Fantasy/Animation

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**

Gremlins (1984) (with Catherine Lester)

Mogwai and monsters after midnight are the focus of Episode 88, as Chris and Alex take a closer look at the part-horror, part-Christmas feature Gremlins (Joe Dante, 1984) with special guest Dr Catherine Lester, Lecturer in Film and Television in the Department of Film and Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. Catherine’s work focuses largely on the intersections between children’s culture and the horror genre, and she is the author of Horror Films for Children: Fear and Pleasure in American Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2021), and several articles on popular animation and children’s horror cinema. She is also currently putting together an edited collection on the controversial animated film Watership Down (Martin Rosen, 1978), based on the The Legacy of Watership Down: Animals, Adaptation, Animation conference held in 2018. Topics for this episode include the fuzziness of children’s horror as a critical category, and how the genre itself has traditionally understood the role and presence of the child figure; the industrial impact of Gremlins within North American cinema and the subsequent introduction of the new PG-13 rating; the implications of horror, fear and monstrosity for theorising the child spectator; the materiality of the film’s animatronic effects and how this connects to a 1980s context of consumerism and merchandising; the citational practices made by director Joe Dante and screenwriter Chris Columbus towards popular Hollywood film history (particularly its reference to Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and evocations of film noir); animation’s potential role in exaggerating, diluting and modulating horrific content; and what Gremlins might have to say about the suitability of horror’s dominant tropes when presented to - and (re)framed for - children.

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

Chinese Animation and the Shanghai Animation Film Studio (1956-1988) (with Yuanyuan Chen)

For Episode 87, Chris and Alex are joined by special guest Dr Yuanyuan Chen, who teaches animation history and theory at Ulster University, for this brief introduction to Chinese animation and the work of the pioneering Shanghai Animation Film Studio. From propagandist impulses and opera traditions to Chinese state politics and painterly aesthetic styles, the complex history of Chinese animation and its more recent iterations are reflected in this cross-section of contemporary examples, which all serve to highlight the creativity of the Shanghai Animation Film Studio and its influential filmmakers. Listen as the trio discuss The Conceited General (Te Wei & Li Keruo, 1956), a colourful yet damning treatment of leadership and pomposity; the comedic Three Monks (A Da, 1980) based on a Chinese proverb, and an early short within China’s rebirth following the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s; A Deer of Nine Colours (Qian Jiajun & Dai Tielang, 1981), another adaptation, this time based on the Buddhist Jataka tale and replete with optical effects that communicates the spirituality of nature; the modernist simplicity and biting satire of modern China in Super Soap (A Da, 1986) and The New Doorbell (A Da, 1986) with their shared narrative of the dangers of ‘supply and demand’; and the lyrical Feeling from Mountain and Water (Te Wei, 1988), whose ink wash and shan shui style is the perfect accompaniment to its story of two travellers and their close master/student relationship.

The Secret of NIMH (1982)

The result of our latest social media poll charting listeners’ favourite Don Bluth animated film yields the focus of Episode 86, where Chris and Alex uncover The Secret of NIMH (Don Bluth, 1982), the filmmaker’s very first animated feature and one that would set the template for his tone and style to follow. Following up their recent episode on The Land Before Time (Don Bluth, 1988), listen as they sit down to discuss the mechanical vs. the magical in the way Bluth constructs his detailed animated world; the metonymic representation of humanity and questions of scale; the film’s reflexive treatment of anthropomorphic (even therianthropic) characters by folding the nature/culture divide common to anthropomorphs into its narrative of animal testing and experimentation; gender and motherhood in the film’s portrayal of heroine Mrs. Brisby; the industrial and aesthetic hybridity of Bluth as a filmmaker caught between established animated traditions and formulae; connections between The Secret of NIMH and High Fantasy filmmaking of the period (including the work of counter-cultural animator Ralph Bakshi); and Bluth’s seismic impact on Disney animation and his influence on the studio’s subsequent shift in narrative during its ‘dark ages’ of the 1980s.

Lovecraft Country (2020) (with Bambi Haggins)

Episode 85 discusses the recent HBO horror television series Lovecraft Country (2020), developed by Misha Green as a continuation of Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel, and places the story of 1950s racial segregation in the United States on a collision course with the science-fiction world of H.P. Lovecraft. Joining Chris and Alex for this latest episode is Dr Bambi Haggins, Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine whose work explores race, class, gender and sexuality in American comedy across media and television history. She is also the author of Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America (2007), while her current book project, Still Laughing, Still Black examines how Black comedy, culture and reception in the new millennium reflect, refract and reveal the necessity and the power of Black comic discourse and survival laughter since 2008. Listen as the trio discuss structuring relationships within Lovecraft Country between identity, race and imagination; the stakes of the programme’s application and reworking of ‘Lovecraftian’ imagery within an oppressive Jim Crow setting; discourses of reconstruction and restoration within both digital VFX post-production work and post-Civil War America; the (re)centring of blackness and the ambivalent power of whiteness as it manifests across the series’ performances; the CGI Cthulu creatures (Shoggoths) that are central to the programme’s allegorical treatment of Black survival and fear; and how Lovecraft Country uses generic hybridity and the threat of fantasy to engage with a narrative of a racial reckoning.

Shrek 2 (2004) (with Sam Summers)

Episode 84 takes a trip for the first time to the computer-animated efforts of the DreamWorks Animation studio, often viewed as Disney and Pixar’s commercial rival but whose features frequently offer a biting satirical revision of the narrative and stylistic formulae of these renowned animation heavyweights. For this latest episode on Shrek 2 (Andrew Adamson, Kelly Asbury & Conrad Vernon, 2004), Chris and Alex’s special guest is Dr Sam Summers, Associate Lecturer at Middlesex University and author of the recent DreamWorks Animation: Intertextuality and Aesthetics in Shrek and Beyond (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Sam is also the co-editor of a collection Toy Story: How Pixar Reinvented the Animated Feature (London: Bloomsbury, 2018) and - alongside journalist Ben Travis - co-host of the Disniversity podcast that offers a crash course through the history of Disney's animated classics. Listen as they discuss Shrek 2 and its industrial and aesthetic place within DreamWorks’ animated canon, and its relationship to Hollywood’s computer-animated film landscape more broadly; star voices and ‘presentational’ performances that contribute to the film’s layering of intrusive anachronism; the combination of medieval fairytale fantasy tropes with California culture; tensions between Shrek 2’s anti-Disney sentiment and the franchising of the Shrek myth; commercial positioning and the role of Shrek 2 in consolidating DreamWorks as a ‘punky’ alternative to the tone and style of the Mouse House; Disney’s timelessness vs. the ‘timeliness’ of DreamWorks when it comes to pop culture satire; and how through the Fairy Godmother, Shrek 2 negotiates (and then weaponises) the happy ending structure common to the fairytale form.