Episode 80 - The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (Gordon Hessler, 1973)
The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (Gordon Hessler, 1973).
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 return once more to the pioneering work of stop-motion animator and effects artist Ray Harryhausen, this time looking at his 1973 fantasy film collaboration with director Gordon Hessler, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. For Episode 80, the focus is on the quasi-parasitic relationship between live-action and animation filmmaking, and the spectatorial fantasy engendered and invited by each form of moving image technology. Topics include psychoanalytic film theory and the ‘internal object’; the ontological integration of Harryhausen’s ‘Dynarama’ effects with the fantasy of location shooting; animation discourse and the problem of essentialist understandings of medium specificity; The Golden Voyage of Sinbad’s orientalist imaginary and problematic constructions of race; the materiality of stop-motion, and the ‘weighty’ qualities to the film’s army of mythical homunculi; and the big-screen trend of casting ‘animators’ as villains in their control and manipulation of suddenly sentient fictional worlds.
Suggested Readings
Bazin, André. 1967 (1945). “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” In What is Cinema?, Vol.1, trans. Hugh Gray, 9-16. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Butler, David. 2009. Fantasy Cinema: Impossible Worlds on Screen. London: Wallflower Press.
Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Darley, Andrew. 2007. “Bones of Contention: Thoughts on the Study of Animation.” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 2, no. 1 (March): 63–76.
Eisenstein, Sergei. 1988. Eisenstein on Disney. Trans. Jay Leyda. London: Methuen.
Pierson, Michele. 2002. Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder. New York: Columbia University Press.
Klein, Melanie. 1997. Envy and Gratitude & Other Works, 1946-1963. London: Vintage.
Metz, Christian. 1977. “Trucage and the Film.” Critical Inquiry 3, no. 4 (Summer): 657-675.
Sergeant, Alexander. 2021. Encountering the Impossible: The Fantastic in Hollywood Fantasy Cinema. New York: SUNY Press.
Ward, Paul. 2000. Defining 'Animation': The Animated Film and the Emergence of the Film Bill.” Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies (December), available here.
Wells, Paul. 1998. Understanding Animation. London: Routledge.