & Sound. Lots here on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’s unique comic book-style design and the visual “crunch” of its evocative flattened style; the upturned generic qualities of the computer-animated film within contemporary Hollywood; and the growing pervasiveness of superhero cinema that, since the film’s release, has become further reinvigorated by Spider-Verse’s now highly influential design.

Archive Episode - Wizards (1977) (Live @ Cinema Museum)

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 10:11:13 +0000

Chris and Alex go all the way back to 2020 for the penultimate archive episode of the podcast for this summer, remembering their discussion of Ralph Bakshi’s high fantasy animated epic Wizards (Ralph Bakshi, 1977), which was originally recorded in front of a live audience at the Cinema Museum in Kennington, London in January 2020. Released first time around as Episode 42, the conversation turned to Wizards as a counter-cultural marvel of the 1970s; the politics and propaganda of the film’s adult themes, including its discourses of socio-realism and gender politics; technology versus magic; and the status of Wizards as a masterpiece of U.S. animation.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Archive Episode - Inside Out (2015) (with Eric Herhuth)

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 11:45:56 +0000

To coincide with the release of Pixar’s science-fiction computer-animated feature Elio (Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi & Adrian Molina, 2025) this summer, Chris and Alex take listeners back a decade to 2015 and the emotional worlds created by the studio’s earlier Inside Out (Pete Docter, 2015). Originally recorded at the 33rd annual Society for Animation Studies conference at Teesside University (and released soon after in October 2022), this episode featured as its special guest Dr. Eric Herhuth, Assistant Professor of Communication and Director of Film Studies at Tulane University, and author of Pixar and the Aesthetic Imagination: Animation, Storytelling, and Digital Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017). Relisten to hear the trio discussing animation’s longstanding propensity for metaphor and political allegory; the film’s 11-year-old protagonist Riley and the youthfulness of emotion; and the stakes of Inside Out as a film that encourages audiences to accept both the sadness of joy and the joy of sadness.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Archive Episode - Sub-Saharan African Animation (1966-2013) (with Paula Callus)

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 07:21:54 +0000

For this second archive episode, Chris and Alex revisit Episode 81 of the podcast that gave listeners a quickfire journey through Sub-Saharan African animation with Paula Callus, a Professor in the National Centre for Computer Animation at Bournemouth University and an expert in Sub-Saharan African animation. The films covered in this instalment were Moustapha Alassane’s Bon Voyage Sim (1966), Ng’endo Mukii’s Yellow Fever (2013), Iwa (2009) from Nigerian filmmaker, illustrator and art director Kenneth (Shofela) Coker, the British/Kenyan animated television series Tinga Tinga Tales (2010-2012), and the science-fiction allegory Pumzi (2009) from writer and director Wanuri Kahiu. Lots here on the cultural and historical specificity of fantasy storytelling, global animation practices, and the post-colonial legacies that guide how African animation has been culturally and critically understood.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Archive Episode - Space Jam (1996) (with Paul Wells)

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 08:55:15 +0000

To mark the return of the Fantasy/Animation archive instalments, Chris and Alex once more delve into the podcast’s back catalogue for this relisten of Episode 70 and their discussion of Space Jam (Joe Pytka, 1996), which featured very special guest Professor Paul Wells, Director of the Animation Academy at Loughborough University. Listen again at their analysis of Space Jam as emblematic of animation’s longstanding relationship with sport; the nostalgic callbacks that the film makes to Golden Age Hollywood stardom; sport, drama, metaphor, and society; Space Jam’s soundtrack and negotiation of black celebrity identities; and how Joe Pytka’s film provides the spectacle of stylistic hybridity through the lens of NBA basketball.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #65 - Pervasive Animation

Mon, 26 May 2025 17:08:02 +0000

The current cultural “pervasiveness” of animated media and the medium’s durable status as a vital intermediary between ‘us’ and ‘the world’ is the focus of this latest Footnote episode, which tackles “Pervasive Animation” as it has been understood within Suzanne Buchan’s 2013 anthology of the same name. Chris takes Alex through the requisite methodological challenges, considerations, and conundrums when looking at animation’s many forms within contemporary moving image culture, as well as what Buchan says about the need to push animation’s multiplicity of definitions towards aesthetic and critical intersections with everything from fine art and sculpture to videogames and medical imaging. Other topics include what this critical re-conceptualisation means for the variant sites, spaces, and interfaces of animation beyond the screen; how interdisciplinarity can critically account for the “pervasive” spread of animation and the possibility of academically studying the medium outside Film and Media Studies; and what all this means for animation itself as a complex and chaotic scholarly object.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (Patrick McKay & J.D. Payne, 2022-) (Live @ PCA 2025)

Mon, 19 May 2025 13:26:50 +0000

This podcast special was recorded live at the recent Popular Culture Association Conference in New Orleans, USA, April 2025, where Alex was delighted to be asked to participate in a roundtable discussion on Amazon’s prequel series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (Patrick McKay & J.D. Payne, 2022-). In a detour from our usual format, Alex is without Chris but joined by two fellow panelists, Alicia Fox-Lenz and Tim Lenz (both stewards of the Mythopoeic Society), alongside an enthusiastic room full of popular culture scholars taking part in a freewheeling and open discussion about the show. Listen for conversations on world-building, adaptation, concerns over representation in relation to the show’s depiction of race, gender, and sexuality, and plenty more.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #64 - The Golden Age of Animation

Mon, 12 May 2025 11:42:32 +0000

Fresh from last week’s discussion of Mickey Mouse, Chris and Alex are once again joined by Dr David McGowan (Lecturer in the Contextual and Theoretical Studies of Animation at the University of the Arts London) to map the mythology of the Golden Age of Animation, and in particular how this phase of the medium’s history has been framed in relation to the cartoon’s move from silent to sound technology but also its emergent stability and security as an industrial art form. Listen as they cover animation’s artistic recognition, questions of distribution, and the economic dominance of the major players in Hollywood cartoon production; the precise terms of ‘golden’ as a descriptor for the business of U.S. commercial animation, but also how alternate histories and representations suggest its limits for certain studios and identities; technological innovation, Disney-level aesthetic qualities, and the solidification of ‘full animation’; and the sentimentality afforded to the Golden Age as a period defined as much by dead ends as the heralding of animation’s growing prestige and ambition.

Mickey Mouse (with David McGowan)

Mon, 05 May 2025 09:11:22 +0000

For this new episode of the podcast, Chris and Alex try and do justice to the global stardom of perhaps the most famous animated character of them all - Mickey Mouse. They are joined by Dr David McGowan, who is Lecturer in the Contextual and Theoretical Studies of Animation at the University of the Arts London, as well as author of Animated Personalities: Cartoon Characters and Stardom in American Theatrical Shorts (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019), to explore Mickey’s enduring celebrity both on and off the animated screen as well as contradictory elements to his stardom that supported his move from cartoon protagonist to animated icon. Listen as the trio discuss Mickey’s shifting star persona and performance style across the three shorts The Karnival Kid (Walt Disney & Ub Iwerks, 1929), Mickey Steps Out (Burt Gillet, 1931), and Clock Cleaners (Ben Sharpsteen, 1937) to map the character in relation to several topics, including cartoon aesthetics and Disney animation’s shift from plasmaticness to hyper-realist registers of representation; romance narratives and the extra-textual coupling of Mickey with Minnie Mouse; the cartoon’s move away from self-reflexivity towards the rounding out of “personality animation”; Mickey’s musicality and modernity, as well as the character’s similarities to Felix the Cat and other animated celebrities of the period; and how Mickey’s links to values of sincerity, intimacy, and humanity perfectly position him as the quintessential animated star.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #63 - The Censored Eleven

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 07:48:52 +0000

Chris and Alex take a look at animation’s historical and troubling relationship to race with this examination of the Censored Eleven, a collection of controversial Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons produced during the 1930s and 1940s removed from syndication since 1968 for their inclusion of harmful and offensive racist stereotypes. Topics include histories of animating the other, identity, and experience within the medium and legacies of minstrelsy performance; the visibility of Black culture and jazz-based parodies like Bob Clampett’s Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (1943) against more hidden (and no less damaging) iconographies within cartoon representation; and what it means to confront such legacies of racism within the critical study of animation, and if erasing any and all mention of the Censored Eleven pretends that racism in Hollywood did not exist.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Rise of the Guardians (2012)

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 08:57:40 +0000

To mark the Easter break, Fantasy/Animation crack open Rise of the Guardians (Peter Ramsey, 2012), the 2012 computer-animated film produced by DreamWorks Animation studio and a Hollywood blockbuster adapted from the children’s book series by William Joyce. Something of a box-office failure and a film that prompted an $87 million loss for DreamWorks, Rise of the Guardians is, as Chris and Alex suggest, certainly a complex and uneven effort that nonetheless incorporates some intriguing animated elements as part of its tale of belief and wonder. Listen as they map the film’s place as entry number 19 within the expanding DreamWorks canon and how it emerged at a crucial moment in their own corporate expansion; the characters of Jack Frost, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Sandman, and Pitch Black as renditions of different types of animation; drawing, artistry, and the Frozen-esque spectacle of cryokinesis; and how Peter Ramsey’s film narrativises the value of what it means for children to believe in fantasy.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #62 - Object Relations

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 09:16:17 +0000

The Fantasy/Animation Footnotes complete their unofficial ‘psychoanalysis trilogy’ with this look at object relations and a branch of psychoanalytic approaches to film that emerged as a competing way of thinking about cinema linked to the development of the conscious minds of children. Listen as Alex takes Chris through the contributions of the British Psychoanalytical Society and the influential work of Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott; the value of unconscious fantasies, creativity, and what it means to theorise play; cinema as a potentially “transitional” (and cultural) object that we can use to fantasise with; using object relations theory to think about what kind of object a film might be, and the specificity of fantasy filmmaking as ‘extra transitional’; and what a focus on objects says about how children can and do formulate relationships to the world.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Up (2009) (with Tom Brown)

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 06:00:00 +0000

Chris and Alex are back in the warm embrace of Pixar Animation Studio, looking at their tenth computer animated film Up (Pete Docter, 2009) - a real high point in the company’s run of critically and commercially successful animated features, and a film that comes almost at the midway point between Pixar today their debut with Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995) 30 years ago. To discuss whether adventure really is ‘out there,’ they are joined by special guest Dr Tom Brown, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Kings College London. Tom is the author of the monographs Spectacle in “Classical” Cinemas: Musicality and Historicity in the 1930s (2016) and Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address in the Cinema (2012), as well as co-editor of The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture (2014), Film Moments: Criticism, History, Theory (2010) and Film and Television After DVD (2008). Topics for this episode include how Pixar’s computer-animated work can be understood according to a “classical” register via its meaningful construction and solidity of animated space; computer-animated staging and how meaning is carried in the studio’s expressive use of mise-en-scène; Up as a stylistic ‘sweet spot’ between photorealism and caricature; links between Pixar and both Classical Hollywood filmmakers like Frank Capra and the category of the middlebrow; what it means to be imprisoned by time in fantasy storytelling; and what Up’s particular combination of the silly and the profound has to say about the weight of grief.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #61 - The Gaze

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 09:47:21 +0000

The Fantasy/Animation Footnotes return to psychoanalysis in order to make sense of the world through gazing and gaze theory. Alex once again takes the lead in discussing Laura Mulvey’s seminal work on the gaze but also how it offers just one way of thinking about the topic, drawing instead on Lacanian psychoanalysis to distinguish between the qualities of looking and gazing. Topics include the conscious and unconscious processes involved in Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’; the politics of cinema and the illusion of mastery; how the gaze both affirms identity through our engagement with the cinematic object and emerges as something not that we have but that we react to; and how ‘gazing’ represents a way of seeing the world through the paradigm of consciousness, concepts, and ideas.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

World of Tomorrow (2015-2020) (with Elizabeth Cox)

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 08:31:38 +0000

For Fantasy/Animation’s very first look at California-born animator, writer, and independent filmmaker Don Hertzfeldt, Chris and Alex are joined by Elizabeth Cox, founder of independent animation studio Should We Studio, to discuss Hertzfeldt’s influential World of Tomorrow (2015-2020) featuring the tribulations of protagonist Emily. In her role as the Senior Editorial Producer at TED-Ed, Elizabeth has written and edited the scripts for over 200 educational animated videos including “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster," a seven-part adaptation of the book by Bill Gates (supported by Gates Ventures). She also served as a science advisor on “My Love Affair With Marriage,” an animated feature film that premiered at Tribeca Festival 2021. Elizabeth recently wrote a short piece for the blog on her animated series Ada, with each episode exploring how a different technology or policy could shape the future. Topics for this episode include World of Tomorrow’s distinct visual style and how underneath the series’ array of hand-drawn stick figures and visual simplicity lies the staging of complex philosophical reflections; absurdist humour and links between Hertzfeldt and experimental filmmakers like David Lynch and Stan Brakhage; histories of “useful” animation and the medium’s longstanding relationship to education; the contribution of art to science in the use of metaphor, humour, and analogy; and what the experimental storytelling style of World of Tomorrow has to say about the flattening of time and the malleability of memory.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #60 - Psychoanalysis

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 09:31:26 +0000

Listen as Alex takes Chris through the desires and distresses of psychoanalysis in this new Fantasy/Animation Footnote, working through its status as a branch of psychological theory and the contribution of the seminal work of Sigmund Freud. Other topics in this instalment include the emergence of psychoanalytic thinking at the end of the nineteenth-century and its subsequent interdisciplinary influence; parapraxis and the interpretation, processing, and diagnosis of dreams; the ‘turn’ towards psychoanalytic film theory during the 1970s via Jacques Lacan and its renewed emphasis on the unconscious and desire; and the repressed of cinema spectatorship and what this means for understanding the film apparatus as a device of ideological positioning.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

The Wind Rises (2013) (with Esther Leslie)

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 12:57:25 +0000

Chris and Alex return to Japanese anime and Studio Ghibli for this reflection on The Wind Rises (2013), Hayao Miyazaki’s then-final animated feature that plots the life of Japanese aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi, and which also offers a quasi-autobiographical tale of Miyazaki’s own animated career and the spectacle of his ‘last designs’ along the way. Joining in the discussion is very special guest Esther Leslie, who is Professor of Political Aesthetics in the School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication at Birkbeck. Esther’s interests are largely related to political theories of aesthetics and culture and the poetics of science and technology, alongside an interest in expanded forms of animation, with publications that include the influential Hollywood Flatlands, Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (Verso, 2002). Topics for this episode include the film’s reflexive register and status as a commentary on Ghibli animation; Japanese political history, representations of violence, and the plane as a historical figure of beauty; what the film does with its portrayal of fantastical worlds and the certainty of dreams; The Wind Rises’ impressionistic visual style and its more ambivalent handling of the modernity/tradition division familiar from Studio Ghibli’s earlier work; and how discourses of fatalism allow Miyazaki’s film to be secure in showing us what we carry in our head, and how and when we fantasise.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #59 - Magic

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 09:35:12 +0000

Fantasy/Animation turns to a kind of magic for this latest Footnote episode, and the role of the magical in the distinction that lies within fantasy between the knowingness of illusion and the pursuit of rationality. Expect turns to how magic can embody both an appreciation of a non-scientific worldview and a magic show’s illusion and sleight-of-hand; theological superstition, spirituality and religion, and what this means for understanding belief in magic as a form of ‘social action’; magic as vital to thinking through the strangeness of fantasy and its language of the fantastic; and how magic invokes a pleasure of engagement rooted in choosing feeling over rationality.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022) (with Lisa Scoggin)

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 11:49:22 +0000

Chris and Alex delve into the stop-motion world of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (Guillermo del Toro & Mark Gustafson, 2022) for Episode 152 of the podcast, joined in this discussion of loss, love, control, and craft by musicologist and animation historian Dr Lisa Scoggin. Lisa is an expert in animation and its relationship to music, publishing widely on everything from United Productions of America (UPA) to Cartoon Saloon, and with expertise that covers film and television music, ludomusicology, and twentieth-century American and British art music. Topics include where Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio fits within Hollywood’s growing stop-motion renaissance; puppetry, agency, monstrosity, and the “terrible joy” of Pinocchio’s creation; the film’s wartime context and contribution of its Fascist imagery to images of collective national trauma; Geppetto’s narration and twice-told tales foregrounded as memory; the ‘lyrical’ role of lullabies and folk songs in depicting Pinocchio’s self-growth; and what del Toro’s film tells us about how things that take time to build can be destroyed in an instant.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #58 - Wonder

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 16:37:26 +0000

In this latest Fantasy/Animation Footnote, Chris and Alex wonder about wonder - a term that emphatically traverses both fantasy and animation as fields of study, yet with alternate meanings and connotations related to everything from mid-1990s cultures of special effects appreciation to fantasy’s historical links to the so-called “wonder film.” Topics include the “wonder years” of special effects production and reception during the 1990s via what Michele Pierson calls a growing “connoisseurship” of effects technologies; histories of the effects-laden ‘wonder film’ as an industrial category and links to the ‘wonder tale’; wonder itself as both the aestheticization of thought and/or thought induced by aesthetics; wonder’s role in fantasy scholarship to describe distinctions between fantasy, horror, and science-fiction; and more recent turns towards expanded animation and the spectatorship and ‘siting’ of wonder in the digital age.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

ABBA Voyage (2022-) (with Ian Comley)

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 11:48:00 +0000

For this brand new podcast episode, Chris and Alex are delighted to discuss the spectacle and staging of virtual holograms with Ian Comley, VFX Supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic and part of the creative team that brought the ABBA Voyage (2022-) musical experience to life. Over three years in the making, ABBA Voyage uses computer-generated imagery to (re)imagine the long-retired Swedish group for 21st century audiences. The show combines sophisticated de-aging techniques to craft the illusion of the band’s 1979 selves, combined with re-recorded vocals and a contemporary light show. Topics include the fluctuating role of nostalgia in the ‘retro’ creation of ABBA’s virtual ‘abbatars’ and the speculative aesthetic of contemporary musical concerts; the ethics of virtual holography when combined with digitally-mediated posthumous performance; the myth of the photographic ‘close-up’ rendered in computer graphics; questions of likeness, liveness, and duration in the construction of an immersive concert; and the complex status of ABBA Voyage as a feature-length animation that negotiates the musical star as a computerised base asset.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #57 - Disney's Nine Old Men

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 08:19:45 +0000

The Fantasy/Animation Footnotes continue with this look at Disney authorship and the industry of animation via a turn to the celebrated Nine Old Men, a core group of directors and artists involved with the consolidated of the Disney aesthetic and a key component of its hyper-realist visual style. Listen as Chris maps some of the Nine Old Men’s key personnel and their contribution to the refinement of animation’s illusion of life credentials; questions of labour and the historical celebration of cel-animation’s best practice; the highly gendered image of technological development and occlusion of women from Disney’s production hierarchies; and the ongoing mythology that surrounds the Nine Old Men as masters of the medium.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Live @ Annecy International Animation Film Festival 2024

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 13:01:34 +0000

Episode 150 is another Fantasy/Animation podcast special, this time recorded live at the recent Annecy International Animation Film Festival back in June 2024, where Chris was invited to speak on a panel as part of the Annecy International Animation Film Market (MIFA). Created in 1960, Annecy is one of the most popular and prestigious events in the animation calendar, and stands today as an annual celebration of all things animation, from features and shorts to animated television, advertising, and student films. MIFA is the more industry-leaning arm of the festival, and a place where attendees can meet exhibitors, buyers, and investors, and make contact and discuss animation projects and productions with industry professionals. This episode features a recording of the Animation Without Borders: Navigating the Imperative of Global Appeal panel, moderated by Juliette Rogasik (founder and creative director of Story Critters) and featuring both Sarah Cox (Chief Creative Director at Aardman) and Peilin Chou (Producer at Netflix Animation). Listen as the panel offer their own perspectives on the cross-cultural challenges and opportunities faced by animation productions in reaching global audiences, and what it means to preserve cultural specificity and authenticity in light of increasing internationalisation.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #56 - Prequels

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 08:59:43 +0000

Inspired by the recent podcast episode discussing movie musical Wicked (John M. Chu, 2024), the first Fantasy/Animation Footnote of 2025 takes on the politics of film prequels, and how these curious entries into film series and the reflexive gestures that it often makes to earlier moments in a broader narrative offer up a way of understanding processes and theories of adaptation. Topics for this episode include the prequel’s relationship to sequels, midquels, and remakes, and its broader fascination with chronology, history, and origin; the commercial value of prequels and the threat of temporality; cultural transference and how such adaptations highlight differences between media products; and the prequel’s status as an evolving industrial category as much as a device used to tell a story.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Wicked (2024)

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 09:47:12 +0000

The Fantasy/Animation podcast is back after the festive break with Episode 149, and as a belated New Year treat offers up a closer look at a film still playing at cinemas across the globe - the movie musical Wicked (John M. Chu, 2024), a big-screen adaptation of Stephen Schwartz’s 2003 theatre production that was itself based on Gregory Maguire’s earlier 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. For this first instalment of 2025, Chris and Alex tackle the links between this first part of the Wicked story and the mythology of both L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel and celebrated 1939 Hollywood adaptation, and what it is about the broader world of Oz that lends itself so well to large-scale visual spectacle; the ‘obvious’ register of Wicked’s racial politics and narrative equivalences between greenness and otherness; Cynthia Erivo (Elphaba), Ariana Grande (Glinda), and gestures that the film makes to white privilege; the possibilities for queerness and the tensions with Hollywood’s pervasive heteronormativity; stylistic mobility, long takes, and the reflexivity of a virtual camera that defies cinematic gravity; and the magic by which Wicked creates its impossible spaces and how this feeds into a broader discourse of fantasy characters that are “done accepting limits.”

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - Part 2 (with Nathalie Dupont)

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 18:42:16 +0000

Episode 148 concludes Fantasy/Animation’s two-part special focusing on C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia book series with this examination of the 2005 big-screen adaptation The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Andrew Adamson, 2005), with special guest Dr Nathalie Dupont. Nathalie is Associate Professor in American Studies at the Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale (ULCO) in France, and is the author of Between Hollywood and Godlywood: The Case of Walden Media (Peter Lang, 2015), which focuses on the history of Walden Media - a unique American company financed by a conservative Christian and a producer of The Chronicles of Narnia big screen franchise. Topics in this instalment include the history of Walden Media and industrial definitions of ‘Godlywood’; the importance of Narnia’s wartime context and the influence of its evacuation narrative on the other-wordly drama of its hide-and-seek fantasy; links between Andrew Adamson’s adaptation and the post-Harry Potter and post-Lord of the Rings climate of contemporary Hollywood; and Narnia’s situating of children within the film’s complex set of relationships, arguments, and tensions.

Footnote #55 - Lewis' In Defence of the Fairytale (with Terry Lindvall)

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 10:23:39 +0000

Fantasy/Animation welcomes back special guest Professor Terry Lindvall to the podcast to continue the discussion of C.S. Lewis, this time with a focus on Lewis’ own work on fairy stories and the value the writer places on the importance of the ‘unexpected’ in fairytales as a mode of narration. Topics include Lewis’ professional history and views on the crafting of child curiosity within the literary imagination; how Lewis’ own students were directed to bring back enchantment via side stories and personal images of haunting; Lewis’ use of female characters, storytelling, and questions of empowerment; distinctions in worldbuilding and world creation between Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien; and the qualities that make Lewis such a seminal writer of popular fantasy.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - Part 1 (with Terry Lindvall)

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 11:47:08 +0000

Episode 147 of the podcast is the first in a two-part special focusing on C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia book series originally published between 1950 and 1956, where Chris and Alex look at a handful of screen adaptations that traverse the fantasy and animation intersection. For this first instalment, they compare the 1979 animated film The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe directed by Bill Melendez with the BBC serial of the same name from 1988, both of which adapted Lewis’ first and perhaps best known Narnia novel. Joining them is special guest Terry Lindvall, who is the C.S. Lewis Endowed Chair in Communication and Christian Thought and Professor of Communication at Virginia Wesleyan College. He is a C.S. Lewis scholar and expert in American film and media, seeking to see how theological thought, Christian faith and tradition, and cinema can intersect. His recent book crosses squarely into animation, titled Animated Parables: A Pedagogy of Seven Deadly Sins and a Few Virtues (2022), and examines how short animated films teach us, directly and indirectly, about vice and virtue, connecting together a range of global cartoons to explore the animators' role in displaying the seven deadly sins. Listen as they discuss distinctions between the marvellous and the uncanny, and how fantasy shaped Lewis’ life and works; his relationship with J.R.R. Tolkien and the influence of Christianity on his brand of fantasy; traditions of limited animation and the medium’s potential status as one of ‘supposal’; shifting representations of the eponymous White Witch as both feared and fearful; and what Narnia has to say about the importance of letting children think.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #54 - Cult Cinema (with Iain Robert Smith)

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 09:34:10 +0000

Fresh from their discussion of La mujer murcielago/The Batwoman (René Cardona, 1968), Chris and Alex are once again joined by Dr Iain Robert Smith, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London, to undertake a 10-minute introduction to cult and cult cinema. Listen as the trio offer a closer look at the politics of ‘cult’ as a critical and cultural category; what it means to negotiate obsessive reception and fandom in the analysis of film, and the extent to which cult operates as a type of cinema; the oppositional quality of cult and its uneven relationship to the mainstream; the implied gender politics of the so-called ‘masculinity of cult’ and questions of inclusion and exclusion; and the enjoyment of both studying and taking part in the kinds of participatory cultures that have shaped the global canon of cult.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

The Batwoman (1968) (with Iain Robert Smith)

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 09:45:55 +0000

The Fantasy/Animation podcast is back with a bang thanks to the Mexican superhero caper La mujer murcielago/The Batwoman (René Cardona, 1968), a transnational twist on the famed DC character. Joining Chris and Alex to discuss intellectual property, international adaptation, and the politics of the remake is Dr Iain Robert Smith, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London. Iain’s research focuses on the ways in which material is adapted across different national contexts, including what happens when Hollywood films are remade by (and for) other cultures. These areas were central to his monograph The Hollywood Meme: Transnational Adaptations in World Cinema (EUP, 2016), and developed further in the anthologies Media Across Borders (with Andrea Esser and Miguel Bernal-Merino, Routledge, 2016) and Transnational Film Remakes (with Constantine Verevis, EUP 2017). Topics for this episode include the postwar history of unlicensed remakes; critical approaches to remaking and imitation through strategies of appropriation and localisation; The Batwoman’s status as a Mexican lucha libre film; budget filmmaking, non-cinema, and the spectacle of different kinds of visual effects; and what René Cardona’s superhero feature has to say about how the industry of the transnational remake helps us make sense of U.S. cultural power and imperialism.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #53 - Star Voices

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 14:41:52 +0000

The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!

