“The show prides itself on being the podcasting world’s number one authority on all things sculptured, painted, drawn and designed within the world of popular entertainment. This podcast delivers on its promise in spades. Not only is it well produced, the sheer level of expertise on offer is unrivalled. ”
As featured on Feedspot’s Top 10 “Best Animation History Podcasts”!
The author of Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance (Rutgers University Press, 2023), Dr. Peter Kunze (Tulane University), is the special guest for Episode 136 of the podcast which looks at the impact of Walt Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise, 1991) and both the industrial and stylistic stakes of the film’s adoption of a Broadway style of musical arrangement.
Read MoreThe Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998) meets They Live (John Carpenter, 1988) in Shawn Levy’s science-fiction comedy Free Guy (2021), which marks the director’s first collaboration with charming Canadian Ryan Reynolds and is a film that confronts head-on contemporary anxieties around technology, choice, security, and artificial intelligence. Joining Chris and Alex to separate out their NPCs from their AI engines is Mark Bould, Professor of Film and Literature at the University of West England, and author of a number of books on the aesthetics, politics and philosophy of science-fiction storytelling.
Read MoreStrap in for Episode 104 of the podcast as the thrill ride that is Lilly and Lana Wachowski’s Speed Racer (2008) provides the focus for this latest instalment in all its unwieldy and unruly CG glory. Chris and Alex’s special guest for this episode is Tim Robey, renowned film critic and author who has written widely on all kinds of cinema for The Daily Telegraph for over the last 20 years.
Read MoreIn this latest episode, Chris and Alex examine one of the most important animation companies of the last 20 years in Hollywood – Blue Sky Studios – who made significant contributions to the shape and direction of U.S. animation, and particularly the computer-animated film. Formed in February 1987 by animator Chris Wedge, the studio recently hit the headlines as they are now sadly in the past tense – The Walt Disney Company acquired Blue Sky as part of their 2019 purchase of 21st Century Fox and then, in February 2021, announced that Blue Sky would be shut down as an animation division. This episode looks back at Blue Sky’s 2011 computer-animated musical Rio (Carlos Saldanha, 2011) with special guest Michael Tanzillo, who worked as a Senior Lighting Technical Director at Blue Sky on a number of computer-animated films.
Read MoreThe 2002 Disney science-fiction epic Treasure Planet (Ron Clements & John Musker, 2002) is the focus of Episode 78 of the podcast, which looks at the melding together of the Disney formula with space fantasy in this swashbuckling adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 adventure novel Treasure Island. Joining Chris and Alex for this bumper episode are two very special guests: Ron Clements and John Musker, who aside from writing and directorial duties on Treasure Planet are known as a filmmaking duo absolutely central to the renaissance of Disney animation in the 1980s and 1990s.
Read MoreEpisode 68 marks Chris and Alex’s first look at popular animation studio DreamWorks, turning to the California-based company’s early cycle of cel-animated cartoons to examine The Prince of Egypt (Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner and Simon Wells, 1998). Joining them to separate the historical realism from the packaged Westernised fantasy is biblical scholar and broadcaster Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at the University of Exeter, whose research encompasses ancient Israelite and Judahite religions, and portrayals of the religious past in the Hebrew Bible.
Read MoreChris and Alex return to the feature films of the Bristol-based Aardman Animations studio for Episode 67, travelling from the world of Kensington propriety ‘up top’ to the underground chaos of Ratropolis ‘down below’ for Flushed Away (David Bowers & Sam Fell, 2006), which tells the story of the trials and tribulations of high society rat Roddy St. James who is inadvertently flushed down into the sewers of London. Mirroring this narrative collision of worlds, Flushed Away also bears the industrial weight of such duality, being part of a 12-year, four-film $250million agreement between Aardman and Hollywood studio DreamWorks Animation to produce a series of animated features.
Read MoreThe Christmas spirit is finally in the air, with Chris and Alex using Episode 63 of the podcast as their annual opportunity to discuss all things seasonal - this time examining the fantasy of Christmas advertising, and the repeated role played by animation in the construction of festive commercials, television ads and brand promotions. They are joined in their Yuletide deliberations by Dr Malcolm Cook, Associate Professor in Film Studies (University of Southampton), whose numerous publications include the monograph Early British Animation: From Page and Stage to Cinema Screens (2018) and the co-edited collection (with Professor Kirsten Moana Thompson) Animation and Advertising (2019).
