Christopher Holliday is Senior Lecturer in Liberal Arts and Visual Cultures Education at King’s College London (UK). Alexander Sergeant is a Lecturer in Digital Media Production at the University of Westminster (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 Apr 17, 2023
Monday Apr 17, 2023
Following up episodes on hyper-realism and photorealism, this latest instalment completes the unofficial Fantasy/Animation ‘realism’ trilogy (!) by focusing on the history, politics, and aesthetic concerns of surrealism. Chris and Alex take a surrealist turn through the crisis of realism in the arts and the advent of photography; dream interpretation, psychoanalysis, and unconscious desires; postwar intellectualism, Salvador Dalí, and Dadaism; and how both fantasy and animation work in relation to surrealism’s political puncturing of the status quo, its claims to protest, and its affective assault on the senses.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
Monday Apr 10, 2023
Monday Apr 10, 2023
Whomping willows, Ford Anglias, and so much more are covered in episode 117 of the podcast, which (better late than never!) returns to Hogwarts for the second instalment of the Harry Potter film franchise and an adaptation of the 1998 novel originally released back in November 2002. Joining Chris and Alex for a closer look at Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Chris Columbus, 2002) is Jyotsna Kapur, who is a Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Southern Illinois University. Jyotsna’s research and teaching interests include Marxist-feminist theory of media arts and culture, the politics of labour, class, race, and sexuality in neoliberalism, and global children's media culture, and she has published widely on the intersections between visual culture and childhood. Listen as they discuss Hollywood cinema’s overlap with children’s rights in Clinton-era America and the question of protection; Harry Potter’s representation of London and the urban regeneration of King’s Cross St. Pancras as a space of travel, transit, and magic; Dobby, flying cars and developments in digital VFX; branding and world-building in relation to Potter fandom and tourism; mudblood as both a racialised category of identity and something entirely emptied of racial consciousness; and how Harry Potter negotiates the relationship between childhood and fantasy to stimulate a broader commercial and audience desire in the franchise.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
Monday Apr 03, 2023
Monday Apr 03, 2023
The tension between spectacle and narrative is investigated through the seminal work of Tom Gunning and his formulation of the “cinema of attractions” in this latest Footnote episode, in which Chris and Alex hold cinema’s propensity for exhibitionist visual display and its later development of story in delicate balance. Listen as they reflect on the emergence of actuality shorts, travelogues, and the ‘trick’ films of Georges Méliès; the acquisition and integration of narrative by cinema that challenged earlier modes of presentationalism; the role of technological innovation in the default myths of silent cinema; and how Gunning’s “cinema of attractions” model defining early film spectatorship and style intersects with both the screen histories and creative figures of fantasy and animation.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
Monday Mar 27, 2023
Monday Mar 27, 2023
Finally following up their podcast on The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson, 2001), Episode 116 has Chris and Alex picking up the story of Middle-earth with this instalment on the second film in the franchise, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Peter Jackson, 2002). Joining them is special guest Dr Daniel White, who is Senior Lecturer in Musicology in the Department of Music & Design Arts at the University of Huddersfield, and author of a number of publications looking at music in relation to worldbuilding and fantasy storytelling, including its role across the Lord of the Rings films. From the sonic dimensions of fantasy cinema to female vocality within Peter Jackson’s big-screen adaptations, listen as the trio discuss the contribution of sound to the construction of impossible fantastic space; processes of suture and de-suture; digital technology and Gollum’s identity as a VFX marvel; New Zealand and the impact within fantasy of shooting on location; what the interpretation of orcs as an indigenous community tells us about the film’s fluctuating levels of ‘humanity’; and the influence of Norse mythology upon The Two Towers’ musical logic.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
Monday Mar 13, 2023
Monday Mar 13, 2023
Fresh from their discussion of hyper-realism in the previous Footnote episode, Chris and Alex discuss ‘photorealism’ in this latest instalment - a term that denotes the aesthetic mimicking of lens-based media to create the appearance of a world as viewed through a camera. Listen as they discuss photorealism’s relationship to the animated illusion of pro-filmic activity; links with hyper-realism as a broader aesthetic category of representation; the role of computer-generated imagery (CGI) in crafting and re-conjuring indexical signs (lens flare; depth-of-field); and how the simulation of analogue by other means links to processes of ‘remediation.’
