Footnote #65 - Pervasive Animation

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!

The 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. Other topics include what this critical re-conceptualisation means for the variant sites, spaces, and interfaces of animation beyond the screen; how interdisciplinarity can critically account for the “pervasive” spread of animation and the possibility of academically studying the medium outside Film and Media Studies; and what all this means for animation itself as a complex and chaotic scholarly object.

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

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

Suggested Readings

• Bieberstein, Rada and Erwin Feyersinger. 2022. “The Ever-Expanding Scope of Animation Historiography: A Discussion of Interdisciplinary Approaches and Methods.” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 17, no. 1: 10–25.

• Buchan, Suzanne, ed. 2013. Pervasive Animation. New York: Routledge.

• Callus, Paula. 2012. “Reading Animation through the Eyes of Anthropology: A Case Study of sub-Saharan African Animation.” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 7, no. 2: 113–130.

• Holliday, Christopher. 2023. “On Teaching With and About Disney Animation.” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies – Teaching Media Dossier 8, no.2 (‘Teaching Disney’ dossier, ed. Peter C. Kunze)(Fall), available here

• Linares Martinez, Omar O. 2015. “Criteria for Defining Animation: A Revision of the Definition of Animation in the Advent of Digital Moving Images.” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 10, no. 1: 42–57.