Christopher Holliday is Senior Lecturer in Liberal Arts and Visual Cultures Education at King’s College London (UK). Alexander Sergeant is a Lecturer in Digital Media Production at the University of Westminster (UK), specialising in the history and theory of fantasy cinema. Each episode, they look in detail at a film or television show, taking listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation.
Episodes
Monday Oct 09, 2023
Monday Oct 09, 2023
Chris and Alex return from their extended summer break with this discussion of the much-maligned musical Cats (Tom Hooper, 2019), a film whose reputation as a big-budget misjudgment has perhaps overwhelmed the intricacies of its uncanny constitution, and in particular how the narrative’s negotiation of its A-list performers speaks to the vexed question of actorly labour and agency in an age of heightened visual effects production. Listen as they wade through Cats’ unsettling feline character design and the integration of digital effects that build disconcerting bodies with multiple moving parts; theatricality and spontaneity in histories of the Hollywood musical; scale and the fantasy of space in director Tom Hooper’s execution of the film’s song-and-dance routines; editing choices and the presentation of blockbuster spectacle; and how the controversial digitised production of Cats taps into recent debates regarding the exploitation of the VFX sector and the many artists who build our CG-enhanced screen fantasies.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
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