Fantasy/Animation

Footnote #10 - Hybridity

The mixed media potential of animation is the subject of Footnote #10, which takes on hybridity via the combination of multiple animated styles, as well as the spectatorial effects that such blended images might conjure. From the earliest hybridised cartoons of the 1910s and the insertion of cel-animation into the Classical Hollywood musical to contemporary live-action/CG composites and the human/machine collision involved in motion-capture technology, hybridity defines animation’s unique visual perspectives as much as the medium’s own fantasy of interaction. But as Chris and Alex discover, to make any distinction between live-action and animation (as increasingly fuzzy categories) ultimately reveals more about the slippage between them than their separateness or contrasts as image-making forms.

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

100th Episodes

The Fantasy/Animation podcast reaches its centenary, so join Chris and Alex as they celebrate 100 episodes with a look back at some memorable televisual hundredths from the world of cartoon sitcoms. Listen as they discuss “Daddy's Little Beauty” (S4E12) from The Flintstones (William Hanna & Joseph Barbera, 1960-1966), in which Fred enters Pebbles in a beauty contest for babies; The Simpsons (Matt Groening, 1989-) episode “Sweet Seymour Skinner's Baadasssss Song” (S5E19) where Principal Skinner is fired (and reinstated) with the unlikely help of Bart; the episode “Hank's Choice” S5E16) from King of the Hill (Mike Judge, 1997-) where Hank must decide between his love for son Bobby and Ladybird (the family pet dog); the South Park (Trey Parker & Matt Stone, 1997-) celebration “I’m a Little Bit Country” (S7E04) from 2003, which features a time travelling Cartman learning more about America’s Founding Fathers set against the backdrop of anti- and pro-war protests; and the 2007 Family Guy (Seth MacFarlane, 1999-) episode “Movin’ Out (Brian's Song)” (S6E02) featuring Brian and Stewie’s ill-fated attempts to live independently beyond the Griffin family home. Topics include the history of American television animation and post-war U.S. culture; the role of humour and satire in an increasingly satirical world; character design and fluctuating realist registers; narrative templates and intertextual referencing between canonical cartoons made for the small-screen; and the enduring role of the family and the home space within constructions of American national identity.

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

Footnote #9 - Sword and Sorcery

The history and application of sword and sorcery - a term initially used to describe a wave of pre-Tolkien fantasy writing - is the latest subject for Chris and Alex in Footnote #9, which plots the relationship between this kind of ‘rough’ historical fiction and questions of world-building, magic, and myth. Topics include sword and sorcery’s origin story in the 1930s and links to the paperback revolution of short stories and cheap pulp fiction; its cinematic adaptations during the 1970s and 1980s from Conan the Barbarian to The Beastmaster; and the response to this sub-genre by Hollywood’s elite and what this meant for fantasy’s broader critical and cultural prestige.

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

Your Name (2016) (Live at the British Film Institute)

Episode 99 is a special instalment of the podcast recorded Live at the British Film Institute in London back in May 2022, with Chris and Alex joined by an audience of anime fans to discuss Your Name (Makoto Shinkai, 2016) as part of the BFI’s Anime season. Featuring an introduction to the artistry and creativity of anime, an examination of Your Name’s temporal loops and overlapping rhythms, and a lively Q&A with those gathered at the BFI’s Reuben Library, this episode features a conversation about writer/director Makoto Shinkai’s romantic animated fantasy - and its pleasures of longing - as protagonists Taki and Mitsuha magically and unexpectedly swap bodies across time and space. Topics for this episode include Japanese anime as a shifting and unstable category of animation, as well as both a local and global cultural phenomenon; the liminal spaces of Your Name as a film invested in temporality and mobility; non-Western traditions of fantasy storytelling and their desire to fracture logic and rationality; the cyclical/linear rhythms that structure the movement of Taki and Mitsuha across temporal (and historical) boundaries; the spectral quality to Shinkai’s handling of characters that ‘haunt’ multiple spaces; and what Your Name has to say about national culture in its two competing - and highly gendered - visions of Japan.

