Sound, performance, and the body come together in this Footnote episode discussing pantomime as an entertainment spectacle, as Chris and Alex seek to map the possible connections between pantomime as a popular theatrical tradition emerging in the 17th century and both animation’s own technologies and representations and legacies of fantasy.
Read MoreChris and Alex take on transnational cinemas in this brand new Footnote episode of the podcast, thinking through the mobility of - and interactions between - films and filmmakers across national borders and what it means for cinema to ‘travel.’
Read MoreThe next Footnote episode of the podcast maps the stakes of telling history and what it means to construct historical narratives through cinema as a form of historical writing. Listen as Fantasy/Animation’s resident lapsed historian Alex takes Chris through the history and theory of making history and doing historical work; verbal and visual discourses of narrativisation in relation to Hayden White’s notions of historiography and historiophoty; distinctions between the fluctuating ‘truths’, poetics, and politics of history; facts and events as non-narrative and empirical; and how the modes and meanings of telling history contribute to the writerly and highly subjective craft of the historian.
Read MoreInspired by the recent podcast episode on Casper (Brad Silberling, 1995) that featured a conversation with the film’s lead animator Mark Austin, Chris and Alex maintain the Halloween theme for this latest Footnote instalment that examines the spectacular imagery of “pepper’s ghost” - an illusion technique dating back to the earliest forms of stage magic that also found a home across multiple popular entertainment spaces and attractions.
Read MoreThe first Footnote podcast of the new season kicks off with this discussion of enviro-toons, a category - perhaps even sub-genre - of animation that speaks to the complex relationship that exists between the representations of (and labour processes behind) the animated medium and the environment.
Read MoreThe current cultural “pervasiveness” of animated media and the medium’s durable status as a vital intermediary between ‘us’ and ‘the world’ is the focus of this latest Footnote episode, which tackles “Pervasive Animation” as it has been understood within Suzanne Buchan’s 2013 anthology of the same name. Chris takes Alex through the requisite methodological challenges, considerations, and conundrums when looking at animation’s many forms within contemporary moving image culture, as well as what Buchan says about the need to push animation’s multiplicity of definitions towards aesthetic and critical intersections with everything from fine art and sculpture to videogames and medical imaging.
Read MoreFresh from last week’s discussion of Mickey Mouse, Chris and Alex are once again joined by Dr David McGowan (Lecturer in the Contextual and Theoretical Studies of Animation at the University of the Arts London) to map the mythology of the Golden Age of Animation, and in particular how this phase of the medium’s history has been framed in relation to the cartoon’s move from silent to sound technology but also its emergent stability and security as an industrial art form.
Read MoreChris and Alex take a look at animation’s historical and troubling relationship to race with this examination of the Censored Eleven, a collection of controversial Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons produced during the 1930s and 1940s removed from syndication since 1968 for their inclusion of harmful and offensive racist stereotypes.
Read MoreThe Fantasy/Animation Footnotes complete their unofficial ‘psychoanalysis trilogy’ with this look at object relations and a branch of psychoanalytic approaches to film that emerged as a competing way of thinking about cinema linked to the development of the conscious minds of children.
Read MoreThe Fantasy/Animation Footnotes return to psychoanalysis in order to make sense of the world through gazing and gaze theory. Alex once again takes the lead in discussing Laura Mulvey’s seminal work on the gaze but also how it offers just one way of thinking about the topic, drawing instead on Lacanian psychoanalysis to distinguish between the qualities of looking and gazing.
Read MoreListen as Alex takes Chris through the desires and distresses of psychoanalysis in this new Fantasy/Animation Footnote, working through its status as a branch of psychological theory and the contribution of the seminal work of Sigmund Freud.
Read MoreFantasy/Animation turns to a kind of magic for this latest Footnote episode, and the role of the magical in the distinction that lies within fantasy between the knowingness of illusion and the pursuit of rationality.
Read MoreIn this latest Fantasy/Animation Footnote, Chris and Alex wonder about wonder - a term that emphatically traverses both fantasy and animation as fields of study, yet with alternate meanings and connotations related to everything from mid-1990s cultures of special effects appreciation to fantasy’s historical links to the so-called “wonder film.”
Read MoreThe Fantasy/Animation Footnotes continue with this look at Disney authorship and the industry of animation via a turn to the celebrated Nine Old Men, a core group of directors and artists involved with the consolidated of the Disney aesthetic and a key component of its hyper-realist visual style.
Read MoreInspired by the recent podcast episode discussing movie musical Wicked (John M. Chu, 2024), the first Fantasy/Animation Footnote of 2025 takes on the politics of film prequels, and how these curious entries into film series and the reflexive gestures that it often makes to earlier moments in a broader narrative offer up a way of understanding processes and theories of adaptation.
Read MoreFantasy/Animation welcomes back special guest Professor Terry Lindvall to the podcast to continue the discussion of C.S. Lewis, this time with a focus on Lewis’ own work on fairy stories and the value the writer places on the importance of the ‘unexpected’ in fairytales as a mode of narration.
Read MoreFresh from their discussion of La mujer murcielago/The Batwoman (René Cardona, 1968), Chris and Alex are once again joined by Dr Iain Robert Smith, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London, to undertake a 10-minute introduction to cult and cult cinema.
Read MoreThe Fantasy/Animation Footnotes return with this reflection on the star voice as both an industrial trend within contemporary animation production and as an object of critique often assumed to nothing more than novelty leaned on too heavily to ‘sell’ animation as an entertainment medium.
Read MoreThe Fantasy/Animation Footnotes continue with this latest examination of the many ‘rhetorics’ of fantasy that accounts for the mechanics by which fantasy writers can and do achieve their fantastical effects. Drawn from Farah Mendlesohn’s influential work on fantasy literature Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008), this Footnote has Alex reflect on the categorisation of fantasy and the value of Mendlesohn’s self-declared “tour around the skeletons and exoskeletons of the genre” to distinguish and divide kinds of storytelling practices.
Read MoreThe Fantasy/Animation Footnotes return with this consideration of the many relationships that cinema can have with - and to - the city. Building on their recent episode on Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007), Chris and Alex reflect on those scholars who have placed cinema in dialogue with issues related to space, urban design, and sociology, and who ask questions about how a city is represented onscreen, how its spaces are organised and mapped, and the stakes of re-animating a ‘real’ space to transform an otherwise authentic and accessible locale.
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