Fantasy/Animation

Treasure Planet (2002) (with Ron Clements and John Musker)

The 2002 Disney science-fiction epic Treasure Planet (Ron Clements & John Musker, 2002) is the focus of Episode 78 of the podcast, which looks at the melding together of the Disney formula with space fantasy in this swashbuckling adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 adventure novel Treasure Island. Joining Chris and Alex for this bumper episode are two very special guests: Ron Clements and John Musker, who aside from writing and directorial duties on Treasure Planet are known as a filmmaking duo absolutely central to the renaissance of Disney animation in the 1980s and 1990s. They are the writers and directors of a number of Disney feature films, including The Great Mouse Detective (1986), The Little Mermaid (1989), Aladdin (1992), Hercules (1997), The Princess and the Frog (2009) and Moana (2016), as well as Treasure Planet, the Mouse House’s 43rd animated feature film and one of the studio’s rare turns to the codes and conventions of science-fiction storytelling. Listen as they trace the industrial origins of Treasure Planet and the film’s initial pitching' to Disney chairman and chief executive Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Roy E. Disney and Thomas Schumacher; the evolution of the story from Ron and John’s early treatment to the first draft of the script; the nature of adaptation and the creative affordances of an animated re-telling; the ‘cyborgian’ identity of Treasure Planet in its combination of traditional technique and digital processing (including its use of the digital painting tool Deep Canvas), and where the film’s ethos of ’something old, something new’ sits in relation to the landscape of Hollywood animation of the 1990s; the creative contributions of animator Glen Keane to the development of John Silver; and remembering the ‘tough period’ for Disney Feature Animation that surrounded Treasure Planet’s 2002 release and subsequent lukewarm critical reception.

The Hunger Games (2012) (with Tarja Laine)

The first instalment of The Hunger Games (2012) franchise, directed by Gary Ross, provides the focus of Episode 77 of the podcast, which looks at the film’s connections to ethics, rationality and affect, and what structures our emotional engagement with its narrative of totalitarian systems and panoptic visions. Joining Chris and Alex to examine the immersive world of Panem is Dr Tarja Laine, Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the University of Amsterdam and author of the new monograph Emotional Ethics of The Hunger Games (2021), as well as the books Bodies in Pain: Emotion and the Cinema of Darren Aronofsky (2015), Feeling Cinema: Emotional Dynamics in Film Studies (2011) and Shame and Desire: Emotion, Intersubjectivity, Cinema (2007). Listen as they discuss the politics of spectacle, and what it means for Young Adult Fiction to ‘do’ philosophical and ethical enquiry; narrative focalisation and the difference between subjectivity (style), allegiance (narrative) and alignment (ethics); how The Hunger Games invites an ethical engagement through fear, shame and hope; the economy of worldbuilding, structures of myth and how this relates to the fluctuations of character knowledge; how notions of ‘looking’ ultimately prevent access into interiority; and what the mediatised nature of The Hunger Games has to say the contemporary era of social media, where individuals must forge their being and identity in a world in which they are constantly seen and scrutinised.

Avatar (2009) (with Rupert Read)

The politics and proxies of James Cameron’s 2009 blockbuster Avatar provide the focus for Chris and Alex in Episode 76, as they plug into Pandora to make sense of the relationships between the film’s ecological sensibilities and its technological prowess. Joining them is Rupert Read, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia who specialises in everything from the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to the contemporary climate crisis. Rupert was also a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion (authoring the 2020 book Extinction Rebellion: Insights from the Inside), and was a Green Party councillor from 2004-2011 (having stood for both national parliamentary and European elections). Topics for this episode include Avatar’s anti-imperialist message and discourses of the post-racial in Obama’s America; racial passing, the politics of motion-capture and what Cameron’s reflexive puppet show says about the ‘state of the art’; fantasies of control, surrogacy, perception and the trust we place in (digital) bodies; blurred formal and stylistic distinctions between live-action/humanity and CG/Na’vi; the act of ‘reverse anthropology’ and Avatar’s claims for the power of ancient wisdoms; the awe of 3D technologies, the meaning of spectacle and links to ritualistic communal viewing experiences; digital farms, new media culture and human/machine connectivity; the material, mineral dimension of our own media consumption and creation, and the carbon footprint of digital backlots; and how in asking what we as spectators are going to do to ‘wake up’, Avatar invites us into a very real politics of ecology and activism.

