Fantasy/Animation

Roobarb (and Custard) (1974) (with Birgitta Hosea)

The anarchy and artistry of British television animation provides the springboard for Episode 58 of the Fantasy/Animation podcast, which welcomes London-based media artist, animator and curator Professor Birgitta Hosea (who is also the Director of the Animation Research Centre at the University for the Creative Arts) to talk about Roobarb (Grange Calveley, 1974) directed by English animator Bob Godfrey. Godfrey’s particular connections to the UCA (he established the Animation course at the university back in 1969) were the subject of the recent Cartoon Animation - Satire and Subversion event earlier this year that examined the animated medium’s more radical histories through Godfrey’s surrealistic and pointed creations. For this episode, listen as Chris and Alex join with Birgitta to identify Godfrey’s particular relationship to political cartoons in Britain, notwithstanding his marginal and underrated status within animation history. Other topics include the honesty and transformative energy of cel-animation embodied in the programme’s streaky, “boiling” aesthetic; the importance of white cartoon space within the visual style of Roobarb, and how this connects to traditions of overdetermining/underdetermining with fantasy storytelling; questions of imperfection in relation to the very technology of drawing; the power of Richard Briers’ voiceover and anthropomorphic characterisation; and what Calveley’s cartoon tells us about the way self-reflexivity can - and does - operate in the animated fantasy.

***To donate to The Bob Godfrey Collection, please click here***

Rango (2011) (with Neil Brand)

Performer, composer, silent film accompanist and television presenter Neil Brand is the special guest joining Chris and Alex for Episode 57 of the podcast, which celebrates the musical beats and Mariachi owls of Rango (Gore Verbinski, 2011). Listen as they discuss how this curious 2011 computer-animated film revels in the power of telling tales alongside its broader relationship to folk ballads; Rango’s cinephilic evocation of canonical Hollywood Westerns and U.S. cinema history; themes of ambition, isolation, and aimlessness, and how this ties into a film whose existentialist narrative is predicated on the question of inevitability; Rango’s musical score that functions as a bridge between landscape and character; and what Gore Verbinski’s film tells us about what audiences might want from contemporary fantasy/animation (namely highly sophisticated anarchy rather than structures that organise, and a fantasy better realised onscreen that we can ever imagine!).

Bright (David Ayer, 2017)

The latest Listeners’ Choice episode sees Chris and Alex turn to Netflix and the much-maligned yet curiously provocative feature film Bright (David Ayer, 2017), whose narrative of racism, police corruption and latent magical forces is set against the backdrop of an alternate fantasy vision of contemporary Los Angeles. With a budget of $90 million, Ayer’s social discourse via fantasy (the script was written by Max Landis) was critically-derided despite being Netflix’s most downloaded feature within its first week of release. There is certainly much to say about Bright’s heavy use of metaphor that points a number of fingers at systemic violence and racial hegemony through themes of respect, tolerance and acceptance. Listen as the discussion in Episode 56 takes in Bright’s evocation of Hollywood buddy movie story structures and the popular police procedural; categories of the fantastic, the allegoric and the parodic, and how allegory functions as a deconstructive impulse against fantasy’s pursuit of reconstruction; the depiction of Elftown and the film’s portrayal of whiteness; Orc clan politics, Will Smith’s racial coding and the role of the Other; and how Bright offers a complicated - and, at times, highly uneven - possible world that presents its modern urban fantasy setting as a social class commentary.

Hugo (2011) (with Eric Smoodin)

Chris and Alex dust off their knowledge of early film history for Episode 55 as they examine Martin Scorsese’s adventure Hugo (2011), a playful mystery set in 1930s Paris that takes audiences through the special effects and spectacular stagecraft of pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès. Joining Chris and Alex amid the architecture of the Gare Montparnasse is Eric Smoodin, Professor of American Studies and Cinema and Technocultural Studies at the University of California, who has published monographs and edited collections on Walt Disney, Frank Capra and Hollywood film history, as well as a new book Paris in the Dark: Going to the Movies in the City of Light, 1930–1950 (Duke University Press, 2020) that sketches a picture of French film culture of the 1930s and 1940s. Listen as they situate Hugo within the history of cine-clubs, cinéphile subcultures and local exhibition practices of early twentieth-century Paris; the significance of Méliès as a filmmaker within the entwined genealogies of fantasy and animation; the pleasures of digital artificiality and VFX fakery in Scorsese’s historical depiction of the French capital; the intertextual invitations made by the film to the spectatorial experience; the interrelationship between cinema as a machine, animation, and the automaton; and how Hugo offers a lavish - if highly imagined and typically conservative - 3D vision of early filmgoing as a powerful unifying force.

Watchmen (2009) (with Drew Morton)

In an alternate 1985, Chris and Alex sit down to watch the recent comic book feature film Watchmen (Zach Snyder, 2009), a neo-noir/superhero blockbuster that adapts the popular DC Comics series for the big screen. They are joined in this Cold War-era tale of Soviet Union-United States relations by Dr Drew Morton, Associate Professor of Mass Communication at Texas A&M University, Texarkana, and author of Panel to the Screen: Style, American Film, and Comic Books During the Blockbuster Era (University Press of Mississippi, 2016), as well as a number of articles and chapters on motion comics, media convergence and comic book adaptation. Topics up for discussion in Episode 54 include Watchmen’s pivotal place within Hollywood comic book feature films of the 2000s; formal issues in adaptation and the graphic decompression of time and space; digital technology and the spectacle of Baroque aesthetics (including director Zach Snyder’s balletic slow-motion visual style); the film’s depiction of psychologically repressed superheroes and noir-esque vigilantism; and how Watchmen presents a crucial case study for thinking about the movement of media products within a broader transmedia flow.

