The mixed media potential of animation is the subject of Footnote #10, which takes on hybridity via the combination of multiple animated styles, as well as the spectatorial effects that such blended images might conjure.
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The history and application of sword and sorcery - a term initially used to describe a wave of pre-Tolkien fantasy writing - is the latest subject for Chris and Alex in Footnote #9, which plots the relationship between this kind of ‘rough’ historical fiction and questions of world-building, magic, and myth.
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Footnote #8 offers a brief detour to the abridged and incomplete animated writings of Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein from the 1940s, and in particular his notorious concept of “plasmaticness” that he argued was a way of understanding the appeal and attraction of Walt Disney’s cartoon images
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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.
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The business of talking animals is the focus of Footnote #6, as Chris (with a bit of Alex) takes listeners through the shared histories of anthropomorphism and animation, and the acquisition of humanlike qualities (sentience, subjectivity, and selfhood) by non-human animated characters.
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Footnote #5 seeks to embrace the sub-division of fantasy literature through distinctions of “high” and “low,” whereby the era of post-Tolkien fantasy was culturally and critically understood through the identification of the genre’s specific storytelling modes.
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In Footnote #4, Chris and Alex unpack the uncanny spectacle and affecting effects of stop-motion animation, from understanding the hands-on labour that crafts its illusions of life to the oneiric ‘stopped-motion’ worlds of Ladislas Starevich, Willis O’Brien, Ray Harryhausen, Jan Švankmajer and the Quay Brothers.
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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.
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The first Fantasy/Animation Footnote Episode proper launches with this short discussion on the origins and genealogies of animation, from cave paintings and Victorian children’s toys to the lightning sketch tradition and the comic books.
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Fantasy/Animation launches its new series of Footnote Episodes with this short introductory discussion that explains what to expect from these bonus fortnightly instalments, which will serve as brief ‘footnotes’ to the main podcast.
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