Episode 23 - Gulliver's Travels (Dave Fleischer, 1939)

Gulliver’s Travels (Dave Fleischer, 1939).

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!

In Episode 23, Chris and Alex turn to the work of the Fleischer studios, looking at the second North American animated feature film Gulliver’s Travels (Dave Fleischer, 1939), an adaptation of Jonathan Swift’s seminal work of fantasy fiction. As something of a follow-up to Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937), the film raises questions about animation’s creative ability to render perspectival shifts and ‘scaled’ imagery of ‘big’ versus ‘small’; world-building and the intrusive fantasy of human figuration; and the surrealist design of the Flesichers’ characters offset against Disney’s more ‘hyperrealist’ aesthetic. The duo suggest that Gulliver’s Travels stands as an imaginative development of animation in the U.S. context, with a playful visual register in the presentation of Lilliput that uses the drama of shifting dimensionality to speak to the emotional function of fantasy spaces for children.

Suggested Readings

• Cook, Malcolm. 2014. “Performance Times: The Lightning Cartoon and the Emergence of Animation.” In Performing New Media 1890–1914, edited by Kaveh Askari, Scott Curtis, Frank Gray, Louis Pelletier, Tami Williams, and Joshua Yumibe, 48-56. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

• Cook, Malcolm. 2018. Early British Animation: from Page and Stage to Cinema Screens. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

• Crafton, Donald. 1979. “Animation iconography: The “hand of the artist.” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 4, no. 4: 409-428.