Episode 175 - Enchanted (Kevin Lima, 2007)
Enchanted (Kevin Lima, 2007)
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 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. Topics for Chris and Alex to grapple with in this episode include Disney’s careful curating of their history and the question of branding and authorship; sincerity and Enchanted’s function as a form of Disney revisionism; the importance of the film’s 2007 release and the role of fantasy in the Disney/Pixar corporate merger; gender, femininity, and creative labour; intrusive vs. portal quest fantasy as it plays out in contemporary New York; the drama of mixed media hybridity; and the codes and conventions of Enchanted’s “fairytale nonsense” that allows it to openly declare its use of animation as fantasy.
**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
Bell, Elizabeth, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells. 1995. From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Davis, Amy M. 2006. Good Girls & Wicked Witches: Women in Disney’s Feature Animation. John Libbey & Company/University of Indiana Press.
Davis, Amy M. 2013. Handsome Heroes & Vile Villains: Men in Disney’s Feature Animation. John Libbey & Company/University of Indiana Press.
Holliday, Christopher. 2018. “From Buzz to Business: Hollywood, Fantasy, and the Computer-Animated Film Industry.” In Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres, eds. Christopher Holliday and Alexander Sergeant, 210-226. London & New York: Routledge.
Holliday, Christopher. 2018. “Animation, Fantasy and the Disney/Pixar Dilemma.” Fantasy-Animation, available at: https://www.fantasy-animation.org/current-posts/animation-fantasy-and-the-disneypixar-dilemma.
Holliday, Christopher. 2023. “Walt’s Art History: Late Style, Digital Aesthetics and the ‘Disney Baroque’,” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 18, no. 1 (March): 78-95, available here.
McGowan, Todd. 2007. The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Pallant, Chris. 2011. Demystifying Disney: A History of Disney Feature Animation. London: Bloomsbury Academic.