Following the recent podcast episode on Space Ghost Coast to Coast (Mike Lazzo, 1994-2008), Alex takes the reins for Fantasy/Animation Footnote 74, taking Chris through Jacques Derrida and deconstructivism as a philosophical doctrine, which embraces a way of interpretive thinking that is loosely tasked with exposing the lack of meaning within meaning itself and pushing against the clear resolution of a thesis.
Read MoreFootnote 73 looks at animation’s historical relationship to the body and how physicality was transcribed via the rotoscoping process as part of the construction of the earliest animated characters. From the Fleischer Studios pioneering the technology for use in their Out of the Inkwell series of shorts (1918–1927) and later feature films Gulliver's Travels (David Fleischer, 1939), and Mr. Bug Goes to Town (Dave Fleischer, 1941), through to Bob Sabiston’s digital homage to rotoscoping when developing the Rotoshop tool during the 1990s, this episode has Chris take Alex through the mechanics of projecting performances onto glass to be be traced by the animators to craft their animated performances.
Read MoreBuilding on their recent podcast episode on Kung Fu Panda (John Stevenson & Mark Osborne, 2008) with screenwriter John Yorke, Alex takes Chris through the mechanics and mysteries involved in the hero’s journey, Joseph Campbell’s famous structure and patterning of narrative, to discuss how such storytelling archetypes link to Jungian approaches towards the process of character individuation.
Read MoreListen as the brand new Fantasy/Animation Footnote tackles the complexities and contradictions of digital performance and cyber stardom via this discussion of synthespians, a term very much anchored to early-2000s concerns around the future of acting, agency, and authenticity whose popularisation was largely prompted by the rise of motion capture and other forms of computerised intervention.
Read MoreSound, 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.
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