Episode 60 - Christopher Robin (Marc Forster, 2018)

Christopher Robin (Marc Forster, 2018)

Christopher Robin (Marc Forster, 2018)

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!

Heffalumps and Woozles take centre stage for Episode 60 of the podcast, as Chris and Alex take a trip deep into Hundred Acre Wood to confront Christopher Robin (Marc Forster, 2018) (not to be confused with the earlier A.A. Milne biography Goodbye Christopher Robin [Simon Curtis, 2017]…), and its pleasures of nostalgia. For this latest Listeners’ Choice, they discuss the role of illustration and illusionism in relation to Disney’s earlier Winnie the Pooh animated adaptations; how imagination and impossibility manages the film’s treatment of childhood fantasies, and the extent to which this is mirrored in elements of Christopher Robin’s digital/analogue production; the politics of niceness and the film’s gestures to a Trump-era “nicecore” cinema that delights in kindness and the intrinsic value of ‘being good’; the construction of a malleable, fluid virtual urban space to form bricolage architecture (particularly in its CG portrayal of postwar London); what Christopher Robin has to say about coming back to family, returning home, and simply seeing the world differently; and how doing nothing often leads to the very best kind of something.

Suggested Readings

  • Lucy Donaldson, “Rough and Smooth: The Everyday Textures of Toy Story,” in Toy Story: How Pixar Reinvented the Animated Feature, eds. Susan Smith, Noel Brown, Sam Summers (London: Bloomsbury: 2018), 73-86.

  • David Ehrlich, “The New Wave of Nicecore: How the Dark Age of Donald Trump Is Inspiring Movies to Choose Kindness Over Conflict,” IndieWire (2018), available at: https://www.indiewire.com/2018/06/nice-movies-in-age-of-trump-1201974749/.

  • Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1993).

  • Nick Jones, “The Flexible Urban Imaginary: Postindustrial Cities in Inception, The Adjustment Bureau, and Doctor Strange,” in The City in American Cinema: Film and Postindustrial Culture, eds. Johan Andersson and Lawrence Webb (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019), 223-249.

  • Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008).

  • Carolyn Rickards, “Review: Saving Christopher Robin - A Review of Two Winnie-the-Pooh Films,” Fantasy-Animation (August 2018), available at: https://www.fantasy-animation.org/current-posts/2018/8/30/saving-christopher-robin-a-review-of-two-winnie-the-pooh-films?rq=christopher%20robin.

  • Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975).

PODCASTChristopher Holliday and Alexander SergeantWORLDS, IMAGINATION, CEL, COMPUTER ANIMATION, HYBRIDITY, WALT DISNEY, ADAPTATIONComment