Footnote #38 - Storybook Openings

The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!

Footnote #38 tackles the recurrent motif of the storybook that so often begins Disney’s animated features, but which also takes other forms and styles as part of the studio’s sustained dramatisation of storytelling. Listen as Chris and Alex discuss the importance of the prologue within definitions of the Disney formula; animation’s decorative function as a way of actualising and illustrating narrative events; visual developments in the trope and the role of literary legitimisation; and how the recurrent image of the leather-bound manuscript has been subject to contemporary Hollywood animation’s increasingly deconstructive register.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Suggested Readings

• Genette, Gérard. 1997. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

• Kelly, Katherine Coyne. 2012. “Disney’s medievalized ecologies in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Sleeping Beauty.” In The Disney Middle Ages: A Fairy-Tale and Fantasy Past, edited by Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein, 189-207. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

• Propp, Vladimir. 2003. Morphology of the Folktale. Austin: University of Texas Press.

• Sergeant, Alexander. 2019. “High Fantasy Disney: Recontextualising The Black Cauldron.” In Discussing Disney, edited by Amy M. Davis, 53-72. Bloomington, New Barnet: John Libbey.

• Wasko, Janet. 2001. Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy. London: Polity Press.