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In many fantasy stories, magic is drawn from ancient relics or arcane symbols, but what if it came from something as simple, intimate, and culturally rich as a cup of tea? In Tea Leaves Last, a 2D animatic pilot made by Asians in Animation, that’s the recipe. The story follows Mya, a young woman from a small farming nation as she ventures out to bring back forgotten Tea magic to the world. This society revolves around the plant – it is used in place of water for everything from bathing to drinking to waterfalls and lakes of tea. But the choice of this drink has deeper meaning. As the world’s most widely consumed drink, tea originates from a region between Burma (Myanmar) and China, with which showrunner Saira Umar shares ethnic roots. Tea’s journey to global presence has shaped empires and incited revolutions from the Boston Tea Party to the Opium Wars. It is a drink of ritual, rebellion, and colonial entanglement, serving as a perfect foundation of an entire magical ecosystem.
In the previous blog, I analyzed Stromae’s verse from the song Ma Meilleure Ennemie as a reflection of Ekko’s emotional struggle in the animated series Arcane. This part is about Pomme’s verse and how it can be interpreted as a representation of Jinx’s inner guilt. Pomme has a softer voice that contrasts with the chaotic atmosphere that Jinx is often associated with. I will explore how both the lyrics and the visuals of the music video reflect Jinx’s fractured sense of self, emotional paralysis and duality between desiring connection and fearing it at the same time.
This is the first of two blogs that focus on music as narrative in the animated series Arcane (Christian Linke & Alex Yee, 2021-) supported by an analysis of its animation and character development. The series is set within the League of Legends (2009-) universe, an online multiplayer videogame created by Riot Games. It takes place in various fictional lands populated by hundreds of different champions, some of whom are explored in Arcane.
You’ve seen this all before. A character, often male, is a nice guy, maybe a bit too nice or too repressed. They’re nerdy or meek, not overly popular, and often bullied or abused in some way. However, in certain situations, everything changes. Either through a shift in mannerisms or through an actual physical transformation, they change into a violent brute, a self-confident schemer, or a passionate womaniser. Characters like The Incredible Hulk, Yami Yugi and Yami Bakura from Japanese manga series Yu-Gi-Oh! (Kazuki Takahashi, 1996-), and all versions of The Nutty Professor story. Popularised by the fantasy of Dr Jekyll and Mister Hyde, and later by pulp entertainment drawing from limited understandings of the then-named Multiple Personality Disorder in the early 20th century, the dramatised conception of people with aggressive alternate personalities appear across a diverse range of animation in both heroic and villainous roles, but few name what it is or give the topic proper weight.
Experimental animation often employs metamorphosis and incorporates visual metaphors as strategies to explore concepts such as the cycle of historical trauma, thereby contributing to the transmission of collective memories related to colonialism, apartheid, and war. (Stewart 2024, 7). These transformations not only signify external historical ruptures but also mirror internal emotional upheavals. In this context, the body emerges as a crucial site of expression, metaphorically becoming a space through which the intensity of emotion can be measured (Kövecses 2000, 24). This provides a solid theoretical basis for using the body to express abstract traumatic emotions in experimental animation.
Long ago it may have seemed a distant sci-fi dream, but now the Metaverse stands for a growing digital universe where users interact, create, and experience content in real time. The beauty at the very core of it is a creative revolution – one where artists are building entire virtual worlds as interactive canvases rather than one being powered purely by machines.
A recurring motif in Japanese animation and contemporary climate fiction animation is the misuse of technology by fictional scientific and militaristic authorities, which in the fictional narratives leads to severe disaster, often with ecological and environmental consequences. In this context, “living weapons” – powerful beings created by science whose impact and abilities are reminiscent of weapons of mass destruction – are particularly potent. Living weapons are “fantasy characters who exist in alternative worlds and become embroiled in implausible plot lines” (Swale 2020, 1999). As archetypes, they prompt reflection on the depiction of cultural notions of catastrophe, particularly environmental catastrophe, and are often explored as symptomatic of deep-rooted and durable cultural anxieties about disastrous scientific incidents.
When arthouse streaming service, MUBI, acquired one of the year’s surprisingly successful films, 6x Oscar-nominated The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024), it was originally being distributed by Universal for barely $18M. However, French writer/director Coralie Fargeat’s refusal to cut certain scenes eventually allowed her to shop the film elsewhere. With Fargeat now satisfied and Universal likely banging their heads against the wall, The Substance has become an absolute hit, going on to make $70M+ at the global box office (D’Alessandro, 2024).
