Fantasy/Animation

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

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

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

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

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

Footnote #76 - Performativity

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

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

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

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

SuperTed (1982-1986) (with Elain Price)

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

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

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

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

Footnote #75 - Identification

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

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

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

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

Leeds Animation Workshop (with Terry Wragg)

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

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

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

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

Footnote #74 - Deconstructivism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnote #73 - Rotoscoping

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

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

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

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

AI and Animation (with Mihaela Mihailova)

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

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

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

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

Footnote #72 - The Hero's Journey

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**