Fantasy/Animation

Footnote #68 - Historiography

The next Footnote episode of the podcast maps the stakes of telling history and what it means to construct historical narratives through cinema as a form of historical writing. Listen as Fantasy/Animation’s resident lapsed historian Alex takes Chris through the history and theory of making history and doing historical work; verbal and visual discourses of narrativisation in relation to Hayden White’s notions of historiography and historiophoty; distinctions between the fluctuating ‘truths’, poetics, and politics of history; facts and events as non-narrative and empirical; and how the modes and meanings of telling history contribute to the writerly and highly subjective craft of the historian.

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

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

Tee Collins (with Robby Gilbert)

Episode 161 of the podcast features an examination of the animated career of Tee Collins, a pioneer of the medium whose place within received histories has tended to sideline, rather than celebrate, his contribution to the industry and aesthetics of the animated craft. Joining Chris and Alex to situate Collins within the trajectory of U.S. animation is animator, artist, and historian of animation and moving images Robby Gilbert. Robby has worked as an animator for several studios and has illustrated numerous works for children, including The Adventures of Ranger Rick for the National Wildlife Federation. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Animation at Rowan University and is the author of the recently released City in Motion: Animation in New York 1966-1999 (Palgrave, 2025). Topics for this episode include the emergence of Harlem’s early Black animators against the backdrop of institutional and representational racism; Collins’ early work on Sesame Street (Jim Henson, 1969-) with the Wanda the Witch and Nancy the Nanny Goat shorts as well as his later animated feature The Songhai Princess (Tee Collins, 1990); his signature Afro-Cubist style and links to the adult animation of Ralph Bakshi; ‘fast’ animation, movement, motion studies, and basketball (!); and what Collins’ forgotten place within global animation history tells us about the necessity of historical recovery.

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

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

Footnote #67 - Pepper's Ghost

Inspired by the recent podcast episode on Casper (Brad Silberling, 1995) that featured a conversation with the film’s lead animator Mark Austin, Chris and Alex maintain the Halloween theme for this latest Footnote instalment that examines the spectacular imagery of “pepper’s ghost” - an illusion technique dating back to the earliest forms of stage magic that also found a home across multiple popular entertainment spaces and attractions. Topics include the origins of John Henry Pepper’s ghostly apparitions and the ‘trick’ mechanics of theatrical display; the techniques involved in the illusory creation of three-dimensional objects and the broader seduction of holographic effects; how and where the ‘live’ interactions between physical performers and transparent spectral figurations on stage moved into early silent cinema; and possible links between pepper’s ghost as a technique of illusion and contemporary digital holography (including ABBA Voyage [2022-]).

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

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

Casper (1995) (with Mark Austin)

The Fantasy/Animation podcast presents its Halloween special with this deep dive into Casper (Brad Silberling, 1995) featuring a conversation with the film’s lead animator Mark Austin, who as part of the team at Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) worked on bringing the supernatural spectacle of Casper’s lonely ghost roaming the corridors of Whipstaff Manor to life. Since his involvement with the film, Mark has developed over 30 years experience in visual effects production (specifically within previsualization) across multiple features, games, commercial projects, and 3D attractions. After a decade at the visual effects studio Moving Picture Company (MPC), Mark recently joined Netflix Animation Studio in 2020 as a Sequence Designer and is now a freelance ‘Previs’ Supervisor. Listen as Mark discusses with Chris and Alex his own career and shift from cel-animated advertisements into the world of computer-generated imagery, and his role in crafting Casper’s many digital VFX sequences; the technologies involved in building virtual performances and the eponymous ghost’s status as cinema’s first fully CG film character; where Casper sits in relation to the 1990s’ boom in ‘live-action cartoons’ from Hocus Pocus (Kenny Ortega, 1993) to Flubber (Les Mayfield, 1997); and how Brad Silbering’s feature marked an often forgotten turning point in Hollywood’s ability to (inter)act digital with physical elements.

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

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

Footnote #66 - Enviro-Toons

The first Footnote podcast of the new season kicks off with this discussion of enviro-toons, a category - perhaps even sub-genre - of animation that speaks to the complex relationship that exists between the representations of (and labour processes behind) the animated medium and the environment. Topics include the questionable ‘greenness’ of animation and how specific cartoons might engage ecological concerns within their narratives; anthropomorphic subjectivity as a way to display images of urban sprawl; the environmental impact and sustainability of animation production, from the reuse of cels during Classical Hollywood to the repurposing of biodegradable stop-motion sets; and what the contemporary era of AI and machine learning means for how we understand animation’s growing cost to the environment.

