Fantasy/Animation

Footnote #17 - Metaphor

The power of symbolism and the creativity of the metaphorical are the focus of Footnote #17, which seeks to distinguish Metaphor through animation’s identity as a ‘metaphorical’ medium and, as a consequence, its fundamental rhetorical and symbolic potential. Topics for Chris and Alex include the thorny issue of film when considered as a language, and whether or not we can see images as symbols in the same way as written words; the split between denotative and connotative interpretation in the examination of media; metonym and the role of imagination; the commitment of animation to ‘the idea’ and the cultural specificity of this act of creation; and the use of fantasy as a psychoanalytical process of metaphorical meaning making.

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

Inside Out (2015) (with Eric Herhuth)

The problematic pursuit of happiness is the focus of Episode 107 of the podcast, which looks at the pleasure of the mindscape in Pixar Animation Studios’ computer-animated film Inside Out (Pete Docter, 2015). Joining Chris and Alex for this cerebral trip inside the mind is Dr Eric Herhuth, Assistant Professor of Communication and Director of Film Studies at Tulane University, and author of a number of publications on the intersections between animation, aesthetics, and politics, including the monograph Pixar and the Aesthetic Imagination: Animation, Storytelling, and Digital Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017). Topics for this episode include contemporary Hollywood animation and the place of Inside Out within Pixar’s Golden Age; animation’s longstanding propensity for metaphor and political allegory; emotion, personality, and the U.S. obsession with happiness; the politics and creativity of ruined spaces and Inside Out’s linking of agency with repression; the 11-year-old Riley as both protagonist and setting (and the subsequent gendering of the film’s virtual space); what Inside Out is saying about the acceptance of sadness; and the dramatic stakes of what happens when feelings have feelings.

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

Footnote #16 - Dual Address (with Noel Brown)

Recent podcast guest Dr Noel Brown (Senior Lecturer in Film and Programme Leader for Film and Visual Culture, Liverpool Hope University) returns for this Footnote episode on Dual Address, and the ways in which children’s fiction (and cultural products more broadly) might engage multiple registers and include simultaneous meaning for both child and adult audiences. Listen as Chris, Alex, and Noel discuss its emergence within the field of children’s literature and status as a ‘hypothetical’ category; relationships to ‘single’ address and questions of subtext; the role of humour, literacy, and intertextual referencing; hierarchies of knowledge and taste; and how Dual Address function as a strategy to think through industry, audience appeal, and even the rise of replay home video culture.

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

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) (with Noel Brown)

Episode 106 marks Chris and Alex’s first foray into the filmmaking career of Steven Spielberg as they take on the director’s 1982 science-fiction fantasy E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. To help explore the film’s status as a landmark of popular U.S. cinema is special guest Dr Noel Brown, who is Senior Lecturer in Film and Programme Leader for Film and Visual Culture at Liverpool Hope University. Noel has published extensively in the areas of children’s cinema, family films, and animation, including the recent monograph Contemporary Hollywood Animation: Style, Storytelling, Culture and Ideology Since the 1990s (2020) and edited collection The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Film (2022). Listen as the trio discuss the origins of the ‘family film’ as a prestige category within histories of Hollywood cinema; the contributions of Spielberg, George Lucas, and E.T. to the reinvention of cinema as family entertainment; emotion and strategies of ‘relatability’; dual address, disposability, and the darkness of Spielberg’s stories; outsiderdom and alienation in relation to the realities of American childhood in the 1980s; puppetry, animatronics and the materiality of VFX; traditions of gender performance and radical renditions of masculinity/femininity in animation; and how E.T. navigates the experience of loss and the ability to feel again.

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

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**