The Fantasy/Animation Footnotes return with this reflection on the star voice as both an industrial trend within contemporary animation production and as an object of critique often assumed to nothing more than novelty leaned on too heavily to ‘sell’ animation as an entertainment medium. Chris takes the lead for this discussion of the potency and power of star sound, with topics including the longstanding history of star voicework across popular animated film and television, and the forceful emergence of the celebrity voice within the landscape of 1990s animation; the authenticating properties of the star and their possible function as a legitimising force; questions of labour and the relationship between the star and the trained voice artist; and how animators can tap into a star persona through character design to enhance or subvert their otherwise hidden vocal presence.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Bride of Frankenstein (1935) (with David Sandner)

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 10:22:40 +0000

This year’s Halloween special of the podcast goes back to 1930s Hollywood with this look at Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935), the follow-up to Universal Pictures’ 1931 feature Frankenstein also directed by James Whale. To discuss the horror and humour of this most monstrous and macabre sequel, Chris and Alex are joined by special guest David Sandner, author and editor of multiple works on fantasy literature and a Professor at California State University. David has published widely on histories of fantasy, including the books The Fantastic Sublime: Romanticism and Transcendence in Nineteenth-century Children's Fantasy Literature (Westport, 1996) and Critical Discourses of the Fantastic, 1712-1831 (Routledge, 2011), alongside the edited collections Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader (Praeger, 2004) and The Treasury of the Fantastic with Jacob Weisman (Tachyon, 2013). Topics for this spooky instalment include the film’s status as a work of fantasy and horror, and the framing of Frankenstein’s original author Mary Shelley as a practitioner of the fantastic; early cartoon exhibition practices, the notion of “theatre animation,” and the influence of the twentieth century’s pervasive culture of animation on Bride of Frankenstein’s special effect technologies; questions of adaptation and the new invitations to fantasise made by director James Whale; the film’s self-reflexivity around film production; links between size and the sublime, and how an uncanny portrayal of homunculi sites the film’s story within screen histories of the miniature; and how Bride of Frankenstein negotiates a pleasure in agency, creation, reanimation, and restoration.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #52 - Rhetorics of Fantasy

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 14:27:06 +0000

The Fantasy/Animation Footnotes continue with this latest examination of the many ‘rhetorics’ of fantasy that account for the mechanics by which fantasy writers can and do achieve their fantastical effects. Drawn from Farah Mendlesohn’s influential work on fantasy literature Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008), this Footnote has Alex reflect on the categorisation of fantasy and the value of Mendlesohn’s self-declared “tour around the skeletons and exoskeletons of the genre” to distinguish and divide kinds of storytelling practices; the distinctions between intrusive, immersive, portal quest, and liminal fantasy stories, and what these modes mean for narrative structure, world-building, rules, and characterisation; the disruptions that fantasy makes to a world that is ‘already known’ and the game it plays with our assumptions of mimetic fiction; and the way that Mendlesohn’s typology of fantasy illuminates both the way that the genre’s stories are told and the address that these narratives make to the spectator.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Monsters, Inc. (2001) (with John Airlie)

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:13:22 +0000

The Fantasy/Animation podcast continues its involvement with the work of Pixar Animation Studios in this closer look at the computer-animated film Monsters, Inc. (2001) featuring Chris and Alex’s first guest of the new season John Airlie, Associate Lecturer in Film and Media at Birkbeck University in London. Not only has John has taught courses across higher education related to gender and sexuality, but has, in his own words, also toiled in the world of publishing and book distribution. He now works for one of the major U.S. film companies in London, where he specialises in post production (localisation/dubbing) for international markets. Topics include the role of the voice in character animation and international dubbing practices as a form of adaptation; the interplay between the dubbed voice and stardom, and what it means for culturally-specifically stars to ‘match’ the physicality of an ‘original’ animated body; contemporary Hollywood animation and celebrity voicework; the politics of the animated cameo; and what Monsters, Inc. has to say about the power of the child’s voice.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #51 - Cinema and the City

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 12:08:27 +0000

The Fantasy/Animation Footnotes return with this consideration of the many relationships that cinema can have with - and to - the city. Building on their recent episode on Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007), Chris and Alex reflect on those scholars who have placed cinema in dialogue with issues related to space, urban design, and sociology, and who ask questions about how a city is represented onscreen, how its spaces are organised and mapped, and the stakes of re-animating a ‘real’ space to transform an otherwise authentic and accessible locale. Topics include how cities can and do become different through their rendition via animation and fantasy; cinephilic cinema cultures that unfold within urban spaces; filmmaking as a form of tourism and the spectacle of the touristic gaze; and the fictionalising of real cities to create an imagined and imaginary place.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Ratatouille (2007)

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 07:44:01 +0000

Chris and Alex return for a brand new season of the Fantasy/Animation podcast, beginning with this special episode on Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007), the eighth computer-animated film from Pixar Animation Studies and one of the studio’s cleverest in how it uses the metaphor of food and cookery to discuss ingenuity, artistry, and what it means to value creativity. Topics on the menu include the Europeanness of Ratatouille’s Parisian setting and how it departs from Pixar’s previous depictions of modern American; anthropomorphic subjectivity and the impact of new points of view on the accessibility of virtual space; the film’s symbolic rejection of Hollywood’s industrial shift to motion-capture through its comedic fantasies of control and the framing of cooking as an art; and how Brad Bird’s film incorporates both montages that “underdetermine” narrative acts and reflexive techniques that highlight Ratatouille’s own status as a computer-animated construction.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Archive Episode - My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

Mon, 29 Jul 2024 05:49:00 +0000

Another trip through the Fantasy/Animation archive lands on this very early episode from February 2019 that focuses on Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988). Chris and Alex take the opportunity to reminisce about when fantasy and animation first met, and whether Alex has ‘clicked’ with the film since the original episode was recorded. With My Neighbor Totoro initially released as part of a double-bill with Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata, 1988) - a film that Chris and Alex have also covered on the podcast - this is a chance for listeners to enjoy their own Fantasy/Animation double-header!

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Archive Episode - Ex Machina (2014) (with Andrew Whitehurst)

Mon, 22 Jul 2024 08:15:24 +0000

Chris and Alex welcomed Oscar-winning visual effects artist Andrew Whitehurst to the Fantasy/Animation podcast back in November 2019 for this reflection on the posthumanism of science-fiction parable Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014). Andrew kindly spoke with us about his role as Visual Effects Supervisor on the film (for which he received an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects in 2015), and navigated through Ex Machina’s technologised construction of bodies and the hybrid performance of humanoid robot Ava.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Archive Episode - The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) (with Caroline Ruddell - Live @ Cinema Museum)

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 09:14:58 +0000

The latest archive instalment takes Chris and Alex back to January 2020, and their first live episode recorded in front of an audience of animated fantasy fans in attendance at the Fantasy/Animation screening series in collaboration with the Cinema Museum in Kennington, London. Joining the Q&A to discuss The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Lotte Reiniger, 1926) was special guest Dr Caroline Ruddell (Brunel University London), an expert on Lotte Reiniger who has published work on the filmmaker in Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres (2018), and the recent anthology The Crafty Animator: Handmade, Craft-based Animation and Cultural Value (2019). Lots here on Reiniger’s signature style of 2D cutout animation and gendered discourses of craft and the politics of the handmade, alongside the film’s production during a specific historical moment of upheaval in 1920s Weimar Germany.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Archive Episode - Treasure Planet (2002) (with Ron Clements and John Musker)

Mon, 08 Jul 2024 08:27:29 +0000

For this third archive episode, Chris and Alex revisit a real bucket list moment by journeying back to July 2021 and the episode on Treasure Planet (Ron Clements & John Musker, 2002), which featured as its very special guests the film’s directors Ron Clements and John Musker. Faced with a host of technical issues (alongside barely-concealed disbelief when Disney animation royalty first joined the video call), this episode is a particular favourite, and for good reason - expect turns to the industrial origins of Treasure Planet and the film’s initial pitching to Disney chairman and chief executive Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Roy E. Disney, and Thomas Schumacher, as well as reflections on its use of the digital painting tools in relation to the landscape of Hollywood animation of the 1990s.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Archive Episode - Aladdin (1992) (with Steve Henderson)

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 10:09:09 +0000

Chris and Alex continue their journey back through the Fantasy/Animation podcast with this reminder of an early episode looking at the Disney animated musical Aladdin (Ron Clements & John Musker, 1992), which featured as its special guest Steve Henderson - Editor of the Skwigly Online Animation Magazine and Director of the Manchester Animation Festival. Originally recorded as Episode 21 back in May 2020, this instalment appeared just before the Guy Ritchie-directed remake that was covered on the podcast almost exactly a year later, and marked Fantasy/Animation’s first look at the Disney Renaissance, as well as featuring turns to the star voice, digital VFX imagery, and animation’s own history of Orientalist imaginaries.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Archive Episode - Peppa Pig (2004-) (with Richard Dyer)

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 10:15:05 +0000

Chris and Alex kick off the first in a series of episodes that give listeners a chance to revisit and review some earlier podcasts, or perhaps hear one or two instalments they might have missed first time around. For this inaugural delve back into the Fantasy/Animation archive, they look back at their conversation with Professor Richard Dyer (Emeritus Professor of Film Studies, King's College London and Professorial Fellow in Film Studies, University of St Andrews) who discussed the popular British animated television series Peppa Pig (Neville Astley & Mark Baker, 2014-) way back in May 2019. In a conversation that covered everything from the work of modernist painter Henri Matisse and filmmaker Béla Tarr to the realism of Peppa Pig’s anthropomorphic character designs and its politics of niceness, this episode shows that there is more to this animated media text than just muddy puddles.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

The Thief of Bagdad (1940)

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 08:18:49 +0000

The Fantasy/Animation podcast is soon to break for the summer, but not before a few more episodes to round off the series - this time, it is the “Arabian fantasy” The Thief of Bagdad (Michael Powell, Ludwig Berger & Tim Whelan, 1940) that provides the focus for Episode 142, as Chris and Alex try to make sense of its story and style drawn from the “One Thousand and One Nights” collection of Middle Eastern folktales and its reproduction of Orientialist imaginaries and iconographies. Topics include The Thief of Bagdad’s sustained fascination with the Orient and storytelling interest in the exoticism and erotics of magic and spells; fantasy and animation’s historical links with the development of Technicolor, and how The Thief of Bagdad marks the inaugural use of the Technicolor blue-screen travelling matte process; the stylistic influence of Powell’s film on the characters and setting of Walt Disney’s Aladdin (Ron Clements & John Musker, 1992); and how the film manifests insidious tropes of Empire within its broader Anti-Arab sentiment.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #50 - Postfeminism (with Eve Benhamou)

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 08:43:20 +0000

The Fantasy/Animation Footnotes reach their half-century as Chris and Alex are once again joined by Dr Eve Benhamou, teaching fellow in Film Studies at the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France to examine the contradictory cultural and political space of postfeminism. A much-debated topic, postfeminism typically pivots on gendered discourses of agency, autonomy, potency, and physical empowerment. Topics include the ambivalent relationship between contemporary postfeminism and the ‘gains’ of earlier feminist movements; the culture and politics of postfeminism’s multimedia presence in the late-1990s and early-2000s; and how the graphic rendering of female bodies as both powerful and powerless feeds into the broader animated representation of postfeminist physicality.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Frozen (2013) (with Eve Benhamou)

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 14:39:59 +0000

Episode 141 returns to the contemporary era of Disney Feature Animation with this discussion of the computer-animated musical blockbuster Frozen (Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee, 2013), a fairytale film of female empowerment that is widely credited with ushering in Disney’s Third Golden Age of animated features after the ‘Classic’ Disney period and earlier Disney Renaissance. The special guest for this instalment is Dr Eve Benhamou, teaching fellow in Film Studies at the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France who has previously taught at the Bristol School of Animation and Swansea University. Eve’s research concerns the intersection of Disney, Hollywood, and gender - ideas central to her first monograph Contemporary Disney Animation: Genre, Gender and Hollywood (EUP, 2022) which examines the “multifaceted interactions between animated films, Disney properties such as Pixar and Marvel, and popular genres including the romantic comedy, the superhero film and the cop buddy film.” Topics for this episode include Frozen’s negotiation of the longstanding Disney formula and how such a blueprint impacts the film’s identity as both ‘classic’ and ‘typical’ Disney; gender, genre, and the portrayal of girl power and sisterhood through the Anna/Elsa relationship; recent turns towards Baroque aesthetics in Disney’s post-Frozen computer-animated features; stylistic overlaps with the musical performances of Wicked; and what the sustained cultural power of Frozen has to say about the Disney corporation in twenty-first-century America.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #49 - Cyborgs

Mon, 27 May 2024 12:25:46 +0000

Footnote 49 looks at the fascinating figure of the cyborg as an embodiment of hybridity, resistance, and rebellion, interrogating the role of cyborgs as surrogate figurations that representing disparate forms of identity within both popular media culture and social reality. Chris and Alex begin by discussing the cyborg as the provocative integration of artificial components and technologies with the human, before asking where and how the image of the cyborg appears throughout cinema history. This includes a look at its metaphorical role within and beyond science-fiction and fantasy; the cyborg as the increasing locus for current cultural debates about race, gender, and sexuality; and the politics of the cyborg as a reflection of the possibilities of liminal identities that are ‘caught between’ the normative.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) (with Yvonne Tasker)

Mon, 20 May 2024 08:29:52 +0000

Professor Yvonne Tasker is the very special guest for Episode 140 of the podcast, joining Chris and Alex for this discussion of action spectacle and the gendered body in science-fiction sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991). Across several foundational publications that have interrogated the intersections between genre and gender, including the monographs Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and Action Cinema (Routledge, 1993) and Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema (Routledge, 1998) and the edited anthology The Hollywood Action and Adventure Film (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), Professor Tasker’s research has explored the convergence of feminism and gender cultures through popular media. Topics for this instalment include Terminator 2: Judgment Day’s presentation of the female body and 1980s Hollywood “muscularity”; technofuturist vs. simulationist registers of VFX imagery in Hollywood’s “wonder years”; the metamorphosing T-1000 and the formal presentation of computer-generated imagery; the place of James Cameron’s science-fiction epic within broader Hollywood histories of the genre and overlaps with the war movie; and what Terminator 2 has to say about computers given its defining treatment of an international technological threat.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #48 - Visual Effects

Mon, 13 May 2024 10:42:41 +0000

Having already tackled the topic of special effects in an earlier Footnote, this latest episode instead focuses on visual effects (VFX) as a way to think through the practical/digital distinction that has come to culturally and industrially define the specificity and spectacle of VFX imagery. Topics include the rise of digital technologies and their ubiquity in contemporary moving image culture; crisis narratives of the virtual supplanting evidence of ‘in-camera’ labour from motion-capture to machine learning; categorisations of ‘special’ and ‘visual’ from within Hollywood and what this says about the broader recognition of the contribution of effects artists; and the marketing of contemporary blockbusters according to an emerging anti-VFX agenda.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Dungeons & Dragons - The Fantasy Adventure Board Game (with Cat Mahoney)

Mon, 06 May 2024 08:47:11 +0000

Episode 139 marks something of a first as Chris and Alex play ‘The Fantasy Adventure Board Game’ Dungeons & Dragons originally created and designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974, taking on its array of characters, weapons, and quests live during the podcast with special guest (and Dungeon Master) Dr Cat Mahoney, Derby Fellow in Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool. Cat is the co-editor with Jilly Boyce Kay and Caitlin Shaw of The Past in Visual Culture Essays on Memory, Nostalgia and the Media (McFarland, 2016) and author of the monograph Women in Neoliberal Postfeminist Television Drama: Representing Gendered Experiences of the Second World War (Palgrave, 2019), as well as multiple book chapters and articles engaging with representations of gender through historical and historiographical frameworks. Discussions during this roll-by-roll episode of the Dungeons & Dragons game include the suitability of fantasy as a genre conducive to the table-top role-playing game format; the influence of Gygax and Arneson’s fame upon the 1980s resurgence of fantasy cinema; Dungeons and Dragons as an enduring transmedia property and the possibilities of world-building; and how ‘metagaming’ in Dungeons and Dragons offers a way to think about the player’s complex relationship to character and embodiment.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #47 - Aura

Mon, 29 Apr 2024 13:36:13 +0000

Art’s relationship to the auratic is the focus of Footnote #47, which engages cinema’s historical relation to ‘aura’ via the foundational work of Walter Benjamin who argued for technology’s “withering” of art’s uniqueness of space and time thanks to the potential for the creation of a “plurality of copies” that shift art’s “unique existence.” Topics include photography’s reproducibility that creates ontological tensions between the ‘original’ and ‘copy'; processes of perception, proximity, and distance; and how for Benjamin, aura seemingly liquidated tradition in the age of invasive capitalism.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Toy Story (1995) (with Lucy Fife Donaldson)

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 08:27:43 +0000

The Fantasy/Animation podcast finally tackles the seminal Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995), with Episode 138 looking at Pixar’s computer-animated feature and the film that transformed animation in Hollywood - and beyond - into a digital medium. Joining Chris and Alex to examine Toy Story’s computerised production and the pleasures of its pristine visual illusionism is Dr Lucy Fife Donaldson, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, whose work focuses on film and television style, audiovisual design and 'below-the-line' labour, performance and the body, and videographic criticism. Lucy is the author of Texture in Film (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), and the co-editor (with James Walters) of Television Performance (Bloomsbury, 2019) and most recently, Epic / everyday: Moments in Television (Manchester University Press, 2023) with Sarah Cardwell & Jonathan Bignell. Topics in this episode include Toy Story’s digital surfaces and textures, and the vocabulary that is needed to talk about fine and peripheral detail; animation as a space of inescapable and intensified design; the contribution of everyday textures to the film’s construction of worldhood and the narrative journey of the toys; the plasticity of character and the miniaturisation (and magnification) of texture; and how Toy Story’s sense of ‘play’ is articulated via the careful and highly reflexive attention paid to scuffs, surfaces, and scale.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #46 - Multiplanarity

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 07:53:37 +0000

Footnote #46 responds to a listener email by focusing on the speeds and spaces of the “multiplanar” image, a term theorised in Thomas Lamarre’s writing on anime and its techniques which looks at how motion is able to divide animated landscapes into different planes of action. In this episode, Chris treats Alex to a rundown of Lamarre’s work on multiplanarity via the author’s citation of the optical logic of foreground and background spaces in relation to the window of a moving train; the particular geometric perspectives of anime against the graphic “hyper-three-dimensionality” of contemporary computer-animated film; the perspectives and “scalar relations” afforded by developments in the multi-plane camera; and how the defining animetism of anime “focuses less on realism of depth than on realism of movement.”

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) (with Sarah Thomas)

Mon, 08 Apr 2024 12:33:25 +0000

Episode 137 appropriately begins at the end of the commercially and critically successful Indiana Jones franchise with this discussion of the fifth and final feature Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (James Mangold, 2023) featuring special guest Dr Sarah Thomas. Sarah is Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media in the School of Arts, whose research expertise centres on stardom/celebrity, media industries, and screen performance in Hollywood and transnational cinemas. She is the author of James Mason (BFI, 2018), Peter Lorre - Face Maker: Constructing Stardom and Performance in Hollywood and Europe (Berghahn Books, 2012), and the edited collection Cult Film Stardom: Offbeat Attractions and Processes of Cultification (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012) with Kate Egan. In this podcast episode, the conversation turns to Harrison Ford’s star image and the representation of aged physicality onscreen; digital de-aging and the computerised replication of celebrity; ‘legacy’ cinema and the star’s role in supporting the continuity of a franchise; the impact of the film’s thematic “fissures in time” on the construction of narrative jeopardy; and how Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny uses images and icons of the past to disappear into its own sense of history.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #45 - The Disney Renaissance (with Peter Kunze)

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 10:33:03 +0000

Chris and Alex once again draw on the expertise of Dr Peter Kunze (Tulane University) for this discussion of the form and function of the period critically and culturally known as the Disney Renaissance. Listen as they reflect on the complex and often contradictory place of the Renaissance as a crucial phase of renewal within Disney’s own internal history; the contribution made to the studio’s animated features by the repeating presence of key creative personnel; the influential role of Broadway upon Disney’s corporate synergy and the formal interplay between a ‘Broadway style’ and 1980s and 1990s cartoon aesthetics; and the cultural politics of the Renaissance as a phase of Hollywood animation that can be mapped onto Disney’s own multicultural negotiation of diversity and inclusion.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Beauty and the Beast (1991) (with Peter Kunze)

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 13:04:20 +0000

The author of Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance (Rutgers University Press, 2023), Dr Peter Kunze (Tulane University), is the special guest for Episode 136 of the podcast which looks at the impact of Walt Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise, 1991) and both the industrial and stylistic stakes of the film’s adoption of a Broadway style of musical arrangement. Topics include the film’s place within the Disney Renaissance period of the studio’s animated features and the role of key figures like Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Howard Ashman, and Alan Menken; corporate synergy and the top-down reimagining of Disney’s production strategies during the 1980s and 1990s; song, dance, and the film’s casting of established Broadway voices; the application of emergent computer animation and digital VFX to the presentation and realisation of the film’s musical numbers; and how Beauty and the Beast adapts both the original fairytale and the later fantasy La Belle et la Bête (Jean Cocteau, 1946) in ways that illustrated the contemporary state and status of the musical genre in Hollywood.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #44 - Hanna-Barbera (with Jared Bahir Browsh)

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 09:00:00 +0000

A deep dive into the U.S. animation studio Hanna-Barbera provides the focus of Footnote #44, as Chris and Alex are once again joined by Dr Jared Bahir Browsh to discuss the origins of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera’s influential and prolific production company that strengthened the cartoon’s move from theatrical exhibition to television. Topics include the studio’s origins and defining animated products; their particular application of limited animation and the relationship to elements of character and background design; the industrial and aesthetic circumstances that came to support their dominance over children’s animated television in North America; and the many challenges of researching Hanna-Barbera as a popular - yet largely under-represented - area of film, media, and animation studies.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

The Flintstones (1960-1966) (with Jared Bahir Browsh)

Mon, 11 Mar 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Chris and Alex are delighted to welcome Dr. Jared Bahir Browsh (Assistant Teaching Professor, University of Colorado Boulder) to the podcast to discuss William Hanna and Joseph Barbera’s landmark animated sitcom The Flintstones (1960-1966), the first cartoon series to occupy a prime time slot on U.S. television. Listen as they discuss Jared’s research into the political economics of the media and his recent book Hanna-Barbera: A History (2022) through a consideration of The Flintstones as a highly influential animated product, one whose Stone Age setting, multi-episode narratives, and anarchic energy all helped to define the cartoon and support its identity as a seminal piece of serial television. The conversation is focused on three important episodes within the programme’s history - The Flintstone Flyer (S1E1), The Blessed Event (a.k.a. The Dress Rehearsal) (S3E23), and The Great Gazoo (S6E7) - which collectively map the trajectory of Bedrock’s famous family while reflecting broader narrative and tonal shifts across its original six season run. Topics include the industrial history of The Flintstones across network television in North America and its status as an early exemplar of adult animation on television; renditions of Stone Age technology and links to mid-century modernism; Wilma, gender politics, and the emergent cultural role of the homemaker on and off the screen; the impact of merchandising and syndication on characterisation; the ‘loose’ aesthetic style of the programme and its ‘cacophonic’ use of sound; and how The Flintstones shifted the codes and conventions of popular animated television. Yabba Dabba Doo!

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #43 - Disney Princesses (with Robyn Muir)

Mon, 04 Mar 2024 11:01:21 +0000

Fresh from their discussion of Wish (Chris Buck & Fawn Veerasunthorn, 2023), Chris and Alex are once again joined by Dr Robyn Muir, Lecturer in Media and Communication (University of Surrey), author of The Disney Princess Phenomenon: A Feminist Analysis (2023), and founder and director of the Disney, Culture and Society Research Network to discuss the historical and cultural power of Disney princesses, a phenomenon that traverses films, merchandise, and several ancillary media. Topics for Footnote #43 include the industrial framing of Disney femininity and its politics of inclusion and exclusion; the stakes of merchandising certain female bodies; and how this top-down and highly lucrative phenomenon moves through multiple cultural spaces to fully support its enduring audience and economic appeal.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Wish (2023) (with Robyn Muir)

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 14:46:35 +0000

To celebrate Disney’s computer-animated film musical Wish (Chris Buck & Fawn Veerasunthorn, 2023) and the company’s recent centenary year, Chris and Alex are joined by Dr Robyn Muir, Lecturer in Media and Communication in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey. Robyn’s research is interested in how identity is constructed and interpreted within cultural phenomena, including images of femininity in the Disney Princess franchise. Her book The Disney Princess Phenomenon: A Feminist Analysis (2023) explores Disney’s princess films, merchandise, and consumer experiences to account for the cultural pervasiveness and political power of Disney princesses, and to map their wider representations within society. Robyn is also the founder and director of the Disney, Culture and Society Research Network, an international and interdisciplinary space for Disney Studies scholars, and co-founder and co-editor of The International Journal of Disney Studies. Listen as they discuss Wish’s identity as nostalgic evocation of Walt Disney animation and tie-ins with the recent Disney100 Exhibition and Once Upon a Studio (Dan Abraham & Trent Correy, 2023) cartoon short; magic, Magnifico, and tensions between community desire and individual wish fulfilment; the gendered exceptionality of Asha as a woman of colour; power and the ‘imagined community’ of Rosas; the film’s hybrid aesthetic of cel- and computer-animated techniques; and the role of fantasy in providing the schema to know what to wish for.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #42 - Tolkien’s On Fairy Stories

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 12:08:23 +0000

Following up last week’s feature-length episode on The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Peter Jackson, 2003), the latest Footnote looks at J.R.R. Tolkien’s seminal essay “On Fairy Stories” that engages the definitions, origins, and applications of the fairy story; the fairy vs. faerie distinction and questions of magic and imagination; sub-creation and secondary belief in the construction of fantasy’s logically-consistent fictional worlds; and how Tolkien’s defense of fantasy literature can be helpful for the craft of fantasy stories across multiple forms of media.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 10:20:24 +0000

Chris and Alex conclude their journey through Middle-earth with this episode on the third and final entry into Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy - The Return of the King (Peter Jackson, 2003) - where they reflect on the stylistic influence and cultural legacy of the franchise since its culmination over twenty years ago. Listen as they discuss the role of vertical space in fantasy cinema and its contrast with the portrayal of New Zealand’s sprawling landscapes; Andy Serkis, motion-capture, and the narrative ambivalence of Gollum’s technological body; the use of digital VFX n the creation of masses and multitudes; how the film divides its drama between narrative and spectacle plotlines; and Return of the King’s aesthetic extravagance and what it means to experience a Hollywood epic.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #41 - Canons

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 10:15:29 +0000

Footnote #41 looks at canon formation and value judgments in relation to the selection and privilege of art and culture’s masterworks, with Chris and Alex tackling the relationship between canons and consensus. Topics include canonisation as a political process of inclusion and exclusion; core-periphery models of how so-called untouchable art secures its prominence; the contributions of fan cultures to discourses of ownership, authenticity, and what is considered ‘official’; and the implications for syllabus design when it comes to thinking about the canonising of key texts in the classroom.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Life, Animated (2016) (with Janet Harbord)

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 09:15:33 +0000

Special guest Janet Harbord, Professor of Film Studies at Queen Mary, joins Chris and Alex to discuss the intersections between fantasy, animation, and autism in this examination of documentary Life, Animated (Roger Ross Williams, 2016), a film that reflects on the value and fantasies of animated media at the same time as it navigates and represents autistic apprehensions of the world. Janet’s research is primarily involved with cinema’s ability to create relationships between bodies, feelings and environments, but also how neurotypicality has historically framed our understanding of film, and she is currently one of the principle investigators on a four year Wellcome Trust funded project ‘Autism through Cinema’. Topics in this episode include Life, Animated’s treatment of protagonist Owen Suskind and images of neurodiversity onscreen; the canonisation of a certain version of Disney animation history through processes of repetition, ritualism, and re-enactment; Owen as himself a text and his status as an animator; the Disneyfication of autism and the importance of physical media in portraying animated fan communities; and what it is about (animated and fantasy) cinema that makes legible or holds an affinity with the autistic experience.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #40 - Puppetry

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 09:53:43 +0000

What is puppet animation, and are puppets a form of animation? The historical and theoretical implications of fantasy and animation’s relationship to puppet performance are the focus of Footnote #40, with Chris and Alex looking at the defining role of puppets in fantasy’s fête and carnival culture origins; the phantasmagoria of the puppet and the desire to express fantasy through puppetry; links to the earliest stop-motion shorts and rise of motion-capture technologies in an era of virtual puppetry; and whether evolving definitions of animation and its medium specificity are appropriate enough to encompass the volume and diversity of puppet forms.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

The Dark Crystal (1982) (with Tanya Kirk)

