Episodios
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Another trip through the Fantasy/Animation archive lands on this very early episode from February 2019 that focuses on Studio Ghibliâs 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 âclickedâ 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 Feedspotâs 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
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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 Machinaâs technologised construction of bodies and the hybrid performance of humanoid robot Ava.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspotâs 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
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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 Reinigerâs signature style of 2D cutout animation and gendered discourses of craft and the politics of the handmade, alongside the filmâs production during a specific historical moment of upheaval in 1920s Weimar Germany.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspotâs 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
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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 filmâs 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 filmâs 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 Feedspotâs 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
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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/Animationâs first look at the Disney Renaissance, as well as featuring turns to the star voice, digital VFX imagery, and animationâs own history of Orientalist imaginaries.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspotâs 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
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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 BĂ©la Tarr to the realism of Peppa Pigâs 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 Feedspotâs 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
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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 âArabian fantasyâ 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 âOne Thousand and One Nightsâ collection of Middle Eastern folktales and its reproduction of Orientialist imaginaries and iconographies. Topics include The Thief of Bagdadâs sustained fascination with the Orient and storytelling interest in the exoticism and erotics of magic and spells; fantasy and animationâs 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 Powellâs film on the characters and setting of Walt Disneyâs 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 Feedspotâs 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
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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-ValĂ©ry 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 âgainsâ of earlier feminist movements; the culture and politics of postfeminismâs 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 Feedspotâs 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
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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 Disneyâs Third Golden Age of animated features after the âClassicâ 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-ValĂ©ry Montpellier 3, France who has previously taught at the Bristol School of Animation and Swansea University. Eveâs 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 âmultifaceted 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.â Topics for this episode include Frozenâs negotiation of the longstanding Disney formula and how such a blueprint impacts the filmâs identity as both âclassicâ and âtypicalâ Disney; gender, genre, and the portrayal of girl power and sisterhood through the Anna/Elsa relationship; recent turns towards Baroque aesthetics in Disneyâs 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 Feedspotâs 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
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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 âcaught betweenâ the normative.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspotâs 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
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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 Taskerâs research has explored the convergence of feminism and gender cultures through popular media. Topics for this instalment include Terminator 2: Judgment Dayâs presentation of the female body and 1980s Hollywood âmuscularityâ; technofuturist vs. simulationist registers of VFX imagery in Hollywoodâs âwonder yearsâ; the metamorphosing T-1000 and the formal presentation of computer-generated imagery; the place of James Cameronâs 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 Feedspotâs 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
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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 âin-cameraâ labour from motion-capture to machine learning; categorisations of âspecialâ and âvisualâ 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 Feedspotâs 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
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Episode 139 marks something of a first as Chris and Alex play âThe Fantasy Adventure Board Gameâ 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 Arnesonâs fame upon the 1980s resurgence of fantasy cinema; Dungeons and Dragons as an enduring transmedia property and the possibilities of world-building; and how âmetagamingâ in Dungeons and Dragons offers a way to think about the playerâs complex relationship to character and embodiment.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspotâs 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
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Artâs relationship to the auratic is the focus of Footnote #47, which engages cinemaâs historical relation to âauraâ via the foundational work of Walter Benjamin who argued for technologyâs âwitheringâ of artâs uniqueness of space and time thanks to the potential for the creation of a âplurality of copiesâ that shift artâs âunique existence.â Topics include photographyâs reproducibility that creates ontological tensions between the âoriginalâ and âcopy'; 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 Feedspotâs 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
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The Fantasy/Animation podcast finally tackles the seminal Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995), with Episode 138 looking at Pixarâs computer-animated feature and the film that transformed animation in Hollywood - and beyond - into a digital medium. Joining Chris and Alex to examine Toy Storyâs 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 Storyâs 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 filmâs construction of worldhood and the narrative journey of the toys; the plasticity of character and the miniaturisation (and magnification) of texture; and how Toy Storyâs sense of âplayâ 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 Feedspotâs 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
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Footnote #46 responds to a listener email by focusing on the speeds and spaces of the âmultiplanarâ image, a term theorised in Thomas Lamarreâs 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 Lamarreâs work on multiplanarity via the authorâs 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 âhyper-three-dimensionalityâ of contemporary computer-animated film; the perspectives and âscalar relationsâ afforded by developments in the multi-plane camera; and how the defining animetism of anime âfocuses less on realism of depth than on realism of movement.â
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspotâs 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
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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 Fordâs star image and the representation of aged physicality onscreen; digital de-aging and the computerised replication of celebrity; âlegacyâ cinema and the starâs role in supporting the continuity of a franchise; the impact of the filmâs thematic âfissures in timeâ 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 Feedspotâs 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
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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 Disneyâs own internal history; the contribution made to the studioâs animated features by the repeating presence of key creative personnel; the influential role of Broadway upon Disneyâs corporate synergy and the formal interplay between a âBroadway styleâ and 1980s and 1990s cartoon aesthetics; and the cultural politics of the Renaissance as a phase of Hollywood animation that can be mapped onto Disneyâs own multicultural negotiation of diversity and inclusion.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspotâs 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
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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 Disneyâs Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise, 1991) and both the industrial and stylistic stakes of the filmâs adoption of a Broadway style of musical arrangement. Topics include the filmâs place within the Disney Renaissance period of the studioâs 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 Disneyâs production strategies during the 1980s and 1990s; song, dance, and the filmâs casting of established Broadway voices; the application of emergent computer animation and digital VFX to the presentation and realisation of the filmâs musical numbers; and how Beauty and the Beast adapts both the original fairytale and the later fantasy La Belle et la BĂȘte (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 Feedspotâs 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
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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 Barberaâs influential and prolific production company that strengthened the cartoonâs move from theatrical exhibition to television. Topics include the studioâs 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 childrenâs 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 Feedspotâs 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
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