Christopher Holliday researches animation history and digital media at King’s College London (UK). Alexander Sergeant is a Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at University of Portsmouth (UK), specialising in the history and theory of fantasy cinema. Each episode, they look in detail at a film or television show, taking listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation.
Episodes
Monday Nov 20, 2023
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) (with Taylor Driggers)
Monday Nov 20, 2023
Monday Nov 20, 2023
Chris and Alex continue their journey through the world of Harry Potter for Episode 128 of the podcast, looking at the fourth instalment Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Mike Newell, 2005) accompanied by special guest Dr Taylor Driggers. Taylor is an academic researcher specialising in fantasy literature, theology and religious studies, gender, and sexuality, whose PhD in English Literature from the University of Glasgow focused on fantasy literature’s potential to offer queer and feminist re-visionings of Christian theology and religious practices. His first book was titled Queering Faith in Fantasy Literature and was published by Bloomsbury in 2022 as part of its Perspectives on Fantasy series. Listen as they discuss queer fandom and the connected controversies surrounding J.K. Rowling that have emerged since the conclusion of the big-screen franchise; Harry, Ron, and Hermione’s processes of gendered ‘becoming’ and overlaps with the early-2000s U.S. teen movie cycle; the role of the Triwizard Tournament in shaping the Goblet of Fire’s particular image of both heroic and marginal bodies; the 'heterospectacle' of the Yule Ball and images of coupling; and what it means to re-negotiate the spectatorial pleasures of popular media in ways that might take the text away from the original author.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
Monday Nov 13, 2023
Footnote #37 - Silent Cinema (with Lawrence Napper)
Monday Nov 13, 2023
Monday Nov 13, 2023
Special guest Dr Lawrence Napper, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London and expert in early silent and British cinemas, joins Chris and Alex once again - this time to talk about silent cinema in this Footnote episode of the podcast. Topics include the role of piano accompaniments, string quartets, and full orchestras within early film culture; the locating of silent cinema as a Victorian leisure practice and connections to pantomime; aesthetic shifts in narrative, editing, and style during the 1920s that codify the language of cinema as it develops across the silent period; the ‘realism’ of silent cinema acting styles; and what it means to be a film historian and archivist today.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
Monday Nov 06, 2023
They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) (with Lawrence Napper)
Monday Nov 06, 2023
Monday Nov 06, 2023
For Episode 127 of the podcast, Chris and Alex travel through (film) history to examine the negotiation of the past through computer manipulation, focusing on Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) and its use of digital techniques to re-articulate the sounds and images of the First World War. Joining them to discuss the technological mediation of national traumas and triumphs is Dr Lawrence Napper, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London, who is an expert in early silent and British cinemas and author of the monographs British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years (2009), The Great War in Popular British Cinema of the 1920s: Before Journey’s End (2015) and Silent Cinema: Before the Pictures Got Small (2017). Listen as they discuss digital enhancement, discourses of truth, and the authenticity of the film’s added frames; historical screen representations of WW1 and the fictionalisation (and colourisation) of real-world events; the appeal and opportunities of archival footage in crafting cultural understandings of the Front; and how They Shall Not Grow Old offers spectators a landscape of imagination that captures the complexities of war while ‘animating’ the very fantasy of bringing the past back to life.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
Monday Oct 30, 2023
Footnote #36 - Horror Cinema (with Stacey Abbott)
Monday Oct 30, 2023
Monday Oct 30, 2023
What is horror cinema, and where did it come from? What are its unsettling spectatorial effects and uncomfortable provocations? What codes and conventions define its big screen history, and at which points does it splinter into slasher sub-genres and monstrous cycles? What role does the gothic and supernatural play in its generic construction? And how does the body as both threat and as threatened play into horror’s fascination with the impacts of difference and otherness? Answers to all these questions and more feature in this spooky Footnote episode on Horror Cinema with special guest Professor Stacey Abbott, incoming Professor of Film at Northumbria University and an expert in histories of gothic and horror in film and television.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
Monday Oct 23, 2023
ParaNorman (2012) (with Stacey Abbott)
Monday Oct 23, 2023
Monday Oct 23, 2023
