Episode 172 - Helen Hill (with Karen Redrobe)

The Florestine Collection (Helen Hill, 2011)

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 Fantasy/Animation podcast welcomes as its special guest for Episode 172 Professor Karen Redrobe, who is Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor and Undergraduate Chair in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work traverses film theory, animation, and feminism, and she is the author of Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism (2003) and the new book Undead: (Inter)(in)animation, Feminisms, and the Art of War (2025), as well as editor of Animating Film Theory (2014) and Deep Mediations: Thinking Space in Cinema and Digital Cultures (2021, with Jeff Scheible). In this instalment, Karen introduces Chris and Alex to the life and career of the artist and filmmaker Helen Hill, who died in 2007 aged only 36, but whose ebullient imagination on display across her experimental shorts pushed at the boundaries of direct animation, stop-motion, and do-it-yourself methods of animated filmmaking. Listen as the trio discuss Hill’s last short The Florestine Collection (2011) completed by her husband Paul Gailiunas, alongside earlier works Mouseholes (1999), and Madame Winger Makes A Film (2001), to reflect on mixed media film as a negotiation of trauma and mode of catharsis; unfinished animation and the political act of recovery; film-based activism, education, and the interpretive form of experimental animation; pantomime aesthetics and the role of paper, puppets, fabric and ‘stuff’ in crafting worlds that only animation can access; and the playfulness of Hill’s animated experiments and projects that expressed not just her delight in life but confronted what it means for a community to have filmmaking at its centre.

**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

• Herhuth, Eric. 2018. “Political Animation and Propaganda.” In The Animation Studies Reader, eds. Nichola Dobson, Annabelle Honess Roe, Amy Ratelle, and Caroline Ruddell, 169–180. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

• Honess Roe, Annabelle. 2013. Animated Documentary. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

• Moore, Samantha. 2018. “Does this look right? Working within the collaborative frame.” In Jonathan Murray and Nea Ehrlich, eds. Drawn from Life: Issues and Themes in Animated Documentary Cinema, . Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.

• van Gageldonk, Maarten, László Munteán, and Ali Shobeiri, eds. 2021. Animation and Memory. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

• Young, Susan, 2023, Bearing Witness: Autoethnographic Animation and the Metabolism of Trauma (PhD thesis), School of Communication, Royal Academy of Art. Available here.