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 11:12:53 +0000

2024 kicks off with this episode on The Dark Crystal (Jim Henson & Frank Oz, 1982), recorded at the British Library with Tanya Kirk, Lead Curator of Printed Heritage Collections 1601–1900, and one of the organisers and curators of the Fantasy: Realms of Imagination exhibition that runs at the library until February of this year. The exhibition explores the history of the fantasy genre from its origins in fairy and folk tales to more recent incarnations in literature and film, and features original artwork, props, and costumes from well-known fantasy media including The Dark Crystal, as well as fantasy inspired tabletop and video games. Topics in this new year’s instalment include histories of craft and puppetry’s links to industry, skill, labour, and the pantomimic; acts of curation when it comes to preserving fantasy and animation’s archaeologies of materiality; the cultures and traditions central to The Dark Crystal’s fictional world; 1980s VFX technologies and the pleasure of characters moved ‘by hand’; and where Jim Henson and puppet performances fit into the British Library’s exhibition of fantasy storytelling.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Arthur Christmas (2011)

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 15:27:06 +0000

The Christmas special of the Fantasy/Animation podcast is finally delivered, and a perfectly wrapped episode it is too (!), with Chris and Alex enjoying the magic and mayhem of Arthur Christmas (Sarah Smith, 2011) - the Aardman studio’s second foray into computer animation and a film that confronts head-on Christmas as a collective fantasy through the comedic conflicts between generations. Listen as they discuss tensions between old and new, magic and technology, in the film’s playful portrayal of the bureaucracy and labour of Christmas; Aardman’s own industrial image of craft and the symbolism of automation versus those presents delivered ‘by hand’; the narrative function of Santa Claus as an ‘actor’ and an ‘actant’, and his complex identity as a mythic figure; Arthur Christmas’ ambivalent images of generous consumerism; spectatorial positioning in relation to the intrusion of festive fantasy and ideas of belief; and how the film negotiates what it means to represent and reinvent Christmas onscreen.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #39 - Special Effects

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 08:22:30 +0000

What is so special about special effects? What role does technological innovation play in their convincing construction of illusion? What distinguishes ‘special’ from ‘visual’ effects? In this Footnote episode, Chris and Alex play with ideas of special effects in relation to fantasy and animation, going back to early cinema and the animated fantasies (or fantastical animations) of Georges Méliès to think about the history of pro-filmic illusions captured on camera; practical vs. digital distinctions in the articulation and realisation of effects imagery; and the growing influence of post-production processes in the era of computer graphics.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Disney: A Tale of Technology and Innovation (Live at the British Film Institute) (with Chris McKenna)

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 08:55:34 +0000

Episode 129 sees Chris flying solo in this conversation recorded live at the recent Once Upon A Time: A Disney Day held at the British Film Institute in London back in July, which was part of the Making Magic: 100 Years of Disney two-month season that ran throughout 2023. Discussing the Disney studio’s longstanding relationship to technological innovation is returning special guest Chris McKenna, current Head of Creative Operations at the VFX studio Moving Picture Company, who featured on the earlier Dumbo (Tim Burton, 2019) episode of the podcast. In this discussion panel, Chris talks further about his work on several of Disney’s “live-action” remakes, including The Jungle Book (Jon Favreau, 2016), The Lion King (Jon Favreau, 2019), Lady and the Tramp (Charlie Bean, 2019), and the recent The Little Mermaid (Rob Marshall, 2023), where he worked as Head of Layout and Animation at MPC. The duo reflect on Chris’ own history and how he got involved with this latest cycle of Disney features; whether or not to use the original animated film as a reference point; and the many challenges of adapting the Mouse House’s beloved animated classics for new audiences. They also field questions from those gathered together in NFT1 on everything from digital creativity; the links between realism, reception, and the potential loss of ‘magic’; and the collective labour involved in producing blockbuster computer graphics for the latest Disney’s animation.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #38 - Storybook Openings

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:58:46 +0000

Footnote #38 tackles the recurrent motif of the storybook that so often begins Disney’s animated features, but which also takes other forms and styles as part of the studio’s sustained dramatisation of storytelling. Listen as Chris and Alex discuss the importance of the prologue within definitions of the Disney formula; animation’s decorative function as a way of actualising and illustrating narrative events; visual developments in the trope and the role of literary legitimisation; and how the recurrent image of the leather-bound manuscript has been subject to contemporary Hollywood animation’s increasingly deconstructive register.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) (with Taylor Driggers)

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 08:01:00 +0000

Chris and Alex continue their journey through the world of Harry Potter for Episode 128 of the podcast, looking at the fourth instalment Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Mike Newell, 2005) accompanied by special guest Dr Taylor Driggers. Taylor is an academic researcher specialising in fantasy literature, theology and religious studies, gender, and sexuality, whose PhD in English Literature from the University of Glasgow focused on fantasy literature’s potential to offer queer and feminist re-visionings of Christian theology and religious practices. His first book was titled Queering Faith in Fantasy Literature and was published by Bloomsbury in 2022 as part of its Perspectives on Fantasy series. Listen as they discuss queer fandom and the connected controversies surrounding J.K. Rowling that have emerged since the conclusion of the big-screen franchise; Harry, Ron, and Hermione’s processes of gendered ‘becoming’ and overlaps with the early-2000s U.S. teen movie cycle; the role of the Triwizard Tournament in shaping the Goblet of Fire’s particular image of both heroic and marginal bodies; the heterospectacle of the Yule Ball and images of coupling; and what it means to re-negotiate the spectatorial pleasures of popular media in ways that might take the text away from the original author.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #37 - Silent Cinema (with Lawrence Napper)

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 08:50:32 +0000

Special guest Dr Lawrence Napper, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London and expert in early silent and British cinemas, joins Chris and Alex once again - this time to talk about silent cinema in this Footnote episode of the podcast. Topics include the role of piano accompaniments, string quartets, and full orchestras within early film culture; the locating of silent cinema as a Victorian leisure practice and connections to pantomime; aesthetic shifts in narrative, editing, and style during the 1920s that codify the language of cinema as it develops across the silent period; the ‘realism’ of silent cinema acting styles; and what it means to be a film historian and archivist today.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) (with Lawrence Napper)

Mon, 06 Nov 2023 18:18:44 +0000

For Episode 127 of the podcast, Chris and Alex travel through (film) history to examine the negotiation of the past through computer manipulation, focusing on Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) and its use of digital techniques to re-articulate the sounds and images of the First World War. Joining them to discuss the technological mediation of national traumas and triumphs is Dr Lawrence Napper, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London, who is an expert in early silent and British cinemas and author of the monographs British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years (2009), The Great War in Popular British Cinema of the 1920s: Before Journey’s End (2015) and Silent Cinema: Before the Pictures Got Small (2017). Listen as they discuss digital enhancement, discourses of truth, and the authenticity of the film’s added frames; historical screen representations of WW1 and the fictionalisation (and colourisation) of real-world events; the appeal and opportunities of archival footage in crafting cultural understandings of the Front; and how They Shall Not Grow Old offers spectators a landscape of imagination that captures the complexities of war while ‘animating’ the very fantasy of bringing the past back to life.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #36 - Horror Cinema (with Stacey Abbott)

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 06:58:00 +0000

What is horror cinema, and where did it come from? What are its unsettling spectatorial effects and uncomfortable provocations? What codes and conventions define its big screen history, and at which points does it splinter into slasher sub-genres and monstrous cycles? What role does the gothic and supernatural play in its generic construction? And how does the body as both threat and as threatened play into horror’s fascination with the impacts of difference and otherness? Answers to all these questions and more feature in this spooky Footnote episode on Horror Cinema with special guest Professor Stacey Abbott, incoming Professor of Film at Northumbria University and an expert in histories of gothic and horror in film and television.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

ParaNorman (2012) (with Stacey Abbott)

Mon, 23 Oct 2023 06:00:00 +0000

As Halloween rolls around once more, things take a positively spooky turn as Chris and Alex discuss the stop-motion animated horror film ParaNorman (Sam Fell & Chris Butler, 2012) with very special guest Professor Stacey Abbott, who is incoming Professor of Film at Northumbria University and an expert in histories of gothic and horror in film and television. Topics for this discussion include the role of horror cinema in processing trauma, including the special case of children’s horror that is both with and for children; horror as a series of embodiments and the broader question of body genres; links between ParaNorman and Frankenweenie (Tim Burton, 2012) in the creation of juvenile outsiderdom; the troublesom entanglement of digital effects with stop-motion aesthetics; why horror might work best when connected to the materiality of object animation; and how ParaNorman is a film that reflexively recognises the many pleasures of horror for children.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #35 - Twice Told Tales

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 12:23:13 +0000

Chris and Alex return to the Footnote format for this latest episode on “twice told tales” - a term that, following its Shakespearean origins, has been applied by writers of fantasy to refer to fantasy’s relationship to oral literature and fairytales. Topics include the fairytale’s codification of oral culture; legacies of literary structures and the power of (re)telling the beats of a story; shifting narrative templates and the act of adding one story ‘on top’ of another; and the spectatorial pleasure of receiving the fantasy of twice told creativity.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Cats (2019)

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 14:56:45 +0000

Chris and Alex return from their extended summer break with this discussion of the much-maligned musical Cats (Tom Hooper, 2019), a film whose reputation as a big-budget misjudgment has perhaps overwhelmed the intricacies of its uncanny constitution, and in particular how the narrative’s negotiation of its A-list performers speaks to the vexed question of actorly labour and agency in an age of heightened visual effects production. Listen as they wade through Cats’ unsettling feline character design and the integration of digital effects that build disconcerting bodies with multiple moving parts; theatricality and spontaneity in histories of the Hollywood musical; scale and the fantasy of space in director Tom Hooper’s execution of the film’s song-and-dance routines; editing choices and the presentation of blockbuster spectacle; and how the controversial digitised production of Cats taps into recent debates regarding the exploitation of the VFX sector and the many artists who build our CG-enhanced screen fantasies.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Fantasy/Animation - Announcement

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 16:08:24 +0000

A quick message about Fantasy/Animation's Summer Break, as well as ways that you can get in touch to support all things fantastical and animated. From listening back through our podcast archive and leaving us a quick review and star rating, to dropping us an email or sending in a blog post idea or submission ready for when we return, we would love to hear from you! In the meantime, have happy summers wherever you are and see you in October!

Footnote #34 - Science Fiction (with Mark Bould)

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 18:38:13 +0000

Chris and Alex are joined once more by Mark Bould, Professor of Film and Literature at the University of West England, for this Footnote episode that explores the origins and definitions of science-fiction storytelling. Expect turns to genre theory and the evolution of generic cycles, including the shifting ways that science fiction gets defined (and by whom); how science fiction moved from print magazines and paperback publishing to movie serials and the international and U.S. blockbuster; and the multimedia expansion of the genre that sits alongside the intensification of the study of science fiction into an academic discipline.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Free Guy (2021) (with Mark Bould)

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 06:12:59 +0000

The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998) meets They Live (John Carpenter, 1988) in Shawn Levy’s science-fiction comedy Free Guy (2021), which marks the director’s first collaboration with charming Canadian Ryan Reynolds and is a film that confronts head-on contemporary anxieties around technology, choice, security, and artificial intelligence. Joining Chris and Alex to separate out their NPCs from their AI engines is Mark Bould, Professor of Film and Literature at the University of West England, and author of a number of books on the aesthetics, politics and philosophy of science-fiction storytelling. The focus of this episode of the podcast is on Free Guy’s engagement with the spectacle and industry of videogames, as well as questions of sentience, play, and hyper-distracted spectatorship; its representation of the internet, digital culture, and communications technologies; repetitious acts and the labour of gaming; and what the smartness of Levy’s film has to say about incremental freedom and better social relations via nods to the absurd normalising of gun culture in the U.S. and the damaging effects of toxic masculinity.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #33 - Can Colour Blind People Work in VFX? (with Chris McKenna)

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 09:05:20 +0000

Special guest Chris McKenna, current Head of Creative Operations at the VFX studio Moving Picture Company, joins Chris and Alex for this latest Footnote episode on the VFX industry, with a particular focus on artists with colour blindness and advice on the best avenues for getting into animation lighting and design. From understanding the specific challenges of colour blindness for VFX artistry to the question of industry accessibility, the trio discuss the process of animation visualisation and what it means when animators struggle with distinguishing colour variations, matches, and palettes.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Dumbo (2019) (with Chris McKenna)

Mon, 03 Jul 2023 09:57:13 +0000

The emergence of Disney’s so-called ‘live-action’ remakes provides the focus of Episode 123, with the recent adaptation of Dumbo (Tim Burton, 2019) offering Chris and Alex plenty to get their teeth into thanks to the film’s particular brand of digital realism as well as director Tim Burton’s reflections on the very nature of spectacle itself. Special guest for this discussion is Chris McKenna, current Head of Creative Operations at the VFX studio Moving Picture Company, and Lead Technical Animator on Dumbo who has also worked on a host of Hollywood blockbusters and franchise films, including Terminator: Genisys (Alan Taylor, 2015), Spectre (Sam Mendes, 2015), Transformers: The Last Knight (Michael Bay, 2017), Ad Astra (James Gray, 2019), Cats (Tom Hooper, 2019), and Disenchanted (Adam Shankman, 2022). Among his many credits, Chris has several of the Disney remakes and spin-offs on his CV too, from The Jungle Book (Jon Favreau, 2016), The Lion King (Jon Favreau, 2019), and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (Joachim Rønning, 2019) to Lady and the Tramp (Charlie Bean, 2019) and the upcoming The Little Mermaid (Rob Marshall, 2023), where he worked as Head of Layout and Animation at MPC. Listen as the trio discuss the industrial workflow of VFX studio production, from the definition of “technical animation” to the question of simulation; how Dumbo reconciles Burton’s own “flavour” as a filmmaker with its broader ‘photorealistic caricature’ visual style; technological deterministic narratives of cinema and what it means for digital animation to copy lens-based media in these ‘live-action’ features; how Dumbo reflexively acknowledges histories of effects and photography in its construction of screen spectacle; and how when it comes to VFX artists creativity functions as an extension of passion.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #32 - 3D (with Nick Jones)

Mon, 26 Jun 2023 13:05:29 +0000

Fresh from their discussion of Spider-Man: No Way Home (Jon Watts, 2021), Chris, Alex and special guest Dr Nick Jones (Senior Lecturer in Film, Television and Digital Culture, University of York) return for this short Footnote episode on the marvel and magic of 3D technology. Topics include cinema’s own history of size, space, and spectacle from the Lumière brothers to James Cameron; the kinds of depth cues offered by 3D cinema that extends perception beyond the real-world; technological innovation and 3D’s default narratives of extension and protrusion; and how understanding the history of film in three-dimensions perhaps gets us closer to seeing what cinema might actually be as a creative medium.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) (with Nick Jones)

Mon, 19 Jun 2023 15:35:56 +0000

The MCU comes calling once again for Episode 122 of the podcast, as Chris and Alex navigate the complex web of storylines and superheroes that build the world of Spider-Man: No Way Home (Jon Watts, 2021). Joining them to reflect on the genre’s enduring appeal alongside the contemporary pleasures of Hollywood’s increasing multiversal madness is Dr Nick Jones, who is Senior Lecturer in Film, Television and Digital Culture at the University of York. Nick is the author of the monographs Hollywood Action Films and Spatial Theory (2015), Spaces Mapped and Monstrous: Digital 3D and Visual Culture (2020), and the upcoming Gooey Media Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface (2023), and his research focuses on digital effects, popular cinema, and interactive media. Listen as they discuss the complex place of Spider-Man within the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the industrial power of the franchise reboot; superheroic nostalgia and post-pandemic realities of what it means to ‘move on’; the collective authorship of a character as it is crafted through actorly labour and VFX processes across disparate entries within a film series; digital de-aging and the virtual recreation of youth; the stakes of popular cinema’s turn towards the fractures of a multiverse narrative; and how Spider-Man: No Way Home offers a space where heightened levels of intertextuality and intensified emotion determine the importance of an exceptional individual as much as the value of connection.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #31 - Claymation

Mon, 12 Jun 2023 04:15:00 +0000

From the invention of Plasticine by William Harbutt in Britain in 1897 to the use of malleable materials in the earliest stop-motion ‘trick films’ of Edwin S. Porter, J. Stuart Blackton, and the Fleischer Brothers, the application of clay in animation has a history as long as the medium itself. In Footnote #31 of the podcast, Chris and Alex deliberate the evolution of clay animation, including the patenting of ‘Claymation’ in the early-1980s and its emergent synonymy with the Bristol-based Aardman studio; distinctions between more freeform and fluid clay animation and the moveable, modelled bodies of Wallace and Gromit; and how this craft-based handmade style came to embody (and continues to define) the Aardman studio’s animated spirit in an era of pervasive and pristine computer graphics.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Monster House (2006) (with Jane Batkin)

Mon, 05 Jun 2023 05:45:04 +0000

Chris and Alex delve into motion-capture, murder mystery, and monster houses for this discussion of Gil Kenan’s 2006 computer-animated film Monster House, a digital feature produced by the ImageMovers company founded by renowned filmmaker Robert Zemeckis and a specialist in animation utilising mo-cap technologies. Joining them for Episode 121 of the podcast is Dr Jane Batkin, an animation film theorist and Associate Professor in the School of Film, Media and Journalism at the University of Lincoln. Her book Identity in Animation: A Journey into Self, Difference, Culture and the Body was published in 2017, and she has had various chapters in edited collections on animation, including a recent piece on childhood wandering in Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio Laika’s Stop Motion Witchcraft (2021). Jane is currently working on a monograph on childhood in animated film and television and gained a British Academy Award for research in August 2022 for her project entitled “The Secret Space of Childhood in Animated and Live Action Cinema: Performance, Preservation and Metaphor.” Topics in this instalment include the production context for Monster House and the question of child labour; the uncanniness of children-in-performance and what it means for a child to be viewed as ‘acting’ vs. ‘being’; the digital rendering of surfaces and textures and the film’s ‘puppetlike’ character designs; computer animation and nostalgia, and whether it is possible to be nostalgic for CGI; the ‘body’ of animated homes and psycho-architectural spaces via the film’s proximity to the horror genre; and how Monster House’s negotiation of adulthood positions Kenan’s computer-animated feature as a ‘Sirkian’ melodrama for children.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #30 - Franchises

Mon, 29 May 2023 09:39:52 +0000

The economy of the Hollywood franchise is the focus of Footnote #30, where Chris and Alex examine the multimedia conglomeration of the U.S. cinema industry in the blockbuster era of the 1970s, and the subsequent impact on the post-2000 phase of Hollywood film production and its intensified franchise mentality. To unpack the so-called ‘genius of the system,’ they take a journey through the history of sequels, serials, and series as far back as early Hollywood, and discuss the value of ‘pre-sold’ pleasures in the marketing of popular film franchises. The result is a consideration of precisely when (and how) Hollywood went from making franchises out of movies to making movies out of franchises.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) (with Rhianna Dhillon)

Mon, 22 May 2023 07:33:57 +0000

No sooner have Chris and Alex finished their examination of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Chris Columbus, 2002) than they make a swift return to Hogwarts for the third (and best?) in the franchise, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Alfonso Cuarón, 2004). Joining them in this instalment to separate their Leaky Cauldrons from their Time-Turners is very special guest Rhianna Dhillon, Film/TV critic and Presenter who has featured on BBC Radio One, Front Row, Sky News, and Channel 5, and is currently the film critic for BBC6Music and Radio 5 Live as well as regularly appearing on Kermode and Mayo's Take. Listen as they get to grips with Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘darker’ approach to the Harry Potter universe as a vital moment of change for the series; fantastical transformation stories and the power of the VFX animagus; enchantment and wizarding spells of de-animation; the power of Pam Ferris as the magically-inflating Aunt Marge; shifting narrative chronology and the film’s links to Hollywood’s emergent ‘puzzle film’ tradition; the visualisation of childhood trauma through the dark Dementors; and how Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban successfully captures Harry’s anger at a world in which his family, friendships, and loyalties are becoming increasing fractured and fragmented.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #29 - Transmedia

Mon, 15 May 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Drawing on the seminal work of scholar Henry Jenkins, this latest Footnote episode engages the question of transmedia storytelling, industrial organisation, cultures of appreciation, and the consumption of media in an era of convergence. Alex takes the lead in discussing how contemporary entertainment experiences involve the dispersal of content across interacting, co-ordinated, and co-dependent media platforms. From medium specificity to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the idea of ‘transmedia’ is understood in this instalment through the creation of unified stories and narratives that no longer belong to one singular media channel, as well as in relation to the role played by fan practices and the post-classical horizontal integration and media synergy of the Hollywood film industry.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Arab Animation (1937-2015) (with Omar Sayfo)

Mon, 08 May 2023 06:39:18 +0000

Special guest Dr Omar Sayfo joins Chris and Alex for Episode 119 of the podcast, which features a rundown of Arab Animation covering a range of cartoons from Egypt, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates, alongside a discussion of Omar’s recent book Arab Animation: Images of Identity (2021). Omar is an Affiliated Researcher in the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON) at Utrecht University, and a researcher at the Avicenna Institute of Middle Eastern Studies, who has published articles in animation: an interdisciplinary journal, Media Industries Journal and The Journal of Popular Culture, as well as chapters in a number of edited collections. His monograph Arab Animation: Images of Identity looks at Arab animation from the 1930s to the present, offering an in-depth study of the “institutional and infrastructural background of animation production in the Arab world,” but also how Arab producers and artists have used animation to “mediate national, pan-Arab, Islamic and revolutionary identities.” Listen as the trio discuss a cross-section of animated examples that negotiate national culture and the mediation of political and religious messages, but also invite questions of local audiences vs. transnational flow; humour, allegory, and censorship; and the broader Arab political environment into which animation and fantasy has repeatedly entered. The case studies up for examination include Mish Mish Effendi (Frenkel Brothers, 1937) featuring the first Arab cartoon star; the fantasy film The Princess and the River (Faisal Al Yasiri, 1982) animated in East Germany; television series Freej (Mohammed Saeed Harib, 2006-2007) on the importance of tradition and custom; the parable Animal Stories from Qur'an (Sabbah Brothers, 2011) that demonstrates animation’s ability for educational entertainment; and the computer-animated feature Bilal: A New Breed of Hero (Khurram H. Alavi & Ayman Jamal, 2015) that depicts the life of Bilal ibn Rabah.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #28 - Adult Animation

Mon, 01 May 2023 16:53:26 +0000

Animation’s rude and crude history is the topic of Footnote #28 of the podcast as Chris and Alex take up the complex issue of adult animation. Topics include adult animation as the medium’s cultural ‘other’ and how it is a term involved in exclusionary tactics of classification; associations between the ‘adult’ of adult animation and taboo themes, strong language, and graphic sexual content; alternate definitions of adultness rooted in everything from the medium’s potential for satire, parody, and social criticism to wartime propaganda shorts; and how adult animation as a label opens up a discussion of animation’s own pedagogical function as a tool for education.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo*

Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) (with David Sorfa)

Mon, 24 Apr 2023 15:20:23 +0000

Prepare for more multiverse madness as Chris and Alex dive into the world of Everything Everywhere All At Once (Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert, 2022), the Oscar-winning absurdist sci-fi action adventure that engages head-on with the question of what it means to be human set against the backdrop of forking path storylines, a sumptuous mise-en-scène of colliding visual styles, and a maelstrom of digital VFX. The special guest for Episode 118 is Dr David Sorfa, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh and editor-in-chief of the journal Film-Philosophy, who specialises in philosophy’s relationship with cinema, Existentialism, phenomenology, the work of Jacques Derrida, and the presentation of thought and thinking in cinema. The trio cover a variety of topics appropriate to a film that slingshots spectators between multiple times and places, including what Everything Everywhere All At Once establishes in relation to feelings of worthlessness, apathy, and the power of choice; images of freedom and responsibility, and what it means for humanity to act in good faith; Michelle Yeoh’s star persona and her relationship to late-1990s/early-2000s Hollywood kung-fu cinema; the reflexive depiction of multiple femininities at breaking point; turns to chaos and fictional world theories rooted in what is made ‘possible’; and how a film like Everything Everywhere All At Once can add to and ‘do’ philosophical enquiry in positing how things might be otherwise than they are.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #27 - Surrealism

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 09:52:55 +0000

Following up episodes on hyper-realism and photorealism, this latest instalment completes the unofficial Fantasy/Animation ‘realism’ trilogy (!) by focusing on the history, politics, and aesthetic concerns of surrealism. Chris and Alex take a surrealist turn through the crisis of realism in the arts and the advent of photography; dream interpretation, psychoanalysis, and unconscious desires; postwar intellectualism, Salvador Dalí, and Dadaism; and how both fantasy and animation work in relation to surrealism’s political puncturing of the status quo, its claims to protest, and its affective assault on the senses.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) (with Jyotsna Kapur)

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 13:13:03 +0000

Whomping willows, Ford Anglias, and so much more are covered in episode 117 of the podcast, which (better late than never!) returns to Hogwarts for the second instalment of the Harry Potter film franchise and an adaptation of the 1998 novel originally released back in November 2002. Joining Chris and Alex for a closer look at Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Chris Columbus, 2002) is Jyotsna Kapur, who is a Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Southern Illinois University. Jyotsna’s research and teaching interests include Marxist-feminist theory of media arts and culture, the politics of labour, class, race, and sexuality in neoliberalism, and global children's media culture, and she has published widely on the intersections between visual culture and childhood. Listen as they discuss Hollywood cinema’s overlap with children’s rights in Clinton-era America and the question of protection; Harry Potter’s representation of London and the urban regeneration of King’s Cross St. Pancras as a space of travel, transit, and magic; Dobby, flying cars and developments in digital VFX; branding and world-building in relation to Potter fandom and tourism; mudblood as both a racialised category of identity and something entirely emptied of racial consciousness; and how Harry Potter negotiates the relationship between childhood and fantasy to stimulate a broader commercial and audience desire in the franchise.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #26 - The Cinema of Attractions

Mon, 03 Apr 2023 14:59:39 +0000

The tension between spectacle and narrative is investigated through the seminal work of Tom Gunning and his formulation of the “cinema of attractions” in this latest Footnote episode, in which Chris and Alex hold cinema’s propensity for exhibitionist visual display and its later development of story in delicate balance. Listen as they reflect on the emergence of actuality shorts, travelogues, and the ‘trick’ films of Georges Méliès; the acquisition and integration of narrative by cinema that challenged earlier modes of presentationalism; the role of technological innovation in the default myths of silent cinema; and how Gunning’s “cinema of attractions” model defining early film spectatorship and style intersects with both the screen histories and creative figures of fantasy and animation.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) (with Daniel White)

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 16:51:33 +0000

Finally following up their podcast on The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson, 2001), Episode 116 has Chris and Alex picking up the story of Middle-earth with this instalment on the second film in the franchise, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Peter Jackson, 2002). Joining them is special guest Dr Daniel White, who is Senior Lecturer in Musicology in the Department of Music & Design Arts at the University of Huddersfield, and author of a number of publications looking at music in relation to worldbuilding and fantasy storytelling, including its role across the Lord of the Rings films. From the sonic dimensions of fantasy cinema to female vocality within Peter Jackson’s big-screen adaptations, listen as the trio discuss the contribution of sound to the construction of impossible fantastic space; processes of suture and de-suture; digital technology and Gollum’s identity as a VFX marvel; New Zealand and the impact within fantasy of shooting on location; what the interpretation of orcs as an indigenous community tells us about the film’s fluctuating levels of ‘humanity’; and the influence of Norse mythology upon The Two Towers’ musical logic.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #25 - Photorealism

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 09:14:32 +0000

Fresh from their discussion of hyper-realism in the previous Footnote episode, Chris and Alex discuss ‘photorealism’ in this latest instalment - a term that denotes the aesthetic mimicking of lens-based media to create the appearance of a world as viewed through a camera. Listen as they discuss photorealism’s relationship to the animated illusion of pro-filmic activity; links with hyper-realism as a broader aesthetic category of representation; the role of computer-generated imagery (CGI) in crafting and re-conjuring indexical signs (lens flare; depth-of-field); and how the simulation of analogue by other means links to processes of ‘remediation.’