As Halloween rolls around once more, things take a positively spooky turn as Chris and Alex discuss the stop-motion animated horror film ParaNorman (Sam Fell & Chris Butler, 2012) with very special guest Professor Stacey Abbott, who is incoming Professor of Film at Northumbria University and an expert in histories of gothic and horror in film and television. Topics for this discussion include the role of horror cinema in processing trauma, including the special case of children’s horror that is both with and for children; horror as a series of embodiments and the broader question of body genres; links between ParaNorman and Frankenweenie (Tim Burton, 2012) in the creation of juvenile outsiderdom; the troublesom entanglement of digital effects with stop-motion aesthetics; why horror might work best when connected to the materiality of object animation; and how ParaNorman is a film that reflexively recognises the many pleasures of horror for children.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
Monday Oct 16, 2023
Footnote #35 - Twice Told Tales
Monday Oct 16, 2023
Monday Oct 16, 2023
Chris and Alex return to the Footnote format for this latest episode on “twice told tales” - a term that, following its Shakespearean origins, has been applied by writers of fantasy to refer to fantasy’s relationship to oral literature and fairytales. Topics include the fairytale’s codification of oral culture; legacies of literary structures and the power of (re)telling the beats of a story; shifting narrative templates and the act of adding one story ‘on top’ of another; and the spectatorial pleasure of receiving the fantasy of twice told creativity.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
Monday Oct 09, 2023
Cats (2019)
Monday Oct 09, 2023
Monday Oct 09, 2023
Chris and Alex return from their extended summer break with this discussion of the much-maligned musical Cats (Tom Hooper, 2019), a film whose reputation as a big-budget misjudgment has perhaps overwhelmed the intricacies of its uncanny constitution, and in particular how the narrative’s negotiation of its A-list performers speaks to the vexed question of actorly labour and agency in an age of heightened visual effects production. Listen as they wade through Cats’ unsettling feline character design and the integration of digital effects that build disconcerting bodies with multiple moving parts; theatricality and spontaneity in histories of the Hollywood musical; scale and the fantasy of space in director Tom Hooper’s execution of the film’s song-and-dance routines; editing choices and the presentation of blockbuster spectacle; and how the controversial digitised production of Cats taps into recent debates regarding the exploitation of the VFX sector and the many artists who build our CG-enhanced screen fantasies.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
Monday Jul 31, 2023
Fantasy/Animation - Announcement
Monday Jul 31, 2023
Monday Jul 31, 2023
A quick message about Fantasy/Animation's Summer Break, as well as ways that you can get in touch to support all things fantastical and animated. From listening back through our podcast archive and leaving us a quick review and star rating, to dropping us an email or sending in a blog post idea or submission ready for when we return, we would love to hear from you! In the meantime, have happy summers wherever you are and see you in October!
Monday Jul 24, 2023
Footnote #34 - Science Fiction (with Mark Bould)
Monday Jul 24, 2023
Monday Jul 24, 2023
Chris and Alex are joined once more by Mark Bould, Professor of Film and Literature at the University of West England, for this Footnote episode that explores the origins and definitions of science-fiction storytelling. Expect turns to genre theory and the evolution of generic cycles, including the shifting ways that science fiction gets defined (and by whom); how science fiction moved from print magazines and paperback publishing to movie serials and the international and U.S. blockbuster; and the multimedia expansion of the genre that sits alongside the intensification of the study of science fiction into an academic discipline.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
Monday Jul 17, 2023
Free Guy (2021) (with Mark Bould)
Monday Jul 17, 2023
Monday Jul 17, 2023
The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998) meets They Live (John Carpenter, 1988) in Shawn Levy’s science-fiction comedy Free Guy (2021), which marks the director’s first collaboration with charming Canadian Ryan Reynolds and is a film that confronts head-on contemporary anxieties around technology, choice, security, and artificial intelligence. Joining Chris and Alex to separate out their NPCs from their AI engines is Mark Bould, Professor of Film and Literature at the University of West England, and author of a number of books on the aesthetics, politics and philosophy of science-fiction storytelling. The focus of this episode of the podcast is on Free Guy’s engagement with the spectacle and industry of videogames, as well as questions of sentience, play, and hyper-distracted spectatorship; its representation of the internet, digital culture, and communications technologies; repetitious acts and the labour of gaming; and what the smartness of Levy’s film has to say about incremental freedom and better social relations via nods to the absurd normalising of gun culture in the U.S. and the damaging effects of toxic masculinity.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**