Chicken Run (2000) (with Lynn Ferguson)

For Episode 75, Chris and Alex revisit the work of Aardman Animations, taking a look at their debut feature film Chicken Run (Peter Lord & Nick Park, 2000), whose narrative of meat pies and morality remains underwritten by the Bristol-based studio’s signature stop-motion style and very British sense of anarchy. Joining them for this discussion of the art of poultry-in-motion is Chicken Run’s very own Mac, the loveable Scottish genius engineer chicken voiced by writer, actress, and story coach and consultant Lynn Ferguson. Listen as the discussion turns to the Aardman community and how it functions within both industrial and narrative contexts; Chicken Run’s tempering of the epic, and the spectacle of table-top production; vocal performance (in both animated features and video games), and the need to give audio ‘angles’ to the animator; notions of Scottishness, discourses of nationality and fantasy storytelling; the power of ‘revolting’ animation and collectivities of rebellion and resistance; and pop singer Chesney Hawkes.

WandaVision (2021)

In this latest episode, Chris and Alex sit down with the Disney+ series WandaVision (Jac Schaeffer, 2021), a spectacular fantasy of U.S. television history that continues the citational practices and narrative complexities of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, yet does so by working through the industrial, cultural and stylistic lexicon of the sitcom. Topics for discussion in this episode include the reflexive gestures made by WandaVision to canonical American television, from mid-century staples I Love Lucy (Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz, 1951-1957), Bewitched (Sol Saks, 1964-1972) and I Dream of Jeannie (Sidney Sheldon, 1965-1970) to contemporary hits like Malcolm in the Middle (Linwood Boomer, 2000-2006) and Modern Family (Christopher Lloyd & Steven Levitan, 2009-2020); how the animated title sequences (that recall graphic traditions of the Hanna Barbera studio) fit in with the series’ rhetoric of self-consciousness; distinctions between the ‘complex’ and the ‘complicated’ when it comes to serial narrative engagement; emotional catharsis and Wanda’s ontology as a television ‘showrunner’, including her reconstruction of identity when trapped in a small-screen format of her own making; questions of nostalgia and audience appeal; and what WandaVision as an audiovisual product says about Marvel’s own potential future in relation to television programming.

Arrival (2016) (with William Brown)

Episode 73 reaches deep into the science, spaces and squids of Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016), the recent science-fiction feature starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner, and based on Ted Chiang’s 1998 short story “Story of Your Life.” Joining Chris and Alex to discuss this atmospheric subversion of the sci-fi genre is Dr William Brown, Independent Scholar and Honorary Fellow at the University of Roehampton whose research expertise focuses on contemporary digital and new media, posthumanism, critical race theory, and film-philosophy. William is the author of numerous monographs, book chapters and articles related to popular cinema, media convergence and digital filmmaking - from eye tracking technologies to motion capture - and his latest collection is The Squid Cinema From Hell: Kinoteuthis Infernalis and the Emergence of Chthulumedia (co-authored with David H. Fleming) (2020). Listen as they chat about the earthly (squids, octopi, cuttlefish) and extraterrestrial cephalopods that have populated the history of cinema; the cephalopodan qualities of the digital and the tentacular reach of the virtual camera; the gaseous, cloudy spectacle of chromophoric display as it manifests throughout Arrival’s army of Heptapods; discourses of racial otherness and the gendering of so-called ‘squid cinema’; narrative, linearity, duration and the film’s fantastical relationship with/to time; Felix the Cat, ‘soft beings’ and the animator’s desire for control of the animated ink; how Villeneuve evokes the Rorschach stain through Arrival’s chaos of plasma, and how this feeds into the cultural and political plasticity of black bodies; and why, in the end, it all comes back to tentacles.

Grave of the Fireflies (1988) (with Alex Dudok de Wit)

Chris and Alex continue their discussions of Studio Ghibli for Episode 72 with a look at animated war feature Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata, 1988), a film that was initially released as a double bill with partner My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988). Telling the story of teenage boy Seita and his younger sister Setsuko who, after fleeing the city of Kobe, must navigate the public horrors and personal traumas of World War II, Grave of the Fireflies offers a graphic and emotional portrait of conflict and society through the isolation and struggle experienced by the siblings. Joining the podcast this week to discuss the film’s potent political message is Alex Dudok de Wit, Associate Editor at Cartoon Brew, freelance journalist (including work for the BFI/Sight and Sound) and author of the upcoming BFI Film Classic on Grave of the Fireflies (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). Listen as the trio examine the historical, political and artistic contexts for the film, and its important place within the Ghibli canon; the cartoon short tradition and wartime propaganda in both the U.S. and Japan; pacing, rhetoric and the narrative framing of Grave of the Fireflies through fantasy and subjectivity; ghostliness, death and the afterlife, and what the pull between naturalism and fantasy means for the film’s tragedy; the interplay between the fantastical elements of Takahata’s film and its anti-war sentiment; the possible narrative judgment of Seita’s actions and protection of Setsuko; and how Grave of the Fireflies opens up questions about the many relationships between animation and politics, and what it means for popular animation to ‘do’ political enquiry.