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Peppa Pig Revisited (with Sarah Ann Kennedy)

Mon, 06 Mar 2023 09:55:12 +0000

Episode 115 celebrates Chris and Alex’s return to Peppa Pig (Neville Astley & Mark Baker, 2004-) for a part-interview, part-reflection on this staple of contemporary British animation and culture, which (unofficially at least!) follows on from the earlier podcast instalment discussing the style and tone of the series. The guest for this special ‘revisited’ episode is voice artist Sarah Ann Kennedy, who voices both Miss Rabbit and Mummy Rabbit in the show, alongside performing as Nanny Plum in Ben & Holly's Little Kingdom (Neville Astley & Mark Baker, 2009-) and Dolly Pond in the Channel 4 adult animation series Pond Life (Candy Guard, 1996-2000). Sarah is also a writer for Peppa Pig and an animation director, creating animated soap opera Crapston Villas (1995-1998) again for Channel 4, and is also currently a lecturer in the School of Arts and Media at the University of Central Lancashire. This episode covers all things related to the labour, creative practice, and technologies of voice acting, as well as featuring turns to the scope of ‘adult’ animation as a descriptor; local dubbing practices and the movement of animated television across national boundaries; ‘condensed’ animation aesthetics and anthropomorphic character designs; and the fun and fantasy of family that structures the colourful world of Peppa Pig.

Footnote #24 - Hyper-Realism

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 13:53:31 +0000

The podcast's first engagement with questions of ‘realism’ in animation takes centre stage in Footnote #24, where Chris and Alex historicise and interrogate the function of realism and hyper-realist traditions within a multitude of media and aesthetic traditions. Topics include hyper-realism’s place in relation to painting and sculpture; the uncanny quality of hyper-realist art and issues of resemblance; the parameters of Disney’s ‘hyper-realist’ animated style against earlier ‘plasmatic’ sensibilities; and how animation’s capabilities for authentically portraying the real are fundamentally tied to its status as a technology of creative representation.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021)

Mon, 20 Feb 2023 10:33:54 +0000

The Netflix feature The Mitchells vs. the Machines (Mike Rianda, 2021) gets the Fantasy/Animation treatment, as Chris and Alex offer up a discussion in this episode of the film’s dysfunctional family dynamics, road movie structure, and its spectacular sentient robots techno-narrative. Topics include the contribution of Sony Pictures Animation to the Hollywood computer-animated film industry and stylistic links to both Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Phil Lord & Christopher Miller, 2009) and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman, 2018); The Mitchells vs. the Machines’ critique of technology that seemingly sits at odds with its own visual enjoyment of the pleasures of screen culture; timeless vs. timely storytelling via the contemporaneity of the film’s intertextual referencing and depiction of digital natives; the historical whiteness of AI and the racialising of voice-activated virtual digital assistants; the realisation of Katie’s queerness and the fraught logic of equating screen visibility with progress; the potential to read the family through neurodivergent frameworks; and how Mike Rianda’s film provides an ultimately uneven and highly performative portrayal of ‘madcap’ antics, female creativity, and outsiderdom.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #23 - Phantasy

Mon, 13 Feb 2023 08:51:01 +0000

The story of phantasy (with a ‘ph’) forms the basis of this latest Footnote episode, a term that is as muddy and complex as its more familiar ‘f’ counterpart. Whereas ‘fantasy’ is associated with carefree, escapist enjoyment in the imagination, phantasy describes a process of meaning making within the human psyche, and is a psychological act that is a regular part of our engagement with - and understanding of - the world. In Alex’s 10-minute survey of the term, topics include its relationship to the language of psychoanalysis; the pleasurable frivolity and creativity of fantasy vs. phantasy’s more pointed link (as a basic mechanic of how our brains work) to the imagination of situations that are not happening in front of us; and the implications of applying psychoanalytic theory and phantasy to the study of fantasy cinema.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Czech Animation (1946-2011) (with Adam Whybray)

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 21:33:06 +0000

For this brief survey of the politics and pleasures of Czech animation, Alex and Chris are joined by special guest Dr Adam Whybray, who lectures in Film Studies at the University of Suffolk and who is also the author of The Art of Czech Animation: A History of Political Dissent and Allegory (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). Listen as the trio discuss a number of canonical and controversial examples from the recent history of Czech animation, featuring Vzpoura hraček/Revolution in Toyland (František Sádek and Hermína Týrlová, 1947), Ruka/The Hand (Jiří Trnka, 1965), Žvahlav aneb šatičky slaměného Huberta/Jabberwocky (Jan Švankmajer, 1971), Balada o zeleném drevu/A Ballad About Green Wood (Jiří Barta, 1983), and A King Had a Horse (Aleš Pachner, 2011). Topics for Episode 113 include the styles and rhythms of Czech animation and its particular use of stop-motion and puppet forms; avant-gardism and specific Czech traditions of surrealism; the utilisation of worn and imperfect everyday objects to reflect the resistance and retaliation to power, as well as themes of agency and control; fantasies of craft, creativity, and labour; and how the many allegories of Czech animation offer spectators a reflexive animated space that plays with variant notions of humanity.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #22 - Boiling

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 13:50:03 +0000

The second Fantasy/Animation footnote of the year sees Chris and Alex discuss boiling, an often-unintentional aesthetic effect involving the visibility of undulating animated lines that surfaces due to slight deviations within repeating drawn images. To unpack the pleasures of animated variation, they examine the modulations and discontinuities caused by images as they are ‘crafted’ imperfectly by hand; comparisons with the illusion of life generated by the industrial and standardised cel-animation process, and the staccato movements of stop-motion effects; and how in its many traces of artistry the animated images that ‘boil’ manifest the labour of difference and repetition, movement and stillness.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

House of the Dragon (2021-) (with Kim Akass)

Mon, 23 Jan 2023 13:03:46 +0000

For Episode 112, Chris and Alex are joined for this discussion of HBO’s television series House of the Dragon (Ryan Condal & George R. R. Martin, 2021-) - the prequel to Game of Thrones (David Benioff & D. B. Weiss, 2011-2019) - by Professor Kim Akass, who is Professor of Radio, Television and Film at Rowan University, Glassboro. Kim is is one of the founding editors of the television journal Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies (SAGE), co-editor of the “Reading Contemporary Television Series” for I.B. Tauris, and managing editor of CSTonline. Listen as they work through world-building and storytelling within long-form televisual fantasy; the narrative function of the series’ array of digital dragons and VFX imagery; why fantasy and animation lend themselves to sprawling franchises and extended mythologies; histories of unruly femininity and its (false?) equivalence with madness, anger, and rage; and the many ways in which House of the Dragon asks what it means to be at war with your own body.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #21 - World-Building

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 10:28:53 +0000

The Fantasy/Animation Footnote podcasts return for 2023 with this 10-minute discussion of world-building, which examines both fantasy and animation’s ability to create believable and credible ‘worldly’ spaces. Chris and Alex wrestle with a number of ideas related to the appreciation of cinema beyond character and narrative, drawing on V.F. Perkins’ influential writing on film’s many fictional worlds to discuss the question of art’s connection to world-building, worldliness, and worldhood. Topics include cinema’s narration of almost imperceptible worldly details; the parameters of fictional horizons in relation to character (and spectator) knowledge; the interplay between onscreen and offscreen space; and the many bits of information that ‘go without saying’ to help convince and build our aesthetic encounters with the worlds of fiction.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) (with Gary Trousdale)

Mon, 09 Jan 2023 16:17:22 +0000

For the first episode of 2023, Chris and Alex are back into the world of Disney Feature Animation, following up earlier discussions of The Emperor’s New Groove (Mark Dindal, 2000) and Treasure Planet (Ron Clements & John Musker, 2002) with Episode 111, which looks at the studio’s 2001 feature film Atlantis the Lost Empire (Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise, 2001), a science-fiction adventure that draws inspiration from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870). Joining them as their very special guest is the film’s co-director, Gary Trousdale, who was part of the celebrated Disney Renaissance and together with Kirk Wise also directed the Disney features Beauty and the Beast (1991) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996). Gary was first hired by Walt Disney Feature Animation back in 1984 as an effects animator on The Black Cauldron (Ted Berman & Richard Rich, 1985). He then moved onto story for Oliver & Company (George Scribner, 1988) and worked as a Storyboard Artist for The Little Mermaid (Ron Clements & John Musker, 1989), before finally taking up directorial duties on Beauty and the Beast that was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. Gary later moved to DreamWorks and, more recently, is credited as creative consultant for the 2017 reimagining of Beauty and the Beast (Bill Condon, 2017). Listen as they discuss the Disney Renaissance as a period of industrial and creative renewal via the studio’s return to a Golden Age sensibility; the siting of Atlantis: The Lost Empire within Disney’s post-2000 era of narrative and stylistic heterogeneity; the 1914 setting of the Verne-inspired film, and how its images of war bear the influence of advancements in early twentieth-century technology; the formal connection between animated musical numbers and action sequences; and what the adventure narrative of Atlantis: The Lost Empire and its application of CGI has to say about Hollywood animation’s own technological frontier.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #20 - Christmas

Mon, 19 Dec 2022 08:03:38 +0000

What makes a Christmas film, and why are fantasy and animated films so popular during this festive period? How is cinema consumed and ‘used’ at Christmas by both the popular film industry and families as a source of comfort? How is Christmas is narratively and thematically presented in our favourite festive-themed films? All these questions and many more are tackled by Chris and Alex in the final Footnote episode of the podcast for 2022, which looks at the very nature of Christmas onscreen as sometimes animated but almost always a fantasy. Happy holidays!

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

The Snowman (1982) (with James Walters)

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 16:00:14 +0000

The 2022 Fantasy/Animation Christmas special is here, with Chris and Alex well and truly ‘walking in the air’ (!) for Episode 110 of the podcast as they wonder at the delights of The Snowman (Dianne Jackson, 1982), the 26-minute television special released on Channel 4 in the early 1980s and based on Raymond Briggs’ picture book. Joining them for this tale of festive fantasy and to celebrate the film’s 40th anniversary is Dr James Walters, who is Reader in Film and Television Studies in the Department of Film and Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. James’ work embraces film and television aesthetics, and he is the author of two monographs regularly cited on the podcast - Fantasy Film: A Critical Introduction (2011) and Alternative Worlds in Hollywood Cinema (2008) - among other recent work on television comedy and performance. Listen as they discuss the relationship between British and Hollywood fantasy cinema in the 1980s; the contribution of Channel 4 to the evolution of British television animation; depth, energy, movement, and sincerity in The Snowman’s cosy construction of fantasy, and the spectators’ ability to ‘take off’ with its defining images of flight; childhood and the power of snow as an enchanting (if always fleeting) force; texture, detail, and stillness in Brigg’s original drawings; divisions between interior/order and exterior/chaos; and the way that fantasy - like Christmas - can mean different things to different people. Oh, and there’s a bit about David Bowie too. Happy holidays!

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #19 - Morphing

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 12:23:15 +0000

Animation’s potential for quick change is the focus of Footnote #19, as Chris and Alex go through questions of transformation via a 10-minute look at morphing. Discussions turn to the spectacle of fluid, flexible bodies in relation to more concrete states of being; connections to digital VFX as an enabling tool that articulates pristine images of fragmentation and disintegration that push at the boundaries of realism; the morph’s implied stability as it moves from one form to another; and the politics of selecting an identity in relation to queer images of mobility-in-performance.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Willow (Ron Howard, 1988)

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 12:44:04 +0000

Alex fulfils something of a lifelong dream in Episode 109 in that he finally gets a chance to talk about the mythology and magic of Willow (Ron Howard, 1988) for the Fantasy/Animation podcast, albeit with Chris alongside him as relative novice to its world of prophecies, sorcery, and high fantasy storytelling. Listen as they discuss the film’s broader liminal status within traditions of both fantasy and animation that anchor it very much to Hollywood cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, including its place on the cusp of industry turns towards digital VFX imagery and the evolution of a particular kind of fantasy away from ‘wonder’ films towards spectacular ‘frontier’ blockbusters. Topics include Willow’s use of practical effects and the role of George Lucas (as Executive Producer) in relation to emergent digital VFX technologies; the Computer Graphics Lab, Lucasfilm, and the spectacle of cinema’s first ‘digital morph’; the film’s perceived failure and the blacklisting of high fantasy in U.S. cinema; narrative and thematic links to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (2001-2003), including the use of location shooting in New Zealand; disabled representation, and how Willow navigates the complex issues of ableism and exceptionalism; and what Ron Howard’s film has to say about the enchanting powers of magic and trickery both on and offscreen.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #18 - Studio Ghibli (with Susan Napier)

Mon, 21 Nov 2022 15:57:08 +0000

The latest Footnote episode of the podcast sees the return of Professor Susan Napier (Goldthwaite Professor of Rhetoric, International Literary and Cultural Studies at Tufts University), who straight from her guest turn on Chris and Alex’s discussion of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2002) chats about the animated works and philosophy of Studio Ghibli. Listen as they examine Studio Ghibli’s contribution to global animation history and their vexed industrial and creative relationship to the Walt Disney Studio; the multimedia reach of the company and its turn to theatrical stage shows and theme parks; the methodological fascination of Ghibli given their synonymy with Japanese anime (and how they differ from other representational traditions within the animated medium); and how the aesthetics and narratives of Studio Ghibli’s feature films are the bearers of high levels of love, detail, and the magic of artistic creation.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Spirited Away (2001) (with Susan Napier)

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:47:58 +0000

Episode 108 returns Chris and Alex once more to the world of Japanese anime as they look at the images of displacement, gluttony, and labour in Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001), perhaps the flagship Studio Ghibli animated feature and a film that won the 2003 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Special guest for this instalment is Professor Susan Napier (Goldthwaite Professor of Rhetoric, International Literary and Cultural Studies at Tufts University) whose work spans the history and theory of Japanese animation as well as issues of gender, science-fiction, and fantasy. Susan is also the author of a number of monographs and essays on both fantasy and animation, from The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature: The Subversion of Modernity (1996) and Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Japanese Animation (2005) to the recent Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art (2018). Topics for this episode includes tropes of the ‘portal quest’ narrative within fantasy storytelling, and child protagonist Chihiro’s quest to both ‘escape’ and ‘prove’ her identity; distinctions between human and spirit worlds that permit an interrogation of modern society’s capitalist consumptions and expenditures; the animated representation of cleanliness and disgust, including the portrayal of food; and how Spirited Away navigates spectators through the uneven, ambivalent, and transformative fantasy space of childhood.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #17 - Metaphor

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 14:18:41 +0000

The power of symbolism and the creativity of the metaphorical are the focus of Footnote #17, which seeks to distinguish Metaphor through animation’s identity as a ‘metaphorical’ medium and, as a consequence, its fundamental rhetorical and symbolic potential. Topics for Chris and Alex include the thorny issue of film when considered as a language, and whether or not we can see images as symbols in the same way as written words; the split between denotative and connotative interpretation in the examination of media; metonym and the role of imagination; the commitment of animation to ‘the idea’ and the cultural specificity of this act of creation; and the use of fantasy as a psychoanalytical process of metaphorical meaning making.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Inside Out (2015) (with Eric Herhuth)

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 13:11:20 +0000

The problematic pursuit of happiness is the focus of Episode 107 of the podcast, which looks at the pleasure of the mindscape in Pixar Animation Studios’ computer-animated film Inside Out (Pete Docter, 2015). Joining Chris and Alex for this cerebral trip inside the mind is Dr Eric Herhuth, Assistant Professor of Communication and Director of Film Studies at Tulane University, and author of a number of publications on the intersections between animation, aesthetics, and politics, including the monograph Pixar and the Aesthetic Imagination: Animation, Storytelling, and Digital Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017). Topics for this episode include contemporary Hollywood animation and the place of Inside Out within Pixar’s Golden Age; animation’s longstanding propensity for metaphor and political allegory; emotion, personality, and the U.S. obsession with happiness; the politics and creativity of ruined spaces and Inside Out’s linking of agency with repression; the 11-year-old Riley as both protagonist and setting (and the subsequent gendering of the film’s virtual space); what Inside Out is saying about the acceptance of sadness; and the dramatic stakes of what happens when feelings have feelings.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #16 - Dual Address (with Noel Brown)

Mon, 24 Oct 2022 11:57:31 +0000

Recent podcast guest Dr Noel Brown (Senior Lecturer in Film and Programme Leader for Film and Visual Culture, Liverpool Hope University) returns for this Footnote episode on Dual Address, and the ways in which children’s fiction (and cultural products more broadly) might engage multiple registers and include simultaneous meaning for both child and adult audiences. Listen as Chris, Alex, and Noel discuss its emergence within the field of children’s literature and status as a ‘hypothetical’ category; relationships to ‘single’ address and questions of subtext; the role of humour, literacy, and intertextual referencing; hierarchies of knowledge and taste; and how Dual Address function as a strategy to think through industry, audience appeal, and even the rise of replay home video culture.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) (with Noel Brown)

Mon, 17 Oct 2022 10:26:59 +0000

Episode 106 marks Chris and Alex’s first foray into the filmmaking career of Steven Spielberg as they take on the director’s 1982 science-fiction fantasy E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. To help explore the film’s status as a landmark of popular U.S. cinema is special guest Dr Noel Brown, who is Senior Lecturer in Film and Programme Leader for Film and Visual Culture at Liverpool Hope University. Noel has published extensively in the areas of children’s cinema, family films, and animation, including the recent monograph Contemporary Hollywood Animation: Style, Storytelling, Culture and Ideology Since the 1990s (2020) and edited collection The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Film (2022). Listen as the trio discuss the origins of the ‘family film’ as a prestige category within histories of Hollywood cinema; the contributions of Spielberg, George Lucas, and E.T. to the reinvention of cinema as family entertainment; emotion and strategies of ‘relatability’; dual address, disposability, and the darkness of Spielberg’s stories; outsiderdom and alienation in relation to the realities of American childhood in the 1980s; puppetry, animatronics and the materiality of VFX; traditions of gender performance and radical renditions of masculinity/femininity in animation; and how E.T. navigates the experience of loss and the ability to feel again.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #15 - Motion Capture

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 09:05:39 +0000

The Fantasy/Animation Footnotes return with a new podcast episode on the form and function of motion capture as mode of computerised performance in an era of digital mediation. For Episode 15, topics for this quickfire discussion include motion capture as a mode of digital puppetry and links to both the theatrical tradition of performing objects and the Rotoscope; discourses of control that feed into the creativity of ‘mo-cap’ technologies; industry narratives, labour hierarchies, and the question of who performs the digital image; ambivalent connections between voice and body in motion captured characters; and what happens when human physicality is transcribed via digital processing.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

In Conversation with Nancy Beiman

Mon, 03 Oct 2022 12:41:11 +0000

Chris and Alex return after their belated summer hiatus with Episode 105 of the podcast, and a very special instalment that features them in conversation with renowned animation director, character designer, animator, and teacher Nancy Beiman, who has worked at a number of studios (from Steven Spielberg’s Amblin studio to the Walt Disney Company and Warner Brothers) as well as on feature films including A Goofy Movie (Kevin Lima, 1995), Hercules (Ron Clements & John Musker, 1997) and Treasure Planet (Ron Clements & John Musker, 2002). She is also the author of two landmark books on animation acting and storyboarding - Prepare to Board! Creating Story and Characters for Animated Features and Shorts (2007) and Animated Performance: Bringing Imaginary Animal, Human and Fantasy Characters to Life (2010) - and the recent How I Finally Got to Live a Cat's Life: A Cartoon Diary 2020-2021 (2022), which promises “the diary of a cartoonist "character" who got the ultimate Staycation!” Listen as they discuss her extensive career in Hollywood animation, including her training at Cal Arts ahead of becoming a supervising animator and the origins of the mysterious “graphic blandishment” role; the evolution of U.S. animation within the 1970s and 1980s as a continuation of classical traditions rather than a phase of transition; voice artistry and the creative bargain that the animation process must strike with voice performance tracks; animation as a form of dance, and the way that animators are continually blending a multitude of sources and inspirations; technological advancement in relation to characterisation; and the creative value of simply looking at things given how the development of an animated film is always greater than the sum of its parts.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #14 - Thinning

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 12:36:16 +0000

Alex is once again in the spotlight for Footnote #14 as he explains to Chris the notion of ‘thinning,’ a term recommended on social media as a potential subject for a bite-sized Fantasy/Animation podcast. Topics in this brief instalment include the representation within fantasy storytelling of so-called ‘thinned’ worlds that articulate spaces via loss and deprivation; the role played by magic in supporting a desire for restoration and the return to the world as it once was; thinning as both a repeating narrative device or motif and an element of world creation; how thinning helps to define fantasy and its fables of recovery; and how fantasy is a melancholic force that corrects worldly fractures and fissures to replace that which has been lost.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Speed Racer (2008) (with Tim Robey)

Mon, 22 Aug 2022 09:18:43 +0000

Strap in for Episode 104 of the podcast as the thrill ride that is Lilly and Lana Wachowski’s Speed Racer (2008) provides the focus for this latest instalment in all its unwieldy and unruly CG glory. Chris and Alex’s special guest for this episode is Tim Robey, renowned film critic and author who has written widely on all kinds of cinema for The Daily Telegraph for over the last 20 years. He is also the co-editor of the book The DVD Stack: The Best DVDs of the Best Movies from Around the World (2006) - a guide to the best versions of movies available globally - and has discussed film on Radio 4’s Front Row, the Film Programme, Monocle FM Radio, and BBC Film. Listen as they seek to get to grips with Speed Racer’s manic energy and digital mayhem, including its relationship to computer graphics at a time when digital VFX imagery in Hollywood was perhaps reaching its elastic limit; connections between the film’s abrasive style and 1950s melodrama via the work of filmmaker Douglas Sirk; the fragmented labour of digital processes and the implications that such shifting temporalities hold for understanding digitally-mediated screen performance; the digital or virtual backlot as a production trend popular within early-2000s U.S. cinema; the conjunction of photorealist and videogame aesthetics with live-action characters; and how Speed Racer’s capitalist contradictions unfold in both a narrative and restless visual style that pits ideas of authenticity against those of surrealist fantasy.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #13 - Folklore and Folkloric

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 09:13:53 +0000

Alex takes the reins for this double tale of folklore and the folkloric, two terms that are fully implicated in the history of fantasy storytelling and cultural expression, as he navigates through and defines each for this latest Footnote episode. Listen as he explains to Chris the relationship that folklore has to ‘official,’ codified or canonised discourse and documentation; the role of shared anecdotal evidence in binding a culture together in a folkloric fashion; the collective stories, rituals, traditions, and customs of folklore passed between communities without a fixed author; top-down vs. bottom-up modes of expression, and how folklore has traditionally been a space for the marginal; and the identity of the ‘folkloric’ as a stylised and fictionalised form of folk culture.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Flee (2021) (with Cristina Formenti)

Mon, 08 Aug 2022 06:52:08 +0000

The acclaimed animated documentary Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen, 2021), which tells the story of Amin Nawabi and his journey from from Afghanistan to Denmark as a refugee, is the subject of Episode 103 of the podcast that reflects on the shared ability of animation, fantasy and the documentary format to ‘reveal.’ Joining Chris and Alex for this instalment is Dr Cristina Formenti, Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the University of Udine in Italy, and author of a number of books on animation and documentary, including Il mockumentary: la fiction si maschera da documentario (2013), and her latest book The Classical Animated Documentary and Its Contemporary Evolution (2022). Cristina is also the editor of the volumes Mariangela Melato tra cinema, teatro e televisione (2016) and Valentina Cortese: un’attrice intermediale (2019), while her work has appeared in various national and international journals, such as Studies in Documentary Film, Alphaville, and Horror Studies. She is currently the co-editor of the journal Animation Studies and serves on the Board of the Society for Animation Studies. Listen as they discuss the value of animated reconstruction, fictionalisation, and the authenticating use of live-action footage within Flee’s predominantly animated aesthetic style that potentially ‘corrects’ its cartoonal qualities; the role of memory and the subjectivity of experience; connections between imagination, emotion and trauma; shifts in the animated style of Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s film between raw nightmarish impressionism and heightened visual detail; the ‘fable’ and ‘sober’ as useful ways to categorise the historical trajectory and stylistic approaches of the animated documentary; the experiential effects of subjective narration and the film’s intimate interview style, and what happens when vocal recordings in the documentary have to be falsified; and how Flee offers a narrative of reconciliation that mirrors animation’s own creative combination with certain recognisable documentary conventions.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #12 - The Lightning Sketch (with Malcolm Cook)

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 10:37:22 +0000

Joining Chris and Alex for this lightning quick journey through the origins and aesthetics of the lightning sketch tradition in Footnote #12 of the podcast is Dr Malcolm Cook, Associate Professor in Film Studies (University of Southampton), author of Early British Animation: From Page and Stage to Cinema Screens (2018) and co-editor (with Professor Kirsten Moana Thompson) of the collection Animation and Advertising (2019). Malcolm was also a special guest on the earlier Christmas advertisements episode, but here he discusses the importance of ‘lightning cartooning’ to the history of animation; the spectatorial effects and perceptions involved in witnessing the live act of drawing; pioneers of the original stage show who became cinema’s very first animators such as J. Stuart Blackton, Georges Méliès, Walter Booth, Tom Merry, and Winsor McCay; the lightning sketch as a crucial point of contact between moving images and graphic art; and what the convergence between this music hall and vaudeville tradition with ‘trick film’ techniques has to say about about the emergence of the animated short.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Mothra (1961) (with Alex Davidson)

Mon, 25 Jul 2022 09:17:23 +0000

Chris and Alex take their first visit to the Japanese kaiju genre for Episode 102 of the podcast thanks to Toho studio’s 1961 feature Mothra (Ishirō Honda, 1961), a film that kickstarted the longstanding Mothra monster movie franchise. Joining them to discuss the history and legacy of Japanese cinema’s famous winged creature is Alex Davidson, cinema curator at the Barbican Theatre who also writes on film for the BFI and beyond, with a specialism is queer cinema and television. To tie in with the Barbican’s screening of Mothra on August 24th 2022 as part of their Outdoor Cinema series, the trio reflect on the genesis of Mothra as a character and its importance to twentieth-century Japanese monster cinema; the codes and conventions of the kaiju film, and connections to Japan’s postwar national trauma following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; distinctions between revenge and rampage that structure Mothra narratives; allegories of modernity that recur across supernatural fables; the fluctuating scales of the film’s practical VFX imagery (from superimpositions and forced perspectives to models and miniatures) all directed by Eiji Tsuburaya; the political stakes of its fictional setting of Rolisica that combines East Asian and European influences; and what director Ishirō Honda has to say about science, finance, technology, and soft economic power through both Mothra’s reign of terror and the character’s desire to ‘protect.’

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #11 - Society for Animation Studies (with Chris Pallant)

Mon, 18 Jul 2022 08:27:32 +0000

Footnote #11 comes live from the 33rd annual Society for Animation Studies conference, which took place in late-June and early-July 2022 at Teesside University. Joining Chris and Alex for this rundown of the society as an “international organisation dedicated to the study of animation history and theory” is the current SAS President, Dr Chris Pallant (Canterbury Christ Church University), previously a special guest on our Bagpuss (Peter Firmin & Oliver Postgate, 1974) episode of the podcast. Listen as they discuss the origins of the society and its founding back in 1987, and the contribution of its members towards the consolidation of Animation Studies as a specialist discipline; the society’s growth as an international space of knowledge exchange and networking among animation practitioners, artists, and academics; the commitment of SAS to create a diverse intellectual environment both in-person and online that is accessible for (and to) a range of interdisciplinary audiences; and how to get involved in the society’s many activities, from its online blog animationstudies2.0 to its range of Special Interest Groups (SIGs).

