Fantasy/Animation

Cats (2019)

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**

Fantasy/Animation - Announcement

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!

Footnote #34 - Science Fiction (with Mark Bould)

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**

Free Guy (2021) (with Mark Bould)

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**

Footnote #33 - Can Colour Blind People Work in VFX? (with Chris McKenna)

Special guest Chris McKenna, current Head of Creative Operations at the VFX studio Moving Picture Company, joins Chris and Alex for this latest Footnote episode on the VFX industry, with a particular focus on artists with colour blindness and advice on the best avenues for getting into animation lighting and design. From understanding the specific challenges of colour blindness for VFX artistry to the question of industry accessibility, the trio discuss the process of animation visualisation and what it means when animators struggle with distinguishing colour variations, matches, and palettes.

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

Dumbo (2019) (with Chris McKenna)

The emergence of Disney’s so-called ‘live-action’ remakes provides the focus of Episode 123, with the recent adaptation of Dumbo (Tim Burton, 2019) offering Chris and Alex plenty to get their teeth into thanks to the film’s particular brand of digital realism as well as director Tim Burton’s reflections on the very nature of spectacle itself. Special guest for this discussion is Chris McKenna, current Head of Creative Operations at the VFX studio Moving Picture Company, and Lead Technical Animator on Dumbo who has also worked on a host of Hollywood blockbusters and franchise films, including Terminator: Genisys (Alan Taylor, 2015), Spectre (Sam Mendes, 2015), Transformers: The Last Knight (Michael Bay, 2017), Ad Astra (James Gray, 2019), Cats (Tom Hooper, 2019), and Disenchanted (Adam Shankman, 2022). Among his many credits, Chris has several of the Disney remakes and spin-offs on his CV too, from The Jungle Book (Jon Favreau, 2016), The Lion King (Jon Favreau, 2019), and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (Joachim Rønning, 2019) to Lady and the Tramp (Charlie Bean, 2019) and the upcoming The Little Mermaid (Rob Marshall, 2023), where he worked as Head of Layout and Animation at MPC. Listen as the trio discuss the industrial workflow of VFX studio production, from the definition of “technical animation” to the question of simulation; how Dumbo reconciles Burton’s own “flavour” as a filmmaker with its broader ‘photorealistic caricature’ visual style; technological deterministic narratives of cinema and what it means for digital animation to copy lens-based media in these ‘live-action’ features; how Dumbo reflexively acknowledges histories of effects and photography in its construction of screen spectacle; and how when it comes to VFX artists creativity functions as an extension of passion.

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

Footnote #32 - 3D (with Nick Jones)

Fresh from their discussion of Spider-Man: No Way Home (Jon Watts, 2021), Chris, Alex and special guest Dr Nick Jones (Senior Lecturer in Film, Television and Digital Culture, University of York) return for this short Footnote episode on the marvel and magic of 3D technology. Topics include cinema’s own history of size, space, and spectacle from the Lumière brothers to James Cameron; the kinds of depth cues offered by 3D cinema that extends perception beyond the real-world; technological innovation and 3D’s default narratives of extension and protrusion; and how understanding the history of film in three-dimensions perhaps gets us closer to seeing what cinema might actually be as a creative medium.

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

Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) (with Nick Jones)

The MCU comes calling once again for Episode 122 of the podcast, as Chris and Alex navigate the complex web of storylines and superheroes that build the world of Spider-Man: No Way Home (Jon Watts, 2021). Joining them to reflect on the genre’s enduring appeal alongside the contemporary pleasures of Hollywood’s increasing multiversal madness is Dr Nick Jones, who is Senior Lecturer in Film, Television and Digital Culture at the University of York. Nick is the author of the monographs Hollywood Action Films and Spatial Theory (2015), Spaces Mapped and Monstrous: Digital 3D and Visual Culture (2020), and the upcoming Gooey Media Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface (2023), and his research focuses on digital effects, popular cinema, and interactive media. Listen as they discuss the complex place of Spider-Man within the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the industrial power of the franchise reboot; superheroic nostalgia and post-pandemic realities of what it means to ‘move on’; the collective authorship of a character as it is crafted through actorly labour and VFX processes across disparate entries within a film series; digital de-aging and the virtual recreation of youth; the stakes of popular cinema’s turn towards the fractures of a multiverse narrative; and how Spider-Man: No Way Home offers a space where heightened levels of intertextuality and intensified emotion determine the importance of an exceptional individual as much as the value of connection.

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

Footnote #31 - Claymation

From the invention of Plasticine by William Harbutt in Britain in 1897 to the use of malleable materials in the earliest stop-motion ‘trick films’ of Edwin S. Porter, J. Stuart Blackton, and the Fleischer Brothers, the application of clay in animation has a history as long as the medium itself. In Footnote #31 of the podcast, Chris and Alex deliberate the evolution of clay animation, including the patenting of ‘Claymation’ in the early-1980s and its emergent synonymy with the Bristol-based Aardman studio; distinctions between more freeform and fluid clay animation and the moveable, modelled bodies of Wallace and Gromit; and how this craft-based handmade style came to embody (and continues to define) the Aardman studio’s animated spirit in an era of pervasive and pristine computer graphics.

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

Monster House (2006) (with Jane Batkin)

Chris and Alex delve into motion-capture, murder mystery, and monster houses for this discussion of Gil Kenan’s 2006 computer-animated film Monster House, a digital feature produced by the ImageMovers company founded by renowned filmmaker Robert Zemeckis and a specialist in animation utilising mo-cap technologies. Joining them for Episode 121 of the podcast is Dr Jane Batkin, an animation film theorist and Associate Professor in the School of Film, Media and Journalism at the University of Lincoln. Her book Identity in Animation: A Journey into Self, Difference, Culture and the Body was published in 2017, and she has had various chapters in edited collections on animation, including a recent piece on childhood wandering in Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio Laika’s Stop Motion Witchcraft (2021). Jane is currently working on a monograph on childhood in animated film and television and gained a British Academy Award for research in August 2022 for her project entitled “The Secret Space of Childhood in Animated and Live Action Cinema: Performance, Preservation and Metaphor.” Topics in this instalment include the production context for Monster House and the question of child labour; the uncanniness of children-in-performance and what it means for a child to be viewed as ‘acting’ vs. ‘being’; the digital rendering of surfaces and textures and the film’s ‘puppetlike’ character designs; computer animation and nostalgia, and whether it is possible to be nostalgic for CGI; the ‘body’ of animated homes and psycho-architectural spaces via the film’s proximity to the horror genre; and how Monster House’s negotiation of adulthood positions Kenan’s computer-animated feature as a ‘Sirkian’ melodrama for children.

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