STORYTELLING — footnote episodes

Footnote #68 - Historiography

The next Footnote episode of the podcast maps the stakes of telling history and what it means to construct historical narratives through cinema as a form of historical writing. Listen as Fantasy/Animation’s resident lapsed historian Alex takes Chris through the history and theory of making history and doing historical work; verbal and visual discourses of narrativisation in relation to Hayden White’s notions of historiography and historiophoty; distinctions between the fluctuating ‘truths’, poetics, and politics of history; facts and events as non-narrative and empirical; and how the modes and meanings of telling history contribute to the writerly and highly subjective craft of the historian.

FOOTNOTE PODCASTChristopher Holliday and Alexander SergeantNovember 10, 2025HISTORY, MEDIA, STORYTELLING, FILM HISTORYComment

Footnote #38 - Storybook Openings

Footnote #38 tackles the recurrent motif of the storybook that so often begins Disney’s animated features, but which also takes other forms and styles as part of the studio’s sustained dramatisation of storytelling.

FOOTNOTE PODCASTChristopher Holliday and Alexander SergeantNovember 27, 2023WALT DISNEY, NARRATIVE, STORYTELLING, STYLE, HOLLYWOODComment

Footnote #35 - Twice Told Tales

Chris and Alex return to the Footnote format for this latest episode on “twice told tales” - a term that, following its Shakespearean origins, has been applied by writers of fantasy to refer to fantasy’s relationship to oral literature and fairytales. Topics include the fairytale’s codification of oral culture; legacies of literary structures and the power of (re)telling the beats of a story; shifting narrative templates and the act of adding one story ‘on top’ of another; and the spectatorial pleasure of receiving the fantasy of twice told creativity.

FOOTNOTE PODCASTChristopher Holliday and Alexander SergeantOctober 16, 2023NARRATIVE, FANTASY, AUDIENCE, STORYTELLINGComment

Footnote #29 - Transmedia

Drawing on the seminal work of scholar Henry Jenkins, this latest Footnote episode engages the question of transmedia storytelling, industrial organisation, cultures of appreciation, and the consumption of media in an era of convergence. Alex takes the lead in discussing how contemporary entertainment experiences involve the dispersal of content across interacting, co-ordinated, and co-dependent media platforms.

FOOTNOTE PODCASTChristopher Holliday and Alexander SergeantMay 15, 2023INDUSTRY, HOLLYWOOD, STORYTELLINGComment

Footnote #18 - Studio Ghibli (with Susan Napier)

The latest Footnote episode of the podcast sees the return of Professor Susan Napier (Goldthwaite Professor of Rhetoric, International Literary and Cultural Studies at Tufts University), who straight from her guest turn on Chris and Alex’s discussion of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2002) chats about the animated works and philosophy of Studio Ghibli.

FOOTNOTE PODCASTChristopher Holliday and Alexander SergeantNovember 21, 2022JAPAN, ANIME, FANTASY, STORYTELLINGComment

Footnote #7 - The Fantastic

The fantasy of the fantastic is the subject of Footnote #7, as Alex takes listeners (including Chris) on a journey through the origins of the fantastique and a term that often describes certain stories with impossible elements.

Footnote #3 - Fantasy

Chris and Alex talk all things fantasy in this second Fantasy/Animation Footnote Episode, following-up their discussion of animation with a rapid journey through fantasy from Aristotle and European enlightenment through to J. R. R. Tolkien and Mary Poppins.