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For many decades, mainstream animation has maintained a relatively uniform visual identity. Following the release of Pixar’s 1995 debut film Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995), a dominant visual style emerged within computer-generated filmmaking, as major animation studios began to adopt a shared set of stylistic conventions, resulting in films that appeared similar (Holliday 2018, 1). However, in 2018, mainstream animation experienced a notable shift in both its aesthetic and industrial priorities following the release of Sony’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman, 2018). The film achieved both critical acclaim and box office success, being widely praised for its distinct visual style and its use of animation as a medium to enhance storytelling. Traditionally, mainstream animated films have followed an orthodox form, which is a mode that, despite depicting fantastical or exaggerated events, adheres to conventional narrative structures and realist frameworks (Wells 1998, 51).
Every Pokémon fan has one card they remember before they remember its value. It might be a battered Charizard from a schoolyard trade, a ghost Pokémon that looked creepier on cardboard than on television, or a small card that stayed at the front of a binder for years at home.
Twenty five years ago to this day, in the ancient coastal city of Genoa, anti-riot units of the Italian police mounted a night-time raid against sleeping activists. Mostly young people, some of them journalists, who were spending the night camped inside a school complex—one named, perhaps fittingly, after a victorious WW1 general. Genoa was playing host to the G8. Protesters from all over the world had gathered there, as part of a ‘social forum’, to oppose the global system of governance which those periodic, heavily-sheltered meetings of the mighty had come to symbolise.
At the 2025 Academy Awards ceremony, the actress Goldie Hawn announced that the winner of the Oscar for Best Animated Film was Flow – a moment where global audience members discovered the film’s creator and director, the Latvian animator Gints Zilbalodis. Yet another previous feature of his awaits such attention. The 2019 film Away, Zilbalodis’ the director’s debut feature, laid the foundation upon which Flow is built.
When we watch a movie, what exactly do we feel? The answer to this question is different from person to person. It is very obvious to someone who has studied sociology to analyse the movie using their own thoughts and embodied knowledge. Similarly, as a student in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies, when I watch a movie, I always try to interpret it through a theatrical lens and to understand the method followed by the characters. Animated movies are no exception in this case.
Most movie reviews are just a plot summary wearing a star rating. They walk you through the whole story, then end with “it was good” or “it was boring.” That is a recap, not a review. Nobody needs you to retell the film. They can watch it themselves. What they want to know is whether it is worth their time and why. Learning how to write a movie review is really about learning to make that case clearly. It follows a repeatable process, whether you are posting on a blog, turning in a school assignment, or building your own site.
June 2026 marks the 25th anniversary of the film AI: Artificial Intelligence, written and directed by Steven Spielberg. This month also sees the release of the latest Steven Spielberg science fiction film, Disclosure Day. For Fantasy/Animation, writer James Clarke (@jameswriter72) speaks with concept artist John Bell about his memories of working on AI: Artificial Intelligence and also on Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993) and Back to the Future Part II (Robert Zemeckis, 1989).
When arthouse streaming service, MUBI, acquired one of the year’s surprisingly successful films, 6x Oscar-nominated The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024), it was originally being distributed by Universal for barely $18M. However, French writer/director Coralie Fargeat’s refusal to cut certain scenes eventually allowed her to shop the film elsewhere. With Fargeat now satisfied and Universal likely banging their heads against the wall, The Substance has become an absolute hit, going on to make $70M+ at the global box office (D’Alessandro, 2024).
In this week’s blog, Fantasy/Animation sat down with Mikkel Mainz of SKJALD Animation studio, a full-pipeline creative house and animation studio located in Denmark, to discuss its experience working on successful web series and feature films, the interpretation of music through animated style, and SKJALD’s future animated projects.
Under the sea, monsters lurk. Despite The Little Mermaid (Ron Clements & John Musker, 1989)’s Sebastian singing about under the sea being better, audiences have long held a fear of the ocean and what lies beneath. It is an understandable fear, linked to the fear of the unknown; after all, it is estimated that 80% of our oceans remain unexplored.
The brand new series of the Fantasy/Animation podcast kicks off with this opening look at Disney’s celebrated animated/live-action musical Enchanted (Kevin Lima, 2007), a film that cleverly negotiates Disney’s history and prestige as a global animation studio by parodying the Classic cartoons of Hollywood’s Golden Age and offering audiences a comedic pastiche of the Mouse House’s very own Renaissance era animated features.
To coincide with the recent big-screen release of The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan, 2026), the final Fantasy/Animation archive episode of the summer looks back the filmmaker’s science-fiction blockbuster Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010) that featured as its special guest Todd McGowan, Professor of Film Studies in the Film and Television Studies Department at the University of Vermont.
The next archive episode of the Fantasy/Animation podcast goes all the way back to Episode 24 and the discussion of the celebrated animated documentary Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008) which featured a conversation with special guest Dr Bella Honess Roe, author of the influential book Animated Documentary (2013).
For this second archive episode, Chris and Alex revisit Episode 138 of the podcast that gave listeners their first taste of Pixar’s Toy Story (1995-) franchise thanks to this look at the 1995 original. The discussion of Pixar’s debut feature featured as its special guest Lucy Fife Donaldson, who is now Professor of Film Studies at the University of St Andrews and whose work focuses on film and television style, audiovisual design and 'below-the-line' labour, performance and the body.
The Fantasy/Animation podcast has a new theme tune! Click here to read about its origins and influences from composer Francisca Araujo.
Building off the recent podcast on KPop Demon Hunters (Maggie Kang & Chris Appelhans, 2025), Footnote #80 examines Netflix as a popular digital platform via both the context (and illusion) of choice and the algorithmic processes that create, tailor, and appeal to our audiovisual desires, but equally Netflix’s contribution to the contemporary landscape of media production and consumption.
For Footnote #79, Chris and Alex engage the seminal work of Edward Said and his coining and development of Orientalism as a critical framework for mapping the acceptance of the presence of a distinction between East and West, and the terms under which such a geographical and, crucially, conceptual division has been understood.
Footnote #78 of the podcast focuses on the imagination as Alex takes Chris through the world of generative cognition and the many philosophical reflections that discuss our mental forces, which in turn allow us to conjure ideas, thoughts, concepts, and images that do not exist in the material world.
What might it mean for animation to ‘expand’? Footnote 77 confronts the performances and technologies of expanded animation, a term that speaks to both the broadening out of animation and its many sites of production, exhibition, and consumption, as well as those intermedial or multimedia live works that involve different kinds of animated images.
Fantasy/Animation gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Society for Animation Studies (SAS).
Fantasy/Animation gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the ASIFA-Hollywood’s Animation Educators Forum 2021 Faculty Grant
This is the second blog post of three discussing the emergence of a new developmental computer-animated style in mainstream studio animation. This week will leave Pixar behind, focusing on the DreamWorks studio as we analyse Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (Joel Crawford 2022), the most recent instalment in the Shrek (2001-) franchise, and the second standalone film featuring the character of Puss in Boots. Prior to this film, DreamWorks had primarily produced 3D hyperrealism films; The Last Wish diverges from the studio's usual formula and instead takes on more stylized, “painterly” visuals (Fig.1). While the animation remains computer-generated, the style is distinct from previous films as it was intended to emulate the look and texture of a storybook, using “painterly” rendering to blend softer brush-like textures with expressive, frame-conscious movement (Basset et al. 2013, 156). This shift in style stemmed from the influence of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, with director Joel Crawford noting that although earlier films like Shrek were celebrated for their technical realism, post Spider-Verse audiences expected greater stylistic innovation (Weiss 2024).