Fantasy/Animation

Footnote #15 - Motion Capture

The Fantasy/Animation Footnotes return with a new podcast episode on the form and function of motion capture as mode of computerised performance in an era of digital mediation. For Episode 15, topics for this quickfire discussion include motion capture as a mode of digital puppetry and links to both the theatrical tradition of performing objects and the Rotoscope; discourses of control that feed into the creativity of ‘mo-cap’ technologies; industry narratives, labour hierarchies, and the question of who performs the digital image; ambivalent connections between voice and body in motion captured characters; and what happens when human physicality is transcribed via digital processing.

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

In Conversation with Nancy Beiman

Chris and Alex return after their belated summer hiatus with Episode 105 of the podcast, and a very special instalment that features them in conversation with renowned animation director, character designer, animator, and teacher Nancy Beiman, who has worked at a number of studios (from Steven Spielberg’s Amblin studio to the Walt Disney Company and Warner Brothers) as well as on feature films including A Goofy Movie (Kevin Lima, 1995), Hercules (Ron Clements & John Musker, 1997) and Treasure Planet (Ron Clements & John Musker, 2002). She is also the author of two landmark books on animation acting and storyboarding - Prepare to Board! Creating Story and Characters for Animated Features and Shorts (2007) and Animated Performance: Bringing Imaginary Animal, Human and Fantasy Characters to Life (2010) - and the recent How I Finally Got to Live a Cat's Life: A Cartoon Diary 2020-2021 (2022), which promises “the diary of a cartoonist "character" who got the ultimate Staycation!” Listen as they discuss her extensive career in Hollywood animation, including her training at Cal Arts ahead of becoming a supervising animator and the origins of the mysterious “graphic blandishment” role; the evolution of U.S. animation within the 1970s and 1980s as a continuation of classical traditions rather than a phase of transition; voice artistry and the creative bargain that the animation process must strike with voice performance tracks; animation as a form of dance, and the way that animators are continually blending a multitude of sources and inspirations; technological advancement in relation to characterisation; and the creative value of simply looking at things given how the development of an animated film is always greater than the sum of its parts.

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

Footnote #14 - Thinning

Alex is once again in the spotlight for Footnote #14 as he explains to Chris the notion of ‘thinning,’ a term recommended on social media as a potential subject for a bite-sized Fantasy/Animation podcast. Topics in this brief instalment include the representation within fantasy storytelling of so-called ‘thinned’ worlds that articulate spaces via loss and deprivation; the role played by magic in supporting a desire for restoration and the return to the world as it once was; thinning as both a repeating narrative device or motif and an element of world creation; how thinning helps to define fantasy and its fables of recovery; and how fantasy is a melancholic force that corrects worldly fractures and fissures to replace that which has been lost.

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

Speed Racer (2008) (with Tim Robey)

Strap in for Episode 104 of the podcast as the thrill ride that is Lilly and Lana Wachowski’s Speed Racer (2008) provides the focus for this latest instalment in all its unwieldy and unruly CG glory. Chris and Alex’s special guest for this episode is Tim Robey, renowned film critic and author who has written widely on all kinds of cinema for The Daily Telegraph for over the last 20 years. He is also the co-editor of the book The DVD Stack: The Best DVDs of the Best Movies from Around the World (2006) - a guide to the best versions of movies available globally - and has discussed film on Radio 4’s Front Row, the Film Programme, Monocle FM Radio, and BBC Film. Listen as they seek to get to grips with Speed Racer’s manic energy and digital mayhem, including its relationship to computer graphics at a time when digital VFX imagery in Hollywood was perhaps reaching its elastic limit; connections between the film’s abrasive style and 1950s melodrama via the work of filmmaker Douglas Sirk; the fragmented labour of digital processes and the implications that such shifting temporalities hold for understanding digitally-mediated screen performance; the digital or virtual backlot as a production trend popular within early-2000s U.S. cinema; the conjunction of photorealist and videogame aesthetics with live-action characters; and how Speed Racer’s capitalist contradictions unfold in both a narrative and restless visual style that pits ideas of authenticity against those of surrealist fantasy.

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

Footnote #13 - Folklore and Folkloric

Alex takes the reins for this double tale of folklore and the folkloric, two terms that are fully implicated in the history of fantasy storytelling and cultural expression, as he navigates through and defines each for this latest Footnote episode. Listen as he explains to Chris the relationship that folklore has to ‘official,’ codified or canonised discourse and documentation; the role of shared anecdotal evidence in binding a culture together in a folkloric fashion; the collective stories, rituals, traditions, and customs of folklore passed between communities without a fixed author; top-down vs. bottom-up modes of expression, and how folklore has traditionally been a space for the marginal; and the identity of the ‘folkloric’ as a stylised and fictionalised form of folk culture.

