Fantasy/Animation

To coincide with the recent big-screen release of The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan, 2026), the final Fantasy/Animation archive episode of the summer looks back the filmmaker’s science-fiction blockbuster Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010) that featured as its special guest Todd McGowan, Professor of Film Studies in the Film and Television Studies Department at the University of Vermont. Todd is the 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), and joined Chris and Alex back in 2021 to discuss the fantasy of dreams, Inception’s rhizomatic, mazelike narrative structure, and Nolan’s commitment to puzzling plotlines, the reconstitution of beginnings, and practical effects imagery. **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**

The next archive episode of the Fantasy/Animation podcast goes all the way back to Episode 24 and the discussion of the celebrated animated documentary Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008) which featured a conversation with special guest Dr Bella Honess Roe, author of the influential book Animated Documentary (2013). Listen as the trio discuss the recent industrial and scholarly turn towards animated documentary and the medium’s capabilities for representing the real; discourses of trauma and what it means to ‘animate’ dreams and a national-cultural memory; combinations of the factual and the fantastical that are weaved throughout Ari Folman’s autobiographical narrative; and how Waltz with Bashir illustrates animation’s status as a creative medium of catharsis. **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**

For this second archive episode, Chris and Alex revisit Episode 138 of the podcast that gave listeners their first taste of Pixar’s Toy Story (1995-) franchise thanks to this look at the 1995 original. The discussion of Pixar’s debut feature featured as its special guest Lucy Fife Donaldson, who is now Professor of Film Studies at the University of St Andrews and whose work focuses on film and television style, audiovisual design and 'below-the-line' labour, performance and the body. Topics in this episode included a closer look at the textures, surfaces, and scuff marks of Toy Story and its peripheral detail rendered in pristine computer graphics; worldhood and the toys’ own journey through digital space; play and plasticity; and the stylistic potential of registers of miniaturisation and magnification. **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**

To celebrate the summer, Chris and Alex take another trawl through the Fantasy/Animation archive to pick out some of their favourite past instalments of the podcast. For this first archive episode for 2026, they turn to their discussion of The Prince of Egypt (Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner & Simon Wells, 1998) that took place way back in March 2021 that featured the insights of biblical scholar and broadcaster Francesca Stavrakopoulou, who is Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at the University of Exeter. Listen again at their analysis of this 1998 cel-animated and CG epic that took in conversations about musicality, animated adaptations, star voices, spectacle, and myth-making, as well as the film’s contribution to the industrial standing of DreamWorks as a successful Hollywood studio, the politics of white-washing and colour-coding, and the stylistic mobilisation of Christian iconography. **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**

Building off the recent podcast on KPop Demon Hunters (Maggie Kang & Chris Appelhans, 2025), Footnote #80 examines Netflix as a popular digital platform via both the context (and illusion) of choice and the algorithmic processes that create, tailor, and appeal to our audiovisual desires, but equally Netflix’s contribution to the contemporary landscape of media production and consumption. Topics include Netflix as a gatekeeper that manages and shapes our access to ‘content’; the digital architecture of streaming platforms and how their optimised capabilities for providing highly personalised recommendations interpellates the user into its structures; the politics of ‘making’ taste and questions of authorship; default narratives of loss and gain that frame digital forms of innovation; Netflix Animation as an emerging production studio; and what the curated library of platform content tells us about industrial and cultural categorisation of fantasy and 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**

The final episode of the current series of the podcast addresses the phenomenon of KPop Demon Hunters (Maggie Kang & Chris Appelhans, 2025), the most watched original animated film of all time on Netflix whose global reach, critical and commercial success, and intensified fandom has positioned it as central to the contemporary ‘Korean Wave’ marked by the international visibility and popularity of cultural exports produced by South Korea. In this instalment, Chris and Alex discuss the diversity of aesthetic styles that defines KPop Demon Hunters and how its design fits into post-Spider-Verse computer-animated filmmaking; images of manufacture and performance, and how they contribute to a highly reflexive engagement with the industry and business of pop music; the emphasis placed on the labour of creativity at the expense of physicality; the politics of female friendship and big-screen shift towards the “girlfriend action flick”; how the narrative’s celebration of a Golden Honmoon illustrates the pleasures of communality, collaboration, and joy; and what the didacticism of KPop Demon Hunters has to say about the struggles in finding your voice and ultimately defeating your demons. **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**

For Footnote #79, Chris and Alex engage the seminal work of Edward Said and his coining and development of Orientalism as a critical framework for mapping the acceptance of the presence of a distinction between East and West, and the terms under which such a geographical and, crucially, conceptual division has been understood. Topics include the emergence of an Orientalist rhetoric during the 1970s and its alignment with psychoanalysis; the West’s constructed image of the East as the manifestation of what Gerald Sim calls a “European unconscious” and its identity as a repressed, hidden, and mystical Other; the implications for an essentialist attitude towards the Middle East, Asia, North Africa powered by the decorative - rather than in-depth - view of Arab “customs” and traditions; the value of Orientalism to Film Studies and its histories of representation in defining the “foreign”; and the Orient as a “repository” for certain types of colonialist and post-colonialist fantasies. **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**

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 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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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 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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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 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**

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**

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**

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**

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. 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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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 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**

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.

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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.

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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.

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**

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**

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 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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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 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**

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**

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 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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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 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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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**

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 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**

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**

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**