Dark (2017-2020) (with Nicolas Leu)

Twisting and travelling back and forth (and then back again) is Episode 71 of the podcast, which has Chris and Alex visit the fictional German town of Winden for Dark (Baran bo Odar & Jantje Friese, 2017-2020), Netflix’s hugely successful science-fiction series that tells the story of supernatural activity and conspiracy set against the backdrop of interconnected family trees and time-space conundrums. Joining them is the programme’s VFX Production Supervisor Nicolas Leu, whose film and television work beyond Dark as part of the RISE Visual Effects Studio also includes Game of Thrones (David Benioff & D.B. Weiss, 2011-2019), Marvel features Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Anthony Russo & Joe Russo, 2014) and Doctor Strange (Scott Derrickson, 2016), Creed (Ryan Coogler, 2015), The Fate of the Furious (F. Gary Gray, 2017), American Renegades (Steven Quale, 2017), and Dumbo (Tom Burton, 2019). Listen as they discuss Dark’s landmark status as Netflix’s first German-language series; digital compositing as an industrial process with the VFX production pipeline; forms of ‘digital chaos’ as a way of thinking through both Dark’s narrative of doubling and causality, but also its layering of live-action/CG spaces; the materality and black matter of time travel; and what Dark has to say about how what it means to ‘do’ science through fiction via a fiction that is, itself, scientific.

Space Jam (1996) (with Paul Wells)

Chris and Alex take to the basketball court for a sports-themed instalment of the podcast by looking at Space Jam (Joe Pytka, 1996), the part-animated, part-Michael Jordan sports comedy that has lots to say about the spectacle of stylistic hybridity, animation’s longstanding relationship to sport, and nostalgia via its many callbacks to Golden Age Hollywood cartooning all through the lens of NBA basketball. Joining them for Episode 70 is Professor Paul Wells, who is Director of the Animation Academy at Loughborough University, as well as being an internationally established scholar, screenwriter and director, working across and within both academia and industry contexts. Paul’s work has been central to the study, practice and research of animation as a field, and he has also written and directed numerous projects for theatre, radio, television and film. Listen as they discuss Space Jam as a laboratory for thinking about sport as a social metaphor for how societies should run; animation’s status as controlled drama (versus the unscripted nature of sport); notions of the professional versus the amateur in relation to sport’s rules, codes and conventions; the cultural practice of stars Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny, and their ability to act as ciphers for the contemporary moment; how the medium provides a version of ‘perfect motion’ through its excessive lyricism; the politics of race and what Space Jam tells us about black identities and whiteness through its black musical vernacular; and how Joe Pytka’s film reveals how animation can manage the very metaphors of sport.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) (with Helen O'Hara)

Following our take on Star Wars: The Force Awakens (J.J. Abrams, 2015), the next instalment in the new Star Wars trilogy gets the Fantasy/Animation treatment for Episode 69, as Chris and Alex (and the Force) battle through Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Rian Johnson, 2017) to talk about its gender politics, questions of fandom and the film’s narrative of resistance, rebellion and struggle for power. Joining them for this celebration of contemporary Hollywood science-fiction is film critic and journalist Helen O’Hara, editor-at-large of Empire film magazine, and author of the book The Ultimate Superhero Movie Guide (2020) and the recent Women vs. Hollywood: The Fall And Rise Of Women In Film (2021). Listen as they discuss the ambivalent reception of Rian Johnson’s film, elements of its critical backlash, and how reviewers saw its vexed relationship to the Star Wars legacy; fan communities, gatekeeping and gender; the case of Kelly Marie Tran and the changing face of popular franchise cinema; how the film navigates themes of energy, force and balance ably supported by digital VFX and more ‘grounded’ effects technologies to create ‘lived in’ environments; sci-fi worldbuilding and the ‘incompleteness’ of fictional realms; Carrie Fisher as star, and the power of aging bodies that move through time (and space); and the central contradictions of Kylo Ren that enables The Last Jedi to question what it means to turn your back on genealogy.