Fantasy/Animation

Ratatouille (2007)

Chris and Alex return for a brand new season of the Fantasy/Animation podcast, beginning with this special episode on Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007), the eighth computer-animated film from Pixar Animation Studies and one of the studio’s cleverest in how it uses the metaphor of food and cookery to discuss ingenuity, artistry, and what it means to value creativity. Topics on the menu include the Europeanness of Ratatouille’s Parisian setting and how it departs from Pixar’s previous depictions of modern American; anthropomorphic subjectivity and the impact of new points of view on the accessibility of virtual space; the film’s symbolic rejection of Hollywood’s industrial shift to motion-capture through its comedic fantasies of control and the framing of cooking as an art; and how Brad Bird’s film incorporates both montages that “underdetermine” narrative acts and reflexive techniques that highlight Ratatouille’s own status as a computer-animated construction.

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

Archive Episode - My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

Another trip through the Fantasy/Animation archive lands on this very early episode from February 2019 that focuses on Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988). Chris and Alex take the opportunity to reminisce about when fantasy and animation first met, and whether Alex has ‘clicked’ with the film since the original episode was recorded. With My Neighbor Totoro initially released as part of a double-bill with Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata, 1988) - a film that Chris and Alex have also covered on the podcast - this is a chance for listeners to enjoy their own Fantasy/Animation double-header!

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

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Archive Episode - Ex Machina (2014) (with Andrew Whitehurst)

Chris and Alex welcomed Oscar-winning visual effects artist Andrew Whitehurst to the Fantasy/Animation podcast back in November 2019 for this reflection on the posthumanism of science-fiction parable Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014). Andrew kindly spoke with us about his role as Visual Effects Supervisor on the film (for which he received an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects in 2015), and navigated through Ex Machina’s technologised construction of bodies and the hybrid performance of humanoid robot Ava.

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

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Archive Episode - The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) (with Caroline Ruddell - Live @ Cinema Museum)

The latest archive instalment takes Chris and Alex back to January 2020, and their first live episode recorded in front of an audience of animated fantasy fans in attendance at the Fantasy/Animation screening series in collaboration with the Cinema Museum in Kennington, London. Joining the Q&A to discuss The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Lotte Reiniger, 1926) was special guest Dr Caroline Ruddell (Brunel University London), an expert on Lotte Reiniger who has published work on the filmmaker in Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres (2018), and the recent anthology The Crafty Animator: Handmade, Craft-based Animation and Cultural Value (2019). Lots here on Reiniger’s signature style of 2D cutout animation and gendered discourses of craft and the politics of the handmade, alongside the film’s production during a specific historical moment of upheaval in 1920s Weimar Germany.

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

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Archive Episode - Treasure Planet (2002) (with Ron Clements and John Musker)

For this third archive episode, Chris and Alex revisit a real bucket list moment by journeying back to July 2021 and the episode on Treasure Planet (Ron Clements & John Musker, 2002), which featured as its very special guests the film’s directors Ron Clements and John Musker. Faced with a host of technical issues (alongside barely-concealed disbelief when Disney animation royalty first joined the video call), this episode is a particular favourite, and for good reason - expect turns to 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, as well as reflections on its use of the digital painting tools in relation to the landscape of Hollywood animation of the 1990s.

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

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Archive Episode - Aladdin (1992) (with Steve Henderson)

Chris and Alex continue their journey back through the Fantasy/Animation podcast with this reminder of an early episode looking at the Disney animated musical Aladdin (Ron Clements & John Musker, 1992), which featured as its special guest Steve Henderson - Editor of the Skwigly Online Animation Magazine and Director of the Manchester Animation Festival. Originally recorded as Episode 21 back in May 2020, this instalment appeared just before the Guy Ritchie-directed remake that was covered on the podcast almost exactly a year later, and marked Fantasy/Animation’s first look at the Disney Renaissance, as well as featuring turns to the star voice, digital VFX imagery, and animation’s own history of Orientalist imaginaries.

