Fantasy/Animation

Footnote #53 - Star Voices

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

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

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

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

Bride of Frankenstein (1935) (with David Sandner)

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

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

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

Footnote #52 - Rhetorics of Fantasy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnote #51 - Cinema and the City

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

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

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

Ratatouille (2007)

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

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

Archive Episode - My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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**