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Osmosis Jones (2001) (with Tom Sito)

Mon, 11 Jul 2022 08:47:00 +0000

Episode 101 confronts the animated representation of disease and illness via Warner Brothers’ 2001 cel-animated/live-action hybrid Osmosis Jones (Bobby Farrelly, Peter Farrelly, Piet Kroon & Tom Sito, 2001), which tells the story of a white blood cell policeman who joins together with a cold pill to stop a deadly virus from destroying their human host. Joining Chris and Alex to talk about the film’s imaginative depictions of a body’s internal workings is Osmosis Jones’ animation director Tom Sito, a veteran of the Hollywood animation industry who has worked on numerous animated fantasy films at the Walt Disney, DreamWorks, and Warner Brothers studios, from Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and The Lion King (1994) to Shrek (2001) and Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003). Tom is currently Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, and author of the books Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson (2006), Moving Innovation, A History of Computer Animation (2013), and, more recently, Eat, Drink, Animate: An Animator's Cookbook (2019) containing the food recipes of famous animators such as Walt Disney and Chuck Jones. Listen as they discuss the production of the animated sequences for Osmosis Jones and the industrial and aesthetic stakes of hybridity; celebrity voice acting, “audio discipline,” and how the film’s casting practices feed into its bi-racial buddy cop narrative; the creative representation of human biology as a bustling and hyper-modern urban space; the affordances of animation for shifting scales and fantastical perspectives; and how Osmosis Jones reveals the medium’s metaphorical abilities in allowing spectators to grasp the often intangible shape of things.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #10 - Hybridity

Mon, 04 Jul 2022 09:34:40 +0000

The mixed media potential of animation is the subject of Footnote #10, which takes on hybridity via the combination of multiple animated styles, as well as the spectatorial effects that such blended images might conjure. From the earliest hybridised cartoons of the 1910s and the insertion of cel-animation into the Classical Hollywood musical to contemporary live-action/CG composites and the human/machine collision involved in motion-capture technology, hybridity defines animation’s unique visual perspectives as much as the medium’s own fantasy of interaction. But as Chris and Alex discover, to make any distinction between live-action and animation (as increasingly fuzzy categories) ultimately reveals more about the slippage between them than their separateness or contrasts as image-making forms.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

100th Episodes

Mon, 27 Jun 2022 09:14:31 +0000

The Fantasy/Animation podcast reaches its centenary, so join Chris and Alex as they celebrate 100 episodes with a look back at some memorable televisual hundredths from the world of cartoon sitcoms. Listen as they discuss “Daddy's Little Beauty” (S4E12) from The Flintstones (William Hanna & Joseph Barbera, 1960-1966), in which Fred enters Pebbles in a beauty contest for babies; The Simpsons (Matt Groening, 1989-) episode “Sweet Seymour Skinner's Baadasssss Song” (S5E19) where Principal Skinner is fired (and reinstated) with the unlikely help of Bart; the episode “Hank's Choice” S5E16) from King of the Hill (Mike Judge, 1997-) where Hank must decide between his love for son Bobby and Ladybird (the family pet dog); the South Park (Trey Parker & Matt Stone, 1997-) celebration “I’m a Little Bit Country” (S7E04) from 2003, which features a time travelling Cartman learning more about America’s Founding Fathers set against the backdrop of anti- and pro-war protests; and the 2007 Family Guy (Seth MacFarlane, 1999-) episode “Movin’ Out (Brian's Song)” (S6E02) featuring Brian and Stewie’s ill-fated attempts to live independently beyond the Griffin family home. Topics include the history of American television animation and post-war U.S. culture; the role of humour and satire in an increasingly satirical world; character design and fluctuating realist registers; narrative templates and intertextual referencing between canonical cartoons made for the small-screen; and the enduring role of the family and the home space within constructions of American national identity.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #9 - Sword and Sorcery

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 10:35:01 +0000

The history and application of sword and sorcery - a term initially used to describe a wave of pre-Tolkien fantasy writing - is the latest subject for Chris and Alex in Footnote #9, which plots the relationship between this kind of ‘rough’ historical fiction and questions of world-building, magic, and myth. Topics include sword and sorcery’s origin story in the 1930s and links to the paperback revolution of short stories and cheap pulp fiction; its cinematic adaptations during the 1970s and 1980s from Conan the Barbarian to The Beastmaster; and the response to this sub-genre by Hollywood’s elite and what this meant for fantasy’s broader critical and cultural prestige.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Your Name (2016) (Live at the British Film Institute)

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 11:18:54 +0000

Episode 99 is a special instalment of the podcast recorded Live at the British Film Institute in London back in May 2022, with Chris and Alex joined by an audience of anime fans to discuss Your Name (Makoto Shinkai, 2016) as part of the BFI’s Anime season. Featuring an introduction to the artistry and creativity of anime, an examination of Your Name’s temporal loops and overlapping rhythms, and a lively Q&A with those gathered at the BFI’s Reuben Library, this episode features a conversation about writer/director Makoto Shinkai’s romantic animated fantasy - and its pleasures of longing - as protagonists Taki and Mitsuha magically and unexpectedly swap bodies across time and space. Topics for this episode include Japanese anime as a shifting and unstable category of animation, as well as both a local and global cultural phenomenon; the liminal spaces of Your Name as a film invested in temporality and mobility; non-Western traditions of fantasy storytelling and their desire to fracture logic and rationality; the cyclical/linear rhythms that structure the movement of Taki and Mitsuha across temporal (and historical) boundaries; the spectral quality to Shinkai’s handling of characters that ‘haunt’ multiple spaces; and what Your Name has to say about national culture in its two competing - and highly gendered - visions of Japan.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #8 - Plasmaticness

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 10:01:57 +0000

Footnote #8 offers a brief detour to the abridged and incomplete animated writings of Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein from the 1940s, and in particular his notorious concept of “plasmaticness” that he argued was a way of understanding the appeal and attraction of Walt Disney’s cartoon images. Listen as Chris and Alex discuss the historical, political, technological, and aesthetic dimensions of “plasmaticness” and the term’s relationship to the Hollywood “rubberhosing” style; the “irresistible changeability” of Disney’s reforming bodies and how, for Eisenstein, such figures momentarily took spectators back to a pre-conscious mode of existence; Disney’s own artistic shift away from plasmatic impulses towards a “hyper-realist” sensibility; and the contemporary digital afterlives of Eisenstein’s animated approach to transformation, character, and movement.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)

Mon, 30 May 2022 09:16:06 +0000

Chris and Alex venture (back?) into the multiverse in this entirely unplanned episode on Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (Sam Raimi, 2022), prompted by both a last-minute cinema trip and a desire to check-in once more with what’s happening in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. A partner to the earlier discussion of complexity and serial narratives in Wandavision (2021), episode 98 involves a new and improved journey through the MCU’s iterative storytelling to delight in its quantum realms and colliding incursions, including an examination of how contemporary Hollywood cinema is increasingly being driven by the spectacle of intellectual properties; discourses of play, rules, and frivolity that manages the stakes of mulitversal narratives; the ethical element of multi-dimensional travel and repeating existences; how Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness negotiates Wanda’s identity as a ‘villainous’ unruly female within post-Trump America; the relationship between multiverse plotlines, complex narratives, and fan cultures; and what Sam Raimi’s film has to say about the relationship between grief and anger.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #7 - The Fantastic

Mon, 23 May 2022 11:46:16 +0000

The fantasy of the fantastic is the subject of Footnote #7, as Alex takes listeners (including Chris) on a journey through the origins of the fantastique and a term that often describes certain stories with impossible elements. Other topics includes the fantastic as initially a literary impulse and fantasy as a genre that codifies dimensions of that impulse into narrative expectations and archetypes; Tzvetan Todorov’s work on “the fantastic” as an historical genre of writing that involves characters experiencing a momentary narrative “hesitation”; psychoanalysis and the uncanny; and what the fantastic means for the reader-/viewer-response of popular fantasy media.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Rogue One (2016) (with Jonathan Wroot)

Mon, 16 May 2022 11:03:57 +0000

Episode 97 of the podcast takes on the intergalactic conflicts and rebel alliances of Rogue One (Gareth Edwards, 2016), an anthology feature film and prequel to Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) that tells the origin story of the ‘Rogue One’ starfighter squadron and the creation of the Death Star. Special guest for this episode is Dr Jonathan Wroot, who is Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader for Film Studies at the University of Greenwich. Jonathan has published research on home media formats and Asian cinema distribution, including the co-edited collection entitled New Blood: Framing 21st Century Horror (2021) and his recent monograph on the Zatoichi film and TV franchise. He has also contributed to the podcast series Beyond Japan and Second Features, as well as the 2022 Japan Touring Film Programme. Listen as they discuss Jedis, the Jidaigeki (時代劇) period film, and longstanding East Asian influences upon the Star Wars saga; the relationship between Zatoichi the blind swordsman and Rogue One’s own blind warrior Chirrut Îmwe; hope, alliance, and the religious structures of Gareth Edwards’ spin-off story; the generic implications of ‘the Force’ upon science-fiction/fantasy distinctions via questions of rationality; digital de-aging technologies and the virtual recreation of youth; and the challenges of Rogue One to expand the Star Wars brand by taking spectators back into the fictional world of Hollywood’s most famous space fantasy.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**This episode was produced and edited by Leon Waldo**

Footnote #6 - Anthropomorphism

Mon, 09 May 2022 09:51:18 +0000

The business of talking animals is the focus of Footnote #6, as Chris (with a bit of Alex) takes listeners through the shared histories of anthropomorphism and animation, and the acquisition of humanlike qualities (sentience, subjectivity, and selfhood) by non-human animated characters. Topics include the visual curiosity of the anthropomorph as a hybrid figuration caught between humanity (ánthrōpos) and the non-human (morphē); the role of persuasive personality and affinity within identifiable cel-animated, object, or virtual characters; collisions between nature and culture embedded in the anthropomorph’s fractured identity; affiliated terms such as ‘therianthropy’ that speak to gradations of humanity in animated animals; and why anthropomorphism as a representational strategy perhaps lies at the very heart of animated filmmaking.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

The Secret of Moonacre (2008) (with Lucy Shuttleworth)

Mon, 02 May 2022 11:47:23 +0000

Based on Elizabeth Goudge’s 1992 children’s story Little White Horse, the 2008 fantasy The Secret of Moonacre (Gábor Csupó, 2008) is the subject of Episode 96 of the podcast, with Chris and Alex joined in their discussion of morality, class, and the power of the ego by the film’s screenwriter and Associate Producer Lucy Shuttleworth, who is also Senior Lecturer in the School of Film, Media and Communication at the University of Portsmouth. Listen as they examine the influence and inspiration on Gábor Csupó’s film of a number of literary sources, from 14th Century text Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the wood and forest as a site of technological expressivity as much as narrative hostility and sanctuary with fantasy cinema; comparisons with big-screen adaptations like The Golden Compass (Chris Weitz, 2007) and Enola Holmes (Harry Bradbeer, 2020); VFX technologies and gender representation; and what The Secret of Moonacre tells us about the perils of the adaptation process and the power of effective visual storytelling.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**This episode was produced and edited by Leon Waldo**

Footnote #5 - High Fantasy and Low Fantasy

Mon, 25 Apr 2022 10:35:27 +0000

Footnote #5 seeks to embrace the sub-division of fantasy literature through distinctions of “high” and “low,” whereby the era of post-Tolkien fantasy was culturally and critically understood through the identification of the genre’s specific storytelling modes. Listen as Chris and Alex (well, mostly Alex) give a rundown of the role of alternative worlds and mythic tropes used in such divisions; sword-and-sorcery genre elements, folkloric imagery, and character archetypes; how such categories relate to the evolving language of fantasy scholarship, including the criteria for “immersive” and “intrusive” fantasies; and the political stakes of both identifying and splintering fantasy through the overlapping categories of “high” and “low.”

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Contemporary Ukrainian Animation (with Joshua First)

Mon, 18 Apr 2022 09:34:09 +0000

Episode 95 is a special Fantasy/Animation double header, with two recent computer-animated films up for discussion as Chris and Alex look into the stories and symbols of contemporary Ukrainian animation - the country’s first 3D CG film The Dragon Spell (Manuk Depoyan, 2016) based on the stories of Ukrainian writer Anton Siyanika, and The Stolen Princess (Oleg Malamuzh, 2018), a fantasy that adapts the fairytale Ruslan and Ludmila by Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin. This week’s instalment features as its guest an expert in the politics and aesthetics of modern Russia and the Soviet Union, Dr Joshua First, who is Croft Associate Professor of History and International Studies at the University of Mississippi. Joshua’s work includes the monograph Ukrainian Cinema: Belonging and Identity during the Soviet Thaw (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015) and Sergei Paradjanov: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (London: Intellect, 2016), as well as a number of articles on the visual cultures of Eastern Europe. Listen as they discuss Ukrainian history post-Soviet Union and The Revolution of Dignity; how such historical moments open up the Ukraine’s reclamation of pan-European/Russian mythologies; notions of recovery, the politics of recognition, and how stories can impose the image of a nation; the interdisciplinary status and activist potential of ‘useful’ animation; the ‘Frozenification’ of the computer-animated fairytale; and how both The Dragon Spell and The Stolen Princess offer fantasy worlds that reflexively provide folkloric understandings of what Ukrainian animation might be.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**This episode was produced and edited by Leon Waldo**

Footnote #4 - Stop-Motion

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 14:08:02 +0000

In Footnote #4, Chris and Alex unpack the uncanny spectacle and affecting effects of stop-motion animation, from understanding the hands-on labour that crafts its illusions of life to the oneiric ‘stopped-motion’ worlds of Ladislas Starevich, Willis O’Brien, Ray Harryhausen, Jan Švankmajer, and the Quay Brothers. Listen as they spend 10 minutes working through the European found object tradition; the use of stop-motion as part of the armoury of Hollywood effects technology; the power of awarding objects and puppets sudden sentience; Aardman’s contemporary ‘claymation’ and the work of the LAIKA Studios; and the broader accessibility of stop-motion as a popular technique of animation.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Encanto (2021) (with Dolores Tierney)

Mon, 04 Apr 2022 11:48:01 +0000

Chris and Alex finally talk about Bruno (among other things) in this latest episode of the podcast, turning to the fantasy and family of Encanto (Byron Howard & Jared Bush, 2021), Disney Feature Animation’s computer-animated musical that tells the story of the magical Madrigal family via protagonist Mirabel, ably supported by lush visuals, colourful abstractions, and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s score inspired by the vallenato, cumbia, bambuco and rock en español genres. Joining them for Episode 94 is Dolores Tierney, Professor of Film at the University of Sussex and an expert in the aesthetics and politics of transnational imaging practices between Latin America, the U.S. and Spain. Topics up for examination this week include the film’s rhetoric of ‘authenticity’ with regards to Colombian representation; the growing role played by family and community in contemporary Disney Feature Animation; the maligning of Latin America within Trump-era politics; Encanto’s narrative and aesthetic links to Pixar’s Coco (Lee Unkrich, 2017) via engagements with Classical Mexican cinema and the influence on the film of Latin American telenovas; the portrayal of Colombian culture and how animation can navigate the ‘touristic’ gaze; the importance of the quotidian in magical realist storytelling; and what Encanto has to say about the relationship between individuality and exceptionalism.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**This episode was produced and edited by Leon Waldo**

Fantasy/Animation supports the #UCUstrike

Mon, 28 Mar 2022 10:29:40 +0000

A short note on the ongoing strike action currently happening across a number of UK Higher Education Institutions over devastating cuts to pensions and deteriorating pay and working conditions. More information about the strikes can be found by visiting the UCU website: www.ucu.org.uk.

Fantasy/Animation supports the #UCUstrike

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 09:56:46 +0000

Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) (with Brian Attebery)

Mon, 14 Mar 2022 12:31:35 +0000

Myth, magic, and technology take to the skies in Episode 93 of the podcast, with Howl’s Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki, 2004) providing a welcome return to the steampunk spectacle and metamorphic marvels of Japanese anime. Joining Chris and Alex to examine Studio Ghibli’s 2004 feature film fantasy of flight is Professor Brian Attebery, writer and professor of English at Idaho State University, who took over as editor of the Journal of the Fantastic in Arts in 2006, and is also a prolific author whose seminal work encompasses all things fantasy literary, history, and storytelling. Listen as they discuss the director Hayao Miyazaki’s careful combination of provincial communities with (anti-)war themes and adolescent activity; voicework in anime and how specific casting practices feed into the film’s juvenile feminine perspectives; the exchange between gender and unruliness; the film’s play with verticality and flight, and what it means politically to look down as well as up; and the instability of Howl’s Moving Castle’s fictional world, and what this says about the challenges of trying to belong in places and spaces that continually change.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #3 - Fantasy

Mon, 07 Mar 2022 09:11:50 +0000

Chris and Alex talk all things fantasy in this second Fantasy/Animation Footnote Episode, following-up their discussion of animation with a rapid journey through fantasy from Aristotle and European enlightenment through to J. R. R. Tolkien and Mary Poppins. In just 10 minutes, Alex works through fantasy’s relationship to genre theory alongside the non-generic ways of thinking about fantasy as a highly nebulous mode of storytelling and (unstable) iconography; the ‘blockbustering’ of fantasy in contemporary popular cinema; and fantasy’s intrinsic pleasures of wonder and impossibility.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Fantasy/Animation supports the #UCUstrike

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 09:22:56 +0000

Fantasy/Animation supports the #UCUstrike

Mon, 21 Feb 2022 10:26:36 +0000

Lady and the Tramp (1955)

Sun, 13 Feb 2022 15:22:58 +0000

Tuck in for some Valentine’s Day spaghetti and meatballs as Chris and Alex chew on Walt Disney’s celebrated cel-animated love story Lady and the Tramp (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson & Hamilton Luske, 1955), a musical romance released in the mid-1950s and based on the 1945 Cosmopolitan magazine story “Happy Dan, The Cynical Dog” by Ward Greene. The studio’s first CinemaScope release and a film that coincided with the opening of Disneyland in California, Lady and Tramp is rife with context and offers a number of threads that speak to the landscape of Disney animation in the 1950s. Listen as discussion turns to the collision in Lady and the Tramp between a refined vs. rough animated style embodied by the film’s eponymous characters; its complex anthropomorphic register, and how the film’s many canine performances negotiate the meeting point of humanity with the animal through racial politics; caricature and the grotesque within character design, and the silhouetted and symbolic representation of affluence, class, wealth, power, and normalcy; connections between Disney’s feature and the Mammy Two Shoes figure from Tom & Jerry; the star voice of Peggy Lee and traditions of animated voicework; and how Lady and the Tramp reflects on the possible ‘threat’ of children in suburban America as part of its subversive and radical agenda. Bella Notte!

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #2 - Animation

Mon, 07 Feb 2022 14:04:09 +0000

The first Fantasy/Animation Footnote Episode proper launches with this short discussion on the origins and genealogies of animation, from cave paintings and Victorian children’s toys to the lightning sketch tradition and the comic books. Over the course of 10 minutes, Chris and Alex offer a rapid quickfire journey through the many optical illusions of animation and the performance (and performativity) of the medium, including the spectacular vitality of characters and objects coming to life; the solidification of cel-animation as a viable economic industry in the U.S. during the 1940s; key studios and creative figureheads; silhouette, sand, and stop-motion animated movements; and the impact of digital technology on animation’s past, present, and future.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Rio (2011) (with Michael Tanzillo)

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 12:00:22 +0000

In this latest episode, Chris and Alex examine one of the most important animation companies of the last 20 years in Hollywood – Blue Sky Studios – who made significant contributions to the shape and direction of U.S. animation, and particularly the computer-animated film. Formed in February 1987 by animator Chris Wedge, the studio recently hit the headlines as they are now sadly in the past tense – The Walt Disney Company acquired Blue Sky as part of their 2019 purchase of 21st Century Fox and then, in February 2021, announced that Blue Sky would be shut down as an animation division. This episode looks back at Blue Sky’s 2011 computer-animated musical Rio (Carlos Saldanha, 2011) with special guest Michael Tanzillo, who worked as a Senior Lighting Technical Director at Blue Sky on a number of computer-animated films, including three of the Ice Age films (Dawn of the Dinosaurs in 2009; Continental Drift in 2012 and Collision Course in 2016), both Rio and its 2014 sequel, The Peanuts Movie (Steve Martino, 2015), Ferdinand (Carlos Saldanha, 2017), and Spies in Disguise (Nick Bruno & Troy Quane, 2019). He is also the co-author, with Jasmine Katatikarn, of the book Lighting For Animation: The Art of Visual Storytelling (2016), and co-founder of the Academy of Animated Arts, an online academy teaching the artistic side of Animation and VFX. Listen as the trio discuss Blue Sky’s origins and influences on twenty-first century Hollywood animation; the studio’s commercial work and early animated advertisements; the craft of 3D lighting in computer-animated films, and its foundational role in creating mood, volume, weight, and legibility; Rio’s two blue macaw protagonists (Blu and Jewel) and traditions of anthropomorphism; the film’s articulation of Brazilian culture through colour scripts and colour keys; lighting contrasts and the distinctions between ‘heroic’ and ‘villainous’ lighting; and what Rio’s sumptuous fantasy of light can tell us about sophisticated digital lighting as a storytelling device.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Footnote #1 - Introduction

Mon, 24 Jan 2022 11:10:00 +0000

Fantasy/Animation launches its new series of Footnote Episodes with this short introductory discussion that explains what to expect from these bonus fortnightly instalments, which will serve as brief ‘footnotes’ to the main podcast. Listen as Chris and Alex explain the form and function of these supplementary episodes that are intended to be an extra space where listeners can sharpen up on the definition of some key terms, ideas, and contexts related to the study of fantasy and animation. In addition to flagging up the importance of citational practices and how audiences might want to use these extra 10-minute episodes, they also reveal the ways that you can suggest your own topics or pose questions for the hosts to answer, whether this is elaborating on conversations that may have cropped up elsewhere in the Fantasy/Animation podcasts so far, or recommending emergent areas of fantasy and animation that you have encountered but which require additional focus. Get in touch via email, social media, or the website with your suggestions, and get footnoting!

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

See You Yesterday (2019) (with Ebony Elizabeth Thomas)

Mon, 17 Jan 2022 11:50:56 +0000

2022 kicks off with the provocative politics and violent tragedies of See You Yesterday (2019), the Netflix science-fiction feature about the time-travel adventures of two young scientific prodigies in Brooklyn. The special guest for this discussion on the stakes of temporality, the futility of breaking out of a cycle, and the immediacy of racialised trauma is Dr Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Associate Professor in the Division of Literacy, Culture, and International Education (University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education). Ebony has written and co-authored more than 25 articles and book chapters across numerous academic journals and edited volumes, and is also the author of Reading African American Experiences in the Obama Era: Theory, Advocacy, Activism (Peter Lang, 2012) and, most recently, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games (NYU Press, 2019). Topics for this episode include how director and co-writer Stefan Bristol plays with the erasure of timelines set against the backdrop of systemic police brutality and institutional violence; the exchange between computer graphics and black subjectivity in the pursuit of fantasy; nostalgia, progress, and the emotion of racialised bodies that are haunted by the replaying past; the film’s portrayal of childhood and discourses of black exceptionalism; narrative distinctions between ‘aspirational’ and ‘inspirational’ fantasies in the desperation of seeking change; and links between the racial dimension of puzzle films and the digitally-mediated and progressive (Capitalist) spectacle of Afrofuturism, and what happens when low-budget films such as See You Yesterday do not have have access to Hollywood’s VFX opulence.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Mickey‘s Christmas Carol (1983) (with Amy M. Davis)

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 11:36:59 +0000

For the 2021 Christmas special episode of the podcast, Chris and Alex turn to the short Mickey’s Christmas Carol (Burny Mattinson, 1983), the Walt Disney Studio’s cel-animated retelling of the Charles Dickens masterpiece directed and produced by longtime Disney storyboard artist Burny Mattinson. Joining them to discuss Disney’s cultural relationship to Christmas and its longstanding history of festive-themed productions starring its most beloved characters is Dr Amy M. Davis, Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Hull. Amy is the author of numerous books, articles and chapters on Disney and animation, including the monographs Good Girls & Wicked Witches: Women in Disney’s Feature Animation (2006) and Handsome Heroes & Vile Villains: Men in Disney’s Feature Animation (2013), and the recent edited anthology Discussing Disney (John Libbey Publishing, 2019). Listen as they discuss Disney’s synergistic company strategies when it comes to representing Christmas across its multimedia products; animated adaptations and what it means to ‘cast’ fantastical cartoon stars in recognisable roles; Disney, Dickens and even Mickey Mouse himself as master storytellers; the consistency of vocal performance across different iterations and phases of animated characters; the themeable nature of Mickey as he is ‘recostumed’ across time and space; and how Mickey’s Christmas Carol parallels the Mouse House’s relationship to the vault as an audiovisual archive given the cartoon’s heightened reflexivity and engagement with the audience’s media memory.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Gremlins (1984) (with Catherine Lester)

Mon, 06 Dec 2021 08:44:46 +0000

Mogwai and monsters after midnight are the focus of Episode 88, as Chris and Alex take a closer look at the part-horror, part-Christmas feature Gremlins (Joe Dante, 1984) with special guest Dr Catherine Lester, Lecturer in Film and Television in the Department of Film and Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. Catherine’s work focuses largely on the intersections between children’s culture and the horror genre, and she is the author of Horror Films for Children: Fear and Pleasure in American Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2021), and several articles on popular animation and children’s horror cinema. She is also currently putting together an edited collection on the controversial animated film Watership Down (Martin Rosen, 1978), based on the The Legacy of Watership Down: Animals, Adaptation, Animation conference held in 2018. Topics for this episode include the fuzziness of children’s horror as a critical category, and how the genre itself has traditionally understood the role and presence of the child figure; the industrial impact of Gremlins within North American cinema and the subsequent introduction of the new PG-13 rating; the implications of horror, fear and monstrosity for theorising the child spectator; the materiality of the film’s animatronic effects and how this connects to a 1980s context of consumerism and merchandising; the citational practices made by director Joe Dante and screenwriter Chris Columbus towards popular Hollywood film history (particularly its reference to Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and evocations of film noir); animation’s potential role in exaggerating, diluting and modulating horrific content; and what Gremlins might have to say about the suitability of horror’s dominant tropes when presented to - and (re)framed for - children.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Chinese Animation and the Shanghai Animation Film Studio (1956-1988) (with Yuanyuan Chen)

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 11:14:18 +0000

For Episode 87, Chris and Alex are joined by special guest Dr Yuanyuan Chen, who teaches animation history and theory at Ulster University, for this brief introduction to Chinese animation and the work of the pioneering Shanghai Animation Film Studio. From propagandist impulses and opera traditions to Chinese state politics and painterly aesthetic styles, the complex history of Chinese animation and its more recent iterations are reflected in this cross-section of contemporary examples, which all serve to highlight the creativity of the Shanghai Animation Film Studio and its influential filmmakers. Listen as the trio discuss The Conceited General (Te Wei & Li Keruo, 1956), a colourful yet damning treatment of leadership and pomposity; the comedic Three Monks (A Da, 1980) based on a Chinese proverb, and an early short within China’s rebirth following the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s; A Deer of Nine Colours (Qian Jiajun & Dai Tielang, 1981), another adaptation, this time based on the Buddhist Jataka tale and replete with optical effects that communicates the spirituality of nature; the modernist simplicity and biting satire of modern China in Super Soap (A Da, 1986) and The New Doorbell (A Da, 1986) with their shared narrative of the dangers of ‘supply and demand’; and the lyrical Feeling from Mountain and Water (Te Wei, 1988), whose ink wash and shan shui style is the perfect accompaniment to its story of two travellers and their close master/student relationship.

