Fantasy/Animation

Footnote #80 - Netflix

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**

KPop Demon Hunters (2025)

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**

Footnote #79 - Orientalism

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**

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnote #78 - The Imagination

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

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

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

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

Helen Hill (with Karen Redrobe)

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

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

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

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

Footnote #77 - Expanded Animation

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

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

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

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

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

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**