Episode 155 - Up (Pete Docter, 2009) (with Tom Brown)

Up (Pete Docter, 2009).

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!

Chris and Alex are back in the warm embrace of Pixar Animation Studio, looking at their tenth computer animated film Up (Pete Docter, 2009) - a real high point in the company’s run of critically and commercially successful animated features, and a film that comes almost at the midway point between Pixar today their debut with Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995) 30 years ago. To discuss whether adventure really is ‘out there,’ they are joined by special guest Dr Tom Brown, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Kings College London. Tom is the author of the monographs Spectacle in “Classical” Cinemas: Musicality and Historicity in the 1930s (2016) and Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address in the Cinema (2012), as well as co-editor of The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture (2014), Film Moments: Criticism, History, Theory (2010) and Film and Television After DVD (2008). Topics for this episode include how Pixar’s computer-animated work can be understood according to a “classical” register via its meaningful construction and solidity of animated space; computer-animated staging and how meaning is carried in the studio’s expressive use of mise-en-scène; Up as a stylistic ‘sweet spot’ between photorealism and caricature; links between Pixar and both Classical Hollywood filmmakers like Frank Capra and the category of the middlebrow; what it means to be imprisoned by time in fantasy storytelling; and what Up’s particular combination of the silly and the profound has to say about the weight of grief.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Suggested Readings

• Brown, Noel. 2020. Contemporary Hollywood Animation: Style, Storytelling, Culture and Ideology Since the 1990s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

• Cotta Vaz, Mark. 1999. “A Bug’s Life: An entomological epic.” Cinefex: The Journal of Cinematic Illusions 76: 41–50, 133–40.

• Holliday, Christopher. 2015. “Carl’s Moving Castle: ‘Animated’ houses and the Renovation of Play in Up (2009).” In Spaces of the Cinematic Home: Behind the Screen Door, eds. Frances Pheasant-Kelly, Stella Hockenhull, and Eleanor Andrews, 19–31. London: Routledge.

• Holliday, Christopher. 2018. The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

• Napper, Lawrence. 2009. British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.

• Perkins, V.F. 1982. “Moments of choice.” In Movies of the Fifties, ed. Ann Lloyd, 209-213. London: Orbis Publishing.

• Wood, Robin. 2012. ”Ideology, Genre, Auteur.” In Film Genre Reader IV, ed. Barry Keith Grant, 78-92. New York: University of Texas Press.