Fantasy/Animation

Wicked: For Good (2025)

Just as it did to kick off 2025, the Fantasy/Animation podcast returns once again following the festive break to celebrate the New Year with another visit to Oz, with Chris and Alex reflecting on movie musical Wicked: For Good (John M. Chu, 2025) that as with the first instalment released in 2024 discussed a year ago adapts Stephen Schwartz’s successful 2003 theatre production. Topics for this first episode of 2026 include Wicked: For Good’s heightened reflexivity around performance, deception, and the power of illusions that take place in front of and behind the curtain; Elphaba’s political radicalism vs. the pragmatism of Glinda; necropolitical action and the film’s targeting of who gets to live and who must die; ‘wickedness’ and the emptiness (and reclaiming) of language; and where Wicked: For Good succeeds - and ultimately fails - as it seeks to find its own narrative in the intriguing ellipses of the Oz lore.

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

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

The Polar Express (2004)

The Fantasy/Animation Christmas special pulls into the proverbial station with this look at The Polar Express (Robert Zemeckis, 2004), a computer-animated adaptation of the 1985 children’s book by Chris Van Allsburg and a film noted for its pioneering - if at times highly uncanny - application of motion capture technology as it portrays the magic of Christmas Eve through a young boy as he journeys to the North Pole. Topics for Chris and Alex in this episode include the state of computer graphics in the early-2000s and the emergence of the cyberstar; motion capture performance and the mechanics of virtual stardom; simulation, belief, time, and the digital long-take; strategies of narration and metaleptic transgressions between the world of the telling and the world of the told; fantasy and agency embodied through Tom Hanks as he inhabits multiple roles on- and off-screen; and how The Polar Express offers audiences a festive spectacular defined by the same shifting registers of fantasy that have shaped screen representations of Christmas and the magic of what it means to believe. Happy holidays!

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

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

Footnote #70 - Pantomime

Sound, performance, and the body come together in this Footnote episode discussing pantomime as an entertainment spectacle, as Chris and Alex seek to map the possible connections between pantomime as a popular theatrical tradition emerging in the 17th century and both animation’s own technologies and representations and legacies of fantasy. Topics include classical antiquity, gesture, and choric dramas; European precursors like commedia dell’arte and féerie stories; the invested interest by early animation scholarship in the medium’s multiple genealogies and the role of pantomime in defining animated points of origin; and how the self-reflexive staging and gestures of pantomime came to influence the different visual and comedy stylings of cartoon storytelling.

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

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

Babes in Toyland (1934) (with Rob King)

Chris and Alex make their first foray into the world of Laurel and Hardy with this reflection on Babes in Toyland (Gus Meins and Charles Rogers, 1934), a film based loosely on the Mother Goose fairytale albeit with a few other nursery rhyme characters thrown in for good measure, all supported by the iconicity of Laurel and Hardy and the duo’s particular brand of slapstick comedy. Joining them to separate their Tom-Tom Piper from their Bo Peep is Rob King, Professor of Film at Columbia University and a film historian who has written wildly on American genre cinema, popular culture, and cultural history with a particular emphasis on silent-era stardom and comedy. Topics for Episode 163 include Laurel and Hardy’s starring role in smoothing out the transition from silent to sound cinema, and the early twentieth-century industrial importance of the slapstick genre; the sound of fantasy and the demise of the comedy short in Hollywood; the immersive worlds of childhood and the enchantment of drawings; toys, toyness, and child’s play; and what Babes in Toyland has to say about the emergence of consumer culture through its pointed citation of Mickey Mouse.

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

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

Footnote #69 - Transnational Cinemas

Chris and Alex take on transnational cinemas in this brand new Footnote episode of the podcast, thinking through the mobility of - and interactions between - films and filmmakers across national borders and what it means for cinema to ‘travel.’ Topics include the national/transnational relation, and how new kinds of interconnectedness between nation-states are powered by globalisation; how we might understand the cross-cultural production and distribution of films as transcending national boundaries; the role of personal histories in how films represent diasporic experiences through images of migration; and how scholars have grappled with cinemas and individual filmmakers that appear to hold two national identities at once.

