Fantasy/Animation

Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) (with Brian Attebery)

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**

Footnote #3 - Fantasy

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**

Fantasy/Animation supports the #UCUstrike

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.

Fantasy/Animation supports the #UCUstrike

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.

Lady and the Tramp (1955)

Tuck in for some Valentine’s Day spaghetti and meatballs as Chris and Alex chew on Walt Disney’s celebrated cel-animated love story Lady and the Tramp (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson & Hamilton Luske, 1955), a musical romance released in the mid-1950s and based on the 1945 Cosmopolitan magazine story “Happy Dan, The Cynical Dog” by Ward Greene. The studio’s first CinemaScope release and a film that coincided with the opening of Disneyland in California, Lady and Tramp is rife with context and offers a number of threads that speak to the landscape of Disney animation in the 1950s. Listen as discussion turns to the collision in Lady and the Tramp between a refined vs. rough animated style embodied by the film’s eponymous characters; its complex anthropomorphic register, and how the film’s many canine performances negotiate the meeting point of humanity with the animal through racial politics; caricature and the grotesque within character design, and the silhouetted and symbolic representation of affluence, class, wealth, power, and normalcy; connections between Disney’s feature and the Mammy Two Shoes figure from Tom & Jerry; the star voice of Peggy Lee and traditions of animated voicework; and how Lady and the Tramp reflects on the possible ‘threat’ of children in suburban America as part of its subversive and radical agenda. Bella Notte!

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

Footnote #2 - Animation

The first Fantasy/Animation Footnote Episode proper launches with this short discussion on the origins and genealogies of animation, from cave paintings and Victorian children’s toys to the lightning sketch tradition and the comic books. Over the course of 10 minutes, Chris and Alex offer a rapid quickfire journey through the many optical illusions of animation and the performance (and performativity) of the medium, including the spectacular vitality of characters and objects coming to life; the solidification of cel-animation as a viable economic industry in the U.S. during the 1940s; key studios and creative figureheads; silhouette, sand, and stop-motion animated movements; and the impact of digital technology on animation’s past, present, and future.

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

Rio (2011) (with Michael Tanzillo)

In this latest episode, Chris and Alex examine one of the most important animation companies of the last 20 years in Hollywood – Blue Sky Studios – who made significant contributions to the shape and direction of U.S. animation, and particularly the computer-animated film. Formed in February 1987 by animator Chris Wedge, the studio recently hit the headlines as they are now sadly in the past tense – The Walt Disney Company acquired Blue Sky as part of their 2019 purchase of 21st Century Fox and then, in February 2021, announced that Blue Sky would be shut down as an animation division. This episode looks back at Blue Sky’s 2011 computer-animated musical Rio (Carlos Saldanha, 2011) with special guest Michael Tanzillo, who worked as a Senior Lighting Technical Director at Blue Sky on a number of computer-animated films, including three of the Ice Age films (Dawn of the Dinosaurs in 2009; Continental Drift in 2012 and Collision Course in 2016), both Rio and its 2014 sequel, The Peanuts Movie (Steve Martino, 2015), Ferdinand (Carlos Saldanha, 2017), and Spies in Disguise (Nick Bruno & Troy Quane, 2019). He is also the co-author, with Jasmine Katatikarn, of the book Lighting For Animation: The Art of Visual Storytelling (2016), and co-founder of the Academy of Animated Arts, an online academy teaching the artistic side of Animation and VFX. Listen as the trio discuss Blue Sky’s origins and influences on twenty-first century Hollywood animation; the studio’s commercial work and early animated advertisements; the craft of 3D lighting in computer-animated films, and its foundational role in creating mood, volume, weight, and legibility; Rio’s two blue macaw protagonists (Blu and Jewel) and traditions of anthropomorphism; the film’s articulation of Brazilian culture through colour scripts and colour keys; lighting contrasts and the distinctions between ‘heroic’ and ‘villainous’ lighting; and what Rio’s sumptuous fantasy of light can tell us about sophisticated digital lighting as a storytelling device.

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

Footnote #1 - Introduction

Fantasy/Animation launches its new series of Footnote Episodes with this short introductory discussion that explains what to expect from these bonus fortnightly instalments, which will serve as brief ‘footnotes’ to the main podcast. Listen as Chris and Alex explain the form and function of these supplementary episodes that are intended to be an extra space where listeners can sharpen up on the definition of some key terms, ideas, and contexts related to the study of fantasy and animation. In addition to flagging up the importance of citational practices and how audiences might want to use these extra 10-minute episodes, they also reveal the ways that you can suggest your own topics or pose questions for the hosts to answer, whether this is elaborating on conversations that may have cropped up elsewhere in the Fantasy/Animation podcasts so far, or recommending emergent areas of fantasy and animation that you have encountered but which require additional focus. Get in touch via email, social media, or the website with your suggestions, and get footnoting!

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

See You Yesterday (2019) (with Ebony Elizabeth Thomas)

2022 kicks off with the provocative politics and violent tragedies of See You Yesterday (2019), the Netflix science-fiction feature about the time-travel adventures of two young scientific prodigies in Brooklyn. The special guest for this discussion on the stakes of temporality, the futility of breaking out of a cycle, and the immediacy of racialised trauma is Dr Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Associate Professor in the Division of Literacy, Culture, and International Education (University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education). Ebony has written and co-authored more than 25 articles and book chapters across numerous academic journals and edited volumes, and is also the author of Reading African American Experiences in the Obama Era: Theory, Advocacy, Activism (Peter Lang, 2012) and, most recently, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games (NYU Press, 2019). Topics for this episode include how director and co-writer Stefan Bristol plays with the erasure of timelines set against the backdrop of systemic police brutality and institutional violence; the exchange between computer graphics and black subjectivity in the pursuit of fantasy; nostalgia, progress, and the emotion of racialised bodies that are haunted by the replaying past; the film’s portrayal of childhood and discourses of black exceptionalism; narrative distinctions between ‘aspirational’ and ‘inspirational’ fantasies in the desperation of seeking change; and links between the racial dimension of puzzle films and the digitally-mediated and progressive (Capitalist) spectacle of Afrofuturism, and what happens when low-budget films such as See You Yesterday do not have have access to Hollywood’s VFX opulence.

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

Mickey‘s Christmas Carol (1983) (with Amy M. Davis)

For the 2021 Christmas special episode of the podcast, Chris and Alex turn to the short Mickey’s Christmas Carol (Burny Mattinson, 1983), the Walt Disney Studio’s cel-animated retelling of the Charles Dickens masterpiece directed and produced by longtime Disney storyboard artist Burny Mattinson. Joining them to discuss Disney’s cultural relationship to Christmas and its longstanding history of festive-themed productions starring its most beloved characters is Dr Amy M. Davis, Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Hull. Amy is the author of numerous books, articles and chapters on Disney and animation, including the monographs Good Girls & Wicked Witches: Women in Disney’s Feature Animation (2006) and Handsome Heroes & Vile Villains: Men in Disney’s Feature Animation (2013), and the recent edited anthology Discussing Disney (John Libbey Publishing, 2019). Listen as they discuss Disney’s synergistic company strategies when it comes to representing Christmas across its multimedia products; animated adaptations and what it means to ‘cast’ fantastical cartoon stars in recognisable roles; Disney, Dickens and even Mickey Mouse himself as master storytellers; the consistency of vocal performance across different iterations and phases of animated characters; the themeable nature of Mickey as he is ‘recostumed’ across time and space; and how Mickey’s Christmas Carol parallels the Mouse House’s relationship to the vault as an audiovisual archive given the cartoon’s heightened reflexivity and engagement with the audience’s media memory.

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