In this week’s blog, Fantasy/Animation sat down with Mikkel Mainz of SKJALD Animation studio, a full-pipeline creative house and animation studio located in Denmark, to discuss its experience working on successful web series and feature films, the interpretation of music through animated style, and SKJALD’s future animated projects.
Under the sea, monsters lurk. Despite The Little Mermaid (Ron Clements & John Musker, 1989)’s Sebastian singing about under the sea being better, audiences have long held a fear of the ocean and what lies beneath. It is an understandable fear, linked to the fear of the unknown; after all, it is estimated that 80% of our oceans remain unexplored.
Chris and Alex go all the way back to 2020 for the penultimate archive episode of the podcast for this summer, remembering their discussion of Ralph Bakshi’s high fantasy animated epic Wizards (Ralph Bakshi, 1977), which was originally recorded in front of a live audience at the Cinema Museum in Kennington, London in January 2020.
To coincide with the release of Pixar’s science-fiction computer-animated feature Elio (Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi & Adrian Molina, 2025) this summer, Chris and Alex take listeners back a decade to 2015 and the emotional worlds created by the studio’s earlier Inside Out (Pete Docter, 2015). Originally recorded live at the 33rd Annual Society for Animation Studies conference at Teesside University (and released soon after in October 2022), this episode featured as its special guest Dr. Eric Herhuth, Assistant Professor of Communication and Director of Film Studies at Tulane University, and author of Pixar and the Aesthetic Imagination: Animation, Storytelling, and Digital Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017).
For this second archive episode, Chris and Alex revisit Episode 81 of the podcast that gave listeners a quickfire journey through Sub-Saharan African animation with Paula Callus, a Professor in the National Centre for Computer Animation at Bournemouth University and an expert in Sub-Saharan African animation. The films covered in this instalment were Moustapha Alassane’s Bon Voyage Sim (1966), Ng’endo Mukii’s Yellow Fever (2013), Iwa (2009) from Nigerian filmmaker, illustrator and art director Kenneth (Shofela) Coker, the British/Kenyan animated television series Tinga Tinga Tales (2010-2012), and the science-fiction allegory Pumzi (2009) from writer and director Wanuri Kahiu.
To mark the return of the Fantasy/Animation archive instalments, Chris and Alex once more delve into the podcast’s back catalogue for this relisten of Episode 70 and their discussion of Space Jam (Joe Pytka, 1996), which featured very special guest Professor Paul Wells, Director of the Animation Academy at Loughborough University.
The Fantasy/Animation podcast has a new theme tune! Click here to read about its origins and influences from composer Francisca Araujo.
The current cultural “pervasiveness” of animated media and the medium’s durable status as a vital intermediary between ‘us’ and ‘the world’ is the focus of this latest Footnote episode, which tackles “Pervasive Animation” as it has been understood within Suzanne Buchan’s 2013 anthology of the same name. Chris takes Alex through the requisite methodological challenges, considerations, and conundrums when looking at animation’s many forms within contemporary moving image culture, as well as what Buchan says about the need to push animation’s multiplicity of definitions towards aesthetic and critical intersections with everything from fine art and sculpture to videogames and medical imaging.
Fresh from last week’s discussion of Mickey Mouse, Chris and Alex are once again joined by Dr David McGowan (Lecturer in the Contextual and Theoretical Studies of Animation at the University of the Arts London) to map the mythology of the Golden Age of Animation, and in particular how this phase of the medium’s history has been framed in relation to the cartoon’s move from silent to sound technology but also its emergent stability and security as an industrial art form.
Chris and Alex take a look at animation’s historical and troubling relationship to race with this examination of the Censored Eleven, a collection of controversial Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons produced during the 1930s and 1940s removed from syndication since 1968 for their inclusion of harmful and offensive racist stereotypes.
The Fantasy/Animation Footnotes complete their unofficial ‘psychoanalysis trilogy’ with this look at object relations and a branch of psychoanalytic approaches to film that emerged as a competing way of thinking about cinema linked to the development of the conscious minds of children.
Fantasy/Animation gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Society for Animation Studies (SAS).
Fantasy/Animation gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the ASIFA-Hollywood’s Animation Educators Forum 2021 Faculty Grant
The Society for Animation Studies (SAS), one of the world’s most well-known and popular international organizations dedicated to the study of animation history, theory and practice, holds an annual conference at locations throughout the world each year, where members present their recent research. The 36th Annual Society for Animation Studies conference took place between 7th-10th July 2025, hosted in Elephant & Castle, London, by the Screen School, London College of Communication (LCC), University of the Arts London (UAL). This year’s conference title was ‘Sustaining Animation’, and was inspired by UAL’s key values of climate, social and racial justice, and equality, diversity, and inclusion.