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 06, 2025
Monday Oct 06, 2025
The Fantasy/Animation podcast returns for a brand new season with Chris and Alex marking the end of their summer hiatus with another trip into the magic of Disney’s animated features, this time to remember the pleasures of the pride lands and the circle of life held in delicate balance that propels forward the story of The Lion King (Roger Allers & Rob Minkoff, 1994) - the studio’s critical and commercial smash that has generated sequels, spin-offs, remakes, and a highly-successful theatre show. Topics for Episode 159 include the place of the film within Disney’s broader corporate and creative history, including important distinctions between ‘typical’ and Classic Disney; computer graphics, digital VFX, and registers of self-referentiality; anthropomorphic agency and the limits (and instincts) of animated animality in the film’s rendition of its non-human protagonists; Rafiki as the ‘Magical Negro’ archetype; the complications of the film’s well-documented Fascist imagery and the racial politics of its coded casting; and how The Lion King navigates wider ecocritical concerns around the relationships we can (and do) have to the environment.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
No comments yet. Be the first to say something!