The Secret of NIMH (1982)

Mon, 08 Nov 2021 10:00:55 +0000

The result of our latest social media poll charting listeners’ favourite Don Bluth animated film yields the focus of Episode 86, where Chris and Alex uncover The Secret of NIMH (Don Bluth, 1982), the filmmaker’s very first animated feature and one that would set the template for his tone and style to follow. Following up their recent episode on The Land Before Time (Don Bluth, 1988), listen as they sit down to discuss the mechanical vs. the magical in the way Bluth constructs his detailed animated world; the metonymic representation of humanity and questions of scale; the film’s reflexive treatment of anthropomorphic (even therianthropic) characters by folding the nature/culture divide common to anthropomorphs into its narrative of animal testing and experimentation; gender and motherhood in the film’s portrayal of heroine Mrs. Brisby; the industrial and aesthetic hybridity of Bluth as a filmmaker caught between established animated traditions and formulae; connections between The Secret of NIMH and High Fantasy filmmaking of the period (including the work of counter-cultural animator Ralph Bakshi); and Bluth’s seismic impact on Disney animation and his influence on the studio’s subsequent shift in narrative during its ‘dark ages’ of the 1980s.

Lovecraft Country (2020) (with Bambi Haggins)

Mon, 25 Oct 2021 14:51:42 +0000

Episode 85 discusses the recent HBO horror television series Lovecraft Country (2020), developed by Misha Green as a continuation of Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel, and places the story of 1950s racial segregation in the United States on a collision course with the science-fiction world of H.P. Lovecraft. Joining Chris and Alex for this latest episode is Dr Bambi Haggins, Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine whose work explores race, class, gender and sexuality in American comedy across media and television history. She is also the author of Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America (2007), while her current book project, Still Laughing, Still Black examines how Black comedy, culture and reception in the new millennium reflect, refract and reveal the necessity and the power of Black comic discourse and survival laughter since 2008. Listen as the trio discuss structuring relationships within Lovecraft Country between identity, race and imagination; the stakes of the programme’s application and reworking of ‘Lovecraftian’ imagery within an oppressive Jim Crow setting; discourses of reconstruction and restoration within both digital VFX post-production work and post-Civil War America; the (re)centring of blackness and the ambivalent power of whiteness as it manifests across the series’ performances; the CGI Cthulu creatures (Shoggoths) that are central to the programme’s allegorical treatment of Black survival and fear; and how Lovecraft Country uses generic hybridity and the threat of fantasy to engage with a narrative of a racial reckoning.

Shrek 2 (2004) (with Sam Summers)

Mon, 11 Oct 2021 10:11:46 +0000

Episode 84 takes a trip for the first time to the computer-animated efforts of the DreamWorks Animation studio, often viewed as Disney and Pixar’s commercial rival but whose features frequently offer a biting satirical revision of the narrative and stylistic formulae of these renowned animation heavyweights. For this latest episode on Shrek 2 (Andrew Adamson, Kelly Asbury & Conrad Vernon, 2004), Chris and Alex’s special guest is Dr Sam Summers, Associate Lecturer at Middlesex University and author of the recent DreamWorks Animation: Intertextuality and Aesthetics in Shrek and Beyond (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Sam is also the co-editor of a collection Toy Story: How Pixar Reinvented the Animated Feature (London: Bloomsbury, 2018) and - alongside journalist Ben Travis - co-host of the Disniversity podcast that offers a crash course through the history of Disney's animated classics. Listen as they discuss Shrek 2 and its industrial and aesthetic place within DreamWorks’ animated canon, and its relationship to Hollywood’s computer-animated film landscape more broadly; star voices and ‘presentational’ performances that contribute to the film’s layering of intrusive anachronism; the combination of medieval fairytale fantasy tropes with California culture; tensions between Shrek 2’s anti-Disney sentiment and the franchising of the Shrek myth; commercial positioning and the role of Shrek 2 in consolidating DreamWorks as a ‘punky’ alternative to the tone and style of the Mouse House; Disney’s timelessness vs. the ‘timeliness’ of DreamWorks when it comes to pop culture satire; and how through the Fairy Godmother, Shrek 2 negotiates (and then weaponises) the happy ending structure common to the fairytale form.

By the Time It Gets Dark (2016) (with Felicity Gee)

Mon, 27 Sep 2021 11:59:38 +0000

Episode 83 sees Chris and Alex trace the magical realist threads and overlapping timelines that build Anocha Suwichakornpong’s often confounding drama By the Time It Gets Dark (2016) (known in Thai as Dao Khanong), replete with its shifting realities, fleeting digital VFX and a pivotal citation of the ‘father of fantasy’ (as well as one of cinema’s first animators) Georges Méliès. Joining them to discuss Suwichakornpong’s mesmerising, kaleidoscopic, and highly original second feature film that dramatises the events of the 1976 Thammasat University massacre is Dr Felicity Gee, Senior Lecturer in Modernism and World Cinema at the University of Exeter, and author of the recent Magic Realism, World Cinema and the Avant-Garde (London: Routledge 2021). Listen as they discuss the film’s ‘magical realist’ identity and the term’s vexed relationship to surrealism, (Low) fantasy storytelling and animation; the possible connections between fantasy narratives and world cinema; imagination, image-making and illusion from Méliès to Chris Marker; the reflexive staging of history and how Suwichakornpong crafts a collage effect that evokes the slipperiness of experience and memory; cinema’s capacity to spin an eternal present, and the stakes of the film’s own temporal confusion; and the politics of glitch art, and how By the Time It Gets Dark offers spectators an affective assault on both narrative and image that mirrors the violence and brutality of its historical subject matter.

The Land Before Time (1988) (with Mark Witton)

Mon, 13 Sep 2021 08:59:47 +0000

The spectacular animated world of U.S. filmmaker Don Bluth is the focus of Episode 82, with Chris and Alex journeying to the Great Valley for this discussion of The Land Before Time (Don Bluth, 1988). Joining them is Dr Mark Witton, vertebrate palaeontologist and palaeoartist (based at the University of Portsmouth), who is best known for his scientific research and illustrations around the habits and behaviors of pterosaurs, as well as his consultancy work with museums and on the BBC television series Walking with Dinosaurs (1999) and Planet Dinosaur (2011). Listen as they discuss the importance of Bluth to the landscape of 1980s animation, including his work as a stylistic and ideological forbearer to the Disney Renaissance; The Land Before Time as a collision between mid-/late-twentieth century dinosaur science; the long history of ‘marketing’ dinosaurs that first began in the 1850s within a number of cultural institution and museum exhibits (especially in London and, later, across the U.S.); the storytelling structures and segmentation of the film’s framing journey narrative; Bluth’s tone and characterisation of the dinosaurs that falls back on the physicality and physiology of modern dinosaur images, including discourses of ‘monsterisation’ that have marked several media depictions; the problems of animating science and the artists’ creative latitude in constructing dinosaur performances; and why so many filmmakers across animation history have been continually drawn to the figure of the dinosaur as a creature of fascination.

Sub-Saharan African Animation (1966-2013) (with Paula Callus)

Mon, 30 Aug 2021 11:28:22 +0000

Episode 81 of the podcast provides an introductory survey of Sub-Saharan African animation, as Chris and Alex plot a pathway through a cross-section of animated fantasies covering a multitude of forms, styles and modes from a number of African countries and territories. Joining them is Dr Paula Callus, Associate Professor in Computer Animation at Bournemouth University and an expert in Sub-Saharan African animation, who has also worked as a consultant and educator on the UNESCO Africa Animated projects in Kenya and South Africa, and who has been involved in projects looking at marginalization and the use of digital technologies (with a focus upon Arts, Activism and Marginalization in Nairobi). Listen as they discuss Moustapha Alassane’s Bon Voyage Sim (1966), the earliest short animation from West Africa with a highly political (and amphibious) comic narrative; the quasi-animated documentary Ng’endo Mukii’s Yellow Fever (2013) that interrogates the implications of skin and race via the theme of hair braiding; Iwa (2009) from Nigerian filmmaker, illustrator and art director Kenneth (Shofela) Coker based on West African ‘tree of life’ myths; the colourful British/Kenyan animated television series Tinga Tinga Tales (2010-2012) based on African folktales and featuring both English and Swahili languages; and the science-fiction allegory Pumzi (2009) from writer and director Wanuri Kahiu. Topics include the cultural and historical specificity of fantasy storytelling and the mapping and remapping of folklore across national borders; animation as itself a medium wrought with competing ‘contexts’ shaping modes of production and reception; core/periphery models of understanding global animation practices and their diversity of visual cultures and heritages; post-colonial legacies and how questions of pastness guide how African animation has been culturally and critically understood; Afrofuturism, Afropessimism and animation’s aesthetics of despair; and how fantasy and animation are systematic tools for the subjective on account of their shared ‘immateriality’.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973)

Mon, 16 Aug 2021 09:46:20 +0000

Chris and Alex return once more to the pioneering work of stop-motion animator and effects artist Ray Harryhausen, this time looking at his 1973 fantasy film collaboration with director Gordon Hessler, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. For Episode 80, the focus is on the quasi-parasitic relationship between live-action and animation filmmaking, and the spectatorial fantasy engendered and invited by each form of moving image technology. Topics include psychoanalytic film theory and the ‘internal object’; the ontological integration of Harryhausen’s ‘Dynarama’ effects with the fantasy of location shooting; animation discourse and the problem of essentialist understandings of medium specificity; The Golden Voyage of Sinbad’s orientalist imaginary and problematic constructions of race; the materiality of stop-motion, and the ‘weighty’ qualities to the film’s army of mythical homunculi; and the big-screen trend of casting ‘animators’ as villains in their control and manipulation of suddenly sentient fictional worlds.

Bagpuss (1974) (with Chris Pallant)

Mon, 02 Aug 2021 10:03:57 +0000

Episode 79 marks a special edition of the podcast, recorded back in February 2021 as part of the virtual Fantasy/Animation @ Canterbury Anifest event where Chris and Alex curated a series of podcasts, themed blog posts, a roundtable on the topic of diversity and inclusion (returning to the Anti-Racist Syllabus) and a live Q&A, as well as premiering a brand new Fantasy/Animation podcast episode released exclusively for festival attendees. This Anifest special tackles Bagpuss (1974) the 13-episode stop-motion television series from the celebrated Kent-based Smallfilms studio. Joining Chris and Alex to talk through his ongoing research into both Smallfilms and its founders Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate is Festival Director of the Canterbury Anifest Dr Chris Pallant, who is also a Reader in Film Studies at Canterbury Christ Church University and President of the Society for Animation Studies. Chris has published widely across film and media studies, including his monograph Demystifying Disney: A History of Disney Feature Animation (Bloomsbury, 2011), and collections Storyboarding: A Critical History (Palgrave, 2015), Animated Landscapes: History, Form and Function (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: New Perspectives on Production, Reception, Legacy (2021). In this episode, Chris gives us a rundown of his favourite Top 5 Bagpuss episodes, with other topics including the modular structure of the series and its bricolage of storytelling and comic effects; the pleasures of ‘objectness’ vs. anthropomorphic representation; Bagpuss’ particular kind of character expressivity, pose and movement; fantasy rhetoric and the image of the ‘storyteller’; the vocal performances (and musical designs) of folk singing duo Sandra Kerr and John Faulkner; the seduction of the animation archive and locating lost production materials; how to tell animation history, and what gets include/omitted from industrial narratives; and the status of Bagpuss as a signature Smallfilms property, including the role of a saggy old cloth cat in shaping histories of this small but influential animation studio.

Treasure Planet (2002) (with Ron Clements and John Musker)

Mon, 19 Jul 2021 11:06:08 +0000

The 2002 Disney science-fiction epic Treasure Planet (Ron Clements & John Musker, 2002) is the focus of Episode 78 of the podcast, which looks at the melding together of the Disney formula with space fantasy in this swashbuckling adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 adventure novel Treasure Island. Joining Chris and Alex for this bumper episode are two very special guests: Ron Clements and John Musker, who aside from writing and directorial duties on Treasure Planet are known as a filmmaking duo absolutely central to the renaissance of Disney animation in the 1980s and 1990s. They are the writers and directors of a number of Disney feature films, including The Great Mouse Detective (1986), The Little Mermaid (1989), Aladdin (1992), Hercules (1997), The Princess and the Frog (2009) and Moana (2016), as well as Treasure Planet, the Mouse House’s 43rd animated feature film and one of the studio’s rare turns to the codes and conventions of science-fiction storytelling. Listen as they trace the industrial origins of Treasure Planet and the film’s initial pitching' to Disney chairman and chief executive Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Roy E. Disney and Thomas Schumacher; the evolution of the story from Ron and John’s early treatment to the first draft of the script; the nature of adaptation and the creative affordances of an animated re-telling; the ‘cyborgian’ identity of Treasure Planet in its combination of traditional technique and digital processing (including its use of the digital painting tool Deep Canvas), and where the film’s ethos of ’something old, something new’ sits in relation to the landscape of Hollywood animation of the 1990s; the creative contributions of animator Glen Keane to the development of John Silver; and remembering the ‘tough period’ for Disney Feature Animation that surrounded Treasure Planet’s 2002 release and subsequent lukewarm critical reception.

The Hunger Games (2012) (with Tarja Laine)

Mon, 05 Jul 2021 08:57:07 +0000

The first instalment of The Hunger Games (2012) franchise, directed by Gary Ross, provides the focus of Episode 77 of the podcast, which looks at the film’s connections to ethics, rationality and affect, and what structures our emotional engagement with its narrative of totalitarian systems and panoptic visions. Joining Chris and Alex to examine the immersive world of Panem is Dr Tarja Laine, Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the University of Amsterdam and author of the new monograph Emotional Ethics of The Hunger Games (2021), as well as the books Bodies in Pain: Emotion and the Cinema of Darren Aronofsky (2015), Feeling Cinema: Emotional Dynamics in Film Studies (2011) and Shame and Desire: Emotion, Intersubjectivity, Cinema (2007). Listen as they discuss the politics of spectacle, and what it means for Young Adult Fiction to ‘do’ philosophical and ethical enquiry; narrative focalisation and the difference between subjectivity (style), allegiance (narrative) and alignment (ethics); how The Hunger Games invites an ethical engagement through fear, shame and hope; the economy of worldbuilding, structures of myth and how this relates to the fluctuations of character knowledge; how notions of ‘looking’ ultimately prevent access into interiority; and what the mediatised nature of The Hunger Games has to say the contemporary era of social media, where individuals must forge their being and identity in a world in which they are constantly seen and scrutinised.

Avatar (2009) (with Rupert Read)

Mon, 21 Jun 2021 12:10:46 +0000

The politics and proxies of James Cameron’s 2009 blockbuster Avatar provide the focus for Chris and Alex in Episode 76, as they plug into Pandora to make sense of the relationships between the film’s ecological sensibilities and its technological prowess. Joining them is Rupert Read, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia who specialises in everything from the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to the contemporary climate crisis. Rupert was also a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion (authoring the 2020 book Extinction Rebellion: Insights from the Inside), and was a Green Party councillor from 2004-2011 (having stood for both national parliamentary and European elections). Topics for this episode include Avatar’s anti-imperialist message and discourses of the post-racial in Obama’s America; racial passing, the politics of motion-capture and what Cameron’s reflexive puppet show says about the ‘state of the art’; fantasies of control, surrogacy, perception and the trust we place in (digital) bodies; blurred formal and stylistic distinctions between live-action/humanity and CG/Na’vi; the act of ‘reverse anthropology’ and Avatar’s claims for the power of ancient wisdoms; the awe of 3D technologies, the meaning of spectacle and links to ritualistic communal viewing experiences; digital farms, new media culture and human/machine connectivity; the material, mineral dimension of our own media consumption and creation, and the carbon footprint of digital backlots; and how in asking what we as spectators are going to do to ‘wake up’, Avatar invites us into a very real politics of ecology and activism.

Chicken Run (2000) (with Lynn Ferguson)

Mon, 07 Jun 2021 09:12:54 +0000

For Episode 75, Chris and Alex revisit the work of Aardman Animations, taking a look at their debut feature film Chicken Run (Peter Lord & Nick Park, 2000), whose narrative of meat pies and morality remains underwritten by the Bristol-based studio’s signature stop-motion style and very British sense of anarchy. Joining them for this discussion of the art of poultry-in-motion is Chicken Run’s very own Mac, the loveable Scottish genius engineer chicken voiced by writer, actress, and story coach and consultant Lynn Ferguson. Listen as the discussion turns to the Aardman community and how it functions within both industrial and narrative contexts; Chicken Run’s tempering of the epic, and the spectacle of table-top production; vocal performance (in both animated features and video games), and the need to give audio ‘angles’ to the animator; notions of Scottishness, discourses of nationality and fantasy storytelling; the power of ‘revolting’ animation and collectivities of rebellion and resistance; and pop singer Chesney Hawkes.

WandaVision (2021)

Mon, 24 May 2021 09:05:31 +0000

In this latest episode, Chris and Alex sit down with the Disney+ series WandaVision (Jac Schaeffer, 2021), a spectacular fantasy of U.S. television history that continues the citational practices and narrative complexities of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, yet does so by working through the industrial, cultural and stylistic lexicon of the sitcom. Topics for discussion in this episode include the reflexive gestures made by WandaVision to canonical American television, from mid-century staples I Love Lucy (Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz, 1951-1957), Bewitched (Sol Saks, 1964-1972) and I Dream of Jeannie (Sidney Sheldon, 1965-1970) to contemporary hits like Malcolm in the Middle (Linwood Boomer, 2000-2006) and Modern Family (Christopher Lloyd & Steven Levitan, 2009-2020); how the animated title sequences (that recall graphic traditions of the Hanna Barbera studio) fit in with the series’ rhetoric of self-consciousness; distinctions between the ‘complex’ and the ‘complicated’ when it comes to serial narrative engagement; emotional catharsis and Wanda’s ontology as a television ‘showrunner’, including her reconstruction of identity when trapped in a small-screen format of her own making; questions of nostalgia and audience appeal; and what WandaVision as an audiovisual product says about Marvel’s own potential future in relation to television programming.

Arrival (2016) (with William Brown)

Mon, 10 May 2021 08:37:56 +0000

Episode 73 reaches deep into the science, spaces and squids of Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016), the recent science-fiction feature starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner, and based on Ted Chiang’s 1998 short story “Story of Your Life.” Joining Chris and Alex to discuss this atmospheric subversion of the sci-fi genre is Dr William Brown, Independent Scholar and Honorary Fellow at the University of Roehampton whose research expertise focuses on contemporary digital and new media, posthumanism, critical race theory, and film-philosophy. William is the author of numerous monographs, book chapters and articles related to popular cinema, media convergence and digital filmmaking - from eye tracking technologies to motion capture - and his latest collection is The Squid Cinema From Hell: Kinoteuthis Infernalis and the Emergence of Chthulumedia (co-authored with David H. Fleming) (2020). Listen as they chat about the earthly (squids, octopi, cuttlefish) and extraterrestrial cephalopods that have populated the history of cinema; the cephalopodan qualities of the digital and the tentacular reach of the virtual camera; the gaseous, cloudy spectacle of chromophoric display as it manifests throughout Arrival’s army of Heptapods; discourses of racial otherness and the gendering of so-called ‘squid cinema’; narrative, linearity, duration and the film’s fantastical relationship with/to time; Felix the Cat, ‘soft beings’ and the animator’s desire for control of the animated ink; how Villeneuve evokes the Rorschach stain through Arrival’s chaos of plasma, and how this feeds into the cultural and political plasticity of black bodies; and why, in the end, it all comes back to tentacles.

Grave of the Fireflies (1988) (with Alex Dudok de Wit)

Mon, 26 Apr 2021 11:12:44 +0000

Chris and Alex continue their discussions of Studio Ghibli for Episode 72 with a look at animated war feature Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata, 1988), a film that was initially released as a double bill with partner My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988). Telling the story of teenage boy Seita and his younger sister Setsuko who, after fleeing the city of Kobe, must navigate the public horrors and personal traumas of World War II, Grave of the Fireflies offers a graphic and emotional portrait of conflict and society through the isolation and struggle experienced by the siblings. Joining the podcast this week to discuss the film’s potent political message is Alex Dudok de Wit, Associate Editor at Cartoon Brew, freelance journalist (including work for the BFI/Sight and Sound) and author of the upcoming BFI Film Classic on Grave of the Fireflies (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). Listen as the trio examine the historical, political and artistic contexts for the film, and its important place within the Ghibli canon; the cartoon short tradition and wartime propaganda in both the U.S. and Japan; pacing, rhetoric and the narrative framing of Grave of the Fireflies through fantasy and subjectivity; ghostliness, death and the afterlife, and what the pull between naturalism and fantasy means for the film’s tragedy; the interplay between the fantastical elements of Takahata’s film and its anti-war sentiment; the possible narrative judgment of Seita’s actions and protection of Setsuko; and how Grave of the Fireflies opens up questions about the many relationships between animation and politics, and what it means for popular animation to ‘do’ political enquiry.

Dark (2017-2020) (with Nicolas Leu)

Mon, 12 Apr 2021 09:48:05 +0000

Twisting and travelling back and forth (and then back again) is Episode 71 of the podcast, which has Chris and Alex visit the fictional German town of Winden for Dark (Baran bo Odar & Jantje Friese, 2017-2020), Netflix’s hugely successful science-fiction series that tells the story of supernatural activity and conspiracy set against the backdrop of interconnected family trees and time-space conundrums. Joining them is the programme’s VFX Production Supervisor Nicolas Leu, whose film and television work beyond Dark as part of the RISE Visual Effects Studio also includes Game of Thrones (David Benioff & D.B. Weiss, 2011-2019), Marvel features Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Anthony Russo & Joe Russo, 2014) and Doctor Strange (Scott Derrickson, 2016), Creed (Ryan Coogler, 2015), The Fate of the Furious (F. Gary Gray, 2017), American Renegades (Steven Quale, 2017), and Dumbo (Tom Burton, 2019). Listen as they discuss Dark’s landmark status as Netflix’s first German-language series; digital compositing as an industrial process with the VFX production pipeline; forms of ‘digital chaos’ as a way of thinking through both Dark’s narrative of doubling and causality, but also its layering of live-action/CG spaces; the materality and black matter of time travel; and what Dark has to say about how what it means to ‘do’ science through fiction via a fiction that is, itself, scientific.

Space Jam (1996) (with Paul Wells)

Mon, 29 Mar 2021 11:21:25 +0000

Chris and Alex take to the basketball court for a sports-themed instalment of the podcast by looking at Space Jam (Joe Pytka, 1996), the part-animated, part-Michael Jordan sports comedy that has lots to say about the spectacle of stylistic hybridity, animation’s longstanding relationship to sport, and nostalgia via its many callbacks to Golden Age Hollywood cartooning all through the lens of NBA basketball. Joining them for Episode 70 is Professor Paul Wells, who is Director of the Animation Academy at Loughborough University, as well as being an internationally established scholar, screenwriter and director, working across and within both academia and industry contexts. Paul’s work has been central to the study, practice and research of animation as a field, and he has also written and directed numerous projects for theatre, radio, television and film. Listen as they discuss Space Jam as a laboratory for thinking about sport as a social metaphor for how societies should run; animation’s status as controlled drama (versus the unscripted nature of sport); notions of the professional versus the amateur in relation to sport’s rules, codes and conventions; the cultural practice of stars Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny, and their ability to act as ciphers for the contemporary moment; how the medium provides a version of ‘perfect motion’ through its excessive lyricism; the politics of race and what Space Jam tells us about black identities and whiteness through its black musical vernacular; and how Joe Pytka’s film reveals how animation can manage the very metaphors of sport.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) (with Helen O'Hara)

Mon, 15 Mar 2021 12:27:21 +0000

Following our take on Star Wars: The Force Awakens (J.J. Abrams, 2015), the next instalment in the new Star Wars trilogy gets the Fantasy/Animation treatment for Episode 69, as Chris and Alex (and the Force) battle through Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Rian Johnson, 2017) to talk about its gender politics, questions of fandom and the film’s narrative of resistance, rebellion and struggle for power. Joining them for this celebration of contemporary Hollywood science-fiction is film critic and journalist Helen O’Hara, editor-at-large of Empire film magazine, and author of the book The Ultimate Superhero Movie Guide (2020) and the recent Women vs. Hollywood: The Fall And Rise Of Women In Film (2021). Listen as they discuss the ambivalent reception of Rian Johnson’s film, elements of its critical backlash, and how reviewers saw its vexed relationship to the Star Wars legacy; fan communities, gatekeeping and gender; the case of Kelly Marie Tran and the changing face of popular franchise cinema; how the film navigates themes of energy, force and balance ably supported by digital VFX and more ‘grounded’ effects technologies to create ‘lived in’ environments; sci-fi worldbuilding and the ‘incompleteness’ of fictional realms; Carrie Fisher as star, and the power of aging bodies that move through time (and space); and the central contradictions of Kylo Ren that enables The Last Jedi to question what it means to turn your back on genealogy.

The Prince of Egypt (1998) (with Francesca Stavrakopoulou)

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 12:05:52 +0000

Episode 68 marks Chris and Alex’s first look at popular animation studio DreamWorks, turning to the California-based company’s early cycle of cel-animated cartoons to examine The Prince of Egypt (Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner and Simon Wells, 1998). Joining them to separate the historical realism from the packaged Westernised fantasy is biblical scholar and broadcaster Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at the University of Exeter, whose research encompasses ancient Israelite and Judahite religions, and portrayals of the religious past in the Hebrew Bible. Listen as they discuss the artistic and historic license (and forms of poetic embellishment) that support this part-musical animated adaptation; The Prince of Egypt’s late-1990s context and vital place within the development of DreamWorks as a successful Hollywood studio; how the original Exodus story functions as a foundational myth central to the construction of Israelite identity; the formal and narrative interplay between Moses’ divine power, the supernatural, and Egyptian magic; star voice casting, vocal performance, and problematic processes of white-washing and colour-coding; the use of embryonic digital imagery during certain spectacular set-pieces; and how The Prince of Egypt presents its Christian iconography alongside the framing of miraculous activity within Moses’ own search for figurative and literal truth.

Flushed Away (2006)

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 07:44:17 +0000

Chris and Alex return to the feature films of the Bristol-based Aardman Animations studio for Episode 67, travelling from the world of Kensington propriety ‘up top’ to the underground chaos of Ratropolis ‘down below’ for Flushed Away (David Bowers & Sam Fell, 2006), which tells the story of the trials and tribulations of high society rat Roddy St. James who is inadvertently flushed down into the sewers of London. Mirroring this narrative collision of worlds, Flushed Away also bears the industrial weight of such duality, being part of a 12-year, four-film $250million agreement between Aardman and Hollywood studio DreamWorks Animation to produce a series of animated features. Listen as Chris and Alex examine how Aardman’s stop-frame processes (and signature silicon-based Plasticine style) combined with the workflow of computer-animated films in the U.S.; character modelling and the sculpting of digital clay as part of the Flushed Away’s CG/stop-motion hybrid aesthetics; pantomimic expression and film comedy; questions of national identity and the film’s construction of a ‘national fantastic’; the Romantic origins of fantasy storytelling; and the contribution that Flushed Away’s creativity with waste, junk, garbage and cultural detritus makes to its crafting of a highly-detailed animated world.

Happy Feet (2006) (with Hannah Hamad)

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 08:46:38 +0000

Episode 66 is a real toe-tapper, as Chris and Alex dance to the beat of George Miller’s 2006 computer-animated musical feature Happy Feet (George Miller, 2006), produced by U.S. studio Village Roadshow Pictures in collaboration with Australian animation and VFX studio Animal Logic. Joining them to discuss this digital tale of all-singing all-dancing penguins is Dr Hannah Hamad, Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Culture, having previously been Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London, and Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of East Anglia. Hannah’s first monograph Postfeminism and Paternity in Contemporary US Film was published by Routledge in 2014, and since then she’s gone on to write on recessionary reality TV, austerity, contemporary celebrity/stardom and postfeminist media cultures, the postracial, and feminist media history. Listen as they discuss Happy Feet’s racial body politics and problematic relationship to neo-minstrelsy; the ‘invisible’ role of dance performer Savion Glover within the film’s marketing campaign, and how Happy Feet’s status as a ‘post-Gollum’ motion-capture feature taps into its appropriation of black culture; discourses of the post-racial within mid-2000s animated features in Hollywood; the star vocal performance of Robin Williams; and the extent to which audiences are able to accept as the fantasy of the animated medium as a vital form of social discourse.

