Footnote #70 - Pantomime

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!

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. Topics include classical antiquity, gesture, and choric dramas; European precursors like commedia dell’arte and féerie stories; the invested interest by early animation scholarship in the medium’s multiple genealogies and the role of pantomime in defining animated points of origin; and how the self-reflexive staging and gestures of pantomime came to influence the different visual and comedy stylings of cartoon storytelling.

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

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

Suggested Readings

• Crafton, Donald. 1982. Before Mickey: Animated Film 1898–1928. Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

• Crafton, Donald. 2013. Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief and World-Making in Animation. Berkeley: University of California Press.

• Lutz, E.G. 1920. Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons.

• Moen, Kristian. 2013. Film and Fairy Tales: The Birth of Modern Fantasy. London: I.B. Tauris.