Pan's Labyrinth (2006) (with Deborah Shaw)

Episode 53 journeys into the irregular and twisting world of Spanish fantasy cinema, with Chris and Alex joined in their discussion of Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006) by Deborah Shaw, Professor of Film and Screen Studies at the University of Portsmouth, and a specialist in Latin American cinema whose publications include The Three Amigos: The Transnational Filmmaking of Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Alfonso Cuarón (Manchester University Press, 2013), as well as the edited collections The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and Latin American Women Filmmakers: Production, Politics, Poetics (I. B. Tauris, 2017). Topics up for examination this episode include the potency and power of the film’s national-historical setting, and its knotted relationship with the perennial allegory of Fascism; the narrative role of magic and belief within the construction of villainy and antagonism; the ‘monstrosity’ of Guillermo del Toro’s VFX and the formal style of its monstrous aesthetics; the rhythmical dimension of how del Toro treats time, chronology and history; and the global circulation of Pan’s Labyrinth that is enabled by its palatable mainstream vocabulary of CGI and populist effects imagery.

Persepolis (2007)

For the first in a special series of listener selections, Episode 52 has Chris and Alex get to grips with Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi, 2007), taking inspiration from social media suggestions that were submitted around the broader theme of diversity and inclusion. Adapted from Marjane Satrapi’s own autobiographical graphic novels Persepolis and Persepolis 2 (originally published in November 2000), Persepolis provides a stark - and often humorous - depiction of national trauma told through Marji’s own experience as she navigates the Iranian Revolution and overthrow of the Shah regime and Pahlavi dynasty; is exiled to Austria, before returning to Iran where she marries (and divorces); and climaxes with her arrival into France. Listen as Chris and Alex discuss Persepolis’ vexed relationship to the animated documentary (and its critical categorisation); discourses of Orientalism and the depiction of intrusive Western culture; the ambivalence of animated space and the black-and-white style of the film’s comic book aesthetic; how Persepolis might be understood as an example of the “dark fantastic”; and what Paronnaud and Satrapi’s film tells us about animation’s wider ability to bear the weight of social reality,

Beetlejuice (1988) (with Jingan Young)

Episode 51 travels back to the late-1980s to look closely at Beetlejuice (Tim Burton, 1988), a film that uses stop-motion, practical effects, prosthetics, make-up and bluescreen to complete its fantasy story of netherworlds, outsiderdom and life after death. Joining Chris and Alex is special guest Jingan Young, playwright, screenwriter, journalist and academic who is the editor of ‘Foreign Goods’ (the first collection of British Chinese plays published in the UK) and a regular contributor to The Guardian and Hong Kong Free Press, who has recently completed a PhD in Film Studies at King’s College London. Listen as they discuss the tonally abrasive qualities of Tim Burton’s film and its shifts into haunted house horror; narratives of conquest, and how this connects to Beetlejuice’s take on white privilege and U.S. national identity; Michael Keaton’s performance and the figure of the trickster; the racialised use of music and questions of neo-minstrelsy; and how the film’s satirical-political edge gives the animated fantasy a bit of extra bite.

Princess Mononoke (1997) (with Rayna Denison)

For the podcast’s half century, Chris and Alex tackle a tale of rising tensions between nature and culture, gods and humans, by looking at Studio Ghibli’s animated fantasy feature Princess Mononoke (Hayao Miyazaki, 1997). Joining us in this battle of tradition and modernity is anime scholar Dr Rayna Denison, Senior Lecturer in the School of Art, Media and American Studies at UEA, and author and editor of a number of books, chapters and articles on Japanese animated cinema. These include Anime: A Critical Introduction (2015) and, more recently, an anthology of essays on Princess Mononoke (2018). Listen as they discuss the exchange between the supernatural and historical fantasy (including the film’s dialogue with jidai-geki period cinema); the framing of fantasy as a form of intrusive modernity to identify threats to the magic of nature made by industrialisation; the formal overlaps between director Hayao Miyazaki and filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu through their stylistic evocation of the environment; ferocious female representation and the depiction of gendered labour; Princess Mononoke’s relationship to traditions of narrative ‘thinning’ within fantasy storytelling; and how the film’s use of digital imagery (including its application of the ‘Toonshader’ software) can be used to understand Studio Ghibli’s ambivalent relationship to computer graphics during the 1990s.

(Bonus) Q&A with Graham Humphreys (Live from Portsmouth Bookfest)

Recorded live at the Portsmouth Bookfest on Tuesday 25th February 2020, this bonus episode of the podcast has Alex flying solo as he interviews artist and illustrator Graham Humphreys, best known for designing the iconic film posters for horror features The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1981) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984). Tune in to hear Graham reflect on his forty years of experience working in graphic illustration as one of the UK’s celebrated poster artists, and introduce his new book Hung, Drawn and Executed (2019) that collects together his artwork, paintings, drawings and colour studies.