Episode 127 - They Shall Not Grow Old (Peter Jackson, 2018) (with Lawrence Napper)
They Shall Not Grow Old (Peter Jackson, 2018).
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!
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**
Suggested Readings
Napper, Lawrence. 2009. British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
Napper, Lawrence. 2015. The Great War in Popular British Cinema of the 1920s: Before Journey’s End. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Napper, Lawrence. 2017. Silent Cinema: Before the Pictures Got Small. London: Wallflower.
Napper, Lawrence. 2021. “The Battle of the Somme (1916) and They Shall Not Grow Old (2018): archivists, historians, lies and the archive,” Studies in European Cinema 18, no. 3: 212-221.
Woodworth-Hou, Jason. 2022. “Reanimating the Master Narrative: How They Shall Not Grow Old Curates the Perception of Common Truth through CGI Animation,” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 17, no. 3: 271-285.