Fantasy/Animation

Willow (Ron Howard, 1988)

Alex fulfils something of a lifelong dream in Episode 109 in that he finally gets a chance to talk about the mythology and magic of Willow (Ron Howard, 1988) for the Fantasy/Animation podcast, albeit with Chris alongside him as relative novice to its world of prophecies, sorcery, and high fantasy storytelling. Listen as they discuss the film’s broader liminal status within traditions of both fantasy and animation that anchor it very much to Hollywood cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, including its place on the cusp of industry turns towards digital VFX imagery and the evolution of a particular kind of fantasy away from ‘wonder’ films towards spectacular ‘frontier’ blockbusters. Topics include Willow’s use of practical effects and the role of George Lucas (as Executive Producer) in relation to emergent digital VFX technologies; the Computer Graphics Lab, Lucasfilm, and the spectacle of cinema’s first ‘digital morph’; the film’s perceived failure and the blacklisting of high fantasy in U.S. cinema; narrative and thematic links to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (2001-2003), including the use of location shooting in New Zealand; disabled representation, and how Willow navigates the complex issues of ableism and exceptionalism; and what Ron Howard’s film has to say about the enchanting powers of magic and trickery both on and offscreen.

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

Footnote #18 - Studio Ghibli (with Susan Napier)

The latest Footnote episode of the podcast sees the return of Professor Susan Napier (Goldthwaite Professor of Rhetoric, International Literary and Cultural Studies at Tufts University), who straight from her guest turn on Chris and Alex’s discussion of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2002) chats about the animated works and philosophy of Studio Ghibli. Listen as they examine Studio Ghibli’s contribution to global animation history and their vexed industrial and creative relationship to the Walt Disney Studio; the multimedia reach of the company and its turn to theatrical stage shows and theme parks; the methodological fascination of Ghibli given their synonymy with Japanese anime (and how they differ from other representational traditions within the animated medium); and how the aesthetics and narratives of Studio Ghibli’s feature films are the bearers of high levels of love, detail, and the magic of artistic creation.

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

Spirited Away (2001) (with Susan Napier)

Episode 108 returns Chris and Alex once more to the world of Japanese anime as they look at the images of displacement, gluttony, and labour in Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001), perhaps the flagship Studio Ghibli animated feature and a film that won the 2003 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Special guest for this instalment is Professor Susan Napier (Goldthwaite Professor of Rhetoric, International Literary and Cultural Studies at Tufts University) whose work spans the history and theory of Japanese animation as well as issues of gender, science-fiction, and fantasy. Susan is also the author of a number of monographs and essays on both fantasy and animation, from The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature: The Subversion of Modernity (1996) and Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Japanese Animation (2005) to the recent Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art (2018). Topics for this episode includes tropes of the ‘portal quest’ narrative within fantasy storytelling, and child protagonist Chihiro’s quest to both ‘escape’ and ‘prove’ her identity; distinctions between human and spirit worlds that permit an interrogation of modern society’s capitalist consumptions and expenditures; the animated representation of cleanliness and disgust, including the portrayal of food; and how Spirited Away navigates spectators through the uneven, ambivalent, and transformative fantasy space of childhood.

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

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**