Footnote #78 - The Imagination
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 #78 of the podcast focuses on the imagination as Alex takes Chris through the world of generative cognition and the many philosophical reflections that discuss our mental forces, which in turn allow us to conjure ideas, thoughts, concepts, and images that do not exist in the material world. Topics include early film theory and the question of imagined depth; the ‘use’ of the imagination to imagine and the distinction between imagination as a way to escape or transcend the real vs. a productive way to interrogate the world; the force of the imagination as a tool of meaning making, and the power in daydreaming certain fanciful ideas; cinema as an imaginary medium and the longstanding coding of fantasy as a genre of the imagination; and the productive tension between indulging or curtailing imagination with regards to the assumed non-realist and non-rational logic of fantasy cinema.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
**As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**
Suggested Readings
Addison, Joseph. 1712. “Pleasures of the Imagination,” The Spectator (June).
Fowkes, Katherine A. 2010. The Fantasy Film. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Münsterberg, Hugo. 1970. The Film: A Psychological Study. New York: Dover.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2004 [1940]. Trans. by Jonathan Webber. The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination. London and New York: Routledge.
Worley, Alec. 2005. Empires of the Imagination: A Critical Survey of Fantasy Cinema from Georges Méliès to The Lord of the Rings. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.