Read MorePerformer, composer, silent film accompanist and television presenter Neil Brand is the special guest joining Chris and Alex for Episode 57 of the podcast, which celebrates the musical beats and Mariachi owls of Rango (Gore Verbinski, 2011). Listen as they discuss how this curious 2011 computer-animated film revels in the power of telling tales alongside its broader relationship to folk ballads; Rango’s cinephilic evocation of canonical Hollywood Westerns and U.S. cinema history; themes of ambition, isolation, and aimlessness, and how this ties into a film whose existentialist narrative is predicated on the question of inevitability.
Read MoreChris and Alex dust off their knowledge of early film history for Episode 55 as they examine Martin Scorsese’s adventure Hugo (2011), a playful mystery set in 1930s Paris that takes audiences through the special effects and spectacular stagecraft of pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès. Joining Chris and Alex amid the architecture of the Gare Montparnasse is Eric Smoodin, Professor of American Studies and Cinema and Technocultural Studies at the University of California, who has published monographs and edited collections on Walt Disney, Frank Capra and Hollywood film history, as well as a new book Paris in the Dark: Going to the Movies in the City of Light, 1930–1950 (Duke University Press, 2020) that sketches a picture of French film culture of the 1930s and 1940s.
Read MoreIn an alternate 1985, Chris and Alex sit down to watch the recent comic book feature film Watchmen (Zach Snyder, 2009), a neo-noir/superhero blockbuster that adapts the popular DC Comics series for the big screen. They are joined in this Cold War-era tale of Soviet Union-United States relations by Dr Drew Morton, Associate Professor of Mass Communication at Texas A&M University, Texarkana, and author of Panel to the Screen: Style, American Film, and Comic Books During the Blockbuster Era (University Press of Mississippi, 2016), as well as a number of articles and chapters on motion comics, media convergence and comic book adaptation.
Read MoreEpisode 28 sees Chris and Alex joined in their world of pure imagination by Stuart Messinger, VFX Coordinator on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Tim Burton, 2005), to discuss the part-musical, full-fantasy and live-action/CGI adaptation of Roald Dahl’s popular story. Topics include Stuart’s work on the film in digital visual effects at the Moving Picture Company; the collaborative nature of multi-studio effects production on feature-length blockbusters; the practical and artistic challenges of animating live-action plates; the combination of 2D (matte) and 3D (sub-surface scattering) technologies; and the integration of realist aesthetics together with the surrealistic imagery and fantastic stylisations conjured by Dahl’s original 1964 story.
Read MoreFor episode 26, Chris and Alex are joined by special guest Barry J.C. Purves, renowned stop-motion animator, director and screenwriter who is also the author of Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance (Burlington, MA: Focal Press, 2007). The focus of their conversation is the monster epic King Kong (Peter Jackson, 2005), the digital VFX-heavy remake of the original 1933 film of the same name, and a film upon which Barry himself worked as part of the animation department.
Read MoreVenturing to Middle-earth, and ably accompanied on this opening stage of their podcasting quest by Shaun Gunner, chairman of the Tolkien Society, Chris and Alex discuss the first of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings adaptations, The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). Journeying from the Shire on the way to Mount Doom, episode 25 debates Tolkien’s ability to craft believable genealogies and histories in his high fantasy realms; cartography, map-making and the geographical consistency of fictional worlds; and the film’s relationship to post-millennial Hollywood franchises via technological developments in digital visual effects.
Read MoreIn episode 15, Chris and Alex log on to Tron (Steven Lisberger, 1982), a watershed moment in the history of computer animation and one that taps into the early electronic spectacle of digital visual effects within a Hollywood context. Representing the wonder of - if not the cultural anxieties surrounding - the newness of computers and virtual reality (as well as the growing popularity of videogames), the film reframes cyberspace as a complex three-dimensional fantasy world.
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