Footnote #80 - Netflix

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!

Building off the recent podcast on KPop Demon Hunters (Maggie Kang & Chris Appelhans, 2025), Footnote #80 examines Netflix as a popular digital platform via both the context (and illusion) of choice and the algorithmic processes that create, tailor, and appeal to our audiovisual desires, but equally Netflix’s contribution to the contemporary landscape of media production and consumption. Topics include Netflix as a gatekeeper that manages and shapes our access to ‘content’; the digital architecture of streaming platforms and how their optimised capabilities for providing highly personalised recommendations interpellates the user into its structures; the politics of ‘making’ taste and questions of authorship; default narratives of loss and gain that frame digital forms of innovation; Netflix Animation as an emerging production studio; and what the curated library of platform content tells us about industrial and cultural categorisation of fantasy and animation.

**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

• Bradbury-Rance, Kit. 2023. “‘Unique joy’: Netflix, pleasure and the shaping of queer taste,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 21, no. 2: 133-157.

• Frey, Mattias. 2021. Netflix Recommends: Algorithms, Film Choice, and the History of Taste. California, University of California Press.

• Frey, Mattias. 2021. MUBI and the Curation Model of Video on Demand. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

• Lotz, Amanda D. 2022. Netflix and Streaming Video: The Business of Subscriber- Funded Video on Demand. Cambridge: Polity Press.

• Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression - How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press.

• Rettberg, Jill Walker. 2023. Machine Vision: How Algorithms are Changing the Way We See the World. Cambridge: Polity Press.

• Webster, Jack. 2023. “The promise of personalisation: Exploring how music streaming platforms are shaping the performance of class identities and distinction.” New Media & Society 25, no. 8: 2140-2162.