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
Monday Mar 06, 2023
Monday Mar 06, 2023
Episode 115 celebrates Chris and Alex’s return to Peppa Pig (Neville Astley & Mark Baker, 2004-) for a part-interview, part-reflection on this staple of contemporary British animation and culture, which (unofficially at least!) follows on from the earlier podcast instalment discussing the style and tone of the series. The guest for this special ‘revisited’ episode is voice artist Sarah Ann Kennedy, who voices both Miss Rabbit and Mummy Rabbit in the show, alongside performing as Nanny Plum in Ben & Holly's Little Kingdom (Neville Astley & Mark Baker, 2009-) and Dolly Pond in the Channel 4 adult animation series Pond Life (Candy Guard, 1996-2000). Sarah is also a writer for Peppa Pig and an animation director, creating animated soap opera Crapston Villas (1995-1998) again for Channel 4, and is also currently a lecturer in the School of Arts and Media at the University of Central Lancashire. This episode covers all things related to the labour, creative practice, and technologies of voice acting, as well as featuring turns to the scope of ‘adult’ animation as a descriptor; local dubbing practices and the movement of animated television across national boundaries; ‘condensed’ animation aesthetics and anthropomorphic character designs; and the fun and fantasy of family that structures the colourful world of Peppa Pig.
Monday Feb 27, 2023
Monday Feb 27, 2023
The podcast's first engagement with questions of ‘realism’ in animation takes centre stage in Footnote #24, where Chris and Alex historicise and interrogate the function of realism and hyper-realist traditions within a multitude of media and aesthetic traditions. Topics include hyper-realism’s place in relation to painting and sculpture; the uncanny quality of hyper-realist art and issues of resemblance; the parameters of Disney’s ‘hyper-realist’ animated style against earlier ‘plasmatic’ sensibilities; and how animation’s capabilities for authentically portraying the real are fundamentally tied to its status as a technology of creative representation.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
Monday Feb 20, 2023
Monday Feb 20, 2023
The Netflix feature The Mitchells vs. the Machines (Mike Rianda, 2021) gets the Fantasy/Animation treatment, as Chris and Alex offer up a discussion in this episode of the film’s dysfunctional family dynamics, road movie structure, and its spectacular sentient robots techno-narrative. Topics include the contribution of Sony Pictures Animation to the Hollywood computer-animated film industry and stylistic links to both Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Phil Lord & Christopher Miller, 2009) and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman, 2018); The Mitchells vs. the Machines’ critique of technology that seemingly sits at odds with its own visual enjoyment of the pleasures of screen culture; timeless vs. timely storytelling via the contemporaneity of the film’s intertextual referencing and depiction of digital natives; the historical whiteness of AI and the racialising of voice-activated virtual digital assistants; the realisation of Katie’s queerness and the fraught logic of equating screen visibility with progress; the potential to read the family through neurodivergent frameworks; and how Mike Rianda’s film provides an ultimately uneven and highly performative portrayal of ‘madcap’ antics, female creativity, and outsiderdom.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
Monday Feb 13, 2023
Monday Feb 13, 2023
The story of phantasy (with a ‘ph’) forms the basis of this latest Footnote episode, a term that is as muddy and complex as its more familiar ‘f’ counterpart. Whereas ‘fantasy’ is associated with carefree, escapist enjoyment in the imagination, phantasy describes a process of meaning making within the human psyche, and is a psychological act that is a regular part of our engagement with - and understanding of - the world. In Alex’s 10-minute survey of the term, topics include its relationship to the language of psychoanalysis; the pleasurable frivolity and creativity of fantasy vs. phantasy’s more pointed link (as a basic mechanic of how our brains work) to the imagination of situations that are not happening in front of us; and the implications of applying psychoanalytic theory and phantasy to the study of fantasy cinema.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
Monday Feb 06, 2023
Monday Feb 06, 2023
For this brief survey of the politics and pleasures of Czech animation, Alex and Chris are joined by special guest Dr Adam Whybray, who lectures in Film Studies at the University of Suffolk and who is also the author of The Art of Czech Animation: A History of Political Dissent and Allegory (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). Listen as the trio discuss a number of canonical and controversial examples from the recent history of Czech animation, featuring Vzpoura hraček/Revolution in Toyland (František Sádek and Hermína Týrlová, 1947), Ruka/The Hand (Jiří Trnka, 1965), Žvahlav aneb šatičky slaměného Huberta/Jabberwocky (Jan Švankmajer, 1971), Balada o zeleném drevu/A Ballad About Green Wood (Jiří Barta, 1983), and A King Had a Horse (Aleš Pachner, 2011). Topics for Episode 113 include the styles and rhythms of Czech animation and its particular use of stop-motion and puppet forms; avant-gardism and specific Czech traditions of surrealism; the utilisation of worn and imperfect everyday objects to reflect the resistance and retaliation to power, as well as themes of agency and control; fantasies of craft, creativity, and labour; and how the many allegories of Czech animation offer spectators a reflexive animated space that plays with variant notions of humanity.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**