Episode 70 - Space Jam (Joe Pytka, 1996) (with Paul Wells)
Space Jam (Joe Pytka, 1996).
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 take to the basketball court for a sports-themed instalment of the podcast by looking at Space Jam (Joe Pytka, 1996), the part-animated, part-Michael Jordan sports comedy that has lots to say about the spectacle of stylistic hybridity, animation’s longstanding relationship to sport, and nostalgia via its many callbacks to Golden Age Hollywood cartooning all through the lens of NBA basketball. Joining them for Episode 70 is Professor Paul Wells, who is Director of the Animation Academy at Loughborough University, as well as being an internationally established scholar, screenwriter and director, working across and within both academia and industry contexts. Paul’s work has been central to the study, practice and research of animation as a field, and he has also written and directed numerous projects for theatre, radio, television and film. Listen as they discuss Space Jam as a laboratory for thinking about sport as a social metaphor for how societies should run; animation’s status as controlled drama (versus the unscripted nature of sport); notions of the professional versus the amateur in relation to sport’s rules, codes and conventions; the cultural practice of stars Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny, and their ability to act as ciphers for the contemporary moment; how the medium provides a version of ‘perfect motion’ through its excessive lyricism; the politics of race and what Space Jam tells us about black identities and whiteness through its black musical vernacular; and how Joe Pytka’s film reveals how animation can manage the very metaphors of sport.
Suggested Readings
Brown, Tom, and Belén Vidal, eds. 2013. The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture. London: Routledge.
Wells, Paul. 1998. Understanding Animation. London: Routledge.
Wells, Paul. 2002. Animation and America. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
Wells, Paul. 2008. The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons and Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Wells, Paul. 2014. Animation, Sport and Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan.