Episode 138 - Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995) (with Lucy Fife Donaldson)
Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995).
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!
The Fantasy/Animation podcast finally tackles the seminal Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995), with Episode 138 looking at Pixar’s computer-animated feature and the film that transformed animation in Hollywood - and beyond - into a digital medium. Joining Chris and Alex to examine Toy Story’s computerised production and the pleasures of its pristine visual illusionism is Dr Lucy Fife Donaldson, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, whose work focuses on film and television style, audiovisual design and 'below-the-line' labour, performance and the body, and videographic criticism. Lucy is the author of Texture in Film (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), and the co-editor (with James Walters) of Television Performance (Bloomsbury, 2019) and most recently, Epic / everyday: Moments in Television (Manchester University Press, 2023) with Sarah Cardwell & Jonathan Bignell. Topics in this episode include Toy Story’s digital surfaces and textures, and the vocabulary that is needed to talk about fine and peripheral detail; animation as a space of inescapable and intensified design; the contribution of everyday textures to the film’s construction of worldhood and the narrative journey of the toys; the plasticity of character and the miniaturisation (and magnification) of texture; and how Toy Story’s sense of ‘play’ is articulated via the careful and highly reflexive attention paid to scuffs, surfaces, and scale.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
Suggested Readings
Barker, Jennifer M. 2009. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bruno, Giuliana. 2014. Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Donaldson, Lucy Fife. 2018. “Rough and Smooth: The Everyday Textures of Toy Story.” In Toy Story: How Pixar Reinvented the Animated Feature (Animation: Key Films/Filmmakers series), ed. Noel Brown, Susan Smith, and Sam Summers, 73-86. London: Bloomsbury.
Garwood, Ian. 2015. The Sense of Film Narration. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Holliday, Christopher. 2018. The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Sobchack, Vivian. 2004. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.