Fantasy/Animation

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**

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022) (with Lisa Scoggin)

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**

Footnote #58 - Wonder

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**

ABBA Voyage (2022-) (with Ian Comley)

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**

Footnote #57 - Disney's Nine Old Men

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**

Live @ Annecy International Animation Film Festival 2024

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**

Footnote #56 - Prequels

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**