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 Jun 17, 2024
Monday Jun 17, 2024
The Fantasy/Animation podcast is soon to break for the summer, but not before a few more episodes to round off the series - this time, it is the “Arabian fantasy” The Thief of Bagdad (Michael Powell, Ludwig Berger & Tim Whelan, 1940) that provides the focus for Episode 142, as Chris and Alex try to make sense of its story and style drawn from the “One Thousand and One Nights” collection of Middle Eastern folktales and its reproduction of Orientialist imaginaries and iconographies. Topics include The Thief of Bagdad’s sustained fascination with the Orient and storytelling interest in the exoticism and erotics of magic and spells; fantasy and animation’s historical links with the development of Technicolor, and how The Thief of Bagdad marks the inaugural use of the Technicolor blue-screen travelling matte process; the stylistic influence of Powell’s film on the characters and setting of Walt Disney’s Aladdin (Ron Clements & John Musker, 1992); and how the film manifests insidious tropes of Empire within its broader Anti-Arab sentiment.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
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