Footnote #40 - Puppetry

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!

What is puppet animation, and are puppets a form of animation? The historical and theoretical implications of fantasy and animation’s relationship to puppet performance are the focus of Footnote #40, with Chris and Alex looking at the defining role of puppets in fantasy’s fête and carnival culture origins; the phantasmagoria of the puppet and the desire to express fantasy through puppetry; links to the earliest stop-motion shorts and rise of motion-capture technologies in an era of virtual puppetry; and whether evolving definitions of animation and its medium specificity are appropriate enough to encompass the volume and diversity of puppet forms.

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

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

Suggested Readings

• Bell, John, ed. Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects. Cambridge: THE MIT Press.

• Gross, Kenneth. 2011. Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

• Nelson, Victoria. 2001. The Secret Life of Puppets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

• Warner, Marina. Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors & Media Into the Twenty-first Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.