In the first act of Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto (2005), a tale of a young transgender woman growing up in small town Ireland during the height of the troubles in the 1970s, there is an extended fantasy sequence in which Kitten (Cillian Murphy) imagines her own conception by her parents. It is one of many fantasy sequences that are scattered throughout the film, and one that relies heavily on manifesting a fictional memory which most likely did not happen.
Read MoreSystematic genre criticism has gone out of fashion and Sotiris Petridis’s Anatomy of the Slasher Film: A Theoretical Analysis (2019) is an attempt to respond to this pressing need in genre studies. Anatomy of the Slasher Film (Fig. 1) consists of an introduction, four chapters, a conclusion, two appendices (“Films Referenced” and “Semantic Elements”), endnotes, a filmography, a bibliography, and an index.
Read MoreNoel Brown provides an engaging and well-researched account of contemporary Hollywood feature animation, here defined as from the 1990s onwards. Noting the recent significance of animation to both the Hollywood studios, their parent conglomerates, and popular culture more broadly, he aims to outline the “form and poetics of the mainstream animated feature” (Brown 2020, 2), with chapters devoted to their narrative and thematic focus on family and friendship, aesthetic shifts, and changes around their representations of identity.
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