Christopher Holliday (King’s College London)

Dr Christopher Holliday is Lecturer in Liberal Arts and Visual Cultures Education at King’s College London, where he teaches Film Studies and Liberal Arts and specializes in Hollywood cinema, animation history and contemporary digital media. He gained his PhD in Film Studies from King’s College London in 2013, having previously been an undergraduate and postgraduate student at the University of Warwick, where he graduated with a First-Class BA Honours degree in Film and Television Studies (2006) and an MA for Research in Film and Television Studies (2008) with Distinction. Christopher was a Graduate Teaching Assistant (2010-2015) and Teaching Fellow (2015-2017) in Film Studies at King’s, and also acted as convenor of the London and Film module for the university’s Summer School programme. He previously taught modules in Film and Media at the University of Kent (2014), University of Surrey (2015), and on the BA Film Practice course at London South Bank University (2013-2015). He became Lecturer in Liberal Arts and Visual Cultures Education in 2021, and since 2017 has also acted as the department’s Admissions Tutor.

Christopher’s monograph, The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre is the first academic work to examine the computer-animated feature film as a global phenomenon of popular cinema. It provides a genre analysis of computer animation informed by wider technological discourses and the status of animation as an industrial art form, connecting elements of film style to the computer-animated film’s unique production contexts. The book was shortlisted for the international Society for Animation Studies (SAS) 2019 McLaren-Lambart Award for the Best Scholarly Book on Animation. Christopher is also the co-editor with Chris Pallant of the recent collection Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: New Perspectives on Production, Reception, Legacy for Bloomsbury’s ‘Animation: Key Films/Filmmakers’ series. This book explores the enduring qualities that have marked Snow White's influence and legacy, as well as its central place within the history of global animation.

Alongside the Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres collection, Christopher continues to publish widely on Hollywood cinema, popular animation, and digital media. His work has appeared in Animation Practice, Process & Production, animation: an interdisciplinary journal (where he is also Associate Editor), Journal of British Cinema and Television, Journal of Popular Film and Television, The London Journal and Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, and he has forthcoming articles in the Journal of Early Popular Visual Culture and Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. He has also written on animation and contemporary media culture for The Independent; on the Impakter, Peephole Journal, The Conversation, In Media Res and Critical Studies in Television websites; for the international Society of Animation Studies blog animationstudies2.0; and in the popular film magazine Total Film. Christopher is currently co-editing two critical anthologies. The first is focused on characters and aesthetics in animation as part of the four-volume Encyclopedia of Animation Studies series, to be published with Bloomsbury in 2025. The second is an interdisciplinary examination of the connections between animation as an industrial and creative art form and studies of performance. His other new project concerns computer graphics and compositing in relation to the cultural politics of identity. This new research investigates the evolving modes and forms of CG characters, cyborgs and posthuman subjects within post-millennial Hollywood film as shifting sites of digital reproduction, labour and convergence. It examines the development of such ‘digital body politics’ within a cross-section of recent U.S. cinema, looking at the exchange between computer technologies and the representation of virtual bodies across different intersections of a range of cultural identity paradigms.

Christopher has spoken on popular culture, animation history, Hollywood cinema, and contemporary digital technology at various events, screenings, festivals, and academic institutions. He has presented on his research and teaching across the U.K. and to international audiences in the U.S., Canada, Portugal, France, and Germany; been interviewed for The Guardian, The New Statesman, BBC News and several BBC Radio programmes; and appeared on the BBC Arts website and international arts review programme Showcase TRT discussing Walt Disney animation and U.S. animator and illustrator Gene Deitch. In March 2020, he was an invited panellist at the Animation: The Write Stuff public event held at the British Film Institute, and has previously spoken at The Book Club and Genesis Cinema in London; at the Matchbox Cineclub held at the Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow; on panels at the KCL Film Studies Festival and KCL Race Equality Network (at the college’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience); and as part of the University of Surrey’s Animation: 100 Years of Artistry and Innovation series. Since 2017, Christopher has also been part of the Canterbury Anifest organising committee as symposium director, running both academic events and free animation/drawing workshops for children. And as many listeners will know, Christopher also enjoys life as Alexander Sergeant’s begrudging co-host on the Fantasy-Animation podcast.

For a complete list of Christopher’s publications, please click here, or visit his King’s College London institutional profile here.

Recent publications

2023

• Walt’s Art History: Late Style, Digital Aesthetics and the ‘Disney Baroque’

  animation: an interdisciplinary journal 18, no. 1 (March 2023): 78-95. Available here.

• “Rhythm and the Rotoshop: Waking Life (2001), A Scanner Darkly (2006), and Rhythmanalysis.” ReFocus: The Films of Richard Linklater. Eds. Timotheus Vermeulen and Kate Wilkins (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), 210-233.

2022

• “Aardman’s Animal Farm: “Loaded” Livestock and Illustrative Aesthetics in Shaun the Sheep (2007–).” Children, Youth, and International Television. Eds. Adrian Schober and Debbie Olson (London: Routledge, 2022), 151-170.

• “Retroframing the Future: Digital De-aging Technologies in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema.” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 61, no. 5 (2021-2022): 210-237.

2021

• “Rewriting the Stars: Surface Tensions and Gender Troubles in the Online Media Production of Digital Deepfakes.”
  Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 27, no. 4 (August): 899-918. Available here.

• “Old Dog, New Tricks”: James Bond’s Digital Chaos.” The International Journal of James Bond Studies 4, no. 1 (May): 1-24. Available here.

• “Tim Burton’s Unruly Animation.” In Tim Burton’s Bodies: Gothic, Animated, Corporeal and Creaturely, edited by Fran Pheasant-Kelly & Stella Hockenhull, 42-53. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press