Episode 101 - Osmosis Jones (Bobby Farrelly, Peter Farrelly, Piet Kroon & Tom Sito, 2001) (with Tom Sito)
Osmosis Jones (Bobby Farrelly, Peter Farrelly, 2001).
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!
Episode 101 confronts the animated representation of disease and illness via Warner Brothers’ 2001 cel-animated/live-action hybrid Osmosis Jones (Bobby Farrelly, Peter Farrelly, Piet Kroon & Tom Sito, 2001), which tells the story of a white blood cell policeman who joins together with a cold pill to stop a deadly virus from destroying their human host. Joining Chris and Alex to talk about the film’s imaginative depictions of a body’s internal workings is Osmosis Jones’ animation director Tom Sito, a veteran of the Hollywood animation industry who has worked on numerous animated fantasy films at the Walt Disney, DreamWorks, and Warner Brothers studios, from Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and The Lion King (1994) to Shrek (2001) and Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003). Tom is currently Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, and author of the books Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson (2006), Moving Innovation, A History of Computer Animation (2013), and, more recently, Eat, Drink, Animate: An Animator's Cookbook (2019) containing the food recipes of famous animators such as Walt Disney and Chuck Jones. Listen as they discuss the production of the animated sequences for Osmosis Jones and the industrial and aesthetic stakes of hybridity; celebrity voice acting, “audio discipline,” and how the film’s casting practices feed into its bi-racial buddy cop narrative; the creative representation of human biology as a bustling and hyper-modern urban space; the affordances of animation for shifting scales and fantastical perspectives; and how Osmosis Jones reveals the medium’s metaphorical abilities in allowing spectators to grasp the often intangible shape of things.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
Suggested Readings
Barker, Martin and Thomas Austin, 2000. From Antz to Titanic: Reinventing Film Analysis. London: Pluto Press, 2000.
Ehrlich, Nea. 2021. “Viral Imagery: The Animated Face of Covid-19.” Visual Resources 36, no. 3: 247-261.
Mihailova, Mihaela. 2020. “Contagion Animation as Contagious Animation.” www.fantasy-animation.org, available here.
Sito, Tom. 2006. Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
Sito, Tom. 2013. Moving Innovation, A History of Computer Animation. Massachussetts: The MIT Press.
Sito, Tom. 2019. Eat, Drink, Animate: An Animator's Cookbook. New York: CRC Press.