Episode 92 - Lady and the Tramp (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson & Hamilton Luske, 1955)

Lady and the Tramp (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson & Hamilton Luske, 1955).

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!

Tuck in for some Valentine’s Day spaghetti and meatballs as Chris and Alex chew on Walt Disney’s celebrated cel-animated love story Lady and the Tramp (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson & Hamilton Luske, 1955), a musical romance released in the mid-1950s and based on the 1945 Cosmopolitan magazine story “Happy Dan, The Cynical Dog” by Ward Greene. The studio’s first CinemaScope release and a film that coincided with the opening of Disneyland in California, Lady and Tramp is rife with context and offers a number of threads that speak to the landscape of Disney animation in the 1950s. Listen as discussion turns to the collision in Lady and the Tramp between a refined vs. rough animated style embodied by the film’s eponymous characters; its complex anthropomorphic register, and how the film’s many canine performances negotiate the meeting point of humanity with the animal through racial politics; caricature and the grotesque within character design, and the silhouetted and symbolic representation of affluence, class, wealth, power, and normalcy; connections between Disney’s feature and the Mammy Two Shoes figure from Tom & Jerry; the star voice of Peggy Lee and traditions of animated voicework; and how Lady and the Tramp reflects on the possible ‘threat’ of children in suburban America as part of its subversive and radical agenda. Bella Notte!

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

Suggested Readings

• Clute, John, and John Grant, eds. 1999. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.

• Davis, Amy M. 2006. Good Girls & Wicked Witches: Women in Disney’s Feature Animation. New Barnet: John Libbey.

• Davis, Amy M. 2013. Handsome Heroes & Vile Villains: Men in Disney’s Feature Animation. New Barnet: John Libbey.

• DiAngelo, Robin. 2012. What Does It Mean to Be White?: Developing White Racial Literacy. New York: Peter Lang.

• Dyer, Richard. 1985. “Male Sexuality and the Media.” In The Sexuality of Men, eds. Andy Metcalf and Martin Humphries, 28-43. London: Pluto Press.

• Holliday, Christopher. 2020. “Frenetic Footwear and Lively Lace-Ups: the Spectacle of Shoes in Golden Age Hollywood Animation.” In Shoe Reels: The History and Philosophy of Footwear in Film, eds. Elizabeth Ezra and Catherine Wheatley, 102-124. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

• 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, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.

• Rose, Jacqueline. 1984. The Case of Peter Pan: The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.