Episode 52 - Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi, 2007)

Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi, 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!

For the first in a special series of listener selections, Episode 52 has Chris and Alex get to grips with Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi, 2007), taking inspiration from social media suggestions that were submitted around the broader theme of diversity and inclusion. Adapted from Marjane Satrapi’s own autobiographical graphic novels Persepolis and Persepolis 2 (originally published in November 2000), Persepolis provides a stark - and often humorous - depiction of national trauma told through Marji’s own experience as she navigates the Iranian Revolution and overthrow of the Shah regime and Pahlavi dynasty; is exiled to Austria, before returning to Iran where she marries (and divorces); and climaxes with her arrival into France. Listen as Chris and Alex discuss Persepolis’ vexed relationship to the animated documentary (and its critical categorisation); discourses of Orientalism and the depiction of intrusive Western culture; the ambivalence of animated space and the black-and-white style of the film’s comic book aesthetic; how Persepolis might be understood as an example of the “dark fantastic”; and what Paronnaud and Satrapi’s film tells us about animation’s wider ability to bear the weight of social reality,

Suggested Readings

• David Butler, Fantasy Cinema: Impossible Worlds on Screen (London: Wallflower Press, 2009).

• W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903).

• Eric S. Rabkin, The Fantasy in Literature (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1976).

• Annabelle Honess Roe, Animated Documentary (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

• Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978).

• Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (New York: New York University Press, 2019).

• Aylish Wood, “Re-Animating Space,” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 1, no. 2 (2006): 133-152.