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 Apr 25, 2022
Monday Apr 25, 2022
Footnote #5 seeks to embrace the sub-division of fantasy literature through distinctions of “high” and “low,” whereby the era of post-Tolkien fantasy was culturally and critically understood through the identification of the genre’s specific storytelling modes. Listen as Chris and Alex (well, mostly Alex) give a rundown of the role of alternative worlds and mythic tropes used in such divisions; sword-and-sorcery genre elements, folkloric imagery, and character archetypes; how such categories relate to the evolving language of fantasy scholarship, including the criteria for “immersive” and “intrusive” fantasies; and the political stakes of both identifying and splintering fantasy through the overlapping categories of “high” and “low.”
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
Monday Apr 18, 2022
Monday Apr 18, 2022
Episode 95 is a special Fantasy/Animation double header, with two recent computer-animated films up for discussion as Chris and Alex look into the stories and symbols of contemporary Ukrainian animation - the country’s first 3D CG film The Dragon Spell (Manuk Depoyan, 2016) based on the stories of Ukrainian writer Anton Siyanika, and The Stolen Princess (Oleg Malamuzh, 2018), a fantasy that adapts the fairytale Ruslan and Ludmila by Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin. This week’s instalment features as its guest an expert in the politics and aesthetics of modern Russia and the Soviet Union, Dr Joshua First, who is Croft Associate Professor of History and International Studies at the University of Mississippi. Joshua’s work includes the monograph Ukrainian Cinema: Belonging and Identity during the Soviet Thaw (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015) and Sergei Paradjanov: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (London: Intellect, 2016), as well as a number of articles on the visual cultures of Eastern Europe. Listen as they discuss Ukrainian history post-Soviet Union and The Revolution of Dignity; how such historical moments open up the Ukraine’s reclamation of pan-European/Russian mythologies; notions of recovery, the politics of recognition, and how stories can impose the image of a nation; the interdisciplinary status and activist potential of ‘useful’ animation; the ‘Frozenification’ of the computer-animated fairytale; and how both The Dragon Spell and The Stolen Princess offer fantasy worlds that reflexively provide folkloric understandings of what Ukrainian animation might be.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**This episode was produced and edited by Leon Waldo**
Monday Apr 11, 2022
Monday Apr 11, 2022
In Footnote #4, Chris and Alex unpack the uncanny spectacle and affecting effects of stop-motion animation, from understanding the hands-on labour that crafts its illusions of life to the oneiric ‘stopped-motion’ worlds of Ladislas Starevich, Willis O’Brien, Ray Harryhausen, Jan Švankmajer, and the Quay Brothers. Listen as they spend 10 minutes working through the European found object tradition; the use of stop-motion as part of the armoury of Hollywood effects technology; the power of awarding objects and puppets sudden sentience; Aardman’s contemporary ‘claymation’ and the work of the LAIKA Studios; and the broader accessibility of stop-motion as a popular technique of animation.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
Monday Apr 04, 2022
Monday Apr 04, 2022
Chris and Alex finally talk about Bruno (among other things) in this latest episode of the podcast, turning to the fantasy and family of Encanto (Byron Howard & Jared Bush, 2021), Disney Feature Animation’s computer-animated musical that tells the story of the magical Madrigal family via protagonist Mirabel, ably supported by lush visuals, colourful abstractions, and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s score inspired by the vallenato, cumbia, bambuco and rock en español genres. Joining them for Episode 94 is Dolores Tierney, Professor of Film at the University of Sussex and an expert in the aesthetics and politics of transnational imaging practices between Latin America, the U.S. and Spain. Topics up for examination this week include the film’s rhetoric of ‘authenticity’ with regards to Colombian representation; the growing role played by family and community in contemporary Disney Feature Animation; the maligning of Latin America within Trump-era politics; Encanto’s narrative and aesthetic links to Pixar’s Coco (Lee Unkrich, 2017) via engagements with Classical Mexican cinema and the influence on the film of Latin American telenovas; the portrayal of Colombian culture and how animation can navigate the ‘touristic’ gaze; the importance of the quotidian in magical realist storytelling; and what Encanto has to say about the relationship between individuality and exceptionalism.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**This episode was produced and edited by Leon Waldo**
Monday Mar 28, 2022
Monday Mar 28, 2022
A short note on the ongoing strike action currently happening across a number of UK Higher Education Institutions over devastating cuts to pensions and deteriorating pay and working conditions. More information about the strikes can be found by visiting the UCU website: www.ucu.org.uk.
Monday Mar 21, 2022
Monday Mar 21, 2022
A short note on the ongoing strike action currently happening across a number of UK Higher Education Institutions over devastating cuts to pensions and deteriorating pay and working conditions. More information about the strikes can be found by visiting the UCU website: www.ucu.org.uk.
Monday Mar 14, 2022
Monday Mar 14, 2022
Myth, magic, and technology take to the skies in Episode 93 of the podcast, with Howl’s Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki, 2004) providing a welcome return to the steampunk spectacle and metamorphic marvels of Japanese anime. Joining Chris and Alex to examine Studio Ghibli’s 2004 feature film fantasy of flight is Professor Brian Attebery, writer and professor of English at Idaho State University, who took over as editor of the Journal of the Fantastic in Arts in 2006, and is also a prolific author whose seminal work encompasses all things fantasy literary, history, and storytelling. Listen as they discuss the director Hayao Miyazaki’s careful combination of provincial communities with (anti-)war themes and adolescent activity; voicework in anime and how specific casting practices feed into the film’s juvenile feminine perspectives; the exchange between gender and unruliness; the film’s play with verticality and flight, and what it means politically to look down as well as up; and the instability of Howl’s Moving Castle’s fictional world, and what this says about the challenges of trying to belong in places and spaces that continually change.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
Monday Mar 07, 2022
Monday Mar 07, 2022
Chris and Alex talk all things fantasy in this second Fantasy/Animation Footnote Episode, following-up their discussion of animation with a rapid journey through fantasy from Aristotle and European enlightenment through to J. R. R. Tolkien and Mary Poppins. In just 10 minutes, Alex works through fantasy’s relationship to genre theory alongside the non-generic ways of thinking about fantasy as a highly nebulous mode of storytelling and (unstable) iconography; the ‘blockbustering’ of fantasy in contemporary popular cinema; and fantasy’s intrinsic pleasures of wonder and impossibility.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
Monday Feb 28, 2022
Monday Feb 28, 2022
A short note on the ongoing strike action currently happening across a number of UK Higher Education Institutions over devastating cuts to pensions and deteriorating pay and working conditions. More information about the strikes can be found by visiting the UCU website: www.ucu.org.uk.
Monday Feb 21, 2022
Monday Feb 21, 2022
A short note on the ongoing strike action currently happening across a number of UK Higher Education Institutions over devastating cuts to pensions and deteriorating pay and working conditions. More information about the strikes can be found by visiting the UCU website: www.ucu.org.uk.