Inception (2010) (with Todd McGowan)

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 07:28:00 +0000

Are we dreaming, or are we awake? How do we choose which realities to believe in? What levels of fictionality count? Find out in Episode 65, which works its way through the dream logic and desires of Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010), a film that probes deep into our unconscious to revel in how dreams allow us to participate in a shared fantasy. Joining Chris and Alex as they kick back through the layers of Inception’s rhizomatic, mazelike structure is Todd McGowan, Professor of Film Studies in the Film and Television Studies Department at the University of Vermont, and author of a number of books on psychoanalytic film theory, film comedy and popular media, including The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan (2007) and The Fictional Christopher Nolan (2012). Topics for discussion include Christopher Nolan’s pre-occupation with revelation as a narrative device; how Inception’s interweaving, puzzling plotlines demonstrate trends towards complex narration by showing how beginnings can be constituted by the end; Nolan’s relationship with practical effects traditions, and the interplay between visual effects and the diegetic coherency of a fantasy world; why Inception is a rich film for thinking about what we want from visual effects, and what we desire of spectacular computer-generated imagery; spectatorial investments in social reality (as fictionality) and its application of “timespaces”; and the status of Inception as a broader metaphor for cinema going.

Captain Marvel (2019) (with Trixter VFX Studio)

Mon, 04 Jan 2021 11:34:12 +0000

2021 kicks off with a supersonic bang as Chris and Alex return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) to explore the world of Kree Empires, alien shapeshifters, flerkens, and digital de-aging in American superhero feature Captain Marvel (Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck, 2019), based on the celebrated Marvel Comics character. Joining them for a discussion of Hollywood special effects production and the labour of fantastical imagery are the film’s VFX Producer Christine Neumann and VFX Supervisor Dominik Zimmerle of German visual effects studio Trixter based in Munich, whose work also includes a number of Hollywood blockbusters and other MCU entries Spider-Man: Homecoming (Jon Watts, 2017), Thor: Ragnarok (Taika Waititi, 2017), Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (James Gunn, 2017), Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018) and the upcoming Black Widow (Cate Shortland, 2021). Topics for discussion in Episode 64 include the industrial relationships between Marvel Studios and its VFX vendors; the splintering of effects workflow into elements of animation, camera/layout, simulation, body dynamics, lighting, pre-visualisation, rigging and compositing; what goes into the creation of digital assets/artefacts, and the challenges in Captain Marvel of replicating everyday or domestic spaces and objects; taste cultures and connoisseurship in contemporary VFX spectatorship; the vital role of controlled lighting environments and virtual camerawork in the design of pristine effects imagery; and the distinctions between a ‘photorealistic’ and a ‘caricatured’ cat.

Animated Christmas Adverts (1951-2018) (with Malcolm Cook)

Mon, 07 Dec 2020 08:21:12 +0000

The Christmas spirit is finally in the air, with Chris and Alex using Episode 63 of the podcast as their annual opportunity to discuss all things seasonal - this time examining the fantasy of Christmas advertising, and the repeated role played by animation in the construction of festive commercials, television ads and brand promotions. They are joined in their Yuletide deliberations by Dr Malcolm Cook, Associate Professor in Film Studies (University of Southampton), whose numerous publications include the monograph Early British Animation: From Page and Stage to Cinema Screens (2018) and the co-edited collection (with Professor Kirsten Moana Thompson) Animation and Advertising (2019). Listen as they discuss the style and form of the following selection of Christmas-themed animated advertisements: Lotte Reiniger’s “Christmas is Coming” (1951) made in collaboration with the General Post Office (GPO) informing audiences about the last postal dates; “The Flintstones - Cocoa Pebbles” (1985) that provides a playful prehistoric retelling of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol; the stargazing and fizzy drink-loving marine mammals of Coca-Cola’s “Polar Bears (Northern Lights)” (1993); the mixed media John Lewis advert “The Bear and The Hare” (2013) influenced by the sentimentality of Disney’s animated animals; Cartier’s 2016 luxurious offering titled “Winter Tale” replete with spectacular digital effects; and Hershey’s recent musical commercial “Heartwarming the World (Play the Kisses)” (2018) set to the tune of We Wish You a Merry Christmas. Topics include the entwined historical and formal exchange between the animation and advertising industries; the role of desire, enchantment and the magical-making quality of Christmas-as-fantasy (including thematic connections to the “film blanc”); the challenges of archiving animated advertising and its many pioneers; the value of analysing animation’s place within a variety of popular cultural experiences; the politics of audiovisual capitalist consumption and the business of Christmas; and the ways in which global brands historically lean in and out of the festive period through highly-animated commercial enterprises.

James Bond Title Sequences (1962-2015) (with Ed Lamberti) (Part 2)

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 08:59:21 +0000

The names Bond…James Bond in Episodes 61 and 62, as Chris and Alex tackle the official Eon James Bond 007 film series by casting their eyes over a longstanding staple of the franchise - the celebrated credits sequences. Beginning with Dr. No (Terence Young, 1962) and culminating in Spectre (Sam Mendes, 2015), listen as they place in rank order their ‘Top 24’ title sequences, judging their audiovisual spectacle, structural elements and broader connections to traditions in animated fantasy (Part 1 focuses on Bond films #24 to #13, while Part 2 counts down from #12 to their #1 ranked 007 title sequence). Joining them for this extended double-header is Dr Ed Lamberti, an independent researcher in Film Studies who has been a teaching assistant at King's College London, a screenwriting mentor at the London Film School, and who is currently Policy Manager at the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC). In 2019, Ed published his monograph Performing Ethics through Film Style, which discusses the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas alongside films directed by the Dardenne Brothers, Barbet Schroeder and Paul Schrader. He is also the editor of Behind the Scenes at the BBFC: Film Classification from the Silver Screen to the Digital Age (2012), and the assistant editor of the upcoming V. F. Perkins on Movies: Collected Shorter Film Criticism (2020). Listen as the trio examine elements of design, movement, rhythm and pacing in the Bond titles; the gendered imaginaries and Anglophonic fantasies of race that support the sequences’ progress of imagery; authorial figures such as Maurice Binder, Robert Brownjohn, and Daniel Kleinman; questions of coherency and the relation between image and soundtrack; and the broader structural role of the credits across the Bond series. Quite simply, nobody does it better.

James Bond Title Sequences (1962-2015) (with Ed Lamberti) (Part 1)

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 08:50:54 +0000

Christopher Robin (2018)

Mon, 09 Nov 2020 09:55:24 +0000

Heffalumps and Woozles take centre stage for Episode 60 of the podcast, as Chris and Alex take a trip deep into Hundred Acre Wood to confront Christopher Robin (Marc Forster, 2018) (not to be confused with the earlier A.A. Milne biography Goodbye Christopher Robin [Simon Curtis, 2017]), and its pleasures of nostalgia. For this latest Listeners’ Choice, they discuss the role of illustration and illusionism in relation to Disney’s earlier Winnie the Pooh animated adaptations; how imagination and impossibility manages the film’s treatment of childhood fantasies, and the extent to which this is mirrored in elements of Christopher Robin’s digital/analogue production; the politics of niceness and the film’s gestures to a Trump-era “nicecore” cinema that delights in kindness and the intrinsic value of ‘being good’; the construction of a malleable, fluid virtual urban space to form bricolage architecture (particularly in its CG portrayal of postwar London); what Christopher Robin has to say about coming back to family, returning home, and simply seeing the world differently; and how doing nothing often leads to the very best kind of something.

Sherlock Jr. (1924) (with Peter Adamson)

Mon, 26 Oct 2020 09:20:10 +0000

Episode 59 heralds Chris and Alex’s first foray into silent film comedy via the work of performer Buster Keaton, looking at his feature Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924) that celebrates the dreams and psychology of a movie theatre projectionist. Joining them as the lights go down is Peter Adamson, Professor of Late Ancient and Arabic Philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Münich and King's College London, and host of the successful History of Philosophy without any gaps podcast that examines the “ideas, lives and historical context” of both major philosophers and more lesser-known figures. From Buster Keaton’s gag structures to the unruliness and absurdity of early nickelodeon audiences, this episode of the Fantasy/Animation podcast covers distinctions between theatrical vaudeville performance and the ‘staging’ of action afforded by the film medium; how Sherlock Jr. relates to classical film theory’s post-romantic emphasis on dreams and psychology to explain the emotion and aesthetic experience of moviegoing; experiments with editing and the power of the ’cut’ in Keaton’s comedy; the cyclical arrangement of comic narrative structures; Keaton’s expressive relationship to both silent-era animation stars (such as Felix the Cat) and the sentimentality of contemporaries like Charlie Chaplin; and how Sherlock Jr. offers the potential to think through the division between ‘film philosophy’ and ‘philosophical cinema.’

Roobarb (and Custard) (1974) (with Birgitta Hosea)

Mon, 12 Oct 2020 09:17:35 +0000

The anarchy and artistry of British television animation provides the springboard for Episode 58 of the Fantasy/Animation podcast, which welcomes London-based media artist, animator and curator Professor Birgitta Hosea (who is also the Director of the Animation Research Centre at the University for the Creative Arts) to talk about Roobarb (Grange Calveley, 1974) directed by English animator Bob Godfrey. Godfrey’s particular connections to the UCA (he established the Animation course at the university back in 1969) were the subject of the recent Cartoon Animation - Satire and Subversion event earlier this year that examined the animated medium’s more radical histories through Godfrey’s surrealistic and pointed creations. For this episode, listen as Chris and Alex join with Birgitta to identify Godfrey’s particular relationship to political cartoons in Britain, notwithstanding his marginal and underrated status within animation history. Other topics include the honesty and transformative energy of cel-animation embodied in the programme’s streaky, “boiling” aesthetic; the importance of white cartoon space within the visual style of Roobarb, and how this connects to traditions of overdetermining/underdetermining with fantasy storytelling; questions of imperfection in relation to the very technology of drawing; the power of Richard Briers’ voiceover and anthropomorphic characterisation; and what Calveley’s cartoon tells us about the way self-reflexivity can - and does - operate in the animated fantasy.

***To donate to The Bob Godfrey Collection, please click here***

Rango (2011) (with Neil Brand)

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 14:28:54 +0000

Performer, composer, silent film accompanist and television presenter Neil Brand is the special guest joining Chris and Alex for Episode 57 of the podcast, which celebrates the musical beats and Mariachi owls of Rango (Gore Verbinski, 2011). Listen as they discuss how this curious 2011 computer-animated film revels in the power of telling tales alongside its broader relationship to folk ballads; Rango’s cinephilic evocation of canonical Hollywood Westerns and U.S. cinema history; themes of ambition, isolation, and aimlessness, and how this ties into a film whose existentialist narrative is predicated on the question of inevitability; Rango’s musical score that functions as a bridge between landscape and character; and what Gore Verbinski’s film tells us about what audiences might want from contemporary fantasy/animation (namely highly sophisticated anarchy rather than structures that organise, and a fantasy better realised onscreen that we can ever imagine!).

Bright (David Ayer, 2017)

Mon, 14 Sep 2020 07:45:17 +0000

The latest Listeners’ Choice episode sees Chris and Alex turn to Netflix and the much-maligned yet curiously provocative feature film Bright (David Ayer, 2017), whose narrative of racism, police corruption and latent magical forces is set against the backdrop of an alternate fantasy vision of contemporary Los Angeles. With a budget of $90 million, Ayer’s social discourse via fantasy (the script was written by Max Landis) was critically-derided despite being Netflix’s most downloaded feature within its first week of release. There is certainly much to say about Bright’s heavy use of metaphor that points a number of fingers at systemic violence and racial hegemony through themes of respect, tolerance and acceptance. Listen as the discussion in Episode 56 takes in Bright’s evocation of Hollywood buddy movie story structures and the popular police procedural; categories of the fantastic, the allegoric and the parodic, and how allegory functions as a deconstructive impulse against fantasy’s pursuit of reconstruction; the depiction of Elftown and the film’s portrayal of whiteness; Orc clan politics, Will Smith’s racial coding and the role of the Other; and how Bright offers a complicated - and, at times, highly uneven - possible world that presents its modern urban fantasy setting as a social class commentary.

Hugo (2011) (with Eric Smoodin)

Mon, 31 Aug 2020 09:20:54 +0000

Chris and Alex dust off their knowledge of early film history for Episode 55 as they examine Martin Scorsese’s adventure Hugo (2011), a playful mystery set in 1930s Paris that takes audiences through the special effects and spectacular stagecraft of pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès. Joining Chris and Alex amid the architecture of the Gare Montparnasse is Eric Smoodin, Professor of American Studies and Cinema and Technocultural Studies at the University of California, who has published monographs and edited collections on Walt Disney, Frank Capra and Hollywood film history, as well as a new book Paris in the Dark: Going to the Movies in the City of Light, 1930–1950 (Duke University Press, 2020) that sketches a picture of French film culture of the 1930s and 1940s. Listen as they situate Hugo within the history of cine-clubs, cinéphile subcultures and local exhibition practices of early twentieth-century Paris; the significance of Méliès as a filmmaker within the entwined genealogies of fantasy and animation; the pleasures of digital artificiality and VFX fakery in Scorsese’s historical depiction of the French capital; the intertextual invitations made by the film to the spectatorial experience; the interrelationship between cinema as a machine, animation, and the automaton; and how Hugo offers a lavish - if highly imagined and typically conservative - 3D vision of early filmgoing as a powerful unifying force.

Watchmen (2009) (with Drew Morton)

Mon, 17 Aug 2020 09:02:02 +0000

In an alternate 1985, Chris and Alex sit down to watch the recent comic book feature film Watchmen (Zach Snyder, 2009), a neo-noir/superhero blockbuster that adapts the popular DC Comics series for the big screen. They are joined in this Cold War-era tale of Soviet Union-United States relations by Dr Drew Morton, Associate Professor of Mass Communication at Texas A&M University, Texarkana, and author of Panel to the Screen: Style, American Film, and Comic Books During the Blockbuster Era (University Press of Mississippi, 2016), as well as a number of articles and chapters on motion comics, media convergence and comic book adaptation. Topics up for discussion in Episode 54 include Watchmen’s pivotal place within Hollywood comic book feature films of the 2000s; formal issues in adaptation and the graphic decompression of time and space; digital technology and the spectacle of Baroque aesthetics (including director Zach Snyder’s balletic slow-motion visual style); the film’s depiction of psychologically repressed superheroes and noir-esque vigilantism; and how Watchmen presents a crucial case study for thinking about the movement of media products within a broader transmedia flow.

Pan's Labyrinth (2006) (with Deborah Shaw)

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 09:07:35 +0000

Episode 53 journeys into the irregular and twisting world of Spanish fantasy cinema, with Chris and Alex joined in their discussion of Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006) by Deborah Shaw, Professor of Film and Screen Studies at the University of Portsmouth, and a specialist in Latin American cinema whose publications include The Three Amigos: The Transnational Filmmaking of Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Alfonso Cuarón (Manchester University Press, 2013), as well as the edited collections The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and Latin American Women Filmmakers: Production, Politics, Poetics (I. B. Tauris, 2017). Topics up for examination this episode include the potency and power of the film’s national-historical setting, and its knotted relationship with the perennial allegory of Fascism; the narrative role of magic and belief within the construction of villainy and antagonism; the ‘monstrosity’ of Guillermo del Toro’s VFX and the formal style of its monstrous aesthetics; the rhythmical dimension of how del Toro treats time, chronology and history; and the global circulation of Pan’s Labyrinth that is enabled by its palatable mainstream vocabulary of CGI and populist effects imagery.

Persepolis (2007)

Mon, 20 Jul 2020 09:37:21 +0000

For the first in a special series of listener selections, Episode 52 has Chris and Alex get to grips with Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi, 2007), taking inspiration from social media suggestions that were submitted around the broader theme of diversity and inclusion. Adapted from Marjane Satrapi’s own autobiographical graphic novels Persepolis and Persepolis 2 (originally published in November 2000), Persepolis provides a stark - and often humorous - depiction of national trauma told through Marji’s own experience as she navigates the Iranian Revolution and overthrow of the Shah regime and Pahlavi dynasty; is exiled to Austria, before returning to Iran where she marries (and divorces); and climaxes with her arrival into France. Listen as Chris and Alex discuss Persepolis’ vexed relationship to the animated documentary (and its critical categorisation); discourses of Orientalism and the depiction of intrusive Western culture; the ambivalence of animated space and the black-and-white style of the film’s comic book aesthetic; how Persepolis might be understood as an example of the “dark fantastic”; and what Paronnaud and Satrapi’s film tells us about animation’s wider ability to bear the weight of social reality,

Beetlejuice (1988) (with Jingan Young)

Mon, 06 Jul 2020 09:52:35 +0000

Episode 51 travels back to the late-1980s to look closely at Beetlejuice (Tim Burton, 1988), a film that uses stop-motion, practical effects, prosthetics, make-up and bluescreen to complete its fantasy story of netherworlds, outsiderdom and life after death. Joining Chris and Alex is special guest Jingan Young, playwright, screenwriter, journalist and academic who is the editor of ‘Foreign Goods’ (the first collection of British Chinese plays published in the UK) and a regular contributor to The Guardian and Hong Kong Free Press, who has recently completed a PhD in Film Studies at King’s College London. Listen as they discuss the tonally abrasive qualities of Tim Burton’s film and its shifts into haunted house horror; narratives of conquest, and how this connects to Beetlejuice’s take on white privilege and U.S. national identity; Michael Keaton’s performance and the figure of the trickster; the racialised use of music and questions of neo-minstrelsy; and how the film’s satirical-political edge gives the animated fantasy a bit of extra bite.

Princess Mononoke (1997) (with Rayna Denison)

Mon, 22 Jun 2020 09:43:14 +0000

For the podcast’s half century, Chris and Alex tackle a tale of rising tensions between nature and culture, gods and humans, by looking at Studio Ghibli’s animated fantasy feature Princess Mononoke (Hayao Miyazaki, 1997). Joining us in this battle of tradition and modernity is anime scholar Dr Rayna Denison, Senior Lecturer in the School of Art, Media and American Studies at UEA, and author and editor of a number of books, chapters and articles on Japanese animated cinema. These include Anime: A Critical Introduction (2015) and, more recently, an anthology of essays on Princess Mononoke (2018). Listen as they discuss the exchange between the supernatural and historical fantasy (including the film’s dialogue with jidai-geki period cinema); the framing of fantasy as a form of intrusive modernity to identify threats to the magic of nature made by industrialisation; the formal overlaps between director Hayao Miyazaki and filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu through their stylistic evocation of the environment; ferocious female representation and the depiction of gendered labour; Princess Mononoke’s relationship to traditions of narrative ‘thinning’ within fantasy storytelling; and how the film’s use of digital imagery (including its application of the ‘Toonshader’ software) can be used to understand Studio Ghibli’s ambivalent relationship to computer graphics during the 1990s.

(Bonus) Q&A with Graham Humphreys (Live from Portsmouth Bookfest)

Tue, 16 Jun 2020 09:33:11 +0000

Recorded live at the Portsmouth Bookfest on Tuesday 25th February 2020, this bonus episode of the podcast has Alex flying solo as he interviews artist and illustrator Graham Humphreys, best known for designing the iconic film posters for horror features The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1981) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984). Tune in to hear Graham reflect on his forty years of experience working in graphic illustration as one of the UK’s celebrated poster artists, and introduce his new book Hung, Drawn and Executed (2019) that collects together his artwork, paintings, drawings and colour studies.

Waterworld (1995) (with Simon Brew)

Mon, 08 Jun 2020 08:10:04 +0000

Episode 48 is a mid-1990s feast of action, water, and a drenched Kevin Costner, as Chris and Alex attempt to stay afloat for their visit to Waterworld (Kevin Reynolds, 1995), the ill-fated post-apocalyptic action adventure that has earned its place in U.S. film history seemingly for all the wrong reasons. The special guest for this instalment is Simon Brew - founder and editor at Film Stories magazine/podcast - who joins Chris and Alex to discuss the pleasures of high-concept blockbuster filmmaking in the 1990s; Waterworld’s notoriously troubled production that dominated the Hollywood trade press before, during and after its release; the industrial context shaping Reynold’s film (including its application of physical sets in an era of encroaching digital technology and computer animation); the challenges of world-building on water; VFX connoisseurship and audience reception; and how the environmentalist discourse regarding melting polar ice caps pushes the Waterworld away from disaster/science-fiction territory and into science fact.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971)

Mon, 25 May 2020 07:15:13 +0000

Episode 47 bobs along on the bottom of the beautiful briny sea, with Chris and Alex gliding far below the rolling tide and through the bubbly blue and green for this latest episode of the podcast, which this week looks at musical fantasy Bedknobs and Broomsticks (Robert Stevenson, 1971). In addition to the film’s political agenda and 1940s wartime setting, the discussion also takes in both the Hollywood cinema and Disney Feature Animation contexts (including its formal resemblances to Mary Poppins and The Jungle Book); what Bedknobs and Broomsticks’ depiction of an illusory and imaginary London means for the organisation of fantasy against its fictional reality; the integration of musical numbers and questions of utopia; national identity and the representation of Nazism; the variant relationships between animation and sport as equally stylised practices; and how Robert Stevenson’s film gestures to postwar British cinema and the “spiv” cycle. Oh, and there’s a couple of references to Bruce Forsyth too.

Aladdin (2019) (with Myles Robey)

Mon, 11 May 2020 09:57:43 +0000

For Episode 46, Chris and Alex take a magic carpet ride through the pleasures and problems of the recent musical fantasy Aladdin (Guy Ritchie, 2019). Joining them for a discussion of exactly how (and indeed if) it adapts Disney’s highly successful 1992 cel-animated musical is the film’s VFX Editor Myles Robey, whose work also includes the Harry Potter franchise and feature films Skyfall, Muppets Most Wanted, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and the recent 1917. Listen as they examine the production pipeline of a Hollywood blockbuster, including Previs, Postvis and the development of “Sketchvis” approaches in Ritchie’s remake; the application of live-action footage as a visual effect within a heavily digital feature; the logic of location shooting and the ‘grounding’ of computer graphics; Aladdin’s connections to the Classical Hollywood musical and its spectacle of staging; and the relationship between Will Smith’s star persona and screen performance.

Hercules (1997) (with Edith Hall)

Mon, 27 Apr 2020 09:39:11 +0000

Bless my soul, we are definitely on a roll with Episode 45 of the Fantasy/Animation podcast, which continues the Disney Renaissance theme in its take on Hercules (Ron Clements & John Musker, 1997). To make sense of the visual culture of antiquity manifest in Disney’s cel-animated musical fantasy and its adaptation of Greek myth, Chris and Alex are joined by Edith Hall, Professor of Classics at King’s College London and a specialist in ancient Greek literature and cultural history. Listen as they discuss the film’s reworking of Hercules, Hades and Philoctetes alongside questions of tragedy, comedy and images of slavery; its combination of celebrity culture with Greek heroism and masculinity; the politics of Disneyfication operating in Hercules as a process situated between authenticity and animated representation; the visual character designs of British political cartoonist Gerard Scarfe; and its exhibitionist use of computer graphics in its portrayal of the multi-headed Hydra.

The Emperor's New Groove (2000) (with Astrid Goldsmith)

Mon, 13 Apr 2020 09:44:17 +0000

Voted for by the Fantasy/Animation community on social media as the inaugural #feelgoodfananim, Episode 44 of the podcast looks at the Walt Disney studio’s cel-animated feature The Emperor's New Groove (Mark Dindal, 2000). Chris and Alex are also joined by their very first returning guest, award-winning animator Astrid Goldsmith (a.k.a. Mock Duck Studios), to discuss the troubled production history, buddy narrative and anarchic comic structures of a film that marked a seismic formal shift in the familiar Disney style. Or did it? Listen as the trio make their way through The Emperor’s New Groove’s adherence to the Disney formula and its ambiguous relationship to the Disney Renaissance, while remembering the landscape of Hollywood animation in the 1990s where the film began life as “The Kingdom of the Sun”. Other topics include the fantasy of The Emperor’s New Groove’s strongly self-reflexive register and complex use of voiceover narration; character design, anthropomorphism and talking llamas; and what happens if you pull the wrong lever.

To all our listeners, stay safe and remember, no touchy!

Dungeons & Dragons (1983-1985)

Mon, 30 Mar 2020 10:42:38 +0000

Take a trip on a magic theme park ride with a Ranger, Barbarian, Magician, Thief, Cavalier and Acrobat as Chris and Alex turn once again to the small screen, this time to discuss Dungeons & Dragons (Kevin Paul Coates, Dennis Marks & Takashi, 1983-1985). Premiering on American television with CBS and animated by Japanese company Toei Animation, Dungeons & Dragons is a high fantasy cel-animated series that follows the tribulations of six young children as they strive to escape from a mythical realm. They are guided on their quest by the Dungeon Master, who allocates each of the characters a key role in the battle against evil forces, embodied by the wizard Venger and a five-headed dragon Tiamat. Topics include the structures of serial narration and worldbuilding, and how these elements map onto the real-world Dungeons & Dragons game as a set of props; the issue of ‘play’ both inside and outside the programme as part of its broader ludic impulse; the series’ ‘limited’ cartoonal style (including traditions in Syncro-Vox voice production); and the pleasure in fantasy storytelling of simply going along for the ride.

Wizards (1977) (Live @ Cinema Museum)

Mon, 16 Mar 2020 17:04:12 +0000

Join Chris and Alex for a discussion of the animated high fantasy epic Wizards (Ralph Bakshi, 1977), recorded in front of a live audience at the Cinema Museum in Kennington, London in January 2020. Conceived by animator Ralph Bakshi, Wizards is a counter-cultural marvel of the 1970s, one that blends a series of innovative animation styles with a story designed to stick two fingers up at the man with its heady mixture of psychedelia, allegory and fantasy. Listen as the conversation turns to the film’s relationship to politics and propaganda through its mixed media aesthetic and formal style; how Wizards mobilises its adult themes, socio-realism and gender politics, and how this appealed to a generation fed on a diet of Disney cartoons; the reflexivity of a narrative that pits forces of technology against the forces of magic; and how the fantasy of its creative illustrations contributes to the status of Wizards as an often overlooked masterpiece from the history of U.S. animation.

Brazil (1985) (with Hope Dickson Leach)

Mon, 02 Mar 2020 10:48:32 +0000

Events take a turn for the dystopian in Episode 41, as Chris and Alex venture to Brazil (1985), Terry Gilliam’s nightmarish and absurdist satire of bureaucratic totalitarianism and governmental red tape. They are joined for this latest instalment by very special guest, filmmaker Hope Dickson Leach, whose work includes drama The Levelling (2015), which premiered internationally at the Toronto International Film Festival, and a number of successful short films such as Morning Echo (2010) and Silly Girl (2016). In October 2016, Hope was awarded the inaugural IWC Filmmaker Bursary Award in Association with the BFI at the London Film Festival, was named a BAFTA Breakthrough Brit in October 2017, and a month later won a Scottish BAFTA for Best Screenwriter for The Levelling. Listen as they discuss distraction, delusion, dreaming and desire; the film’s technological commentary on cinema that gestures to the medium’s relationship to fiction; Brazil’s caricaturist logic that contributes to its surrealist horror; and how Gilliam creates the frustration of a vacuous fantasy for protagonist Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) that - thanks to the film’s uncooperative fictional society - can never be enacted.