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

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

The Lion King (1994)

The Fantasy/Animation podcast returns for a brand new season with Chris and Alex marking the end of their summer hiatus with another trip into the magic of Disney’s animated features, this time to remember the pleasures of the pride lands and the circle of life held in delicate balance that propels forward the story of The Lion King (Roger Allers & Rob Minkoff, 1994) - the studio’s critical and commercial smash that has generated sequels, spin-offs, remakes, and a highly-successful theatre show. Topics for Episode 159 include the place of the film within Disney’s broader corporate and creative history, including important distinctions between ‘typical’ and Classic Disney; computer graphics, digital VFX, and registers of self-referentiality; anthropomorphic agency and the limits (and instincts) of animated animality in the film’s rendition of its non-human protagonists; Rafiki as the ‘Magical Negro’ archetype; the complications of the film’s well-documented Fascist imagery and the racial politics of its coded casting; and how The Lion King navigates wider ecocritical concerns around the relationships we can (and do) have to the environment.

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

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

Archive Episode - Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) (with Simran Hans)

For the final archive episode of 2025, Chris and Alex once again swing their way back into the superhero world of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman, 2018), revisiting their discussion of Sony Pictures Animation’s computer-animated film that featured special guest Simran Hans, film critic and culture writer whose work has appeared in The Observer, The Guardian, Buzzfeed, Dazed, The Fader and Sight & Sound. Lots here on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’s unique comic book-style design and the visual “crunch” of its evocative flattened style; the upturned generic qualities of the computer-animated film within contemporary Hollywood; and the growing pervasiveness of superhero cinema that, since the film’s release, has become further reinvigorated by Spider-Verse’s now highly influential design.

Archive Episode - Wizards (1977) (Live @ Cinema Museum)

Chris and Alex go all the way back to 2020 for the penultimate archive episode of the podcast for this summer, remembering their discussion of Ralph Bakshi’s high fantasy animated epic Wizards (Ralph Bakshi, 1977), which was originally recorded in front of a live audience at the Cinema Museum in Kennington, London in January 2020. Released first time around as Episode 42, the conversation turned to Wizards as a counter-cultural marvel of the 1970s; the politics and propaganda of the film’s adult themes, including its discourses of socio-realism and gender politics; technology versus magic; and the status of Wizards as a masterpiece of U.S. animation.

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

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

Archive Episode - Inside Out (2015) (with Eric Herhuth)

To coincide with the release of Pixar’s science-fiction computer-animated feature Elio (Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi & Adrian Molina, 2025) this summer, Chris and Alex take listeners back a decade to 2015 and the emotional worlds created by the studio’s earlier Inside Out (Pete Docter, 2015). Originally recorded at the 33rd annual Society for Animation Studies conference at Teesside University (and released soon after in October 2022), this episode featured as its special guest Dr. Eric Herhuth, Assistant Professor of Communication and Director of Film Studies at Tulane University, and author of Pixar and the Aesthetic Imagination: Animation, Storytelling, and Digital Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017). Relisten to hear the trio discussing animation’s longstanding propensity for metaphor and political allegory; the film’s 11-year-old protagonist Riley and the youthfulness of emotion; and the stakes of Inside Out as a film that encourages audiences to accept both the sadness of joy and the joy of sadness.

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

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

Archive Episode - Sub-Saharan African Animation (1966-2013) (with Paula Callus)

For this second archive episode, Chris and Alex revisit Episode 81 of the podcast that gave listeners a quickfire journey through Sub-Saharan African animation with Paula Callus, a Professor in the National Centre for Computer Animation at Bournemouth University and an expert in Sub-Saharan African animation. The films covered in this instalment were Moustapha Alassane’s Bon Voyage Sim (1966), Ng’endo Mukii’s Yellow Fever (2013), Iwa (2009) from Nigerian filmmaker, illustrator and art director Kenneth (Shofela) Coker, the British/Kenyan animated television series Tinga Tinga Tales (2010-2012), and the science-fiction allegory Pumzi (2009) from writer and director Wanuri Kahiu. Lots here on the cultural and historical specificity of fantasy storytelling, global animation practices, and the post-colonial legacies that guide how African animation has been culturally and critically understood.

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

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