Fantasy/Animation

AI and Animation (with Mihaela Mihailova)

The creative - and highly controversial - relationship between animation and artificial intelligence provides the focus of Episode 167 of the Fantasy/Animation podcast, which features as its special guest Dr Mihaela Mihailova, an Assistant Professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. Mihaela is the editor of Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio LAIKA’s Stop-Motion Witchcraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), whose work has also appeared in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, The Velvet Light Trap, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Feminist Media Studies, animation: an interdisciplinary journal, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, and [in]Transition. She has contributed to Animating Film Theory (with John MacKay), The Oxford Handbook of the Disney Musical, Animated Landscapes: History, Form, and Function, The Animation Studies Reader, and Drawn from Life: Issues and Themes in Animated Documentary Cinema, and was editor of the recent “AI and the Moving Image” dossier published in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. She is currently co-editor of Animation Studies and serves as co-President of the Society for Animation Studies. Listen as Mihaela introduces Chris and Alex to the AI-generated short films Generation (2022), PLSTC (2022), Bruegel the Younger (2022), and Dissolution (2023) as a backdrop to thinking about the trajectory of machine learning in relation to animated imagery and creative practice; the aesthetics and implications for labour prompted by AI as both an assistive and generative tool; the discourses of technophilia and technophobia that surround contemporary synthetic media; and what impact the ‘open secret’ of AI might have within the animation industry beyond some of its current applications.

**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 #72 - The Hero's Journey

Building on their recent podcast episode on Kung Fu Panda (John Stevenson & Mark Osborne, 2008) with screenwriter John Yorke, Alex takes Chris through the mechanics and mysteries involved in the hero’s journey, Joseph Campbell’s famous structure and patterning of narrative, to discuss how such storytelling archetypes link to Jungian approaches towards the process of character individuation. Topics include the big-screen reworkings of the hero’s journey and its industry function as a screenwriting template; theorisations of form and formalist frameworks for understanding narrative organisation; Campbell’s interests in the traces of our unconscious mind as found in collective archetypes that surround culture; and the way that the formula for heroic action and its calls to adventure can and do work within the creative spaces of fantasy.

**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**

Kung Fu Panda (2008) (with John Yorke)

Episode 166 of the Fantasy/Animation podcast high kicks its way into the world of DreamWorks’ successful Kung Fu Panda franchise (2008-) with this look at the series’ first big-screen instalment, Kung Fu Panda (John Stevenson & Mark Osborne, 2008), with very special guest John Yorke. John is a television producer, screenwriter, editor, and author, who was Head of Channel 4 Drama (2003–2005), controller of BBC drama production (2006–2012) where he founded the BBC Writers Academy, and more recently managing director of Company Pictures (2013–2015). He is now teaching screenwriting via his own company, John Yorke Story, and is the author of Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them (Penguin, 2014) and Trip to the Moon: Understanding the True Power of Story (Penguin, 2026). Topics include the tension between showing and telling that underpins the character development of Kung Fu Panda’s protagonist Po (Jack Black); story as central to the film’s effectiveness as a martial arts animated comedy and the spectacle of the animated body in physicalising certain narrative beats; storytelling within a commercial animation context and how the medium’s narrative strategies are enabled by animation as an industrial art form; and how Kung Fu Panda functions as a popular fantasy film merging Chinese with American cultural concerns yet remains indebted to longstanding folkloric structures of narrative.

This podcast is sponsored by the project “UK-China Animation: Co-Creating Research and Knowledge Exchange,” led by the University of Nottingham and funded by the British Council through an award from its Going Global Partnerships programme, which builds stronger, more inclusive, internationally connected higher education and Technical and Vocational Education and Training systems (TVET).

**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 #71 - Synthespians

Listen as the brand new Fantasy/Animation Footnote tackles the complexities and contradictions of digital performance and cyber stardom via this discussion of synthespians, a term very much anchored to early-2000s concerns around the future of acting, agency, and authenticity whose popularisation was largely prompted by the rise of motion capture and other forms of computerised intervention. In this latest instalment, Chris takes Alex through the origins of (and key discourses surrounding) the cyberstar and the broader entertainment industry’s increased turn towards the creative possibilities of the “synthetic thespian”; how scholars have grappled with the divergent forms of labour and performance styles engendered by CG avatars, proxies, and digital doppelgängers; the role of celebrities in mediating shifts between old and new media, including the stakes of newer star-centred forms of digital replication; and the growing anxieties surfacing in late-2025 regarding the arrival of synthespian ‘Tilly Norwood’ and what artificial intelligence and machine learning might now mean for the next phase in digital cyberstardom.

**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**

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.

This podcast is sponsored by the project “UK-China Animation: Co-Creating Research and Knowledge Exchange,” led by the University of Nottingham and funded by the British Council through an award from its Going Global Partnerships programme, which builds stronger, more inclusive, internationally connected higher education and Technical and Vocational Education and Training systems (TVET).

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

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