Fantasy/Animation

Mickey Mouse (with David McGowan)

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 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**

Footnote #63 - The Censored Eleven

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**

Rise of the Guardians (2012)

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**

Footnote #62 - Object Relations

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**

Up (2009) (with Tom Brown)

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**

Footnote #61 - The Gaze

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**

World of Tomorrow (2015-2020) (with Elizabeth Cox)

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**

Footnote #60 - Psychoanalysis

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**

The Wind Rises (2013) (with Esther Leslie)

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**

Footnote #59 - Magic

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**