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

Footnote #8 - Plasmaticness

Footnote #8 offers a brief detour to the abridged and incomplete animated writings of Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein from the 1940s, and in particular his notorious concept of “plasmaticness” that he argued was a way of understanding the appeal and attraction of Walt Disney’s cartoon images. Listen as Chris and Alex discuss the historical, political, technological, and aesthetic dimensions of “plasmaticness” and the term’s relationship to the Hollywood “rubberhosing” style; the “irresistible changeability” of Disney’s reforming bodies and how, for Eisenstein, such figures momentarily took spectators back to a pre-conscious mode of existence; Disney’s own artistic shift away from plasmatic impulses towards a “hyper-realist” sensibility; and the contemporary digital afterlives of Eisenstein’s animated approach to transformation, character, and movement.

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

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)

Chris and Alex venture (back?) into the multiverse in this entirely unplanned episode on Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (Sam Raimi, 2022), prompted by both a last-minute cinema trip and a desire to check-in once more with what’s happening in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. A partner to the earlier discussion of complexity and serial narratives in Wandavision (2021), episode 98 involves a new and improved journey through the MCU’s iterative storytelling to delight in its quantum realms and colliding incursions, including an examination of how contemporary Hollywood cinema is increasingly being driven by the spectacle of intellectual properties; discourses of play, rules, and frivolity that manages the stakes of mulitversal narratives; the ethical element of multi-dimensional travel and repeating existences; how Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness negotiates Wanda’s identity as a ‘villainous’ unruly female within post-Trump America; the relationship between multiverse plotlines, complex narratives, and fan cultures; and what Sam Raimi’s film has to say about the relationship between grief and anger.

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

Footnote #7 - The Fantastic

The fantasy of the fantastic is the subject of Footnote #7, as Alex takes listeners (including Chris) on a journey through the origins of the fantastique and a term that often describes certain stories with impossible elements. Other topics includes the fantastic as initially a literary impulse and fantasy as a genre that codifies dimensions of that impulse into narrative expectations and archetypes; Tzvetan Todorov’s work on “the fantastic” as an historical genre of writing that involves characters experiencing a momentary narrative “hesitation”; psychoanalysis and the uncanny; and what the fantastic means for the reader-/viewer-response of popular fantasy media.

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

Rogue One (2016) (with Jonathan Wroot)

Episode 97 of the podcast takes on the intergalactic conflicts and rebel alliances of Rogue One (Gareth Edwards, 2016), an anthology feature film and prequel to Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) that tells the origin story of the ‘Rogue One’ starfighter squadron and the creation of the Death Star. Special guest for this episode is Dr Jonathan Wroot, who is Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader for Film Studies at the University of Greenwich. Jonathan has published research on home media formats and Asian cinema distribution, including the co-edited collection entitled New Blood: Framing 21st Century Horror (2021) and his recent monograph on the Zatoichi film and TV franchise. He has also contributed to the podcast series Beyond Japan and Second Features, as well as the 2022 Japan Touring Film Programme. Listen as they discuss Jedis, the Jidaigeki (時代劇) period film, and longstanding East Asian influences upon the Star Wars saga; the relationship between Zatoichi the blind swordsman and Rogue One’s own blind warrior Chirrut Îmwe; hope, alliance, and the religious structures of Gareth Edwards’ spin-off story; the generic implications of ‘the Force’ upon science-fiction/fantasy distinctions via questions of rationality; digital de-aging technologies and the virtual recreation of youth; and the challenges of Rogue One to expand the Star Wars brand by taking spectators back into the fictional world of Hollywood’s most famous space fantasy.

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

**This episode was produced and edited by Leon Waldo**

Footnote #6 - Anthropomorphism

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**

The Secret of Moonacre (2008) (with Lucy Shuttleworth)

Based on Elizabeth Goudge’s 1992 children’s story Little White Horse, the 2008 fantasy The Secret of Moonacre (Gábor Csupó, 2008) is the subject of Episode 96 of the podcast, with Chris and Alex joined in their discussion of morality, class, and the power of the ego by the film’s screenwriter and Associate Producer Lucy Shuttleworth, who is also Senior Lecturer in the School of Film, Media and Communication at the University of Portsmouth. Listen as they examine the influence and inspiration on Gábor Csupó’s film of a number of literary sources, from 14th Century text Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the wood and forest as a site of technological expressivity as much as narrative hostility and sanctuary with fantasy cinema; comparisons with big-screen adaptations like The Golden Compass (Chris Weitz, 2007) and Enola Holmes (Harry Bradbeer, 2020); VFX technologies and gender representation; and what The Secret of Moonacre tells us about the perils of the adaptation process and the power of effective visual storytelling.

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

**This episode was produced and edited by Leon Waldo**