Wicked (2024)

The Fantasy/Animation podcast is back after the festive break with Episode 149, and as a belated New Year treat offers up a closer look at a film still playing at cinemas across the globe - the movie musical Wicked (John M. Chu, 2024), a big-screen adaptation of Stephen Schwartz’s 2003 theatre production that was itself based on Gregory Maguire’s earlier 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. For this first instalment of 2025, Chris and Alex tackle the links between this first part of the Wicked story and the mythology of both L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel and celebrated 1939 Hollywood adaptation, and what it is about the broader world of Oz that lends itself so well to large-scale visual spectacle; the ‘obvious’ register of Wicked’s racial politics and narrative equivalences between greenness and otherness; Cynthia Erivo (Elphaba), Ariana Grande (Glinda), and gestures that the film makes to white privilege; the possibilities for queerness and the tensions with Hollywood’s pervasive heteronormativity; stylistic mobility, long takes, and the reflexivity of a virtual camera that defies cinematic gravity; and the magic by which Wicked creates its impossible spaces and how this feeds into a broader discourse of fantasy characters that are “done accepting limits.”

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

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