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

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

Lotus Lantern (1999) (with Muyang Zhuang)

Chris and Alex are delighted to be joined for Episode 162 of the podcast by Muyang Zhuang (Assistant Professor at Tongji University), who is a specialist in Chinese cinema, media, and visual culture in East Asia, with a special focus on animation and cartoons. In this instalment, the trio discuss Shanghai Animation Film Studio’s Lotus Lantern (Chang Guangxi, 1999), a film based on Chinese folklore whose animated adaptation in the late-1990s comes in a long line of reworkings of this most famous of tales. Topics include the context of state-owned animated production in socialist and post-socialist China; the (trans)national style and aesthetic choices of Chang Guangxi’s film and the politics of its Westernisation; European vs. Chinese folklore, the figure of the trickster, and links between the film’s musical sequences and character; the complex market forces that have helped position Disney animation as China’s monstrous other; and why Lotus Lantern is considered a landmark in contemporary Chinese animation.

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

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

Footnote #68 - Historiography

The next Footnote episode of the podcast maps the stakes of telling history and what it means to construct historical narratives through cinema as a form of historical writing. Listen as Fantasy/Animation’s resident lapsed historian Alex takes Chris through the history and theory of making history and doing historical work; verbal and visual discourses of narrativisation in relation to Hayden White’s notions of historiography and historiophoty; distinctions between the fluctuating ‘truths’, poetics, and politics of history; facts and events as non-narrative and empirical; and how the modes and meanings of telling history contribute to the writerly and highly subjective craft of the historian.

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

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

Tee Collins (with Robby Gilbert)

Episode 161 of the podcast features an examination of the animated career of Tee Collins, a pioneer of the medium whose place within received histories has tended to sideline, rather than celebrate, his contribution to the industry and aesthetics of the animated craft. Joining Chris and Alex to situate Collins within the trajectory of U.S. animation is animator, artist, and historian of animation and moving images Robby Gilbert. Robby has worked as an animator for several studios and has illustrated numerous works for children, including The Adventures of Ranger Rick for the National Wildlife Federation. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Animation at Rowan University and is the author of the recently released City in Motion: Animation in New York 1966-1999 (Palgrave, 2025). Topics for this episode include the emergence of Harlem’s early Black animators against the backdrop of institutional and representational racism; Collins’ early work on Sesame Street (Jim Henson, 1969-) with the Wanda the Witch and Nancy the Nanny Goat shorts as well as his later animated feature The Songhai Princess (Tee Collins, 1990); his signature Afro-Cubist style and links to the adult animation of Ralph Bakshi; ‘fast’ animation, movement, motion studies, and basketball (!); and what Collins’ forgotten place within global animation history tells us about the necessity of historical recovery.

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

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

Footnote #67 - Pepper's Ghost

Inspired by the recent podcast episode on Casper (Brad Silberling, 1995) that featured a conversation with the film’s lead animator Mark Austin, Chris and Alex maintain the Halloween theme for this latest Footnote instalment that examines the spectacular imagery of “pepper’s ghost” - an illusion technique dating back to the earliest forms of stage magic that also found a home across multiple popular entertainment spaces and attractions. Topics include the origins of John Henry Pepper’s ghostly apparitions and the ‘trick’ mechanics of theatrical display; the techniques involved in the illusory creation of three-dimensional objects and the broader seduction of holographic effects; how and where the ‘live’ interactions between physical performers and transparent spectral figurations on stage moved into early silent cinema; and possible links between pepper’s ghost as a technique of illusion and contemporary digital holography (including ABBA Voyage [2022-]).

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

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

Casper (1995) (with Mark Austin)

The Fantasy/Animation podcast presents its Halloween special with this deep dive into Casper (Brad Silberling, 1995) featuring a conversation with the film’s lead animator Mark Austin, who as part of the team at Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) worked on bringing the supernatural spectacle of Casper’s lonely ghost roaming the corridors of Whipstaff Manor to life. Since his involvement with the film, Mark has developed over 30 years experience in visual effects production (specifically within previsualization) across multiple features, games, commercial projects, and 3D attractions. After a decade at the visual effects studio Moving Picture Company (MPC), Mark recently joined Netflix Animation Studio in 2020 as a Sequence Designer and is now a freelance ‘Previs’ Supervisor. Listen as Mark discusses with Chris and Alex his own career and shift from cel-animated advertisements into the world of computer-generated imagery, and his role in crafting Casper’s many digital VFX sequences; the technologies involved in building virtual performances and the eponymous ghost’s status as cinema’s first fully CG film character; where Casper sits in relation to the 1990s’ boom in ‘live-action cartoons’ from Hocus Pocus (Kenny Ortega, 1993) to Flubber (Les Mayfield, 1997); and how Brad Silbering’s feature marked an often forgotten turning point in Hollywood’s ability to (inter)act digital with physical elements.

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

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