BoJack Horseman (2014-2020)

Mon, 17 Feb 2020 07:09:39 +0000

With its last episode recently broadcast on Netflix, the web television series BoJack Horseman (Raphael Bob-Waksberg, 2014-2020) provides a timely and topical subject for Episode 40. Join Chris and Alex as they take a canter through the programme’s status as ‘adult animation’ (and what this term might mean as a label); the dark truth of its themes of narcissism, depression and self-destructive behaviour; how its shifting chronology and narrative ellipses places BoJack Horseman within contemporary Hollywood ‘puzzle film’ storytelling traditions; its complex anthropomorphic register and cartoonal forms of representation; and how BoJack Horseman’s ensemble cast navigates modes of cross-species sexuality at the same time as it collectively disavows any presence of a concrete moral centre.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001) (with Frances Pheasant-Kelly)

Mon, 03 Feb 2020 13:55:48 +0000

For Episode 39, Chris and Alex venture for the first time to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry as they take on another highly popular fantasy film franchise by discussing Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Chris Columbus, 2001). They are joined by Dr Frances Pheasant-Kelly, who is a Reader in Screen Studies at the University of Wolverhampton, as well as the author of numerous publications on fantasy cinema including Fantasy Film Post-9/11 (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) that traces fantasy’s cathartic potential as a vehicle to work through traumatic memories in a post-9/11 climate. Together they examine the historical framing of the Harry Potter series, and in particular 2001 as a crucial turning point for fantasy cinema; questions of interpretation, adaptation and identification in the Harry Potter universe; the framing role of intrusive magic and the lack of a stable equilibrium; the pleasure of unfixed and sentient space; the collision between ordinary artefacts and CGI; the status of Harry Potter as an abject text rooted in the Dark Arts; and how the fantasy film franchise - like the characters as a whole - often battles against its own magical components.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) (with Caroline Ruddell - Live @ Cinema Museum)

Mon, 20 Jan 2020 13:01:24 +0000

Episode 38 comes to you live from the Cinema Museum in Kennington, London, as Chris and Alex take to the stage to discuss the craft and creativity of silhouette animated feature The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Lotte Reiniger, 1926). Recorded in front of a lively audience of animated fantasy fans back in October 2019, the conversation featured very special guest Dr Caroline Ruddell (Programme Lead and Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at Brunel University London), an expert on Reiniger who has published work on the filmmaker in Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres (2018), and the recent anthology The Crafty Animator: Handmade, Craft-based Animation and Cultural Value (2019), of which she is also the collection’s co-editor. Listen as they trace The Adventures of Prince Achmed through a multitude of critical and cultural contexts, including Reiniger’s signature style of 2D cutout animation; gendered discourses of craft and the politics of the handmade; Reiniger’s own ‘forgotten’ status and position at the margins of animated film history; the film’s production during a specific historical moment of upheaval in 1920s Weimar Germany; and how The Adventures of Prince Achmed sits within the traditions of abstract cinema, avant-garde animation, German Expressionism and fantasy storytelling.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) (with Becca Harrison)

Mon, 06 Jan 2020 10:54:23 +0000

Beginning the New Year in a galaxy far, far away, Chris and Alex turn for the first time to the seminal Star Wars franchise for their latest episode, this time revisiting the first in the latest sequel trilogy Star Wars: The Force Awakens (J.J. Abrams, 2015). Joining them for this journey through this epic space fantasy is Dr Becca Harrison, Lecturer in the Theatre, Film & Television Studies department at the University of Glasgow. Becca has written extensively on Star Wars for both the BFI and The Conversation, and is also the author of two upcoming books on the Star Wars franchise. Listen as they make their way through topics including the shape of academic scholarship on the film series and the challenges of critically engaging with the Star Wars universe; the film’s place within the industrial logic of the franchise feature; how recalls, callbacks and looping within Star Wars: The Force Awakens can be understood as examples of narrative ‘recursion’; inclusive representation and the film’s complex racial and gender politics; the authorship of George Lucas; and mythologies of female-oriented power that exist both within and beyond the film.

The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) (with Meredith Braun)

Mon, 16 Dec 2019 11:23:24 +0000

The festive season has well and truly arrived, so join Chris and Alex as they get into the Christmas spirit by discussing Yuletide classic The Muppet Christmas Carol (Brian Henson, 1992). Helping to roast the fantasy chestnuts on the animated open fire is actress, singer and West End performer Meredith Braun, who starred alongside Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, The Great Gonzo, Rizzo the Rat and Fozzie Bear in The Muppet Christmas Carol as Ebenezer Scrooge’s (Michael Caine) neglected fiancée Belle. Together they discuss the film’s historical place within 1980’s fantasy and puppet cinema; wider definitions of puppetry as an animated art form; the interplay between musicality and sincerity; and how The Muppet Christmas Carol negotiates multiple levels of Muppet narration and performance. Meredith also reveals the challenges and pleasures of acting ‘live’ with Jim Henson’s iconic puppets, as well as a few behind-the-scenes treats about what it takes to make a Muppet movie. Merry Christmas one and all!

Mary Poppins Returns (2018) (with Christian Kaestner and Frederikke Glick)

Mon, 02 Dec 2019 12:45:05 +0000

Trip a little light fantastic with Episode 35 of the Fantasy/Animation podcast, which marks Chris and Alex’ very own return to Cherry Tree Lane as they visit musical sequel Mary Poppins Returns (Rob Marshall, 2018). Joining them underneath the lovely London sky are Visual Effects Supervisor Christian Kaestner and Compositing Supervisor Frederikke Glick, who both worked as part of VFX studio Framestore’s contribution to the film. Topics for discussion include the construction a fictional London that owes a debt to design of the 1964 original; the ‘keying’ or extracting of bluescreen and greenscreen images as part of the compositing process; the production of the Royal Doulton Music Hall sequence; lighting effects and practical sets in the film’s climactic Big Ben set piece; and the pleasurable fantasy of hybridity when integrating (yet keeping separate) live-action and cel-animated components. Off we go!

Ex Machina (2014) (with Andrew Whitehurst)

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 13:57:04 +0000

Episode 34 sees Chris and Alex focusing on the pleasures, politics and posthumanism of science-fiction parable Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014). To help untangle the circuitry of Garland’s film, they are joined by Academy Award-winning visual effects artist Andrew Whitehurst. Andrew is currently the Creative Director and VFX Supervisor at the Double Negative (DNEG) studio in London, with credits that include Troy (Oliver Stone, 2004), Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (David Yates, 2007), Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2010), Skyfall (Sam Mendes, 2012), Paddington (Paul King, 2014), and Annihilation (Alex Garland, 2018). In this latest episode, Andrew talks about his role as Visual Effects Supervisor on Ex Machina, a film for which he received an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects in 2015. Listen as they discuss the relationship between visual effects and production design; the film’s digital construction of bodies (via facial shapes, skin simulations, and data sets for physiognomies); questions of hybrid performance in the animation (movement, walking, gesturing) of humanoid robot Ava; the erotics of technology; and what Ex Machina has to say about the broader ethics and morality of creativity.

The Valley of Gwangi (1969) (with Astrid Goldsmith)

Mon, 04 Nov 2019 16:05:38 +0000

Part-Western, part-dinosaur epic, The Valley of Gwangi (Jim O’Connolly, 1969) is a fantasy that combines the icons and images of the frontier myth together with stop-motion animation directed by Ray Harryhausen, a project that he had himself inherited from his mentor Willis O'Brien. Set in Mexico at the turn of the 20th century, and with a plot that involves the capture of a living Allosaurus by a gang of cowboys, The Valley of Gwangi stands as Harryhausen’s final ‘dinosaur film’, one whose effects imagery is the fullest expression of his unique handling of stop-motion creatures. Joining Chris and Alex for episode 33, and to discuss the power of The Valley of Gwangi’s stop-motion puppetry, is award-winning animator Astrid Goldsmith (a.k.a. Mock Duck Studios). Topics include the film’s fantastical treatment (and manipulation) of generic conventions; the organisation of interconnected spatial ‘arenas’ that structure the Western Fantasy narrative; and the interplay of live-action and animated elements during the film’s celebrated ‘rope battle’ between man and dinosaur.

Corpse Bride (2005) (with Emily Mantell)

Mon, 21 Oct 2019 13:27:12 +0000

Halloween is well and truly upon us for Episode 32, with Chris and Alex getting to grips with spooky stop-motion feature Corpse Bride (Tim Burton, 2005). Joining them is animator Emily Mantell, Storyboard Staff Assistant on the film and currently Head of Animation at University of Wolverhampton. Expect proceedings to take a turn for the ghoulish - if not become a little ‘topsy turvy’ - as they discuss the art and labour of storyboarding within animated feature-film production; vocal performances and animating to the voicetrack; the role of ambivalent feminine unruliness embodied in the eponymous corpse bride; themes of outsiderdom and the grotesque; and the broader creative messiness of stop-motion.

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! (2012) (with Richard Haynes)

Mon, 07 Oct 2019 09:03:26 +0000

For Episode 31, Chris and Alex are joined on their swashbuckling adventure by stop-motion animator Richard Haynes (Arts University Bournemouth) to discuss his work on Aardman Animations’ The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! (Peter Lord, 2012), as well as a few other animated feature films and television series along the way. Topics include how The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! differs from the traditional shape of Aardman’s exaggerated and lavish fantasy worlds; the production pipeline of stop-motion feature films; the Britishness of the clean and crisp homemade style of the Aardman studio; and the philosophies of performance with (and around) the ‘animated’ character of the camera.

This episode was edited by Gabriel Hunt.

Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986) (with Robert Maslen)

Mon, 23 Sep 2019 11:34:04 +0000

Episode 30 marks a return to the work of both Studio Ghibli and filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, as Chris and Alex build on their discussion of My Neighbor Totoro with a journey to Laputa: Castle in the Sky (Hayao Miyazaki, 1986), an animated fantasy that follows the magical Sheeta and companion Pazu from a mining community of Japan up into the skies thanks to the floating powers of a mythical crystal. To discuss this early Ghibli feature, they are joined by Dr Robert Maslen, Senior Lecturer in English Literature (University of Glasgow) and founder of the MLitt English Literature: Fantasy, the first graduate programme in the world specifically dedicated to the study of fantasy and the fantastic. Topics include the film’s many imaginative acts of creativity and invention that support its steampunk aesthetic; its articulation of the treasures of learning, knowledge and dreams; Laputa’s links to both the speculative fiction of author Ursula K. Le Guin and the spectre of Japan’s industrialisation; and its multiple levels of space (the dynamism of the air, the land that conveys the work of living, and the underground mines that spark Sheeta and Pazu’s flying adventure).

Mr. Bug Goes to Town (1941)

Mon, 09 Sep 2019 10:47:34 +0000

Chris and Alex return to the work of the Fleischer studios for Episode 29, following up their discussion of Gulliver’s Travels with Mr. Bug Goes to Town (Dave Fleischer, 1941), similar in concept and design to its predecessor and loosely inspired by Belgian poet Maurice Maeterlinck's book The Life of the Bee (1901). The second (and final) cel-animated feature film produced by the Fleischers, Mr. Bug Goes to Town negotiates the conflict between an insect community and the threatening human world, all framed by an environmental narrative of modernisation, redevelopment and urban sprawl. Expect turns to the layered organisation of fantasy spaces and geographies of diverse scales; the film's connection to traditions of ecocritical cinema and contemporary computer-animated filmmaking; the depiction of rapid urbanisation and the metonymic forces of capitalism (and the role of cigars!); and animation’s representational history of blackface and racial coding.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) (with Stuart Messinger)

Mon, 26 Aug 2019 02:40:57 +0000

Episode 28 sees Chris and Alex joined in their world of pure imagination by Stuart Messinger, VFX Coordinator on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Tim Burton, 2005), to discuss the part-musical, full-fantasy and live-action/CGI adaptation of Roald Dahl’s popular story. Topics include Stuart’s work on the film in digital visual effects at the Moving Picture Company; the collaborative nature of multi-studio effects production on feature-length blockbusters; the practical and artistic challenges of animating live-action plates; the combination of 2D (matte) and 3D (sub-surface scattering) technologies; and the integration of realist aesthetics together with the surrealistic imagery and fantastic stylisations conjured by Dahl’s original 1964 story.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) (with Simran Hans)

Mon, 12 Aug 2019 08:13:15 +0000

Episode 27 has Chris and Alex swinging their way into a superhero-filled multiverse to discuss the narrative strategies and visual dynamism of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman, 2018), the highly-successful computer-animated feature film from Sony Pictures Animation. Caught in the fantasy/animation web for this latest instalment is Simran Hans, film critic and culture writer whose work has appeared in The Observer, The Guardian, Buzzfeed, Dazed, The Fader and Sight & Sound. Topics for discussion include Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’s unique formal design and flattened style that reinvigorates computer-animated film aesthetics; superheroes, space and moments of stasis; forking path narratives and the fantasy of twice-told tales; and the role of family relationships as the film’s main structuring principle.

King Kong (2005) (with Barry J.C. Purves)

Mon, 29 Jul 2019 10:41:34 +0000

For Episode 26, Chris and Alex are joined by special guest Barry J.C. Purves, renowned stop-motion animator, director and screenwriter who is also the author of Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance (Burlington, MA: Focal Press, 2007). The focus of their conversation is the monster epic King Kong (Peter Jackson, 2005), the digital VFX-heavy remake of the original 1933 film of the same name, and a film upon which Barry himself worked as part of the animation department. Topics for discussion include the labour involved in the interaction between live-action and digital elements; the economy of King Kong’s symmetrical narrative structure; and the power of stop-motion’s objects as they become storytelling agents, as well as turns to William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and Greek tragedy along the way.

The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) (with Shaun Gunner)

Mon, 15 Jul 2019 07:20:47 +0000

Venturing to Middle-earth, and ably accompanied on this opening stage of their podcasting quest by Shaun Gunner, chairman of the Tolkien Society, Chris and Alex discuss the first of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings adaptations, The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). Journeying from the Shire on the way to Mount Doom, episode 25 debates Tolkien’s ability to craft believable genealogies and histories in his high fantasy realms; cartography, map-making and the geographical consistency of fictional worlds; and the film’s relationship to post-millennial Hollywood franchises via technological developments in digital visual effects.

Waltz with Bashir (2008) (with Bella Honess Roe)

Mon, 01 Jul 2019 11:46:14 +0000

Episode 24 takes a walk through the terrain of animated documentary, with Chris and Alex joined by Dr Bella Honess Roe (Senior Lecturer and Programme Director for Film Studies, University of Surrey) to discuss the relationship between truth, authenticity and animation in Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008). Documenting his own personalised account of the Lebanon war, Folman’s feature film provides a useful test case to think about how fantasy and animation might be applied within a non-fiction context. Topics for discussion include the ability of animation to represent trauma (including its depiction of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre); the veracity of animating dreams and memory; and the medium’s veiling properties as a mode of historical or personal distraction. The result is both the framing of Waltz with Bashir as a crucible moment that reignited scholarly interest in animated documentary, and a reflection on how Folman’s film crystallises memory as itself as a combination of the factual and fantastical.

Gulliver’s Travels (1939)

Mon, 17 Jun 2019 08:25:04 +0000

In Episode 23, Chris and Alex turn to the work of the Fleischer studios, looking at the second North American animated feature film Gulliver’s Travels (Dave Fleischer, 1939), an adaptation of Jonathan Swift’s seminal work of fantasy fiction. As something of a follow-up to Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937), the film raises questions about animation’s creative ability to render perspectival shifts and ‘scaled’ imagery of ‘big’ versus ‘small’; world-building and the intrusive fantasy of human figuration; and the surrealist design of the Flesichers’ characters offset against Disney’s more ‘hyperrealist’ aesthetic. The duo suggest that Gulliver’s Travels stands as an imaginative development of animation in the U.S. context, with a playful visual register in the presentation of Lilliput that uses the drama of shifting dimensionality to speak to the emotional function of fantasy spaces for children.

Pogles’ Wood (1965-1967) (with Simon Costin)

Mon, 03 Jun 2019 09:30:03 +0000

Episode 22 marks a return to the small screen, as Chris and Alex discuss the BBC television stop-motion animated series Pogles’ Wood (Oliver Postgate, 1965-1967), produced by renowned British production company Smallfilms. The Fantasy/Animation team are joined for this latest installment by Simon Costin, artist, set designer and director of the Museum of British Folklore, a project devoted to celebrating and researching the UK's rich folkloric cultural heritage. Weaving their way through this staple of sixties British television, the trio examine stop-motion techniques and the craft of puppetry, the integration of magic and wonder into idyllic pastoral visions, and broader traditions of British fairies, folktales, and fantasy.

Aladdin (1992) (with Steve Henderson)

Mon, 20 May 2019 05:54:42 +0000

In Episode 21, Chris and Alex are joined by Steve Henderson - Editor of the Skwigly Online Animation Magazine and Director of the Manchester Animation Festival, and Senior Lecturer in Animation at the Manchester School of Art - to discuss the Disney animated musical Aladdin (Ron Clements & John Musker, 1992). With the live-action/CG remake soon to hit cinema screens, this episode provides the perfect opportunity to revisit what has made this popular cel-animated fantasy so enduring among audiences. Expect all your wishes granted as the conversation turns to reflexivity and narration, the Disney Renaissance, star voices and vocal artistry, the film’s use of digital visual effects, Orientalist discourse and the representation of ‘Otherness,’ and even the Gulf War. You’ve never had a friend like this podcast!

Peppa Pig (2004-) (with Richard Dyer)

Mon, 06 May 2019 10:15:28 +0000

Episode 20 welcomes Professor Richard Dyer (Emeritus Professor of Film Studies, King's College London and Professorial Fellow in Film Studies, University of St Andrews) to the podcast, joining Chris and Alex to discuss the popular British animated television series Peppa Pig (Neville Astley & Mark Baker, 2014-). Comparing the programme to the work of modernist painter Henri Matisse and filmmaker Béla Tarr, they examine questions of episodic seriality, simplicity and realism in character design, and the politics of niceness, as well as the idea of children as a social construct via the inscription of ‘the child’ into the animated media text. We also talk about Daddy Pig’s big tummy and the joy of jumping in muddy puddles.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)

Mon, 15 Apr 2019 12:27:37 +0000

For Episode 19, Chris and Alex revisit the Walt Disney Studio and its adaptation of Victor Hugo’s nineteenth-century Gothic novel for its cel-animated musical The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise, 1996). A melodrama set against the backdrop of medieval Paris, the film reworks its classic source material and gives it the Mouse House treatment, bringing Hugo’s mature literary Gothicism together with Disney’s ‘cartoon’ principles. Discussion ranges from the film’s evocation of the ‘topsy turvy’ carnivalesque to specific elements of its character design, as Chris and Alex consider how Hunchback’s broader thematic concerns of suppressed sexuality and obsession, damnation, and grotesque horror reconfigure Disney’s (fairy) tale ‘as old as time’ formula.

Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2019 (Part 2)

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 06:56:38 +0000

Episode 18 comes to you live from the 2019 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, held in Seattle, Washington, USA! Hear Chris and Alex report on the ins and outs of attending the largest academic media conference in the world, providing you with insights into the various panels, delegates and procedures of the event through a series of interviews with the best and brightest from the worlds of fantasy and animation. Part 2 continues the discussion with Dr Tim Jones (Robert Morris University), Christina Kowalski and Suzanne Richardson (Routledge), Professor Eric Smoodin (University of California, Davis) and Dr Leon Gurevitch (Victoria University of Wellington).

Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2019 (Part 1)

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 06:53:17 +0000

Episode 17 comes to you live from the 2019 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, held in Seattle, Washington, USA! Hear Chris and Alex report on the ins and outs of attending the largest academic media conference in the world, providing you with insights into the various panels, delegates and procedures of the event through a series of interviews with the best and brightest from the worlds of fantasy and animation. Part 1 includes interviews with Professor Kirsten Moana Thompson (Seattle University), Professor Susan Ohmer (University of Notre Dame), Dr Cristina Formenti (University of Milan) and Dr Murray Leeder (University of Calgary), as well as highlights from Chris and Alex's own panel at the conference titled “Animation, Technology and Identity”, also featuring as speakers Cristina and Dr Mihaela Mihailova (University of Michigan).

Coco (2017) (with Eavesdropping at the Movies)

Mon, 18 Mar 2019 14:36:00 +0000

Episode 16 heralds the first Fantasy/Animation crossover instalment, with Chris and Alex joined by Michael Glass and José Arroyo, also known as the Eavesdropping at the Movies team. The focus of their discussions is Pixar’s feature film Coco (Lee Unkrich, 2017), a computer-animated fantasy inspired by the Mexican ‘Día de los Muertos’ (Day of the Dead) holiday. Seizing their moment, the foursome touch on issues of cultural specificity, authenticity and appropriation; its expressive use of luminescent lighting to illuminate its styles and details; and the themes of grief, ancestry, history and heritage that support the structures of a film whose two interconnected worlds of life and death are powered by the vitality of memory.

Tron (1982)

Mon, 04 Mar 2019 12:34:10 +0000

In episode 15, Chris and Alex log on to Tron (Steven Lisberger, 1982), a watershed moment in the history of computer animation and one that taps into the early electronic spectacle of digital visual effects within a Hollywood context. Representing the wonder of - if not the cultural anxieties surrounding - the newness of computers and virtual reality (as well as the growing popularity of videogames), the film reframes cyberspace as a complex three-dimensional fantasy world. Tron invites spectators into the labyrinthine geographies of hardware and software, asking us to marvel at a series of magical mainframes but also to speculate over what digital technology might look like, and how it could be represented onscreen.

(Bonus) Live from London Anime & Gaming Con 2019

Tue, 26 Feb 2019 13:27:55 +0000

Recorded live at the London Anime & Gaming Con during a special “Fantasy in Anime” panel on Saturday 16th February 2019, this bonus episode of the podcast has Chris and Alex joined by an audience of passionate Japanese anime fans brought together through the Animeleague community. Tune in to hear an energetic discussion of anime authorship, the role of fantasy and imagination in cartoon narratives, and the creative compatibility between characterisation and design.

Animal Farm (1954) (with Jez Stewart)

Mon, 18 Feb 2019 10:20:00 +0000

Far from being unlucky, Episode 13 offers listeners a bumper line-up as Chris and Alex are joined by special guest Jez Stewart - curator at the BFI National Archive and expert on British animation history - to talk about Animal Farm (John Halas & Joy Batchelor, 1954). Taking on this celebrated animated adaptation of George Orwell’s popular novel, they discuss the production history of Britain’s first animated feature film and the vital role of archival material, alongside broader questions of cartoonal allegory via the narrative’s heavy politicised visions of anthropomorphic left-wing uprising.

Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)

Mon, 04 Feb 2019 10:47:00 +0000

Episode 12 takes Chris and Alex to feudal Japan as they get to grips with LAIKA studio’s stop-motion feature film, Kubo and the Two Strings (Travis Knight, 2016). The thorny question of animation’s inherently self-reflexive identity and status as anti-illusionist art; the magic of fantasy storytelling and spectatorship; and the medium specificity of object animation provide just some of the topics involved in their own critical battle with this popular fantasy/animated samurai epic.

Disenchantment (2018-)

Mon, 21 Jan 2019 14:12:00 +0000

Episode 11 marks Chris and Alex’s first venture to the small screen, offering a rundown of Matt Groening’s recent television series Disenchantment, which first premiered in August 2018 on Netflix. A fantasy sitcom visualised through Groening’s signature animated style (including the requisite character overbite), Disenchantment parodies the archetypes familiar from fantasy mythology. From hard-drinking princesses to sweet-toothed elves, its playful swipes at fantasy storytelling feed into an overriding irreverence that fully exploits animation’s subversive potential, as Groening’s series sets about both constructing and deconstructing the terms of its own animated world.

Moana (2016) (with Catherine Wheatley)

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 13:05:00 +0000

For Episode 10, Chris and Alex travel to Polynesia to tackle their first computer-animated film - Walt Disney’s all-singin’, all-dancin’ and all-digital musical Moana (Ron Clements & John Musker, 2016). They are joined by Dr Catherine Wheatley (Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London) to discuss the film’s gender politics and feminist register; its beautiful Samoan and Tokelauan-language soundtrack (with songs written and composed by Opetaia Foa’i, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Mark Mancina); its ambivalent status as typical Disney fare; and the ‘tiny details’ that comprise its message of diplomacy and female empowerment.

Mary Poppins (1964)

Mon, 10 Dec 2018 10:41:00 +0000

The ninth episode takes Chris and Alex up to the rooftops of London as they tackle Walt Disney’s fantasy musical Mary Poppins (Robert Stevenson, 1964). This song-and-dance celebration follows the adventures of Mary, Bert and the Banks children, including their famous journey into the wonderful world of animation. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!

Black Panther (2018)

Mon, 19 Nov 2018 08:21:00 +0000

Episode 8 sees Chris and Alex discuss the eighteenth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018). As the first Marvel film to feature a predominantly black cast, Black Panther offers the opportunity to situate fantasy and animation both within the codes of the popular superhero genre, and alongside broader critical questions of black subjectivity in contemporary cinema. Chris and Alex therefore move through an examination of its spectacular use of digital animation in its portrayal of Third World-but-secretly-techno-heavy Wakanda; the fruitful overlap between science-fiction and fantasy cinema as categories of classification; and post-Trump Afrofuturist identity politics. Oh, and they talk a bit about CGI rhinos too.

The Triplets of Belleville (2003)

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 09:53:00 +0000

In Episode 7, Chris and Alex encounter ferocious bicycle wheels, music hall stars fishing for frogs using dynamite, and the French mafia in their discussion of the frankly bizarre animated fantasy The Triplets of Belleville (Sylvain Chomet, 2003). With minimal dialogue and an expressionist, borderline surreal visual style, Chomet’s film - released in the UK as Belleville Rendezvous - is erratic, eccentric, and downright charming. It offers spectators a journey through early-1900’s France via some ornate painterly backdrops, and an army of grotesque characters (in the mould of cartoonist Gerard Scarfe) that populate this pedal-powered modern metropolis.

The Greatest Showman (2017) (with Martha Shearer)

Mon, 15 Oct 2018 07:24:00 +0000

For Episode 6, Chris and Alex are joined by Dr Martha Shearer (King’s College London), expert on the Hollywood musical and author of the recent monograph New York City and the Hollywood Musical: Dancing in the Streets (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Together, they discuss The Greatest Showman (Michael Gracey, 2017) in relation to its status as a biopic, as a fantasy of New York, and its marked use of computer graphics that bring this all-singing, all-dancing American musical to life.

Yellow Submarine (1968)

Mon, 01 Oct 2018 08:57:00 +0000

Episode 5 takes Chris and Alex on a magical mystery tour through psychedelic British animation of the 1960s thanks to Yellow Submarine (George Dunning, 1968). This animated fantasy musical mixes playful caricatures of John, Paul, George, and Ringo with a colourful, abstract and, at times, surreal visual style from art director Heinz Edelmann. Drawing from both classical, folk and pop music, sixties rebellious youth culture, and The Beatles’ own rock and roll repertoire, Yellow Submarine presented the possibilities for animation as a significant and serious art form.

My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

Mon, 17 Sep 2018 09:20:00 +0000

In Episode 4, Chris and Alex discuss the work of Studio Ghibli and their feature-film My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988). Released as part of a double-bill with Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata, 1988), My Neighbor Totoro is a colourful animated fantasy that takes place in rural Japan inhabited by mysterious dustbunnies and the eponymous Totoro creature (who has since become Ghibli’s own official mascot).

Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

Mon, 03 Sep 2018 07:53:00 +0000

The third episode sees Chris and Alex reflecting on Jason and the Argonauts (Don Chaffey, 1963), which showcases the pioneering work of stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen. Based on classical Greek mythology, the film's famed 'skeleton warrior' battle sequence designed by Harryhausen fully encapsulates the possibilities of animated special effects for fantasy cinema.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

Mon, 20 Aug 2018 08:10:00 +0000

For this second episode, Chris and Alex discuss Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, 1988), a part-live-action/part-animation/part-fantasy film that functioned as an important milestone in marking the return of animation's commercial and critical appeal in Hollywood.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

Fri, 03 Aug 2018 13:33:00 +0000

In this inaugural Fantasy/Animation podcast, Chris and Alex discuss Walt Disney’s first feature-length animated cartoon Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937).