Episode 8 - Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018)
Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 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!
Episode eight sees Chris and Alex discuss the eighteenth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018). As the first Marvel film to feature a predominantly black cast, Black Panther offers the opportunity to situate fantasy and animation both within the codes of the popular superhero genre, and alongside broader critical questions of black subjectivity in contemporary cinema. Chris and Alex therefore move through an examination of its spectacular use of digital animation in its portrayal of Third World-but-secretly-techno-heavy Wakanda; the fruitful overlap between science-fiction and fantasy cinema as categories of classification; and post-Trump Afrofuturist identity politics. Oh, and they talk a bit about CGI rhinos too.
Suggested Readings
William Brown, Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013).
Mark Dery, “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose,” in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, ed. Mark Dery (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994), 179-222.
Lonny J. Avi Brooks, “Cruelty and Afrofuturism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 1 (2018): 101-107.
Richard A. Grusin, “Donald Trump’s Evil Mediation,” Theory & Event 20, no. 1 (January 2017): 86-99.
Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981).
Kendall R. Phillips, ““The safest hands are our own”: cinematic affects, state cruelty, and the election of Donald J. Trump,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 1 (2018): 85-89.
Lisa Purse, Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).