Fantasy/Animation

What is so special about special effects? What role does technological innovation play in their convincing construction of illusion? What distinguishes ‘special’ from ‘visual’ effects? In this Footnote episode, Chris and Alex play with ideas of special effects in relation to fantasy and animation, going back to early cinema and the animated fantasies (or fantastical animations) of Georges Méliès t...

Episode 129 sees Chris flying solo in this conversation recorded live at the recent Once Upon A Time: A Disney Day held at the British Film Institute in London back in July, which was part of the Making Magic: 100 Years of Disney two-month season that ran throughout 2023. Discussing the Disney studio’s longstanding relationship to technological innovation is returning special guest Chris McKenna ,...

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. Listen as Chris and Alex discuss the importance of the prologue within definitions of the Disney formula; animation’s decorative function as a way of actualising and illustrating narra...

Chris and Alex continue their journey through the world of Harry Potter for Episode 128 of the podcast, looking at the fourth instalment Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Mike Newell, 2005) accompanied by special guest Dr Taylor Driggers . Taylor is an academic researcher specialising in fantasy literature, theology and religious studies, gender, and sexuality, whose PhD in English Literature f...

Special guest Dr Lawrence Napper , Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London and expert in early silent and British cinemas, joins Chris and Alex once again - this time to talk about silent cinema in this Footnote episode of the podcast. Topics include the role of piano accompaniments, string quartets, and full orchestras within early film culture; the locating of silent cinema as a...

For Episode 127 of the podcast, Chris and Alex travel through (film) history to examine the negotiation of the past through computer manipulation, focusing on Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) and its use of digital techniques to re-articulate the sounds and images of the First World War. Joining them to discuss the technological mediation of national traumas and triumphs is Dr Lawren...

What is horror cinema, and where did it come from? What are its unsettling spectatorial effects and uncomfortable provocations? What codes and conventions define its big screen history, and at which points does it splinter into slasher sub-genres and monstrous cycles? What role does the gothic and supernatural play in its generic construction? And how does the body as both threat and as threatened...

As Halloween rolls around once more, things take a positively spooky turn as Chris and Alex discuss the stop-motion animated horror film ParaNorman (Sam Fell & Chris Butler, 2012) with very special guest Professor Stacey Abbott , who is incoming Professor of Film at Northumbria University and an expert in histories of gothic and horror in film and television. Topics for this discussion include...

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; shif...

Chris and Alex return from their extended summer break with this discussion of the much-maligned musical Cats (Tom Hooper, 2019), a film whose reputation as a big-budget misjudgment has perhaps overwhelmed the intricacies of its uncanny constitution, and in particular how the narrative’s negotiation of its A-list performers speaks to the vexed question of actorly labour and agency in an age of hei...

A quick message about Fantasy/Animation's Summer Break, as well as ways that you can get in touch to support all things fantastical and animated. From listening back through our podcast archive and leaving us a quick review and star rating, to dropping us an email or sending in a blog post idea or submission ready for when we return, we would love to hear from you! In the meantime, have happy summ...

Chris and Alex are joined once more by Mark Bould , Professor of Film and Literature at the University of West England, for this Footnote episode that explores the origins and definitions of science-fiction storytelling. Expect turns to genre theory and the evolution of generic cycles, including the shifting ways that science fiction gets defined (and by whom); how science fiction moved from print...

The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998) meets They Live (John Carpenter, 1988) in Shawn Levy’s science-fiction comedy Free Guy (2021), which marks the director’s first collaboration with charming Canadian Ryan Reynolds and is a film that confronts head-on contemporary anxieties around technology, choice, security, and artificial intelligence. Joining Chris and Alex to separate out their NPCs from their...

Special guest Chris McKenna , current Head of Creative Operations at the VFX studio Moving Picture Company, joins Chris and Alex for this latest Footnote episode on the VFX industry, with a particular focus on artists with colour blindness and advice on the best avenues for getting into animation lighting and design. From understanding the specific challenges of colour blindness for VFX artistry t...

The emergence of Disney’s so-called ‘live-action’ remakes provides the focus of Episode 123, with the recent adaptation of Dumbo (Tim Burton, 2019) offering Chris and Alex plenty to get their teeth into thanks to the film’s particular brand of digital realism as well as director Tim Burton’s reflections on the very nature of spectacle itself. Special guest for this discussion is Chris McKenna , cu...

Fresh from their discussion of Spider-Man: No Way Home (Jon Watts, 2021) , Chris, Alex and special guest Dr Nick Jones (Senior Lecturer in Film, Television and Digital Culture, University of York) return for this short Footnote episode on the marvel and magic of 3D technology. Topics include cinema’s own history of size, space, and spectacle from the Lumière brothers to James Cameron; the kinds of...

The MCU comes calling once again for Episode 122 of the podcast, as Chris and Alex navigate the complex web of storylines and superheroes that build the world of Spider-Man: No Way Home (Jon Watts, 2021). Joining them to reflect on the genre’s enduring appeal alongside the contemporary pleasures of Hollywood’s increasing multiversal madness is Dr Nick Jones , who is Senior Lecturer in Film, Televi...

From the invention of Plasticine by William Harbutt in Britain in 1897 to the use of malleable materials in the earliest stop-motion ‘trick films’ of Edwin S. Porter, J. Stuart Blackton, and the Fleischer Brothers, the application of clay in animation has a history as long as the medium itself. In Footnote #31 of the podcast, Chris and Alex deliberate the evolution of clay animation, including the...

Chris and Alex delve into motion-capture, murder mystery, and monster houses for this discussion of Gil Kenan’s 2006 computer-animated film Monster House, a digital feature produced by the ImageMovers company founded by renowned filmmaker Robert Zemeckis and a specialist in animation utilising mo-cap technologies. Joining them for Episode 121 of the podcast is Dr Jane Batkin , an animation film th...

The economy of the Hollywood franchise is the focus of Footnote #30, where Chris and Alex examine the multimedia conglomeration of the U.S. cinema industry in the blockbuster era of the 1970s, and the subsequent impact on the post-2000 phase of Hollywood film production and its intensified franchise mentality. To unpack the so-called ‘genius of the system,’ they take a journey through the history...

No sooner have Chris and Alex finished their examination of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Chris Columbus, 2002) than they make a swift return to Hogwarts for the third (and best?) in the franchise, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Alfonso Cuarón, 2004). Joining them in this instalment to separate their Leaky Cauldrons from their Time-Turners is very special guest Rhianna Dhillo...

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 m...

Special guest Dr Omar Sayfo joins Chris and Alex for Episode 119 of the podcast, which features a rundown of Arab Animation covering a range of cartoons from Egypt, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates, alongside a discussion of Omar’s recent book Arab Animation: Images of Identity (2021). Omar is an Affiliated Researcher in the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON) at Utrecht University, and a rese...

Animation’s rude and crude history is the topic of Footnote #28 of the podcast as Chris and Alex take up the complex issue of adult animation. Topics include adult animation as the medium’s cultural ‘other’ and how it is a term involved in exclusionary tactics of classification; associations between the ‘adult’ of adult animation and taboo themes, strong language, and graphic sexual content; alter...

Prepare for more multiverse madness as Chris and Alex dive into the world of Everything Everywhere All At Once (Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert, 2022), the Oscar-winning absurdist sci-fi action adventure that engages head-on with the question of what it means to be human set against the backdrop of forking path storylines, a sumptuous mise-en-scène of colliding visual styles, and a maelstrom of...