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

Flee (2021) (with Cristina Formenti)

The acclaimed animated documentary Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen, 2021), which tells the story of Amin Nawabi and his journey from from Afghanistan to Denmark as a refugee, is the subject of Episode 103 of the podcast that reflects on the shared ability of animation, fantasy and the documentary format to ‘reveal.’ Joining Chris and Alex for this instalment is Dr Cristina Formenti, Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the University of Udine in Italy, and author of a number of books on animation and documentary, including Il mockumentary: la fiction si maschera da documentario (2013), and her latest book The Classical Animated Documentary and Its Contemporary Evolution (2022). Cristina is also the editor of the volumes Mariangela Melato tra cinema, teatro e televisione (2016) and Valentina Cortese: un’attrice intermediale (2019), while her work has appeared in various national and international journals, such as Studies in Documentary Film, Alphaville, and Horror Studies. She is currently the co-editor of the journal Animation Studies and serves on the Board of the Society for Animation Studies. Listen as they discuss the value of animated reconstruction, fictionalisation, and the authenticating use of live-action footage within Flee’s predominantly animated aesthetic style that potentially ‘corrects’ its cartoonal qualities; the role of memory and the subjectivity of experience; connections between imagination, emotion and trauma; shifts in the animated style of Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s film between raw nightmarish impressionism and heightened visual detail; the ‘fable’ and ‘sober’ as useful ways to categorise the historical trajectory and stylistic approaches of the animated documentary; the experiential effects of subjective narration and the film’s intimate interview style, and what happens when vocal recordings in the documentary have to be falsified; and how Flee offers a narrative of reconciliation that mirrors animation’s own creative combination with certain recognisable documentary conventions.

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

Footnote #12 - The Lightning Sketch (with Malcolm Cook)

Joining Chris and Alex for this lightning quick journey through the origins and aesthetics of the lightning sketch tradition in Footnote #12 of the podcast is Dr Malcolm Cook, Associate Professor in Film Studies (University of Southampton), author of Early British Animation: From Page and Stage to Cinema Screens (2018) and co-editor (with Professor Kirsten Moana Thompson) of the collection Animation and Advertising (2019). Malcolm was also a special guest on the earlier Christmas advertisements episode, but here he discusses the importance of ‘lightning cartooning’ to the history of animation; the spectatorial effects and perceptions involved in witnessing the live act of drawing; pioneers of the original stage show who became cinema’s very first animators such as J. Stuart Blackton, Georges Méliès, Walter Booth, Tom Merry, and Winsor McCay; the lightning sketch as a crucial point of contact between moving images and graphic art; and what the convergence between this music hall and vaudeville tradition with ‘trick film’ techniques has to say about about the emergence of the animated short.

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

Mothra (1961) (with Alex Davidson)

Chris and Alex take their first visit to the Japanese kaiju genre for Episode 102 of the podcast thanks to Toho studio’s 1961 feature Mothra (Ishirō Honda, 1961), a film that kickstarted the longstanding Mothra monster movie franchise. Joining them to discuss the history and legacy of Japanese cinema’s famous winged creature is Alex Davidson, cinema curator at the Barbican Theatre who also writes on film for the BFI and beyond, with a specialism is queer cinema and television. To tie in with the Barbican’s screening of Mothra on August 24th 2022 as part of their Outdoor Cinema series, the trio reflect on the genesis of Mothra as a character and its importance to twentieth-century Japanese monster cinema; the codes and conventions of the kaiju film, and connections to Japan’s postwar national trauma following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; distinctions between revenge and rampage that structure Mothra narratives; allegories of modernity that recur across supernatural fables; the fluctuating scales of the film’s practical VFX imagery (from superimpositions and forced perspectives to models and miniatures) all directed by Eiji Tsuburaya; the political stakes of its fictional setting of Rolisica that combines East Asian and European influences; and what director Ishirō Honda has to say about science, finance, technology, and soft economic power through both Mothra’s reign of terror and the character’s desire to ‘protect.’

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

Footnote #11 - Society for Animation Studies (with Chris Pallant)

Footnote #11 comes live from the 33rd annual Society for Animation Studies conference, which took place in late-June and early-July 2022 at Teesside University. Joining Chris and Alex for this rundown of the society as an “international organisation dedicated to the study of animation history and theory” is the current SAS President, Dr Chris Pallant (Canterbury Christ Church University), previously a special guest on our Bagpuss (Peter Firmin & Oliver Postgate, 1974) episode of the podcast. Listen as they discuss the origins of the society and its founding back in 1987, and the contribution of its members towards the consolidation of Animation Studies as a specialist discipline; the society’s growth as an international space of knowledge exchange and networking among animation practitioners, artists, and academics; the commitment of SAS to create a diverse intellectual environment both in-person and online that is accessible for (and to) a range of interdisciplinary audiences; and how to get involved in the society’s many activities, from its online blog animationstudies2.0 to its range of Special Interest Groups (SIGs).

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

Osmosis Jones (2001) (with Tom Sito)

Episode 101 confronts the animated representation of disease and illness via Warner Brothers’ 2001 cel-animated/live-action hybrid Osmosis Jones (Bobby Farrelly, Peter Farrelly, Piet Kroon & Tom Sito, 2001), which tells the story of a white blood cell policeman who joins together with a cold pill to stop a deadly virus from destroying their human host. Joining Chris and Alex to talk about the film’s imaginative depictions of a body’s internal workings is Osmosis Jones’ animation director Tom Sito, a veteran of the Hollywood animation industry who has worked on numerous animated fantasy films at the Walt Disney, DreamWorks, and Warner Brothers studios, from Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and The Lion King (1994) to Shrek (2001) and Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003). Tom is currently Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, and author of the books Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson (2006), Moving Innovation, A History of Computer Animation (2013), and, more recently, Eat, Drink, Animate: An Animator's Cookbook (2019) containing the food recipes of famous animators such as Walt Disney and Chuck Jones. Listen as they discuss the production of the animated sequences for Osmosis Jones and the industrial and aesthetic stakes of hybridity; celebrity voice acting, “audio discipline,” and how the film’s casting practices feed into its bi-racial buddy cop narrative; the creative representation of human biology as a bustling and hyper-modern urban space; the affordances of animation for shifting scales and fantastical perspectives; and how Osmosis Jones reveals the medium’s metaphorical abilities in allowing spectators to grasp the often intangible shape of things.

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