Episode 167 - AI and Animation (with Mihaela Mihailova)

Generation (Riccardo Fusetti, 2022).

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!

The creative - and highly controversial - relationship between animation and artificial intelligence provides the focus of Episode 167 of the Fantasy/Animation podcast, which features as its special guest Dr Mihaela Mihailova, an Assistant Professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. Mihaela is the editor of Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio LAIKA’s Stop-Motion Witchcraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), whose work has also appeared in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, The Velvet Light Trap, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Feminist Media Studies, animation: an interdisciplinary journal, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, and [in]Transition. She has contributed to Animating Film Theory (with John MacKay), The Oxford Handbook of the Disney Musical, Animated Landscapes: History, Form, and Function, The Animation Studies Reader, and Drawn from Life: Issues and Themes in Animated Documentary Cinema, and was editor of the recent “AI and the Moving Image” dossier published in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. She is currently co-editor of Animation Studies and serves as co-President of the Society for Animation Studies. Listen as Mihaela introduces Chris and Alex to the AI-generated short films Generation (2022), PLSTC (2022), Bruegel the Younger (2022), and Dissolution (2023) as a backdrop to thinking about the trajectory of machine learning in relation to animated imagery and creative practice; the aesthetics and implications for labour prompted by AI as both an assistive and generative tool; the discourses of technophilia and technophobia that surround contemporary synthetic media; and what impact the ‘open secret’ of AI might have within the animation industry beyond some of its current applications.

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

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

**As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

Suggested Readings

  • Mihailova, Mihaela. 2016. “Collaboration without Representation: Labor Issues in Motion Capture.” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 11, no. 1: 40–58.

  • Mihailova, Mihaela. 2021. “To Dally with Dalí: Deepfake (Inter)faces in the Art Museum.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 27, no. 4: 882–898.

  • Mihailova, Mihaela. 2024. “In Focus Introduction: AI and the Moving Image.” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 64, no. 1 (Fall): 170–174.

PODCASTChristopher Holliday and Alexander SergeantSTARDOM, HOLLYWOOD, PERFORMANCE, COMPUTER ANIMATION, RACE, IDENTITY, MUSICALComment