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

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Archive Episode - Peppa Pig (2004-) (with Richard Dyer)

Chris and Alex kick off the first in a series of episodes that give listeners a chance to revisit and review some earlier podcasts, or perhaps hear one or two instalments they might have missed first time around. For this inaugural delve back into the Fantasy/Animation archive, they look back at their conversation with Professor Richard Dyer (Emeritus Professor of Film Studies, King's College London and Professorial Fellow in Film Studies, University of St Andrews) who discussed the popular British animated television series Peppa Pig (Neville Astley & Mark Baker, 2014-) way back in May 2019. In a conversation that covered everything from the work of modernist painter Henri Matisse and filmmaker Béla Tarr to the realism of Peppa Pig’s anthropomorphic character designs and its politics of niceness, this episode shows that there is more to this animated media text than just muddy puddles.

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

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

The Thief of Bagdad (1940)

The Fantasy/Animation podcast is soon to break for the summer, but not before a few more episodes to round off the series - this time, it is the “Arabian fantasy” The Thief of Bagdad (Michael Powell, Ludwig Berger & Tim Whelan, 1940) that provides the focus for Episode 142, as Chris and Alex try to make sense of its story and style drawn from the “One Thousand and One Nights” collection of Middle Eastern folktales and its reproduction of Orientialist imaginaries and iconographies. Topics include The Thief of Bagdad’s sustained fascination with the Orient and storytelling interest in the exoticism and erotics of magic and spells; fantasy and animation’s historical links with the development of Technicolor, and how The Thief of Bagdad marks the inaugural use of the Technicolor blue-screen travelling matte process; the stylistic influence of Powell’s film on the characters and setting of Walt Disney’s Aladdin (Ron Clements & John Musker, 1992); and how the film manifests insidious tropes of Empire within its broader Anti-Arab sentiment.

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

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Footnote #50 - Postfeminism (with Eve Benhamou)

The Fantasy/Animation Footnotes reach their half-century as Chris and Alex are once again joined by Dr Eve Benhamou, teaching fellow in Film Studies at the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France to examine the contradictory cultural and political space of postfeminism. A much-debated topic, postfeminism typically pivots on gendered discourses of agency, autonomy, potency, and physical empowerment. Topics include the ambivalent relationship between contemporary postfeminism and the ‘gains’ of earlier feminist movements; the culture and politics of postfeminism’s multimedia presence in the late-1990s and early-2000s; and how the graphic rendering of female bodies as both powerful and powerless feeds into the broader animated representation of postfeminist physicality.

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

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Frozen (2013) (with Eve Benhamou)

Episode 141 returns to the contemporary era of Disney Feature Animation with this discussion of the computer-animated musical blockbuster Frozen (Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee, 2013), a fairytale film of female empowerment that is widely credited with ushering in Disney’s Third Golden Age of animated features after the ‘Classic’ Disney period and earlier Disney Renaissance. The special guest for this instalment is Dr Eve Benhamou, teaching fellow in Film Studies at the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France who has previously taught at the Bristol School of Animation and Swansea University. Eve’s research concerns the intersection of Disney, Hollywood, and gender - ideas central to her first monograph Contemporary Disney Animation: Genre, Gender and Hollywood (EUP, 2022) which examines the “multifaceted interactions between animated films, Disney properties such as Pixar and Marvel, and popular genres including the romantic comedy, the superhero film and the cop buddy film.” Topics for this episode include Frozen’s negotiation of the longstanding Disney formula and how such a blueprint impacts the film’s identity as both ‘classic’ and ‘typical’ Disney; gender, genre, and the portrayal of girl power and sisterhood through the Anna/Elsa relationship; recent turns towards Baroque aesthetics in Disney’s post-Frozen computer-animated features; stylistic overlaps with the musical performances of Wicked; and what the sustained cultural power of Frozen has to say about the Disney corporation in twenty-first-century America.

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

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**