Episode 66 - Happy Feet (George Miller, 2006) (with Hannah Hamad)
Happy Feet (George Miller, 2006).
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 66 is a real toe-tapper, as Chris and Alex dance to the beat of George Miller’s 2006 computer-animated musical feature Happy Feet (George Miller, 2006), produced by U.S. studio Village Roadshow Pictures in collaboration with Australian animation and VFX studio Animal Logic. Joining them to discuss this digital tale of all-singing all-dancing penguins is Dr Hannah Hamad, Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Culture, having previously been Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London, and Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of East Anglia. Hannah’s first monograph Postfeminism and Paternity in Contemporary US Film was published by Routledge in 2014, and since then she’s gone on to write on recessionary reality TV, austerity, contemporary celebrity/stardom and postfeminist media cultures, the postracial, and feminist media history. Listen as they discuss Happy Feet’s racial body politics and problematic relationship to neo-minstrelsy; the ‘invisible’ role of dance performer Savion Glover within the film’s marketing campaign, and how Happy Feet’s status as a ‘post-Gollum’ motion-capture feature taps into its appropriation of black culture; discourses of the post-racial within mid-2000s animated features in Hollywood; the star vocal performance of Robin Williams; and the extent to which audiences are able to accept as the fantasy of the animated medium as a vital form of social discourse.
Suggested Readings
Allison, Tanine. 2015. “Blackface, Happy Feet: The Politics of Race in Motion Picture Animation.” In Special Effects: New Histories, Theories, Contexts, edited by Dan North, Bob Rehak and Michael Duffy, 114–126. London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan.
Elizabeth Thomas, Ebony. 2019. The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. New York: New York University Press.
Hall, Stuart. 1997. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage.
King, C. Richard, Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo, and Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo. 2010. Animating Difference Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Films for Children. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Mihailova, Mihaela. 2015. “Collaboration without Representation: Labor Issues in Motion and Performance Capture.” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 11, no. 1 (February): 40–58.
Sammond, Nicholas. 2015. The Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation. Durham: Duke University Press.
Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. 1994. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London and New York.
Sontag, Susan. 1966. Against Interpretation. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Thompson, Kristin. 2006 “By Annie Standards.” Observations on Film Art (December), available here.