Fantasy/Animation

Arthur Christmas (2011)

The Christmas special of the Fantasy/Animation podcast is finally delivered, and a perfectly wrapped episode it is too (!), with Chris and Alex enjoying the magic and mayhem of Arthur Christmas (Sarah Smith, 2011) - the Aardman studio’s second foray into computer animation and a film that confronts head-on Christmas as a collective fantasy through the comedic conflicts between generations. Listen as they discuss tensions between old and new, magic and technology, in the film’s playful portrayal of the bureaucracy and labour of Christmas; Aardman’s own industrial image of craft and the symbolism of automation versus those presents delivered ‘by hand’; the narrative function of Santa Claus as an ‘actor’ and an ‘actant’, and his complex identity as a mythic figure; Arthur Christmas’ ambivalent images of generous consumerism; spectatorial positioning in relation to the intrusion of festive fantasy and ideas of belief; and how the film negotiates what it means to represent and reinvent Christmas onscreen.

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

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

Footnote #39 - Special Effects

What is so special about special effects? What role does technological innovation play in their convincing construction of illusion? What distinguishes ‘special’ from ‘visual’ effects? In this Footnote episode, Chris and Alex play with ideas of special effects in relation to fantasy and animation, going back to early cinema and the animated fantasies (or fantastical animations) of Georges Méliès to think about the history of pro-filmic illusions captured on camera; practical vs. digital distinctions in the articulation and realisation of effects imagery; and the growing influence of post-production processes in the era of computer graphics.

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

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

Disney: A Tale of Technology and Innovation (Live at the British Film Institute) (with Chris McKenna)

Episode 129 sees Chris flying solo in this conversation recorded live at the recent Once Upon A Time: A Disney Day held at the British Film Institute in London back in July, which was part of the Making Magic: 100 Years of Disney two-month season that ran throughout 2023. Discussing the Disney studio’s longstanding relationship to technological innovation is returning special guest Chris McKenna, current Head of Creative Operations at the VFX studio Moving Picture Company, who featured on the earlier Dumbo (Tim Burton, 2019) episode of the podcast. In this discussion panel, Chris talks further about his work on several of Disney’s “live-action” remakes, including The Jungle Book (Jon Favreau, 2016), The Lion King (Jon Favreau, 2019), Lady and the Tramp (Charlie Bean, 2019), and the recent The Little Mermaid (Rob Marshall, 2023), where he worked as Head of Layout and Animation at MPC. The duo reflect on Chris’ own history and how he got involved with this latest cycle of Disney features; whether or not to use the original animated film as a reference point; and the many challenges of adapting the Mouse House’s beloved animated classics for new audiences. They also field questions from those gathered together in NFT1 on everything from digital creativity; the links between realism, reception, and the potential loss of ‘magic’; and the collective labour involved in producing blockbuster computer graphics for the latest Disney’s animation.

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

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

Footnote #38 - Storybook Openings

Footnote #38 tackles the recurrent motif of the storybook that so often begins Disney’s animated features, but which also takes other forms and styles as part of the studio’s sustained dramatisation of storytelling. Listen as Chris and Alex discuss the importance of the prologue within definitions of the Disney formula; animation’s decorative function as a way of actualising and illustrating narrative events; visual developments in the trope and the role of literary legitimisation; and how the recurrent image of the leather-bound manuscript has been subject to contemporary Hollywood animation’s increasingly deconstructive register.

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

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

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) (with Taylor Driggers)

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**

Footnote #37 - Silent Cinema (with Lawrence Napper)

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**

They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) (with Lawrence Napper)

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**

Footnote #36 - Horror Cinema (with Stacey Abbott)

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**

ParaNorman (2012) (with Stacey Abbott)

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**

Footnote #35 - Twice Told Tales

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**