Episode 106 - E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982) (with Noel Brown)
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982).
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
Episode 106 marks Chris and Alex’s first foray into the filmmaking career of Steven Spielberg as they take on the director’s 1982 science-fiction fantasy E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. To help explore the film’s status as a landmark of popular U.S. cinema is special guest Dr Noel Brown, who is Senior Lecturer in Film and Programme Leader for Film and Visual Culture at Liverpool Hope University. Noel has published extensively in the areas of children’s cinema, family films, and animation, including the recent monograph Contemporary Hollywood Animation: Style, Storytelling, Culture and Ideology Since the 1990s (2020) and edited collection The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Film (2022). Listen as the trio discuss the origins of the ‘family film’ as a prestige category within histories of Hollywood cinema; the contributions of Spielberg, George Lucas, and E.T. to the reinvention of cinema as family entertainment; emotion and strategies of ‘relatability’; dual address, disposability, and the darkness of Spielberg’s stories; outsiderdom and alienation in relation to the realities of American childhood in the 1980s; puppetry, animatronics and the materiality of VFX; traditions of gender performance and radical renditions of masculinity/femininity in animation; and how E.T. navigates the experience of loss and the ability to feel again.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
Suggested Readings
Alberto Albarrán-Torres, César and Dan Golding. 2019. “Creed: legacy franchising, race and masculinity in contemporary boxing films.” Continuum 33, no. 3: 310-323.
Griffin, Sean. 2004. “Pronoun Trouble: The Queerness of Animation.” In Queer Cinema: The Film Reader, edited by Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin, 105–118. New York: Routledge.
Kendrick, James. 2014. Darkness in the Bliss-Out: A Reconsideration of the Films of Steven Spielberg. London: Bloomsbury.
Krämer, Peter. 1998. “Would You Take Your Child to See This Film? The Cultural and Social Work of the Family-Adventure Movie." In Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, edited by Steve Neale and Murray Smith, 294-311. London: Routledge.
Wood, Robin. 1986. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. New York: Columbia University Press.