“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 MoreFor Episode 127 of the podcast, Chris and Alex travel through (film) history to examine the negotiation of the past through computer manipulation, focusing on Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) and its use of digital techniques to re-articulate the sounds and images of the First World War. Joining them to discuss the technological mediation of national traumas and triumphs is Dr Lawrence Napper, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London, who is an expert in early silent and British cinemas and author of the monographs British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years (2009), The Great War in Popular British Cinema of the 1920s: Before Journey’s End (2015) and Silent Cinema: Before the Pictures Got Small (2017).
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 MoreFor the podcast’s half century, Chris and Alex tackle a tale of rising tensions between nature and culture, gods and humans, by looking at Studio Ghibli’s animated fantasy feature Princess Mononoke (Hayao Miyazaki, 1997). Joining us in this battle of tradition and modernity is anime scholar Dr. Rayna Denison, Senior Lecturer in the School of Art, Media and American Studies at UEA, and author and editor of a number of books, chapters and articles on Japanese animated cinema.
Read MoreEpisode 24 takes a walk through the terrain of animated documentary, with Chris and Alex joined by Dr Bella Honess Roe (Senior Lecturer and Programme Director for Film Studies, University of Surrey) to discuss the relationship between truth, authenticity and animation in Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008). Documenting his own personalised account of the Lebanon war, Folman’s feature film provides a useful test case to think about how fantasy and animation might be applied within a non-fiction context.
Read MoreFor this second episode, Chris and Alex discuss Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, 1988), a part-live-action/part-animation/part-fantasy film that functioned as an important milestone in marking the return of animation's commercial and critical appeal in Hollywood.
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