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 May 09, 2022
Monday May 09, 2022
The business of talking animals is the focus of Footnote #6, as Chris (with a bit of Alex) takes listeners through the shared histories of anthropomorphism and animation, and the acquisition of humanlike qualities (sentience, subjectivity, and selfhood) by non-human animated characters. Topics include the visual curiosity of the anthropomorph as a hybrid figuration caught between humanity (ánthrōpos) and the non-human (morphē); the role of persuasive personality and affinity within identifiable cel-animated, object, or virtual characters; collisions between nature and culture embedded in the anthropomorph’s fractured identity; affiliated terms such as ‘therianthropy’ that speak to gradations of humanity in animated animals; and why anthropomorphism as a representational strategy perhaps lies at the very heart of animated filmmaking.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
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